Fallout comparisons are stupid because I just started playing Fallout 3 for the first time last night and we as a fandom do not appreciate how each game did their own unique thing with the ambiance and environment.
Fallout 4 is a fish out of water damn near odyssey action movie where most of the main plot can be summarized by Epic the Musical. The mechanics are action based and fun to utilize, and the overall narrative of the story works better when you’ve already befriended most of the companions because almost all of the companion storylines are about not giving up on them or staying true to being who they are: good people. Which works narratively when you are given the choice to give up your humanity for your son, or give up your son for humanity.
Fallout New Vegas is a goofy ass western where your main motivation is to get back at a guy for shooting you in the head, but then somewhere along the way you get wrapped up in a surprisingly insightful commentary on the two party political system where there’s obviously a cartoonishly evil guy and you’d think picking the lesser of two evils would help, but even when the lesser of two evils means well AT BEST, they still fail the lower class everyday people living in the Mojave and the soldiers they send to die for them, all to serve what is at best the obliviousness of the bosses in Shady Sands and at worst the GREED of the bosses in Shady Sands
I haven’t gotten through much of Fallout 3 but I can already tell that this is a HORROR MOVIE. Your character starts off born and raised in a safe environment and you are forced out of it suddenly and without real warning. When you leave the vault everything around you looks dead, and the only radio to comfort you is Enclave (fascist) propaganda that is specifically written to make you feel unsafe by labeling various groups as monsters. The environmental design is so good that you immediately understand where you need to go because you’re pointed in that direction by a path and some signs. But when you’re pointed away from the safety of that rundown city with a bomb in the center of it, the game directs you to a tunnel with giant rats, like 10 ghouls, and you’re very likely to run out of ammo or weapons entirely. And when you run to the end of the tunnel thinking you’re safe because you’re in a new area, you see the SHADOW of a super mutant up ahead. That’s fucking HORROR GAME design (although the level scaling was kind of off because how is someone at level 2 supposed to take on that much?).
I think the fallout fandom focusses way too much on glazing the games we played as kids and going “this is what the series as a whole is SUPPOSED to look like” when just 3 games all did something drastically different and unique. Each game has their own flaws. I have yet to kill anyone with VATS in fallout 3 without launching them into space. So much of New Vegas’ environment is “this is a desert so there’s nothing here and when there is something here there’s a 50/50 chance it’s just gonna be a boarded up building that you can’t access.” Fallout 4’s main story is boring if you don’t take the companions into context, and they arguably should’ve leaned more into making Nate and Nora their own characters than this weird middle ground where they aren’t quite you and they aren’t quite them. But, so far, I’d say each game has something they EXCEL at. Fallout 3 has amazing environmental design. New Vegas has brilliant storytelling and character writing. 4’s gameplay is the best I’ve seen in the whole series and is one of the most REWARDING to play.
We as a fandom need to focus more on actually enjoying the series we love so much, because there’s a lot to enjoy.