Skyrim vs Fallout 3 GO!

[The_Blue_Rider]

Yes yes I get it, you really like Fallouts locations, the thing is, I never said that theyre all samey as you seem to think, I just said that to someone who has never played it, they probably wouldnt be able to identify the places quickly.

And good job on sidestepping the question completely

I'm just explaining what I liked about them. They're different and unique. Skyrim just has one walled medieval city after another. There's no real personality to it. Someone could see that each settlement is distinctly different beyond having to identify that this walled medieval city is heavily inspired as eastern European, while this other one is obviously Scandinavian. The visual ascetics of the settlements in Fallout 3 add to the personality of the population. Skyrim is just a walled city full of people who don't like cat and lizard people.

And you seem very confrontational over something so trivial.

So are you two actually gonna offer any evidence for these deep characters or are you just gonna continue contradicting eachother?

Also Im gonna quickly agree with SajuukKhar, all the cities in Skyrim are very visually distinct, and If you claim otherwise, there might be something wrong with your eyesight. Sure someone whos never played the game may not be able to tell the difference, but Im sure they also wouldnt be able to tell which places were which in Fallout.

OT: I like them both, and they're very different experiences, but I think Skyrim slightly beats out Fallout. If only ever so slightly.

See that bit in bold? You know the part with the question mark? That was a genuine question, Im interested in finding out an example of a well done Fallout character from you since all you've done is bash Skyrim's characters instead of providing evidence for your own point.

Also what do you mean confrontational? Im just adding my two cents on the matter, besides its a forum, discussion is sort of the point.

You're very clearly attacking people. It's not just adding your thoughts to a discussion if you're making aggressive comments. If you're not aware what that means, there's a good chance you have a problem with hurting people's feelings when you talk to them in real life.

But, if you'd like a few good examples of deep characters in Fallout, I can provide quite a few good ones. I may stick with New Vegas since that was the most recent one I played.

Veronica
She's one of my favorites to do this with. She's more than just a sarcastic idealist of the Brotherhood of Steel. Her views on how they Brotherhood should act in the Mojave are directly opposed to the views of the Elder. She wants them to open the Bunker and start trading with the Mojave because she knows they won't last another 2 generations if they stay isolated. That headbutting with the Elder made her a sort of pariah in the Bunker and is what lead her to leaving. Her personality is rather non-chalant and snarky, but when she's talking about her views on what she thinks the Bunker should do, she couldn't be more serious. Once you go through her quest of looking for evidence to prove to the Elder the Bunker should be opened, you can either tell her to stay with the brotherhood or to leave them and to join the Followers of the Apocalypse. If you tell her to stay by her family, eventually the Brotherhood ends the feud they've had with the NCR. If you convince her the Brotherhood will never change and they'll always stay secretive and cloistered, a group of Brotherhood Knights and Paladins decimate a Followers of Apocalypse outpost for "corrupting" one of their scribes.

Pacer
He seems pretty simple when you first meet him. He's the number two of the Kings, the faction that runs Freeside. But once you start doing jobs for The King, you realize Pacer has been trouble for some time, but he's still loyal to the group. Eventually, you get caught up in a shootout Pacer started with a group of NCR relief workers who were providing food to the "squatters" Pacer so despises. He may seem kind of like a classic "Starscream", but he doesn't lust for power or want to overthrow The King. He wants to look out for Freeside and the "native" people who live there. You also discover his secret deals with the Van Graffs. All things considered,he probably deserves the "evil karma" he has.

Corporal Betsy
Seemingly your standard hard nosed military type and member of the First Recon. But if you ask around, you'll find out her story and her past with a particularly nasty character by the name of Cook-Cook. After claiming the bounty on Cook-Cook, you start talking to Betsy and her friends around Camp McCarren and realize her personality changed after her run in with the Fiends. Going through dialogue with her either trauma is just another war would that should be healed or by telling her that her trauma makes her the weak link and puts her friends in danger, she'll get counciling. Talking to her after that, she'll be noticably nicer and not immediately snap at you, and thank you for convincing her to get fixed. It's a legitimate character arc that the player is in direct control over.

Im not trying to be insulting, I was legitimately curious, I saw your discussion with SajuukKhar, and I just noticed how you didnt really back up your points about developed characters with evidence, I wanted to see if you actually had anything.

Im glad to you say you werent just making baseless arguments. I will concede that Skyrim doesnt have any characters really on the level that Fallout New Vegas had, but you can chalk that up to them focusing on different things.

I am interested though, which parts make it seem like Im attacking you?

