And found out filmset scenarios are filled with tricks that make it seem one thing to viewers whilst being something else, just like 3D worlds in games.
“I think fans debate what their favourite one is, which is understandable,” Howard says. “I think it’s great that you can have a lot of factions and the fans say, ‘Oh, I like one or two or three or four, or Vegas or 76’ now, and so I think that’s really healthy for a franchise where people can say which one is their favourite.”
I’m sure Todd’s head canon is that there’s more of a debate than there actually is.
im not sure what this comment is trying to get at, ive never seen a game franchise more debated than fallout. ive seen every game labelled as someones favorite, including that awful brotherhood of steel game
The fact of the matter is it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean it was a good game or something was done better (which is what Todd is looking for, validation), because some people liked it.
then what is? because 3 new vegas and 4 are all pretty much critically acclaimed, so would we go based off sales then? because in that case the order would be 4 then 3 then new vegas
That's the point, it doesn't matter. Enjoy any you want.
Todd just wants "his" Fallout games to be the most liked, to stroke his ego.
Also side note, sales never works as a metric because the gaming industry is constantly growing, any game released now sells much more than it ever would have 5, 10, 15, 20.. years ago. Regardless of quality.
Just about any game is someone’s favorite, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lot of debate. Fallout 4 and 76 appear to have reached an audience much larger than the rest of the series’ usual standards for copies sold, so the sense I get is that if you’re calling one of those your favorites, you most likely haven’t seen most of the rest of the series. I think 3 and 4 get a lot of criticism that may go too far, but the long and short of it is that the consensus is that Bethesda’s entries are not among the strongest in the series.
that may be your opinion but ive seen people who love fo3 but cant get into new vegas, who love 4 but cant get into 3 or new vegas, who love 76 because its online multiplayer and therefore not as big on the single player entries. theres endless debates about it. you may think its consensus but its not as clear cut as you think
hell theres fallout 1 purists who think that game is the ONLY fallout game
I’ve been on gaming forums for a long time, and I honestly can’t recall a single time I saw anything resembling an actual debate that people might like 3 more than New Vegas. I have seen debates of 3 vs. 4 and New Vegas vs. 1/2, but I’ve never come across a debate between people who’ve played more or less the entire series and preferred Bethesda’s games. Maybe that’s you, but this would be the first time.
ive seen it quite a bit. but i think 3 fans are too busy starting up another character to bother with debating 😂 definitely a quiet crowd but not totally invisible
I’ve seen a ton of debate over 3 and New Vegas. People have said New Vegas is too small or too empty. I don’t get that at all, but I’ve definitely seen several people saying so in different venues.
Well, take this for what it’s worth since I’m personally of the 1 > NV > 2 > 3 > 4 > Tactics/76 > BoS persuasion, so our preferences probably overlap and I might not be the best person to speak to why some prefer 3. But here’s my best take at why some people might genuinely prefer Fallout 3 over New Vegas.
1. The world is more exploration-friendly.
Fallout 3 drops you near the center of the map, uses fewer invisible walls, and basically lets you run in any direction from the moment you leave the vault. Some of those design choices come at the cost of immersion and a clear sense of progression, but for players who just want to wander and explore, 3 scratches that itch.
New Vegas, by contrast, funnels players through a “racetrack” loop that eventually leads you to the Strip, then sends you outward to deal with the major factions. This structure reinforces the narrative pacing and supports the game’s strong story design, but it does reduce the sense of open-ended freedom.
2. Fallout 3’s dungeons are more extensive.
Most of 3’s dungeons are longer, more combat-heavy, and offer more substantial looting/scavenging opportunities, including bobbleheads and unique gear. While New Vegas has brilliantly written locations (Looking at you Vault 11), many of its buildings amount to one or two rooms, largely due to the game’s famously short development cycle.
For players who enjoy the simple rhythm of clearing out big spaces and gathering loot, Fallout 3 offers more of that classic “delve and scavenge” gameplay, even if its combat system is fairly “mid”.
3. The atmosphere feels more traditionally “post-apocalyptic.”
This one is entirely subjective, but many players feel that Fallout 3’s bleak, bombed-out wasteland better captures the classic “nuclear apocalypse” aesthetic. New Vegas has richer world-building, themes more aligned with Fallout 1 and 2, and a more realistic sense of a society rebuilding after centuries, but its tone is often more eccentric than apocalyptic. For some players, that makes 3 easier to get immersed in.
For the record, I still personally believe New Vegas is the stronger game. (Outside of “atmospheric reasons") Most of the things Fallout 3 excels at are also done just as well (or better) in Oblivion and Skyrim. But what New Vegas does well, player agency and narrative depth, is something very few non-Isometric CRPG games even attempt, and even fewer do it even half as good. So comparing the two within their respective genre “spiritual siblings”, NV is a exemplary title within its peers, while 3 is kinda just “one of the post Morrowind Bethesda” games (where Skyrim seems to reign as the champion).
