I view Mothership Zeta as the DLC equivalent of one of the bigger Random Encounters in Fallout 2.

I doubt most people consider it canon that the Chosen One went through the Guardian of Forever and broke Vault 13's Water Chip.

Radcreatures can be linked to the setting - as in nuclearwar -> radiation -> radiation turning animals huge. Robots are built by humans. Aliens are there just for the heck of it. They have no connection to the setting whatsoever, unless we're going with the anything goes mentality - which, imo, is not a good idea. They can be crammed in and say "Well, there they are now", as has been done, but the game would be better off without them. Again, theres nothing preventing them from existing, but they should be kept as a mysterious/funny small random encounter (as it was in earlier games and vanilla Fallout 3).

yes but why were those movies made that made it seem that nuclear energry/radiation would make things big? it was social commentary that we are getting too powerful for our own good.
likewise the alien in "the day the earth stood still" is social commentary that we were getting too powerful for our own good.

one was from space and one was from our own back yard, but make no mistake about it- they were created by film makers to illustrate the exact same thing

But they are still separate beings meant to be illustrated differently - to depict a different kind of "philosophies" behind the same goal. (that may not come out as clear as I would want, but I just got home from work and I'm tired)

Alien only place as far as I consider in Fallout is just some random encounter and their existence are not really taken to serious as far as the game goes. The thing on spotlight more of a contribute huge content, like DLC. Zeta was an example of this and from what I understand, I would say the Dev made that DLC for Lulz and Money.

From what ya been saying, it is most likely that ya keep saying "All-50s Movies" == Must be in Fallout and must be true" and not realize that.

Again with the USSR - USA conflict. Its already known they movies did a theme with this in mind, but ya keep saying they should add more things on aliens jsut because the movies they made in the 50s.

And blinders? Are ya sure ya the one not wearing them and not everyone else? Alien was taken was not really taken serious as far as Fallout concern. Its more likely that the idea that radiation == big things give a great amount of idea to work with, hence surviving of the fittest in the post-apocalyptic game. Same goes with robots. This show how much technology the humans of Fallout are capable of.

Naw, its just simple concept that radiation == grow big thing. There really no meaning to it.

From reading all this, I come to a conclusion of what ya trying to do:

Ya putting the Aliens on a Pedestal.

again no. not all 50s movies.. you even quoted me saying that i dont expect to see Gene Kelley doing a number from "singing in the rain".
i am certain i am not wearing blinders, quite the opposite, i have asked any of you to give me good reasoning why they dont fit and have done actual digging into the Fallout bible and 50's pulp.. im actively looking at this from many sides.


I will also point out again that im not saying they should be central protagonists/antagonist/plot devices.. only that all of this "this is against canon/lore/these dont fit in the FO universe" talk going around on the forums is IMHO completely unfounded. I still have yet any evidence that proves the contrary.... people saying things like "i just dont think they fit/too many people use them in other things" is hardly sufficient reasoning.

as for you mentioning robots and saying that they are there to showcase what technology we were capable of.. thats the up side of the same coin.. that technology gives us great things.. but the downside is what it aslo has the potential to be very bad if yeilded irresponsibly, by say making nuclear weapons and hernessing the power of the atom.



read the first post i made in this thread that discusses the 50's sci fi movies and how it was all about social commentary. there is a big meaning to it.. people were scared of what the ramifications to all of the nuclear/atomic testing we were doing could be.. thats where "those" came from.... from the idea that our weapons testing would backfire and creat giant creatures that would destroy us.. same with the day the earth stood still. its no coincidence that this move came out about the time we were creating weapons that could destroy everyone on the planet.. again it was bout our own power backfiring on us. Fallout is based on a lot of these movies. i dont understand how going back a step and realizing what those movies were beased on isnt an easy concept.




i am not putting aliens on a pedestal.. its more like this: since i have come to this fourm, they are being discounted by most around people here.. i am merely trying to give them a fair shot, because metaphorically, they are the same as many of the things in the game that people have no problems with.\




as far as all of this random encounter stuff. forget the easter eggs in one and 2..
forget MZ..

the crash site in the capitol wasteland wasnt a rondom encounter. its just there.

