Why is Fallout 3 so loved ?

[naossano]

The counterpart of this thread, for the opposite end of the spectrum.

It is also quite not the same as this one. That thread was about what you liked or what you thought was done the right way, even if you didn't like the game.

In this one i tought i might be cool to gather your own guesses or actual quotes from people who actually loved & praised the game.
I am aware that there might be some unwanted trolling as a good half of this community is hating Fo3 for already stated (a thousands time) reasons. But even if it could happen, it is not the point of the thread. It would be more about fair guesses.

Also, there is no need, IMO to contradict everything. For instance, if someone says that people love Fo3 because of the great combat system, it doesn't mean that the combat system is great, but that the people who love Fo3 think that the combat system is great. There is no need to argue about it. (that is an example)

In short, what made that game a huge success with a faithfull new playerbase, that mostly hate any other episode, despite the flaws that were brougth up so many time ?

What make it so special compared with the other past and present games ? (TES put aside, considering they share playerbase)

What makes that game so Revolutionary ? (for them)

PS: I am sorry if some of you feel that i am trying to bash Fo3 or their makers. I don't deny i have a opinion about this episode that isn't the kindest possible, but i would still enjoy some perpective, from those who loved or those who didn't but spent enough time reading the game's praise to have a clearer idea in mind, or just from those who tried to guess. I have some guesses too, but i want the first post of the thread to be as open-ended as possible.

 

[Kalasanty11]

http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1503199-the-wasteland-feels-like-home/

I think it's because it helps people forget about their boring/pathetic lives and live out an adventure in "truly immersive" world (unfortunatelly few people care about such "details" as this world making actual sense). Just look at some of the most popular mods or even dlcs (for Skyrim) - houses, marriages, adoptions etc. As someone on rpgcodex forum noticed - why all actually good mods for Skyrim have word "immersive" in their names?
I personally don't like direction in which this is going, but if it helps people like those from link...

Is "giving post rads" basically "like" system?

 

[Korin]

I will share my thoughts on why I loved Fallout 3 and still do... so, buckle up, it's long-ish.

I hadn't heard of Fallout 3 until a friend of mine from work told me I should play it. I hadn't to that date played any Bethesda game, though a few years prior I'd tried and given up on Morrowind a few times (I didn't even know they made that game). I'd also played Fallout 1 (and possibly 2) when they first came out on demo discs but had long forgotten that the games I'd played were prequels (I wouldn't realize until later after I'd played 3 and looked for 1 and 2). So I went in with no preconception about what the game would be about or what it would be like or really what the hell I would be doing. I hadn't even seen trailers for it.

When I started playing, I was however, immediately and thoroughly hooked. It's hard to say exactly what cocktail of features did it... I think what drew me in at first was the setting. That idealistic atmosphere of the 50s era, presented as the white picket fence world destroyed by atomic warfare. The flickering of that vaccuum tube radio playing "I don't want to set the world on fire" against a backdrop of a ruined city. The idea of "what if the cold war had turned into a nuclear war" and that the height of humanity was sort of freeze framed in that timeline and what you wander around in is the echo of when things had this visage of a perfect age with perfect ideals. A place where those white picket fences are now burned and broken but still exist.

This was the first open world game I'd played as well, so being able to walk in pretty much any direction and just find something, was incredibly satisfying to me... and still is. Sifting through the debris of an old house with the skeletons of the family lying on the floor while Bob Crosby crooned over my Pip-boy was also an almost euphoric kind of experience for me. Trudging through the sewer systems... just exploring and being in that world. Finding quests and NPCs no matter where I went all of which gave me more venues for exploring other parts of the world. I've since learned this is basically the mainstay of Bethesda games.

I spent many, many (many) late evenings playing Fallout 3. Not with any particular goal in mind but my favourite thing to do was just go in a direction. Go to some place on the map I hadn't explored and see what I could find. In hindsight, having gone back to play the game many times since when I first played it, I can make objective observations about the dialogue and quest lines and I see the arguments people make against the game. But really, the best story was the one that I created, which was that every night it was an adventure of my choosing and I never knew what I was going to find. Actually, even just re-reading what I typed, you can tell the memories I have aren't quests and dialogue, they're memories of my personal experience and adventure. There were characters I liked, certainly... like Moira Brown (every hates her, I like her). The Nuka-Cola lady. Dukov. All non-sense characters but nonetheless at the time they served their purpose and I enjoyed interacting with them as a part of the world presented before me. It reminds me almost somewhat of what it was like to be a child. You can be told what to enjoy, how to enjoy something or what something must comprise to be enjoyable. You can be presented with something very rigourously structured and designed that is either fun or not fun based on their purely topical or constructed aspects. But most of the fun I had as a child came by having my imagination aroused. That's why an empty cardboard box was usually more fun than a bicycle. Most of the greatest adventures I had as a child were entirely imaginary because myself and occasionally friends would indulge ourselves in that.

