Good post on Wasteland 2 forums

[Infinitron]

Krellen is one of the rare non-Codexian commenters on the W2 forums. He's also a frequent commenter on Shamus Young's blog. He made this excellent post.

http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1189&p=20465

Setting, Location, and Continuity

by krellen » April 2nd, 2012, 9:52 pm

This is a sister thread to this one I wrote earlier.

A franchise is defined largely by three things - Mood, Theme (addressed in the linked post above), and Setting. Of these three pieces, the Setting is the easiest to implement, the easiest to botch, and the least important to continuity.

I'm going to be picking on Fallout 3 a lot in this discussion. If you are a fan of the title, please, take the time to ready my points before rebutting. At no point am I going to claim that Fallout 3 is a bad game. I'm merely stating that it is a bad Fallout game.

Setting are the trappings that make up a franchise's world - the people, places, and things (technological and otherwise) that define the world and differentiate it not only from ours, but from other fictional worlds as well. What would Star Wars be without the Force? Star Trek without the Federation? Fallout without the retro-50s vibe?

Make no mistake: Setting is important. And yet Setting alone will not maintain continuity.

Each title I mentioned above has within its franchise elements that failed to maintain the franchise. Star Wars has the prequels. Star Trek has Enterprise. Fallout has Fallout 3. Each one of those titles very openly maintained the Setting of the franchise, but they failed because Setting was all they kept.

Star Wars

The Star Wars prequels definitely take place in the Star Wars universe; we have Jedi, the Force, the Republic, blasters, droids, planets and people from the original films. And yet for many people, these films do not feel like they are part of the same franchise. The prequels are full of nods to Setting, and yet hardly touch at all upon the Mood and Themes of the original films; in many cases, the nods themselves are the problem. Midichlorians ruined the Mystery of the Force. Leaping Yoda shattered his image as Wise Old Sage. A whiny Anakin undercuts the Sinister Villainy of Darth Vader.

Moreover, the prequels changed the genre by failing to maintain the Mood. Instead of a Space Opera, we get a political drama. Meaningful duels between two characters (Vader and Kenodi, Luke and the Emperor-in-proxy Vader) are turned into CGI-fueled action-fests with little narrative purpose (the finale of Genosis, every fight with Yoda). Instead of flirty, playful banter (Leia and Han) we get awkward, stilted romance (Padme and Anakin).

Furthermore, other titles have proven the relative unimportance of many aspects of Setting. X-Wing and TIE Fighter are both wildly successful titles in the Star Wars franchise, and neither deal at all with Jedi or the Force.

Star Trek

Enterprise is clearly meant to take place in the same universe as Star Trek - it has Vulcans, and Klingons, warp drive and transporters, it even tries to focus on exploration and discovery. And yet it fails as part of the Star Trek franchise, trying to maintain the Mood of discovery without paying attention to Theme or Setting.

Theme: Star Trek has always been about idealism triumphant. It doesn't ignore pragmatism - pragmatism exists, there are pragmatists aplenty in Star Trek's universe, and many conflicts are presented with a pragmatic solution - but it holds idealism as paramount. Whenever idealism and pragmatism come into conflict, idealism wins - unreservedly. It's this last point that causes Enterprise to fail; while Archer often takes the idealistic solution, his idealism often comes back to bite him in the ass. An early example of this is the episode around P'Jem, with the Vulcans spying on the Andorians from their supposedly sacred monastery. Archer idealistically tries to protect the Vulcans, only to find out the Andorians were right - and then he idealistically reveals the truth, only to find he's started a war.

A title can maintain franchise without touching on all Themes from earlier works, but it cannot do so whilecontradicting those earlier Themes.

Setting: Perhaps the best example here of the importance of Setting is Enterprise. Taking place before the original series, Enterprise had some pretty big shoes to fill. It clung to the sense of discovery and wonder present in the original series and the later successful titles, and yet when pushed, it opted to completely co-opt Setting in favour of narrative expedience. The failures in Setting range from the minor - botching the established name of the Andorian homeworld and introducing new alien species heretofore unheard of - to the moderate - introducing Klingons without the conflict that canonically led to the Prime Directive, establishing a conflict between Andorians and Vulcans that did not exist before - to the most egregious - ignoring central precepts of the Star Trek setting like the Temporal Prime Directive and world-shattering plot lines that somehow escape all mention in "later" series.

