James is responsible for his own death. He sabotaged the terminal in Project Purity, the Enclave wanted him to make it work, and James basically broke it, and they didn't break it, they wanted to get Project Purity up and running. That said, even if what you claimed is true (Which it isn't) some people can look past something as petty and barbaric as revenge, especially if they feel a faction is the embodiment of progress for humanity. Just because they are not YOUR idea of progress does not mean they aren't progress. Their progress is no different than the Legions, it lift's some to ascension while being built on the labour and broken backs of others.

This.

Personally I also believe that Fallout 2's storyline could have been better developed in order to facilitate an option of joining the Enclave. In other words, make the choice less about "saving your friends and family and casting down those evil bastards" and more about making an honest choice based on morality. The developers chose to make it so that it made more sense for the Chosen One to defeat the Enclave, not side with them. Its not like they didn't have a conscious choice in development.

I'm not saying it had to be done, but I believe it would have improved Fallout 2's main storyline significantly.

But yes, I agree that Fallout 2 had much better minor choices in both side quests and the like, which Fallout 3 had little of.

yeah they wanted it project purty so they can use F.E.V on the water so it kills every one who drinks it

That's Eden's plan. Autumn wanted to use it exactly as the BOS did.

Even Eden's plan isn't that bad honestly. How many innocent wastelanders would the plan really kill? On the other hand, every supermutant, raider, TC merc, deathclaw, radscorpian, centaur, etc. would be dead. Eden's is more of a "well screw it we can't save everyone, lets clean the slate" plan rather than being a conciously evil one. Its not good for the wastelanders, but then again, how many factions are humanitarian? Its the Enclaves version of manifest destiny that the NCR uses.

I still don't buy it.
Skip any hatred you might have towards your father or that you "think" someone can have for their father and look at the LW.
She spends all her life in a vault and then her only family member disappears and she has to run for her life out into the wasteland where she knows no one.
Then when she finally finds him he goes ahead and kills himself because of the Enclave trying to take over his project.
Why would this character be able to look past this?
Yeah, he killed himself, it was his own choice and fault. But why would the Lone Wanderer just go "meh, svcks to be you" and then stroll over to the Enclave and ask for an enlistment sheet?

It lies in how one looks at the story. Perhaps the LW became indoctrinated by Eden's rhetoric when he stepped out from the Vault and saw the horrors of the wastes. Eden offers substantial change and an end to it all.

Perhaps the LW was sufficiently angered by his father's actions.

Besides, it seems pretty clear that James killed himself. Autumn even points this out in dialogue:

"YOU KILLED MY FATHER!"

"Actually, he killed himself. I did nothing."

If the LW is sufficiently convinced that the Enclave is in the right, the option to reason his fathers death as not being the Enclave's fault emerges.

Sorry, but the way I picture the LW's growing up I can't think that she could possibly ever forgive the Enclave for what they did.
I blame that on the beginning of the game though.
It railroads me down a certain path that when I leave the vault anything that strays from that growing up part feels incoherent to the character.

Wrong, for a lot of people Fallout 3 was their first Fallout game, anything Bethesda would have thrown at them those fans would consider Fallout.

Since the LW is a tebula rasa though who's to say? All we know is that there seemed to be a good father-child bond but Dad just decided to up-out and leave on day, potentially forcing his child to kill people in the Vault - when you think of it from a realistic stand-point of course as opposed to "derp, kill [censored]".

I mean face it, James did kill himself and for little reason - espcially as in-lore power armour is supposed to be very good at keeping out radiation but whatever Fallout 3 - Autumn wasn't going to shoot him and even makes it clear that James will still pretty much run the show there (point being that James would at least have more time to think of a better plan to sabotage his own [censored] as opposed to activating his convenient dirty bomb, which still baffles me btw.

@Yeah Kyle, Fallout 3 was my first Fallout too. I mean I do get that the over-whelming majority probably won't give a toss about the originals but I just spent ￡40 ($65?) on an original Fallout 2 from 1998 with Vault-Tec Lab instruction book

This about sums it up. When I first started Fallout 3, I knew nothing of the series, and when I first heard Enclave Radio I fell in love with Eden's comforting reassurance. Before they started shooting at me I was of the mindset that 'Man, I seriously hope I get to help these guys restore the America'. Suffice it to say, I was horribly denied my bleary eyed childlike state of delusion.

@Kyle- Fallout 3 was my first Fallout and I took the time to go play them all, and I'm a fan of the old ones just as much as the new ones. I just don't stomp around here [censored]ing all day that Bethesda 'ruined' the lore.

Ah, now I see what happened, lol. My (orignal) post was in response to a comment that there is nothing given anywhere In-Game, implied or otherwise, that there as a base item that the FO3 cap was based on- unlike with FO1, where it's explicitly stated that the cap is based on water.

But yeah, anything that's hard to make, not rare but not too common, yet easy to carry and durable makes a good item to be called "money." As the Cap meets all three criteia, it's a pretty good thing to use as money.

The biggest inconsistencies I see are jet in the CW and the appearance of more Enclave soldiers than were present in FO2 after the majority were killed on the oil rig or wiped out by NCR.

