1. Is this an official thread?
"Official" is a word people stick in the title of a hype thread, hoping to get stickied, and thus remove the ability for others to post threads discussing more interesting issues surrounding the particular game in question. As such the world "official" in a non-stickied thread is meaningless. Until a mod makes a thread stickied, there's no such thing as "official".
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2. Why should this thread be used instead of a hype thread?
Hype threads are idiotic because they begin with massive praise and worship of a game. This is done in order to garner readership. Sadly, gaming journalism does this as well. We see endless *praise* of games that have yet to earn that praise. When the actual game is released, the results can vary drastically from what was promised. For example, Hour of Victory received positive previews, yet was a mediocre game.
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3. Why the negativity?
Let's avoid confusing negativity and honesty - there are multiple, nuanced sides to every issue. Often System Wars becomes so caught up in insignificant (and frankly stupid) worries such as "will the PS3 or 360 version have the best graphics" (who cares, most people are going to buy it for whatever system they have), that it completely misses the bigger picture.
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With these things in mind, let's address the real debate here:
Fallout 3 - A Gaming Audience Divided
It's the year 2020, you're a huge fan of (Halo, MGS, Pokemon, etc), and the last game in main series was released a decade ago. The studio that makes your favorite game has long since gone under, and the designers have retired or moved on to careers in other fields. Checking the gaming news, you see a huge announcement - they're making another (Halo, MGS, Pokemon, etc)!
But wait, it's being made by the studio that made (Killzone, Splinter Cell, Digimon, etc)... wtf? The press is going wild, even before footage of the real game is shown, positive previews begin pouring out - journalists, the people you turn to for objective information on gaming, have seemingly turned into rabid fanboys overnight, putting out news stories that could be mistaken for press releases or MySpace blogs.
You turn to the videos, and the lone previews from old fans of the series, hoping for the best. As you read, you see the worst coming to pass - they're not making a bad game, of course, but it looks the things that made (Halo, MGS, Pokemon, etc) special to you are being replaced with things from (Killzone, Splinter Cell, Digimon, etc) and the vision and interpretation of the universe is radically different from the one of your beloved old studio.
Everywhere around you, however, masses of new gamers, unfamiliar with your favorite "old game" are seething - any criticism you make is ignored, and the mantra "it doesn't matter, as long as it's fun" is chanted to drown out cries for respect for the old series, and the need to hold games to a higher standard.
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This is the story of what has happened to Fallout. The year is 2008, the new studio is Bethesda, and the crime is the bastardization of Fallout.
Bethesda's not a bad studio, they're not bad people, they don't intend to make Fallout 3 into a bad game - and yet, in all of their actions, they are creating a game which only vaguely resembles Fallout 1 and 2 - and that fails to capture the elements that made Fallout special.
Many would argue that a game like Fallout 2 could not be created in the modern era of censorship - Fallout was a game series that contained violence, sex, prostitution, infanticide, cannibalism, and genocide. Fallout is a game series that deals starkly with the grim realities of a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Yet this is what we see in Fallout 3:
Prior to Fallout the world went to war over the diminishing resources, petrol and uranium, "hell bent on controlling the last remaining resources on Earth". That war reduced most of the planet to rubble, as seen in Fallout and Fallout 2. The government went out of their way, spending billions to built vaults under the Earth in order to protect the people from the nuclear war. They also built Power Armor in order to enchance combat ability. Radiation is still heavily felt in both games (i.e. The Glow). Ghouls are humans who have been severely disfigured due to radiaton. Not all super mutants were simpletons. So why is it that in Fallout 3 we have:
- A town built in the crater of an unexploded nuke? A) How could an unexploded nuke have a crater? B) The population fears nuclear weapons, so why build a town around it?
- Exploding nuclear cars. A) If the world went to war over sources of nuclear power, why are nuclear cars in such plentiful supply? B) Why hasn't anyone in the entire wasteland used this system as a means to develop? C) Why do they generate a mushroom cloud? D) Why doesn't the explosion destroy the car? E) Why does the radiation disappear almost immediately? F) The cars weren't even ****ing nuclear in the originals. They were all destroyed beyond comprehension.
- A ****ing phone booth that protects from a nuclear explosion. What. The. ****. If they could build such a thing, what was the purpose of the vaults?!
- It takes 5 NUKES (!) to kill a Behemoth. So why does it use a car door as a shield?
- Why can ghouls leap at tremendous speed when they were falling apart in the originals? How can they heal eachother with radiation? How can they zap the player with radiation attacks?
- Why doesn't intelligence alter my dialogue choices?
- Again, nuclear power was a thing to be feared in the originals. So what purpose does the Fatman serve?
- Power Armor negatively impacts the player's abilities.
RobbieH1234
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So what is the problem?
Fallout had a major characteristic - your choices mattered, and the world did not bend to them. You could create a stupid character (one incapable of speaking any languages, due to low intelligence) and they had to grunt and drool their way through the game. You could create a sharpshooter too weak to carry much more than a gun or two and some ammo. You could create a diplomat, and talk your way through the entire game, never firing a single shot or killing a single enemy.
Ultimately it was a game where you could do anything.
When Bethesda went to create Fallout 3, rather than start with the idea of it being an RPG of survival, it became an RPG of combat - a journey in which your character takes defined paths, the enemies scale, a free world is replaced with a pseudo-MMO world of mandatory storyline quests (which may as well say "Story Advancing Quests #27" in the description) and logic / world integrity take a backseat to dumb jokes, combat, and scenarios selected for the "we did a cool thing" factor.
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Fallout 3 wasn't meant to be created as a bad game. And yet, buying Fallout 3 is an act of evil - praising Fallout 3, saying "as long as it's fun" or "we'll wait and see" is evil. It's evil because, rather than choosing to side with good, choosing to set the bar high and demand integrity, we allow Bethesda to put another game in the Vault Dweller's clothing. Before hyping that game, before praising that - ask yourself - would I want my favorite game to be remade by a studio that I hate a decade from now? Do I support the bastardization of clas sic games?
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