I've re-played Fallout 3 recently and it's lost a lot of its magic. I've seen everything. I've been everywhere. I've had perfect stats. I've played with and without mods. The dialogue and quest lines are really plain to me now... transparent and lack the depth to keep going back to. There aren't a lot of choices to make that would greatly vary your playthroughs. New Vegas surpassed Fallout 3 very much in that regard.

That being said, it's still my favourite game. I took a lot more from that game than just the adventure but it gave me a deep appreciation for music of that era. I developed a long lasting interest in blues, jazz and swing music. I started listening to it almost exclusively. My love for the music evolved and grew until I was playing trumpet. Eventually I started swing dancing. Both things I still do, all because Fallout 3 whet my appetite for it. I don't play Fallout 3 now and there are surely games that can be broken down as better more intellectually but this halloween I'll be dressed as a Vault Dweller, just as I have been the last 5 or 6 halloweens.

Side note:
Fallout 3 is why I came here to NMA and years later, I'm practically running the site now.

I think it's because it helps people forget about their boring/pathetic lives and live out an adventure in "truly immersive" world

My life is neither boring nor pathetic!

Is "giving post rads" basically "like" system?

Yes

 

[Kalasanty11]

My life is neither boring nor pathetic!

Maybe I should use word "normal" instead of "boring". I've just read so many posts on so many forums about this "immersion", even Obsidian devs noticed the popularity of "house mods", which led them to creating The Sink in OWB.
I believe that almost every game is created for this, let's say, escape from normality. Bethesda games succeed, because they went further with illusion (illusion being key word) of living and breathing world that one may make his own "home".

 

[naossano]

It must have been a special path to join NMA after Fo3.
I am sure the website already had a shady reputation from the eyes of some Beth fans.

When I started playing, I was however, immediately and thoroughly hooked. It's hard to say exactly what cocktail of features did it... I think what drew me in at first was the setting. That idealistic atmosphere of the 50s era, presented as the white picket fence world destroyed by atomic warfare. The flickering of that vaccuum tube radio playing "I don't want to set the world on fire" against a backdrop of a ruined city. The idea of "what if the cold war had turned into a nuclear war" and that the height of humanity was sort of freeze framed in that timeline and what you wander around in is the echo of when things had this visage of a perfect age with perfect ideals. A place where those white picket fences are now burned and broken but still exist.

I also think they had a (partial) success in making a gameworld feels the suffering of the Old World, having the city like a cemetery.

 

[TheChosen1]

Most people that liked F3 were constantly rambling about immersion, fun and the atmosphere. Some were also praising it for being extremely lore-friendly but I can't tell if they were being serious or high.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Yes, the BOS, the Enclave, and Harold crossing the US all the way to the Washington DC era made so much sense, as did the fact that Washington DC was barely touched by bombs.
People just left their houses and sealed them up, and two hundred years later no one ever got the idea of breaking those houses open again or use their raw material for new houses.

For me part of the lore was that it made sense and really followed up on the previous established lore (Fallout 2, FNV)

 

[Korin]

It didn't make sense in retrospect, I had no idea the war was 200 years previous. I played the whole game thinking it was more or less recent.

 

[naossano]

I have no evidence, but i heard rumors about the game being initially planned to happen earlier in the timeline, but they then moved the dates to fit with the presence of the Enclave/BOS/Harold/Jet/any post-war lore they included.

 

[Emperor]

IRC the most praised things are immersion and using your own imagination to make up stories ( Like Korin), since the game world is vast.

 

[Gizmojunk]

My assumption (since playing Oblivion, and later FO3) has been that it is because it says 'yes'. Bethesda sells an interactive world in their games; but what they are really selling is pure empowerment fantasy. It's the same thing seen in a game like Mortal Kombat, but more addictive... In MK the player can beat the hell out of their challenger (the CPU or another player), and it was them. Bethsoft's simulators allow the same vicarious achievements, but done in a far more intensive manner. The game's sole purpose is to flatter the player ~and thus keep them playing indefinitely. This is stark contrast to the grandfathered RPG series that their game has been forcibly made part of. Fallout challenged the player; Bethsoft's Todd will tell you that games [these days] don't challenge, they entertain.

The modern consumer is become narcissistic and Bethsoft makes fantastic mirrors that can replace the background with a completely different world for one to admire; That's it in a nutshell.