Still, Fallout 3 delivers the “meditative, exploration-driven gameplay” that Bethesda built its reputation on from Oblivion onwards. For players who fell in love with that formula (especially those who entered the series with 3), New Vegas can feel like a departure from what they enjoy about the series.
And honestly, that’s one of my favorite things about Fallout: every game is a departure from the last. Fallout 2 shifted the tone dramatically from Fallout 1. Fallout 3 reinvented the franchise entirely. New Vegas reworked 3’s skeleton into something more narrative-focused. Fallout 4 emphasized crafting and building. Fallout 76 went multiplayer. No matter which game is your favorite, each one brings something unique to the table.
Anyway, I could talk about this stuff until the actual apocalypse, but I’ll end it here. But hopefully this helps explain why some people genuinely prefer Fallout 3 over New Vegas.
Thanks! But I really do mean it when I say I haven’t come across defenders of 3 over New Vegas, so this was definitely all a new perspective for me, lol. I also think there are a lot of people asking for a new Fallout game that haven’t tried 1 and 2, and I’d love to point more people that way when the topic comes up, or at least to the Wasteland games as a close enough proximity.
But I really do mean it when I say I haven’t come across defenders of 3 over New Vegas
Agreed, there are not very many folks still hard Stanning for 3. Though I think a large reason for that is 3 was superseded by Skyrim, and FO4. While NV fans are still kinda waiting on even a true spiritual successor. So NV fans really haven’t moved on, while 3’s fans have long since gone onto other things.
Plus, the things 3 does well kinda makes you “forget about most of it” after a while. Like, I play A Tale of Two Wastelands pretty often, and one thing that stands out about 3’s world is how much of it is just more of the same. It all just blends together. Eventually, the feeling of a real world breaks down, leaving you with a “lot of gameplay with not a lot of substance”
NV’s emphasis on world building and choice on the other-hand makes you think about the game a lot more, even when you put the game down, you can still “play it” just by thinking about how your choices would affect the long term realities of the world.
So while 3’s fans can basically say “Yeah, I really liked that game, the world was fun and stealing the Declaration of Independence from that robot was funny”, NV fans can have full on years long debates of “Independent Vegas vs NCR vs House”, I’ve even seen some mad lads argue that Caesar’s belief that a sufficiently strong opponent to challenge the NCR would force the NCR to address some of the issues they were having as a country was a good idea. These people are of course insane, but you get my point.
All of this really adds up to the fact that NV built a game that is easy to form communities around, and people are excited to talk about, while 3 kinda just built a really solid turn your brain off game.
Edit: Oh, and yeah, 100% agree. More people should play 1 and 2. It’s hard to recommend for fans of Bethesda games to go back to an obscure game from the late 90’s, but like, they’re so fucking good!
For the setting point, I agree three is more classic post-nuclear-apocalypse, but also that’s a big negative. Fallout isn’t just post-nuclear-apocalypse, it’s post-post-apocalyptic. The radiation should be a lot less prevelant and there should be societies rebuilt.
Three feels like it should be set very soon after the nukes fell. A lot of the narrative and environment don’t make sense with the timeline they wrote. There’s speculation this is because it was originally supposed to be set much earlier, but they pushed the date back late in development to make the story BoS VS Enclave, which wouldn’t fit earlier.
100% agree. A youtuber once summed up the setting pretty perfectly imho. They said something to the effect of
“Fallout isn’t just a post-apocalypse. It’s an example of retro futurism. Specifically, it’s the year 2077, as the people of the 1990’s imagined the people of the 1950’s imagined it. But then, that society got nuked, and the post-apocalypse imagined by the pop-culture of the 80’s and 90’s rose from it’s ashes.”
3’s more standard “post-apocalypse vibes” don’t really nail the vision of the original Fallout. This is especially a negative if you are coming at Fallout from the standpoint of a long time fan. Like I said in my first rant,
“New Vegas has richer world-building, themes more aligned with Fallout 1 and 2, and a more realistic sense of a society rebuilding after centuries”
And yeah, it seems pretty obvious that 3 was meant to be set much earlier in the timeline originally. With Rivet City being the most advanced “from the ground up” society in terms of agriculture simply by having a small hydroponics lab, most of society surviving by scavenging, attempts to cleanup and rebuild at an extremely early or nonexistent stage, etc.
Though I assume that for folks who prefer 3, these are not hills they particularly care about, and that the more generic post-apocalyptic vibes (that were really in vogue when 3 was released) hit the exact fantasy they wanted to play through.
But yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with your points.
Very true, and that’s one of my favorite elements of the West Coast lore. Honestly, if I could change only one thing about Bethesda’s approach to Fallout, it would be their dogmatic approach to keeping the world locked in time.
I actually enjoyed the show, and am even trying to remain optimistic for season two, but resetting the world-building on the West Coast just to keep the apocalyptic tone really made me sad to see. Killed off a story I loved that had been slowly building since my childhood.
Bethesda has a lot of lore issues, but their main one is that they set pretty much all of their games far too late in the timeline. If you want to tell a post-apocalyptic story, that’s fine.
