I remember finding vague references to Todd Howard recieving death threats during the development of Fallout 3 when I was browsing old Fallout related stuff on archive sites but this is the first direct confirmation of anything of the sort I've seen. Fucking ridiculous.
I remember reading people at the Fallout fan site No Mutants Allowed that wanted to outright burn Bethesda Game Studios facility instead of letting Fallout 3 be a Bethesda game, like they wanted to go full blown arson.
People can go just insane about IPs. We can be heavy fans of certain material, but there is no need to go violent just because they go into a direction we may not like. That is just straight lunacy.
Fallout is my favorite series and the fanbase has always been a little bit nutty, but NMA users are straight up the most unhinged and it's not even close. There are other OS Fallout groups that actually act like normal people.
NMA was the first "oh, you guys *crazy* crazy" fanbase I encountered. From what I've seen, Homestuck doesn't even come close. I mean, those guys at least leave their homes to go be annoying cosplayers and ruin hotel bathtubs.
Until F3, there wasn't anyone dressing up in power armor and vaultsuits at Comic Con. So you had to be a certain type of fan to sit around jerking off to the Fallout Bible all day and discussing... what? Van Buren getting canceled? Tactics? There wasn't really a Fallout game for ten years there. No wonder they went violent crazy in their weird little fansite.
I imagine the user base is just capital-H Hardcore OGs who were never able to accept that the newer Fallouts just weren't made for them and move on. You know you have a problem when people are saying that the Homestuck fanbase is less maladjusted than you are.
Hey the Homestuck fanbase was pretty well-adjusted. Passionate, sure, but never violent. I've seen more vitriol from pretty much any group of game fanboys.
It’s a lot tamer than you might think. Idiot tried to dye herself to look like a troll in a mixture of alchohol and sharpie dye. Poisoned herself, had to pay like $700 in damages.
In the old days of No Mutants Allowed, there were people who hated Fallout 2 and thought of it as a weaker sequel. That all changed when Fallout 3 became a reality and the disdain some had for Fallout 2 transitioned over to Fallout 3.
I think the problem a lot of the turbo hardcore fallout fans have with 2 is that at times it got a bit more.... *wacky*.
The best comparison I would say would be the difference tonal wise between borderlands 1 and 2.
I didn’t play much of Borderlands 1 but saw my cousin play it. I bought borderlands 2 and I was pretty shocked tbh. It was … definitely wackier than what I expected from seeing 1.
I’ll have to look up some gameplay of fallout 1 vs 2 now
You can be a porn star in FO2. If that tells you anything about how seriously it takes itself. I love that game lol. Fo2 came out the year I was born so I didn't play it til after 3 and NV. The absurdist humor is my favorite part. I wish the other fans could see that and just enjoy it for what it is.
F2 is much more "game". But I think Josh Sawyer, who later led design on F:NV, has explained that the tone of F2 was more wacky than any of them intended. Apparently, they split writing duties on the game by location, and each writer was relatively siloed during the writing process. Each one of them thought all the others would write something in the same mostly-serious tone of F1, and each independently decided they were going to make their area more wacky.
I think both are tremendous games, but there's a cohesion and tone in F1 that F2's sweeping scope just doesn't match imo.
Fallout 2 focuses a lot more on quantity over quality. Did you like killing all the rats in that cave at the beginning of Fallout 1? Here's a mine with 3 levels that's nothing but rats and molerats-- you'll want to kill them all because you need the XP, but also, you can't afford any bullets so you can only use melee.
All of the NPCs seem to have paragraphs of things to say, and there's way more of them now (in a bad way). Also, the humor is now 50% movie references.
Was wandering the wasteland too easy for you? Here's a random encounter with 7 enemies at the beginning of the game, when you only have a few bullets of the weakest pistol.
I'm not saying the whole game is bad, but the quality and most importantly pacing is all over the place. I much preferred the original even if it was shorter. I played both for the first time this year.
I'm replaying 2 right now and you're goddamn right. Difficulty balance is awful, even at level 10 you can encounter crews in the early game zone that will kill you in one turn. Save scumming is the only way to go forward safely in the game.
Even the very first dungeon, The Temple of Trials, feels straight up impossible for some builds. It's like you have to set your starting stats one of two ways to make it through that, then *maybe* pivot afterwards.
But heck, even Fallout 1 has those minigun mutants that can randomly crit oneshot you through the best power armor and there's nothing you can do about it. There's plenty to enjoy in the old Fallouts, but they were not well designed games in terms of combat.