Settings are flexible; like well-made steel, there is some flex and give to them. But push it too far, and your Setting will bend and warp, or, worse, shatter altogether.

--

Both Star Wars and Star Trek have failures that tried to take the timeline earlier than the established franchise, and thought that, because of that, setting is all they needed. But it's not only the past that falls into this trap.

Fallout

There are divided camps on Fallout 3. Some consider it a great game; others consider it a complete failure. While there are outliers, for the most part the divide between these two camps can be determined by whether or not the person had been a fan of Fallout prior to the release of Fallout 3. For many of the former, Fallout 3 is great - it fits very much their expectations for a Post-Apocalyptic world. For the latter, however, Fallout 3 fails, because it is an entirely different person wearing Fallout's clothes.

Both Fallouts (from here on out, "Fallout" shall refer to Fallouts 1 and 2, while Fallout 3 shall be referred to explicitly so) illicit an overall Mood of Curiosity or Discovery. There's a world out there to get to know, places to discover and explore. Finding out about things is a central point to the Fallout title - discovering a water chip, finding a MacGuffin, learning the motives of the Master and the Enclave, seeing what settlements exist and how the world has adapted to the nuclear devastation.

Fallout 3's overarching Mood, on the other hand, is Isolation. It's a big world out there, and you are alone in it. While there are things to discover and explore, they are largely not the focus of the game; the game focuses on long stretches of time between locations and the utter isolation that is inherent in Fallout 3's seamless, unbroken world. Even the very beginning of the game is about isolation - your father has abandoned you, you are thrust alone from the Vault, and you're stuck in this wide open world with no direction. Many fans of Fallout 3 talk about how amazing their experiences with Isolation are, how wonderfully emergent the game play of surviving on your own in this wide open world can be.

Fallout avoided Isolation by removing you from the overall world. Exploration was done on a simple map, with no real representation of your character upon it. Settlements were far from one another, but the player rarely actuallysaw the distance and the emptiness. Instead they were drawn to the next green hub, the next new settlement to discover and explore.

Fallout 3 lacked Discovery because of the nature of its seamless world. While there were plenty of things to find, plenty of locations and discoveries, all were surrounded by Isolation: all were separated from each other by large stretches of map - and game play! - empty of anything but waste. Because you were never pulled out from the world, the large stretches of empty became a major part of the title absent from its earlier namesakes.

The Mood is the biggest difference, but Themes play a major role in the differences as well. The first Fallout had a minor Theme of Water (finding the water chip was your excuse to go out in the world, not the ultimate goal); the second did not touch upon it at all. Fallout 3 took the Theme of Water and made it central to the entire plot, thrusting constantly in the player's face the need for water: through the dual items of Clean and Dirty Water, through the beggars outside major settlements looking for water, through the central plot line focusing on purifying water. Taking a minor theme and making it paramount is incredibly jarring; what was once a narrative excuse has now become the entire focus.

Fallout had a resonant theme of Old vs. New; the Old Master sought to create a New race from the Old vault stock, while New settlements thrived while the Old vault stagnated. The Old Government returns to destroy the New humanity, while a New village tribal seeks Old technology as a remedy to all that is wrong. Fallout 3 ignored this theme altogether. There is nothing New in Fallout 3; it is all Old ruins, surrounding Old relics, focusing solely on the past. Even the one New thing - Project Purity - was Old by the time the game started, and it was your father looking at his Old glory that drove the narrative. Discarding a major theme - not even touching on it briefly - is also incredibly jarring to continuity.