It doesn’t make sense for anything to be living in a place where the water has been poison for 200 years. Fallout 3 would fit perfectly before Fallout 1 on the timeline.
They knew it didn’t make sense for there to be like 3 half-assed towns in Boston after 200 years, so they created The Institute. Who are so all-powerful they wiped the Commonwealth of any real progress toward society, yet have no clear goals and are extremely incompetent. Set it around 60 years after the bombs, maybe take out the Synth plot and replace it with actual, nonconvoluted slavery, thus expanding on the themes of 3.
To me, the show is a collage of scenes that I like, with quite a bit of stuff that I really dislike. There’s really cool ideas in it, and I honestly do love how they reference some of the universal experiences that we get when playing those games. But the treatment of the lore, in general, is honestly borderline disrespectful. The nuking of Shady Sands, as you referenced. But also the dumbing-down of the Sino-American War to a simple ideological conflict. Fallout is absolutely about how different groups interact and conflict with each other, but it is not about capitalism vs communism, and the Sino-American War is not the real-life Cold War, it’s a war between America and China over depleting resources. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think they even really reference the war, save for a crashed SOVIET satellite. Awfully convenient to tweak it that way when the show is made by a global megacorporation and China’s all in on the American media market now.
Now, they’ve announced that in Season 2, “…every faction might think they’ve won.” To emulate, “…the story of history depend[ing] on who you ask.” Which, yknow, New Vegas already showed with the vast and varying opinions of its characters, as well as quite literally showing the effect of historical debate with the in-game debate about the Bitter Springs Massacre.
I’m waiting to see how they pull it off, but I can’t see how all the factions could think they’ve won if Mr. House is alive, seeing how you have to assassinate him for 3 of the endings.
Also, Caesar has an incurable brain tumor and you either kill Lanius or talk him into abandoning the front entirely in 3 of the endings. I don’t see how the Legion could ever be doing good. Maybe Macaulay Macaulay “Mr. McCulkin” Culkin Culkin is their new leader.
Apologies for the rant, I’ve sorted through my feelings on the material we’ve had for a while but this show has me hot. That said like yeah solid 7/10 as a standalone show and I would even recommend it to people who would never play the games anyway.
Yeah, I totally concur, a lot of the stories they want to tell fit so much better closer to the bombs.
I also think Bethesda’s need to make sure every story contains the core elements of Super Mutants, the BoS, Deathclaws, Radscorpions, etc is another key issue they have with the lore. When I played 1 and 2, it felt like I was seeing just a small slice of a world that could have any number of crazy new things in it. But now that it’s basically the same thing coast to coast, the world feels stale and predictable.
And you pretty much summed up all my thoughts on the show. The ‘collage of fun scenes’ made it enjoyable. But it was also beyond disrespectful. Throwing away the world built up in 1, 2, and NV just to make it match the key elements of 3 and 4 is… super fucking shitty.
And I really don’t see how they can make it seem like every faction in NV can think they won without also completely invalidating the significance of the choices in NV. But I’m honestly already resigned to Bethesda just killing off that as well tho, so I hope they at least still have a fun collage of scenes.
You’re absolutely right on your point about the core elements. They think that the Fallout universe needs a Triforce, a Master Sword, and a Ganon. But it’s just not that kind of series. The iconography is so much less important than the themes. It feels like they’re jingling keys in front of us sometimes when they show off BoS and Super Mutants (who were supposed to be dying out).
Funnily enough, the only icon they use that would feasibly be in every part of the US was Nuka Cola, and they retconned its design…
Oh, just saw your edit, but no apologies necessary. If the small essay I’ve written between all my comments is any indication, I just like talking about fallout. So thanks for the rant actually!
As someone else who prefers 3, I think that it’s more fun to explore and generally has a better atmosphere. New Vegas has better writing but the world feels empty. 3 more fun to actually play. Honestly, I’d probably take 4 over NV for the same reason.
1/2 I haven’t managed to get into. At all.
ETA - I was also never really interested in the wild west as a setting, so NV has a bit of an uphill battle from the start.
Fallout 3 is the better exploration game, New Vegas is the better RPG. Now, I love Fallout 3 and I think it has the best world design in the series (lore not included), but I get a great deal more enjoyment from leveling a character toward a specialization and seeing the different ways my small decisions affect the world than I do from dungeon crawling.
New Vegas has me covered there, its perks are really fun and a large part of its many quests have 3 or more solutions (or an alternative quest). Contrast that with Fallout 3, where perks often don’t do more than raise a skill and the quest outcomes are largely binary between angelic and pure evil.
However, if I want to scavenge through the wreckage of a dead world I can think of no finer game than Fallout 3. It really just seeps atmosphere from every pixel.
I don’t think it’s better than NV as a whole, but there are things it does do better. Probably the biggest is the random events. They have a lot more variety and interaction then NV. You might end up with a BoS Remnant group spawn and a Deathclaw, and they’ll just start fighting. NV doesn’t really have this. It’s much more contained and scripted.
