Fallout Tale of Two Wastelands, a proper look at Fallout 3 writings and designs

[laclongquan]

I actually find it strange the Brotherhood in FO3 had so much trouble with Super Mutants. Sure, East Coast Supies are beefier, but they're total durr durr dumb.

A most important factor would be terrain.

In West Coast, they are practically fighting on flat fland, not much rubble. Who has more guns (and ammo) win. Which is why F1 SM are a big threat, but F2 SM is just remnant.

In East Coast BOS was fighting SM in urban ruins. Both side has too much cover, and too short distance, so the advantage of range just get eliminate. Each SM has enough HP to cross the short distance and get into melee time

 

[Ol' Willy]

In East Coast BOS was fighting SM in urban ruins. Both side has too much cover, and too short distance, so the advantage of range just get eliminate. Each SM has enough HP to cross the short distance and get into melee time

The thing is, why fight muties in the city at all? There's no people in the city. There's little valuable. BoS just can contain muties in the city, killing anyone who tries to break out or break in. Since muties come from vault 87 in time their numbers in the city will dwindle and their supplies will run out.

 

[laclongquan]

As I mentioned earlier, Bethesda writers make no detailed reason about why. SM supposedly trying to find something in the city. NOT very concrete detail as to what. I made a guess that they found one or two (or even more) prewar cache and arsenal to arm themselves, thus they keep trying to find more (which is reasonable because capital of super power, mang~) Not captives because Megaton is nearby and they dont even bother attacking it. Sm capture humans from Arefu to Big Town, not beyond that range.

BOS mostly because they want to prevent SM from achieving whatever they want to achieve, also not concrete reason.

Reilly Rangers I guess taking contract from BOS. Not said clearly, but considering they have their own redoubt nearby but without being under attack from BOS.

In contrast, Talon dont have a noticeable redoubt in the area despite investing heavily, even pushing into White House and fighting with SM inside. They are too active for a company of their side. I guess they take contract from Enclave, especially considering Broken Steel show Enclave capture Adam base which can be connected by presidential metro line with terminal in the Capitol building.
+++ My guess is they being front man for Enclave, resupplied and transported through said metro. Because if they resupply from Fort Bannister, it's too bloody long, and their presence on that route is too weak. It explain why their presence in DC is heaviest around capitol. Yet out of DC, they dont appear much: Jury station where a Behemoth appear has a team nearby. but Arlington Falls Church area where tehre's some SM presence they dont appear much unless to hunt PC.

 

[SharkClub]

It's implied that the Super Mutants are looking for more FEV in the city because Vault 87 has ran out by that point. Now, why they would think to look in the city for it, or why they would even want to find more FEV and turn more people into Super Mutants (to continue their race because they can't reproduce is what the game says, but what would motivate them to do that other than some real grand scale big picture thinking that they are seemingly incapable of?) completely falls apart when you realize they have no defined leader that isn't as dumb as a sack of bricks telling them what to do and that they're explicitly stated to have locked up Fawkes in Vault 87 because he's not retarded and that makes him different. In the end it was just an excuse to include Super Mutants without any regard to lore beyond how they exist there in the first place. They have no reasonable motive in-universe to be doing anything but eating the city full of children next door to their Vault, which they also just aren't doing for no particular reason (Bethesda expected us to believe the 200 year old city of children could hold off an endless army of Super Mutants for years because they have one or two kids armed with guns).

It's like if in Fallout 1 there was no Master and no Lieutenant, and Harry was the leader of the Super Mutants and he was like "durr my pee pee no work on woman, me enlist me army of super dupers to steal humens of wasteland to dip them to continue race so super mutant race survive!" The fuck?

 

[Camel]

Just currently, I am still playing Fallout Tale of Two Wastelands, the TC mod that allow playing Fallout 3 with FNV mechanics. So I am going to share my opinions of Fallout 3's writings and designs as gleaned through this mod.

Fallout 3's supporters generally like to point at its writings and design as greatest, GOTY material, and so on.

