Reply With Quoteyeah...Originally Posted by Tim Cain
I've yet to see any of the principles from the earlier games really bash the direction Fallout 3 took the series. Some have been quite complimentary, though I suppose it could be argued that they all have reasons for being nice rather then "honest" even if they actually hated it. After all, the bunch that ended up at Obsidian aren't going to bash Bethesda, for obvious reasons.
yeah...
Professional curiosity and no reason to wanna burn bridges with similar developers.
Tim Cain I think has been the most critical yet even admitting to keeping some things to himself in that video.
Also Tim Cain Fans = RPGCodex/No Mutants Allowed. If anyone was wondering when he said his fans were upset he liked it.
The only thing he kept to himself was his thoughts on the humor in Fallout 3, but I think he also criticized the humor in Fallout 2 as implemented after his departure from Interplay in previous interviews. Like he notes, humor is pretty subjective. So what he's choosing not to discuss is not because he's holding back as much as he realizes it's a subjective part of his opinion.
Sure, but more to the point, Fallout 3 wasn't funny at all.
I'm not disagreeing with that. While a few things worked (though I can't recall any examples at the moment) a lot of it was forced. But then I don't consider the humor to be a core element of Fallout, because some of the absurdist humor has always felt out of place to me to begin with. I get that they were trying to throw a little "Dr. Strangelove"-esque into it, but like most humor it's hit and miss. And the pop culture humor works only in small doses.
I do think dark humor is very important to capture the Fallout setting in the right tone. And there were parts of Fallout and Fallout 2 that were pretty damn hilarious. I recall laughing aloud on several occasions.
Off the top of my head:
Harold
Talking to the Enclave guy from the Ghoul controlled Power Plant
Several PC and NPC responses throughout the game...the writing was so good.
This is were Fallout 3 fell completely flat.
It really came in small doses, though, didn't it? Fallout 3 had some pretty absurd shit as well, though less tongue-in-cheek. More often it was just weird.
(Disclaimer: I have yet to complete the game. I got as far as Little Lamplight and burned out/was distracted by something shiny. That said .. )
I think character was sorely lacking in general, in 3 - not just humor. There were so many little glimmers of character in Fallout 2, often hidden in random, insignificant NPCs. In 3, most NPCs are pretty bland and static.
And the companions - man .. Sulik, Goris, Skynet, Marcus, Lenny - some real interesting dudes joined up with you and really contributed to the sense of personality and life in the wastes. I didn't feel I'd met someone of that caliber until Dashwood, and was very disappointed when I couldn't get him to join me (nevermind after the ghoul tragedy).
The only companion I managed to get was Cross, and, bleh.
For as much as you could go anywhere and do stuff in whatever order you wanted, the first 2 fallouts really weren't open world RPGs, at least not in the Bethesda sense. There was a clear drive to the story, and character interaction was central to the gameplay, rather than a sidenote.
Well no wonder, you got the most humorless companion in the game. RL-3 and his bombastic Patton-Bot personality, on the other hand, I found to be hilarious.
"There's nothing I love more than making some other poor bastard die for his country!"
I regret that - and I've always had a soft-spot for the noble savage as well.
I say they were "open world" RPGs but not in the same way. They didn't have a continuous world like a Bethesda game but rather zones connected via overworld map travel.
That said, Fallout's main quest was much more open ended than Fallout 3. I'm not sure what you mean by clear drive to the story but "Find a Waterchip" or "Find a GECK" is the only information you got. No hand holding aka direction marker to follow along Bethesda's linear quest chain. Shit, you can go straight to the Military Base or Cathedral right at the start. There was also a shortcut to the Military Base in Necropolis that is very easy to hit. Everything besides completing those two areas was optional including the Waterchip.
I think the only open part of the Fallout 3 main quest is stumbling upon the vault where your dad is via pure exploratory.
Well at least they didn't use Monty Python skits.
Some of the random encounters/pop culture dump in Fallout 2 is another bad thing.
