Another example of Fallout's superiority over Fallout 2

[Hobo Elf]

But I was truly fascinated by the world of abandoned industrial sites in STALKER. That makes Fallout look simplistic/

STALKER's style worked, because many of the farmhouses, the factories, residential areas, and communes in Chernobyl were specifically built as a model city that would show the world a true, nuclear-powered Soviet utopia. Instead, the whole site was abandoned before it was put to any good use, the apartments and factories went to decay without ever being filled to capacity, the grasses and meadows turned grey, and the streams filled with green sludge. Vacated by normal people, it was instead filled with scavengers and mind-controlled fanatics dressed in power armour, and armed to the teeth.

What is left is a thing of beauty. :D Really, I loved the dirty, rusty, derelict world of STALKER, and Fallout seemed too clean by comparison.

Yeah, STALKERs world is pretty neat. But I'd say it's a more convincing post apoc world while Fallout seems to be an excuse to have a more retro futuristic wild west thing going on. That's basically what Fallout is to me. A western.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I think it's because the world in Stalker wasn't nuked.

 

[Hobo Elf]

True, but every piece of land can't look like it was nuked either. The areas around the places that were nuked aren't gonna look like they are bombed to hell, they'll look decayed and lifeless.

 

[Leonard DeVir]

True, but every piece of land can't look like it was nuked either. The areas around the places that were nuked aren't gonna look like they are bombed to hell, they'll look decayed and lifeless.

Thats my major qualm with post-apoc settings. Why is everything destroyed, grey, burned, lifeless? On top of that, more often than not everything looks like it was destroyed 12 hours ago. If someone knows the game, Lost Odyssey gave a more accurate picture of a detroyed civilization, with a city in ruins, overgrown with flora and small animals living in it.

And I agree with Hobo Elf, the Fallout setting feels more like a western with sci-fi elements thrown into it. Fallout 2 just tops it and changes the genre to spaghetti western. And piecing together background information for whatever is always a great narrative element because it forces the player to search, think and puzzle together the various clues. But TBH, a lot of games have something like this, Fallout just did it better.

 

[bhlaab]

Because they capsized your boat. These things happen (see The Odyssey).

"These things happen" like it actually did just happen instead of being written in as an excuse to make the game slightly longer and because one of the designers thought the D&D fishmen creatures were super rad

 

[sea]

Thats my major qualm with post-apoc settings. Why is everything destroyed, grey, burned, lifeless? On top of that, more often than not everything looks like it was destroyed 12 hours ago. If someone knows the game, Lost Odyssey gave a more accurate picture of a detroyed civilization, with a city in ruins, overgrown with flora and small animals living in it.

I believe a lot of the time they use things like the depleting of the ozone layer, acid rain, etc. to explain the fact that the environment has stayed so shitty. And to be fair, Fallout does mostly take place in a desert, so at least the dryness and brownness makes sense.

For other examples, I think one could make the argument that the post-apoc setting is less about realism and more about creating a certain emotional state in the audience. It's meant to be crappy, desperate, in ruins, and so on; even if it doesn't make much sense, it's an extremely powerful way to communicate the despair and lost legacy of a destroyed civilisation.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

How about being poorly told through rambling unskippable expositiory dream sequences

Why do you hate Bhaal? It's the only time BG2 is subtle.

and featuring a multitude of pointless and asinine detours where ALL OF A SUDDEN your party finds itself in Fish City or some shit.

Because they capsized your boat. These things happen (see The Odyssey). You can also skip that city altogether by going through the portal to the Underdark in Spellhold, and as a bonus you miss out on the overpowered gamebreaking Cloak of Mirroring (which was even more OP and GB originally since it reflected all spell damage back to the source. And Bioware thought this was a perfectly acceptable item for you to have and it was perfectly sensible for some random band of attacking fishpeople to have it).

That's because everything Bhaal said to you in the dreams was inane bullshit.

And the Fish City and Underdark are still complete narrative cuts executed in the most ham-fisted way possible. And mind you, they aren't even a good example "GO OUT THERE AND ADVENTURE" because they happen IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MAIN QUEST. Though I still consider the "get gold lol" to be worse in that regard.

 

[Carrion]

On the other hand, the those two places were the most interesting and memorable parts of the game. I guess that's the reason they never bothered me that much. But yeah, from a narrative point of view they're total filler.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yea, Bethesda really missed the whole thing that "there are forests in FO world." Like the one outside of Arroyo that's now shriveling from the drought.

Obsidian did a far better job with the whole landscaping of a post-apocalyptic world, with the whole forested mountain with grass on the ground on the way to Jacobstown or the downright gorgeous Zion valley. It's rugged all-right, but it's rugged in the way the area normally is.

Bethout just looked like "derp it was like this in Mad Max."

EDIT: I remember when I was once asked to run a tabletop Fallout game. I said "alright, but I'm going to set it in Hawaii, so you'll see different things, like the Pearl Atolls and mutant sharks."

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Fallout games in general don't really try to make sense in regards to radiation. Fallout 3 in particular just takes the SCIENCE! pony and rides it until it's tired and dying, then applies a branding iron on its testicles. Trying to make sense of it is bad and you should feel bad.

Though it's funny how people got so hung up on Autumn's Syringe of Lifesaving, when Fallout never tried to make radiation exposure a serious threat (What's that, vault dweller? Going into the most irradiated place ever? Oh, take a couple of pills and you'll be fine)

 

[Cabazone]

Actually, if you see the Matt's Chat interview with Tim Cain, you see that the Interplay folks didn't try to be too sophisticated with the theme either. They knew they were just game developers and not philosophers. When asked by Matt about the politics of Fallout, Tim Cain gave a vague answer: "Well, yes, uh, we oppose some of the wrongs of governments. We think the military should be, uh, more accountable." So there is a caveat for not looking too much into motivations of people in Fallout.

Tim cain never have seem to be the head-thinker behind fallout/arcanum narrative. My guess is : if you want to really discuss such matter, Boyarksy is the way to go. You'll have some more developed answers.

It's just a game. My point was that makers of Fallout understood that narrative should only be a tool for game-related elements of problem solving and clue finding

Problem is : as a problem-solving type of game, fallout (or arcanum/ planescape torment/etc.) isn't good (i'm pretty sure a monkey can eventually win the game). On the other hand, if you consider the gameplay (even problem-solving type of gameplay) has a tool for the narrative (and not the other way around), these games are amongst the best.
Maybe you're right thought, maybe the makers considered the narrative as a tool and not as the end (but, i'm not sure of that. I tend to think there wasn't really a consensus between them. For example, Taylor was maybe thinking that way, and Boyarsky the other way around) ; still, some games (or movies, books, etc.) are appreciated for aspect the creators wouldn't have expected, or even consciously crafted.

 

[Wyrmlord]

A monkey can win Torment?

That game took me a while to figure out. I was stuck in Sigil section for weeks, wondering how to proceed next. Only by some perseverance could I find all the pieces required to open a portal to Ravel's Maze.

With Fallout, I did two save/reload trips to The Glow, having no idea what to do. The obvious struck me later - a rope, just like Vault 15, but it took some pixel-hunting to find the pier to put the rope. Even inside the Glow, I couldn't enter level 5, until I did a second run through the game. Of course, The Glow was optional, but without it, your chances of surviving later sections were slimmer, since it was the only way to get a Power Armour.

I'd say that the challenge in these games is somewhere halfway between some of the more difficult quests of recent RPGs and the average adventure game of the pre-1997 era. Hard enough that you can be stuck a while, but not so hard that you give up on the game altogether, just like those early French adventure games (Shadow of the Comet, KGB,.etc) that always infruriate me.