Fuck. You. Bioware.

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Well, in the end I just ended up using the save editor. I was expecting to have to fiddle with code in text files, but it's literally just ticking a few boxes in a simple window and away we go. What I missed amounted ultimately to just Samara's recruitment mission and the achievement for recruiting her, ie. negligible. But that doesn't erase Bioware's unprofessionalism about the whole thing.

Having just finished Arrival and essentially done everything there's to do in the game before going to Mass Effect 3, there's a few things that stood up to me after playing ME2 again after all these years:

- The galaxy is way way way too big to justify its size. Extracting minerals from even a fifth of all the available planets will net you more resources than you'll ever be able to spend, and the occasional mini-side missions are way too sparse and short to warrant thorough exploration. They went with quantity over quality, which was lazy
- The binary paragon/renegade system is retarded, which we all knew already. It's just that seeing it for myself I was really rolling my eyes at points, which brings me to...
- Renegade Shepard is a badly written character, if a character at all. Playing even a partial renegade (let's say 50/50) makes him a schizophrenic, petty, flip-flopping, unprofessional, uncaring, inconsiderate, short-sighted, overly impulsive, amoral twat with no consistency in loyalty, philosophy or personal code. When I started this Shepard, I chose to play him as a traumatized war veteran disillusioned with the military, suspicious of any authority figures, and especially angered at abuses of power. This ultimately led me to the renegade path in ME1. But in ME2 playing that character became practically impossible, as Shepard's loyalty and motivations seemed to change on a dime. There were so many conversations where I thought "there's no way anyone would consider this dipshit the savior of the galaxy".
- The way Bioware went about the DLC was just lazy. This was still in the earlier years of the practice, so I can understand some of it, but then again Borderlands had at this point shown everyone how to do DLC right, so they're not off the hook. Dumping everything after a certain point removes all sense of narrative flow from some of them. Overlord and Firewalker are completely removed from the main plot and a bunch of fetch quests respectively, so they could be like that, but Shadow Broker and Arrival should only have been accessible after the suicide mission. Particularly Arrival, which leaves literally minutes away from the Reapers coming into the galaxy, and is more of a prologue to the third installment than anything to do with ME2.
- Again, our old friend Witcher 3 really has ruined this sort of thing for me: it stood out how little the dialogue or the world are altered after the suicide mission. If you leave conversations with members of the team unifinished, then do the suicide mission and then go back to them, they'll still talk like the mission is ahead. The Illusive Man will still send you messages with his whole "I trust you to do the right thing" shtick even after he essentially declares you a persona non grata. It would have been nice to see it addressed in some way at least.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

To an extent, I get this argument. There are certain parts of the game where you'd be rummaging around looking for stuff. But here's the issue, often that would also happen if you'd been given directions. There's always the danger of it becoming a hidden object game, and you'll always need some kind of solution to that.

All games should be hidden object to a certain extent. Getting the clue/device to interact with a real or purely mental challenge to proceed. It's the fundamental aspect of videogames and boardgames that just get gameplay right (like Netrunner... unrezzed ICE, and various means to circumvent them to penetrate a remote or central server that may or may not contain what you need to win). Obstructed views of the whole creates the investment in both plot, drama or a sense of progress.

It lay its foundation on probsbly the biggest emotional drivers in humans. Doubt and hope to effect meaningful change.

I like Euro games as much as thd next person (or at least others who like euro games)... but even in some of its best examples there is an element of the unknown, or of active problrm solving or adaptation as new clues to the whole present themselves.

See, you say that, but then I have to ask myself.. does that sound fun?

Like, none of the isometric fallout games ever did that. Sure, sometimes characters would tell you to go in a compass direction and you'd wander around saving regularly in case you wandered into an area where you'd get attacked by things which would either kill you or waste your ammo, but characters never lied to you unless there was going to be a payoff.

I mean, it's fallout.. not LA Noire, post-apocalyptic edition.