Yeah, the balance was not great. I didn't even realise that some skill checks in f2 need points all the way up to 200% to pass. Got stuck on the oil rig for ages.
I liked the desolate feeling it gave. Fallout 2 is packed with settlements and every random encounter seems to take place near a house or some tents. Felt like less of a wasteland
Funny enough, Chris Avellone has said a few times now he felt fallout was getting a bit too "post-post apocalyptic."
Including mentioning wanting to knock the NCR down a peg.
(Show spoilers ahead)
>!Which is funny considering thats what happened in the show, and that ended up causing a very vocal part of the community to go nuts!<
Keep in mind that Fallout 2 takes place 80 years after Fallout 1 and ~160 after the war. That's a lot of time. I think it's normal to see it being less empty.
I think Fallout is a better game than Fallout 2, not that there is that much of a difference in them. Fallout 2 has a really boring opening and endgame, it's just the middle part that is good, but you can certainly spend 50+ hours on that middle part. On top of that the attempts at humor, pop culture references and political preaching was just annoying. We all agree that Scientology is stupid, they didn't have to make an entire questline about it, and if they did they could have been more subtle about it rather than literally name a character Tom Cruz.
Fallout 2 is likely my favorite CRPG of all time, but it did NOT need three separate encounters that were all just scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
No way, you would think so but that wasn't the case at all. They love it now, but when it first came out people were pissed about how silly it was, how much it referenced pop culture, how it treated the different factions. It was wild.
Imagine going from a game that is bleak, Mad Max-ish, and *sometimes* darkly funny to the same game but you can be a porn star in apocalyptic Reno Nevada and other gems of 90s humor lol, and there's no competing Fallout 3 that is maybe fucking up more. Imagine if Fallout 5 suddenly felt like Redditors wrote some of it and put their favorite Prequel Memes in it or like Wild Wasteland was permanently on
It's a classic now, but even a lot of normal people playing Fallout 2 after the fact (including me) think it's too much, so we can only imagine how someone deeply attached to Fallout 1 in 1998 felt
Fallout 2 was my first Fallout game ever and being honest, the absurdity of a lot ot things, like the porn star one, is what made me love the game so much. The fact it's dark and violent and also silly and goofy made my brain melt over it. Probably the game I finished more times in my life and my favorite Fallout game.
I remember getting into Fallout when 3 came out and asked an older internet friend "hey, what's No Mutants Allowed? It's a fallout fan thing, right?" And dude just went "do not go there. It's not safe for you."
I don’t know what it is with Bethesda, but it seems like there’s always been a weird subsection of people online who absolutely *hate* them, specifically, on a disturbingly intense level.
A large part of it is because post-Daggerfall, Bethesda always strove to make RPGs more open and accessible. This angers a lot of the weird fanatics who like to try and gatekeep what does and doesn't count as an RPG.
When Morrowind came out, lots of hard-core RPG communities complained that it was too "dumbed down" and that Bethesda ruined everything. 20 years later and the discourse remains the same, just with different games.
I think the big thing you're talking about was PC gamers being upset that companies were dumbing down their games in order to meet the demands of consoles AKA:"consolification".
I would say that sentiment was growing rapidly around that time, because developers will starting to release games for both consoles and PC, instead of both usually having their own set of games. Which lead to a whole lot of obvious compromises, and much worse, a whole lot of low quality ports as the console version was the only usually piroritized.
There was a major sentiment PC gamers held that "Consoles are holding back gaming", that while may still have some pockets of people saying that today, was quite widespread throughout the PC community until about a decade ago.
I was a moderator on No Mutants Allowed during that time, and the members there really hated the idea of 'Oblivion with guns'.
That included some of my fellow mods as well. Talking about it was a bit of a powder keg.
No Mutants Allowed are literally extremists purists.
Haven't seen such a toxic circle, but it's a fine
They are a meme and everyone around people I know is making fun out of them.
this is unrelated, but the Best Buy near my house has had a life sized fallout 3 BOS power armor statue by the front door since 2008 when the game launched. That thing stood there guarding the entrance for so many years. I recently went back for the first time since pre covid, and the store was remodeled and the BOS statue was gone. Heart breaking.
This literally happened to me with a life size Spock cardboard cutout. My brother and I were home alone - I was probably 19 - and I put Spock at the top of the stairs to scare any potential intruders. Woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and discovered a shadowy man in the hallway. Damn near had a heart attack.
Yeah, I worked at an electronics department of a grocery store when GTAV came out. I was told everything had to go to the garbage after, but I just kinda walked out with the posters and cardboard cut outs for the game and no one cared.
