What are you playing?

[AEmer]

Someone just said Fallout3 is more faithful to the series than New Vegas.

I think I've seen everything now.

Hahah. Yes, I believe I'm fairly alone with that perspective.

But don't misunderstand me: It's both more and less faithful. New Vegas is considerably more hardcore in its game mechanics, but it's still very far from how hardcore fallouts 1 and 2 were.

NV railroads you during the beginning of the game; F3 doesn't.
In NV, you can find everything of import by simply following the road. In FO3, you need to actually talk to people to get locations. You don't merely stumble your way through things; you're looking for something, and it's location isn't obvious.

The thematics are much closer to the former fallouts. You're a vault dweller, and FEV plays a part, there's super mutants and super mutant production, vaults aren't simply dungeons but actually serve a purpose and some are still inhabited, you're on a quest of actual importance to you... Not to mention that the world has moved on and is constituting government, whereas the old fallouts are almost completely lawless, apart from city-states.

Nearly all of the ways in which NV is less like the old fallouts than F3 is a big improvement however. In fact, I think trying to be like the old fallouts is the biggest problem for F3 - it could easily have been much more of a game onto itself, set in the same universe but with different and more original problems, just like NV is, instead of a rehash of the old games. The worst part is, I think the reason Bethesda didn't do this is because they tried to please the very vocal, hardcore fallout fanbase, who they obviously could never please anyway, and who as a whole have no idea what makes them like specific games and hate others.

The places where NV is more like the old fallouts is in the way it was made, and the ideas that went into it. The take away is a much more wholesome piece of narrative and game mechanics - it's designed to be good sci-fi, not to please internet trolls. It's much more subtle, like the older games, unlike F3 that was blatantly copying things without regard for making it fit together.

It's a supperior product because of these things, and in many ways it plays much more like the older games than F3 - but there is far fewer superficial similarities.

[Jaedar]

I'm not sure I consider blatant copying of every element as being faithful to a series. Especially not when you add a bunch of really stupid stuff.

Hello, I'm looking for my dad, the middle-aged man. Vampires? oh my! Magical genesis devices? yay!

NV railroads you during the beginning of the game; F3 doesn't.

People keep saying this, but I don't buy it. You're not railroaded during the beginning of NV. If there's actual in-game in-universe things keeping you from going in exactly every direction, that's not railroading in my opinion, that's good design. If everything in the world conforms to your power level(as they must for a game to be as open as F3) then it's not really open at all, cause you're railroaded into a certain difficulty of the enemies.

[bobby 55]

I guess if you're talented enough to survive Cazadores and Death Claws when you're in the single figure levels then you're not railroaded.
That's why I stick to the highways and byways 'til about level 15.

I kinda liked GRA challenges at first, but now I've found how exploitable they are...not so much. As an example: you could whittle a Death Claw's health down to one health bar with explosives, then finish it off with a .22 or switchblade(ffs), and it still counts toward the three star achievement.

[AEmer]

I'm not sure I consider blatant copying of every element as being faithful to a series. Especially not when you add a bunch of really stupid stuff.

"Hey, I'm looking for a geck. No, I don't know what it looks like."

"Ugh argh orgh! Whiky! (can I have a whisky on the rocks please, my good barkeep, and serve it up in an oldfashioned glass if you would be so kind)"

"Garden of Eden Creation Kit"

If there's actual in-game in-universe things keeping you from going in exactly every direction, that's not railroading in my opinion, that's good design

Ah, railroad tracks. They're in-game (check), in-universe (check) and they do allow me to go in TWO different directions so they merely keep me from going in exactly every direction...

Nope, no railroading in this game.

[Jaedar]

You know Aemer, I'm starting to like you less and less with each post

"Garden of Eden Creation Kit"

Making a kit with various seed packets, agricultural tips and so on isn't a logical thing to do if you're planning to eventually repopulate the earth?

[shadowblade34]

If there's actual in-game in-universe things keeping you from going in exactly every direction, that's not railroading in my opinion, that's good design

Ah, railroad tracks. They're in-game (check), in-universe (check) and they do allow me to go in TWO different directions so they merely keep me from going in exactly every direction...

Nope, no railroading in this game.

Ahh Trainz Railroad simulutor.

Something that bases it's design on the real world, and actually gets it right. It's got really good design and it fulfills the purpose of the game perfectly.

[AEmer]

@ Jaedar
Candid that you don't like me. What can I do about it?

