I just want to say that my biggest gripe with modern fallout is the fact it's supposedly been 200 years since the bombs fell
In game, it looks like it's been about 4 years at most.

200 years is an INSANELY long time
And as I'm walking around I always find myself asking:
"If it's been two hundred years, why hasn't this happened?"
Or "why is this still like this"
Why hasn't this building, directly next to a main city been looted clean, why hasn't this very easy to explore place been explored?

Bethesda seems to want to forget that people MOVE ON and REGROW

I'll agree that there's too much loot laying around in places that should have been picked clean. Grocery stores ruins for instance might have junk in them from previous inhabitants, but would no longer be stocked like a grocery store; the food would have been one of the first places looted.

As for civilization being in ruins in DC, I think that's ok. the NCR in california is only as powerful as it is because Obsidian assumed the (nearly) best possible endings as canon for Fallout 1 and 2. If they'd gone with less optimistic endings then the NCR might never have even existed, and the world would have been left in ever worsening death spiral rather than rebuilding. DC likely didn't have heroes as epic and good and successful as the canon ones from 1 and 2, and so they didn't rebuild and unite as much. I can only assume as such, that most people were afraid to wander the DC ruins looting stuff and stuck to small safer areas like Megaton and Rivet city.
I once used a mod that allowed you to make raiders follow. With a second level character with a sub machine gun and a couple of random raiders, I killed all of Megaton other than the essential characters. It was a slaughter. Think about that. Possibly one of the strongest old settlements in DC, and it was snuffed out like a toy. The game doesn't show it, but these people must be literally cowering in terror behind their walls. No town so weak could ever think that the super-duper mart would be easy to loot. Their entire population other than Jericho would possibly die trying it. They didn't have the benefit of two great heroes or a Mr. House uplifting their world.

agree, but that's how bethesda sees fallout for now. they think if their games too hard for consumer to play, it might slow down sells, keep away people from purchasing their products, but let's take a look at Dark Souls franchise how successful its even though the game is very definition of hard, HARCORE rage quitting son a bitch, but its still addictive as hell to play because it rewarding you for playing it, the hard difficulty itself doesn't keep away people from buying it, rather it grew much stronger than ever, to be able to spawned 2 sequel, & yes its success. bethesda are afraid of this, adding something so cryptic in their games, remember the debate about those nord dungeon puzzle with certain claws?

There are many reasons why someone won't play Morrowind now for the first time, but at least one of those reasons is (apparently) that newcomers find it too hard -- it's quite easy to make an almost useless 1st level character in morrowind if you don't know what you're doing. As opposed to fallout 4, where it's impossible to make a combat-incompetent character (I've tried.)
Some young people never had the pleasure of growing up with games that don't hand feed the answer and it's a shock I guess. Bethesda knows that.

ElMaldito wrote:

@Wertologist 
I'm gonna disagree a lot with you, NV was far from "railroaded", of course, there's a linear pattern to follow through the main storyline, but MAN, more than 3?? are you fucking kidding? there's a lot more ways to accomplish pretty much all the main quests than in 3, aside from the fact that there's times when you just can walk and find your way from point A to C or even D without being forced to do somone's errand(like in 3) but guess what, we are a Courier after all.

Not to mention the variety of factions and endings(which branches into more things)

Dude, DC was a lot more hit with nuclear power than NV(explained why by House) of course there's a lot of "salvaged pre war shit" in NV, looking it from a technicall point of view, of course the world of NV feels more "empty" or doesn't have more "personality" Obsidian had to make it in 18 months with an engine they didn't know.

@fermindal ↓ Exactly

I know right? How could he say that NV is more railroad than 3? NV have more choices that you can make than other the two. 4 is the worst, you literally have zero options most of the time.

Bethesda didnt understand the concept of Fallout but whats even worst is that Bethesda didnt understand that 'it didnt understand' the concept of Fallout. And they are still going on with ruing this franchise. After what i saw 76 will be probably another disaster (and even old version of pip boy will not change that).
I managed to finish F3 twice but it was just because i was on fallout withdrawn after waiting for Van Buren so many years. Fallout 4 i uninstalled after 30 minutes of playing. And then i cried, cried and cried.
There is plenty of reasons why Bethesda games dont feel like Fallout but what hurts the most are stupid shallow quests, dull characters and dumb story.
What i always valued in Fallout was historical progress in the wasteland (Shady Sands/NCR best example), the progress which is now gone.
Eh, thank you Todd Haward you ruined it just like Ridley Scott ruined Aliens....