They don't. Nobody except probably some rabid fanboys would call the Fallout 3 "writings and design as greatest, GOTY material".

Okay, the single most illustrative of F3 writing should be slavers versus slaves in two quest, the main Pitt one and the OC's Paradise Falls one.

The reason you do PF one is because you want access to that town. To that end you must enslave a few other escaping slavers and enemy of slavers. The first group is fine, I do them in my sleep. The second is a bit hard on moral, but luckily that old man taking potshot at me from afar when I tried to scavenging his town, so moral doesnt get bitten too hard.
++ The reason I dont silent kill their entire town is because the script. One die? They all turn hostile. I want to keep a few NPC alive, so this thing take a back seat for now.

The Pitt's issue is stranger. What turn out to be a straightforeward choosing of slavers or slaves in the slave revolt.... Turn out I seem to be the minority in choosing the SLAVE side, would you believe it? According to the few posts I read, most of players seem to side with Ashur and the slavers. Why? It seem those players like his reasons, his crocodile tears of hating this dirty business of making wealth based lifeblood of slaves.

Reason I chose slave side? They had to eat slop making from mutated monkeys and get killed without a care by slavers and owners. The latter is bad, sure, but the former is a killing crime by my standard, especially considering the hoity toity can drink and eat normally. SLOP, mang! 40 servings of it will kill a person (25 rad per unit). Surely anyone with any imagination would protest this dietary?

While the writing of Pitt quests are nothing special by my standard, it seem the entire thing hit gamers' psyche in some hidden corner and showcase their inhumanity in a way I entirely unexpected.

I would call ethical dilemma in The Pitt DLC is one of the most difficult in Fallout series. Would you choose:
1. Slaves with Werhner - a former lieutenant of Ashur and a slaver himself, who is white by the way. You literally have to kidnap an innocent baby from her mother to bring her into unsanitary conditions where she would be used by former slaves to make a cure. Do you feel good and do you think you have clean hands after that?
2. Slavers under command of Ashur, who is black and it was 2008 when nobody gave a shit about their races, as it should be. Ashur has an orderly society making progress in a wasteland and the only functioning steel mill in the former USA. He also provided a safe and clean environment for his child with the loving mother.
It's kinda telling why most Fallout 3 players chose to side with the slavers.

they need more FEV to create more supermutants? this seems logical to me
I'm really not sure why you guys are digging so hard to shit on bethesda to the point where you're making yourselves look like idiots in the process

Precisely. You can destroy any game's writing and lore if you apply logic. Game developers make games without thinking too much about realism. Don't get me started on Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas writing and lore.

 

[Sykar]

It's implied that the Super Mutants are looking for more FEV in the city because Vault 87 has ran out by that point. Now, why they would think to look in the city for it, or why they would even want to find more FEV and turn more people into Super Mutants (to continue their race because they can't reproduce is what the game says, but what would motivate them to do that other than some real grand scale big picture thinking that they are seemingly incapable of?) completely falls apart when you realize they have no defined leader that isn't as dumb as a sack of bricks telling them what to do and that they're explicitly stated to have locked up Fawkes in Vault 87 because he's not retarded and that makes him different. In the end it was just an excuse to include Super Mutants without any regard to lore beyond how they exist there in the first place. They have no reasonable motive in-universe to be doing anything but eating the city full of children next door to their Vault, which they also just aren't doing for no particular reason (Bethesda expected us to believe the 200 year old city of children could hold off an endless army of Super Mutants for years because they have one or two kids armed with guns).

It's like if in Fallout 1 there was no Master and no Lieutenant, and Harry was the leader of the Super Mutants and he was like "durr my pee pee no work on woman, me enlist me army of super dupers to steal humens of wasteland to dip them to continue race so super mutant race survive!" The fuck?

They, just like BoS, have no reason to be in DC anyway. They are just another indicator as to how morally and creatively bankrupt Bethderp is.