At the same time, Fallout 3 clung desperately to the Setting of Fallout; everywhere you turned, Setting was there staring you in the face. Nuka-Cola. Corvega. Robco. Robobrains. Even aspects of Setting that had no place whatsoever in the Capital Wasteland were featured: The Brotherhood. Super Mutants. The Enclave. Harold. Fallout 3 wore Fallout's Setting like a shroud, hoping that Setting alone would carry on its legacy. This was perhaps the most jarring part of all; instead of a similar title that might plausibly explain the differences in Mood and Theme through slight changes of Setting, Fallout 3 shoved Setting out before it every where it went, drawing as much attention to it as possible. It shouted mightily, "I am Fallout! I have its Setting!", which serves only to draw further attention to all the aspects in which it differs from its predecessors.

Setting is important, but it is not enough, and a hollow Setting is the worst sin of all.

For discussion: what aspects of Wasteland's Setting are vital to you? What are not important? What are some changes to Setting that could be made without destroying continuity?

 

[Havoc]

Good read.

 

[udm]

"Setting is important, but it is not enough, and a hollow Setting is the worst sin of all."

 

[Infinitron]

Fallout avoided Isolation by removing you from the overall world. Exploration was done on a simple map, with no real representation of your character upon it. Settlements were far from one another, but the player rarely actuallysaw the distance and the emptiness. Instead they were drawn to the next green hub, the next new settlement to discover and explore.

I have to disagree with this. Whilst I agree with the general point he's making about exploration versus isolation, Fallout did a considerably better job at communicating a sense of isolation on the world map. Compare watching the days tick by as you trek across a vast, inhospitable wasteland to Fallout 3, where settlements are often literally a mile or so down the road from each other

Yes, but in real time, it's over pretty quickly. Mostly it just makes you feel the pressure of the game's time limit. Or worry about ambushes.

 

[Infinitron]

Fallout avoided Isolation by removing you from the overall world. Exploration was done on a simple map, with no real representation of your character upon it. Settlements were far from one another, but the player rarely actuallysaw the distance and the emptiness. Instead they were drawn to the next green hub, the next new settlement to discover and explore.

I have to disagree with this. Whilst I agree with the general point he's making about exploration versus isolation, Fallout did a considerably better job at communicating a sense of isolation on the world map. Compare watching the days tick by as you trek across a vast, inhospitable wasteland to Fallout 3, where settlements are often literally a mile or so down the road from each other

Yes, but in real time, it's over pretty quickly. Mostly it just makes you feel the pressure of the game's time limit. Or worry about ambushes.

Whether it's real-time or not is irrelevent. Journeying from point A to point B in Fallout 3 does a worse job of communicating a sense of isolation than ten-fifteen seconds of Map time in Fallout, due to everything being so close together and the nature of the Capital Wasteland itself, which as a setting is far more densely packed than the California Wastes.

I guess this is a subjective thing. If you spent time exploring and looking at things (LARPING LOLOLOL), instead of running from town to dungeon to town, Fallout 3 felt pretty isolated.

 

[Oesophagus]

Fallout avoided Isolation by removing you from the overall world. Exploration was done on a simple map, with no real representation of your character upon it. Settlements were far from one another, but the player rarely actuallysaw the distance and the emptiness. Instead they were drawn to the next green hub, the next new settlement to discover and explore.

I have to disagree with this. Whilst I agree with the general point he's making about exploration versus isolation, Fallout did a considerably better job at communicating a sense of isolation on the world map. Compare watching the days tick by as you trek across a vast, inhospitable wasteland to Fallout 3, where settlements are often literally a mile or so down the road from each other

Exactly. Fallout 3 failed terribly at the open, empty world bit. I mean, it's a fucking theme park, you can't walk a hundred meters in any direction without running into something. Or without being attacked by a random mob. The only sense of isolation F3 had was the fact that there were two actual settlements in the entire game.

Fallout 3 lacked Discovery because of the nature of its seamless world. While there were plenty of things to find, plenty of locations and discoveries, all were surrounded by Isolation: all were separated from each other by large stretches of map - and game play! - empty of anything but waste. Because you were never pulled out from the world, the large stretches of empty became a major part of the title absent from its earlier namesakes.