And no, the GECK never made sense. It wasn't supposed to. Just like the vaults don't make sense, the incredible optimism of the culture doesn't make sense, the mr handy robot clearly doesn't make sense...Fallout was in part a criticism of modern day consumerism. It's a parody of the 1950'es nuclear family image. That's the point of Ron Perlmans speech - war never changes, it's always essentially about the same thing, resources. Rather than adjust an extravagant way of life, countries go to war, not just for necessities, but also for luxuries.

Everything that's pre-war in the fallout universe is ridiculously wasteful and over-the-top to bring home this point. Nuclear powered flying cars, perpetually hovering robotic servents, and, of course, the idea that you can insure yourself against nuclear holocaust and live the life of your dreams underground, never having to change a thing. All for your convenience. The idea is that it is these things that lead to human downfall. And in Fallout, all of these things simply work, althought they're often tragically flawed...like the vaults that would've worked just fine, if not for some insane government nutjobs deciding to use them for a science experiment to prepare for space colonization.

Fallout 2's GECK isn't supposed to be a suitcase with non-hybrid-seeds; it's supposed to fit with the theme of the game: Over the top pre-war extravaganza - even as you rebuild in a nuclear wasteland, you can still lean back and have a pre-packaged product take care of all the worrisome aspects as easy as it would be to use a shake-and-bake.

I don't think it was a good idea to put yet another game out where the geck was important. I think it's tired, and I think they should've just given it a small cameo and let that be that.

But they decided to include it because it's something people would recognize. The message is pretty muddied in F3...it's not at all clear anymore that the GECK was an extravagant product of a time where people were profiting off of other peoples fear of nuclear war in the most opportunistic way possible...but even here, they realized that they needed to put in some tragic irony: you get to save the wasteland from radiation, but not without dying to it yourself.

I'm not saying that the F3 creators got it right (in general, they didn't), but new vegas focus is completely different. The entire 50'es aesthetic is almost completely removed, and instead, gambling, personal powerplays, cowboys and slavers step up. It's much closer to science fantasy, much further from science fiction. It's a huge improvement, since I think fallout the older fallouts already got the message right, and there is no longer a need for the series to use that as its thrust - and the casino metaphors do serve as a nice bit of cultural criticism - but it's just further removed from the old games than F3 in a lot of ways.

@ Shadowblade (and Jaedar)

I didn't actually know the name of the game. It does feature railroading though, and it fits exactly what Jaedar described as not railroading. Jaedar, I apologize for mocking you, but your argument that those things - good design and well-explained zoning - mean that a game cannot railroad the player is baffling to me. As far as I can tell, it's a non-sequitur, and I thought it best to illustrate why I felt that way with an example.

[Jaedar]

The GECK isn't really a replicator. It contains a fertilizer system, with a variety of food seeds, soil supplements, and chemicals that could fertilize arid wasteland (and possibly selected sections of the moon's surface pre-conditioned to accept the GECK) into supporting farming. The GECK is intended to be "disassembled" over the course of its use to help build communities (for example, the cold fusion power source is intended to be used for main city power production), and so on. Anything else people needed, they could simply consult the How-To Books/Library of Congress/Encyclopedias in the GECK holodisk library for more knowledge. The pen flashlight was just a bonus.

Say what you will about pre-war comforts, but that does not sound like a genesis device. And it sounds pretty handy for reclaiming the wasteland too.

I didn't actually know the name of the game. It does feature railroading though, and it fits exactly what Jaedar described as not railroading. Jaedar, I apologize for mocking you, but your argument that those things - good design and well-explained zoning - mean that a game cannot railroad the player is baffling to me. As far as I can tell, it's a non-sequitur, and I thought it best to illustrate why I felt that way with an example.

The thing is that I don't get why people think NV is railroaded. They say it's because they can't go straight for Vegas through the deathclaw territory(even though this is possible with some luck/skill equipment). But even so: It's railroaded because there's one direction you can't go in? Are people truly so spoiled by Oblivion that they think that if they can't go to every corner of the world map at level 1, they're being railroaded?

[DDL]

Is it not just "FO3=no railroading, vs FONV=some railroading"? It doesn't need to be much railroading when the comparator is "go anywhere at all".

Also, for what it's worth, unless the GECK was fucking enormous (with almost all that bulk being 'fertilizer'), then that really doesn't sound that great. Turning wasteland into arable land via pure chemical treatment would need an awful lot of chemicals. Admittedly it's doable, sure, just impractical (and if I'm being honest, I also just like AEmer's more metaphorical take better ).