In this way, 3 is closer to 1 and 2 than NV is. A large part of the first two games are the random events as you travel the world. NV is almost entirely predictable, with the same things always being at the same spots. 1,2, and 3 are fairly unpredictable while exploring. Landmarks will be the same, but what you see along the way usually won’t be.
Eh, I doubt it, because it didn’t seem like I was seeing too few. They came at an appropriate clip, and the second game even gives you a car to see fewer of them after the halfway point.
Your doubt isn’t a factor, it’s just how the game works. Unless both 10 years ago and 1 year ago you replayed them on a computer from the late 90’s, you didn’t get as many random events as were intended. The very fact that you think random events were such a small part of those games also confirms you weren’t getting as many as you were supposed to lol.
playing unpatched vanilla Fallout 2 will likely REDUCE the number of random encounters (and the time you spend on the map screen, lic) because the game originally tied the travel rate to your hardware.
There’s a reason why most fan restoration patches include logic to increase the number of encounters, to make the game play more like it was when released.
The reason is because they tied to travel system to clock speeds, and modern processors cause your travel speed to be too fast which the random encounter timing system doesn’t account for. People were complaining about this 15 years ago, the problem only would have gotten worse since then.
The GOG versions do not include any fixes for the encounter system.
If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong, and if we ignore the distinct possibility that people remembering a higher encounter rate could have been experiencing that due to their CPU spec not being what the developer intended even in the 90s as CPUs increased in speed wildly in the course of just a few years back then, it would only make the random encounters in the overworld more of a deterrent against traveling too often.
If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong
I wouldn’t ignore it at all, in fact, what they might even be experiencing is the games intended encounter rate which as I told you, is much higher than you think it is. A lot of modern Intel CPUs, especially in laptops, have efficiency cores besides their performance cores, and sometimes have insanely low base clock speeds, we’re talking as low as 200mhz. Given the games age, it’s very possible the game was scheduled on an E core and also wouldn’t boost the clock speed, resulting in the behavior they describe.
if we ignore the distinct possibility that people remembering a higher encounter rate could have been experiencing that due to their CPU spec not being what the developer intended even in the 90s
That’s not a possibility. The developers specifically designed the system with lower spec systems of the time in mind. They actually designed it in such a way that the encounter rate would be reasonable compared to their idea rate on systems with clock speeds as low as 200mhz (Just like our friend above).
Now that user will be experiencing more encounters than even the average player in the 90’s, but it still wouldn’t be outside of the realm of what the devs decided was intended.
Look, I believe you, but I’ll admit I’m having trouble reconciling a few things about it. If it’s a CPU-bound problem, I’d expect it to get worse as the CPU gets faster, and my PC now is much faster than the one I played Fallout 1 on about a decade earlier, yet my encounter rates were remarkably similar. Not only were they remarkably similar, but they were remarkably similar to every other RPG I’ve played like it, such as Baldur’s Gate and Wasteland 2. Looking at heat maps of encounter rates on a wiki, I definitely had more in the red zones, but it was maybe two encounters per square rather than a dozen, and a dozen sounds miserable; I, too, would come to the conclusion that something was wrong if I saw significantly more encounters than I did. I ran Fallout 1 on Windows back in the day and Fallout 2 via Proton, so we can eliminate that as a variable that may have caused the game to behave differently. A streamer I watch played Fallout 1 for the first time via Fallout CE and had extremely similar encounter rates, and not only are we running very different machines, but surely that project unbound the encounter rates from the CPU. If we’re hitting some kind of cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced? And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?
cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced?
Well it’s clearly not a cap if you’re seeing people having more frequent encounters than you are.
And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?
Because they tied the encounter system to CPU frequency and the highest consumer CPU frequency at the time was like 500mhz. Why on earth would you assume that the developers designed the rate not around what hardware was capable of at the time, but what would be capable 15 years later?
You’re suggesting that the developers got into a room together and said “Let’s design this so that it won’t play the way we intend for it to be played until 15 years pass”
By cap, I mean lower bound. I see random encounters. If random encounters go down as CPUs get faster, my CPU is so much faster than one from the 90s that my random encounters should approach zero, but I had plenty. I just didn’t have what that person experienced where it felt like too many. In fact, it felt so right to me that I didn’t question that anything might be wrong, but I would if I saw dozens. You’re right: there’s no way they could foresee how fast my CPU would be in 2024 or 2013/2014, so how would their logic still output what feels like an acceptable encounter rate that matches other games in the genre by accident?
If random encounters go down as CPUs get faster, my CPU is so much faster than one from the 90s that my random encounters should approach zero, but I had plenty.
I mean some napkin math and averages would tell me that your base clock speed is roughly 8 times faster than the fastest computers they would have tested on. Is 8 times faster truly enough to bring the random event rate to “near zero”? Problably not. And with an old game like this it’s not as easy as just comparing clock speeds because it depends on which CPU you have, do you have Ecores? If so is your computer scheduling it on those or your p cores? And in either case is it using base clock speed or boost clock speed? How do your drivers fit into all this?