How would you implement them in the setting without them being completely detached from everything around them and at the same time not feeling glued over it? How would you present them if you just want to give them a fair shot and not spotlight them - if being a small random (or like in vanilla FO3) encounter isn't enough? And why do they need a fair shot when they clearly just mess things up - as presented with MZ?

These are some questions I've been asking my self while reading this thread and I haven't found a single answer that would feel natural to the setting. Fallout - in my eyes at least - isn't a 50's scifi simulator. :shrug:

tell me.. when you encounter a molerat in the wastes.;. does it have a greater purpose for being there? is it central to anything other than a small sidequest for moira? radroaches are the same.. not really central to anything, just creatures that exist and that you may run into from time to time, yet whose existance isnt disputed as not fitting or being just a joke.


of course it isnt a 50's sci-fi simulator., though 50's sci-fi is a huge part of it.
i am not sure how i can make myself much clearer on this, but its not the movies themselves. its the raw thinking that went into creating them.


paranoia of that era manifested as giant ants, robots that turn on us, blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons, communists not only taking over the country- but being amongst us already (McCarthyism)..... all of these things brought about by rocket and nuclear technoloty making leaps and bounds during this period.
that is what these movies are really about..

ive read from many people on here that say fallut should be about mans ruination of mankind, and the struggle that comes after.

all these movies did with mosters and aliens was allude to this-mans ruination..

i am trying here.. i know i am opinonated, but im definately trying..

Well I think your right. I mean that's the main reason I got F3. It wasn't the full exploration are unique weapons. It was just the lore.

I'm mean probaly one of my favorite quests is points lookouts Velvet curtain quest. Just the whole entire back story about chinese spies and stuff realy made it seem that a war took place 200 years ago.

As for the radiant monsters of the waste I alway take pride in spotting things like the rolemats look quite like shews from the movie ''Killer Shrews.''

So I enjoyed very much seeing the alien space ship and how it fit in with the 50s lore.

No they've no greater purpose but being monsters and references to 50's scifi. But they are part of the aftermath, a sideproduct of what man did to the planet, as they are man made - no great war, no radiation, no molerats and other creatures. Aliens, on the other hand, have to be brought in. They have nothing to do with what happened on the earth so they have to have a purpose for being present (if they are to be present in higher value than a small encounter baring no greater significance, that is); imo, they represent a different kind of scenario of the same subject - and in my eyes, thats just sidetracking for no good reason.



I don't mean to sound rude, but I think thats reading too much into the subject. You may be right about the thinking behind those movies, but I don't think the reason of the radiation-grows-animals-huge references being in Fallout is quite that complicated.



As are we all.

I've yet to hit up Mothership Zeta, but as for the crashed ship being a non-Random Encounter, that is true. It's always there, in exactly the same location. But it's like Rockopolis or Lucky's - an non-marked "Location of Interest". To me, that translates into a Modern Equivalent of Fallout 2's Bigger Encounters - The Bridge of Death and Cafe of Broken Dreams. While those locations moved from game to game (And sometimes within the same game - I encountered the Cafe about five times during one playthrough), Bethesda's game engine likely couldn't handle that kind of upheaval without some massive penalties. So, they were set down in a permanent location but could only be discovered via exploration.

But the fact it's there pre-existing in the game world doesn't make it suddenly "relevant" to the overall lore of Fallout. And seeing as how the DLC only activates once you encounter the craft, I'd still classify the whole thing as a glorified Random Encounter unless there's some dramatic alteration to the game world after completion of Mothership Zeta.

Some of ya previous comment is more of an indicating otherwise. Of course we would not expect a man walking down the street singing in the rain.

And like I say before, Aliens are not that sufficient to be taken serious as to the their existence in the Fallout Series. Are their alien in the Fallout World. Maybe or maybe not. Are they that sufficient to be an important to the Fallout world, not really. This can go with many of the would be 50's pop culture and events in our timeline. They are influential, but not to the point where its law that everything and everything from the 50s should be automatically attach to the Fallout World.


