Wait. Are you saying the Fancy Lads Snack Cakes, Salisbury Steaks, etc haven't been laying around for hundreds of years and somehow both magically not looted and ok to eat?

Someone turned that into a meme, which means the point is no longer valid. Apparently.

The Capital Wasteland was less boring to me than the desert.

Oh, ok. You haven't made this clear yet. Great points, great argument. I'm really starting to see things your way.

I agree that the environment in 3 was more interesting than in NV...

But the time constraints come into play, as does the environment. If the Mojave desert were as littered with settlements as the nations capital it wouldn't make much sense and would detract from the game. Too much cognitive dissonance.

New Vegas on the other hand had fleshed out characters, faction reputations, and writing that didn't make me hang my head in shame.

To me Bethesda makes great environments to explore but can't write for beans. Obsidian on the other hand has amazing writing but can't match Bethesda in regard to making the same kind of environments. That's why I'd be absolutely ecstatic to see a Fallout: Norleans or Fallout: City of Los with both studios working together.

It's the Capital Wasteland for me. I was born and raised on the outskirts of D.C., and my nostalgia goggles are on good and tight.

I think that what he means is that some people have substituted a meme for reason. If the person using the meme doesn't understand the meme, or doesn't fully understand the thing to which he is applying the meme, then his point may not be valid.

Recently, when explaining how a role is played, I said that when a player fails to acknowledge the output from the game, and instead chooses to believe something that contradicts what he sees, then that player is lying to himself. In response, one person declared, "With your logic you can ignore everything in the game and just RP!" He detailed how screwed up my concept of role-play is for my allegedly believing that one does it by ignoring the game's output.

Another poster jumped in to reinforce what the first had told me. He said that believing "play pretend" to be role-play is the worst aspect of Bethesda's culture. Yet another person agreed with the first. Then another came along and thanked the first one for giving it to me, that he "is tired of people using the excuse 'You can just ignore it.'" Then a fifth individual posted his full agreement with the others.

There before me were five people who chose to believe that I was promoting play-pretend as role-play, despite my having explicitly stated the contrary. I had described role-playing in the context of a Bethesda game, and apparently, a popular stereotype handled the rest. They saw no point to following what I wrote. They saw no need to think about how my words relate to Fallout 4. They just rolled with the meme (or stereotype, whichever it is).

No, I'm saying that the implication that the people of the C.W. rely on those things for food is demonstrably false.

Its directly shown in game that they primary eat brahmin, mirelurks, radroaches, mole rats, squirrels, iguanas, and sometimes yao guai, for meat. And things such Mutfruit, carrots and potatoes grown in Rivet City's hydroponics lab, and punga traded to them via Tobar and the smugglers of Point Lookout, for fruits and veggies.

Pre-war food is something few want, or do, eat, and even Three Dog makes a joke about people not wanting to eat it.

The idea of "LE EVERYONE EATS PRE-WAR FOOD!" is a meme made up by 4-chan, and used by people who have either never played the game, didn't pay attention to what was actually in it, or simply don't care about making an honest argument.

That they are ok to eat is fitting with the 50's retro-future aesthetic, where people imagined such a level of preservatives being possible.

That's a straw man argument you're describing Dinrauko.

Yes, but it does not appear to be an intentional straw man. The cause of the fallacy, not its presence, led me to remark on it.

I like you, let's be friends.

Commonwealth is growing on me, definitely. Want to hold off on finishing it until some good kids come out....but it's killing me not just diving in head first.

Fallout 1 & 2's wasteland

but if I had to choose then NV

Yeah, if we're counting 1, 2, and Tactics I'd have to say the Western Wasteland is my favorite.

West > Mojave = Commonwealth > Capital

MidWests place depends on how it's portrayed if it's ever portrayed again. Probably just ahead of Capital wasteland. Juuuust.

Texas (from BoS) doesn't get rated until & unless they make a not bull crap game set there.

Well, the restaurants in the Fallout 3 world, do sell, and serve, pre-war food. They don't rely on it entirely, but they do eat it.

Well yes, I didn't mean to imply no one ate it ever.

I mean, people in the Vegas area still sell and eat that stuff, but that doesn't mean they rely on it for food.

Well, obviously not as we see farms and what not, something that FO 3 WAS lacking. Madison Li on a ship with a carrot doesn't count as a farm to me, and one cow in Megaton doesn't count as a herd of cattle. They needed to make improvements, as it was a viable criticism and they did make improvements in 4. That is Fallout 4 in a nutshell to me so far, improvements in some areas, a step back in others.

Prettystraight foward concept to get the world of NV was less interesting to explore than the Capital Wasteland. The sole interesting location to me was that vault where the GECK gad grown plants all in that vault with the mantises and plant creatures. Pretty much the only neat place though.


Contrast that with even the generic subway tunnels of 3 which gave a properr condemned dangerous ambiance.

There are more brahmin being raised for food in Fallout 3 then there are in NV actually.

But I don't disagree Fo4 was better at showing it.