That was my one disappointment in Fallout 1. On the map were these city ruins. I'd travel to them hoping to find some secret place or encounter but they were always empty. It would have been cool for some of them to have something - a raider group, abandoned vault, tribal group, etc.
I wandered over to Rivet City well before I started the main quest, and thus was placed on the path to Dad's last known location well before I'd intended to be, so my first playthrough completely skipped over the Three Dog mission.
Same here. I didn't even meet him until long after I'd found Dad. Which is actually a better way to do it, since doing the mission for him after he no longer has useful info for you gives you the key to a weapons cache full of great stuff.
Ok, has anyone tried to enter Little Lamplight from the beginning to access the mutant vault? I know everything that leads up to finding Dad is optional but what about after?
There are a few ways to get into vault 87 without following the main storyline ahead of time. If you have the "child at heart perk" you can talk the mayor into letting you in, or if your speech is high enough you might be able to do the same. There's also another door in LL attached to a terminal that can be hacked for access to the vault, somewhere in the great chamber.
The Fallout universe is based on SCIENCE! rather than science. It's the same reason radiation can cause you to regrow an arm.
There were a number of humorous bits in Fallout 3. The AntAgonizer and Mechanist comes to mind. Doc was pretty funny to me, basically a drug seller styling himself a medical man. A vault of clones who are so similar that they all have the same name. The uber-patriot in Megaton. But as Tim Cain said, humor is subjective.
My favorite bits of humor in Fallout 3 were finding the computer that recorded dictation shortly before and during the final attack and the Nuka Cola Quantum trials.
I loved the Thomas Jefferson robot in the archives. That was hilarious.
I remember the Monty Python skits but was that in Fallout 1 where Tim Cain's humor was reflected or Fallout 2 where he says the humor got away from him? I remember the second had tons of pop cultural references which broke me ou of the setting a few times.
Anyway, if it is in the first one, and I loves me some Monty Python, then his humor is the same as that annoying guy who always says "remember that skit in Kids In The Hall..." and then proceeds into a string of you had to be there watching tv with me stories. I haven't played very far into Fallout 3 to see what the humor looks like, but I feel like Tim Cain shouldn't have brought it up at all since he wasn't going to criticize it even though he really did. The super mutant stuff seems like a valid point to bring up (I don't know Fallout lore well, but obviously he would).
Fallout 2 was the one that had the following special encounters:
The Monty Python-esque Bridge Keeper
King Arthur's Knights, another Python reference
The Cafe of Broken Dreams, packed with characters who talk about the first Fallout
A crashed whale (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
A crashed TOS-era Starfleet shuttle
The Guardian of Forever, another Star Trek reference
Tin Man, a Wizard of Oz reference
Unwashed Villagers fighting a spammer
So.... yeah.
By contrast, the original Fallout's special encounters were entirely in-universe, with the exception of the Dr. Who police box encounter.
Last edited by Zylon; 07-14-2010 at 09:01 AM.
The jokes in Fallout 2 were terrible. I love Monty Python but I just rolled my eyes every time they referenced it.
FO3 had Liberty Prime ("DEMOCRACY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE!!") which was hilarious.
I loved Liberty Prime.
I read bits like this, about how FO3 isn't consistent with FO1 & 2 and it strikes me as so strange. I played the originals when they came out and loved them but I guess they didn't make enough of an impression on me because my recollection is wasteland, scumbags, mutants, and the brotherhood of steel. And FO3 nailed all of that perfectly in my mind--I didn't even occur to me that there wouldn't be supermutants in DC. Does it have something to do with midichlorians?
Anyway, I'm guess I'm just saying that I feel like FO3 captured the setting pretty much perfectly, which is enough for me.
Not yet, but the Fallout universe seems headed toward a Star-Wars level of lore-mongering. Fallout 4 will have to include a bit about how the FEV was transported across the country via secret Vault-tec courier routes by traitorous BOS members. Fallout 4: Topeka will flesh out the backstory of one of the courier stops along that route.
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