Fallout 3 Is Better Than You Think (ManyATrueNerd) - General

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z8XHe2NoAE I'm a fan of Jon's channel and his Fallout content in particular. After dozens of playthroughs for both his channel and for fun he decided to confront the persisting opinion that F:NV > Literally anything ever.

I'm not watching a two hour video on this but I can say upfront that he's wrong. FO3's plot was retarded and the gameplay was average. NV is a far superior game.

But what do they EAT?

I like Jon but it's very clear he hasn't made a video in this style/format before. His speaking as fast as possible with no breaks is tiring to listen to and the very loosely structured way he makes his points makes it hard to follow. He goes on about Megaton for a big before being sidetracked and talking about Little Lamplight and describing the quest in Paradise Falls in detail before snapping back to talking about Megaton like there was no diversion in the middle. He tries to follow the progression of the main quest but goes on so many long rants about other tangentially related shit that it doesn't follow through. Then when he starts comparing the game to New Vegas he makes a whole lot of comparisons between how the games are different without making a point. He also makes a few factual errors and weird statements which bothered me. He says New Vegas only has one biome while pointing out the desert, the forest around Jacobstown, and the canyon while completely overlooking Red Rock Canyon, Vegas itself, Lake Mead, and Camp Searchlight. He says Fallout 3 has more biomes and points out the city, the very north of the map where the colour filter changes, and the rest of the map. Somehow a grey city, grey rocks, and brown/green rocks is the more varied landscape in his mind. Okay? He says New Vegas has very little radiation for a game called Fallout. Never mind that the original games had very little radiation too, and that the title is a pun because it's actually about the sociological fallout of choices made in the past and during your playtime. But that said New Vegas has a fair few of radioactive areas. There's Camp Searchlight, the destroyed power relay station across the bridge from Novac, Vault 34, the crater at Black Mountain, you can even irradiate Cottonwood Cove if you're a sadistic bastard. I'm pretty sure there are fewer irradiated zones in Fallout 3, it's just that that game has radioactive barrels strewn across the world like they're going out of style. He says the karma system in New Vegas is bad because it's barely used. I would say the karma sstem's use in New Vegas is still too much because it's fucking nonsensical. You can't quantify morality in a binary system, especially not one where all stealing is evil but some killing is good. A system where murdering drug addicts with laser weapons is always morally righteous but taking their stuff is fucking evil. He says the karma system in 3 is good because the neutral karma perk is the most powerful, so remaining neutral is encouraged. He completely glosses over the fact that neutral karma in Fallout 3 is not keeping to yourself and avoiding making overtly moral choices, it is instead a system where you play a bipolar psychopath who needs to murder a random hobo because you said a few nice things recently and if you don't do a bad you'll become weaker. There are good things in Fallout 3, but he spends most of his time picking at minor complaints about the game and using terrible counter arguements in a weird 'gotcha' way. Like people complain about Fallout 3's writing being bad, so here's 3 lines of dialogue which are mildly humorous. That's not the problem people have, the problem people have are much higher level than that and I think he knows it because he avoids talking about the details of the main quest through the whole video. I like Jon and I like Fallout 3 well enough, but as a video meant to exclaim the positive elements of the game it's pretty terrible. Far too defensive and far too many snide/sour jabs at people who dislike or criticise Fallout 3. Too many "I don't think people got it." moments.

About ten minutes in and it's already off to a bad start, he's trying to disprove the criticism of Fallout 3 not having enough choice by pointing to one of like three places that I can remember where you do actually have meaningful choices of approach.

"Why are there no dungeons in new vegas after the bison steve?" -Immediately proceeds to list 5 other dungeons and skip over all the mines There's a lot of intentional skipping over of unfavorable comparisons in this video. Here's the biggest problem that this video just skips over: If 99% of people who are huge fans of a series miss lore that is vital to making the world feel alive then the game is failing at storytelling. Every time he tried to justify something with "well there's a terminal over here that says _____" then I have to ask how many terminals people read during any given game section, especially when the writing on any given terminal is a bit boring. I tend to tune terminals out after playing fallout for a long time because, frankly, most are just a little boring. Sure, Fallout 3 has some good hidden depth in some of its terminals, but their up front dialogue is cartoonishly written and gives the impression of shallow idiots. Digging through the terminals just to find some justification is not fun and something most people won't do. If more than 75% of the people don't see something then it might as well not exist in the context of the average person's game.

i'll agree with fallout new vegas being a better RPG experience any day of the week but in my opinion it's still a trash game, though that's more bethesda's fault than obsidian's. fallout 4 fixed everything wrong with 3/NV's gameplay and went in the complete opposite direction for roleplay value. fortunately, Fallout 4 New Vegas continues strong so far.