Because the cattle barons are in California, NCR territory, not in NV, so no duh we don't see many. NV has their own "cattle" the bighorners. The majority of Brahmin we do see in NV are for working, not eating(pack animals), and there are definitely more bighorners in NV than brahmin in FO 3.

Why you always gotta bring up NV anyway when we discussing FO 3 vs FO 4? In neither of my two posts did I mention NV(which also improved on food compared to 3 if you insist on bringing it up). It is like "well there is a criticism of FO 3 so I must include some comparison to NV, even though it is completely irrelevant".

The big difference to me is that F1,2 and Tactics had maps with various points to visit over a larger scale. I simply much prefer that idea than having one map focused around a city. It makes for a greater adventure and more potential for interesting locations to visit and a better, and more epic story. I don't get why Bethesda did away with that idea. Is their game engine simply not capable of doing that? I mean, if people want to talk about it breaking immersion, I would just say wouldn't all the damn loading screens they already have break that anyway, so what's the big difference?

If all the Brahmin are in California, what were they eating for the 200 years before they came into contact with California?

The only towns we see actively raising Bighorners in NV are Goodpsrings, and Jacobstown, and they have a whopping 10 combined. There's over 20 Brahmin in Fallout 3 being raised for food. So no, there aren't more bighorners in NV, unless you count all the wild ones people aren't eating, and if you do, theres several packs of wild brahmin in Fo3.

Because NV, being the most recent game up until just a week or so ago, was the newest game, and the one people compared Fallout 3 too. So its the easiest one to make a comparison too when people say Fallout 3 didn't sow enough of X or Y, when its a systemic problem throughout the series, yet some games get automatic free passes for it solely because they were made by the original devs.

Its this sort of blatant revisionism among a small portion of forums posters I can't stand.

Why in the hell wouldn't people be eating wild bighorners? You claim wastelanders in FO 3 are eating Mirelurks, are there any "domesticated" Mirelurks? No, there are not, they eat "wild" mirelurks.

It isn't a "systematic problem throughout the series" when FO 1 and 2 clearly show tons of brahmin and farms throughout every settlement, and 3 did not, and NV did, again. FO 4 addressed this issue in regards to FO 3, which NV already did anyway, so at least it wasn't a step backwards, again.

Also, there are some Brahmin farms in FONV. Off the top of my head I can think of one in Novac. There is another on the outskirts of Vegas. I just said, which is true, that most brahmin, and the cattle barons, are all in Cali, which is why we don't see a lot of them, and most are used for working, as the local population has it's own wildlife food source, the Bighorners, but they did eat brahmin, too. To say they don't hunt wild bighorners is just a ridiculous statement, as people generally will hunt any wild animal that provides a food source, just like I would imagine people around Boston hunt those wild mutated deer.

There was no agriculture to be seen throughout Fallout 3 the way we saw it in NV so most of what you're defending is what I call "mind-canon" meaning you saw some stuff in the game which wasn't explicit or just maybe barely implicit and decided "Oh that's what's going on here." And really none of this takes away from the fact that there are unlooted stores with inedible junk-food 200 years after the fact.

The subways, like 90% of Fallout 3's map's offerings, were a chore with little to no reward. People often try to compare the NV and 3 maps. The difference, however, is that in New Vegas you have quests like "The Legend of the Star" which not only refrain from hand-holding but are very organic and let you do the legwork, then reward you with great unconventional storytelling. Beyond the quests you have areas like Vault 11 which alone contains storytelling and writing more impressive than all of Fallout 3 combined.

What you get in Fallout 3 & 4 is an area with some window dressing. Maybe a couple skeletons holding hands or a stupid teddy bear propped up. The loot you find usually isn't special or unique, usually just another [censored] tube of Wonderglue. Sometimes if you're lucky you get a greenscreen with a journal, but most of the time "story" is absent as is any reason for you to have ever searched the area you just explored.

There are. There was an entire mirelurk farm and processing facility inside the Anchorage War Memorial until mercs very recently raided the place and killed everyone. They had pens for the lurks and everything.

Actually, Fallout 1 showed a grand total of 18 Brahmin between all non-randomly generated maps, which is less then Fallout 3 showed. So it is a systemic problem, its even worse in Fallout 1 because Fo1 implies a far larger population then Fallout 3 did, and had even less Brahmin to boot.

Its these sort of completely dishonest and easily disprovable comments I am sick of.

No it isn't, that isn't how canon works, period. Unless something directly says or shows they do, then they don't. Obsidian didn't bother to include any sort of hunter NPCs in its game like Bethesda did, and no one mentions hunting bighorners for meat, thus, in canon, the only place they get bighorner meat is from the ones they raise. The only people who actually hunt bighorners are the tribals of Zion, who do so because they lack farms, and domesticated cattle raising techniques.

There is always an "I-I-ITS OBVIOUS!" excuse when it comes to the failings of Obsidian, but Bethesda rarely gets afforded that luxury. The double standards and hypocrisy are sickening.

Yeah cool story.


I liked 3's map much more, there was actually interesting things to see and I cared about the NPCs of NV on average less than those of 3. They were both bad though I think 4 has both trumped.

Such as?