The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3

[Gord]

It doesn't rain in any other Bethesda games, or have any other weather effects, but people seem to have no problem understanding that it does rain, snow, and storm in the game-world, it just doesn't happen in game.

 

[darkpatriot]

lol. I forgot about how it had weather in the TES games. Been a while since I played them. It's even more curious why they didn't implement weather in Fallout 3 then since they had it implemented it in the same engine in the previous game.

It might have been that they weren't happy with the way weather was implemented in Oblivion/Morrowind, basically just effects on the screen that would have rain come through overhead cover, but couldn't get a weather system that didn't clip through overhangs working for Fallout 3 so they decided to just leave it out.

 

[Utgard-Loki]

It might have been that they weren't happy with the way weather was implemented in Oblivion/Morrowind, basically just effects on the screen that would have rain come through overhead covert.

morrowinds engine was capable of that and you could turn it on with hexediting, but it did eat performance like a motherfucker.

 

[Ninjerk]

Who gives a fuck about FARMS when you can have CASTLES and TOWNS BUILT AROUND ATOMIC BOMBS

 

[DraQ]

It doesn't rain in any other Bethesda games, or have any other weather effects, but people seem to have no problem understanding that it does rain, snow, and storm in the game-world, it just doesn't happen in game.

Improved.

Daggerfall also had seasonal weather and it changed environment textures as well depending on the weather.

lol. I forgot about how it had weather in the TES games. Been a while since I played them. It's even more curious why they didn't implement weather in Fallout 3 then since they had it implemented it in the same engine in the previous game.

Because they probably thought it would be un-fallout to have rain.
<-rain proof

So yeah, not having rain is intentional and a valid target of critical potshots.

 

[darkpatriot]

Because they probably thought it would be un-fallout to have rain.
<-rain proof

So yeah, not having rain is intentional and a valid target of critical potshots.

Intentional? Of course, unless it is a bug everything in the game is intentional. But whether it was intentional for technical reasons or because they wanted to emphasize the lack of rain for narrative reasons?

I strongly lean towards technical/production reasons, although how they wished to portray the setting may have affected their decision. If it was an important plot point that it was always rainy they would have spent more time and effort trying to get weather in the game.

I lean towards it for these reasons.

One, we have what Bethesda said about it:

20) What sort of weather effects will we be seeing and will it effect the game play in some manner (e.g. change the landscape, people get off the street to take cover etc.) or is it more or less just 'eye candy?

Other than different cloud types that come and go, there are no other weather effects. We toyed with rain and windstorms but decided not to do them.

http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/856489-fan-interviews/

While you could certainly interpret that to mean they made the design decision that it wouldn't rain in the game for narrative reasons, the far more likely explanation is when they were experimenting with it they didn't like how many resources it was taking, and decided it wasn't worth the time and effort to try and get it working better.

Secondly, you have the fact that they left out all weather, not just rain. If they were trying to emphasize the dryness and lack of water other weather effects like sandstorms or windstorms could be very useful for that. They opted to leave out all weather. Which points to leaving out weather for technical/production reasons, since weather effects take console resources and developer time.

Thirdly, if they had intended that it never rains in the DC wasteland as a narrative choice, then they would have made sure to point it out prominently to reinforce the central plotline of the game which revolved around water. People mention how clean radiation free water is hard to come by, but dirty irradiated water is not treated as rare or hard to come by in the game and there are rivers and pools of water in many areas of the game world. That plot was about purifying water, not bringing water to a parched and dry land.

I could be wrong but unless you have something else, like some in game lore stating that it never rains in the DC wasteland, I think it is pretty clear that it wasn't a narrative decision that it never rains in the Fallout 3 game world. They just didn't show it in-game due to production/technical reasons.

 

[DraQ]

Intentional? Of course, unless it is a bug everything in the game is intentional. But whether it was intentional for technical reasons or because they wanted to emphasize the lack of rain for narrative reasons?

