Of Deathclaws & Radscorpions: A Fallout Thread

idk about the vibe they're broadcasting here

Gives me something to look forward to E3 for anyway, whole show was a bit crappy last year

going by that trailer the vibe is "oops sorry your X360/PS3 game is late"

sorta samey, with airships

not like i'll play it anyway, have fun y'all!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGlf5UVUQAAq-jL.jpg

game title leaked

looks like they're going for a slightly more stylized, cartoon-y feel. they got some shit for F3's rather monochromatic palates, makes some sense that they'd try to freshen it up a bit. idk, not immediately impressed by the trailer or the direction they're (seemingly) going with, but i've got faith.

innarestin' that the protagonist speaks at the end of the trailer - does this mean the end of silent player characters in fallout?

― bizarro gazzara, Wednesday, June 3, 2015 2:31 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i really hope the vault dweller isn't the protagonist

Im cool with cartoony as long as they can occasionally drop it for a dark horror style

like a bunch of scorpions crawling in and out the mouth of a dead child tied to a stake in a candy shop

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--cymARTQ0--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_320/18j3ygfii1iwrjpg.jpg

You're a bunch of grumpy guses - I thought the trailer was great!

everyone is brighting up their games, grey and brown has been outta style since F3 came out pretty much -- 7 years ago! That's a long time. Consider the colors in:

2001 - GTA3; 2008 - GTA4; 2013 - GTA5

Or:
2001 - Metal Gear Solid 2 (so much teal & orange); 2008 - Metal Gear Solid 4 (the beige-est game i can think of off the top of my head); 2014 - MGSV: Ground Zeroes (steps way off the grime pedal, cooler colours all around)

Or games that were "new" IPs those years (counting F3 because it was mostly new to so many people):
2001 - Halo; 2008 - Fallout 3; 2014 - Destiny

I'm cherry-picking a little bit, but basically I think if Fallout 4 came out and it was grey and drab and stuff people would think it looked "dated" and "shitty" no matter what. Gamers are weird man.

COD and battlefield have been pretty drab in the past seven years though iirc

Also I thought Skyrim lacked much needed colour

At this point COD is pretty much a sports game, it exists in its own artistic world away form the general trends. But the last Battlefield (hardline I think?) was super colourful!

I also don't think clean vibrant colors = cartoony also, not sure where that comes from. There's maybe like one set piece in that entire trailer that looks off-brand to me (Fenway park looking like a borderlands level)

(actually i will cop to not having played a COD since... damn, i think i played like 15 minutes of MW2 and that was years ago. for all i know, advanced warfare is colorful even)

That trailer makes the dog the protagonist. Fallout 4: Tokyo Jungle is gonna be great.

also DLH/kingfish what do you mean re: the writing? what writing are you looking for/what writing are you avoiding? and by writing do you mean high level narrative, or dialogue, or level/mission scripting, or what?

i don't exactly feel like the first two have been particularly good anywhere in the OW bethesda games (aside from some of the FNV DLC maybe) and the latter was fine but not spectacular in F3 and FNV (and boring in ESV but that's just me probably).

think theyre hating on the cartoonishly crappy bioware dialogue

i liked those old shows they broadcasted on galaxy news radio about The Adventures of Herbert "Daring" Dashwood

fnv was a lot better, is all i meant. f3 was a game about running around deciding whether to fetch things for good guys or bad guys before speech-checking malcolm mcdowell out of destroying the world and making the weighty decision as to whether or not to destroy it yourself anyway; fnv was a game about gradually discovering where you stood in a four-way geopolitical collision with no sunny outcomes, featuring major rawls lecturing you about the dialectic. but people complained it was "more of the same", so they released an expansion where robots yelled "science" in funny voices and apparently the magic was back.

i don't mind the vividness in that trailer either tho.

i had no idea that was rawls until now and i don't even know how many times i've played through fnv

dlh 100% otm

^ yeah no doubt

naw that is garbage, totally romanticizing f:nv. the "four-way geopolitical collision" was terrible. f3 was a much better sandbox to play in, a much more interesting world to discover. the main plot lines or whatever in both games were basically poor and anyway secondary at best

i mean, we have had this conversation before, and one hallmark of the strength of these games is that have different types of appeal that work for different ppl. but a dissenting voice seemed necessary after the otm parade

maybe i haven't played enough of these sorts of games, but i found the plot of fallout 3 very, very compelling, and was propelled past my very limited gaming skills to complete the game, just to see how it all panned out.

i find the video gaming hype cycle gross especially when it results in triple A boring homogenous trash but if i can't get excited for a new entry in my favorite video game franchise ever when can i?