Its because aliens never has and never will be that very important in the Fallout World itself. Its not that of Fallout theme to begin with.



Shot ain't fair if the idea isn't that great or we would be one big happy family and everyone agree with everyone.

And Like I said before, finding that crash site is as equivalent as a random event. Sure its there, but if one did not even know it exist and stubble upon the crash site, boy its sure is random. Zeta wise, Its just there for Lulz and moneys from the Devs.


You are confusing with the ideal and message of what goes on with the movies and the ideal of what Fallout is. The influence of these Movies is to see all baddies are represented as USSR and the other Reds. Fallout is just the struggle for survival, using some 50s fiction into the mix, but I doubt the ideal of these fiction comes along with it. In the world of Fallout, people see radiation == grow big thing. They did not see the whole "it has a background story that monsters are USSR!!!" but instead, its just monsters that are just creatures that have high amount of radiation level. Its not that complicated.

Well since alien encounters are in every fallout game (wether they be random or not, that's beside the point) I'm pretty sure it is safe to say that they are in fact a part of the fallout universe. To me that is obvious and doesn't need discussion: Is it an alien? Yes. Is it in the fallout universe? Yes --> Part of the Fallout world.

Now things would be different if their is an actual alien invasion in FO:NV and you need to take a ship to their planet to share the joy of Atom's Glow on their home planet and have FO4 and beyond take place anywhere in the galaxy. That's ruining the series.

I (as a self proclaimed big fan) do not see what is wrong with adding aliens in this game. They've been seen before, got some more screen time this time around and we got some good loot, along with something else than raiders and supermutants.

That's not besides the point, that's precisely the point.

We could obviously talk in circles on this (as we already have).
I dont think youre gonna sway my opinion, and i wont sway yours, so i will agree to disagree with you.

I would like to point out (not neccesarily) that they are still counted as 'aliens' in both the kills and in the text i.e.:

"Alien recieves 346 damage and dances to the rythm of lead"

kills:
Aliens 36

even if they are possibly failed metats experiments you have to do some digging to discover that fact.

(Edit - Short Version of the below post:

All these retro and pop-culture references are from the world before the War, in the Fallout Universe. There's nothing "retro" about 2277 beyond what's been pieced together of it's burnt-out husk; all of the "it references the 50's because of X,Y and Z so it 'fits'" stuff belongs in a past that (by the time of Fallout 3) dissapeared 200 years ago. I fully believe aliens "fit" into the Pre-War culture of Fallout's universe (and I don't see any problem with them having visited that world,) but don't "belong" in the game's "present day."))

I really can't imagine there's anything to this topic that I haven't fully covered over in the other "Aliens" thread on this sub-forum, as far as my own opinion goes, but here's my own two cents on this, for what it's worth:

Not everything that was relevant as a retro pop-culture reference necessarily "belongs" in Fallout. I think we're oversimplifying things a bit if we were to say "anything that in any way has anything that could possibly be construed as being even marginally related to 50's pop-culture absolutely 'fits' in the Fallout Universe by sheer virtue of it's own existence." Fallout exists because in 2077 we blew up the "World of Tomorrow." All those pop-culture references and 50's throwbacks are (by the time of Fallout 3) 200 years in the past. They don't even exist "in" the game, so much as their charred corpses still do.

Anyone or thing found in the Wasteland still trying to emulate that style or sensibility is only doing so in the same way that various cultures for hundreds of years tried to emulate the Romans after their Fall (and in the same manner that Romans tried to borrow from the reflected greatness of the Greeks...) All these "retro" trends and references are in the past, during a game of Fallout - they don't reflect the world that your character and the denizens of the Wastes are living in, but provide a backdrop to serve as context for the current predicament; a contrast between the paranoid optimism of the 1950's and the harsh realities of the post-apocalyptic Wasteland.

