Fallout Visual Design Thread

[Hellraiser]

The RR BB gun - that's a joke, right? It isn't looking very futuristic at all, retro or not.

I was listing the only weapons in Fallout 1 or 2 that I recalled and thought also looked/were "retro 50s" rather than going for the contemporary futuristic look. You can argue this is a stretch, but if I was doing something retro-futuristic in this area, I would put a bunch of real world "battle-proven" guns from the 1950s into the item pool in addition to the 50s futurism ones, to establish that the "divergence point" was the 50s. Feel free to disagree, in the end this is really just a subjective vision or manifestation of my own creative style speaking here rather than encyclopedic definition of what is retro-futurism based on some decade.

As for the plasma rifle again feel free to disagree, but for me the weird science fiction look leans into 50s pulp magazine/comic book cover turf.

Is this "Fallout 1 did everything better than Fallout 2" talking here?

No, that was not the point, I forgot to put "IMO also the" in front of my post to indicate I agree the FO2 pulse weapons are retro and I guess this mislead you, could have sworn I had that in that post when I was writing it at some point.

FYI I mentioned those are all FO1 was because that's definitely the original vision and that it wasn't fully contemporary futurism, rather than something one could pin on the change of teams between FO1 and FO2 leading to possible claims that Boyarsky and the rest meant "contemporary futursim only" for Fallout guns.

 

[NecroLord]

but I do know for sure that the playermodel renders for the character and npcs were rushed.

I completely agree, although I think some here hold F2 in such high regard that they can’t accept it.

NecroLord , I think we briefly discussed the decline of F2 NPC sprites vs F1 in the past. I’m not trying to dunk on you - it’s great you engage with these old games - but Surf knows the OG Fallout art pipeline much better than me and is saying the same.

So much of F2 was a rush a job.

Those sprites are more or less the same.
Hellraiser As for the energy weapons, they do have a touch of retrofuturism in their design. Just take a look at the Plasma Rifle.

 

[deuxhero]

On "real" weapons: I think features are more important than era. There's absolutely guns from the 50s (Nylon 66) that should never be in Fallout (at least as a non-unique), but plenty from the 90s that look just fine. Picatiny Rail (yes, I know it's in New Vegas) stands out as 1: being a very specific standard that's a clearly contemporary feature that might be superseded by 2077 in our world 2: Not really fitting with the retro future convention, not inherently because it's from the 90s, but because "universal accessory mount" is such a modern idea.

 

[Saldrone]

I'd like to bring another example of Bethesda trying to fix things that aren't broken.

The combat armor is supossed to look like something like this:

And yet instead of maintaining fidelity they retconned the design in favor of something more... outdated and ugly i guess.

Why are the arms exposed? why the helmet doesn't have a visor? Is perfectly fine to make a scavenged variant of it but not an outright replacement

 

[NecroLord]

And the character models themselves, especially the faces, look ugly as sin.
Not quite Oblivion-like, but still there. Same engine after all.
Look at Sarah Weintraub for example. Supposed to be a Vault Babe just by looking at the Caravan Card depicting her, but she looks like someone else entirely...

 

[lukaszek]

outdated and ugly i guess.

this is f3, embrace f4

 

[Tyranicon]

So much of vidya games is just artists with absolutely no knowledge of the things they're supposed to be creating.

It's even worse in the modern day when any lolrandom 4chan poster has an intimate knowledge of firearms.

 

[frajaq]

I dont mind the pistol but the Laser Rifle is awful

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

A must see.

 

[Sigourn]

Pretty much every single redesign looks like shit.

I also disagree with the popular consensus of "Power Armor in FO4 looks great". I also think it looks awful. Contrast this:

With this:

I also think the problem with Fallout 3's Power Armor wasn't the design itself, but that the game simply looks bad. Look at this art, using the FO3 design. It looks pretty good to me.

 

[NecroLord]

Original Fallout Power Armor was the best looking one.
One of the few things Bugthesda actually got done right.

 

[Saldrone]

Pretty much every single redesign looks like shit.

I also disagree with the popular consensus of "Power Armor in FO4 looks great". I also think it looks awful. Contrast this:

With this:

I also think the problem with Fallout 3's Power Armor wasn't the design itself, but that the game simply looks bad. Look at this art, using the FO3 design. It looks pretty good to me.

Power armor visual retcons in Fallout goes like this:

OG Fallout: Bodybuilder
Fallout 3/New Vegas: The Bodybuilder left the gym
Fallout 4: The Bodybuilder returned...but this time took steroids.

 

[rubinstein]

outdated and ugly i guess.

this is f3, embrace f4

if you want to shit on fo4, why not shit on toilet armor instead

 

[NecroLord]

Pretty much every single redesign looks like shit.

I also disagree with the popular consensus of "Power Armor in FO4 looks great". I also think it looks awful. Contrast this:

With this:

I also think the problem with Fallout 3's Power Armor wasn't the design itself, but that the game simply looks bad. Look at this art, using the FO3 design. It looks pretty good to me.