From a storytelling point of view, a cleanish, peaceful and mostly civilized wasteland with functioning societies wouldn't be as interesting as the nightmarish hell holes we get to play around in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4.
IMO the thing New Vegas did the worst was world building. The Mojave is REALLY borring compared to Boston or DC. Mostly because settlements are mostly civilized and don't have much problems.

Even if the games are set 200 years after the Great War, I prefer by a long shot the ruined Wastelands full of raiders and tribals than a post-post-apocalypic society, even if the later makes more sense.

Besides, I don't see the correlation between this and Bethesda being afraid of shipping difficult games. I just started playing Fallout 4 on Survival Mode and it's a thousand time more difficult than New Vegas in hardcore.

Finally, yeah. Fallout has changed, and I actually think it's for the best. Bethesda didn't killed or ruined Fallout, because, you know... New games are actually coming out, people play them and most importantly, enjoy them !
Maybe Fallout 4 wasn't made for Hardcore Fallout Fans, playing since the first game but you guys know what ? Thanks to Fallout 4, the Fallout Community has grown, and maybe people who discovered Fallout through 4 will play the older games. I discovered Fallout through 3, I played the entirety of 1 ; 2 ; New Vegas ; 4 EVEN Brotherhood Of Steel and yet 4 is still my favorite for a lot of reasons.

Some people do, especially in the fallout 3 days. Old timers might give him a hard time, but you could tell that todd and others loved the old fallout games, it was a passion project for them

Then, they got complacent. They saw how big the franchise has gotten, and they started putting in less effort into the game, and more effort into making the early game good so they could pull in morons out of their money. Just look at the "Le ebin Hype Train XD" right before the release of fallout 4

That's what it is, really, just complacency. People at bethesda could keep stupid shit out of it, if they cared, such as the ghoul in the fridge, SJW elements, that tend to pop out of nowhere in fallout 4(Race mixed couples and gay settlers. I mean, was that REALLY necessary?), like the entirety of the railroad, ect. Same goes for pre war jet, some of the more ridiculous gameplay decisions, list goes on. But why should they? Game will sell, anyways, make it look good, put something for the trailer, it doesn't matter, morons will buy it. What's that, danger hair sally wants to design a quest in the game that involves a child being stuck in the fridge for 200 years, without food or oxygen? Well, I don't know if a quest like that really screams "Fallout", but hey, who cares? They will buy it anyways, go for it. Not interested in talking about lore in a game with talking mutants, after all, Pete will agree with me on that!

Maybe bethesda didn't care even at the beginning, it sure seemed like it, but they also had to win back the older fanbase. Now, they have their own fanbase, the horrid combination of people who only played fallout 3 and don't know a single thing about the lore(Many of which I noticed also seem to have an unatural hatred for NV, for some reason), and bethesda fanboys who compare the fallout franchise to TES and create those cringy crossovers at every turn. Normal people who buy vault boy bobbleheads from the website and wear fallout shirts in public. The old timers are small time, they're a minority, there is no need to pander to them anymore, it's bethesda's franchise now, that's the reality of it whenver you think that's a good thing or not, and it's still better than letting it rot in the grave

People forget that fallout was going in the wrong direction with interplay, right before they bankrupted. In short, the frog that ran the company pretty much ran it to the ground because he didn't know what people wanted out of their games, and forced stupid features or downright ordered games to be made that had no appeal to the core fanbase. Should Fallout 3: van buren be released, and interplay still had hold of the franchise, fallout would have taken a "More action oriented direction, to appeal to a wider audience", and we saw how well that worked with Fallout:BOS, a universally hated game among the fanbase, and forgotten by everyone else. Hell, time and resources, which were very limited at the time, were not only spend on fallout POS at the time, but a sequel was planned as well, even with how poorly the first game was received(Altho the lore behind it was interesting, at least). It is a generally accepted fact that Fallout 3: van buren was cancelled because interplay focused too much resources into outside projects like that, or in other words, that fallout BOS killed the franchise. Van buren was nearly completed, and I am sure if the funding and man power went into helping out the main dev team, it would have been out, and maybe even helped out the struggling interplay at the time.

