I would agree that its very unfair [very unfair :rolleyes:] to compare FO3 against FO1 ~but not for the reasons you might think.

I do not believe atmosphere has anything to do with technology (other than how its used). There are many games that share an engine, but its what they did with it that defines the atmosphere.

Books can be considered a technology too, an ancient one... Books still routinely outclass film & television ~and games, with better atmosphere. :shrug:
(and even then... anyone can write a novel, but not anyone can write one that other's want to read ~despite having access to the same technology).

**edit:
As an experiment... one could imagine describing a play through of both Fallouts' to a friend (over the phone). Which do you think would be more interesting to hear?
****Edit #2: Before you start... lets agree that saying "I missed, I missed again, I'm waiting for my turn dude... I missed" is condensed into an after action summary in both Fallout 1 & 3

Unfortunately, what it boils down to is, like a lot of Bioware's fans, Fallout fans are (generally) an unpleasable fanbase.

They bash on Fallout 3 (though admittedly I can relate, I'm not in any shape or form, a fan of Emil Pagliarulo's writing) for not being like how Black Isle imagined Fallout, when they conveniently forget the fact that Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel had just as many, if not more lore goofs.

If you will, think of Fallout as something akin to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotech (or better yet, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbAM_Po00Bk&feature=channel): multiple fictional universes crammed together into one. It's not always pretty, but it's still entertaining.

@Thread Starter

Figure it out your self, do research like all of us who actually are interested in buying the game and also are Fallout 1 2 and 3 fans.

By the "special areas" I mean the places of interest. Tenpenny Tower was atmospherically AWESOME until you entered it. It was this enigmatic structure on the horizon that must be interesting and important! No spoilers of course, but it felt empty and underdeveloped. I don't think this was because it was first person. I think back to say Morrowind and they pulled off static places and made the rooms and buildings interesting even with limited items and things,, but in this case it just didn't work. Prefab and boring. The variation with regard to the quests around it was really interesting and cool, but again no matter the outcome it felt isolated and static. No matter what happened there, the rest of the world did not respond when it should have. Additionally, it wasn't interesting enough on its own to warrant my attention after everything to be done was done. It was so linear and boring, the feel was just stale. In such a small world, where everybody and everything is so important, everything was so isolated and unconnected. Maybe that is a way to explain part of it, that the world doesn't react as it should given the circumstances and the individual places could sometimes feel way out of place in the rest of the world. Like all of the electronics prefab boxes and things, the blinking lights, those took away from the believability of the rooms. Totally little things, yeah, but it added up. Hah sorry for this being a rant again.


I'm not sure about that, I'll mention the Oblivion/Morrowind comparison again. To me the morrowind style did a lot more than oblivion and with less. I think its more about tasteful implementation than limitation.

I have to disagree with this bit.... (its tough, but I still have to). :laugh:

I would say that this situation is not unlike a foreign traveler asking for a Waldorf Salad of a deaf Italian chef... He'd think the guy was unpleasable too.
*** Actually come to think of it (since its Hitchhikers day ), there is a better example. That being Aurthur's argument with the drink machine, and the machine's total inability to comprehend that he just wants crushed leaves in hot water.

Lol sorry for asking other fallout fans about their thoughts on an exciting new game, I guess I'll just begrudgingly google around and try to separate the marketing from the substance and feel miserable all the while.

FO3, just because there are more details to convey. In Fallout, everyone looks the same, and uses the same stilted animations. Hell, depending on the armor your character is wearing, he may be indistinguishable from the people he's fighting. In FO3 you can describe each character involved in the encounter in detail, down to the clothes characters are wearing and the expressions on their faces. In Fallout, everyone died the same way. Either they collapsed and a pool of blood formed under their head, or if you got really clobbered, there were the five or six overkill animations. In FO3, I once blew some raiders head off and then it rolled down a hill and kept rolling for what had to be 20-30 feet. That's better than anything you'll get on Fallout.

But again, it's largely a technology thing.

No one looks the same in Fallout ~there is not enough detail to tell what they look like. Everyone in the game is represented by archetype.
(except for the principles, and they all have unique faces).
*A bum is a bum... You tell someone you just saw a bum, they know [enough of] what he looked like.

Do you know how many people post here that they wish FO3 could match FO1's death animations... That actually IS a technology thing, because they can't do it in 3D without individual key-frames, and being that close, it would turn out worse that Fallout 1 because of the repetition.

