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I was thinking the other day that none of Bethesda’s games are actually entirely good. They can be fun, but they’re also all kind of bad. Fun and good are two different measurements.
Like, they all have a bad system of tracking health and damage. In like all of them, from Morrowind to fallout4, you get the situation where you hit a naked bandit square in the face with a sledgehammer and he doesn’t really react. He’s level 30 and you’re level 10, so it doesn’t count.
They all do stealth kind of badly. Kill a dude, his buddy yells and then a minute later goes back to idly standing there over the corpse. It’s been more than 20 years and there’s been like no innovation from Bethesda on this.
The engine they’ve been using is bad. It feels like 2002. Can’t climb over waist high barriers. Projectiles get stuck on invisible walls because the textures and hit boxes don’t align. Can’t dodge or lean or even really duck. Lots of loading transitions, still. Also fuck off with these hacking and lockpicking mini games. Either make it a player skill check or a character skill check. Both is the worst.
I want a different company to make a fallout game. Larian I’m sure would knock it out of the park. Rockstar would probably make something more “cinematic” than my taste but undeniably good. Even Ubisoft would probably make a solid wasteland to explore. (Yes yes, everyone likes to make fun of Ubisoft and the map full of markers. But be honest: that’s what a lot of fallout3 and 4 are. Going to map markers to collect duct tape. Except when you actually get there in a Bethesda game, the movement and combat sucks)
Bethesda’s engine is wild because while it’s absolutely horrible in some places, it’s unparalleled in others. Item persistence is something they do better than anyone. Go into a house in Skyrim and drop 300 wheels of cheese then fuck off and go do something else. Come back and those 300 wheels of cheese will still be there, exactly where you left them. Now realize it’s doing that for EVERY item in the game. That’s crazy.
On the other hand, you can’t climb ladders because their engine doesn’t know how to handle that.
That is cool, yeah. I had all my neat-but-heavy equipment on display in the fighter’s guild in Morrowind, and they never disappeared.
Though I think Larian’s games can also do that. Speaking somewhat naively because I’ve never worked on video games, it doesn’t sound that hard to persist the state of items in a region if you’re already loading a bunch of stuff.
It also highlights a bit of bethesda jank- an NPC will have a totally sincere, heartfelt, conversation with you while surrounded by 300 wheels of cheese, and not remark upon the cheese at all. To be fair, I don’t think anyone else has NPCs that react to the environment believably, either.
that’s true with an asterisk, the cheese wheels may well clip into something and detonate, scattering cheese wheels everywhere and killing everyone in line of sight
Fallout 3 was my introduction, if you dont count the time I tried to torrent the original fallout back in like 2005.
I like them all in different ways. But I honestly stopped caring about the lore and worldbuilding around the time of 4. It was clear it was becoming too much of a power fantasy and less about being a role playing game. T-45 on the first mission sequence? come on.
power armor got a new mechanic they had to show everyone how it works
better than the other games where you have to wait eons just to use it, and all it is is armor that weighs a ton
I tried playing Fallout 4 and gave up because of the obstinate mouse acceleration. Tried it in VR and had a good time but the story didn’t hold me.
Is New Vegas worth my time? Should I start with 1 and/or 2 for the atmosphere and world building? Is 3 worth the effort to get into?
if you want to enjoy fallout then new vegas is probably the one to bet on, it’s got the best combination of actual sensible story/worldbuilding and being playable.
fallout 3 is new vegas with worse story, and the first 2 games are new vegas but uh, less refined gameplay. But then they’re also cheap as fuck so like just try them…Here’s the truth, I’m not sure.
I would say that most Fallout games haven’t aged well and I don’t think I would like them if I wasn’t playing them with rose tinted glasses. Fallout 1 and 2 are classic RPGs. Isometric camera, minimal voice acting, and turn based combat, but if you are into that they are definitely worth it for the insane number of ways you can deal with the situations you get into and the different endings you can get. Fallout 3 is like Fallout 4, but with worse graphics and the worst gunplay that I’ve ever seen in a FPS. It’s an action/adventure game with RPG elements, there aren’t many decisions you can make that actually make a difference. It can still be a good bit of fun and is interesting, but the writing isn’t the best and the PC port is a nightmare to get running on modern hardware. New Vegas kinda fixes the problems from 3. Better writing around factions and companion characters, more choices that actually have an affect on the world and the ending you get, and some of the best DLC I’ve ever played in a game. But it is far from perfect, it still feels awful to shoot a gun and empty locations really show off the short production cycle of the game, but NV is easier to get running than 3.
Personally, in my extremely biased opnion, I’d recommend New Vegas. Less finagling required to get running than the others and it actually feeling like the skills you pick make more of a difference than “do you want pew-pew guns, zappy guns, or do you prefer things that go kaboom?” It’s $10 on steam and pretty regularly goes on sale for $5 (used to go on sale for $2.50, but hasn’t since the Fallout show dropped)
Uhhh, we’re 76 players?
