So, the first two games have the space ship. You can interact with the ship, loot the ship and go back and see it again, admidtly as a random encounter in the first game, but it is not allowed to be in the third game? This has always confused me.....

I can only speak for myself, but for me it's the opposite sentiment that confuses me - the idea that something you might run into in the first two games equates to proof that aliens have to be in Fallout 3.

I mean really, when you get down to it - us forumites have likely put waaay more thought into this than the Devs ever did when they put it into the game.

Yeah, devs make things that are fun and basically fit into the game and people here spend years debating meaningless nonsense. I'm pretty much just beyond caring about who thinks what goes where. Give me a good fun game to play that doesn't break all continuity and I'm happy.

The crashed UFO was fine, most people passed it off as a random encounter/easter egg thingie like Godzilla's footprint or Dr Who's tardis, it didn't have a backstory, it was just...there for a joke or references something to do with pop-culture or 50's media. But Mothership Zeta is a whole DLC and people consider any additional, playable content as canon. It alienates the fanbase because a lot of people believe aliens are out of place in the Fallout world. The whole idea is humankind's struggle with itself, and that sorta gets thrown out the window when you hear a holotape of some alien digging into someone's mind for launch codes.

I consider Additional Playable Content, be it a Mod or a DLC as Optional and if it does not fit my world view of the game, is not included in my game. Fallout 3 does not need MZ to be a complete game, while MZ needs Fallout to be playable.

Still, whether you choose to play it or not, the DLC that is, Aliens and their ships have been part of Fallout since it first came out.

MZ however does seem to be the "End" of FO3. As if you are not supposed to get off the ship ever again. There is nothing on the ship that ties on to the capital wasteland. You never meet the cowboy or the bicycle repair girl again. The samurai stays put. And whilst you can go back and interact with the ship getting more stuff... You just sell it.

If you were loyal to BoS you'd beeline back and go "LISTEN guys. I just got hold of a spaceship and have all of these things to show you. What do your scribes have to say abut this tech and would you like to send a few of your guys upthere to check it out ?"

Hell you'd do it for caps too. But nothing. It just goes "flatline" right there as if the thing had no impact. But it would. If I started unloading 50 alien guns at a merchant people would wonder where in gods name I got that. Especially the tech hungry groups. You would have people from the Enclave, Bos, Outcasts and sooner or later the commonwealth and the west coast looking you up.

It seems to me that MZ was just a "fun to do" and "nice to explore" DLC whilst providing an end for the game.

Do you mean the wanamingos? They were a failed mentats experiment, not aliens. The crashed UFO was an easter egg, it's like making a Dr Who DLC just because that an easter egg too.

DLC and mods are different because mods are user-created and generally anything created by the developers is what's considered canon.

In Easter Eggs (which you won't always come across or get the option to) maybe, but they don't play a major part in the stories.

Zeta doesnt play a "major" part in the game.
its a side quest that you can take or leave.

it doesnt "need" to be there. it just is for an added bit of fun

the alien blaster can be found in three places in the first two games. easter eggs or no, thats a few places to have something if indeed its not meant to be part of the universe

The poll has been changed finally.
I added "Yes, but I sure as hell wish it wasn't" by popular request
as well as
TARDIS and Dr. to the "Who" option to clarify what I meant.
And a couple other options at the bottom.
Enjoy.
Also for anyone having (censored for political reference) that much trouble counting the votes "Yes/ Fan Approved" is in the lead.

Agreed. I voted No. I was thinking of voting "yes but I sure as hell wish it was not". If Beth comes out and say it is then fine. (they have yet to do so) I feel it will be the wrong move big time but fine they own the rights.

Plus there are way to many options for that poll.

Why would any fan of Fallout want MZ to be canon?

