On the Codex, Fallout 3 is underrated and Skyrim is overrated

[Glop_dweller]

Well, for starters saying it's the ONLY sequel is incorrect - unless having a number besides the name means that much to you.

Yes.

New Vegas is the sequel to Fallout 2. It's certainly more of a sequel then 3 was.

New Vegas is a FO3 spinoff title.

Further the context of a game being in the Fallout series shouldn't have any bearing on it's quality as a game ...

So would you then accept an official TES6 from Bethesda, if it played like Larian's BG3?

The "Quality of a game" is not much solace to the series fan who does not get a proper game. FO3 & 4 would lose hands down even if they were unanimously voted the best franken-shooters of their respective decades—because they are not supposed to be.

 

[Sentinel]

Skyrim is better than Oblivion but worse than Morrowind.
Fallout 3 is worse than New Vegas, 1 and 2, but better than 4.

 

[Njaevin]

Recently i played some Bethesda games (decline!) and that's my impression.
FO3 is good and even great! Exploration is better than NV, but not writing(it's ok though) Quests are not bad. Skyrim on the other hand sucks very much and I couldn't finish it . It looks worse than Oblivion, no dense forests and less npcs around . Quests are basic fetch and kill ( literally), even Oblivion was better, except in level scaling probably.
So, what gives Codex?

Idk yet how the codex thinks about fallout 3 but it is an enjoyable game, especially modded. Id say it comes down to personal preference because the atmosphere is just different as well as the incentive. People praising new vegas like its a godsend always made me think. They are very similar and fanboys can't accept it because its a classic obsidian vs Bethesda thing.

Oblivion is just meh. Skyrim is also just solid to me. It is a mainstream classic rpg and the first playthrough is pretty damn fun but it aged badly and even mods cant save it. Not much C&C, fetch and mmo tier quests except a few, no real choices, clunky Combat system, especially magic, you name it. Skyrims atmosphere though is PEAK comfy and Ive yet to see another comfy game like that. Oblivion is just...idk, replaying it made me think that I only enjoyed it cause I didnt know any better.

 

[Kainan]

"Skyrim is overrated"? On Codex? Obvious troll is obvious.

You can see it even on just this page

As for the games, Skyrim can be brought up to a fun game for 1 or 2 playthroughs, especially with Requiem.
Fallout 3 cannot be salvaged. Put it into an engine with better FPS gameplay, and you'll still have the shit story and world.
There are no mods making F3 fun to play through...

Skyrim is better than Oblivion, but that's not exactly a mark of quality and outside of creating a decent illusion of the living world (and nordic-like atmosphere) it didn't really improve the formula compared to Oblivion.

Skyrim is better than Oblivion but worse than Morrowind.
Fallout 3 is worse than New Vegas, 1 and 2, but better than 4

Oblivion is just meh. Skyrim is also just solid to me. It is a mainstream classic rpg and the first playthrough is pretty damn fun but it aged badly and even mods cant save it. Not much C&C, fetch and mmo tier quests except a few, no real choices, clunky Combat system, especially magic, you name it. Skyrims atmosphere though is PEAK comfy and Ive yet to see another comfy game like that. Oblivion is just...idk, replaying it made me think that I only enjoyed it cause I didnt know any better.

 

[Harthwain]

You can see it even on just this page

I think you need to work on your definition of "overrated" if you think "better than Oblivion" is a mark of quality.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I loved Malcom McDowell's VA in FO3 and the revelation about his character. FO3 has these little standalone moments/set pieces that if you didn't over-scrutinize and try to fit into the big picture too much were memorable and enjoyable. The only thing I really remember about Skyrim (admittedly I only played about 1/3 of it before giving up) besides the dragonball-Z powers you get and the lame, weakling dragons was the internet meme that wasn't even as funny or quotable as the one from Oblivion: "I saw a mud crab the other day... horrible creatures!"

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Bethesda's design ethos has remained remarkably consistent for a long time. In fact, it's a pretty old school approach that prioritizes the core systems and game functions over set-piece moments.

