Armor comparisons

fallout 1 created an icon th t-51
fallout 2 created another with the badass insect-like APA
and NV yet another with the impossibly cool NCR Black Ranger uniform

fallout 3- ripped off the t-51 and called it t-45
fallout 4 ripped off the t-45 and called it t-60
the less we say about APA MKII and Hellfire armour the better
poor excuses for newly designed fallout armor to say the least.
the only design i felt fallout 3 got right was the leather armor.
power armour hasn't looked quite right since fallout 2 imo. so overall i have to fo with fallout 1/2

 

Fallout 4 looks like garbage apart from maybe the leather jacket (lets be honest, you can't fuck up a leather jacket...).

Fallout 3/NV has some nice design, Metal armour has more coverage, and I like how combat armour is less bulky (no hueg pauldrons).

Fallout 1-2 are simply the best though.

 

Fallout 3 really doesn't win in any armor that exists in all the games for me. I guess I liked the Antagonizer Armor but, I still think it is ridiculous in a way.
The Leather Jacket from the classics are the best because they are a total throwback at the Mad Max leather jacket, and they nailed it:

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Combat Armor I have to go with the original games. Even in game you see someone wearing it and you go like "Better not mess up with this guy" unless you're quite leveled and wearing something as good as combat armor too, but in the more modern games the characters wearing them just look stupid for some reason. Fallout 4 doesn't even look like any combat armor model I ever seen at all (old, modern, 50's sci-fi that Fallout 4 was supposed to be so inspired about, etc).

Fallout 4 has definitly cool Power Armors and they look cool, but like R.Graves mentioned they are just ripoffs of the older models and named differently. But they still look cool. Power Armor also looks cool in a different way in the classics too, but in FO3 they look horrible.

I voted for the classic 1/2 but I would have also voted for PA for 4.

 

Voted for classics. New Vegas had some nice designs but the engine and time constraints can only do so much.

Fallout 4 no, both to power armour and other types. They look ridiculous and when it moves you can see how badly designed it is. Some places look like stretched rubber.

 

I voted for the classics. But I preferred the Metal Armor and Power Armor from Fallout 4.

 

man, the classics were just better for me. The close-ups don't do them justice, but they were.

 

Not having seen the armors in this detail from Fallout 4 before, I gotta at least give them credit for being very improved from Fallout 3.
Especially PAs and vault jumpsuit. Though it may just be how amazingly bad the models from 3 look.

 

And now I have a hard choice here. Fallout 4 is a bad Fallout game, but I really like it's aesthetics. F3/NV looks bland when compared to the other Fallouts (atleast the examples above). So I will go case to case:
Vault jumpsuit: F4
Leather Jacket: F1/2
Leather Armor: F4
Metal Armor: F4
Combat Armor: F1/F2 hands down.
T-51b: F4, but only slightly over the original. If the pauldrons were more upwards it would be just perfect.
APA/X-01: Tie, I just love that armor in every variant, however the NV version is far too skinny to my taste.

My vote goes for the F1/F2, but only because it laid fundation on the whole series, and their designs were original not rehased from earlier titles.

BTW I find T-45d design wise a very fine addition, but T-60... Well it's existence is pointless and even offensive.

And Desert Ranger armor is the most badass thing You could wear.

 

I sometime wonder if that red eyed ranger armor was inspired by this one....

 

just take the douchey enclave bug helmet with built in oakleys out of the lore entirely. the pixelated model looks okay, the face on the cover and the talking heads always looked like leftover kitsch from the 90s at the time and out of place in fallout itself. a lot of art added in fallout 2 was garbage.

 

i'll likely never agree lol, but it's always gonna be highly subjective. again, tho never gonna feel that way cos some things just rub you the wrong way. and it really did then in the 90s when douchebags in oakleys were a thing, a sleazy unctuous annoying thing. maybe they're still a thing--could see especially in contracted private military douche culture, which wouldn't be entirely un-enclave'y. they were intended as assholes, albeit less privatised and more the consolidation of everytihing under the crony capitalists and oligarchs who effectively become the government, shifting to ideals of uniform national identity unity that would quickly take precedence over distinct marketing of brands. it surprises you to think they'd still be catering in any way to what the grunts felt made them look badass--and they were conscripts not people who chose their line of work with youtube videos of yeah them in their oakleys shooting brown people listening to mastadon on their ipod. things fell very fast though iirc in the fallout timeline so it would make sense for the enclave to inherit designs from contractors that still had a dept devoted to making their designs macho, "sexy", and glossy magazine worthy.