[AEmer]

Also from the fallout bible:

As a crude plot device, it may also be used as seen fit to create plots and plant new and exciting adventure seeds as needed. As a result, all of the material in this section is subject to change based on the whims of whoever wants to play with the GECK. If you want it to be a magic box of 1950s science, that's cool - we might do it, too. However, my current take on it is, it's not some miracle device, it's a little more down to earth - more like a deconstruction kit, if you will.

This is the man himself giving anybody and everybody permission to play with the geck. He's arguing that what it does is unclear...but he has some thoughts he would like to put into the discussion anyway.

And as DDL says, that explanation too has ridiculous elements. The GECK is a suitcase with holodesks and fertilizer and seeds and a cold fusion unit, and the replicator...isn't really a replicator. Anyway. Even if this was the case, the GECK wouldn't have been built to conform to the suitcase form factor. It would be a large trolley, or maybe even sectioned up into distinct parts.

The reason it isn't a trolley, of course, is because prewar technology is magically powerful in fallout, because it's an allegory. Point is: Even Chris interpretation results in a ridiculous device. He even says so himself:

The GECKs are a miracle... a miracle that they work.

And here's the original ad from fallout 1. While Chris Avellone is a cool guy, his interpretation of what the GECK was in 2002 is far less than canon, just as he admits.

In the ad, you can clearly see the reference to the shake-and-bake concept.

Anyway, you could argue that, because the GECK is never seen in use, or described in detail, it may have conformed to fallout 2's world in some fashion where it was less magical than it is in fallout 3, and thus in fallout 2 it was not necessarily silly and over the top, and you can interpret it in a way where it wasn't. That in spite of avellones explicit permission for anyone to muck around with it, since it was already used as a crude plot device (and since the designers of fallout 2 already had mucked around with the original joke device), Bethesda should have left it alone because someone may have interpreted it as functioning in a more limited fashion.

Which is fine I guess, except if you're already over-interpreting things, you could argue that you could put blindfolds on in fallout 3 in the exact same way: Whoever tells you that the GECK is a genesis device that rearranges matter within an set-size area is lying, or don't know what they're talking about. Dear old dad may have misunderstood something that was actually propaganda. Stannislaus Braun may have figured out what your dad was after and contrived to lead him on into thinking that the GECK was as magical as he thought, not knowing that the only important bits of the GECK may have been certain catalysts that were actually real: This would have fit perfectly with Braun's M.O.
Since you never actually see the GECK do it's magical conversion on it's own, there's still room to think it's just a suitcase with some chemicals.

But it doesn't matter much to me, either way: I think Fallouts 1 and 2 were pretty clear on just how wonderous the GECK was. Even if it turned out not to be that wonderous, I was fine with it as long as I thought it was wonderous. I didn't, upon the Elder giving me the quest, immediately say to myself "well that man is clearly confused!!!". I didn't, upon visiting Vault City, say "Wow, this community sure is advanced, I bet they made it this far because of their ingenuity and the GECK really didn't help them that much".

I was convinced the GECK was an incredibly powerful device, and I was fine with it, because things in fallout are often over the top allegories anyway, and this was just another thing like that. Even if it was a retcon, if it did exactly what you're lead to believe it can do in fallout 3, it's fine, because it still fits with the world of fallout. A world where people can magically grow muscles in a matter of seconds from being dipped in a mix of green nutrients and virus, and where http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Floater this exists, and is apparently so low-mass that it can actually hover, even as it poses a danger to you.

About the railroading:

What DDL said.

[Jonas]

WHAT is your quest?

To seek the holy GECK.

[AEmer]

are you making a point Jonas?

[Jonas]

No I just loved that easter egg, and you describing the GECK as an analogy reminded me of it.

[bobby 55]

Fallout: New Vegas; Honest Hearts DLC. I've done the final story mission, got the denouement, get the "exit via southern passage" message, then it locks up. I can't move my character. I even tried movetoqt in the console and while it does move me to the southern passage (cripes, that sounds awful ), I can't move there either.

[JC_Helios]

Fallout: New Vegas; Honest Hearts DLC. I've done the final story mission, got the denouement, get the "exit via southern passage" message, then it locks up. I can't move my character. I even tried movetoqt in the console and while it does move me to the southern passage (cripes, that sounds awful ), I can't move there either.

enableplayercontrols?