Fallout 3 vs Fallout 4

[MadMaxHellfire]

Fallout 4 is less bad than Fallout 3. I even had some fun with it.

with or without mods? because, jokes aside, with at least 70-90 mods and completely ignoring any quest and dialogue, f4 can be turned into a sort of almost decent survival.

 

[EldarEldrad]

Fallout 3 is 15 years old already. It's an old-school RPG by today's standards.

And Fallout 4 is 8 years old already, it's an old-school RPG by today's standards.

These two statements contain all you should know about today's standards.

 

[JarlFrank]

Fallout 4 is less bad than Fallout 3. I even had some fun with it.

with or without mods? because, jokes aside, with at least 70-90 mods and completely ignoring any quest and dialogue, f4 can be turned into a sort of almost decent survival.

With some basic mods that make the combat more fun (and add barefoot outfits for my female character )

Specifically, the un-bogus mod that makes Fallout 4's progression a lot better:
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/26026?

Primarily, it fixes the shitty bloated hitpoint progression of vanilla. Neither you nor the enemies gain more HP on levelups, it's solely based on the constitution stat. It also standardizes weapon damage based on bullet caliber.
In vanilla FO4 I had the issue that at high levels everyone is a bullet sponge because weapon damage can't keep up with HP bloat. With the unbogus mod, this is no longer the case.

 

[Theodora]

Fallout 3's combat was to a shooter what Morrowind's was to a medieval hack-and-slash.

Anyway I thought FO4 had abandoned most of the RPG elements? I tried it forever ago and never returned. Is there a mod list or something that makes it more of, well, an RPG?

 

[JarlFrank]

Fallout 4 is not an RPG.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

no. it's irredeemable. best you can do is survival, and i just realized there's a lot of new stuff for horizon and an entirely new sim settlements 2. i might give it another spin in a month or two.

 

[baturinsky]

Fallout 3 has two cool parts. First is the nuked Washington. Second is the Tenpenny tower quest line which teaches about inclusiveness.
Fallout 4 has also two cool parts. First is the power armor. Second is being able to build gulags and capture peasants to work in them.

 

[Theodora]

no. it's irredeemable. best you can do is survival

How is it as that? I looked up Horizon and it looked somewhat interesting, but hard to really picture in practice.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i enjoyed it, but only because i'm a dumbfuck larper who likes scavenging through rubble looking for some resource to improve my equipment. horizon also makes enemies much tougher, so tough it in some way breaks the game, because a starting character just can't survive the first town.

 

[Jaesun]

Both games are total abominations using the Fallout name and are just continued rape of the corpse that was the Fallout series.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

This thread is the future of the 'Codex. In 20 years, smaug and Casual Hero 's kids will be debating here about Fallout 3 vs Fallout 4.

 

[lukaszek]

booted f4 and oh boy, it did age badly as a shooter

 

[Cheesedragon117]

As others have said, it's like comparing a giant douche to a turd sandwich.

But if you locked me in a room and forced me at gunpoint to play one or the other, I'd pick F3. I wouldn't cringe myself to death at the dialogue nearly as fast, and I get to enjoy at least a few high moments like Tenpenny Tower, Tranquility Lane and Liberty Prime.

 

[Falksi]

Honestly, I semi-enjoyed Fallout 3 for a once through. It's not a good game at all, but I liked the world and some of the quests were interesting. Fallout 4 on the other hand seemed better for the first few hours, but descended into complete and utter boredom, with some of the blandest questing I've ever seen. Like one dude literally would tell you to go kill a bunch of ghouls, then on return say "thanks....here....go kill another bunch of ghouls" several times over. I found Fallout 3 more atmospheric too.

You'd be better off ignoring both really though.

 

[GaelicVigil]

Fallout 3 NV and Fallout 4 are more linear experiences than Fallout 3. All three pale in comparison to Fallout 1, but at least F3 gives you a decent open world experience a la Oblivion. I'd suggest F3 - after loading it up with a few hundred mods to fix some of the jank.

 

[Theodora]

All three pale in comparison to Fallout 1, but at least F3 gives you a decent open world experience a la Oblivion.

Idk if it's just me, but the ubiquity of grey, muted puke-orange, and off-green really kills a lot of the interest/value in exploring such a world; in other words, the palette is so restrained that exploration feels heavily handicapped, because the world itself has so much less appeal to see.