Power armor retcons in Fallout goes like this:

OG Fallout: Bodybuilder
Fallout 3/New Vegas: The Bodybuilder left the gym
Fallout 4: The Bodybuilder returned...but this time took steroids.

Their original purpose was to aid the user in lifting and using heavy weapons, of course, also to offer protection against radiation, bullets and other hazards.
They were meant to be bulky, not that pansy ass looking shit you see in NV for example...

 

[deuxhero]

So much of vidya games is just artists with absolutely no knowledge of the things they're supposed to be creating.

It's even worse in the modern day when any lolrandom 4chan poster has an intimate knowledge of firearms.

Reminds me of the quest involving USS Constitution in Fallout 4. Every single mention of her during the quest is written "The Constitution" which is a major style failure when discussing US ships. You just say "Constitution", or "USS Constitution". The only way "the" will be in front is if the is attached to something else like "the frigate USS Constitution" (where "the" is attached to "frigate") or "the USS Constitution museum" (where "the" is attached to museum). I don't care when followers or the scavengers do it, but the quest name and robotic crew, who should know better, is just super annoying (I think Fallout 4 can support italics in subtitles, so failure to do so is another miss). Also Danse's dialog. It reeks of someone who doesn't understand military terminology trying to write military speak.

 

[Saldrone]

Pretty much every single redesign looks like shit.

I also disagree with the popular consensus of "Power Armor in FO4 looks great". I also think it looks awful. Contrast this:

With this:

I also think the problem with Fallout 3's Power Armor wasn't the design itself, but that the game simply looks bad. Look at this art, using the FO3 design. It looks pretty good to me.

Power armor retcons in Fallout goes like this:

OG Fallout: Bodybuilder
Fallout 3/New Vegas: The Bodybuilder left the gym
Fallout 4: The Bodybuilder returned...but this time took steroids.

Their original purpose was to aid the user in lifting and using heavy weapons, of course, also to offer protection against radiation, bullets and other hazards.
They were meant to be bulky, not that pansy ass looking shit you see in NV for example...

It also doesn't make any sense that power armor gives agility penalties in FO3 when a one of the BoS guards in FO1 explicity states that it's like "an extension of the human body" instead of wearing some kind of heavy junk.

 

[deuxhero]

outdated and ugly i guess.

this is f3, embrace f4

if you want to shit on fo4, why not shit on toilet armor instead

I really would like to know where the hell Bethesda pulled The Institute's aesthetics from. They don't belong in Fallout. Even for a deliberate "otherness", they'd have been better served pulling from older (1920s) or newer (60s/70s) sci-fi. I've seen claims its Star Trek inspired, but that doesn't work because ToS had strong color contrasts.

Edit: They could have also pulled from the British 1951 sci-fi film The Man in the White Suit. Make their whites pure white, slightly luminous, and surprisingly protective,

 

[Jacov]

The idea of power armor in F4 is good.
However, as it always is with Bethesda, someone has a good idea but they don't have skills to properly realize it.

The idea of power armor as a mobile fortress that you can customize, adding various bells and whistles, is just great. Something like that I would expect from Van Buren. But the realization of this concept in F4 is just dull and boring.

 

[deuxhero]

F4 power armor suffers from the same as any consumable based balance in RPGs does. At the start cores are so rare you don't bother because you'll both waste most of your cores in transit and few enemies have the firepower to merit bringing it. By the time you'd actually want to use it, it's not worth it despite drowning in the consumable needed. I think I used it for the radioactive sea and never again.

 

[Beastro]

This looks like it would be right at home in Fallout:

 

[lukaszek]

The idea of power armor in F4 is good.
However, as it always is with Bethesda, someone has a good idea but they don't have skills to properly realize it.

 

[NecroLord]

OG Advanced Power Armor is the coolest looking one.

 

[goregasm]

I don't HATE beths design of the laser rifle and plasma pistol per say.

Oddly enough I do actively dislike their laser pistol and plasma rifle designs even with them being rather lazy scaled versions of two designs I think look good, on paper at least.

The big thing, gameplay, these energy weapons are a pain in the ass to use, covering up huge amounts of screen.

All in all, beths concept designs/art for fallout, aren't utterly awful, some are actually kind of cool visually, credit to the artists there, but in practice it all kind of falls apart.

It's all so blocky and chunky, which is something they are going for, but it just doesn't translate well imo in gameplay, tons of shit in your face, tons of screen lost, the (I hate this term) "assault rifle" in fo4 is a perfect example.

They tried to give it this water cooled machine gun look while having perfectly capable firearms that can achieve the same amount of fire rate without antique technology, doesn't make sense from a gameplay or coherent design perspective imo.

 

[NecroLord]

Plasma Rifle looks like absolute shit.
Same for the Laser Rifle and Gatling Laser.
Compare them to original Fallout...

 

[Arbiter]

I really liked F2's gun design. Grease Gun looked slick as fuck even though its stats were ass

It's a real world gun: