Agreed on the first part. Not the second, though. They were only given two years to make an incredibly ambitious game. Lots of things that they'd have liked to include were inevitably going to be cut. You know how big an undertaking it would have been to add satisfying post-game content. That would have taken a ridiculously long time to add in. Time that they didn't have. Considering how early they announced the closed-ending, that cut dialogue was probably from a concept they toyed with very early in development, and they rightly decided against using it.

Obsidian finished the game. Just because more could have been included doesn't mean that they didn't finish it.

Year and a half actually.

And that's no one problem but their own.

I don't consider a game where 99% of what I do amounts to nothing in the game itself to be finished.

I would much rather have a game with fewer, and smaller, consequences, that can actually be put in-game, rather then one with larger ones that cannot. At least in the former I get to experience them.

That is why greatly prefer Broken Steel over the original ending, it actually makes what you do mean something in the game.

I hope not. Fallout New Vegas had it right and Fallout 3 had it almost right. Their saving grace in Fallout 3 was the ending and sacrifice. Unfortunately they butchered the ending with Broken Steel. Fallout has always had ending sliders depicting the consequences and that's how it should remain.

I don't understand why people need to play after the game is finished. Why not play the game before the ending? Why not make multiple playthroughs?

I don't understand why you didn't feel the need to read through this very thread where every single thing you said has been debunked.

Also, yet another person who forgot Fallout 2 exists. Did some mad scientist go back in time and kill Black Isle before they made that game or something?

To be fair, I've never played the first two Fallout games. I was introduced to the series via Fallout 3.

Yeah I don't see it either why a (good made there are sure things to improve) FO2 solution is so disregarded.

Well I mean there's a shocking amount of people who claim to know what the "true Fallout" is and what "Fallout tradition" is and that FO3 is the only one in the series with a post-game.. and they all forget FO2 had a post-game too.

What if i want to do the settlement quest after the ending slides have already played though? The ending slide tells me that townsville withered and died because no one could fix their many problems...but after i shoot/talk the main villian to death, i come back to save the town...but the town supposedly withered and died! See the problem?

The solution would be to not mention the settlement in the ending, but i think thats a lame alternative. And its not a matter of IMMERSION (an overused word) but a matter of closure. I want to know my actions affected the world, good and bad.

It wouldn't!

I would like it, but I dont think it would appease people.

Games have far too often taught players to believe that every fart should have immediate earth shaking consequences. Giving players ending slideswill just cause people to whine they didn't get everything promised in them immediately after the game ended, and the post ending gameplay began, no matter how much time it would logically take for them to really come into effect, be it months or years.

We would just be trading one topic of debate for another.

I suppose what constitutes "many" is subjective, but this seems like an absurd statement to me. The five main endings alone lead to an insane amount of different consequences in almost every inhabited location in the game. Legion wins? Vegas is turned into Ceaser's Rome. People are crucified, some communities live in fear or peace while others are trampled into dust. That's a far cry from House winning and turning Vegas into an economic powerhouse with the NCR wrapped around its finger. Or maybe you destroyed the securitrons and shut down the dam, turning the entire land into an anarchic desert with little value to any major power.

That's just some of the main choices. We also have the Great Khans. Did they leave? The Omertas attack Vegas during the final battle if we don't prevent it. Is the embassy gone? Did they gas the citizens and kill everyone? What about the Fiend attacks on Camp McCaren. I could go on and on. This game has an absurd number of possible choices, and they would play off each other and change depending on other choices you make. That's why we have ending slides, because expecting to see the results of all this 'in-game' once the actual story is over is delusional.

I don't see the problem. If you want to see that ending, then save the settlement before ending the main quest.

Otherwise, it's just what would've happened had you not intervened at a later date.

Heh. Seriously, you have to find a new way to put it. I'm smiling here and if I'm smiling I'm not taking this discussion seriously and WILL start going all sarcastic on you. I can't call someone who works that many hours a week lazy. That's stupid. An oversight? Perhaps. Overly ambitious? Sure. I agreed with another poster in this thread who said the same thing. But not lazy.

Regardless, whether you believe it wouldn't have taken much work to change it doesn't really matter. The simple fact is they only had a year + couple months time to work on this game. Speculation really isn't something I'm willing to do with game development. I'm not going to pretend like I know what I am talking about. So I'm still going to go with the opinion of not feasible.

Believe me if there was another way for both you and I can be happy, I'd take it with flying colors.

Heh. I stand corrected. I don't remember Fallout 2 all that well.

I did read every comment in fact. Just because I didn't feel anything you said actually carried weight doesn't mean I didn't. I've also played every game in the series aside from PoS so... Nothing that you've said has, in any way, debunked the atrocity to the narrative that was Broken Steel.

Obsidian did it right.

It's simple. If you don't do the quest in your main playthrough. Correct you don't get the ending slides when you complete your game. Simple as that. You had no influence for that town so why you should get slides for that.

And no you don't get ending slides too if you play after the mainquest. How often got I told btw that IMMERSION is overrated .

Doesn't matter what you consider. They made a game that clearly doesn't cater to your preferences. That doesn't make them wrong for it.
They let you play out a story. What comes after isn't part of their story. It's the aftermath.

Personally, I liked this story way better than 3's because what we did was actually a big deal. It felt significant, and the nice little epilogue/ending slides they give us proved that our actions had weight.

What timescales are we talking about here? Does Vegas get overrun by Caesar in a day? Do the Khans up and get out right away? Does House revamp Vegas right away?

You don't HAVE to do everything in the post game, the same way the capitol wasteland didn't become a happy recovered land right after the water purifier went online.

You're just overthinking things to a massive degree. To the extent that I could use the same logic to ask what the hell was the Courier doing all that time in the Sierra Madre or Big MT or chasing after Ulysses' dreadlocked ass while Caesar's Legion was about to storm Hoover Dam?

Eh, thats lame. Whats gained by continuing the main quest? I mean do the cops (or equivalent) give you high fives? Do random people give you junk you don't want on the street? Do hokers quit charging you for their services? Or what if i take the evil/pragmatic path? Probably nothing.

I just don't see whats gained, compared to butchering the story so your character can dike around the wastes for a few more months.

This is all speculation, for all i know the end of the main quest might not be dramatic, or world shaking. Maybe you can't effect the world in anyway, good or bad. It would be a shame if it was that way though

That moment when you realize half will be terribly annoyed, and the other will be mildly pleased...Over such a tiny thing.

The ending slides' point isn't just to tell you what you did, but to provide the narrative consequence which, if done right, might occasionally contradict your intent during the game. Say you wanted to save the village, and you did, but only for a time being due to X actions during that or another questline. Say you left the place alone (to destroy afterwards), but your actions somewhere else cause it to proper, or be already raided.

New Vegas's ending slides do, for the most part, depict the immediate future. Why would Ceaser wait to invade Vegas after takin Hoover Dam? House just got a securitron army. Is he just gonna leave half of it at the Fort? No, the slides actually show that he doesn't. We play in an interesting and volatile time in the Mojave Wasteland. Things ARE changing drastically and quickly. That's what happens when so many large powers suddenly clash in a relatively small area.

I never said that the war itself is all happening at once. The things following most ending slides revolve directly around the Battle for Hoover Dam. It is the big event that acts as a catalyst for so much else to kick off and occur. The Courier getting kidnapped by robots or Dog/God and taken away from the main conflict doesn't really have anything to do with it, because the main conflict is still raging on at that point. Once Hoover Dam has happened though, all bets are off. That's made abundantly clear throughout the game, and especially in the ending slides.

That's exactly why I hated NV's story TBH.

It plays into every single terrible RPG trope, "a common mailman suddenly gets to decide the fate of two large established nations for basically no reason then >muh ego."

One of the things I liked most about Fo3's plot and ending, especially Broken Steel's additions, was how much is subverted every [censored] self-serving expectation that RPGs usually give the player in regards to actions and the immediacy and severity of their consequences.

-Did the BoS rush held long into some dumb battle simply because your dad died? Nope.

-Who did most of the heavy lifting against the Enclave? You, a random waster who barely has any experience with gun, or a giant machine of death made to kill [censored] everything? The latter.

-What happens when the purifier is turned on? Does everything magically change in an instant to serve the player's ego, or does it simply begin a slow process that would result in change down the line? the second one.

As much of a literal Jesus allegory Fallout 3 was, it somehow managed to be less of a power fantasy, "the world revolves around you", game then NV was.

Then we'll just have to disagree, because I much prefer it when the events of the game matter. You play as a godlike beast in both games, and do things that go far beyond what can reasonably expected of a normal human. To me it only makes sense that someone who accomplishes so much makes an impact on their world.

I like for our actions to matter, but not for them to matter in such a way in that its obviously just there to stoke the player's ago.

A similar situation as Fo3 occurred in Skyrim.

-You go to the Nordic version of heaven.

-Beat the ever loving [censored] out of the closest thing the Nords have to Satan.

-Kill the one thing that was allowing dragons to come back en mass.

-Save not only the world of the living, but the souls of the dead as well.

And after it all, the dragons give you some weird chant/thank you speech, and then fly off...... and basically no one else knows you actually did anything at all.

You get to live with the knowledge you did something REALLY important, but the entire world doesn't go into one giant collective circlejerk over your actions like it did in Morrowind or NV's endings. Its an event of major importance, that saved millions of lives, but it doesn't result in everything just changing instantly to serve the whim and egos of players wanting everything to revolve around them after doing stuff.

Its also the reason I utterly despise companion quests like those in Mass Effect or NV, and post ending slideshows in general.

I am not 12 year old and never played a Fallout game. You know that and you also know how it was meant (at least I assume so). Yes sure if the story is if the player didn't interact with the town at all it is doomed sure he gets the bad one. I was talking from a technical viewpoint (in case you didn't understand).