What large stretches? It takes two fucking minutes to walk from where you first enter the game world to the nearest settlement. The only reason it takes longer is because you get shit thrown at you al the time, so for every meter you travel towards your destination, you have to backpedal 10 meters, fighting off mobs. Oh, and let's not forget that you can also fast travel, making travelling even more seamless than in Fallout 1/2

 

[Infinitron]

The only sense of isolation F3 had was the fact that there were two actual settlements in the entire game.

...and that's actually a good enough reason on its own.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I cannot speak with authority because I never played Wasteland. But I feel KnotanAlt has a point.

Just give me a game with interesting, challenging, turn based gameplay in any not retarded setting, If the story and the rest is decent, motivation to play will come by itself.

 

[Oesophagus]

Please, storyfags, don't ruin the one possibly good game to come along in the last decade with this stupid backseat game designer nonsense.

I don't think anyone can influence that, seeing as the story is mostly written and all. Besides, Fargo and Avellone are on the job

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Fallout 3 lacked Discovery because of the nature of its seamless world. While there were plenty of things to find, plenty of locations and discoveries, all were surrounded by Isolation: all were separated from each other by large stretches of map - and game play! - empty of anything but waste. Because you were never pulled out from the world, the large stretches of empty became a major part of the title absent from its earlier namesakes.

Doesn't make much sense to me. The sense of discovery - knowing there's a world out there to get to know, places to discover and explore - would be improved by making things closer to each other (literally or via use of overworld map)?

 

[Haba]

Reading the post seems to be challenging, not to even mention understanding the spirit of it. Too many big words innit?

Anyway, ffordesoon makes a very good point as well.

Whereas Fallout kicks you out into a world that couldn't give a dog's balls about you. You're told to do a thing, and that you could maybe start your search at a place that turns out to be a complete dead end. So you wander to all these different places people mention to you, one of them has a Water Chip, you take it back to Vault 13, and then you're out on your ass again. Nobody trusts you, nobody is incompetent enough at their own profession to need your help with it, and people either don't care that you come from a vault or display outright hostility toward you.

The problem with F3 as a Fallout game is not that there are a lot of fudged bits of continuity, or that the gameplay's different, or that it's first-person, or anything like that. Even a change of tone and/or theme is not necessarily a deal-breaker, because, to paraphrase Armistead Maupin, "There are a million stories in the wasteland." Those aspects make the game different, but whether or not it's worse is up to each individual player. What hurts F3 as a Fallout game and as a game of isolation is the nagging sense that everything in the world is a convenient animatronic puppet show for your amusement. It's the isolation of the narcissist rather than the isolation of the little fish in the big pond. While this works for the Elder Scrolls games, because those are all Mary Sue simulators anyway, the original Fallouts' scripted moments are hidden very well by the game's systems through a number of slight inconveniences to the player.

The best example I can think of is the fighting ring outside the Skum Pitt: if you aren't there at the right moment, there's no fight going on, the guy tells you to come back at a certain time on a certain day to watch the fight. The fact that there's a fight is scripted, but In F3, the fight would be going on nonstop for twelve hours every day, because then "the player will definitely see this chunk of content we spent a week on, and be able to do this fun minigame we designed!" It's more convenient, but less involving, because it's clearly content designed to be seen. And the whole game's like that; it's utterly transparent that nothing is happening without the player's participation. Whether you like any of Bethesda's games post-Oblivion depends largely on whether that bothers you enough to make you quit the game in disgust. I personally don't mind it too much, but I understand why people do.