I noticed you think that Fallout's spiritual morals boil down to "it is about humanity and our struggles."
Allow me to explain.
Let us close our eyes and imagine a small child (okay don't actually close your eyes for 'sakes). This boy and his dog are stumbling along in a place called Modoc and the disembodied music that plays to his life is frightening and eerie. Now flashforward to his mother and father recieving the news that their son is dead...except he isn't dead. Later it turns out he is in these tunnels under a haunted farm.
The Chosen One stands at the foot of his rope and a dog (not dogmeat or one of the two robot dogs he can have or the pariah dog either) and says:
"These are our dreams...
...our wishes
and I am taking them back
all of them..."
and proceeds to loot the caps people threw into the well.
Soon he concludes that a stick of dynamite would crack open the rocks leaking water and refill the well. But the DEVs didn't make it that easy.
Almost a whole year (fourteen hours for his puppeteer) later he is dealing with the hubologists and he just can't understand why he can't end up in space after refueling the damned spaceship with the fuel he has masterfully redirected from that Badger fellow and his harem of crazy women on that stupid rust tub in the harbor. If only he could contact the aliens that have dropped their Federation shuttles and Crashed Whales and TARDIS boxes all over the frigging wasteland. Hell even those failed mentats experiments he has made an endangered species could be called aliens. Why not? He found a dead alien that had shot up psycho and died 'reading' a pormographic magazine called Cat's Paw. He still wasn't sure but then Skynet said that it had been built by reverse engineered alien technology. So flying around in space and having space battles with aliens should conclude his adventures right? No. Instead he married some chick from that town calle Modoc. Later on while fighting aliens in the wasteland the robobrain he downloaded Skynet into accidentally shot him and then his wife, a pretty young firecracker and pregnant and vicious dealt the killing blow to the only real alien to protect her mate.
Thus died the legacy of aliens and therefore traveling around in space.
A dream mankind had long had.
Man's greatest dream in fact.
Now a smoking pile of wreckage lying among a half a dozen dead aliens riddled with lead.
So sad.

I meant to explain why a fan would want MZ canonized.

Hmm i wonder if say in a few years we find out aliens are real, that we will all agree that MZ is cannon
(I voted "No" btw)

Okay so I am wrong. But I was only trying to elaborate why I would like to see MZ canonized.

I don't think Bethesda is above having a little bit of fun with their games, and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be able to do so in the form of DLC and such. I still think that as far as Fallout is concerned, that aliens "belong" in that world's Pre-War past. But I don't have any issue with Mothership Zeta. It doesn't keep me awake at night, and I don't fall into a flying rage whenever I think of it.

I simply decided not to buy that particular DLC. As far as my own gaming experience is concerned, there is no alien abduction quest in my playthrough of Fallout 3. There is absolutely no possible way that anyone is ever going to be able to convince me otherwise. Todd Howard could come to my house, break down my door, and forcibly install Mothership Zeta on my computer (assuming he'd really care enough about any of this one way or another - something tells me this forum is putting more thought into this than any of the Devs involved in any of the Fallout games ever did...) I'd still be perfectly within my rights to ignore any of the events that take place on that DLC.

Other people had different views on MZ when it came out. They bought it, played it, and (presumably) enjoyed the experience. No amount of debate is ever going to convince them that none of that ever happened. Nor should it. That's their game, their playthrough; and I don't see how it should be up to each individual person to decide what "happened" in Fallout 3, by this point.

We're talking about an ostensibly "open world" game. What we're really discussing is the paradox that what occured in some players' playthroughs, did not "happen" in everyone else's. But that's a non-issue. Not everyone blew up Megaton. There's entire areas in the core vanilla game that not everyone is going to have found during their own playthroughs. Mothership Zeta is simply one of those places.

EDIT - ie, I have no right to tell anyone that a portion of the game that they themselves played and experienced "never happened." But by that same token, I would find it personally offensive if someone were to insist that I recognize and support something that literally did not occur during my playthrough of the game.

Early science fiction pulp magazines, some comic books and movie seriels had very similiar looking rayguns. Back then some of them were pop culture such as (black and white movie seriels) Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century, Flash Gordon along with many that have long been forgotten. That they were or were not called 'Alien Blasters', Bethesda still calls upon the cultural themes of what were shown. Point is that the rayguns themselves were very important in their shape, appearance and their use by space heroes. They were an important part of the pulp culture of various stories, characters etc.

I remember seeing raygun pistols almost identical in illustrations back when I was a teen in the 1970s and maybe earlier.

Mothership Zeta is canon because it fits into the general craziness of the Fallout universe. The aliens are more easily explained than some other facets of Fallout canon such as the ghouls or the super mutants. They are exotic because they are aliens but how did humans become ghouls or super mutants? The explanations are much more complicated and sometimes contradictory.

I voted no. Aliens shouldn't be canon.