I can think of monents. Whether gaining a rope, looking for a cache that a character tells you about and you have to take it on faith it might be there, and so forth. You had to pay attention to your environments, otherwise you *failed*. I'm a big believer in the idea that fun is not a singular thing. It involves numerous things, some of which may not be present in a game that might heighten other aspects.

To bring it to the flipside....

I love the Close Combat series. Particulatly the second and third entries in the series.

That game can literally be described as 'unfair'. Ordering mortars to hit an 88 or lay down smoke screens to shield a major push for Son bridge because you need to take it and it's open ground... I've had fresh 60mm mortar crews, full ammunitio,n spend an entire battle trying to hit an 88mm and score 1 incapacitation. Within 180M of it, occulted only by s small hill and light tree cover. All battle.

Some games, with same maneuvers, with same probings with ad hoc rifle groups leading you'll assault successfully. Suffer only moderate casualties. Some games they might have an additional MG team you didn't know was there, isn't suppressed, and they'll cut your advance to ribbons and you'll lose the bridge. Permanently changing the rest of the campaign on all fronts.

And that's it.

The control you have to effect change hits that wall of unpredictability. With morale mechanics, how sneaking and hiding works, unpredictability of total enemy force composition, and simply whether that rifle unit throws their grenades first and scores that all too desireable first blood in an assault.

But control isn't what makes the games fun. It's about a pseudo-narrative you have created.

Fun is an ad hoc mix of componentry and in order to deliver it and make it stick with you.

Fun can be frustrating. Annoying. Might even makr you scream; "Come on!" As soldiers cower and perhaps even rout or surrender faster than you would of liked if you were relying on them simply checking the enemy elsewhere to allow your other units to outmanoeuvre. Dashing the rest of your battle plans. Snatching defeat from the jaws of a hard won victory as it were.

And it's satisfying in way if only for being reminded of the potential of your own frustration. Makes victory feel awesome, and defeat all the more crushing. If you're not paying attention, the game will mock you and tell you that you fucked up, should feel bad, and how the rest of the campaign is just that much harder because of your personal failings.

I'm not saying every game has to be like this. As I was saying, fun is a mixture of componentry and might even rely on removing one component to increase the stakes in another way. Giving you total control over your units would make me not play Close Combat...

But what a game should do... is increase the stakes if it decides to give you omniscience ala that bloody pipboy and quest beacons and nav guides and makes it core to navigating the game, a requirement of navigating the game. If it takes away an element of the unknown, it needs to deliver elsewhere somehow better. If you can't ... you shouldn't be curtailing suspense or the possibility of true frustration, otherwise you limit the capacity to do anything but deliver a middling, immemorable, blaise experience.

I really dislike most Metal Gear games barring MGS 3. But at least in those there id a consistently decent idea of problem solving (barring 5 which is god awful in every way). They have the idea of compartmentalized challenge, gambled risk taking, fluidity of puzzling environments requiring adaptation and the necessity of some sense of discovery or real concentration of the environments themselves as if a puzzle.

If it wasn't for the story and narration, they'd be decent games.

MGS and the way it handles navigstion is not only more direct thsn FO3, but each direction and navigable 'strait of experience' from point A to point B tailored and crafted for the player to 'unlock'.

I disagree..

The old fallout games weren't sombre. They were incredibly silly. I mean, fallout sort of had a grounding, but by the time of fallout 2 we've well and truly boarded the train to loopy town. I mean, you could say there's an element of exploration with following characters directions to find new settlements and locations, but in the 3D fallout games you're still doing much the same thing, only instead of being given a compass direction you're given a compass point. Fallout is ultimately a series about absurd violence, pop culture references and questionable attitudes to women. It's a series where the good and bad people literally may as well be wearing white and black hats a lot of the time (and that extends to you, characters react to your karma score even if they've never met you) it's not really about learning who you can trust in a dangerous world.

A part of me agrees? I think the nature of its history doesn't tell a narration that is actually all that divorced from reality if we're talking a society stuck as if in the 1950s due to a technological... barrier ... I guess you could call it? Something about transistors.