The existing fans of the old Fallouts in particular tend to hate Fallout 3, and I think that's largely because whatever goodwill it might build up with them otherwise is undone by one thing above all others: it's totally skewed toward convenience instead of believability. The original games, by accident or design, skewed exactly the opposite way, thus allowing for a natural sense of isolation ("God, I have no idea where that chip is! Is Vault 13 doomed? Does that guy know where a chip is? If so, how can I get him to tell me? He has to look out for himself, after all...") instead of an enforced one ("Why won't that guy shut up about me? Yeah, yeah, say your lines, Doc, I need medicine! Okay, let's go see what that stupid bitch Moira wants. God, why can't she do this crap herself? Why do any of these people trust me at all? Why am I the only smart person in the Capitol Wasteland? I need music. Yeah, yeah, shut up, Three-Dog. YEAH, THREE-DOG, I KNOW WHAT I FUCKING DID, OKAY!? Surely there's something, anything else going on in the wasteland besides me? NO, THREE-DOG, I DON'T MEAN THAT OBVIOUS FUCKING QUEST! Jesus..."). It doesn't "empower" the player so much as stroke the player's ego, and much like a girl that does those porn-star moans and groans in bed to flatter the person she's sleeping with, it has exactly the opposite effect of the intended one. The player ends up feeling powerless and angry and condescended to. The original Fallout games are more or less believable, and they're among the least condescending games ever made. It makes perfect sense that fans of the old games tend to find F3 supremely annoying at best, because the effect it has on you is exactly the opposite of the effect the old games have on the player. All the games have isolation, but the isolation F3 provides is akin to the isolation of the teenage bookworm in a small town, because you begin to feel like you're the only person in the Capitol Wasteland who's not a complete and utter moron. And it gets annoying, because the small town goes on for miles and you can never, ever leave it. Well, unless you buy the DLC. Then you can go to the next town over, where everyone dresses slightly differently but is just as much of an idiot.

Baby Sitter Quest v.s. Some Dude Who Happened to be There and was Later Forgotten

 

[Gragt]

So, where's that promised good post?

 

[Infinitron]

Setting is the least important thing for a game.

Read the post, he fucking agrees with you

 

[Havoc]

Setting is the least important thing for a game.

Read the post, he fucking agrees with you

 

[Morkar Left]

At the same time, Fallout 3 clung desperately to the Setting of Fallout; everywhere you turned, Setting was there staring you in the face. Nuka-Cola. Corvega. Robco. Robobrains. Even aspects of Setting that had no place whatsoever in the Capital Wasteland were featured: The Brotherhood. Super Mutants. The Enclave. Harold. Fallout 3 wore Fallout's Setting like a shroud, hoping that Setting alone would carry on its legacy. This was perhaps the most jarring part of all; instead of a similar title that might plausibly explain the differences in Mood and Theme through slight changes of Setting, Fallout 3 shoved Setting out before it every where it went, drawing as much attention to it as possible. It shouted mightily, "I am Fallout! I have its Setting!", which serves only to draw further attention to all the aspects in which it differs from its predecessors.

The last paragraph is more or less the only thing I can agree with him. The post from ffordesoon Haba quoted makes a lot more sense for me.

 

[Infinitron]

Ironic that ffordesoon was in the Codex Vigilance Thread's Hall of Retards, while it still existed.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

yeah one thing that still pisses me off is the inevitable 'I never played Fallout 1 and 2, but Fallout 3 is great rpg blather nostalgia goggles blather atmospheric blather bad interface, aged poorly blather ' post in fallout discussions

the utter lack of subtlety in Fallout 3's 50s theme thing has been addressed

so, isolationism: it only works when you're believably isolated

why do I say believeable

for all the fucking talk of how fallout 3 is so god damn fucking immersive, the themepark reduced scale nature that comes with the tragic necessity of a lovingly handcrafted seamless first person world, pod people android npc mannerisms, animation and AI conversation, two towns where you can explore everything and yet not figure out how the fuck it stays alive, and 3 brahmin merchants being the economy all add together to make you feel like you've been jammed into the world's largest PVP-enabled larp festival.

The whole damn setting's believability hit the uncanny valley failure zone and people applaud it because they think superficial setpiece fidelity adds up to realism and good design. Oh yeah, that must be why Final Fantasy: The Spirits within is a better movie than Wall-E, which is not as serious or realistic.
And speaking of realism, how about the amount of ambient npcs in the hub and the den, or new reno even! Try rendering that shit in Fallout 3, why don't you?