Just currently, I am still playing Fallout Tale of Two Wastelands, the TC mod that allow playing Fallout 3 with FNV mechanics. So I am going to share my opinions of Fallout 3's writings and designs as gleaned through this mod.

Fallout 3's supporters generally like to point at its writings and design as greatest, GOTY material, and so on.

They don't. Nobody except probably some rabid fanboys would call the Fallout 3 "writings and design as greatest, GOTY material".

Okay, the single most illustrative of F3 writing should be slavers versus slaves in two quest, the main Pitt one and the OC's Paradise Falls one.

The reason you do PF one is because you want access to that town. To that end you must enslave a few other escaping slavers and enemy of slavers. The first group is fine, I do them in my sleep. The second is a bit hard on moral, but luckily that old man taking potshot at me from afar when I tried to scavenging his town, so moral doesnt get bitten too hard.
++ The reason I dont silent kill their entire town is because the script. One die? They all turn hostile. I want to keep a few NPC alive, so this thing take a back seat for now.

The Pitt's issue is stranger. What turn out to be a straightforeward choosing of slavers or slaves in the slave revolt.... Turn out I seem to be the minority in choosing the SLAVE side, would you believe it? According to the few posts I read, most of players seem to side with Ashur and the slavers. Why? It seem those players like his reasons, his crocodile tears of hating this dirty business of making wealth based lifeblood of slaves.

Reason I chose slave side? They had to eat slop making from mutated monkeys and get killed without a care by slavers and owners. The latter is bad, sure, but the former is a killing crime by my standard, especially considering the hoity toity can drink and eat normally. SLOP, mang! 40 servings of it will kill a person (25 rad per unit). Surely anyone with any imagination would protest this dietary?

While the writing of Pitt quests are nothing special by my standard, it seem the entire thing hit gamers' psyche in some hidden corner and showcase their inhumanity in a way I entirely unexpected.

I would call ethical dilemma in The Pitt DLC is one of the most difficult in Fallout series. Would you choose:
1. Slaves with Werhner - a former lieutenant of Ashur and a slaver himself, who is white by the way. You literally have to kidnap an innocent baby from her mother to bring her into unsanitary conditions where she would be used by former slaves to make a cure. Do you feel good and do you think you have clean hands after that?
2. Slavers under command of Ashur, who is black and it was 2008 when nobody gave a shit about their races, as it should be. Ashur has an orderly society making progress in a wasteland and the only functioning steel mill in the former USA. He also provided a safe and clean environment for his child with the loving mother.
It's kinda telling why most Fallout 3 players chose to side with the slavers.

they need more FEV to create more supermutants? this seems logical to me
I'm really not sure why you guys are digging so hard to shit on bethesda to the point where you're making yourselves look like idiots in the process

Precisely. You can destroy any game's writing and lore if you apply logic. Game developers make games without thinking too much about realism. Don't get me started on Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas writing and lore.

Except you have to be disingenous, argue in bad faith and cherry pick hard to "destroy any games writing". FO 3s writing falls off a cliff from the get go.

 

[laclongquan]

The Pitt's issue is stranger. What turn out to be a straightforeward choosing of slavers or slaves in the slave revolt.... Turn out I seem to be the minority in choosing the SLAVE side, would you believe it? According to the few posts I read, most of players seem to side with Ashur and the slavers. Why? It seem those players like his reasons, his crocodile tears of hating this dirty business of making wealth based lifeblood of slaves.

Reason I chose slave side? They had to eat slop making from mutated monkeys and get killed without a care by slavers and owners. The latter is bad, sure, but the former is a killing crime by my standard, especially considering the hoity toity can drink and eat normally. SLOP, mang! 40 servings of it will kill a person (25 rad per unit). Surely anyone with any imagination would protest this dietary?

While the writing of Pitt quests are nothing special by my standard, it seem the entire thing hit gamers' psyche in some hidden corner and showcase their inhumanity in a way I entirely unexpected.