If you've seen stuff from the 1950s, how people discussed things like nuclear war as if inevitable and the downright pathological fear of ideology rather than the reality of geostrategy and a world of growingly close global trade and consumption reducing the desire for war, I think Fallout delivers an uncomfortably true argument of just how 'silly' people were. You had #VerySmartPeople saying things like; "And once after a period of 30 years nations can set the stages for World Wars 4 and 5..."

The American and Soviet centric insanity concerning the 1950s is difficult to satirize without seeming silly... in a sense.

There's a documentary produced in 1963(?) called The War Game made by 60s era British anti-Nuclear movements which detailed a lot of these televised snipoets of insane rhetoric of these people juxtaposed by the (assumed) realities of a strategic exchange.

This was during the time when you needed a Turkey or a Cuba to reliably hit shit with missiles. Intermediate ballistic missile age of nuclear warfare strategy that placed its focus on bombers as basically the 'ender of civilization' and poisoning the rest of the world with critical volumes of Strontium 90 through a combination of air and ground burst weapons.


Why ground burst? Because both nations began heavily investing in hardened targets. And because ground bursting is a uniquely terrible thing longterm even after whatever a suffering 'enemy' could still be classed as just that, well two can play that game once nuclear munitions reached sufficient volumes as to allow it.

Both the Soviets and the U.S. had well and truly (for its own purpose alone) created systems both to achieve local optimal overpressure rates of an amount equal to +10 PSI, and the gyros, timers and what-not to trigger at specific heights. Both Fat Man and Little Boy were airburst at different heights, as an example. Yet they were still experimenting with ground burst means for this reason. Despite knowing full well we were poisoning the planet doing so.

And this was the world we lived in. The age where both the Soviets and the U.S. knowingly created and distributed tactical nuclear weapons systems, that if deployed, had a maximum effective terminus point that would lethally irradiate (if not destroy) not only the forward guard defending their position... but irradiate the crews using them. This was the age where American Zone West German generals and politicians wanted these systems in the *thousands* despite the reality any sudden Soviet push would mean their deployment would still be over West German soil. Not merely nuking Soviets and East German troops, nuking West German civilians, their own rearguard, and their own border guard.

I don't think Fallout could be any less silly without also losing that idea of channeling a society stuck in the 50s.

It's satirical, not silly. Or at least satire taken to the degree of near slapstick. But I don't think it is merely silly.

Silly would be Liberty Prime as if presented as if a realistic weapons platform project... satire is presenting something like a Liberty Prime as if a statement of how uniquely messed up 1950's American rhetoric and arms manufacturing actually was.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I don't think Fallout could be any less silly without also losing that idea of channeling a society stuck in the 50s.

It's satirical, not silly.

Some things which happened in fallout 2, excluding easter eggs, off the top of my head..

* The chosen one searches for a lost child in a well, with the aid of a dog based on the TV show Lassie. Upon finding coins in the well, they repeat a quote the movie "the Goonies".
* The chosen one gets involved in an underground boxing ring in New Reno run by a dwarf promoter, and ends up fighting a boxer known as "Mike the masticator" who is known for biting off his opponents ears. If the fight goes on too long, he bites off the chosen one's ear in the ring in a reference to an incident involving Mike Tyson.
* The chosen one encounters a religious cult known as the hubologists, a parody of scientology. They go through an orientation seminar directed by two porn stars from New Reno who are a reference to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidmann, who reference sexualized movie titles based on the respective filmographies of their real life counterparts.
* The chosen one discover some ghouls playing a card game called "Tragic: The Garnering", which seems to have absurdly complex rules and includes cards such as Vox Muby and Black Dahlia. After playing it, the chosen one finds they can only resist another game with great effort.
* The chosen one teams up with a group of human supermacist terrorists including a descendent of Charles Manson to murder all the super mutants in a small town (this one isn't funny, but is more to show how casually the game takes even relatively dark source material and extremely questionable coding of that material - Charles Manson was a white supremacist who believed in an impeding race war between white and black people in America).