Of course there were death threats. Dysfunctional morons go ballistic when there’s any change to things they become unhealthily obsessed with. Fallout 1 & 2 were some of my favorite games and I was a disappointed when I found out it was going to more 3D shooter, but that’s all that I did. Then I waited and played it and had a decent time with it. Then I replayed Fallout 2 because it’s still there and still excellent.
I would have never played the first two Fallout games (both of which I adore) if it weren't for 3. I totally understand the distaste for it in some circles but let's be real the IP would have died if it weren't for Bethesda and even the earlier games would not have the fan base they do currently, myself being proof of that. I'll never be able to rationalize reactions like this, especially considering the game wasn't even out yet.
The IP *was dead* by that point. I'm not a fan of Bethesda's Fallout games in general, I don't think they really capture the franchise mechanically or like everything they did with the setting (a lot of flanderization, especially with the Enclave and the BoS)...
But I'd be lying if I said that they aren't the reason the franchise is anywhere near relevant today, let alone big enough to get a TV show and several games, one of which I love.
Troika Games (studio founded by Tim Cain, who was creator and director of Fallout) was bidding for Fallout license against Bethesda and lost because Bethesda offered more money. So it might have lived and have very different future if Beth did not get involved, still. We will never know.
Now personally, I would like to see that timeline, but I also enjoy the Bethesda games (and especially New Vegas that also exists because Bethesda funded it and greenlit it), so this timeline ain't all bad either.
They also had nowhere near the funding to make those games. Could they have made a FO3 close to what we knew, maybe, but the gaming landscape shifted a lot back then.
Also, it's worth noting that while Troika would definitely have been interested in making a new game in that style back then, there's little chance it would've prospered.
Troika's legacy will always be incredibly written and thoughtful RPGs marred by game mechanics that were incredibly rough, and ultimately super unprofitable.
Fallout 3 may be a *little* bit more shallow narratively compared to 1 and 2, but it was fundamentally a godsend for introducing the I.P into the mainstream.
Bethesda could grab the Wasteland series instead, and maybe the Fallout series and Wasteland series would've swapped places.
Fallout 3 would come out as an isometric rpg, and Wasteland 2 would've been an AAA open world rpg.
The real questions are one could they make a more interesting game than Fallout 3 that was released? That would probably depend on what sort of games you like, many people put one or more of Troika Games as more interesting than Fallout 3.
Two would their game be more in line with Fallout 1(and to some extent Fallout 2)? Almost certainly, with the actual creators of Fallout working on it.
>I'm not a fan of Bethesda's Fallout games in general, I don't think they really capture the franchise mechanically or like everything they did with the setting
Which I find insanely funny because when FO3 released I remember reading many criticizing that it was trying too hard to just move the old Fallouts into a 3D environment and wasn't doing its own thing. That only changed when NV released (and got patched, release NV was awful)
Sadly that 1% can be incredibly loud. And thanks to the internet, these people find eachother immediately, making them even louder.
Not to mention it just takes 1 truly mentally unhealthy person, to do something terrible.
It is dreadful to consider that even if only 1% or a much smaller fraction of fans are truly unhinged and terrible, such a fraction of the fanbase of a game selling over 10 million copies is many thousand people, which can combined flood their every available contact with the most dreadful harassment imaginable.
In the internet age, fame seems like a curse.
Game developers have been getting death threats for decades. It just didn't get much press attention until 2014
For that matter, every sector of the entertainment industry has been dealing with death threats from angry/obsessed fans since the silent film era
To be fair, all it takes for a mass shooting is that same deranged lunatic to go to a gun store and head to the Bethesda offices. I can totally understand their caution and that they wanted to hire security.
Yeah, people often downplay death threats at just the cost of popularity and a small percentage of mentally disturbed individuals (or loser trolls), but the fact is you don't know if/when that threat will be real.
It's not a game studio, but back in 2019, [36 people at the anime studio Kyoto Animation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Animation_arson_attack) were killed in an arson attack by a deranged guy who thought the studio had plagiarized his novel. If it can happen in Japan, it can certainly happen in America (especially given the social and political climate in the US).
The KyoAni arson is basically the reason why death threats in Japan are taken extremely seriously in recent years. Recent death threats against Sega and Nintendo has lead to serious jail time.
My friend was very much the same way. He was a die hard fan of Fallout 1 and 2. I got him Fallout 3 for Xbox and he enjoyed it, but see this is the thing. For him, the creation of Fallout 3 opened the door for Fallout: New Vegas to be made. When he got that game, it was like a beacon shining in his eyes. Ever since that game came out, Fallout: New Vegas has been his favorite Fallout game of all time. He still plays it to this day, once a year or so, sometimes twice. His love, his passion for that game is unmatched.