The only thing I can give Fallout 3 over New Vegas is that it wasn't totally completely 100% busted at launch. Holy shit New Vegas's launch was embarrassing.

Yep. Now it's the complete opposite. New Vegas is probably the most stable modern Fallout game, and Fallout 3 is busted to the point where it can just randomly crash if you don't set up the game's ini file correctly, even on the latest patch. Obsidian was better at patching games in Bethesda's engine than Bethesda is...

NV was made after Windows 7 came out, it will be more compatible.

God I hate those pretentious titles that think they can speak for you. "You are wrong about [THING]" "[THING] is better than you think" "What you didn't get in [THING]", especially if the guy makes wrong statements as it's apparently the case here.

Do not get me started on how poorly FO3's combat has aged.

videogame essays were a mistake

FO3's combat was just barely passable when it came out, mainly because people were a bit forgiving because it was Bethesda's first shot a Fallout and an FPS to boot. These days trying to play FO3 is nothing short of torture. The combat is complete trash.

There are several other things that Fallout 3 does better than NV. Mostly the fact that there are more dungeons, that they are bigger and more detailed, and also that 3 actually feels big (and is also bigger, of course).

ech there's so much more to games, especially open world character based roleplaying games, than shooty shooty bang bang.

Why every few months does someone feel the need to make a video about Fallout 3. "Here's Why Fallout 3 Was Bad" "This is Why Fallout 3 Was Actually Good". New Vegas did everything Fallout 3 did, but better. It's as simple as that.

Sounds like the thought patterns and conclusions of someone who never played Fallout 1 or 2. Which is really weird, since he did play them. Fallout 3 has the depth and complexity of a saltine cracker, saying someone "isn't getting" Fallout 3 when they say New Vegas is better is laughable.

I was actually surprised they kept the karma system in NV (even if it's barely used). It's just bad design even on paper.

Fallout 3's strengths were always exploration, and a compelling world size that made exploration and travel feel interesting. I have more fond memories traveling the Capital Wasteland than being railroaded into the sights and scenes that New Vegas expected you to follow assuming you didn't cheese it and dodge cazadors or deathclaws acting as the unofficial guardsmen of the region. I'm not one to wildly praise any particular story of Fallout 3, or Fallout: New Vegas, if you ask me, I think people give New Vegas' story way too much credit. It's interesting in some aspects, but some people really just seem to blow its quality way out proportion. I've never seen Fallout as this pinnacle of amazing storytelling, so treating it like a magnum opus, or expecting one is silly to me. A big problem with the story I had in New Vegas is that it might be telling you one thing, but as far as gameplay goes, it doesn't feel representative of what's supposedly going on. For all the importance the area is supposed to have, it pretty much feels like an uninteresting podunk a lot of time whenever you're wandering. Seems like the developers didn't prioritize enough on their actual world. The way I see it, Fallout 3's world and exploration wins over New Vegas. Both games have a variety of interesting mini-stories you can find outside of the main quest, and I don't hold one over the other. New Vegas, on the other hand would win on combat gameplay, and the amount of player-choice. It is completely undeniable that New Vegas is a superior game as far as gunplay goes, and it's not surprising considering the developers were using an engine were working with an existing engine, so they had the means to improve the rougher concepts that Fallout 3 had formed. It's not unlike how Fallout 2 feels like a technically superior game compared to the first Fallout game, and they were both on the same game engine.

I don't get why people just can't give up and say that Fallout 3 is a bad fallout game. Like, the main quest doesn't even make sense. You've built a giant water filtration plant at the end of the water tables?