 

[Beans00]

I hate played fallout 3 to pretty much 100% completion to debate people at school about how bad it was. Easily the most autistic thing I've ever done in my life.
I couldn't hate play fallout 4 to completion(as in side quests), I did beat it a few years ago but basically rolled through the BOS storyline as quickly as possible in like 20 hours and did basically no side content or dlc's.
It's hard to think which is worse. 4 had better shooting but was probably more retarded. 3 on the other hand was also retarded.


E- Also fun fact, the BOS storyline in F4 also has liberty prime.

TLDR; Both are worse then eachother.

 

[Lemming42]

Fallout 3 has mostly terrible writing but interesting quest structure - often better than NV's - and some real C&C (though again, it occurs almost entirely in the context of dodgy writing). The overworld exploration is a mixed bag; some dungeons and locations are very memorable, but about half the world map is phoned in.

I've never been able to get into Fallout 4 no matter what. The shooting is technically better but it's still abominable, and unlike Fallout 3, you can't really do much to avoid it. The game's quests are sub-Far Cry stuff and the roleplaying opportunities are absolute zero. The better shooting doesn't even matter given the absurd "Legendary Enemies" system, which turns everything into health bloat, as if you're playing a shitty MMO. Fo3 (and Fo2) might have been batshit interpretations of Fo1, but Fo4 is literally not even pretending to take place in the Fallout setting, beyond regurgitation of the most tired iconogrpahy (vaults, nuka cola, etc).

Absolutely no hesitation calling Fo3 the better of the two by far. If you want C&C and worldbuilding, Fo3 has it in spades, just be prepared for quite a lot of the world to make very little sense. The only really big problem I have with Fo3 is the main quest, which is absolutely irredeemable and one of the worst Bethesda have ever done (which is really saying something), but if you ignore it and go to do the sidequests, the game is often fun.

Also, I'm going to do the unthinkable, and defend Porky:

Also, F3 is at least somewhat similar in atmosphere to F1/F2/NV

This is sort of true. Fo3 is an odd mix of Fo1 and Fo2, with its own weird sheen on top. It echoes the sort of pulp feeling of Fo1 with very strange, surreal and nightmarish stuff going on, but also echoes Fo2's retardation and tendency towards unfunny jokes. It does neither niche as well as Fo1 and Fo2, but some of the quest ideas are good conceptually, even if they tend to fall apart a bit midway through due to logic errors or awful dialogue. Fo3 also amplifies the 1940s/50s aesthetic to absurd levels, which is occasionally quite haunting and evocative but mostly just annoying.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Ya’ll are supposed to put together a mod list for all the fallouts.

And hey! FO3 has that chick that reminds me of the Mom from Bobby’s world. Golly gee dontcha know?

Moira that’s right… fucking forgot that bitch’s name.


And before fallout 3 happened…

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I’ve never really given FO3+ any serious attempt tbh and I don’t know why. I only recently picked up FO4 because GOG finally released it. Having not finished FO2 or BOS I’d feel odd just jumping in and tbh, I’d want to play FO1 with mods since some 10 years ago I played that game to death but….. rather forgot it due to so much online gaming. Hell, I might want to just jump into the original wasteland all over again.

So, what is so bad about these two games in a bullet list rather than wall paragraphs. Links to examples are fine.

Future question: will someone eventually mod Starfield to have a world with wasteland and each fallout on it? Impossible?

 

[Butter]

So, what is so bad about these two games in a bullet list rather than wall paragraphs. Links to examples are fine.

* Terrible stories
* Focus on linear dungeons full of monsters rather than interesting scenarios and quests
* Lack of roleplaying options
* Theme park world design
* Wacky tone that would make Fallout 2 devs cringe

 

[mediocrepoet]

I wasn't able to begin playing Fallout 3 before getting bored. F4 at least I finished. I would imagine The Outer Worlds is better than both games. At least it's supposed to have some traces of New Vegas in it.

F3 and F4 are both shit in different ways, but let's not get crazy. At least you can play the Fallouts as games, while OW is Cain/Boyarsky's magnum opus in the sense that it really captures the essence of boredom.

