Worst Fallout Game? What are your opinions?

To me, five worst: 3,4,76, shelter and BOS.

Bos was the end of the franchise.

3,4,76 are just atrocious post apocalyptic shooters with Fallout skin that have done nothing more than desecrate the franchise.

Shelter is the best of the worst. It's a shitty mobile game, with lootboxes. It's only redemming factor is that's not nearly as bad as 4.

 

So here's a quick sunmsum of my opinions of the 'bad' fallout games.

Fallout 3- Not an awful game by any means. Has some creative and solid ideas, they were just underdeveloped. I like playing this as a survivor simulator. While S.T.A.L.K.E.R is better at that, I find Fallout 3 more... Streamlined.

Fallout Shelter- Honestly, this is okay if you just take it at face value and not think too much about it. It's a fun shitter game.

Fallout 4- I honestly didn't know what to think of this game for years. It's bad. But it's not as bad as people say it is. It's a mess, and it's confused. But otherwise... I don't know... I don't like needless to say.

Fallout 76- awful game. Just an awful awful game.

Fallout taxtics- not a bad game by any means, just one I can't get into.

BrotyerhBro of Steel- LOL

 

I'll do the same.

Fallout 3-beginning of the end. Do think some give it too much credit. Think they tried with it but was definitely a failure as a Fallout game, and I have a bad taste in my mouth whenever I think of it. Is it fun-yes, but only if you switch your brain off.

Fallout 4-Where Tim Cain told us he didn't want us to make a better Plasma gun, this game allowed it in droves. Abandoning any form of realism or sense, while pathetically trying to pretend to be an rpg. Worse than F03? Most definitely.

Fallout 76-the live action trailer tells it all. At least they aren't trying to pretend its an rpg though. So despite it being conceptually worse-as it is not an rpg, at least it's honest.

What wins? They all are the worst at something. F76 is not an rpg, FO4 is perhaps the most dishonest, and F03 is the start of that. Pick your poison, they all kill you.

 

For me its 76. At least shelter is free.

 

Fallout 4.

Never played 76 or BoS.

 

This is why we can't have nice things.


Both BoS and 76 are absolutely terrible, but the former is just an harmless crappy game that is not even canon, while the latter is actively harmful. It's canon to the franchise (and no, closing my eyes and plugging my ears and scream "lalalala" in an attempt to say this game is not canon will not work) and the lore breaks in this game are ridiculous. They either break continuity or put things in the games after it in the timeline in a completely different context.

So yes, 76 is the worst. But personally, i hate Fallout 3 the most and it's the harbinger of what was going to happen in the franchise after it.

 

lol there's too many to choose from. most of the franchise is outright terrible at this point.

this is like asking someone what the worst highlander sequel is. they're all shit.

 

I won't kill you for liking it, I liked it when I first played it. I will take issue with arguing that it's a good game however. Were they trying to make a good game? Were they trying to make a good fallout game? Maybe, but they did not succeed. As I said above, if you switch your brain off, you can fall into the feelings that the game tries to give you (especially in the side content which is the games most loved feature) that of being either a Wasteland Messiah or Devil. That feeling of power is nice, for a while. But it does not make a good game, especially compared to 3 others that carry the same title that we all know and very much love.

 

lol what an abstract self defeating question.

i can tell you why fallout 3 is bad tho.

the story is atrocious. star war prequel tier. the characters are all either entirely forgettable or painfully one note. the game makes no sense 100% of the time no matter what you're doing or where you are on the map. also the game offers no player freedom or choice and your characters backstory is pretty locked in. it has almost nothing to add to series lore. the worldbuilding is beyond nonsense and even goes so far as to contradict the story itself.

^that right there takes away everything you find in a good rpg.

lucky for fallout 3 its not even trying to be an rpg. you spend 90% of the game shooting things in tunnels.

so how's the shooting then? well enemy ai seems to be set to "kamikazi" because they have no sense of danger at all. they don't react to being shot. not even shotgun blasts at point range. even catacombs 3d, the literal first fps had enemies react to being shot. so fallout 3 fails to meet the bar set by a game made in 1991. that's the caliber of badness we're talking about here. and all that is ignoring how bad it is as a sequel.

and people like this game? lol okay sometimes people just have bad taste. that's fine. we've all got our guilty pleasures. but don't try to tell me its a good game. that would be an uphill battle because, to put it simply fallout 3 is objectively bad.

 

Not really into that side of the ranking.

BOS might be worse, but it was a spin-off that didn't seem that much important for its makers.

Same for Shelter.