I would call ethical dilemma in The Pitt DLC is one of the most difficult in Fallout series. Would you choose:
1. Slaves with Werhner - a former lieutenant of Ashur and a slaver himself, who is white by the way. You literally have to kidnap an innocent baby from her mother to bring her into unsanitary conditions where she would be used by former slaves to make a cure. Do you feel good and do you think you have clean hands after that?
2. Slavers under command of Ashur, who is black and it was 2008 when nobody gave a shit about their races, as it should be. Ashur has an orderly society making progress in a wasteland and the only functioning steel mill in the former USA. He also provided a safe and clean environment for his child with the loving mother.
It's kinda telling why most Fallout 3 players chose to side with the slavers.

This one illustrate what a strange beast F3 fan can be,mentally. F3 fan base judge on slavery almost totally based on color of skin, fact or history disregarding. It's a future world, and certainly changed beyond recognition, yet they tried to judge thing on what they know. Strange, but there they are~

And when come to the biggest slaver of all, they judge him not on what he did, but on what his personal circumstance are: loving father, loving husband. Disregarding that all the slaves has to eat most poisonous food known to world (40 meals will kill you) and suffer slavery. Or that he command his men to raid all over to rape, pillage, enslave, and kill.

Like I said, F3 fan! What a strange specimen you can meet.

Oh, and Camel is nothing unique. That one is a very typical sample of what F3 fan is.

 

[Ol' Willy]

As I mentioned earlier, Bethesda writers make no detailed reason about why.

Because reasons don't matter. What matters for them is the sheer AWESOMENESS of action on the screen. Yay, we have our own Stalingrad in the ruins of Washington! Who need some silly reasons to explain anything?

 

[Sykar]

What matters is that their engine is now old enough to legally drink.

 

[laclongquan]

Which mean the awesome graphic overhaul mods can come into play~

Seriously, the design of FNV and F3 is overtaxing pc of its day. most of the complaints can be traced back to rigs not powerful enough. Once you achieve that? FNV and F3 run silky-smooth.

And then we add 70+ mods on its back~

 

[Camel]

Except you have to be disingenous, argue in bad faith and cherry pick hard to "destroy any games writing". FO 3s writing falls off a cliff from the get go.

No, you can pick holes and destroy "any game's writing" and lore if you apply logic in good faith.

This one illustrate what a strange beast F3 fan can be,mentally. F3 fan base judge on slavery almost totally based on color of skin, fact or history disregarding. It's a future world, and certainly changed beyond recognition, yet they tried to judge thing on what they know. Strange, but there they are~

And when come to the biggest slaver of all, they judge him not on what he did, but on what his personal circumstance are: loving father, loving husband. Disregarding that all the slaves has to eat most poisonous food known to world (40 meals will kill you) and suffer slavery. Or that he command his men to raid all over to rape, pillage, enslave, and kill.

Like I said, F3 fan! What a strange specimen you can meet.

Oh, and Camel is nothing unique. That one is a very typical sample of what F3 fan is.

You're strangely butthurt about a game which was released in 2008 and it's non-existent fanbase so I'm going to leave you in your little thread to be butthurt.

 

[Valdetiosi]

Mere 8 hours 15 minute video about how crappy Failturd 3 is.

Man I hate these vids that take entire day. Why not just say something short and strong instead elaborating one thing for over minutes?
Like, I did video trashing about MATN's views on Fallout 3 too and it only was under 30 mins.

 

[Sykar]

Mere 8 hours 15 minute video about how crappy Failturd 3 is.

Man I hate these vids that take entire day. Why not just say something short and strong instead elaborating one thing for over minutes?
Like, I did video trashing about MATN's views on Fallout 3 too and it only was under 30 mins.

Link?

 

[luj1]

a proper look at Fallout 3

nah fuck that

 

[Valdetiosi]

Link?

All I'm surprised it got as many views as it did.

 

[Butter]

It depends how rigorously you want to address each point in the original 2hr video. Creetosis's approach is to show the full context of everything MATN says and then respond, which naturally makes his video quite a bit longer than the original. I think this is a good choice because one of the biggest problems with MATN's video is how he strawmans the fuck out of both hbomberguy and Indigo Gaming, and he doesn't actually use clips from either of their videos, instead just quoting them out of context.