I personally see MZ as massively overgrown easter egg, Fallout 3's engine is different and it didn't allow "special" encounters as original games had them. I enjoyed playing DLC, personally I see it as probably second best DLC with Pitt being my favorite.

I still fail to grasp why this has to be such a black-and-white issue. Why can't we all just say it's "semi-canon" and leave it at that?

Frankly, as I see it, that term applies to all of the Fallout 3 DLC. So far, I've only purchased the Anchorage and Pitt DLC packs. And I've only actually played the Pitt so far. So in my own playthrough of the game, my character never encountered any Mothership, never went to Anchorage or Point Lookout, and my character's story ended with what the vanilla game gave me. Those events never occured in my game. They're optional anyway. Sure, I might not have got the "full" experience of playing through every single piece of DLC, but I still very much "played" Fallout 3.

You can't tell me that in my Fallout 3 game, that something happened to my character - because it's "canon" and therefore overrules any other contradictions - when it never occured in my game. And like I've already said - there's equally no justification in telling someone else who did get abducted by aliens in their playthrough that it never occured because some of us don't feel it "fits" quite as well into the existing setting.

Erego - semi-canon. We're each of free to decide for ourselves whether or not each specific DLC "belongs" in our playthroughs of the game. And that's the only thing that matters anyway.

Though I agree - I don't particularly care for aliens playing a "story" role in any future Fallout games (I could concievably concede that it might "fit" as a "retro-sci-fi reference," but I think those sorts of references fit only so far as references to the Pre-War world of Fallout, and not so much within it's "contemporary" setting. ie, some dead aliens or evidence of previous visitations "fit" in the same way that coming across any other vestige of Pre-War civilization does.) But I honestly don't think there's much danger of anything like that happening. I don't really see Bethesda bringing any sort of alien presence into the forefront anytime soon, and despite my misgivings, I doubt that Fallout 4 or 5 is going to have you gallavanting about the Wasteland with GleepThorpe the curmudgeonly little green man trying to stop an invasion from Evil Aliens.

I figure that if players want to get abducted by aliens and run around in an alien spaceship, that I don't really have any right to say that them doing so isn't "valid." I also have the option to choose not to do so. So long as the only role that aliens play is relegated to optional content a la DLC, then I don't think there's really any problem either way. I don't want to be told that I have to play MZ in order to have considered myself to have played the "canon" events of Fallout 3, but by that same token I don't see any problem with allowing other players to decide to do so.

Voted "Yes, but I sure as hell wish it wasn't". Bethesda has stated it's canon, unfortunately. War. War never changes. UNTIL ALIENS ATTACK. Nonetheless, I've been trying my best to completely ignore Mothership Zeta and everything to do with that abomination. If it wasn't for that one holodisk, I wouldn't care about it at all.

For the people saying they've always been in the Fallout universe, you're right, they always were. But they were also something called an easter egg, which is not considered canon.

Soppose that we the fans who pay for the game out of our pockets with our money have opinions that most likely do matter to Beth. Even if the aliens are going to be integrated into the main storyline of FO4 and it turns out that they were somehow involved in the Great War thereby removing responsibility from the hands of man it will matter. It will matter to all of us. Is MZ canon? This is a question that begs for opinions and opinionated rants and calm explanations and heated debate alike. People care whether MZ is canon. Why any fan would want MZ to be canon is as complicated as why a fan wouldn't care or would disown FO if it turned out to be. MZ is far more controversial than the other DLCs which are basically unique sidequests and are as canon as the other quests of the game. However MZ isn't like the others and doesn't sit so easily in our minds. Even those of us who wish to see it canonized and part of future games are still at a loss to describe how it won't ruin everything.

I don't want anyone to have to call FO4 the second (censored game title) which we all agree wasn't canon and shouldn't be called Fallout or have the noble name of Brotherhood of Steel in its title. FOr any newbies I am not referring to FO: Tactics which is canon but contains non-canon weapon names and an apocryphal fuel source for vehicles. So for anyone who would feel violated by an alien inclusion into the future storylines of FO I hope an understanding can be reached before then on how they can fit into the known FO universe as we love it.

Thats not to say it wont happen though. They could easily fill a role in the main quest, side quests or even just show up in cameo form.

that isn't saying it couldnt happen though. Gleeepthorp might just be a part of some side quest or even the main quest of FO4.

(sorry for the double post...it said the first one didn't post and then i posted again and then there were two...wtf)