I strongly lean towards technical/production reasons, although how they wished to portray the setting may have affected their decision.

The fact that they implemented full weather system in pretty much every game they developed both prior to and after making FO3 runs contrary to that.

If it was an important plot point that it was always rainy they would have spent more time and effort trying to get weather in the game.

Hello? Water. The whole MQ is about water. Of course it's a fucking plot point.

While you could certainly interpret that to mean they made the design decision that it wouldn't rain in the game for narrative reasons, the far more likely explanation is when they were experimenting with it they didn't like how many resources it was taking, and decided it wasn't worth the time and effort to try and get it working better.

Except they have always liked how many resources it was taking and they always liked the result of their efforts.
OTOH it could be claimed to clash with the idea they built their game around (however ineptly) and could be argued to clash with FO aesthetics (as they preceived it) so they axed it.

 

[Zombra]

Because they probably thought it would be un-fallout to have rain.
So yeah, not having rain is intentional and a valid target of critical potshots.

Intentional? Of course, unless it is a bug everything in the game is intentional. But whether it was intentional for technical reasons or because they wanted to emphasize the lack of rain for narrative reasons?

Well, no. It's not "intentional" that there is no school of dentistry in Fallout 3 because they didn't sit down and go "School of dentistry? Yes? No? Okay, no. No school of dentistry." But weather effects is very likely something that did come up and was deliberately left out of the design.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

There probably wasn't any rain because it would make the game a bit less repetitive and for some reason Bethesda wanted it to be the most boring game since desert bus.

 

[Jaesun]

Weather is VARY SERIOUS BUSINESS for an RPG.

 

[DraQ]

Weather is VARY SERIOUS BUSINESS for an RPG.

D:OS

 

[Zombra]

Weather is VARY SERIOUS BUSINESS for an RPG.

I didn't notice its absence in the FP Fallouts, but I've loved it in TES. (Especially with mods.) I remember reading about the development of Morrowind and how one of the devs at one point walked out of a building and was like, oh shit an ash storm, I better stay inside, and then realized what he just said to himself and what a victory for immersion it was. I feel weird walking into a Skyrim blizzard without a thick fur hood on. It's just fun - and in my opinion no less serious than making graphics of people that look like people or rocks that look like rocks. Cosmetics certainly aren't necessary for any game, but they sure can be cool.

 

[Metro]

I feel weird walking into a Skyrim blizzard without a thick fur hood on.

IRL?

 

[Zombra]

No.

 

[tuluse]

Sure, the game TELLS you he’s evil, but based on what we’re shown, he has the exact same goals (fix the purifier) and methodology (murder) as the player

Biting meta-commentary by Beth writers. Eat your heart out Spec Ops: The line.

And how are those two approaches any different?
In both you provide the relevant fragment of your location, some transition zones, a bit of unreachable backdrop and ideally some unusable but implied way to reach the nonexisting parts.
How is Fallout any different from, say, Deus Ex (the first one) in this regard?

It's a bit stranger in first person AND open world. Then again, VtMB does it with the subway system, so you can do it.

More generally seeing things in isometric forces the brain into abstract mode, so it accepts other abstractions more easily.

 

[Jaesun]

Weather is VARY SERIOUS BUSINESS for an RPG.

D:OS

Well OK fine. That ONE game.

 

[DraQ]

And how are those two approaches any different?
In both you provide the relevant fragment of your location, some transition zones, a bit of unreachable backdrop and ideally some unusable but implied way to reach the nonexisting parts.
How is Fallout any different from, say, Deus Ex (the first one) in this regard?

It's a bit stranger in first person AND open world. Then again, VtMB does it with the subway system, so you can do it.

More generally seeing things in isometric forces the brain into abstract mode, so it accepts other abstractions more easily.