There’s also the fact that while the encounter rate is tied to CPU speed it’s not a 1:1 relationship either. The encounter system also factors in tiles, and in game days.
that they built and tested the game on higher end machines than many of their customers had, and that faster CPUs resulted in the correct encounter rate while slower CPUs resulted in dozens.
Like I’ve already said, they accounted for lower CPU clocks at the time. They designed the encounter rate for clock speeds between 200mhz and 450-500mhz, the whole range for the time. You’re also acting like fallout 1 wasn’t a cheap side project half made for free by people working off company hours. It wasn’t some big budget release. Or as if Fallout 2 wasn’t an incredibly rushed game shoved out the door by a financially failing company.
I’d sooner believe that the game working differently at different clock rates was an oversight rather than how they intended for it to work.
It was neither. It was simply an engine limitation they had to account for best they could because the first two games were functionally just tabletop RPGs under the hood that ran on a modified version of GURPS and relied on dice rolls for practically everything. As with anything else in life they designed around the problems they encountered at the time, not some hypothetical distant future scenario they’d have no way to predict.
It’s the shoestring budget and development timeline that would leave me to believe that they didn’t intend for it to be dependent on clock speeds. It’s the tabletop roots that made me feel like I got the correct encounter rate while 8 times as many would feel wrong.
They didn’t intend for it to be based on clock speeds, they were bound by it. Your subjective opinion and personal taste is what made you feel like you got the correct encounter rate, not developer intention, which as we’ve discussed, would be impossible.
Like what I think you don’t get is that it’s ok that you prefer an encounter rate lower than what the devs intended. They wanted the world to feel dangerous and hostile, and gave you the option to alleviate the encounters through acquirable items and skill point allocations. You prefer the scripted content and want the random encounters to stay out of your way for the most part.
The old Fallout games were meant to feel punishing, to a sometimes unfair degree. That was the style at the time and you’d be surprised just how many games were like that. It was a different time. To circle back, that’s why there is in fact so much debate over all these games. People like different things and the Bethesda games are far, far more forgiving than the originals. Thats why some people like you play the classic games and enjoy the lower encounter rate, and other install restoration mods to restore the higher one.
I would say it’s “tedium” that sounds unappealing to me at higher encounter rates rather than “punishment”. And it’s not just my personal tastes but also what all of their peers were doing with encounter rates, including Wasteland 1 and 2, which I’m sure you know share a lineage with Fallout.
You call it “tedium”, the developers and many classic FO enjoyers called it “immersion”, “living world”, and “fun”.
Wasteland 2 came out 16 years after Fallout, so naturally they aren’t really peers and their design philosophy will be a lot closer than to modern games in that they’re more forgiving.
Wasteland was more of a predecessor to Fallout 1, as the developers were big fans of it and they thought of Fallout as a spiritual successor to Wasteland. Fallout was also designed to be far more punishing in its early game with a steeper power curve, and had a higher focus on the player being a singular, fish out of water character, rather than a capable party like in Wasteland. They also wanted to put more pressure on the player, hence other mechanics like the time limit.
I also faintly recall the creative director of Fallout 1 talking about replaying Wasteland more recently and mentioned needing some kind of limiter to play it because of some issue with movement and other calculations being tied to CPU and/ or FPS. So it’s possible Wasteland has a similar issue, though I wouldn’t know as I’ve never played it.
I only played about 5 hours of Wasteland 1, but in what I’m sure is a DOSBox container that it comes in via Steam, the encounter rate was once again very similar to my experience with Fallout 1 and 2 and other CRPGs. I’m glad you enjoyed the game that way, and I definitely learned that it was at all influenced by CPU speeds, but I’m still not convinced that I got an unintended encounter rate given how reliably I and others come across it that way, unless you can cite a Tim Cain video about it or something.
Spot-on. 3 absolutely follows the world design of 1 & 2, but it scales it down to a city area instead of part of a state.
I’m a huge New Vegas fangirl, but I will say that the random encounters have kept Fallout 3’s world surprisingly fresh. I’ve burnt myself out on the 30 side quests, but if I just go explore then I usually see something new every playthrough. Hell, 3 was the game that really cemented Bethesda’s status as environmental storytellers with a real knack for making a space point toward its previous purpose. Back before they dropped so many skeletons in random places that it became a meme in Fallout 4.
New Vegas simply does not have that type of design. There’s many more avenues to explore in quests and many more quests, but you can tell they focused the dev time almost entirely in that area. 10/10 tho, would recommend.
Not quiet at all. Lots of people loved 3. I’m old enough to remember when NV was the red headed stepchild of the series. I don’t think you’ve picked up on the fact that New Vegas is a cult hit. It didn’t become “everyone’s favorite “ for close to a decade at least after its release.