I keep saying, fallout 1 and 2 did scale well because it abstracted the sense of scale via travel and the world map and 'hot location zones' where you entered via the clicky green circles and ignored the rest of the area you were visiting but the important thing was that they were still 'there', just not pertinent to the gameplay. Let your imagination fill in the gaps.

With Fallout 3, what you see is what you'll get, what you see is what IS. Everything has been set in stone here, metre by metre, with all the charm of a 14-year old DM's epic campaign. You're not just playing one big theme park, the entire world location has been CANONISED into one big pile of stagnant failure.

That is also why random encounters in Fallout 3 feel less like discovering by chance something rare and mysterious and forgotten by humanity, and more like running into a hobo SLIGHTLY zanier than the other hobos around the corner. Instead of 'my character just had a singular lifetime experience', you get 'my character had a quirky encounter today, par for the course in this craaaazy themepark'.

fuck yeah, the strength of bethesda games is to have a large gameworld with an ocean of I don't give a fuck shinies for gamers who like 'exploring' or as I like to call it, 'travel grinding'

Also another thing Fallout 3 fans don't seem to be able to grasp is whether new lore is good or offers something interesting.
The BoS faction in Fallout 3. "What's wrong, they said it was a seperate faction with its own ideals, it's completely faithful to the setting'. FUCK OFF THEY ARE SATURDAY MORNING CARTOON KNIGHTS WITH GUNS, I DON'T CARE IF THEY WROTE THEIR LIFE STORIES INTO THE GAME, THEY ARE A TERRIBLE WASTE OF GAMEPLAY AND FACTION SPACE.

Any idiot should have been able to tell that they took the old tech-monopolising faction and turned them into focus-group friendly gun wielding good guys of the wasteland because in this day and age, awesome guys in power armor will remind you of master chief AND your WoW paladin and therefore make this game awesome too. It's a terrible waste of an unique faction and a shit tier redesign and people still defend it.

ps I don't like fallout 3 much

 

[Pope Amole II]

Fallout without the retro-50s vibe?

Should've stopped reading right here - OP is wrong, original post is retarded. I won't even bother to explain why, the reasons are far too obvious (but are mostly tied not to what the Fallout is but how this author perceives Fallout in his head) and far too tedious to be named. Fallout is anything but retro-vibe, finding mcguffins, discovering identity of Enclave and teh Master, New vs Old, all that shit - all is wrong, so fuck that shit.

 

[Infinitron]

Fallout without the retro-50s vibe?

Should've stopped reading right here - OP is wrong, original post is retarded. I won't even bother to explain why, the reasons are far too obvious (but are mostly tied not to what the Fallout is but how this author perceives Fallout in his head) and far too tedious to be named. Fallout is anything but retro-vibe, finding mcguffins, discovering identity of Enclave and teh Master, New vs Old, all that shit - all is wrong, so fuck that shit.

Okay, what's your definition of Fallout, your holiness

I agree that Krellen could have mentioned FO3's overuse of the retro-50's stuff, but not every single thing you can criticize has to be mentioned in every criticism of FO3.

 

[visions]

Ironic that ffordesoon was in the Codex Vigilance Thread's Hall of Retards, while it still existed.

Heh, noticed this as well.

 

[Morkar Left]

Ironic that ffordesoon was in the Codex Vigilance Thread's Hall of Retards, while it still existed.

Heh, noticed this as well.

yeah, he's very ambivalent. There's a fifty-fifty chance he writes something good or complete bullshit. Maybe it will turn more in favor to the first one.

 

[20 Eyes]

Please, storyfags, don't ruin the one possibly good game to come along in the last decade with this stupid backseat game designer nonsense.

This. If I have to read another "Wasteland 2 should be/have/..." thread I'm going to fucking murder someone... or internet rage. Whatever.

I just don't give a fuck. I don't care what somebody whose game development experience consists of playing a few CRPGs has to say about making Wasteland 2.