I'll reply properly when I have more time, but yeah.. Fallout is very silly.

 

[Kae]

Bioware has never been a good developers.

Baldur's Gate II and KOTOR Man.

Never played BG2 but I've recently gone back to play KOTOR and it's pretty crap, mostly because of the binary morality, it cheapens your decisions because everything is good or evil which leads to some stupid writing, such as when you have to cooperate with one of the Swoop bike gangs in Taris, even though they are both gangs one of the groups are practically saints and the other brutal homicidal maniacs, it's really dumb infantile writing and I really couldn't stand it, I understand it's significance but it's most certainly not good.

 

[jademunky]

Bioware has never been a good developers.

Baldur's Gate II and KOTOR Man.

Never played BG2 but I've recently gone back to play KOTOR and it's pretty crap, mostly because of the binary morality, it cheapens your decisions because everything is good or evil which leads to some stupid writing, such as when you have to cooperate with one of the Swoop bike gangs in Taris, even though they are both gangs one of the groups are practically saints and the other brutal homicidal maniacs, it's really dumb infantile writing and I really couldn't stand it, I understand it's significance but it's most certainly not good.

Well, the KOTOR writing might've been shit, but the binary morality does make sense in this context. It is Star Wars after all. The bad guys are all SPACE NAZIS!

Although the moral choice system does dick itself over pretty well near the end where you get faced with a choice that makes all your other choices, nomatter how good or evil, completely irrelevant.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Some things which happened in fallout 2, excluding easter eggs, off the top of my head..

* The chosen one searches for a lost child in a well, with the aid of a dog based on the TV show Lassie. Upon finding coins in the well, they repeat a quote the movie "the Goonies".
* The chosen one gets involved in an underground boxing ring in New Reno run by a dwarf promoter, and ends up fighting a boxer known as "Mike the masticator" who is known for biting off his opponents ears. If the fight goes on too long, he bites off the chosen one's ear in the ring in a reference to an incident involving Mike Tyson.
* The chosen one encounters a religious cult known as the hubologists, a parody of scientology. They go through an orientation seminar directed by two porn stars from New Reno who are a reference to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidmann, who reference sexualized movie titles based on the respective filmographies of their real life counterparts.
* The chosen one discover some ghouls playing a card game called "Tragic: The Garnering", which seems to have absurdly complex rules and includes cards such as Vox Muby and Black Dahlia. After playing it, the chosen one finds they can only resist another game with great effort.
* The chosen one teams up with a group of human supermacist terrorists including a descendent of Charles Manson to murder all the super mutants in a small town (this one isn't funny, but is more to show how casually the game takes even relatively dark source material and extremely questionable coding of that material - Charles Manson was a white supremacist who believed in an impeding race war between white and black people in America).

I'll reply properly when I have more time, but yeah.. Fallout is very silly.

I'm not sure if you've lost interest in the conversation, but if you don't mind me replying to at least one part of your argument in the meantime.

Okay ... it's very silly and makes a lit of then contemporary pop culture references. But I think there's an important delineation between jokes and thematic framing and worldbuilding. Kind of like a colourful character doesn't necessarily mean a depiction of the whole... but rather help orientate the character to the eccentricities that thst world allows.

The Manson thing is kind of important (if badly mangled and managed I agree) discussion given the worldbuilding that Super Mutants have transcended their motivations of people like the Master within the first game. And the struggle of finding commonality of being after a violent past that has its roots in a distant past. Much like our one... and helps frame the argument there is still work to do. That the past still colours gheir world, helps align the world to the actions of t he PC in the first game.

 

[Trunkage]

I don't think Fallout could be any less silly without also losing that idea of channeling a society stuck in the 50s.

It's satirical, not silly.

Some things which happened in fallout 2, excluding easter eggs, off the top of my head..