 

[Sykar]

They did downvote you to hell though. I do agree with one of the commentators that the background music is too loud which makes it a bit difficult to follow you.

 

[Valdetiosi]

Learned too late about audio balancing. Been thinking if I should remake the video all over again, but I don't know if it would be beating a dead horse at this point.

 

[Sykar]

Personally I make an exception to Failderp 3. I can beat that dead horse until the end of time!

 

[aweigh]

I think this video is important to any further discussion of Bethesda writing:

I was going back and forth on whether to add a biased TLDR on this since I know most people won't want to watch Emil talk about game writing for 45 minutes but I decided to add my biased opinion, anyway the TLDR is Emil basically says game writing is unimportant because players "dismiss" everything they read, that "great games are played, not made", and that writers shouldn't sweat the details because (again) players won't be paying attention anyway.

In short, Bethesda's lead studio writer does not consider game writing an important part of game making.

 

[aweigh]

lol some funny comments from Beth fanboys:

The Man in Black
3 months ago
It's incredible how delusional people here are. Half of the people here are ten times dumber than this guy. The other half is just unquantifiably dumber. This is the man behind Dark Brotherhood quests. And you think you know better than him? This is some major Dunning-Kruger effect going on in this comment section. Why are the gamers like this? Seriously, what is wrong with this community?! I applaud all the game journalists, game developers and other people who are in the industry who have to deal with gamers.

HOW DARE YOU SAY YOU'RE SMARTER THAN EMIL

 

[Butter]

The Dark Brotherhood quest line wasn't particularly well written. It has some fun and creative quests, albeit only in the first half. People praising DB seem to conveniently forget that the second half of the quest line is "Go here, kill a guy and come back" with no bonus objectives and no guildmates to offer advice or witticisms. And it's this way purely for narrative convenience. They have to use dead drops so that *SURPRISE* somebody tricked you into killing the Black Hand members, but there's no actual in-story reason.

 

[aweigh]

I wouldn't be surprised if that guy in the comments is Emil himself, tbh. He comes off as incredibly delusional and self-important.

 

[laclongquan]

In actual fact, judging Fallout 3 best done on gameplay aspect, not writings.

And by gameplay aspect, leaving aside some coding shortcomings that can only be improved by FNV (search function in console command, additem with editor id instead of base id etc..., repair can be done to 100% item just by burning spare parts like crazy, Living Anatomy= Awareness in F1/2), Fallout 3 is a pretty tight game. A very good tactical combat and economy management game.

Barter in F3 is pretty tight. FNV reduce barter variant so the economy feel pretty bloated. To compare the difference, you can get a tougher barter mod which about double FNV's variable.(of course you can argue that's a story reason, Mojave is not a hard land like Capital Wasteland)

Fallout New Vegas introduce some features, that while pretty good interm of story-wise and narrative, completely break game's economy. I am speaking of course of Jury Rigging. FNV before level 16 (JR perk there) play pretty much (leaving barter variant aside) like Fallout 3 in term of economy, but bloat up completely after that. it's too good a perk to ignore, but just break the game.

Ammo variant is also a devil's bargain. On one hand I love the options I can have in choosing ammo variants. On another hand it reduce difficulty by 20% at least. So it's a wash.

Various magazines, drugs and foods introduced in aid section also reduce difficulty to another 20%, at least. When you are used to FNV's boatload of buffs, getting back to F3's bare necessity is a big deal. precisely that lack that lead us to popping stimpack like candy.

EDIT: this post is made on the basis of pure F3, not TTW on FNV. I suddenly find the urge to play F3 after some very long runtime on FNV/TTW.

 

[Sykar]

That is not gameplay but systems or in this case system balance. Failderp 3s gameplay is complete garbage from the shitty gunplay with barely zoom and no iron sights to cheating VATS with no drawbacks to crappy skill checks that can easily be passed by save scumming.