Fallout 1 and 2! But NV was pretty good too
Having played the originals, I don’t understand the hype. New Vegas is way better.
the isometric games excel in atmosphere (partly because of all the limitations), whereas new vegas is not quite as good at that but is in turn way easier to get into since you can just, like, walk forward by pressing W
They’re wildly different games though, it’s hard to say one is better across its 3 styles (1&2, tactics, first person). That being said having played all of them when they came out, 3 holds a special place in my heart of the beginning exiting the vault and entering the national mall and seeing the Washington monument all jacked up.
Combat is way more interesting in 1&2 IMO, I never cared for Bethesda’s “FPS-lite” gameplay.
Combat is one of the major reasons why I don’t like the old Fallouts. Can’t stand turn-based; it distracts from the immersion. When I play New Vegas, I feel like I’m actually in an apocalypse (especially when I play in VR). The OG Fallouts take me right out of it and back into reality as soon as a battle starts.
Maybe the reason is I played them as a teenager when they first came out. The immersion blew my mind at the time.
This is definitely a big factor. They where my first real big rpg with a good story. I was blown away by the time.
Then Fallout 3 almost wasn’t a rpg at all. Big letdown for me. F:NV was much better. But it took some time to get over the similar feeling to F3.
The nostalgia factor surely doesn’t hurt. Fallout 3 was my first, which also colors my opinion of these games. Didn’t try 1&2 until the 2010s.
“I hate Cazadors with every fibre of my being.”
“Aight, you’re cool, head on in.”
Deathclaws are just reused Terrasque assets!
NV > 1 > 2 > 3 > 4
For DLC/expansions New Vegas hit a home run, though 3 does have some good add on content.
There are no other Fallout games, I will accept no argument or evidence that says otherwise.
i’ve said for years now that FO4 is a good game (depending on what you consider important, but like clearly a lot of people enjoy it) BUT it’s not a fallout game.
bethesda has shown over and over and over again that they can only make the same game wearing different costumes, and they aren’t very good at making the costumes.
If they could be convinced to actually make something slightly different i think they could make sort of the ideal VR game, it’d just be a big world filled with details and environmental storytelling and all you do is explore and fight stuff, without bogging it down with attempts at being a proper RPG with a story and stuff.
Agreed. The meme of Fallout 3 just being ‘Oblivion with guns’ wasn’t unfair - they legitimately did a reskin.
I genuinely enjoyed FO4 for some of the survival elements like crafting and outpost building, but it felt very hollow in the world, plot, and setting. I was more invested in the railroad storyline than finding my kid.
When raiders get friggin power armor or the Brotherhood have a functional zeppelin gunship, I’m completely taken out of the “post apocalyptic” theming and scouring for resources feels trite.
that’s part of bethesda not being good at writing stories, if they were they’d realize that fallout new vegas wasn’t actually a postapocalypse setting, it’s post postapocalypse since the NCR is straight up a fully-functional nation-state at that point.
I would quite like to see some people making a total conversion mod for fallout 4 that re-interprets all the story and lore to make more sense, for example:
Instead of just being cartoonishly evil the Institute is actually filled with competent (if snooty) people, and after seeing the success of the NCR they make contact with Vault 81 to start reclaiming Boston. The player is a vault dweller who signs up as part of the force to reclaim the city, clearing out the raiders and whatnot, and either convincing groups to join up or wiping them out if they don’t.No centuries long cryosleep, no nonsensical institute that is apparently both hilariously technologically superior and yet does nothing with that, no fucking shoehorned brotherhood of steel, and actually trying to justify the gameplay. And of course the player won’t be made the leader of every single faction they come across, but are an agent of the intitute/vault government and via that they can hold a lot of authority!
Which is why the plot of NV is so good - it’s multi-layered but interconnected, with the nexus being the Strip/Dam. Each faction has pros anmd cons instead of being simply kitten-murderer evil. The Kahns are outright assholes but they are that way because of Bitter Springs, and largely keep to themselves, the Brotherhood are xenophobic but not xenocidal, the NCR is corrupt and siphons everything they touch westward but is the most stable group around, House is a prick but the only reason Vegas is still standing, the Legion can be argued as necessary evil given the anarchy of the untamed wastelands of the east.
Comparatively each faction in the Bethesda titles are either portrayed as binary good:evil. The closest we get to nuance is
Tap for spoiler
when you’re arguing with the President about the FEV virus being necessary to remove super mutants - along with 99% of the population.
What is this from? Also it’s very true
Civil war
Movie called “Civil War” from 2024. Haven’t seen it myself, but I’ve seen this scene while scrolling through brainrot
It was one of my favorite films from last year!
Hard to watch, but very good.
Fallout 3 is objectively the best game in the Franchise. NV is for little babies who don’t have the cognitive capacitiy to make decision on their own, so they only play games with linear level design.
