A mishap in game developement I think.
Vault 112 (one of Jet locations) might have been made by someone not so familiar with Fallout canon.

Yeah but these mishaps are everywhere. You find makeshift postwar armours in Vault 112 aswell.

Ok it seems that Vault 112 is freely accessible as neither Dad , the player or that guy from Rivet City who stole that chip from there needed a passcode to open that Vault door. Which is strange itself.
Maybe they left the stuff there. But why should they ?

Sadly you find these little logic screw ups throughout the game. It seems that many things in the level design were not very well thought out by the devs.

For instance one of the things i keep on pointing at is that they place totally destroyed buildings made of reinforced concrete next to ones that are almost unscratched and made of bricks or even wood.

I mean..... it really doesnt take a rocket scientist to find that a bit awkward and nonsensical. It should be exactly the other way around.

Canterbury Commons is a good example. It was obviously far away from any blast and this is a good explanation for why the buildings, although battered, are still standing there. But why are the concrete ones still reduced to rubble ? And that within the town itself ? Was there a forced field around those other houses or what ? LOL

I tell you why : Thats what happens when you create a handful of standard buildings and then fill your gameworld with them to save time and money instead of designing and modeling buildings by hand for every location which i would expect from a high quality RPG.

With the available brick houses alone the town was propbaly too small or looked to uniform and boring so they've put some of the standard "concrete rubble" buildings without thinking about the missing logic.

Yes, at least in Fallout 1 there are no two buildings that look exactly the same. But then, that is a true RPG.

/sarc

Of course i was referring to a RPG with 3d engine and a grade of detail that comes along with it.

Exactly his point. FO1 doesn't have FO3's level of detail, yet it doesn't have identical buildings. All of its tile-based buildings are unique, even if the difference comes down to a different door or window.

I'm not saying it doesn't make sense. I'm saying it's a rationalization. I can rationalize that between Fallout 2 and 3, Harold got addicted to Jet, spent 20 years learning chemistry, reverse-engineered the formula and built a rudimentary hanglider from the flesh of his enemies to travel all the way across the country, dropping copies of his recipe from the sky all the way. Whether it makes any sense is different than Bethesda taking the time to fill in the blanks. The production, development, and overall logistics of Jet were kind of a major side-plot in Fallout 2. You didn't just find the stuff lying around over the place - there was a rather impressive facility required to produce this stuff. In Fallout 3 it's just there. I'm not saying it couldn't possibly make sense - only that Bethesda didn't seem to deem it important enough to say why it did. (Important enough that they decided it had to be in the game, but not so important to actually give any background on it. "Let's create an immersive and highly-detailed world with tons of in-game lore - a selling point for our Elder Scrolls series, and one of our bigger strengths - but this Jet stuff? Nah, it's just there..." )

Well frak, where was this during the heated "Vault 87" thread? I'm on my second playthrough, and I'm still a ways from even getting to that part of the MQ, so a lot of this isn't as fresh as it was in my head. But still - why didn't someone post that then?

Is it really unique when they all share the same tileset?

More unique than entirely identical houses in FO3.

This is all in the game's files, but the Overseer's terminal is unreachable/does not appear in the final game.

So now the Fallout canon debate has degenerated into bickering over interior design... this is truly a new low for us all.

Sorry, that just that just gave me a bad vision... Queer Eye for the straight guy, Post apocolypse edition
*Nasal Voice on* "These jumpsuits are so last century, how about we spruce that up with a one armed Jacket?"

Hey, at least it strung this topic to the 9th thread. That's more than most topics get to!

Seriously... I had no idea it was going to go on this long...

Hey! All the paper on the floor looks the same, therefore Beth didn't give a darn. This is a serious issue!

Lol best. Seriously people, if not because of Beth, there would be NEVER a new Fallout game, because Interplay is broken. I dont really believe they can produce anything viable anymore.

EDIT

Ow, also, Beth looks a lot more sixy and beauty than "interplay" lol

Fallout 2 have lots of pristine new alphalt on street; roofs are shine new clear; lots of new bricks on buiding. Like there was never a nuclear war.




Maybe you didnt noticed the high "tiling" tecnhinque on FO2 "high quality rpg" with the above inconsistences.

I love the way FO2 world seen to never had received any atomic blast or nuclear winter.

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/0/0f/Fo2_Vault_City_Council.png

Wow those bricks are really shining after nuclear war! And the roofs! Beautiful.