Finally someone noticed that.

 

[Sykar]

Bethderp's design philosophy: Tell them sweet little lies. It just works!

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

You could say that Oblivion and Skyrim are cut out of the same cloth and you would be correct, but I'd argue they are more like subtractions rather than additions in comparison.

No wonder given that Nu-Bethesda's design mantra has been just removing features rather than deepening them ever since like, I don't know, post Daggerfall. In particular in terms of character and progression systems.

It's also no wonder given that Morrowind was basically the first game that had them reaching out to the crowd some (Morrowind basically had saved the company) -- with the first iteration upon that, Oblivion, confirming to them that they were on the right track on both of those accounts: Morrowind as a basic template, and Oblivion as a confirmation of removing stuff means reaching larger audiences. Skyrim was just barebones and was like huge.

It's interesting that Starfield represents the first time in like ages in which they seem to go the opposite direction on some accounts, however, whether the actual implementation is actually something interesting may be up for debate. This looks another case of FO3's awesome kind of perk design, like the mind-boggingly "+10 to heavy weapon skills" choices to be made, as if that kind of progression wasn't available outside of perks already (which New Vegas mostly immediately ditched for reason, as it was made by guys who actually knew their stuff).

At least by not overwhelming their intended audience, that way Beth can still afford Arkane, so there's that. (Curiously, when Redfall was presented that day, I couldn't help but notice that whilst Starfield's weapon progression too seems to be mostly about potentially choice paralysis inducing +10% - +30% increasements in damage -- Redfall, which looks a pretty straight forward FPS experience still actually dabbled in marginally more interesting modifications such as magazine sizes and weapon spread).

 

[jackofshadows]

Idk yet how the codex thinks about fallout 3 but it is an enjoyable game, especially modded. Id say it comes down to personal preference because the atmosphere is just different as well as the incentive. People praising new vegas like its a godsend always made me think. They are very similar and fanboys can't accept it because its a classic obsidian vs Bethesda thing.

They are indeed similar in terms of gameplay and the looks due to sharing the same engine/some assets but that's about it. The biggest, colossal difference lies in the two adjacent aspects: wordbuilding and writing. NV has carefully crafted plausible gameworld and arguably almost top tier writing by gaming standards while F3 has unbelievably bizarre pseudo post-apoc world where nothing makes sense with on par writing - so stupid that sometimes it makes one's head hurt.

Then NV has more solid RPG mechanics despite the fact it's still an Action oriented game (that's the reason why some, me included, refuse to acknowledge it as some sort of spiritual successor of classic Fallouts) meaning simply speaking character stats and skills matters more.

So no, it has nothing to do with Beth vs Obsidian. Besides, those days are long gone, just look at Obsidian now.

 

[Ryzer]

Idk yet how the codex thinks about fallout 3 but it is an enjoyable game, especially modded. Id say it comes down to personal preference because the atmosphere is just different as well as the incentive. People praising new vegas like its a godsend always made me think. They are very similar and fanboys can't accept it because its a classic obsidian vs Bethesda thing.

NV has carefully crafted plausible gameworld

No.

 

[Lemming42]

NV's as close to a realistic world as anyone's likely to get under the Bethesda model. There's only the occasional bit of retardation (a petrol station full of raiders right fucking next to Mojave Outpost, on a road the NCR would surely use often) but if you accept it as being a slightly diagrammatic representation of the world rather than a totally literal one, it really works well and all the settlements have their location and existence explained.

 

[Njaevin]

After reading some of the posts, I gotta admit, yes the writing is better and the world is more believable. Still, normies seem to don't really make a difference between NV and F3 and think of it as the same. Imo every fallout is retarded in one way or another. And for my own sanity I all view them as single entities instead of being connected somehow. More easy on the mind. In my recent post I said its a bethesda vs obsidian thing. I gotta redefine: it was a bethesda vs obsidian thing. As jackofshadows pointed out, todays obsidian is nothing compared to back then. I feel like that people really dive deep into tribalism when it comes to Fallout, which makes it difficult to take it seriously. Almost feels like console fags battling it out.