“What does FO3 have over New Vegas”? Well at the time New Vegas was regarded as a cheap knockoff of FO3. It didn’t do much to innovate from FO3 and played like more of a Fallout 3.5 which people resented. It also had a less bleak and more “Zany” tone to it than FO3 did which people weren’t a big fan of. Also by that point Bethesda had a bad reputation for releasing buggy games and NV somehow managed to be buggier and more broken than any Bethesda game had been, and what’s worse is it was never even to this day fixed as several major components of the game remain completely broken without fan patches.
I have seen debates of both 3 and 4 over New Vegas. These arguments tend to come almost exclusively from newer fans. Anyone who played 1 and 2 first, especially back in the day, tends to have a much less favourable view of the Bethesda Fallouts. But there are tons of Bethesda-first fans who came into Fallout after first playing Skyrim, typically. The 4 fans either love the base building or tend to think the other games are “too old looking/feeling”. The 3 fans… I don’t even know, that game is pretty terrible I think. But they tend to argue the design of the world in 3 is better to explore than New Vegas.
I haven’t personally heard anyone argue 76 is the best Fallout, but I’m sure someone is out there.
3 was the first one I ever played (after Oblivion tho to your beth point) and it was so radically different from anything I played before that I just fell in love.
New Vegas didn’t capture that same feeling in me, I like it but it just didn’t hit me the same way.
Fallout 4 I enjoyed a ton because of the base building and refinements on scrap usage for modifications and such, with mods like Sim Settlements it can be so damn cool.
The thing with 76 I’d only guess is literally the ability to coop.
Basically the only negative things I can say about NV is that they’re really heavy handed with forcing you to go through the map in certain direction/order. Though it still opens up in the second half of the game.
I mean, I love NV and think it’s by far the best 3D Fallout, but it’s also got a ton of performance and bug issues. Partly due to the engine they were working with and the insane development cycle, but still. The game isn’t without issues. It’s famously unstable and buggy if played without mods. I also think it needs mentioning that a lot of the assets look out of place, because they are. The game had such a short development cycle that a lot of them are just reused FO3 assets.
I love it, but there is a reason so many people recommend something like the Viva New Vegas modlist even for a first playthrough.
Makes you think of what could have been, if they’d done the new Fallouts as tactical/Turn Based RPGs, rather than first person shooters - although the new Wasteland games do a pretty good job of filling that niche.
I’m not saying Metacritic is the end-all be-all, but it does confirm the most commonly held opinion about the popularity of the modern games. You may think that there is a real debate here but that just isn’t the case. 4 and 76 are pretty firmly the less well received of these games.
Idk, The Elder Scrolls’ fandom debates a lot too. There’s still people fighting over whether the Stormcloaks or the Empire were right in Skyrim, or whether Morrowind or Oblivion are the best in the series
I could argue that there are more Fallout games than just 1 and 2, and that we should probably admit that if Fallout 2 gets to sit at the “true Fallout” table, Fallout: New Vegas should probably get a chair too. A bunch of the original Black Isle developers who worked on Fallout 2 helped make it, and it continues the same regional story and factions. But then again, maybe having the Fallout 2 developers is not enough to make something “truly” Fallout. Maybe it is the isometric (actually skewed trimetric) view, classic CRPG style. Although once we open that can of radroaches, we get a whole new pile of questions.
So maybe we can swing the other direction entirely and say there are fewer “true” Fallout games, and that only Fallout 1 really qualifies. That does have some logic behind it, since the original creators, Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson, left during Fallout 2’s development. Their absence changed the whole design philosophy, shifting the tone, with way more pop culture references and absurdist writing, de-focused the tight world design of 1 so we got a ton of fluff dungeons and encounters, and gave us a more scattered writing experience thanks to the team being split up to work on different sections of the game (Tell me San Fran feels even remotely in the same universe as New Reno). Honestly, the jump from 1 to 2 kinda reminds me of the jump from 3 to NV. They feel the same on the surface, but are radically different experiences once you actually play them. But even then, Fallout 2 still uses the same engine and gameplay loop, so you could just as easily argue it stays true to the original formula.
But if that’s the case and we double down on the ‘gameplay matters more than the writing and development teams’ point of view, then Fallout Nevada and Fallout Sonora belong on the list as well right? They are fan-made, sure, but they run on the same engine and play almost exactly like Fallout 1 and 2. So now we are up to four “true Fallout games.” So our definition needs to rules those out to get back to “only 1 and 2”.
So maybe the fan-made games do not count because they are not official releases? But if it being an “official release” is the only rule, then Fallout 76 suddenly joins the “true Fallout” club too, which probably tells us that the bar has to be higher than that.
So if we say that a “true” Fallout game needs a mix of all the things above, like the original devs from the original studio working on the original engine with the original tone and the closest connection to the original story, then we come full circle and land right back at “Fallout 1 is the only true Fallout game.”
No matter how I slice it, I can’t find a definition that only includes Fallout 1 and 2…
You know… thinking about it, I guess the only constant of every single Fallout game since 2 has been that fans of the previous entry look at it and say “this is too radical a departure, this isn’t a true Fallout at all!”