Beth were not the only bidders for the Fallout License. Therefore if there was No beth, There may well have been another Fallout game.

Beth was only the highest bidder, not the only bidder.



Vault City was built using a GECK, which is why it looks better than other towns around.

Are by any chance the bidders known? I wonder if/why Blizzard Entertainment didn't jump on the franchise.

None are known officially, we just know that there were more than just Beth.



Blizzard doesn't buy other people's franchises, they just rip them off.

Didn't they get sued over the Hydralisk design by Games Workshop? And Lost?

Like has been said - Bethesda weren't the only people bidding on the license. Whether anyone else would have done any better is obviously debatable, of course. Besides, without Interplay there would never have been a Fallout 3.

I think that's actually one of Bethesda's better strengths, is their art direction, attention to detail, and level design.

Yeah... not the best illustration you could have used to try and make that point. If you want to show a visual of how "clean" everything looks in Fallout 2, you probably don't want to show the one city that was built after the war by seemingly the only Vault that was properly equipped and was able to follow the official plan. If you want to make this point - you'd do better than show a picture of the one city in the game that's supposed to look clean and pristine.

With all these arguments - "Well, Fallout wasn't perfect," isn't exactly the point to try and make. Mostly because no one is saying that. I know Fallout had some faults. That's nothing new. I've had 10 years to become familiar with it's plot-holes and short-comings. You think the faults of Fallout 3 have been beat to death; say that again 10 years from now and you'll see the definition of "dead horse." The reason a lot "Vets" don't start every post with "Well, Fallout 1 didn't do so well in X,Y, and Z, but nevertheless Fallout 3..." is because we got tired of picking Fallout 1 and 2 apart quite a few years ago. That doesn't mean it's not true - it's more that it's kind of a given at this point.

EDIT: For any flaws in Fallout 1 and 2, I hold Fallout 3 to a higher standard. There's supposed to have been 10 years for videogames to advance in terms of storytelling, gameplay depth, sophistication, etc. Not only graphics and physics. I expect Fallout 3 to not only be able to fix any and all flaws from the originals but to show 10 years' worth of advancement.

Sincerely i see some ridiculous things on FO3 like White House as ground zero but buildings 10 meters away without heavy damage and i think "wow" that is pretty strange. But i take it with a grain of salt, as people playing fo1 and fo2 also surely takes with a grain of salt.

For now really, all i want is to play a nice experience. And fo3 delivers it. And most, im glad it dont take 900 hours to enjoy it, because when im done, im move on. I played TES a lot, its nice, and it takes a lot of time from me. Nothing wrong, but its a game after all. I dont really understand why people get so personal because of game x or y. Its just an experience after all, its not life, its not like graduating or marring, but unfortunally i know some nerds probably married with fo1 or fo2

Im getting Fo1 and 2 next week, and i will play it without any problem. If its nice i will play a lot. If not, i will drop it. I played a lot on 90's plataform isometric games. Some nice some bad. Its all games after all, no need to be personal.

If I am not mistaken, Hiroshima proved that if your a building, the safest spot is right under the nuke/ground zero, however since down town DC would be litterally flattened otherwise, I am pretty sure I would rather them have fun with inaccuracies of that sort, over walking though a massive, flat, open space.

If DC was hit by a precision bombardment of mini nukes instead of a few big nukes, it could explain the lack of destruction.

Your "rationalizing" is a bad theory and I know it's a joke, but this is why it was not explained. No story is better than a possible bad one.

As Ausir stated, Vault 87's Overseer's office is not in the game. I expect the reason to be not to allow the player to venture too far from Fawkes and ultimate capture by Enclave but regardless, the info is there.
For full list of removed content of Vault 87, see: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vault_87_terminal_entries. Scroll down enough to reach cut content.



They are not. Cities don't have identical houses (Big Town being exception). The ranches you find around are the only "solely identical" buildings there are in FO3, and there are only up to a dozen of them found in the game, majority around the central area of the map.
Every single building may not be different, but the same building is set enough far from another that the player will not notice it.

In Fallout 2, I think, the buildings are a lot more alike. In ruined cities, every house looks identical by texture. They just have different shape.
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/6/6c/Fo2_Den_Business_1.png, for example, is almost identical to the Adytum of LA Boneyard from FO1 and all buildings in that town except the old church are identical by texture, only variations are the shop signs.
Vault City and NCR buildings also bear resemblance, having round edges and same color.