I gotta replay both games though, its been too long.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Cool thing about Fallout-style game world over Nu-Fallout-style gameworld is that you don't walk 5 seconds out of town and see a bunch of raiders/monsters/whatever just standing around.
Idk how people can talk about "muh immersion" when shit like that exists. Can't take any game seriously when it has ""open world"" game design like that, and it's pretty much all of them except KCD.

 

[jackofshadows]

One thing when it's a scale - a game's conditionality like again in NV in order for player not to waste too much time on pointless running back and forth and another when say like in F4 where yeah it's so over the top to the point of being ridiculous for anything but a straight up shooter game.

As for classic Fallouts ahem the random encounter system is pretty wonky there I might remind you so it could give even similar wtf experience sometimes.

 

[Zlaja]

Morrowind's is awful and you cannot lose after around level 5

Only if you know exactly where to find good loot from the get go. If the difficulty slider is at +50 or more than you can certainly die to certain things even 10 levels after that.

As @Lemming42 said, the lack of map-based fast travel eventually turns the game into a chore

Both you and Lemming42 are retarded.

If Deus Ex and System Shock 2 can be considered great RPGs, I really don't understand what's keeping Skyrim or even Fallout 4 out

Deus Ex and SS2 are engaging, actually fun to play and don't overstay their welcome. Unlike Skyrim, which is super bland and a mind numbing chore to slog through.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

As for classic Fallouts ahem the random encounter system is pretty wonky there I might remind you so it could give even similar wtf experience sometimes.

I consider this to be more of an oversight than deliberate decision though.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

After reading some of the posts, I gotta admit, yes the writing is better and the world is more believable. Still, normies seem to don't really make a difference between NV and F3 and think of it as the same.

Metacritic user ratings (PC):
FO 3: 7.8
New Vegas: 8.9

Steam recommendations:
FO3: 78%
New Vegas: 96%

New Vegas polls pretty damn highly almost everywhere, Bethesda fans included, and "normies" have also analyzed it plenty. It may inhibit a lot of FO3's flaws, inevitably. But it fixed most of the stuff that was so damn mediocre within it, like most of the quest design, the lazy perks (+10 points to your prefered weapon skill, lulz), and some of the SPECIAL treatment. Not that Bethesda ever cared any, except its addition of ironsights.
But why should they, given that Fallout 3 and 4 made more of what actually counts, which is bucks?

New Vegas to me was perhaps the last AAA RPG that showed there may be a future in this blockbusting format beyond semi-interactive movies (the Nu-Bioware school) and signposted theme park rides (Nu-Bethsoft school) (or a combination of both, aka Witcher). Alas, that future never came to be.

 

[Sigourn]

Both you and Lemming42 are retarded.

So retarded that we at least can put into words why Morrowind's fast travel system is bad, yet your argument probably boils down to "muh immersion", which is the same argument Fallout 3 fags use to justify their retarded setting.

 

[Zlaja]

yet your argument probably boils down to "muh immersion"

While playing Morrowind and pondering about the game's flaws (which are many), not once did I think to myself that the game would be more enjoyable if you could fast travel from the map screen. In fact, the way fast travel was implemented was well thought off and 'balanced' when weighing between different aspects like convenience and challenge/effort.

 

[copebot]

Fallout is bad from even a soft-SF perspective in the area of worldbuilding if you try to make sense of it rationally. Just about nothing in it stands up to rational scrutiny. But it's not intended to be that: it's a rule-of-cool pulp world that expressly references pulp aesthetics and themes. It's a "loving parody" of pulp, but I think the issue that Bethesda's creatives ran into is that there aren't that many people now who know anything about pulp -- same with the audience -- so it became very self-referential. You see this also with Star Wars and its later adaptations in which the twist on pulp became self-referential, squeezing out the vital and original connection to other bodies of popular art.