But that's history, thankfully, todd came along, and bought out the franchise he claims he loved as a kid, and fallout has been given a second chance. That's what people are forgetting, fallout could be abandonware today. At least with bethesda, fallout is still alive, and unless they plan on making the ghoul in the fridge the new standard, that's still better than the franchise being dead. I love the older fallouts, but anyone who blindly defends them can be pointed to fallout:BOS, the new direction that the franchise would have taken place, if the disaster did not strike. Anyways, I have faith in fallout under bethesda, they clearly do understand the franchise, and take elements from the older games, including van buren, in their works, but they need to keep people who don't understand the lore in check, and duct tape the mouths of people like pete hines. I don't care if they make fallout a more action oriented experience, like with fallout 4, it's their franchise now, but I would strongly prefer that they hire other devs on the side, like they did with NV, since it seems that writing or making an actual RPG isn't their strong suit. Fallout 3 was acceptable, not the best, but it was still an RPG, whoever was responsible for that seems to have left the dev team or was focused on making skyrim, since fallout 4 has no RPG mechanics, it almost resembles the cancelled fallout: extreme game, which would have been entirely action oriented, must be the focus on power armor. Anyways, I hope V76 isn't an online game, but a side game developed by another entity or a second team while F4 was being developed, just like with NV, for more profits right after the initial F4 DLC season, as we saw with F3 and NV

I feel like with Fallout you can't ever really say it has an established feeling. Literally every iteration of each game has been a different developer (aside from 3 and 4, although it's arguable how true this is due to size increases.) Tim Cain, to paraphrase, has stated several times that he was attempting to show how people struggled to survive, which IMO sounds more in line with traditional post apocalyptic themes. There wasn't much of a new world in Fallout 1; there were new societies, but they were only a handful of people grouped together, and the overall theme was still one of desperation. When Fallout 2 came around, they definitely went with the theme of a new world built around the old, which is shown through the tribals and the recreation of major cities. The thing is though, this was done by a completely different team, and so it's arguable how true a vision this is to Fallout. Some would argue that since 2 is one of the classic games, it's vision is more or less correct, but this is completely open to debate. I'd definitely say that the story made by 2 and New Vegas is the more interesting one, but I wouldn't say it's the definition of Fallout.

Also, with all that being said, Tim Cain has said he's fine with the newer Fallouts. Unless he's just being professional and is just hiding his feelings, there's no real basis to say that the newer iterations don't capture the feeling of Fallout properly, as his voice is the Fallout equivalent of God. When the sole creator of the series says a game in the series works, then it probably works.

I would just say that Bethesda's problem is story-writing. They have these really interesting landscapes and environments,and extremely dull and one-dimensional characters who are overshadowed by said environments. To put into perspective, Fallout NV felt like a true open-world rpg where the story-telling,dialogue and interesting characters you meet along the way were the highlight and the Mojave simply served as a backdrop. Whereas in Fallout 3 and to an extent 4,the environment was the star and exploration was the main driving factor while the story and characters simply served as a guide telling you where to go to find more interesting locations. Granted,some FO4 characters were a bit more interesting than FO3's,so it seems as if they are very slowly improving in that aspect.

zodiac213 wrote:

I would just say that Bethesda's problem is story-writing. They have these really interesting landscapes and environments,and extremely dull and one-dimensional characters who are overshadowed by said environments. To put into perspective, Fallout NV felt like a true open-world rpg where the story-telling,dialogue and interesting characters you meet along the way were the highlight and the Mojave simply served as a backdrop. Whereas in Fallout 3 and to an extent 4,the environment was the star and exploration was the main driving factor while the story and characters simply served as a guide telling you where to go to find more interesting locations. Granted,some FO4 characters were a bit more interesting than FO3's,so it seems as if they are very slowly improving in that aspect.

This so much, it's always great to see people like you.