Don'T care which is worse between fo3-fo4-fo76. fo3 started the trend and deserve the most blame.

 

I don't really think it's an abstract self-defeating question, I was gonna say it was off-topic and that I would PM the answer, but I'll give a different opinion as to why I don't think Fallout 3 is a good game. It's that it fails in trying to marry up it's themes and narratives with the mechanics.

Fallout 3 takes place in a post apoc wasteland which is not recovering and will die out (yes, I know it's stupid that it's 200 years after bombs fell but that isn't the main point.) All along the way, you meet people who have problems that need solving that, if not solved, may or may not end the lives of all people in towns and even the whole world as presented. That's all fine , desperate people, you want to solve the problems or kill them all (I know there are many examples of where this does not even work either but again I'm skipping major problems here).

Let's talk about the mechanics of how you do that. 1. Combat, the way that you deal with threats in the Wasteland-the major problem of the game-presents no challenge. Apart from Old Olney and some dlc enemies, you tear through enemies so easily that it's laughable. While that gives you the power fantasy feeling, it detracts from the horrible world you are supposed to be in, cause quite frankly, if you can do it, why can't everyone else? Compared to Fallout 1 and 2, where quite a few of the random encounters will spell the death of you, making fast travel a much more tense experience (especially on a first playthrough), these mechanics reinforce the themes of the world and the game far better.

Take a second mechanical point, talking and interacting with characters. If you're gonna have a world where a theme is to decide the fate of the people's you meet, then those people have to be worth saving and helping, or hateful enough to kill. Yes this is a departure from grey morality of the series (which is bad in itself) but they didn't even make the replacement of black and white work either. Nobody you meet is likeable (I didn't even like Moira as some do) which made helping them a real drag. Who cares what Treeminder Birch wants or what his wife (can't even remember the name) wants for Oasis? I'm struggling to remember their personalities apart from what they offer the player in terms of solutions. But, do I hate them and want to kill them cause evil? Not really either. Most of the characters in the game fall under this category, either because of a lack of personality or an absurdity of situation. Take Cantebury Commons. Finding that comic book and letting the antagonizer realise her mistakes might have been a good moment, had you not seen her command (like 3) ants against robots in a town for.... reasons a few minutes earlier, in a supposedly desperate world that you're supposed to take seriously. Compare that to NV, where any faction, major or minor, can garner sympathy or hatred or a varying emotion inbetween (because of morally grey design) for any style of character you want to play.

I could go on and on, but tldr, the game wants you to feel a certain way and to treat the world in a certain way, but cannot get that feeling across if you actually stop and consider what you are actually doing. That makes a bad game. Hope that clears it up.

 

>characters in fallout 3 being desperate
did we even play the same game?

no one cares about anything in fallout 3. megaton's water purifier is on the verge of collapse and no one in megaton is even vaguely concerned about it. Harnkess, basically a runaway slave, doesn't care at all that his captors have tracked him to rivet city. the game keeps telling us how important purified water is but everyone's fine without it and there are even characters more concerned with finding soda than water.

the game isn't bleak its environment is. which is fine example of how no two things in fallout 3 even remotely complement each other ever. even so far down to setting, tone, and story. they all contradict one another.

 

When I said I could go on and on, yes, all of that is true.

I was trying to take the game on what it wants to tell us. It wants us to think that the purified water is important, it wants us to believe that these are life and death situations. Even with taking that as true, the game still fails. If you want to be harsher ( and all of us on this forum can and will be) it fails harder.

 

Fallout 3

 

thing is i can deal with a gameplay being kinda shitty if the game actually offers other things with the experience.

prime example is Planescape: Torment. that's a game that somehow manages to be one of the greatest games of all time despite being kind of a shit as a videogame.

 

For me, if the gameplay is good, then it's already mostly there.
For RPGs however, the writing is tired in with gameplay. Player choice is both about how it's written, but also about how the player approaches said choice in game.

Let's compare Fallout 3 with Fallout 1.
In the first game, the BoS are am option faction that you can join... Or at least visit. You meet them through a side quest which is basically a suicide mission. Doing that side quest makes the end game a little bit easier. The player chooses to do a quest that helps advance their version of the story.

Compare this with the BoS in Fallout 3. You have no option but to join them. Joining them makes the end game easier meaning that no natter what, every playthrough will end the same. The only real choice you get with the BoS in Fallout 3 is in a DLC, and even then, blowing up the BoS makes zero sense in context to the story. There is no player choice here, and the only choice you're given is tact on at the end and actively goes against what your character has been doing for the last 60 hours.