Suffice to say I fulfilled it.

Albeit it not truly until I was able to get the PC version and download mods.


Exactly this.

Out of all the possible "family members deaths at the hands of others" senarios. James is surely up there on the list of those easiest to blame on the members own stupidity. He didn't have to die.

Yeah I kind of laughed when he killed himself my first playthrough.

"I want your project"

"well I might as well just kill myself *dead*"

East Coast related stuff
F.E.V being in Vault 87.
Super Mutants all over DC
Lyon's BoS unable to find the sources after decades of searching
DC is still a ruin and largely hostile.
Jet is in DC when it was West Coast created
Majority of Pre-War food is stil edible.
Weapons are different.
Power Armour is seriously nerfed.
Enclave are a threat, even if a baby boom did happen they wouldn't be fighting fit advlts by Fallout 3.
Project Purity and the G.E.C.K work at the click of a finger switch.
Liberty Prime works.
Ghouls don't suffer serious physical pain, instead of being crippled
Ghouls are just people with a different skin, instead of looking like melted faced zombies.
Mothership Zeta - took an Easter Egg too far.
Wastelander living in a closed vault

I don't dislike or think anything bad happened when bethesda made Fallout 3 tbh.

They did well in my book.

Except they didn't, they screwed up a lot of things.

Matter of opinion, at least the first half of your sentence.

Almost none of this is lore that has been stepped on though. It's just very stupid. That was really the problem with Fallout 3. It wasn't usually that anything in it conflicted with previous lore (although that did happen) it was that what Bethesda chose to do was generally very stupid.

See Lyons' Brotherhood for a good example of this. No lore was technically stepped on in creating Lyons' Brotherhood. It's just a very stupid addition because it made no sense for the Brotherhood to ever want or be capable of launching an expedition to Washington D.C. and it made no sense for Bethesda to do something that stupid when all they wanted was a faction that has next to nothing in common with the actual Brotherhood of Steel in the first place.

I get this, but that's also not what I'm saying.
I'm saying that the stuff where Bethesda screwed up is that they basically tried to make the East just like the West in, what I consider, to not be a very smooth transition at all. That there are other Super Mutants on the East Coast is already one hell of a coincidence, and then when trying to justify the coincidence, what do you get? "Da mutants have an unexplainable desire to make moar mutants." WTF? Ok so what was once a story of a man trying to unite humanity forcefully is now "herp derp dunno why I do it."

It's not that it's unexplained, it's that the explanations provided make one think "yeah right, my ass...." There's so many incredible coincidences going on that it's hard to take it seriously.



Like this. Again, no lore was stepped upon, but the believability of it all is just ridiculous.

Having said that, I actually think Bethesda did a good job with Fallout 3. I mean let's get serious: Fallout 3 was a lose-lose for them. Had they continued on the West Coast, they likely would've screwed up royally and ruined the Core Region forever, something the original fans would NEVER forgive. Had they done their thing on the East Coast without the Enclave, Brotherhood of Steel, Super Mutants or any other Fallout faction, people would complain it's not Fallout, citing a lack of Fallout faces, complaining that this was just an entirely new game with entirely new factions playing around in a world with fallout elements. So what'd they do? East Coast, but use old familiar fallout faces.
Mind you, it's not perfect. For example, I think it would've been enough to simply have the Enclave moving to the East Coast to start over; after this, there's no need for the Brotherhood of Steel or Super Mutants to be there too. They'd have solved the issue of providing an old familiar face just with the Enclave alone; including the other two just makes the story incredibly hard to believe. Feel free to make their own factions after that. People would complain about the Enclave returning anyways, but yknow what? People were gonna complain, it was a lose-lose situation. I think sacrificing the idea that all of the Enclave died in FO2 for the sake of having a familiar Fallout face appear in FO3 is worth it. It's also not that farfetched to believe the US government would have bases strung all over the US, whereas the BoS going there and the Super Mutants of Vault 87? Those are pretty unbelievable.

NO LORE WAS STEPPED ON

People just dislike aliens (WHICH I LOVE!!!)

And they think lore was "STEPPED ON"

Gnrfan/slowbutter just stop. Your either 12 or you have no control, stop spamming.

He's not very good at trolling, a more subtle approach is better.

I still stand by 'It's unexplained'. Because Bethesda basically wrote the first half of the chapter, then said 'Choose your own adventure guys'. Take FEV for example. It's explained that Vault 87 was a project taken over by the USAF for purposes of testing FEV. But it's not explained WHY. One COULD say that it was Vault Tec's secret research ala shadow government research. Also, it could be that mutants have it genetically conditioned through the virus's goo to make mutants however possible, or perhaps one mutant was a scientist and just enough of his mind remained to tell them how to make more mutants. Ultimately the lore of Fallout 3 isn't lore breaking, but it's so sloppily written. It's basically the equivalent of coffee stains on blueprints.

Can we all just agree that FO3 had to happen just so we could have the Tunnel Snakes, the only faction/group of people with any personality worth having?