It’s absolutely fun with friends, we put in around that many hours and then haven’t played it much since, but for the $10 we paid. It was well worth it.
Making the matter even more frustrating is the fact that Horses is apparently quite good—or at least, it accomplishes what it sets out to do. The content is decidedly uncomfortable but reviews and reactions on social media are largely positive
Horses is not low-effort, throwaway trash, but rather a game that genuinely seeks to provoke consideration and conversations.
The game being banned for a misunderstood piece of placeholder concept art in a Steam approval preview build, which was both removed, and explained. Then Valve refusing to reconsider it and rejecting all attempts to clarify their objections.
I know. It’s not Valve’s fault the developer fucked up and gave them the wrong build to review. But that has literally nothing to do with this article unless you’re somehow trying to insinuate that Valve influenced other storefronts.
if one of the builds for your game contains CSAM, then I don’t really give a shit what alternative builds you have, I don’t want to play anything made by you. kudos to Valve for not dealing with pedophiles.
What I get from reading about that scene, it is just one of many examples in that game that was supposed to show how animals are abused on farms by replacing them with humans and letting other people doing „normal“ things to them like marking them with a branding iron or, like in that scene, riding on them. How any sane person reads anything different into that than: this is supposed to show animal abuse really blows my mind.
I wouldn’t call EA anywhere close to the worst company in the world.
Serious contenders based on their overall effect on humanity would be Monsanto, RTX, Aramco, UnitedHealth and Nestlé.
It’s from PC Gamer, so I think it’s safe to say they mean worst gaming company in the world. They could have said that though.
Even limited to gaming, EA, Ubisoft, and Activision have always been pretty much tied for it. Now Activision is part of Microsoft, and I think with both Activision and Bethesda and the shit the latter has caused lately, I think we can bump Ubisoft out. And I think when Copilot gaming rolls out, whatever they’re calling that, they’ll be worse than EA was before. The problem with EA isn’t so much what they were before though, it’s what they’ll be under SA leadership.
Gaming by megacorps has never been good for gamers, and it’s going to get worse. And yet people keep supporting them.
It’s an AI assistant in your game that will help you, tell you where to go and whatnot by using Copilot to help by analysing your game.
Doesn’t sound too bad, I mean who cares if they see what you’re playing or how (bad) you’re playing? It’s just weird. Like the generations after mine used GameFAQs, or asked on Reddit, or watched YouTube videos. My generation read Nintendo Power, and shared tips on the playground or at school, whether we read it in a magazine or discovered it on our own. There were 1-900 numbers you could call, but no one I know called them. Maybe the rich kids did? I was forbidden from doing so (by my parents) and I never did. But that was actually another option. Like, Nintendo operated one. I think some of the third-party gaming magazines may have, as well. You could also write in, and maybe they’d publish your letter and a response, but that would take months.
The only way I can see this shit working is like a search engine that do AI summarizing. They can’t trained Copilot to “learn” about the newest game. This shit looks more like marketing bullshit than anything, any AI that can search the internet will do just fine.
I think some of the third-party gaming magazines may have, as well. You could also write in, and maybe they’d publish your letter and a response, but that would take months.
LOL, I had some of these magazines but at the time internet was already a thing, sounds painful to wait months for a response on how to beat X game.
That’s my thought as well, that it will just source IGN and other sites and scrape the data.
Also, people calling EA the worst company in the world seem to forget that EA published the Mass Effect trilogy. I just noticed that yesterday, their copyright is at the bottom but the EA logo isn’t shown when it (the Mass Effect Legendary Trilogy remaster) boots up. Just the Mass Effect-themed Bioware animation.
EA also published the Rockband games, trying to save the rhythm gaming industry from Activision, which tried to kill it after the developer (Harmonix) left. They got Neversoft (of Tony Hawk games fame) to repackage Guitar Hero 2 with more songs and limp along after it, but once Rockband came out and they added vocals and drums, Guitar Hero was basically done… so Activision flooded the market with slop. I’m not saying EA did anything heroic, they just gave the rhythm game developer a platform to publish on. I don’t think Rockband was ever profitable, but they all damn sure tried. Rockband 3 is also one of the reasons you have mods on console at all. It was part of the pilot program for Microsoft’s XNA, which brought user content to Xbox users. Games too, but most sucked. The real kicker was that anybody could put songs in Rockband, and some indie bands converted their entire catalogue. PC game modding had been a thing long before, but console users getting fan-made content in a game was simply not a thing before then. Even today, people make custom songs for the modded Rockband 3 Deluxe (which requires a modded console, adds a bunch of quality of life features) or computer ports like YARG (Yet Another Rhythm Game).
When I was a kid, EA published a paint program, Deluxe Paint, on the Amiga. Not really gaming related, but it was an awesome paint program and did stuff you still don’t see in drawing/paint programs in 2025, paid or free (DPaint was paid; my father bought it on floppy disk in a cardboard sleeve with a manual and everything).