* The chosen one searches for a lost child in a well, with the aid of a dog based on the TV show Lassie. Upon finding coins in the well, they repeat a quote the movie "the Goonies".
* The chosen one gets involved in an underground boxing ring in New Reno run by a dwarf promoter, and ends up fighting a boxer known as "Mike the masticator" who is known for biting off his opponents ears. If the fight goes on too long, he bites off the chosen one's ear in the ring in a reference to an incident involving Mike Tyson.
* The chosen one encounters a religious cult known as the hubologists, a parody of scientology. They go through an orientation seminar directed by two porn stars from New Reno who are a reference to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidmann, who reference sexualized movie titles based on the respective filmographies of their real life counterparts.
* The chosen one discover some ghouls playing a card game called "Tragic: The Garnering", which seems to have absurdly complex rules and includes cards such as Vox Muby and Black Dahlia. After playing it, the chosen one finds they can only resist another game with great effort.
* The chosen one teams up with a group of human supermacist terrorists including a descendent of Charles Manson to murder all the super mutants in a small town (this one isn't funny, but is more to show how casually the game takes even relatively dark source material and extremely questionable coding of that material - Charles Manson was a white supremacist who believed in an impeding race war between white and black people in America).

I'll reply properly when I have more time, but yeah.. Fallout is very silly.

Have you got a similar list for Fallout 1? All these quests I remember were incredibly stupid in my eyes. Putting them into a list of pop culture references like this has shown me something. I have multiple reasons why F1 was great and F2 is terrible. This might be a piece I'm missing.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Okay ... it's very silly and makes a lit of then contemporary pop culture references. But I think there's an important delineation between jokes and thematic framing and worldbuilding.

Yeah, this is why I put the Charles Manson thing in, because that's not a joke. It's not funny, and even as a child I remember finding it slightly uncomfortable despite not really knowing the full cultural significance (which makes it worse, not better). What it is, though, is a perfect example of how ridiculous and over the top Fallout's writing in general is. This group of anti-mutant terrorists couldn't just be small minded racists, they had to have the descendent of a literal racist serial killer in the group to bring it home and make sure you "get" the themes.

And the struggle of finding commonality of being after a violent past that has its roots in a distant past. Much like our one... and helps frame the argument there is still work to do. That the past still colours their world, helps align the world to the actions of the PC in the first game.

I think you're trying to find ways to make this better or to give it an narrative and emotional depth which I really don't think the depiction in the game itself actually has. The thing is, you could do this with modern games too.

Needless to say, that list could have been a lot longer if I'd just included examples of cheesy or expedient writing. Fallout 2 bears a unique distinction (alongside being one of the first games I got properly obsessed with) of being the first time my teenaged, horny and decidedly un-SJWey self realised that geek culture and the game industry might have a problem with women. You can choose to interpret it as clever commentary, but why give a game the benefit of the doubt?

Have you got a similar list for Fallout 1? All these quests I remember were incredibly stupid in my eyes. Putting them into a list of pop culture references like this has shown me something. I have multiple reasons why F1 was great and F2 is terrible. This might be a piece I'm missing.

The big problem with fallout 1 is that I actually don't remember it that well. I never owned a personal copy of it growing up and I never became as obsessed with it as I did with fallout 2. Needless to say, Fallout 1 was a lot more limited in scope, and it's clear that a lot of the dialogue and writing was more economical.

But yes, from what I remember Fallout 1 did have a more consistently dark tone, and that silly bits and pop culture references were usually overtly fourth wall breaking jokes. There are exceptions though, Loxley is an incredibly silly character.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Yeah, this is why I put the Charles Manson thing in, because that's not a joke. It's not funny, and even as a child I remember finding it slightly uncomfortable despite not really knowing the full cultural significance (which makes it worse, not better). What it is, though, is a perfect example of how ridiculous and over the top Fallout's writing in general is. This group of anti-mutant terrorists couldn't just be small minded racists, they had to have the descendent of a literal racist serial killer in the group to bring it home and make sure you "get" the themes.

That's true ... as I said, managed in a bad way. I think it would have been more clever to allude, rather take a sledgehammer, that the semantics and justifications of the old can and will inflict upon the future if lessons are not learnt.

