Spoilers for a 13 year old game that got retconned anyways
For those who don't know, at the end of Fallout 3 you have to go into a heavily irradiated room to prevent a big water purifier from exploding. Your character will die but your act of self-sacrifice gives everyone in the wasteland clean water which had been very rare up to that point. However it's been previously established (explicitly and several times) that supermutants are immune to radiation, and the game has a very prominent supermutant companion: Fawkes. You would think you could just ask Fawkes to go into the radiation chamber, but no, you get this incredibly stupid line and are forced to kill yourself. Fawkes up to this point has been very selfless and one of the kindest characters in the game.
Like how do you fuck up writing your game so badly this situation is even possible?!
im confused by this, do you mean because the dialogue is mostly unvoiced? and cos most of the characters dont have close-up portraits?
the original fallout 1/2 engine was built around having lots of dialogue and lots of branching dialogue based on all sorts of other triggers and its been a long while since ive played it but i cant recall anything wrong with it? its pretty much the same dialogue system that newer games like pillars of eternity still use for spewing out ridiculous amounts of text
and i will 1000% take unvoiced dialogue every time for an in-depth rpg, voiced dialogue is an expensive time-consuming tradeoff that i mostly click through anyway and mostly serves to ruin characters with bad voice acting rather than improving them with good voice acting. i like the old trick of important characters getting their first line or two voiced so it gives you the idea and then leaving the rest unvoiced. and likewise i would much rather have no portrait than a bad portrait, good writing can give the imagination a picture whereas a bad portrait just takes me straight out of the conversation. and the few 3d portraits that fallout 1 and 2 did have were pretty good at the time (though they may not have aged well idk)
idk, I didn't find the voice acting in the newer fallouts that bad.
I was much more engaged playing say NV then I was playing FO2, and I think the weird claymationesque portraits for people in the original games is a lot harder to take seriously then the models in NV.
those portraits looked amazing when i was a kid and idk maybe its the nostalgia talking but i just looked them up and i reckon they still look pretty good (though admittedly a bit goofy, but that kinda fits with the vibe)
i do think that oblivion and by extension the fallouts had the absolute worst character faces ive ever seen in a game, to the point that i cannot take any of the characters seriously, and they completely take me out of the story when they take up most of the screen during dialogue (a problem oblivion and fallout 3 solved by just having the stupidest stories imaginable so it didnt really matter)
for a point of comparison, vampire the masquerade bloodlines came out earlier with similar branched fully-voiced dialogue, and both the character faces and voice acting are just orders of magnitude better
See, idk, I think the faces in Oblivion look ridiculous, but I never really had that same vibe with them in New Vegas.
Agreed, NV faces still have a little of that stiff weirdness to them, but Oblivion faces are actually terrifying half the time.
I agree with this old man rant
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