**IMO... There is nothing in FO3 that comes close to the deaths in FO1 :shrug:
I just this week tried a PC with Bloody Mess, and all that happens is you get a model swap for a few generic meat chunks (and everyone has the same chunks).

****As for technology though... FO3 lets creatures fall apart in five places. There is a game that shipped the same year as FO2 (1998 and also published by Interplay), that allows full Third Person 3D melee combat with full dismemberment of joints, Lose the forearm, lose the calf, lose the head, and had gore effects on damaged limbs. Now what was special is that this game allowed the weapon to be swung in full 360^o degree player controlled direction, and calculated how hard the weapon impacted the target to derive damage.

Combat in this game blows Oblivion away, and Oblivion's melee outclasses FO3's

Books are heavily reliant on the reader's imagination. How good the book is, is often determined by the writer's style and ability to describe emotion, atmosphere, whatever. The easier it is for the reader to imagine X and empathise with character X - the better job the writer did. That's why I said the OP isn't taking into consideration what he personally applied to the original Fallout, and now remembers as the game delivering an experience. He added a lot to his own experience because it was only a couple steps from being a book - as a game. The technology was limited.

Because Fallout 3 delivered such a complete atmosphere using audio and visual technology the demands on the player were less, but the expectations were higher because there's no immediate, or early demand for him to imagine anything beyond what's presented on screen. So certain areas can fall short of expectation, and the player is now conditioned to be lazy about compensating for it, I guess. I agree with The Revenginator.


I can't disagree because for me Tenpenny is certainly among the worst locations of Fallout 3. The entire place is disjointed and is populated by non-characters, all wrapped in a bow for a pretty weak quest. But while I agree Tenpenny was bad, your OP was about NV capturing the atmosphere of Fallout, where Fallout 3 failed to do so. In order for you to give a good example of Fallout working where Fallout 3 failed, you have to at least cite a really good example of Fallout's atmosphere as delivered in the original title. I don't think you've done that yet. All you've essentially done is criticise Fallout 3. :blush:

Edit:
Exactly. You imagined characters in the first game based on how they were written, not how they were presented visually. Your bum would look different to the one I imagine, which makes your experience completely different. That character could be just one reason why you might like that atmosphere/area so much, if he wasn't there it wouldn't be as good for you, for me he might have been a well-written character but I didn't apply the same quirks to his appearance that you did.

<<>>

Not to complain, but you're breaking the rules of your own experiment. We're supposed to be describing what's on the screen, not what we imagine what's represented by what's on the screen. According to the actual images on the screen, everyone in Fallout looks alike. If you were describing to a third party exactly what was happening during your game, you would be describing the actions of a bunch of blank-faced clones. You can use your imagination to compensate for the technical limitations, but we're not discussing who has the better imagination.

Fallout was as it was deliberately. They wanted the best PC implementation of GURPS that they could make.
A few years before it they released a full first person dungeon crawler with arguably equal or better combat and spell casting than Oblivion (or for sake of age, say Arena). Mid-90's tech was not as limited as most seem to believe.
_________________

Books are not relying on the reader's imagination to provide an experience, they rely on the writers understanding of how to get you to imagine ~what to get you to imagine, and how to pull the right strings to evoke an emotion... This is artifact of skill, not technology.

What you say about putting into it is totally true, (and almost certainly on purpose too); and there is nothing wrong with that. I would say that the reverse is worse. When you add absolutely everything, depict it down to the finest detail... there is no room left to imagine at all, and the finite limit of what you have ~is limited. :shrug:

This is true, but I'm missing your point.
*What you have said is truth, but its self evident truth... So what am I missing?

Are we? I said describe a play through, not describe a game sprite.
I don't take it as a complaint, but if you are scrutinizing a 70x 29 pixel game sprite, instead of the events of the game, then you are missing the point. (and would be boring your friend)

**Problem is that scrutinizing FO3's (admittedly very good) models, should not be the point of the game should it? (nor should it be with FO1), but this is the common theme... Graphics make the game.
Graphics don't make the game.

You're missing the point of the thread, maybe?

We got to mentioning books and imagination because Fallout was presented like an electronic book, relying more on words than visuals, and despite the technology being adequate at the time for presenting a world - for that world to be complete it needed the player's input and imagination. My point is:

Because Fallout 3 doesn't require so much input, and imagination, players of olde are assuming it should deliver everything atmospherically, or somehow failed to accomplish what the first title did [all without citing a single example of where the first title accomplished this amazing atmosphere - which brings us back to technology versus imagination or the requirements of both].