That requires vigilance in order not to repeat past horrors.

I think you're trying to find ways to make this better or to give it an narrative and emotional depth which I really don't think the depiction in the game itself actually has. The thing is, you could do this with modern games too.

Needless to say, that list could have been a lot longer if I'd just included examples of cheesy or expedient writing. Fallout 2 bears a unique distinction (alongside being one of the first games I got properly obsessed with) of being the first time my teenaged, horny and decidedly un-SJWey self realised that geek culture and the game industry might have a problem with women. You can choose to interpret it as clever commentary, but why give a game the benefit of the doubt?

I never said it was clever. Just like I won't ever say Monty Python was ever clever. But it did deliver some finer points particularly in its more coherrent moments. You know those whole 8 episodes that are decent amidst a whole lot of episodes which are utter trash. But I'll take a jovial worldbuilding over one that doesn'teven attempt to provide appropriate worldbuilding ala FO3 and FO4. The Enclave makes no sense in FO3. Its goals make no sense. Its 'super'computer makes no fucking sense. Their intentions make no sense. Its means of achieving its objectives is McGuffin-y AND make no sense.

You can forgive one of those two, not both.

Like you can forgive the Master Sword and the necessity of it to defeating Ganondorf. Just like you can forgive 'magic' as an explanation of being able to rain fireballs on people in D&D ... but you can't forgive a DM that makes an adventure McGuffin-y (you need to find the amulet to stop the thing), not when the story then contradicts itself.

 

[Kae]

Bioware has never been a good developers.

Baldur's Gate II and KOTOR Man.

Never played BG2 but I've recently gone back to play KOTOR and it's pretty crap, mostly because of the binary morality, it cheapens your decisions because everything is good or evil which leads to some stupid writing, such as when you have to cooperate with one of the Swoop bike gangs in Taris, even though they are both gangs one of the groups are practically saints and the other brutal homicidal maniacs, it's really dumb infantile writing and I really couldn't stand it, I understand it's significance but it's most certainly not good.

Well, the KOTOR writing might've been shit, but the binary morality does make sense in this context. It is Star Wars after all. The bad guys are all SPACE NAZIS!

Although the moral choice system does dick itself over pretty well near the end where you get faced with a choice that makes all your other choices, nomatter how good or evil, completely irrelevant.

I get it, however it's contemporary shooter Star Wars Games on the Jedi Knight series did a much better job of that without seeming so childish even if it was cheesy, and even though that's hardly complex it at least manages to be more complex than KOTOR is for the most part, so I don't think that's a particularly good excuse.

 

[Trunkage]

I never said it was clever. Just like I won't ever say Monty Python was ever clever. But it did deliver some finer points particularly in its more coherrent moments. You know those whole 8 episodes that are decent amidst a whole lot of episodes which are utter trash. But I'll take a jovial worldbuilding over one that doesn'teven attempt to provide appropriate worldbuilding ala FO3 and FO4. The Enclave makes no sense in FO3. Its goals make no sense. Its 'super'computer makes no fucking sense. Their intentions make no sense. Its means of achieving its objectives is McGuffin-y AND make no sense.

You can forgive one of those two, not both.

I think I saw earlier that you hadn't played, F1 or 2. If so, don't touch them because they have all three as well.

In case you haven't, let me take some stupidity from F:NV. To live in House's Paradise, you have to turn yourself into a 50s stereotype. Even the ones that abandoned that life and wanted to be free remained 1950s. The isolated bomb-freaks. Another 1950 stereotype. As for Caeser's, what he says doesn't match up with reality, and that is not part of the storyline. It's like there was two separate writers and they never spoke to each other. They had a big camp on Fortification Hill. How was that being supplied across a desert? After being defeated, why wasn't he overthrown? That was a common thing for a leader that defines himself by his wins. And he still says no guns after losing? If House was worried about outsiders, why wouldn't you have multiple plans for defence?