I don't really see the difference. Hub systems have been a thing in FPS games since at least the first Hexen. Many FPS games featured loading zones disguised by redundant geometry and sometimes some sort of mapping one zone onto another so that other objects could cross them as well, although now it's usually possible to just load and unload the content in the background, while world map functionality wouldn't need to differ.
You could have locations surrounded by a small patch of reachable terrain and triggering map travel when trying to leave it, you just wouldn't have visible exit grids.
Take a look at STALKER if you don't see how it could work (apart from the world map).

Weather is VARY SERIOUS BUSINESS for an RPG.

D:OS

Well OK fine. That ONE game.

That doesn't mean it's the only game that could benefit from some creative elemental system. Even those that wouldn't have many opportunities to make use of it can still have weather influence NPC behaviour, stealth, movement (even ash storms in MW did that) and so on.
And even without that seemingly purely cosmetic weather does affect the player - rain or wind make it difficult to hear small noises, rain, fog, dust or darkness make it difficult to see and so on.

Anyway, since Bethesda has always had weather systems in their games, evidently considering them worthwhile and since their pretty much had to have canned weather requiring only minimal modifications from their previous work with the same engine the only plausible reason why FO3 didn't have weather is that Bethesda explicitly didn't want it to have any.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

IC was ridiculous. Half of the "city" included hobo-infested gardens, the arena and the temple square consisting of two empty temples, and the more "residential" districts had more guards than normal folk. I think even Seyda Neen had more citizens than the grand capital of the Empire.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Imperial_City_People

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Seyda_Neen_People

Not quite . Vivec is more comparable, though.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Vivec_People

 

[DraQ]

IC was ridiculous. Half of the "city" included hobo-infested gardens, the arena and the temple square consisting of two empty temples, and the more "residential" districts had more guards than normal folk. I think even Seyda Neen had more citizens than the grand capital of the Empire.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Imperial_City_People

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Seyda_Neen_People

Not quite . Vivec is more comparable, though.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Vivec_People

IC was still at most half of Vivec in terms of population and it *felt* really small.

Skyrim does the clever trick of building its cities in elongated, zoned strips to make them feel much bigger, as if what you see in game was just thin slice of the actual city that isn't there.
Oblivion unwittingly accomplished the opposite trick with the IC, where the "city" is round, homogeneous and comprised of highly symmetrical sectors so that if you just a small fraction of the city that is present in game you feel as if you have seen all of it.

The remaining cities are less symmetrical, but they are awfully small while being relatively open and sparse internally while being overlooked and dominated by massive cathedrals making them replicate this feeling.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Funny thing is that Vivec is even more symmetrical, homogenous and deserted, yet it feels huge. I wonder if it's because it's a closed space.

 

[Metro]

Yes. Morrowind relies on enclosed spaces and fog to make the world seem larger than it is in fact. Of course, Vivec is tediously large.

 

[DalekFlay]

Haven't been playing games much recently but I randomly loaded FO3 up the other day for some aimless wandering while my wife was having an Orange is the New Black marathon like the bitch she is. Every time I load the game I am amazed once again how bad the dialog truly is. Same for Oblivion when I (much less often) randomly load that pile of shit. Bethesda just really fucking didn't know what to do with themselves when they switched to all VO and lost some great writers after Morrowind. It's really embarrassing. Also call me a shallow fuck but I really missed New Vegas' iron-sights.

Anyway I randomly wandered and ended up doing that stupid toxic air hallucination vault that has no real ending and no real reward. Popped into Underword and heard a ton of banal-shit-boring dialog. My god, Michael Bay's Transformer movies are fucking Hugo Award winning artistry compared to FO3's script. I can't complain about it enough. I will complain about it more. You can't fucking stop me.

Anyway I ended up switching to Bookworm Adventures with Kikoskia's Neverwinter Nights LP playing in the background and I had a lot more fun.

 

[laclongquan]

Morrowind writings are no prize to speak of.