but yeah the gas mask above you have looks very serious and utilitarian, like more purpose-built type of ski goggles that don't go too over the edge. it maintains what fallout is to me, imo. i cant really compare the eyes at all, or the segmented lower face of bughelm (from my perspective.) the sample from the animu before it looks v stylised and with merit in its own right for the sake of that. the bug helmet well, looks like a bug, wearing oakleys, the face sectioned off like a mussle but the space its centring on and taking up space and shape almost like its to mimic a hymenopteran insect. ugh. again i'm not young, it looks like how i rememeber shopping for kids who liked bionicle and how all that stuff looked like to me, like some design from somebody's portfolio made it into fallout 2 when it otherwise would not have, but good in its own right (outside of fallout aesthetics, but sadly not its budget and timeframe) to compensate for the fact that again i think at least half of the non-recycled art that made it into fallout 2 was just bad and begged for revision.

and yeah it just being a BUG helmet. and they aren't aliens. well maybe the final boss involves dna from some crash site in addition to whatev piles of fev gene manipulation or idek the lore nvm. and you can loot and wear them--despite no genetic manipulation to place my eyes that far apart like a non-apex predator animal. cars were also focused on having that alien look in the 90s too, sleek swooshy, cars had headlights to look like spaceships or sucked-on candies (and suitably looked awful when they showed wear, no wabi sabi, no "apocalypse awareness"). now angles are involved more but everything still looks like shit. not really topical beyond where our dystopia fork is bleeding into and how interesting our world is.

what i remember in fallout are aesthetics that as far as consumer-geared designs went, they didn't go far beyond jet age. and (urban) architecture otoh looked like the earlier art deco aesthetics decades before lasted forever with maybe multiple revivals (and would maybe incidentally kindof place your second helmet example somewhere fallout'y--NCR ranger idk given the eyes and i don't like picking apart obsidian on how much money/time they had to spend on their art). certain noir comic book styles use a lot of this it seems, like watchmen and batman. brutalism was never really in the game at least as it emerged in the 60s-70s at all, but its common utilitarian ideal of potentially finding cheaper aesthetics in exposed materials and such, and it was around the timeframe that brought us weathered-looking retrofuturism in the first place--much of the gadgetry in fallout had that cumbersome exposed materials look to it with old tech bulging out: half ruggedised, half with mere cages to protect old tech still in use in a dystopia really only still using because they cared even less about energy efficiency and handling waste for even longer than us. they never cared about higher resolution displays because media and art was kept in its place or whatever in a socially conservative world that kept sane through ideals of wholesomeness, unwavering protestant work ethic with an entranced smile, facile doe-eyed bromides recycled amongst amongst nuclear family members common in post-war thinking held through the endless cold war of fallout for forever--a century. i suppose the world of fallout is merely different and maybe we're an accelerated dystopia more obsessed with fossil fuels for cheap energy and will actually meet the precipice of our horrible timeline sooner given global warming--rather than the more nuclear obsessed world of fallout, where overflow of waste, the weapons race, immense genetic testing of fauna not just flora was what left behind the scarred landscape. we'll just have the remnants of proxy wars, before famine takes everyone and the sun's left to bleach everything.

(i feel like i took my concerta twice this morning)

 

You can´t beat this.

 

yeah exactly taste is taste. again seems to heavily polarise you if a given time was when you were still growing up. my dad hates brutalist architecture with a passion but if he sees a car from when he wouldn't have even been old enough to drive, he uncannily recalls the exact year and everything. i love brutalist architecture enough i wasted some of my studies on it--easy when the overflow campuses to contain baby boomers like him and made him gag still had it everywhere and they'v only begun smashing it in the past decade.

more shit tho: where i will give nv som credit for art tho, fuck armour entirely (maybe they even said this at some point), costume design was quite good and had a very deliberate look to it, in keeping with how the game accomplished having a lot more character than anything bethesda. still if they were given free rein on fo4 assets they could take some of what bethesda had so much money to put into somewhere a lot more interesting than fo4--just as they did with fo3. (not that it will ever happen--bethesda would have to own obsidian the way they'v metastasised and no one there wants to work under how controlling they are again, nvm being ripped off. will never surprise me a trump is involved in that company. how bethesda hasn't become an alt-right gamergate darling esp with their policy of choking the media, is beyond me)

the duster, the helmet, not the mask. but again, i don't think obsidian's art needs to be scrutinised in the same way. it worked, with less; whereas bethesda failed while having more resources.

 

The originals, hands down.

What Beth folks do not understand is that the future of Fallout was an amalgamation of different time periods. If anything, it was what people from the 50s thought their future would be like with a super heavy dash of 80s nostalgia.

The leather jacket, as someone else already mentioned, was a nod to Mad Max. You can see more late 70s-late 80s feel by looking at the buildings with the Mohawk heads.

The Combat Armor was specifically designed with a dystopian future look that was very popular in 80s media. Look at the military in any 80s future movie like Robocop or Escape from LA. This is why it just doesn't look right in its later incarnations. Same with the metal armor.

In F2, you could run into bi-pedal combat mechs that were straight out of 80s sci-fi movies. The vaults were less 60s nostalgia and more, 'A Boy And His Dog'.