 

[SharkClub]

Ah yes, this thread/post/question again. Let me recycle my post so I don't have to write it all out again:

They are both just as dumb and bad as eachother but Fallout 4 at least gets points for originality with the Institute/Minutemen/Railroad, however poorly executed.

Fallout 3 on the other hand decides to rehash every plot beat and every major faction from Fallout 1&2 on the opposite coast where it makes no sense for them to be because Bethesda wanted to milk that Fallout iconography. 3 is a soft reboot made with all of those things included because Bethesda never expected anyone to give a shit about yucky old 2D isometric games once their latest and greatest iteration of the series came out.

>Hey, remember the BoS? How they were barely present during Fallout 2 and small scale compared to the current events? Well here, have them back with their numbers multiplied by 10 because we needed a 'good' faction.
>Hey, remember the Enclave? How they were totally annihilated during Fallout 2 and only small contingents of them remain? Well here, have them back with their numbers multiplied by 10 because we needed a 'bad' faction.
>Remember Super Mutants? Those guys who were mutated by FEV from the top secret West Tek and Mariposa facilities? They were lead by the Master and his Lieutenant in Fallout 1. Who are they lead by in 3 and what are their motivations for kidnapping people and taking them to turn them into super mutants in their vault which inexplicably also has FEV? Nobody. The only smart super mutant around is locked in a cell because he's different. There is no intelligent mind leading them, these cannibalistic barbarian ogre people kidnap people and turn them into more mutants because they just do ok cool. We needed an ogre bullet sponge faction. Did I mention that a town full of children with one kid with a gun is able to hold off a horde of these things?
>Remember Radscorpions and Deathclaws? You know, from Fallout! Have them on the east coast because that makes sense.
>Remember bottle caps? That currency that was backed by the water merchants of the hub in Fallout and phased out by the time of Fallout 2? Well guess what, we have bottle caps on the east coast too and they're backed by literally nothing.
>Remember when the vault needed purified drinking water in Fallout? Well that's the basis of our whole plot, the wasteland needs purified drinking water!
>Remember when the overseer said you were a hero and you had to leave, well guess what, you're that here too!
>Remember the GECK? You know, that macguffin from Fallout 2. Go find a GECK to save the wasteland!
>Remember Harold? That old mutie that settled down in Gecko? Well he's inexplicably walked across the continent and turned into a tree for our game.

It's literally the most lazy rehashed garbage ever put into a video game, Fallout 4 isn't great but at least they put a pen to paper at some point during its storyboarding unlike 3 which was probably just copypasted from the synopses for Fallout 1 & 2 with some words changed.

Also Fallout 3's core gameplay is fucking dire and 4 improves on it so much it's unreal. There is literally no reason and never will be a reason to play 3 over 4 if you're looking for dumb low IQ looter shooter. If you're looking for a good Fallout game then 3 is the absolute bottom of the barrel along with Brotherhood of Steel, too. If for some reason you like Fallout 3's gameplay then New Vegas does it better anyway with iron sights, weapon mods, ammo types, actual unique weapons and armor, and just so happens to also be the best attempt at a Fallout game in the modern 3D era. I don't know why you would want to play 3 with its dumbed down RPG systems and shit combat just because the RPG systems are less dumbed down than 4. If you wanted a good RPG why the hell would you play 3 to begin with. Fallout 3 is a painfully boring game where you can get 100 in every skill before level 30 but everything level scales to you so you're shooting bullet sponges for the last third of it.

3 serves no purpose. It is a game for nobody. It doesn't do anything better than any other given game in its own series. The only thing stopping it from being absolutely irredeemable shit is that its existence let New Vegas exist.

The TL;DR is that Fallout 4 is bad in most ways and Fallout 3 is bad in every way. Pick your poison.

 

[Ryzer]

Your post ends with

The only thing stopping it from being absolutely irredeemable shit is that its existence let New Vegas exist.

Considering that New Vegas is irredeemable shit as well, it's a logical conclusion to Fallout 3.

 

[Axel_am]

F3 and F4 are both shit in different ways, but let's not get crazy. At least you can play the Fallouts as games, while OW is Cain/Boyarsky's magnum opus in the sense that it really captures the essence of boredom.

Yeah, I don't know. Everything in F3 is brown and gray. OW at least has more than two colors in it. I would imagine that would make it at least a little bit more interesting to explore than post-apocalyptic Washington.