FO:NV was a little fresher because it reached a little farther with its references and aesthetics. I wouldn't really use the term worldbuilding to describe what it does well. It's really "set-building" in that, like a tightly directed play, all the scenery is relevant and ties into the plot about the Hoover Dam, which if you think about it is an appropriate reference symbol to the pulp era of the 1930s-50s. The 3D continuous world really plays well into this, pulling off a sense that wasn't possible with the first two FO games.

FO3 is really constrained at that in part because of all the technical compromises they had to make in the overmap design -- a city known for its open vistas and monuments became all chopped up with invisible walls and debris because of console constraints. Also, for whatever reason, the plot has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the primo location that they picked for a game. The big locations are just there to say that they were modeled in-game and don't really have much of anything to do with the story or the gameplay.

I think if they wanted to do a good Fallout, they would be better served by just plagiarizing Robert E. Howard as much as possible, embrace sexy pulp cover art as references rather than huffing the farts of its own IP, then it might do a little better. But if it follows the trend of things like the Outer Worlds, which again tries to draw from the overdrawn well of pulp, but then making it 1970s Soviet Dumpy in its desexed aesthetic, then it will continue to wallow around in bestselling mediocrity.

 

[Spukrian]

Back when I played Fallout 3, I liked the beginning. I enjoyed the game for quite a time... but after a while I started getting frustrated and annoyed. In the end I didn't bother exploring everything and didn't finish sidequests, I just wanted to get it over with.

I remember this encounter in the game where two hunters were attacking a child. I killed the hunters and got negative karma (despite them carrying human flesh, indicating that they were cannibals). I reloaded and tried to kill the kid instead, but the kid had plot armor, effectively immortal.

Hmm... I might replay Fallout 3 sometime in the future but it's a low priority.

 

[Sigourn]

While playing Morrowind and pondering about the game's flaws (which are many), not once did I think to myself that the game would be more enjoyable if you could fast travel from the map screen. In fact, the way fast travel was implemented was well thought off and 'balanced' when weighing between different aspects like convenience and challenge/effort.

Perhaps you would understand why many of us think it is annoying that we have to go through the ordeal of going to different silt strider/boat/guild guides/intervention hoops just to hand in a quest and get another.

 

[Lemming42]

yet your argument probably boils down to "muh immersion"

While playing Morrowind and pondering about the game's flaws (which are many), not once did I think to myself that the game would be more enjoyable if you could fast travel from the map screen. In fact, the way fast travel was implemented was well thought off and 'balanced' when weighing between different aspects like convenience and challenge/effort.

The problem is that the world is so totally static that travelling through it repeatedly offers nothing. When you've travelled on any given part of the map, you've seen everything it has to offer. The effect is a feeling of dull loneliness, like playing an MMORPG in which you're literally the only human player.

There were many ways they could have populated the world to make travelling more interesting - New Vegas, for example, has assassins that spawn dynamically in response to the player's faction reputations, as well as caravans and other travellers who (I think) continuously do rounds of the map. Even Fallout 3 and Skyrim have random encounters in which a randomly-selected event plays whenever the player enters a pre-designated trigger zone. But Morrowind is just empty roads and empty cities, where the only thing you're likely to see on your travels (other than the very occasional hand-placed quest) is a static NPC who stands still all day and has the same dialogue as everyone else in the region.

 

[jackofshadows]

The problem is that the world is so totally static that travelling through it repeatedly offers nothing. When you've travelled on any given part of the map, you've seen everything it has to offer. The effect is a feeling of dull loneliness, like playing an MMORPG in which you're literally the only human player.

There were many ways they could have populated the world to make travelling more interesting - New Vegas, for example, has assassins that spawn dynamically in response to the player's faction reputations, as well as caravans and other travellers who (I think) continuously do rounds of the map. Even Fallout 3 and Skyrim have random encounters in which a randomly-selected event plays whenever the player enters a pre-designated trigger zone. But Morrowind is just empty roads and empty cities, where the only thing you're likely to see on your travels (other than the very occasional hand-placed quest) is a static NPC who stands still all day and has the same dialogue as everyone else in the region.

You don't get it. Mushrooms. LOOK AT THE FREAKING MUSHROOMS!