 

[MercurySteam]

I have no idea how people compare Fallout 3 onwards to the Elder Scrolls games. One has a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting while the other is a fantasy setting. They're both action/adventure RPG's developed and published by Bethesda and that's where the similarities end. The main division we'll see is those who like sci-fi games over fantasy games and vice versa.

My vote goes to RAGE, because it's an awesome game.

 

[Jitters Caffeine]

For me, FO3 seemed the same as you find Skyrim.

I played it for 10 hours, couldn't get into it. Everyone was static. Everywhere I went was just more ruined buildings. Sometimes there was a ruined aircraft carrier, or a ruined settlements with walls. I seem to remember a ruined settlement built on a bridge too.

I can totally see that. It took me actually trying to play the game three times to actually realize I was having fun. I'm not the kind of person who enjoys the games that has the draw of "mayhem and chaos for the sake of mayhem and chaos" like most Sandbox style games. When I sit down and see a good story, I want to see what happens, which is how Fallout 3 felt. You were experiencing the story as you completed the main quest. The "running around and exploring" was always a secondary objective in my mind. Sure I COULD do it, but I've gotta find my Dad goddamn it.

I'm not sure but something never clicked with me in Fallout 3. The main story wasn't particularly compelling, the subway system annoys the fuck out of me WHY CANT I GET WHERE I WANT? All the characters seemed flat and dull, the only one I remember is Moria and she was really annoying. I just don't get the game, every time I've played it, it's been a chore. I was happy in Skyrim and even Oblivion exploring, doing the main quest when it suited me, finding new gear and stuff, but Fallout 3 just seems like TES but with guns and without any magic and mystique and sparkle. And more grey.

Hopefully New Vegas will be better.

The setting is a big hurdle for people going from one series to the other. It really seems like people who like standard fantasy hate the Post-Apocalyptic setting of Fallout, and vice-versa. I understand what they wanted to do with the ruins of the subway Systems, but getting around in the DC area was a pain in the ass my first time. Since I've played it a few times, I've more or less accepted it as a part of the aesetic of the world. The characters in New Vegas are MUCH better than in Fallout 3 and miles above anything Skyrim has. It's one of my biggest bug bears about the TES series is that the characters are so uninteresting, and the total lack of player interaction. In Fallout, they have skill checks that let you access new content or even skip what would be a difficult fight. Avoiding a fight with a bunch of dudes by complimenting the leader on his shiny revolver? I'm sure glad I had enough points in my Small Guns to make that check. In Skyrim, my skills are just numbers I'm told I'm supposed to level up.

 

[Jitters Caffeine]

Im not trying to be insulting, I was legitimately curious, I saw your discussion with SajuukKhar, and I just noticed how you didnt really back up your points about developed characters with evidence, I wanted to see if you actually had anything.

Im glad to you say you werent just making baseless arguments. I will concede that Skyrim doesnt have any characters really on the level that Fallout New Vegas had, but you can chalk that up to them focusing on different things.

I am interested though, which parts make it seem like Im attacking you?

Telling someone their eyes are messed up for not having the same opinion as you seems pretty confrontational to me. But yes, I am very competent in my ability to back up my points. I wouldn't make them if I wasn't able to. I will never say Skyrim was a bad game, but when I played it, all I saw a game where the focus making a good looking world, and not actually making an engaging or immersive world.

 

[The_Blue_Rider]

Im not trying to be insulting, I was legitimately curious, I saw your discussion with SajuukKhar, and I just noticed how you didnt really back up your points about developed characters with evidence, I wanted to see if you actually had anything.

Im glad to you say you werent just making baseless arguments. I will concede that Skyrim doesnt have any characters really on the level that Fallout New Vegas had, but you can chalk that up to them focusing on different things.

I am interested though, which parts make it seem like Im attacking you?

Telling someone their eyes are messed up for not having the same opinion as you seems pretty confrontational to me.[/quote]

Because exaggeration is the worst possible thing a poster can do huh?

Then again its hard to get that kind of stuff across in text form so Its probably my fault you thought that

 

[Jitters Caffeine]

Because exaggeration is the worst possible thing a poster can do huh?

Then again its hard to get that kind of stuff across in text form so Its probably my fault you thought that

I would never say Skyrim was a bad game. But when I played it, all I saw was a game who's focus was on making a good looking world instead of one that was engaging or immersive. Fallout has tons of player interaction with things like Skill Checks, dynamic quests, and dialogue trees. Skyrim just seems to want the player to look at the world and appreciate it. I guess that's just because I come from pen and paper games that have a similar focus on the player and the character they've made.

 

[Jitters Caffeine]

Yeah Bethesda is gonna fail at making a "true" RPG or w/e, but they will do what Obsidian has failed to do repeatedly.

