Fallout Visual Design Thread

[NecroLord]

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:

Never used the Tommy Gun.
Is it any good?

 

[Arbiter]

Never used the Tommy Gun.
Is it any good?

I don't know, I have always played as a sniper.

 

[Mise]

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 outdated and ugly i guess.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

American football players have better protection than this.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

F2 drew inspiration of actual guns: grease gun, FN FAL, HKs, SWs, P90s... Tactics too. Then Bethesda came along and... uhh...

Yeah, and a lot of those guns don't fit with the setting much at all. It's one of the complaints about Fallout 2. Fallout's 2077 is not anything close to our timeline.

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

Why is it camouflage?

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.

The Institute reminds me a lot more of 2001, THX-1138, or even Logan's Run. Everything is white and plastic-y, sterile, and brightly lit. Lots of plexiglass everywhere on the inside. Shit, The Institute almost looks like the default "future" world in The Sims 3's "Into the Future" expansion.

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.

They screwed the pooch with the Fusion Cores for the Power Armor. I don't have much of a problem with the rest of the changes. The Power Armor was supposed to have it's own power source which was good for 1000 years. It was replaced with a fusion core which doesn't last very long at all, which makes you wonder how practical that shit would be in an actual battlefield scenario. You better hope the enemy doesn't spot you when your fusion core is around 25%, because in the middle of that skirmish, that armor is going to pop wide open to let you out like a hot dog in a microwave.

I have a feeling that this change was made just so they could toss you a free Power Armor right at the start of the game. Because wouldn't that be cool!?

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.

Fallout 4 is the only Fallout game where I never once used the Power Armor beyond in the beginning where you're handed it to fight a Deathclaw at very low level. I did collect all the power armors I could find, and just used them as display pieces in Sanctuary. I never considered using them, though, because of the fusion core bullshit. I mainly used fusion cores to power settlements.

 

[Jacov]

I have a feeling that this change was made just so they could toss you a free Power Armor right at the start of the game.

Which is ironic considering that F4's power armor sucks eggs until you get the perks and enough cores. So it's not even usable in the first third of the game!