 

[Infinitron]

The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 5

The biggest complaint about this series is that a lot of my objections to the story are over “trivial” things. This is true in parts, but it’s also missing the point. The story of Fallout 3 is fractally bad. It’s bad at many different levels and it often takes people a while to realize just how far the brokenness goes. The fact that the themes of Fallout 3 are wonky isn’t enough to ruin the story on its own. And the fact that Dad is really flat and the only actions he ever takes are destructive isn’t enough to ruin the game either. But when I hammer the game for having nonsense goals, people often defend it on the basis of its themes, or characters, or the places you visit. You can’t drill down through the layers to find a single point of failure that we can point at and say, “Here. THIS is where it all went wrong!” It’s a big interconnected mess and it takes time to document all the failures.

So all those early “trivial nitpicks” were part of a long process to head off all the usual defenses of Fallout 3 so we wouldn’t get caught up in looping cul-de-sac arguments, because I didn’t want to end up discussing the entire game in a kind of nested reverse of “D because C because B because A”. This is long and nitpick-y because the problems are far-reaching.

But here’s the payoff. This is where all the mistakes converge into a completely idiotic conclusion…


The end of the game is an all-out War of The Idiots

For most of the game the writers have been flagrantly cheating their asses off to make Col. Autumn work as an adversary. They save him from 100% guaranteed death inside the purifier without even bothering to make up a bad, cheap, implausible justification for it[1]. His men magically know they need a GECK, they know there’s one in Vault 87, they know you’re going there, and they magically reach it without needing to go through Little Lamplight[2]. They knock you out with a grenade that only exists for this cutscene, and they use it even if you’re in stealth, and it works even if you’ve got equipment that ought to defend against it. The writers have to break so many rules to make this sequence work, but they never get around to establishing the stakes for the giant set-piece battle at the end of the game.

On one hand we have the Enclave, who control the purifier. They have the GECK, they’ve installed it, and they’re apparently going to… what? Turn it on? What’s the plan, here? What are we afraid they’re going to do? If they turn it on and it works then the Potomac will become clean. Short of poisoning it, you can’t maliciously clean water. (Remember, the FEV is Eden’s plan, not Autumn’s. And in either case, the Brotherhood doesn’t know anything about it.) If the Enclave wants to pay the the maintenance of this contraption, why not let them? Why would you spend human lives trying to take control of the facility, when it doesn’t matter who is running it?

But the Brotherhood of Steel conclude that not only is it imperative that we take control, but we must do so right now. They even activate their super-robot that still needs some kind of work before it’s properly ready to be used in battle. Then all the “good guys” assault the purifier so that… what? So the we can turn on the purifier instead of the Enclave?

Are we fighting this war to decide who gets to push the button to turn it on?

The Enclave then turns around and pulls the same trick Dad did. They sabotage the device rather than allow it to fall into enemy hands, even though the machine only has one purpose and it doesn’t matter who runs the damn thing.

Worse, someone needs to sacrifice their life in order to turn on the purifier. So by mounting this assault you’ve goaded the Enclave into sabotaging the machine and made it so that you (the player) are the one that needs to go into the deadly radiation to turn the stupid thing on. If you’d just sat back and left the Enclave alone, then presumably they would have turned on the machine and you would “win”. Maybe Autumn could have turned it on himself, since deadly radiation doesn’t seem to be a problem for him.

Wrapping Up

Dad built a water purifier that didn’t work, for people that didn’t need it, and then made it release radiation it shouldn’t have it to prevent it from falling into the hands of people trying to fix it. This killed the man who had no reason to sabotage it and didn’t kill Colonel Autumn, who had no means to survive. This put the Enclave – an army with no reason to attack – in charge of the purifier, which was of no value to them. Then the player entered vault 87 to recover a GECK, a magical matter-arranger that they shouldn’t need and that would be better put to use in virtually any possible manner besides fixing the purifier. Colonel Autumn, who shouldn’t be alive, captured the player with a flash grenade that shouldn’t have worked that was thrown by soldiers who had no way to get there. The final battle was a war between the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel, to see which one would get to commit suicide trying to turn on the purifier that neither of them needed. This resulted in more sabotage that threatened to explode a device that shouldn’t be explode-able, ending with the death of the player character, who had the means to survive but didn’t, and who was never given a good reason for doing any of this.