The problem I have with their [very impressive!] games is ~only~ that they are sold as RPGs, but that they are not. An RPG asks the player to create an individual; a unique persona that exists in the gameworld, and asks the player "So what would this individual do in this situation?", and the player extrapolates ~from everything [stats/skills/talents/motives/fears/prejudices/past experience/ and current mood] ~ to come to a decision.
A decision of "What would they do?" ~from all that they can do... that's what stats & skills are for... They are to say "no" (or not) to one's attempted actions.

Problem is that the modern [mass-market] gamer seems to take every game ~personally; like it's their achievement; or their failure... This is fine until they play an RPG and start perceiving the character's faults as implying failures of their own. That's when you start to see rant/rage posts about missing a shot point blank, or "I shot him 10 times and he didn't die!? This is stupid!"; for some reason it's never, "My PC tried shooting him 10 times but didn't hit anything vital because they have no clue how to use a gun properly". The problem with the modern RPG is the modern market for them. The modern market [commonly] sees the world only in terms of themselves, and this is not a bad thing unless one chooses to play a roleplaying game ~about someone else and what they would (or could) do in a situation.

As a result: There are no player characters in many modern RPGs, there are only player Avatars; digital costumes. Conceptually of the same kind and quality as can be bought at the corner chemist's [pharmacy] around Halloween each year; and with just as much roleplaying involved. Bethesda's games always depict an adult infant that seemingly could have fallen into the world one night through a hole in the sky. They have no friends, no family, no skills or past life experience... no plausible means of having lived to an adulthood; no ambitions, no previous interests from their teenage years (They are utterly without appreciable skills, so they've presumably never done anything appreciably). You don't even know why they are there or where they came from; how can anyone extrapolate an individual's behavior from ~nothing? And the skills in mainstream RPGs have devolved from enabling competence to attenuating the player's actions... They've become optional bonuses to make things easier rather than commitments that make things possible.

The character/avatars are now seen as husks intended by the developer to be suppressed and replaced by the player ~almost as one might imagine an act of possession ~like in the Exorcist... suddenly the person is utterly controlled by someone else and no longer acts like themselves. In the modern RPG the PC is seen as a vestigial formality ~to then be cast aside; that is... except for the character's appearance, we mustn't forget that it's designed foremost as an interactive mirror. And this is why it's loved, it shows people themselves in a different place.

*This is also why roleplaying is hated, it shows people someone else in a different place... and because they tend to take failure personally... it's like if a character were possessed by a pianist who gets annoyed that the PC lacks the muscle memory to play, and their fingers feel like rubber erasers... the pianist might complain, "But I played the damn notes, these fingers are stupid!", not caring that it's not them ~it's the character sitting at the piano, and that the game should depict how the character would ~personally~ fare with attempting to play the keys. If they are unskilled, they should fail miserably.

An RPG should use the PC as a lens into the world, and their actions... the only implement of change. Fallout did this, FO3 cast this aside, and that's also why it's loved by the masses.


** If anyone disagrees, I would love to be convinced otherwise [seriously]; I'm open minded to a good argument to the contrary. The above summarizes what I think to be the underlying reason that ~with FO3, Bethesda improved on TES instead of Fallout; expected profit, and a good understanding of why the largest available market couldn't give a damn about anything that Fallout was ~except as a playground.

 

[H3rw00d1]

"Korin's details as to why he enjoyed Fallout 3"

Yup, I'm pretty sure that sums up why most people enjoy Fallout 3. Is it cheesey, yes, is it a bit ridiculous, absolutely, but I think it has a charm to it. It may not be "Fallout", but I still think it's fun, even if some things in it could be... out there.

Yes, the BOS, the Enclave, and Harold crossing the US all the way to the Washington DC era made so much sense, as did the fact that Washington DC was barely touched by bombs.

To be entirely fair, if two organizations both from the prewar US government, wanted to look for technology, I'm sure DC would have some goodies. Just sayin...

That, and the Enclave had Vertibirds so that would help them get around quickly.

 

[TheChosen1]

Yes, the BOS, the Enclave, and Harold crossing the US all the way to the Washington DC era made so much sense, as did the fact that Washington DC was barely touched by bombs.

To be entirely fair, if two organizations both from the prewar US government, wanted to look for technology, I'm sure DC would have some goodies. Just sayin...

That, and the Enclave had Vertibirds so that would help them get around quickly.

Except the Enclave were nuked into dust and the Brotherhood of Steel:
a) Did not have enough resources to send whole armies into DC
b) Had Vertibird plans yet chose to send people on foot.

Also that does not explain Harold's sudden urge to go for a walk without dying.

 

[Warhawk]

The atmosphere snagged me, as did the story... until I began reading deeper into Fallout lore and saw how broken it really was. As for the empowerment fantasy, I would agree on the main, but personally it irked the Hell out of me that my actual options were so limited. Got me breaking the game apart with the console, trying to roleplay as Enclave soldiers, or those sorry National Guardsmen right after the dust settled. It was around that point I realized I wanted to be playing something else; if not empowerment fantasy, then sheer 'fantasy,' provided I could weasel my way into whichever role I desired, few of which were possible due to the game's script.