"Wasteland 2 should have great tactical combat and a world map and three dozen playable characters and great atmosphere and 200 weapons and great AI and there should be a level that takes place at my house and you can interact with my dog but if you make eye contact he becomes hostile and it should have meaningful choices and consequences and music composed by Mozart and a story by Tolstoy and there should be animals that you can catch around the world and train to battle with other animal trainers for fun and there should be over 200 skills and 400 attributes and it should have a realistic reputation system and it should have localized damage and"

I'm not talking about OP's post in particular, I'm just tired of seeing this shit. "Wasteland 2 should [insert a very long and detailed description of user's personal dream-game here]". It's boring and I wish Fargo had downplayed his desires for input because I'm tired of scrolling past this stuff.

 

[Pope Amole II]

Okay, what's your definition of Fallout, your holiness

I agree that Krellen could have mentioned FO3's overuse of the retro-50's stuff, but not every single thing you can criticize has to be mentioned in every criticism of FO3.

It's a pastiche and subversion, obviously, so what serious definition can there be? I mean, even if you ignore the 100% "i did it for lulz" Fallout 2, Fallout 1 still hadn't got much in the thematical coherency department and, say, retro-50 stuff - why is it singled out as if it was the main theme of the game? I mean, the very retardation of "there's no fallout without retro" - wtf? Outside of the intro, some GUI and some monster design, that theme was barely noticeable in the game and certainly no bigger than all the mad max nods going around or the whole postapocalyptic space marines business or satirizing the fantasy by introducing nuclear orcs & zombies or whatever.

It's stupid to adress fallout as if it had some grand artistic message and finely crafted setting when it, thankfully, had neither (and even all of that "vaults were teh secret project", as far as I understand, was added later by the fluff bible). Fallout was like improvisational jazz - just some guys stirring up good shit together. It was nothing to ponder on excessively, it just had good character system, good exploration and lots of decent to good small moments, as I've said, it's a pastiche made of small moments. Same can be said about F2, though moments did became lulzier so a percentage of the fans sorta disliked that. And in the third it's just about guys who stir the shit up being talentless hacks, not being able to produce anything interesting even under a threat of multiple anal rapes, so...

 

[Infinitron]

Okay, what's your definition of Fallout, your holiness

I agree that Krellen could have mentioned FO3's overuse of the retro-50's stuff, but not every single thing you can criticize has to be mentioned in every criticism of FO3.

It's a pastiche and subversion, obviously, so what serious definition can there be? I mean, even if you ignore the 100% "i did it for lulz" Fallout 2, Fallout 1 still hadn't got much in the thematical coherency department and, say, retro-50 stuff - why is it singled out as if it was the main theme of the game? I mean, the very retardation of "there's no fallout without retro" - wtf? Outside of the intro, some GUI and some monster design, that theme was barely noticeable in the game and certainly no bigger than all the mad max nods going around or the whole postapocalyptic space marines business or satirizing the fantasy by introducing nuclear orcs & zombies or whatever.

It's stupid to adress fallout as if it had some grand artistic message and finely crafted setting when it, thankfully, had neither (and even all of that "vaults were teh secret project", as far as I understand, was added later by the fluff bible). Fallout was like improvisational jazz - just some guys stirring up good shit together. It was nothing to ponder on excessively, it just had good character system, good exploration and lots of decent to good small moments, as I've said, it's a pastiche made of small moments. Same can be said about F2, though moments did became lulzier so a percentage of the fans sorta disliked that. And in the third it's just about guys who stir the shit up being talentless hacks, not being able to produce anything interesting even under a threat of multiple anal rapes, so...

Very well then.
Let's mail Tim Cain & MCA and ask them if the Fallouts were meant to have well-thought-out thematic depth and consistency or if they were just a pastiche as you say.
Who knows, you might even be right

 

[Alex_Steel]

Krellen sounds like a serious faggot.

Setting also isn't things like mood and atmosphere, or other intangibles. Those it would be nice to get right, but if there's anything Wasteland's mood is about, it's that anything can happen and stupid shit like when the bombs dropped and whether the guys have 80s or 70s clothes don't mean anything.

Mood and atmosphere are definitely part of the the setting.