Fallout 3 vs. Reality: Photo Comparison

Brother None

Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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GamesRadar provides a side-by-side comparison of Fallout 3 locations to their real-life counterparts.<blockquote>Dupont Circle Fountain

Dupont Circle is a historic district in D.C., and its fountain is the subject of nearly every tourist photo taken of the area. A strange decision - Fallout 3's Dupont Circle Fountain is similar in structure, but the statues are all different. Why the sitting pose, why the basins? Where is this inspiration coming from? Maybe there's a hidden meaning, or maybe the designer didn't think that anyone would take a screen of it and compare it to the real thing, and then actually care that they're different.</blockquote>
 
simple answer: the real statues wouldn't fit the art deco style of the game.
 
Only the Fountain was put there in 1921, so normally, by Fallout's timeline divergence, you would expect it to be there.

But yeah, stylistically the change makes sense.
 
Fallout 3's DC is like 1/10th the size of the real thing. There's A LOT of open space and parks around the Washington Monument and they totally dropped the ball. It takes several hours to walk through the center of DC, and in FO3 only a few minutes. It doesn't feel authentic at all, it feels like a mini DC you'd find at a Vegas casino or something.
 
Brother None said:
Only the Fountain was put there in 1921, so normally, by Fallout's timeline divergence, you would expect it to be there.

But yeah, stylistically the change makes sense.
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It would make sense, but I can't but ask the question: how does the change make a difference that contributes to the setting? I do not see anything to justify it. The baroque-style fountain could look absolutely awesome and falloutish with enough well-placed decay on it.

My bet is that it was self-censored out of the game cause the statue is half-naked, and Fallout 3 seems to abhor any form of nudity.


That said, I really wish that they spent more resources on making a good game rather that architecture or interior design of the houses >____<
 
Mad Max RW said:
Fallout 3's DC is like 1/10th the size of the real thing. There's A LOT of open space and parks around the Washington Monument and they totally dropped the ball. It takes several hours to walk through the center of DC, and in FO3 only a few minutes. It doesn't feel authentic at all, it feels like a mini DC you'd find at a Vegas casino or something.
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100% their game design choice. While there are few games that actually use a 1:1 scale on everything (including open spaces) you would think that they would try to get close - maybe 2:1 (note: I haven't done my own geometrical comparison so I am taking your word along with the reviews that it is very compressed). The point is that for a Counterstrike level the compactness would have been a good design choice, but for a bleak post-apocalyptic, "immersive" RPG there could have been a better balance struck.
 
The lords of Fallout 3
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Made want to puke.

I've never been in DC, but I don't think it is as small as my town I grew up in (30.000 population and 700 years of history), because in Fallout 3 it feels like that.
 
Public said:
The lords of Fallout 3
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Made want to puke.

I've never been in DC, but I don't think it is as small as my town I grew up in (30.000 population and 700 years of history), because in Fallout 3 it feels like that.
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D.C. is ever so slightly larger than that.
 
Yeah. I live in Maryland and relatively close to D.C. so I go there a fair bit. It was sort of cool to see all the familiarity, but as a company that is in fact based in Bethesda, Maryland, I almost expected more detail. Bigger size definitely.
 
I always wondered what those status were about. Personally I don't think the "new" statues fit very much. They look like Leni Riefenstahl was the lead artist
 
I've never been to D.C. specifically, so I don't know anything about it, but it seemed to me that Fallout 3 map was completely random and irrelevant... Everything looked the same.
 
Walking through empty miles and miles in a videogame will get tedious very quickly. Shocker here, I know, but Fallout 3 is a game not a simulator. Verisimilitude take's a backseat to functional gameplay just like in every video game, like, ever made.
 
It's a wonder, then, why they want real time and first person so badly, claiming it's "immersive" and more "realistic"...
 
Well, having only been to DC a few times as a tourist, I thought they captured the look and style of the obligatory touristy locations like the Mall and the metros enough for the superficial fuzzy details of a carpetbagging yankee like me. But like Max said, the size and scale is so cranked down it kind of resembles some artifical Disneyland attraction.

That definately is what the distinctive ceiling of all the metro sations look like. But then they go and shrink them down and make every metro station look exactly the same. Other than the amount of shit lying around, was not every metro station in the game a carbon copy duplicate?

Personally, I'm not into the exploration aspect, so I couldn't even be fucked to seek out things I actually would like Arlington/Iwo Jima Mem., CIA bldg etc. The mind-numbingly redundant combat and dungeo...err subway tunnels and shit that I'd have to go through to get there are not my cup of tea, not worth it. You see, FO3 has no sustain for me, me being a RPG fan and all.

And you know, I saw the Planet of the Apes a long time ago (and no one who's copied this aspect since has surpassed it's impact since they miss the point), I remember when Independence Day came out every was all abuzz about it showing the White House exploding. Then you have 9/11. The Day After Tomorrow. On and on. I think the whole "national monument got nuked" scenario has kind of been played out for me. It's tired. I don't really remember previous Fallouts having to drop their pants to impress with played-out devices like that.
Crutch.
 
Air Rifle said:
Walking through empty miles and miles in a videogame will get tedious very quickly. Shocker here, I know, but Fallout 3 is a game not a simulator. Verisimilitude take's a backseat to functional gameplay just like in every video game, like, ever made.
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That's why we had world maps where you could fast travel miles and miles, like in previous Fallouts. :|

And for the statue, I think they should have left the old one. I have no idea why they changed it...

I always wondered what those status were about. Personally I don't think the "new" statues fit very much. They look like Leni Riefenstahl was the lead artist
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Hmmm

http://rexcurry.net/leni-riefenstahl3.jpg

Kind of.
 
Public said:
And for the statue, I think they should have left the old one. I have no idea why they changed it...
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Like most of Fallout 3, no reason other than it's probably leftover from Oblivion.
 
Cimmerian Nights said:
Public said:
And for the statue, I think they should have left the old one. I have no idea why they changed it...
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Like most of Fallout 3, no reason other than it's probably leftover from Oblivion.
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Todd: Hey, we had that unused fountain with half-naked chicks statues on it, let's use it coz it's coolz and awesomz!
 
Public said:
That's why we had world maps where you could fast travel miles and miles, like in previous Fallouts. :|
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Indeed, I see the difficulty in making a verisimilar, continuous world but thats why travel systems like the Fallout, Arcanum, IWD, or any other games' maps exist. If I'm not mistaken they used randomly generated terrain for much of Arena's exploration and I see no reason not to have that so that in between hand-built areas so the player can be allowed to explore the world that way or use a map like Fallout's, thus having an appropriate sized world that doesn't have to be trekked through in a boring manner.
 
Air Rifle said:
Walking through empty miles and miles in a videogame will get tedious very quickly. Shocker here, I know, but Fallout 3 is a game not a simulator. Verisimilitude take's a backseat to functional gameplay just like in every video game, like, ever made.
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Why? The system they had quite worked very nicely in morrowind with a "transportation system" and it made a lot more sense compared to the instant teleport travel system in Fallout 3.

One thing I never get how anyone can talk about immersion, when you need 2-3 ours with fast travel but when you by foot it takes you aprox maybe 2 days [all in game time of course].

Bethesda could have easily added a lot of empty space, buildings, destroyed objects, rubble etc. to give you feeling of some loneliness and emptiness. It is a post apocalyptic setting after all! Instead you have every 30 sec. a fight somewhere going on and communities are not larger then 20 people.

They could have easily either combined the Fallout 1/2 way of traveling with their fast travel system and as well even invent some apoc like travel system. I am thinking about the traiders here that happen to travel around. A system to that worked well in Morrowind.
 
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