I'm proposing that the OP is skewing the experience he had, by magically decorating it with what he added. But isn't giving Fallout 3 the same easy ride, and is merely pointing out where it fell short of its own, already well-delivered audio and visual-tastic atmosphere.

Is that not what Fallout 1 did? (is that not what Fallout 3 did not do?)

Fallout 3 presented the TES game design dressed in Fallout's setting, and with Fallout derived names for things. It used Bottle caps because Fallout had them; it re-used the Enclave, because FO2 had it. Re-used Dogmeat because Fallout had him, and Fallout 2 had him as an easter egg, when he canonically died in the base. Fallout 3 did everything to depict the setting, and nothing to achieve what Fallout did. (in fact they even made a point of removing the Text box and pushing the idea of "show-not tell"). Is it any wonder it doesn't measure up; It's competition incorporate the player's own imagination as an asset.

<<I don't take it as a complaint, but if you are scrutinizing a 70x 29 pixel game sprite, instead of the events of the game, then you are missing the point. (and would be boring your friend)>>>

That has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the person telling the story. Someone with the proper command of the language can make the most mundane events seems fantastic, while a particularly inept story teller could make the most fantastic events seem dull as dishwater.

Indeed. :foodndrink:

I think this is one of those disagreements that has no outcome and if someone says it is because old school vs current i think i might go crazy...
Many of us old school fans loved Fallout 3 but there is still a separate group who have difficulty relating with it and there isn't a problem with that. It seems like any time someone liked the first two but not the third everyone decides it is time that this person saw the light and explain why they are http://www.bpwrap.com/wp-content/duty_calls.png. I think a lot of it has to do with generational gaps, i was about ten when the first fallout was released and i didn't play them until i was 15. People who were advlts when those games were released became accustomed to something that has since gone out of style and i think they hoped to find it in the third game and were disappointed.

What, are you getting this at all? Fallout delivered an experience that required a player's personal input to such a degree that their opinions on the delivered atmosphere is almost entirely subjective. I'm yet to see a comparison made in this thread of Fallout's 'awesome' atmosphere being stunted in its Fallout 3 rendition.

And no, Fallout 3 didn't fall short on an atmospheric level, indeed the atmosphere it delivers is probably its most potent virtue. What it can't do, while delivering a fully realised atmosphere, and what I'm proposing the OP and possibly lots of Fallout original fans expect it to do - is live up to their personal experiences on Fallout. Made personal by their own input while playing it, and evident in the lack of examples of the original atmosphere.

I'm yet to read in this thread any detailed accounts of the Fallout atmosphere, as presented in the game, that Fallout 3 failed to capture. Or seemingly purposefully avoided capturing. For this thread to work as the title of it suggests its supposed to be working, the OP shouldn't be pointing out where Fallout 3 fell short of its own great atmosphere (presenting a great visual treat of Tenpenny and then letting it down with the characters), but where it fell short of Example A/Section of Fallout, that really did put the player in amongst a horde of Super Mutants or whatever, without the player using a great amount of his own imagination to see that atmosphere realised.

I'm just suggesting the criticism is lazy, as is the input of the players of Fallout 3 when remembering Fallout. They're simply not willing to tap into their own imagination to compensate for FO3's alleged failings in atmosphere, as they were for Fallout. With Fallout they didn't do it because they wanted to, I might add, but because they needed to for the game to work. :blush:

Hes got a point.

Reminds me of how looney toons and shows like that got replaced with EEEEXXXTRREEEEMMMEEEE!!! Now those shows are replaced with 'reality' TV shows.

I don't think so, but I love that link you gave. lol The title of the thread is "Recapturing the atmospheric success of the original Fallout - Will NV do a better job than fallout3?"

The OP should give examples of what made the original Fallout's atmosphere successful, and where Fallout 3 failed to capture it, and also of what NV should be doing in order to get back to the originals apparent greatness. lol The atmosphere which is still yet to be defined, but that I suspect is one part writing and three parts player input. Like my love for Icewind Dale. :laugh:

What you are saying (as I take it), is that Fallout 1's experience was partly reliant on the player's own personal perceptions and imaginings. and that this is what made it special to them... Am I right?

And You mention Fallout 3's realized detail of the setting and atmosphere, as not comparing with their imagined (idealized ?) Fallout, and so to them its not the same (perhaps not as good ~and can't be)... Is this right?

Well then I agree with you completely... But we are talking cross purposes. You [appear to] discount the player additions to Fallout, where as I consider those additions as part of the intended design (a predictably unique part).
Consider... They wanted the best GURPS possible on a computer. GURPS itself relies on the player's imagination to flesh out the worlds.