i, for one, am pumped

Im biased toward F:NV but only because it took me back to playing the original black isle/obsidian pc games wayyyyyyy more than F3 did..

the existence of "wacky" stuff and "serious" stuff in fnv felt way more integrated than in f3 where they felt like super jarring in their juxtaposition, like anytime it got goofy you were embarrassed. felt like it made more sense in nevada/cali as a setting?

but yeah i think the writing has basically been on a spectrum from intolerable to tolerable since bethesda started making games for 7th gen consoles, and i don't see that spectrum changing any time soon

I'd agree, the goofy stuff was kind of par for the course in Fallout 1/2/NV and in Fallout 3 it was SERIOUS BUSINESS for most of the time until there was something goofy.

The feel of the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 2 (the first Fallout I really played) was great. Until later in the game you had no idea what was going on, but they had these immaculate headquarters locations in the middle of places that were complete wrecks with these stoic guards out front. And yet it didn't seem out of place next to mobs of pickpocket children and the ability to sneak around at night and rob graves.

F2 was goofier than F1 (and included luck encounters that were totally out of theme)

this has been said many times but: the treatment of the brotherhood of steel in f3--from frightening ascetic technophiles, haughtily allergic to stand-taking, to Hi We're The Good Guys--is kinda synecdoche for the whole thing. (not complaining here about the canon violation--in fact they explicitly define the white knights as a deviationist chapter, schismed from the western organization in the first two games--just complaining that they were lame.) fixed in fnv.

also not telling anyone not to be excited for f4! these games are all fun.

the main plot lines or whatever in both games were basically poor and anyway secondary at best

i wrote an extremely long post about why this is not the case last night but yall didn't need it. it's true of f3 tho. (and skyrim, and oblivion--but not morrowind.)

i admit that f3 gave me one of my single most pleasant gaming moments ever: when the insane robot asked me to travel all around the map collecting something (2 OUT OF 5, 3 OUT OF 5) so he could make me a copy of the declaration of independence, and i shot him and took the original. fuck you world of warcraft.

I did dig the Lovecrafty bit in F3; I wish they'd done more with it, even if it was a different vibe

i liked the townful of pleasantville cannibals.

similarly sorta... incompletely realized.

favorite self-contained dungeon in this gen of fallout tho is Vault 11. like a brutal lil short story. (well, like a few specific ones.) i'm not sure if anyone even directs you to it--i just came across the cave entrance out in the wastes, and asked the fundamental fallout question: what happened here?

Which game had the Gary vault? Was that 11?

http://imgur.com/gallery/lFIxR

Figuring out the square and the rough locations from the trailer alone. This goes into amusing levels of detail.

sorry: gary vault was f3 iirc. the f3 vaults were more numerous and quicker; fnv only had 4 or 5 and they were all complicated. can actually easily see preferring the f3 approach and might myself: the vaults were more or less copypasted and shallow (like post-daggerfall elder scrolls dungeons) but they all got their what-happened-here across vividly just through tinting the air or leaving instruments lying around or naming everybody gary. they could give you the creeps pretty efficiently. (and of course they would be copypasted.) some of the fnv vaults went on and brutally on with no more exploratory payoff than "plants ate everybody". if you are into dungeons for their own sake tho (looking at the roguelike crew) i'd be p surprised if you preferred f3. the best dungeon in modern fallout might actually be the entirety of maligned fnv dlc DEAD MONEY (i had to look this up; i googled "fallout blood money"), which was No Fun except on a zen level, and then only if you went in prepared. (i enjoyed it because my fnv char at that point could vaporize any living thing at 500 yards with her eyeballs, except there.) anyway, vault 11 was the one that cribbed from "the lottery" and it ruled; it came complete w boss fight and sadistic twist.

Yeah, I don't think I have any grand insight on which is superior (F3 vs. NV), but I do know that I explored every last inch of F3 and quit NV about 2/3 of the way through. Not sure if it was because of fatigue with the system or what. NV, despite maybe having more interesting writing/quest lines (so the line goes, anyway), didn't feel as large, mysterious, and awe inspiring.

I preferred FNV due to creator links to the original as well as they got the zany 50s "Science!" Bits more.

Plus, the Googie art design was leagues beyond FO3

Also, throwing knives

killed all those Caesar's Legion assholes

Bethesda's E3 thing about to start. You can stream it on twitch, or watch along with commentary on GiantBomb. I'd recommend the latter.

http://www.giantbomb.com/chat/

this game looks brilliant

ha, they're using my favorite song from atomic platters on the sdtrk