 

[H3rw00d1]

Except the Enclave were nuked into dust and the Brotherhood of Steel:
a) Did not have enough resources to send whole armies into DC
b) Had Vertibird plans yet chose to send people on foot.

I highly doubt ALL of the Enclave in existence was on the oil rig, there were probably still a lot of soldiers on the mainland, just not enough to really put up a fight, thus they relocated, or that's my idea anyway.

I'd also like to say that the Brotherhood did not send "whole armies". That would imply they send, army after army to the Capital Wasteland when in reality they only sent one moderately sized army. They actually mention in Fallout 3 that Lyon's chapter is taking in wastelanders due to the chapter's small size, what with the Outcasts and the events of The Pitt and all.

Also that does not explain Harold's sudden urge to go for a walk without dying.

I never mentioned Harold, the other guy did. Although your right, Harold's appearance so far east is pretty off putting even if Oasis was an okay quest.

 

[naossano]

Gizmo >
I won't go lenghty on the contradiction as it is more about the reasons it is liked, but I am still not convinced that you can be empowered by a game that refuses to aknowledge your agency, to take your actions into account, that even reverse them sometime. In the end, no matter what you do, you will be prisoner of what the devellopers expected you to do, contrary to the more RPG episodes of the franchise.

 

[Mohamed2001]

Except the Enclave were nuked into dust and the Brotherhood of Steel:
a) Did not have enough resources to send whole armies into DC
b) Had Vertibird plans yet chose to send people on foot.

I highly doubt ALL of the Enclave in existence was on the oil rig, there were probably still a lot of soldiers on the mainland, just not enough to really put up a fight, thus they relocated, or that's my idea anyway.

I'd also like to say that the Brotherhood did not send "whole armies". That would imply they send, army after army to the Capital Wasteland when in reality they only sent one moderately sized army. They actually mention in Fallout 3 that Lyon's chapter is taking in wastelanders due to the chapter's small size, what with the Outcasts and the events of The Pitt and all.

I never mentioned Harold, the other guy did. Although your right, Harold's appearance so far east is pretty off putting even if Oasis was an okay quest.

According to the wiki, the Enclave moved to DC because they recieved a call from the AI, Eden.

And yes, the Enclave had bunkers around USA. I don't think the only bunker they had in the Mojave was the one near Jacobstown.

---

I loved the setting, although I did not consider it to be 2277, more like 2089. Everything is looted, so everything's scarce.

I loved the feel of "futuristic" type of game, having robots in a lot of places. But again, how the hell those robots survived 200 years without maintenance was immersion breaking.

I loved finding diaries and the like, but seriously, it felt a bit Fallout breaking. Fallout was always about the future, not the past. And hey, terminals surviving 200 years + Nuclear Explosions.. ok. (However, there are exceptions, like the Divide, nobody's living there anyway, there's no point to think of a future for that place. And who the hell thought it would be great to build a NUCLEAR SILO! in an area with heavy earthquakes?)

That's it pretty much.

 

[Gizmojunk]

Gizmo >
I won't go lenghty on the contradiction as it is more about the reasons it is liked, but I am still not convinced that you can be empowered by a game that refuses to aknowledge your agency, to take your actions into account, that even reverse them sometime.

Empowerment for the very reasons you've mentioned. While what you've said [implied] is the ideal for many of us (a rich and multifaceted story that bends and twists with the players actions; both for good and bad), the empowerment I'm describing is the ability to get away with anything and not suffer for it; the ability in FO3 to shoot the gate guards of the Citadel and return later to join the Brotherhood... The ability to play FO3 as though it were Postal 2 ~and not be hindered or forced to live with consequences of any kind; [including story arc!]. And I don't mean fooling around with the game, I mean playing the game start to ~what passes for a finish, and being forgiven for absolutely anything; not even forgiven ~it just doesn't matter. The only thing held sacred is not to piss off the player ~no matter what they do, and to let them get away with it. The tag-line for these games is "be whoever you want, do whatever you want" and they mean it.

That means burning people alive and then buying back your reputation by giving water bottles to the homeless, or just wait a while and they all forget about it anyway... it's getting away with it; it's the empowerment of getting away with anything.

 

[naossano]

I guess the freedom of one person could be the ties of someone else.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Regarding technology, there would be sources of technology far closer to the Core Region that Washington DC.
That place was an administration center, not a massive research and development center.
Colorado, Michigan and Texas would be far more interesting to the BOS and Enclave.