** Stone keep shipped before Fallout (Tim Cain actually did a bit of work on that game). It was a first person RPG with full voiced characters, dual wielded weapons, FPSpell casting, NPC party members that fought along side you, and some pretty detail oriented tasks for a 1995 game. Fallout had different aspirations and a different design.

Yeah we're on the same page now. All's we gotta do now is get to the bottom of how NV is supposed to do any better than FO3 on the atmosphere front, in the eyes of the Fallout original fans and their differing ideal as to the perfect Fallout atmosphere. When NV is essentially hindered by the same, uh, shall we say 'over' development as FO3, especially when comparing it to the atmosphere of a 90's title that delivered only as much as it could, and found a perfect balance between story, visuals, and interface that possibly can't be mimicked in a modern game, using modern tech, and modern game mechanics. Less is more? I'm looking forward to finding out. :vaultboy:

lol :laugh:

Edit: I owned two 3D D&D games for 3DO back then. They both svcked eggs. Character models were 2D and cloned, and atmosphere wasn't even close to being as good as modern titles, and they played like fantasy versions of Wolfenstein. The isometric RPGs were far better. But that doesn't mean it makes that isometric design a viable choice on the modern market. Nor something I'd be interested in revisiting. *shrug*

What makes recapturing the spirit of original fallouts difficult is.....their bad graphics....we simply had to use our imagination...and that always filled the "climatic" gaps the way it suited individually each one of us, in his own comfortable way of imagining "how this game would look if it had todays graphics and still all the same rich meritoric content"

Ye. That's what I was trying to say, just took me forever to say it, cos I'm long-winded and it's nearly half six in the morning. Tired-typist. If the OP agrees then this thread should probably end with something along the lines of: Fallout is what it is, and with Fallout 3's success, shouldn't NV be looking to establish a new fully realised atmosphere, building on FO3's, creating one that everyone can identify, rather than striving to emulate the 'fabled' atmosphere of the original that no one can define with any degree of certainty? :blink:

Wow interesting discussions going on. To those asking me for an atmospheric difference i guess we have to go back to how we define atmosphere. I was originally using it to describe two things. Atmosphere as in the ways of the world of each respective game would be different in that there is a lot of what I would say is campy 50s scifi stuff in the fallout 3 universe as opposed to the grittier and more grounded in reality original. The other meaning was the way the game felt in conveying and engaging the player in that world. I think they are intermixed- a bad universe with an excellent immersion will still be bad. A great universe that isn't engaging is even worse because you have to fight with what you are seeing and what you expect.

Since people have been asking for something concrete that seemed to work better in fallout 1, it would be the ease with which it dealt with dialogue. The types of discussions are pertinent to the situation and seem realistic, and thought out. I don't think its complicated stuff at all, but it makes a difference. Totally useless NPCs respond to you with believable and understandable lack of interest. No junk cloned dialogue trees with identical voice acting. If you need NPCs for population, you don't have to make them "unique" so much as you have to make them fit the part! Its these little tricks, knowing when to fill out a character, that improve the quality of the game's atmosphere.

I think OniOne has the right idea in explaining what I was trying to get at. From his explanation, I would say that what I was trying to say is that the atmosphere or *feel* of fallout was more successful because it was able to produce and evoke a greater sense of interest and understanding. It engaged more of the brain. The mechanism by which fallout and many of the older games achieved this was that the provided LESS low quality information allowing for the player's brains to do a lot of filling in. The quality of the filled-in information, like voicing text dialogue, ended up producing a superior experience to that of boring and repeated dialogue by the same voice actor. Following this sort of understanding, equal dialogue with unique and quality voice acting may be better for the experience than text dialogue that is filled in by the player, but equal dialogue with poor acting and reused lines/actors/etc... would reduce the illusion. Its a balancing act, and I guess I would say in fallout 3 they erred on the side of "we have to give the characters SOMETHING to say" even though it may have been better doing way less (this plagued oblivion and fallout 3).

I think that makes a lot of sense. If anyone here is familiar with 3d graphics, it is sort of like texel density and how sometimes less can be more unless there is more of everything else. (if you aren't familiar with it, check out http://sheilanash.com/texelDensity.html

Its about balance.

We are thinking way too much about this stuff LOL

Fallout 3 had no atmosphere? I can't imagine anything more atmospheric and immersive than FO3. Seriously, what? (Aside from New Vegas, obviously).

I don't know how an low-rez isometric game can compare, honestly.