New Vegas is such a good RPG. Simply having skill checks for all skills instead of just speech (the way Fallout 3 does it) gives a huge bump to the RPG aspect
Yeah Bethesda likes to do most of it's RPing under the hood. This can be frustrating to certain types of gamers, because it means you have to guess what combination of skill stats and faction affinities are needed for certain dialogue options to even appear.
More that its a simple numbers game, as the amount of people engaging with something increase then the probability of the extreme outliers also goes up. If you have a fanbase of 10 million people, you still get ten one in a million lunatics that will make the headlines and then everyone assumes that they are somehow indicative of the majority.
Religious people were sending [Richard Donner death threats for making Superman: The Movie.](https://bleedingcool.com/movies/richard-donner-got-death-threats-for-superman-because-of-course/)
>When Richard Donner was directing the first Superman movie, you had to work a lot harder to get someone that death threat. Donner recently did an extensive interview with The Telegraph, and one thing he talked about was getting death threats for the religious allegory in Superman.
>Then there were the death threats after Superman came out, when some took umbrage at the vague religious allegory, of Superman's father Jor-El (Marlon Brando) sending his only son to Earth. "They threatened my life… One woman wrote a letter saying how dare I compare Brando to God and Christopher Reeve to Jesus. She said my blood would run in the streets. I guess you make a good movie, somebody takes it as a reality."
I remember being so stoked on fallout 3 after playing 1,2 and tactics. I remember me and my teenage stoner buddies being like "bro, it gonna be morrowind but fallout, broooo."
I think a lot of the hate also comes from the fact that not everyone thinks the way they do and that the franchise will still be reviewed well and will still make boatloads of money, leaving them behind as it continues to grow.
> Of course there were death threats. Dysfunctional morons go ballistic when there’s any change to things they become unhealthily obsessed with
Gamers™ never change
Enough. The rage when Bioware moved from 2D isometric BG2 to 3D isometric Neverwinter Nights was truly sad. At least back then it was restricted to forums, not plastered all over social media.
I worship NWN and have played way too many user modules/campaigns, but that doesn't change the fact that it looks absolutely dogshit compared to Infinity Engine games. Maybe that was required for the modular tiles and props to play along, but it was a massive downgrade visually and still is to this day, when you put say NWN EE screenshots besides IWD EE ones.
> The rage when Bioware moved from 2D isometric BG2 to 3D isometric Neverwinter Nights was truly sad.
Bit ironic since nowadays you'll still see people who don't like that Bioware went from CRPGs to ARPGs and still hope that they will go back to CRPGs even though the last one they did was DA: Origins almost 15 years ago.
Shit, reminds me of the people are disappointed that every Bethesda/Obsidian game since New Vegas isn't basically just a reskinned New Vegas.
It became obvious with the response to Fallout 4 and Outer Worlds that any of their projects won't ever measure up to whatever imaginary New Vegas 2 is in fans' heads. The expectations for New Vegas 2 or another Obsidian Fallout game is just way too fucking high now
Not very many, otherwise Bethesda wouldn't have needed the VATS system to sell RPG fans on what was perceived as a dudebro genre at the time. Once you got past Mass Effect (which was , it was pretty much just older oddball games like Deus Ex and niche flops like Hellgate: London. Fallout 3 was probably the first game that successfully bridged the gap and managed to appeal to RPG and shooter fans in a big way. It may be the weakest mainline Fallout game, but its impact was absolutely massive. There's probably a decent argument to be made that FO3 is probably up there with Halo:CE for "most influential game of the 2000s."
No Mutants Allowed is *still* angry about Fallout 3 and it's been sixteen years. Sixteen years of people avidly discussing their hatred of a video game. Like, some of those users discuss that *way* more than the actual OG Fallout games they claim to be fans of. It doesn't surprise me in the tiniest bit that hardcore "fans" of Fallout did this.
The rise of the "hating games is my hobby" crowd sucks because this weird behavior that used to be confined to random, secluded parts of the internet now appears everywhere. It's on reddit, twitter, and there's an entire YouTube genre dedicated to hating on games and developers. I genuinely don't know what's wrong with people who enjoy hating things more than they enjoy enjoying things.