Make a game that doesn't have as many bugs and that can get a score comparable to the prequels.

for all of Obsidian's "good game design" they have yet to make a game thats actually....... playable.

I've only ever encountered one bug in my 300 hours of Fallout New Vegas gameplay. Never had a single bug with Dungeon Siege 3 or Alpha Protocol either. New Vegas was more playable than Fallout 3 for me.

Yes, every city is boring as an essay about white bread. Glamour shots of the cities doesn't make them any more interesting. Sure, Markarth was different, but I'd hardly recommend a $60 game for that.

If you find
-A city ruled by a mob boss
-A city infiltrated, and under constant threat, by a terrorist group
-A city that resembles is segregated like a city from WW2 Germany
-A city split by a family feud and two sides of a war

To be as boring as "an essay about white bread" then you must be bored of most things.

And did they ever go anywhere with those sub plots? Only in Narkarth can you choose a side and it changes nothing and they're both evil. That's not a good moral faction dilema. Choosing between corrupt civilians and a cult. Where as in New Vegas you could do the main quest on four different sides. And those DLC are the best god damn DLC ever made. period.

Also this is a really good article about skyrim, in my opinion: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/EricSchwarz/20111124/8956/Moral_Ambiguity_and_Choices_in_Skyrim_All_Setup_No_Payoff.php.

This guy knows what's up. The dynamic quests you find in New Vegas are a big reason I keep coming back.

 

[lSHaDoW-FoXl]

I prefer Skyrim over Fallout 3 for quite a few reasons, but if I were to be completely honest I'd probably give a lot of the credit to it simply taking place in a setting which I find more appealing. I'm not too particularly fond of the Post - Apocalypse setting, but never the less I still found Fallout 3 entertaining. The thing I probably found the most interesting of it was that battleship city.

 

[ecoho]

You could show pictures of the major cities in Skyrim to a person and they couldn't tell the difference between them because they're all just generic medieval walled cities with a castle above everything else. The settlements in Fallout 3 and New Vegas all look different, especially in Fallout 3. No two looked even vaguely similar.

Lets see
-Markarth is made in Dwemer style
-Solitude has a very classical Imperial stone style
-Windhelm is built out of massive ancient dark stones, partially falling apart, lots of staircases.
-Whiterun's buildings are made out of a light color wood and have thatched roofs, some have singled roofs and are generally spread out
-Riften has very cramped buildings, made out of a dark lumber, and have shingled roofs


anyone who has played the game for more then 5 seconds could tell the main cities apart from each other because they look nothing alike.

You would have to be literally blind to not see the difference.

Of course YOU can see the difference. You've probably got a combined play time longer than a standard work week. Anyone else just sees another shitty medieval city after another. Nothing in the game made me care about what was happening anywhere. There were no interesting characters, no cities I could like because they all looked the same, and the world was frigid and uninviting. The whole experience just screamed of a development staff that were told to make a huge, good looking world, but were not allowed time to do anything with the world besides will it with dragons and fetch quests.

ummm im sorry but your just flat out wrong. each city in skyrim looks and feel unique and alive were as the ones in fallout just look like any other distroyed city. Now if you just dislike medevil styles just come out and say it dont go makeing excuses that they all look the same when they dont. (oh and ive got less then 20 hours of game time with skyrim and ive been to every one of the cites

 

[Jitters Caffeine]

ummm im sorry but your just flat out wrong. each city in skyrim looks and feel unique and alive were as the ones in fallout just look like any other distroyed city. Now if you just dislike medevil styles just come out and say it dont go makeing excuses that they all look the same when they dont. (oh and ive got less then 20 hours of game time with skyrim and ive been to every one of the cites

I play Dungeons and Dragons, I'm very familiar with the fantasy structure. And saying that any city in Fallout looks the same is factually wrong and proves to me you didn't actually play the game. Every city in Skyrim is just another boring medieval city with a population that hates cat and lizard people.

 

[Vibhor]

I'd go for fallout 3. The "Cities" of skyrim felt more like ghost town with only 10 or so houses. Atleast the setting of fallout 3 partially supported it.

 

[flames09]

IT DEPENDS ON YOUR PERSONAL TASTES

I tend to like Fallout much more, but I know people who enjoy both equally. For me, Fallout is more interesting and relatble due to the technology in it, I also enjoy the survival sorta thing that is included as well as the gunplay.

CAN YOU ANSWER THIS QUESTION WITH A MESSAGE PLEASE!