It's hard to concretely agree or disagree with this video. I like that 3 offers you a good bit more freedom to explore by not salting the map with obvious beef gates, unnecessary invisible walls, and single-room microdungeons, but I don't like that 3 takes more from 1 in that exploring the world is a series of unrelated encounters that maybe vaguely tie into the theme or main plot. I like that 3 kept the same idea of engagingly cheesy moral choices that 1 and 2 had, but Bethesda's writing skills have always been mediocre so it's not as fun as it could be. I like that the three main cities are packed to the gills with quests and small stories, but I hate that smaller settlements get one quest each, plus an unmarked quest if they're lucky. I like that the game allows you to be a wildly mean-spirited prick, but dislike that that's the only selfish option you can take where Neutral is basically just Good with a little more extortion. I like that the game's areas rely heavily on either semi-scripted events or random encounters to make them more engaging than just clearing them out, but dislike that this means the main quest will be super boring super fast. I can tell that Bethesda genuinely tried to capture the feel that Fallout 1 and 2 had, but I don't think they either had the proper management or the experience with non-Elder Scrolls plots to do it. I love New Vegas trying to make a realistic setting with complex motivations for everyone's actions, but it's delivered in the second-least interesting way possible. I like New Vegas's deep story, but the fact that three out of four main quest lines will always follow the same set of quests makes choosing a different faction on a second playthrough feel unrewarding. I like that your relation to the other factions affect how the places you work with end up, but the fact that shit goes south for them in all but the Independent playthrough (except for the Followers, but oh well) doesn't make me want to do anything but High Speech High Science Very Good Independent Courier. I like that New Vegas encourages different combat playstyles more, but dislike that for the most part the only way you're getting new gear is either buying it or looting it off faction-related NPCs' corpses. It's easy to see that Obsidian had the writing chops to make the perfect Fallout game, but Sawyer and Avellone and the rest of the writing team wanted to take it too far away from the themes and gameplay feels of the first two in favor of a deep, realistic war story that happened to be set in the Fallout universe.

While we're on the topic of FO3's story, why did we need the GECK in the first place? The place is literally a water treatment plant that is mostly operational. Who's idea was it to, rather than scrounge more spare parts like they were for the past twenty years to get it working, concoct a grand plan where they send their only child out into super-mutant territory to fetch this magical Deus Ex Machina that would have a better use literally anywhere? You detonate that thing in the Mojave Desert and it'll be a fucking forest, so why not just turn the most irradiated hellhole in North America hospitable again? More importantly how does the GECK continuously purify water? You detonated the thing in a massive pool of water, congrats. Now your nuclear holocaust contaminated water is mixing with the GECK-Juice™ and rendering it impossible to drink again.

i don't think you got my point. i was meaning to say fallout 4's gameplay was great but the roleplay value and story was straight garbage, worse than fallout 3. fallout new vegas i'd still rather play but the shooting for example is probably the worst i've ever utilized.

Something something Too much radiation and it would gunk up the systems. Because radiation somehow stops water from flowing.

Fallout 3 is filled with nonsense. No one questions what is causing the radiation in the water, they just know they need the magic Britta filter to clean it. For some reason the Britta filter is placed right on the river mouth, the point where it would be the least effective (barring being actually in the ocean). Turning on the Britta filter doesn't clean the water, it just blasts a lethal dose of radiation directly into the control room. For some reason you need to use a GECK to make the Britta filter work. Never mind that the GECK is designed to make a large area into farmable land and turned the tiny tribal village of Arroyo into a sprawling town complete with electricity and fresh water in only a few years. Fallout 3 is at its strongest when it isn't trying to use things from previous Fallout games. Rielly's Rangers are a group of regular people who got sick of living in a Super Mutant infested shithole and decided to fight against them, and they're actually doing well. The Superhuman Gambit is a fun quest and it introduced the Hubris comics universe which I think is great. The Little Lamplight and Big Town thing is really dumb but if it was properly fleshed out it could be a really interesting concept.

I won't trash Fallout 3 beyond anything more than being a product of its time. Fallout 3 introduced me to Fallout and if I had not played it I wouldn't have touched Fallout NV or the first two, let alone get incredibly invested in Mods. HL2 and FO3 were basically the core reasons why I wanted to get into game design and story design because while one has a good relaxed form of story telling, I liked Fallout's approach to character creation. Hell, I do like the entire intro sequence because as a teenager I did become invested in finding Dad. But hindsight is 2020, and I won't consider FO3 to be a good game. Its not even close to a good Fallout. But I do appreciate it for opening my horizons.

If they took the GECK to the spot just north of Springvale, right on the river, and activated it you could create a mini utopia that the people of Megaton could pack up and walk to in about 2 hours. Hell, activate it inside DC and it could use the raw material to fucking make a new city.

To be fair, there are just some aspects of the Fallout universe you kind of just have to tolerate without a logical explanation no matter which game we're talking. It's pretty much established not all the rules of our universe apply to the ones in Fallout so it seems like folly to be picky about every little discrepancy. In the case of GECK, the components of the technology were deemed necessary to make the purifier function as intended, and it seems like the GECK in Fallout 3 was implied to be a little different than what it was used for in Fallout 2.

To play advocate here against Fallout's goofier qualities, most of the Fallout designs themeatically like ghouls were based on what we thought radiation could do to some people. We knew what water tables were back in the 1950s, we knew how they worked. They don''t just go in reverse 'because'.