I would love to poke holes at the stupidity of all the factions in NV. Let me just sum it by saying - it doesn't impress me much. Nor does it discount Enclave, Super Mutant or Brotherhood shenanigans in the Capital Wasteland

 

[Terminal Blue]

The Enclave makes no sense in FO3. Its goals make no sense. Its 'super'computer makes no fucking sense. Their intentions make no sense. Its means of achieving its objectives is McGuffin-y AND make no sense.

So, at what point in Fallout 2 did the Enclave make sense?

I mean, they literally had the same goals anhd the same methods. Exterminate the mutants and near humans and repopulate the wasteland with the tiny number of purestrain humans left (meaning basically the remaining vault inhabitants and the enclave personnel). The means of doing this, "The Project" involved releasing a modified strain of FEV (originally intended as a bioweapon rather than a mutagen) to "sweep clean" mainland America in preparation for resettlement. The effectiveness of the toxin was explicitly linked to the degree of FEV exposure, just like in Fallout 3.

This information was much harder to obtain in Fallout 2 and one could easily go through the plot assuming that the Enclave were just bad dudes who needed to be stopped because reasons.

Frank Horrigan (the giant super mutant enforcer of a society that hates mutants and who is named after a Clint Eastwood character, because this is a serious game) even explicitly states as part of his death speech that the work will go on, implying there are other Enclave bases which were also working on weaponizing FEV as a means of accomplishing the goal of wiping out the mutant and near-human population. In this sense, the Enclave in fallout 3 are actually one of the few things which are relatively consistent in portrayal between Fallout 2 and Fallout 3. There are two elements to their depiction in Fallout 3 which really don't work.

1) The general emphasis on scaling the game to the players level made the Enclave less intimidating. In Fallout 2 they were endgame enemies who you only had a chance of fighting if you'd gone through the whole game, Fallout 3 had you mowing down individual Enclave soldiers left and right, which didn't give the impression either of this big technologically advanced threat whom even the Brotherhood of steel were afraid of, or that you were fighting enemies who cared about manpower or conserving the last few purestrain humans on the planet (despite this being their entire point).

2) The enclave in fallout 3 lack any kind of foreshadowing, but they also lack any kind of subtlety. Both were a big part of the portrayal of the enclave in fallout 2. You only encountered or fought the enclave if you went looking for them and intruded on places you shouldn't be, which were strictly endgame areas. Until then, all you really had to go on (other than one really out of context cutscene where you meet Horrigan and he doesn't kill you because bad writing) were clues.

However, there's a twist in the tale here, because while I really didn't like Fallout 3 and never have, I don't think all of its problems can be blamed on them not getting the setting or themes. I think 90% of it, actually, is down to fan nostalgia. See, people don't remember the Brotherhood of Steel as paranoid losers hoarding shit in their bunker because reasons, they remember them as awesome techno-knights who helped you take down the super mutant menace in fallout 1. People don't remember the enclave as reclusive scientists and bad political stereotypes dedicated to a goal of biological warfare and genocide in a vain effort to recapture a world which they hadn't left their oil rig long enough to know was dead, they remember them as badass marines in black power armour who gave zero fucks. They don't remember President Richardson, they remember Sergeant Dornan and Frank Horrigan.

Fallout 3 set out to give Fallout fans the experience they remembered, and for the most part it succeeded and they loved it. New Vegas, despite being a far more literal sequel to Fallout 2 (and in my opinion a far better game), banked far less on nostalgia and came away with a worse metacritic and a weaker fan response.

Nostalgia blurs our perception of old games and conceals weaknesses in story and writing. Fallout 3 retconned the brotherhood because Fallout did such a bad job explaining who the brotherhood were that most players literally remembered them as the good guys (actually Fallout Tactics did this first, but noone remembers Fallout Tactics). Fallout 3 misuses the Enclave because Fallout 2 did such an awful job of actually explaining the Enclave that all anyone remembers is the black power armour and how tough they were to fight. Fallout 3 is a bad game (in my opinion) but that doesn't mean Fallout and Fallout 2 were actually the pinnacles of gaming or storytelling.