So yeah. Way worse companies out there. But I’m not gonna excuse the shit EA got into. I do think Microsoft is worse, between Copilot stuff, Activision, and Bethesda.
well avellone claims obsidian was so poorly managed even if they got the bonus it wouldnt have helped the devs at all, most likely going directly to the obsidian execs pockets (same execs who denied more time on the game)
je sawyer blames himself for not focusing on playtesting and bug fixing until way way way too late in development
so im not sure why todd would feel guilty about it at all. obsidian still got paid in full and the fans got a great game out of the ordeal (after they fixed the bugs at launch)
Oh yeah I’m aware of that. It’s just that foundational game mechanics are still broken to this day lol. Like the game never really reached a polished state, without mods.
The headline is omitting a vital part of the article, namely the “one ingredient”. You have to read the artivke to finish the title, which can be a definition of clickbait.
For me, it didn’t trigger my clickbait alarm. Yes there’s a hook there but I’m already interested in Kowloon City, Minecraft and 3D design so I was happy to read it.
Maybe if the title had put “: people”, at the end then it would have been completely above board, but it’s still a far cry from something like “The New Minecraft Map That Recreates a A Demolished 90’s Era Enclave Has One Super Important Thing Missing!”, followed by pages of ads.
We’re just used to it by now, but the title is phrased in a way to make you curious what the author meant by “what’s important in 3D level design”. I wouldn’t call this clickbait, but it’s definitely written in a way that intentionally omits the central conclusion. A better article title would say “Its lack of residents show how important this is for 3D level design”.
I read the article. It appears to deliver on the promise of the headline pretty completely. What is promised is a little bit too nuanced and complex to be neatly encapsulated in the headline any other way. The headline also isn’t sensationalized or misrepresentative of the content. And, honestly, the reason I think most people are clicking is for the Kowloon part, not the level design part. Are you just upset because it sounds a little bit like a LinkedIn status in its construction?
I’d orefer a title to summarize the article so that I know whether it’s worth my time investment to actually read it at all. Now, I’m put if by the blayant cliff hanger at the end of the title.
It’s a very good summary of the article. The things the author reconsidered were pretty nuanced, and trying to describe them in a headline without making the headline even longer than it is.
Would you have liked this better?
“This Minecraft map that recreates Kowloon Walled City, one of history’s most notorious slums, made me realize that 3D level design isn’t just about the complexity or the environmental challenge, but about the internal lives of the people who live there and the way that the game implies a greater reality that exists beyond the confines of the camera’s field of view”
“This, it should be stated, was not the objective of Sluda’s build. But it nonetheless made me think about what I deem important in virtual architecture and level design more broadly. My favourite games are always those that give me a complex, natty 3D space to unpick, like Dishonored 2’s Stilton Manor, Hitman’s Sapienza, and Thief: Deadly Shadows’ Shalebridge Cradle. But playing Sluda’s map made me realise these levels are more than just environmentally challenging sequences of rooms and corridors. They say something about the people who lived in those spaces, exuding their virtual history from their grimy walls, spooky attics, and beautifully recreated gelato shops.”
Yeah, but…
Minecraft will never achieve the writer’s design requirement; immersive sim level design philosophy is where he is aiming, where highly environmental detail for storytelling and possibly some competent AI, both hostile and friendly, to support the immersion.
MC is just a block-by-block construction, competent with building form, and it offers some simple decoration, and no more; I can’t see how it is a fair comparison.
No, Minecraft cannot deliver that kind of experience.
Go check out the video of The Golem city in Mankind Divided if you want to know what the writer is seeking, which is also inspired by Kowloon Walled City.
Secondly, the interior details of Kowloon Walled City have always been pretty sparse on the internet, Sluda has to imagine all of them, that is not the objective of the build.
Assuming the content is merely controversial and not objectionable (i.e. exploitative), it seems there may be room for an art-centric game store front.
Ironically, I’m betting it’s nowhere near as exploitative as the monetization practices of virtually every AAA release these days.
People commonly have a choice not to drive a car in the first place.
Though cultural pressures, as well as some specific areas being genuinely hard to reach, pushes many people towards it anyway. But if you have a choice, choose public.
Yeah, North America and US specifically is one of these hard to reach places
Also, 12 minutes drive is a biking distance - if you have any semblance of bike infrastructure, that is. Surprisingly though, even American cities have that sometimes.
My 15 minute car commute would take over an hour with a bicycle, lead me over multiple busy and dangerous country roads, has three mountains with over 20% elevation that I have to pass, and would be incredibly unsafe in the winter even with studded tires.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually do take my bicycle when I’m not in a hurry and the weather is right. But it’s a huge time sink and doesn’t absolve my of my dependency on a car.
The same commute takes 2 hours with public transport btw so that’s even worse
Because there exists only one place in the world and that is called US of A? 🙄
Saudi Arabia is still the biggest oil exporter in the world (as of 2024). If you drive an internal combustion car anywhere, chances are high that you paid the Sheiks at least some money for doing so.
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