Keep in mind that what I’ve outlined here isn’t even the worst stuff. I skipped over Little Lamplight, Dad’s Vault-killing adventures, and the fact that the writers didn’t seem to notice all the ways that supposed good-guy Three Dog is actually a monumental selfish, delusional, self-aggrandizing asshole. I’ve just stuck to the crucial elements of the central premise and story.

Sure, you can find a couple of plot holes in Fallout 1. No story is perfect, and it’s hard make big stories hold together over the long haul. But this isn’t just “a couple of plot holes”. This isn’t nitpicking, over-analyzing, or looking for things to complain about. This is a story in which every single aspect of the setting and characters was fundamentally broken from inception. What we’re told isn’t supported by what we’re shown, none of the characters pursue their goals rationally, and the player is constantly obliged to make nonsensical choices.

Despite rampant cheating, hand-waving, railroading, false-choices, and copious amounts of exhaustive over-explaining[3] the writers couldn’t put two concepts together without creating a plot hole and having someone act irrationally. It’s not that the pieces don’t quite fit together, these pieces don’t even work in isolation. Everything is wrong and goofy and desultory. This is an incompetent heap of misunderstood concepts and recycled story themes that the writers never understood.

But what about NEW VEGAS?

Are you one of the people who played through Fallout 3[4] without noticing any of these problems? That’s fine. Lots of people clicked through the dialog without listening, or listened to the dialog without thinking too much about it. You might spend several hours screwing around in subways and killing ghouls between story beats, and by the time you reach the next signpost on your journey the details of the previous scene might seen a little vague.

But I’m willing to bet that the reason so many of us ignored the story was because it was so vapid and flavorless. Maybe with a sensible story, consistent characters, and coherent themes you would have liked it even more.

This is where fans of Fallout 3 jump in and shout, “It’s still better than New Vegas!” I don’t want to see people burn down New Vegas in their attempts to defend Fallout 3, so let’s get this out of the way…

Yes, crawling though subways and gunning down super mutants was fun, and I liked Moria’s quests as much as anyone[5]. And maybe – like me – you enjoy exploring a ruined city more than crawling over the orange hills of the Mojave desert in New Vegas. Maybe you liked fighting super mutants more than screwing around with casinos and Mr. House. That’s fine. That’s all fine. We’ve got this false dichotomy between fans of the games where you can either have:

1. The fun, atmosphere, exploration, and [relative] stability of Fallout 3, or…
   
   
   
2. Rich lore, vibrant characterization, and consistent themes of New Vegas, but the gameworld looks bland, there are invisible walls[6] everywhere, and it crashes all the time.

Do not fall for this. The Fallout 3 story didn’t need to be stupid. They could have just turned the world of Fallout into a mutant shooting gallery, but instead they constructed this long, strange, nonsensical, thematically disjointed, morally confused, horribly paced story with overlong dialog and contrived choices with no emotional payoff.

This shouldn’t be an argument between Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. This should be an argument between Fallout 3 and the BETTER version of Fallout 3 we could have gotten if just one person had stepped in and either fixed the plot, or changed the plot to tackle a subject commensurate with the skills and ambitions of the writing staff.

You don’t need to accept the Fallout 3 story just because you liked the shooting. Games criticism isn’t an all-or-nothing deal, and it’s okay to hate one part of a game and love a different part. When this much time and money is spent on making a game this big, there’s no excuse for the story to be this bad. They could have done better. This franchise deserved better. You deserved better.

 

[DalekFlay]

Morrowind writings are no prize to speak of.

It ain't fucking Shakespeare or even Obsidian video game quality, but it's a hell of a lot better than Oblivion and FO3 in that department. Hell, so is Skyrim, though I would never say Skyrim is "well written." It's really just that Oblivion and FO3 are so embarrassingly bad in the writing department it's rather shocking.