In my view, anything with that "retro" vibe "belongs" in the Fallout Universe, but generally only as a burnt husk. None of that is relevant to your character's world - it's only the remnants of what's been lost to the world.

That's why, in Fallout 1, I thought the Crashed Alien Spaceship was a neat little random encounter. It left things wide open. Here we are the height of our civilization, and maybe these aliens were trying to make First Contact - or were contemplating such - when they were caught up in a Nuclear Armaggedon. The thing is, that it's still part of the "past," during that encounter. Ditto with any other alien claims that might be made through any of the other games, until Mothership Zeta.

In short, anything that references that retro aspect is relevant only to the "past" of the Fallout World, and doesn't necessarily belong in it's "present." Maybe there were Aliens around at some point, in the Earth's past life. But in 2277 the world has ended, and no intelligent being is going to be interested in some scattered conclaves of savages fighting for survival on the burnt-out husk of a once great and thriving civilization. Aliens at one point existing in Fallout's Universe (ie, before the War,) is something I don't have any problem with. But them being there "now" is something I don't see as fitting (because like I said, these "retro" references belong - for the most part - in the game's "past," as context for what has been lost.)

Anyway, that's my thought on the subject...

Sheesh you didn't have to throw the Good Book at me. I know when I am beat. I love you.

Well explain this then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iwFhq57o-M

So did the humans create a freaken Alein ship too lol.

No that called gamesas [censored] up again.

I just feel that getting picked up by little green men for a joyride in Fallout is kind of like hitching a ride with George Jetson in his flying car. Sure, it represents the retro sci-fi/ "World of Tomorrow" schtick, so it "fits" - but the particular implementation would be missing the "point." Which is that in the "contemporary" setting of Fallout during which the game itself takes place, Mr. Jetson is dead. George, his flying car, and the dream of a Technological Utopia, were all incinerated in atomic fire. They would only exist in "present day" Fallout as a burnt-out husk - all these "retro" references are only "relevant" to Fallout as the ghosts of the American Dream.

And Mothership Zeta is just a one-off thing. And it's optional. I think Bethesda was perfectly justified in having a bit of fun with their DLC, and it's up to the player to decide what they want to put in their game. It doesn't have to fit, and I don't have to be a fan of it. But I also don't see that specific DLC as incontrovertible proof of "relevance."

In my humble opinion you are leading the arguement that it is a matter of individual choice. You have even made it so clear Ive gotten giddy, fallen off my couch and my radiation level increased as I lay there laughing. At the same time I also find myself nodding in agreement to your more serious points to this arguement.

But what if it goes further? What if the guy in power armor on the cover of FO4 is holding an alien disintegrator and a massive lootable chunk of the blown up mothership is a map location and can be explored and there is a quest for the last Alien Epoxy left onboard to finish fixing Liberty Prime and while on this quest you have to fight some aliens? I mean it could happen...

rofl. the MZ discussion tops the fun anyone had playing MZ (or NOT playing MZ as some of you claim)...

The funny thing about easter eggs, sometimes they grow and become part of the lore. In warcraft 3 if you got into certain secret areas pictures of a Panda samuria would flash (Because the chief artist samwise has a furry fetish I guess?) nothing but easter eggs however the panda people caught on and low and behold in Warcraft 3 the frozen throne you get a hero called a pandarian brewmaster and it was part of canon.

The truth is Canon is whatever the owners of the franchises rights say it is. And so long as it doesn't svck (Fallout : Brotherhood of Steel) there is no problem. Mothership Zeta is not only canon but to me is stable canon, the aliens werent a central part of the story of Fallout 3. And also after the DLC had little impact even in who knew they exsisted.

Aliens are not relevant, they were a 1950's pop culture reference in the other games. Easter Eggs/Jokes. Beth took that joke and ruined it forever with Mothership Zeta. Most people that like Mothership Zeta have never played the other fallout games at least not before fallout 3. They wiki/google the other games and see the Easter eggs of FO1,FO2 and say "they are relevant!" People need to understand the point of easter eggs.

Sorry for going on a bit of a rant here but aliens ruin fallout.