If they use the same engine for Fallout 4.. CAN I HAZ DRAGONZ IN FALLOUT AND SUPA MUTANTS IN SKYRIM!!!!!! XD 8D

 

[Tomeran]

A tough choice. Fallout 3 and Skyrim both has amazing scenery, good gameplay, a large world, good music and a pisspoor story.

Fallout captures the post-apocalypse setting very well. Question is if it doesnt do it TOO well, because the grey wasteland sure gets very bleak and similar after a while of exploring. New Vegas does that better imo, as the mojave is more interesting and varying to explore then the mass of grey concrete rubble that is Washington DC. But maybe that's just my personal preferance of the desert.
Music is also great and the gameplay is interesting. My main problem, as with any bethesda game, is the story.

As someone else put it:

I dislike them both equally. I've never really been able to get into Bethesda games all that well, typically because of the fact that their stories are some of the poorest in the business and there's never really any sense of urgency that their stories are supposed to tell. Open world supersandboxes can't really do 'THE WORLD IS ENDING SAVE IT NOW' all that well due to how the size of the world can really dilute how it feels.

I largely agree with this quote, although im clinging to the hope that an exploration game can pull off a well written and interesting story some day. Maybe Bethesda should team up with Bioware, which imo makes some of the most interesting stories on the gaming market.



As for Skyrim, it excels in what it is suppose to excel in: Exploration. The atmosphere is amazing, the graphics well upgraded from that previous blob Oblivion and gameplay is solid enough to make it a very enjoyable experience. It doesnt suffer from the "bleak and similar"-problem of Fallout 3 because its nature and dungeons offers variation to a greater extent. The dungeon crawling especielly is something Bethesda has pulled off very well.
Again, as with Fallout, the main problem with the game is the pisspoor story.
I suppose I enjoy storydriven games more then exploration-driven games, but I'd live to see some sort of fusion between the two.

In the end, I think Skyrim wins, narrowly. It outshines Fallout in just about every field, but not by a lot.

 

[ecoho]

ummm im sorry but your just flat out wrong. each city in skyrim looks and feel unique and alive were as the ones in fallout just look like any other distroyed city. Now if you just dislike medevil styles just come out and say it dont go makeing excuses that they all look the same when they dont. (oh and ive got less then 20 hours of game time with skyrim and ive been to every one of the cites

I play Dungeons and Dragons, I'm very familiar with the fantasy structure. And saying that any city in Fallout looks the same is factually wrong and proves to me you didn't actually play the game. Every city in Skyrim is just another boring medieval city with a population that hates cat and lizard people.

i played 60 hours of the damed game and i want my money back besides, but thats not why i say its cities all look the same. the reason i say that is theres only so many ways you can make a distroyed city. Now with skyrim its different as they are using REAL nordic and roman building styles. You can find a real life example of every one of those cities if you try. As for the people in those cities, its the gothic period people hate things that are different then them simple as that.

a little off topic but what do you play in D&D?

 

[Jitters Caffeine]

ummm im sorry but your just flat out wrong. each city in skyrim looks and feel unique and alive were as the ones in fallout just look like any other distroyed city. Now if you just dislike medevil styles just come out and say it dont go makeing excuses that they all look the same when they dont. (oh and ive got less then 20 hours of game time with skyrim and ive been to every one of the cites

I play Dungeons and Dragons, I'm very familiar with the fantasy structure. And saying that any city in Fallout looks the same is factually wrong and proves to me you didn't actually play the game. Every city in Skyrim is just another boring medieval city with a population that hates cat and lizard people.

i played 60 hours of the damed game and i want my money back besides, but thats not why i say its cities all look the same. the reason i say that is theres only so many ways you can make a distroyed city. Now with skyrim its different as they are using REAL nordic and roman building styles. You can find a real life example of every one of those cities if you try. As for the people in those cities, its the gothic period people hate things that are different then them simple as that.

a little off topic but what do you play in D&D?

DC is the only instance of there being widespread destruction. All the actual settlements are amazingly unique and full of personality. A city of children who live in a former field trip site? A settlement made of scavenged pieces from an airfield? A city that a fucking beached Aircraft carrier? Or how about the settlement that's the ONLY FOREST IN THE ENTIRE CAPITAL WASTELAND? None of those are "just destroyed buildings". You're mistaking the setting of the game for the settlements you actually visit. Every city in skyrim is just boring. There's no personality because it's always just a walled city with a population filled with citizens that are indistinguishable from every other city.

I play a Cleric. No one crosses the Cudgel.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Love em both but Fallout 3's atmosphere pips it for me. Plus it doesn't have any snow.

 

[Slayer_2]

I agree with the OP, Fallout 3 was incredible, far better than Skyrim, IMO.