this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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I honestly don't get the hate. To me, fallout 3 was on another level. It was oblivion with guns in a post apocalyptic wasteland and I loved every minute of it. I had never heard of fallout before bathesda bought it. I think the first 2 games plus tactics only sold like a million copies combined. Fallout 3 sold like 10 million.
I'm just saying, had it not been for bathesda, fallout would be dead and forgotten. I mean I sure as heck would have never heard about it. So I'm glad they made fallout 3, and it was a landmark game in my life.
Fallout was created by Tim Cain at Interplay. Herve Caen staged a hostile takeover of the company, forced out Cain and Brian Fargo, and proceeded to run the company into the ground and loot its corpse. Tim Cain was in the process of buying back IP from Interplay when Todd Howard swooped in and bought it for more than Cain could afford. Basically, Tim Cain had his baby - his magnum opus - stolen from him TWICE.
If not for Bethesda, we would have had multiple BG3 level sequels by now, instead of the looter-shooter garbage that Bethesda turned it into.
But then, we wouldn't have VtM: Bloodlines, Pillars of Eternity or The Outer Worlds.
Tim Cain has been hitting it out of the park since the first Fallout.
Yes. Outer Wilds was good, although the combat was a bit bullet spongy at times. The writing and direction was on point. Funny to read that the "Spacer's Choice" edition introduced graphical bugginess - Tim's got jokes.
Outer Wilds doesn't have any combat, you're thinking of Outer Worlds.
I don't get this. Sounds like Tim Cain is a shit business and you're blaming the person who had nothing to do with the company going under.
Another thing I don't get, you think bathesda fallout is "garbage"? Really? Why is it every game is either a 10/10 or hot garbage? Why is there no in between? Why can't you admit it's just not for you? Fallout 1 and 2 weren't for me, I didn't like them. But I like bathesda fallout. It doesn't mean I can 1 and 2 "garbage". Fallout 3 and 4 gave across the board good reviews and millions of sales, clearly many people don't think it's garbage.
There seems to be an incredible amount of things you don't get regarding this subject. And you're refusing to learn any of them.
YOU MUST BE RE-EDUCATED. WRONG THINK IS ILLEGAL!
Yeah, I can believe that there are some people who just don't like Bethesda's games, but I don't agree with them. I like the isometric games, New Vegas, and Bethesda's releases.
All of them had their own warts and limitations. I didn't like the timer -- one had to complete a major portion of the game plot by a given period of time -- in Fallout 1. I didn't like the dialog system in Fallout 4, or how enemies tended to get really bullet-spongy late game. I didn't like the bugginess or limited draw distance with kinda prominent pop-in in New Vegas. Fallout 76 -- owing to its multiplayer nature -- has a kinda limited story and single-player game.
The series as a whole has always has some balance issues with the various skills/perks.
But there also isn't a game in the (mainline) series that I regret having purchased, either.
And I think that the series definitely progressed in a number of ways.
Some people didn't like the shift from the "skill percentages" system present from the first game through Fallout: New Vegas. I don't think that it was a great system. It tended to be grindy, and there were some clearly-better paths to take. I think that the series is better-off for having dropped it.
Some people really didn't like having a voiced PC in Fallout 4, like it breaks their sense of immersion. I don't really feel strongly one way or the other, though I do think that having a voiced PC, absent good voice cloning and synth, makes it hard for mod authors to fit content in seamlessly.
Fallout: New Vegas had a lot of complex story interactions, ways in which you could reshape the world; one choice and another interacted. Fallout 4 was simpler. I liked Fallout: New Vegas doing that...but then, I also remember sitting on a game guide so that I wouldn't make "wrong" choices, because a lot of the interactions aren't obvious.
I can't see a way to frankly assess the quality of a game on its commercial success, but let's at least not pretend the franchise's popularity is based on its later installments - that puts the cart before the horse imo.
Interplay going bankrupt is the reason Bethesda owns this IP. FO3 wasn't a bad game, but it started development before their involvement. Everything Bethesda made on its own has been increasingly in their own simulationist, environmental style, which can be fun but isn't a good fit for the highly novelistic style that made it popular to begin with.
I think my view still stands, without bathesda that series would have ended with that weird ass "fallout: bos" for PS2. If it hadn't been bought by bathesda, we would have no fallout 3, 4 or even NV. Cause as much as people claim it isn't, NV uses the bones and parameters of fo3, just builds on it. We also wouldn't have gotten the show, which was great
You imagine Bethesda was the sole bidder on the IP, but this isn't the case. But for their shrewdness, the series would have survived just fine.
Do you have some insider knowledge about other companies that bid on the rights or?
From what I can find online, there's not much out there aside from Activision, which... Lmao
No, not them. I'm trying to figure out what interview I read about this. Pardon my source amnesia, I'll write back if it comes to me.
You have to take a look on the size of the "gaming market" at release dates of those games. At mid 90s gaming was barely a thing, since PCs were still unbelievably expensive. Ten years later it was very different. Plus consoles on top of it...
Heh. I think of things as being "incredibly cheap" these days and then being the norm.
The point is PCs are much more affordable now. Not sure if it was just my country specific, but getting higher end PC in 90s was like one year of saving whole salary level expensive, while today it's like one or two months.
To try to answer, succinctly (which I'm bad at): looking backward is easier than looking forward. What I mean by that is since you didn't get into the series until 3, it makes sense that you wouldn't have a problem with 3 and 4, since it's harder to see what the series could have been...as pretentious as that sounds.
Where much of the hate comes from (and I think a lot of it is overblown - I'm not trying to justify the behavior of the maniacs out there) is that the overarching progression of the series feels reset. Fallout 1 -> Fallout 2 showed a progression in a *post-*post-apocalyptic world, with society advancing again, to some degree. Shady Sands grew between 1 and 2, and was the foundation of the NCR.
So Fallout 3 at the time was IMHO a disappointment because the setting felt more generic, and like they were just playing the greatest hits from 1 and 2. I get the arguments that the setting in-universe was hit harder, but it still felt weird that it was post-apocalpytic instead of post-post-apocalyptic.
One reason (as always, IMHO) that New Vegas was so popular is that it continued to build on 1 and 2. We saw the NCR had continued to grow, other factions rise in importance, and generally felt less like the bombs had dropped the year prior. It's what a lot of folks hoped Fallout 3 would be, in that sense. That's my own biased view though, so take it with a grain of salt - there's folks who want more humor, only isometric, more complex and branching storylines, etc.
It’s hard to compare sales numbers of 90s games to late 2000s games lol the whole industry had a massive growth spike post-Xbox introduction and PCs getting massively cheaper to build
I was skeptical of the jump to 3D at the time, and sure, it changed the series, but I think that it was done well.
If one wants more isometric games in the rough setting and genre as Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, there's the Wasteland series, the first of which inspired Fallout.
checks
The series is apparently currently on sale on Steam. Wasteland 3 and its expansions are 80% off:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/719040/Wasteland_3/
And Wasteland 2 is 75% off:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/Wasteland_2_Directors_Cut/
...and the latter is bundled with the (very, very elderly) Wasteland 1.
I'd be curious to see the sale results of the games while takeling the amount of console/PC present as well as the market size during the release year.
We might have surprise about results of all the games with these parameters.