Are there any actual downsides to being a Ghoul?

Ghouls are pretty much walking corpses/burning victims.

I would say about the only unambiguous advantages to being a ghoul are the radiation thing and being borderline immortal.

Someone here once said that Ghouls are like Fallout's elves but without the whole "Elves are beautiful and perfect magical creatures" thing.
 
I think people underestimate how... disgusting being a ghoul would be. Being a walking corpse would not be pleasant. You would stink, you'd probably be in a lot of pain, I know they still piss and shit but the process would probably be more difficult and somehow even more repugnant.

None of this is conveyed terribly well. But the reality of ghoulification is disgusting from an aesthetic dimension alone. Thatd be a big downside I think.
 
Khromko said:
They're immortal and can even heal from radiation, they don't need food or water(FO4's fridge kid) or possibly very little of it, they can run and jump and aren't hindered from joint pain.
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What about those ghouls in the Gecko reactor? They seemed to be getting healed by the radiaton, or at least get some sort of benefit from it. I recall a few ghoul npcs there talking about how they liked the radiation there, that it felt nice.. Additionally, in combat, ghouls seem to be able to run pretty damn fast, just recruit Lenny and you'll see. :P
 
Eshanas said:
Being a walking corpse, losing your cohesive skin, hair, the glow of the eyes, or seeing bones and muscles forever and ever isn't fun for mental health, to begin with. Or the smell, apparently.

A 'skin condition' is some discoloring, or psosaris, or vitiligo. What a ghoul is stuck with is far beyond a 'condition', even if it's technically one.
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What? there's plenty of skin conditions that involve things worse than discoloring. Harlequin Ichthyosis, for example.
 
Discoloring?

FO01_NPC_Set_N.png
 
RadioactiveGirlfriend said:
What? there's plenty of skin conditions that involve things worse than discoloring. Harlequin Ichthyosis, for example.
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I mean at that point we can call that an affliction, since it's a danger to living unaided. It's not medical terminology, but very few harlequins make it past their first month, after all.
 
RadioactiveGirlfriend said:
What about those ghouls in the Gecko reactor? They seemed to be getting healed by the radiaton, or at least get some sort of benefit from it. I recall a few ghoul npcs there talking about how they liked the radiation there, that it felt nice.. Additionally, in combat, ghouls seem to be able to run pretty damn fast, just recruit Lenny and you'll see. :P
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The radiation will make them go feral eventually though?
 
I really wish that ghouls looked more like Set in subsequent instalments. Not only does he look truly mangled and horrific, he also looks fucking cool. I like that he's truly skeletal -- you can see his fucking shoulder bones -- and it looks like the bolted-on combat gear isn't just for looks and armor; it's also literally holding him together.
 
Clown_Shoe_Prostitute said:
I really wish that ghouls looked more like Set in subsequent instalments. Not only does he look truly mangled and horrific, he also looks fucking cool. I like that he's truly skeletal -- you can see his fucking shoulder bones -- and it looks like the bolted-on combat gear isn't just for looks and armor; it's also literally holding him together.
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It's the face rig. They wouldn't put in the effort to make ghoul faces work for all ghoul NPCs; they did do a closer likeness with the 'so called' feral ghouls... but those ghouls are non-interactive/animal creatures, and do not use the human head & body skeleton that the NPCs do.
 
Gizmojunk said:
It's the face rig. They wouldn't put in the effort to make ghoul faces work for all ghoul NPCs; they did do a closer likeness with the 'so called' feral ghouls... but those ghouls are non-interactive/animal creatures, and do not use the human head & body skeleton that the NPCs do.
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They still have jaw bones is the thing -- and in FO4 they have brow and eyeball bones iirc, so they kinda got no excuse. With the art budgets modern games have they really don't have any excuse to keep going with the weird Oblivion-style race system for Ghouls, especially when Super Mutants get their own body type and all.
 
FreedomStalker said:
The radiation will make them go feral eventually though?
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AFAIK Radiation is not what is making normal Ghouls go feral. Some ghouls seem to go feral in a short span of time, others take centuries, if ever. Camp Searchlight Ghouls got hit by a big, fast pulse of radiation and went feral at once, but other ghouls seem to take years, decades, or more.

Feralization seems more like a mental illness, or a mutation inside the mutation.
 
Slaughter Manslaught said:
AFAIK Radiation is not what is making normal Ghouls go feral. Some ghouls seem to go feral in a short span of time, others take centuries, if ever. Camp Searchlight Ghouls got hit by a big, fast pulse of radiation and went feral at once, but other ghouls seem to take years, decades, or more.

Feralization seems more like a mental illness, or a mutation inside the mutation.
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This is a good way of putting it. Some people can handle the trauma of becoming a rotting, shambling corpse that exists in constant pain, while others are driven to madness by the condition.

Also, do people in this thread realize that the question in the title is more of a rhetorical question? OP is simply reflecting on how Bethesda has turned ghoulism into magical immortal beings that seem to do perfectly fine with the exception that they’re a little uglier than they were before the rads.
 
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