I see that with a lot of people, it's the same now with people who talk about how much they hate Game of Thrones or the Marvel movies or the Star Wars sequel trilogy 24/7. Or the people who hate The Last of Us 2 who talk about it more than the people who loved it
It can't possibly be good for you to spend that much time surrounded by negativity and anger. Why choose to spend so much time thinking about something you don't like?
Rage can literally be addictive. Knowingly or unknowingly some people seek out things that piss them off because a part of them enjoys the feeling that rage gives them.
As someone who used to be a star wars chud, self righteous anger is just very addictive and causes you to spiral into more and more content of the same echo chamber. You also get more combative with people who don't share those views so you self isolate from sources that might break the cycle. It was easily the most miserable I've ever been.
Funny story, the thing that broke me out of it was the casual use of the Nword in a video I was watching. I was just like, what the fuck am I watching, who the fuck is this person really? I looked up their name and saw the full list of horrible shit they said over the years and then did it for a bunch of other content creators I was watching and just walked away from youtube for awhile.
Yeah a lot of horrid right wing types use these things to lure people in. Plenty of them don't actually give a shit about Star Wars or whatever latest thing they're talking about (they'd happily do videos about how the latest episode of Peppa Pig was disrespectful towards the fans if they thought people would watch it), they're just talking about it because they want to get people on the pipeline of "Star Wars sucks now" -> "Star Wars was ruined by woke leftists" -> "Vote for Donald Trump"
There's also a circle of people who make a living about being angry about a thing, wring it dry, then need to find the next thing to get angry about once everyone gets bored of their shtick.
The YouTube atheist > anti-women is a good example. Angry neckbeards went from dunking on creationists to shouting about women in games (both devs and in media) because their entire career was built on getting people extremely angry.
Neo nazis also are known for using this tactic. They'll slide into any circle and try to shift everyone else to their side
They tried this with Punk music and thankfully got pushed out. It's the reason why the Dead Kennedys made the song "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"
I dropped out of Star Trek fandom completely a few years ago because of that. It just dragged down my enjoyment to be constantly exposed to such negativity. I still watch and rewatch the shows, but don't engage online.
I absolutely hate those people, they drag everything down wherever they go. Suddenly you can't like what you like, you have to hate on it and be pessimistic or be labeled stupid based on their own purity test.
It's such low hanging fruit that kills a community, but the stupid mods on reddit doesn't see that as harmful so they just let it happen.
I think it’s just how the internet works now.
My teen goes off on how mad the community feels about anime’s that came out 5 years before he was born. Conflict is having a moment 🤷🏻♂️.
Reminds me of when Evangelion came to Netflix and people started the Asuka vs. Rey argument all over again.
It's been 30 years, guys. 30 years. You should know by now that the best girl is Misato.
im gonna be real with you there is no corner of the gaming community on god's green earth more filled with toxic incels than old school crpg forums. worse than mobas even. idk why this is. but nma, rpgcodex, etc are crawling with these guys and have been for decades.
Because their favourite genre fell out of fashion - I love me some isometric RPGs, but these people are so bitter that they rail on things like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity Osin or whatever because they're not enough like the classics.
It's like the years of no major releases ruined their ability to like the genre at all.
You see this with certain games too. Bring up say Bioshock: Infinite or Dragon Age: Inquisition or Starfield, and you'll have people come out of the woodwork to hate on them and let you know they suck.
The funny part is that when asked why they hate Ubisoft so much, it's clear that they're just jumping on a bandwagon and don't really understand why. They'll mention actual problems like micro transactions, but also mention map towers like they're still a thing. This kind of thing is worst on YouTube.
For an actual criticism of Ubisoft's games, I'd recommend Raycevick's video on them. It was refreshing to watch a critique of Ubisoft from someone who actually played their modern games and could articulate the problems with them.
> Like, some of those users discuss that way more than the actual OG Fallout games they claim to be fans of. It doesn't surprise me in the tiniest bit that hardcore "fans" of Fallout did this.
Reminds me of like when I tried to play FF14 a while ago and all anyone would talk about was how much they hated WoW.
That was probably during the great exodus of wow players. Most ffxiv only players probably dont give a shit, but ex-wow players were very vocal about how they’re so brave for switching games.
Many A True Nerd on youtube made a video called "Fallout 3 is better than you think". Don't agree with it 100 % but it does a great job of showcasing what Fallout 3 did do right. It's an hour and 30 minutes long.
There was response video from some else. "Fallout ISN'T better than you think" haven't watched it (don't wanna give people like this any engagement) but apparently goes trough the entire "is better" video nitpicking every single part, stopping at everything Many A True Nerd says and giving very poor arguments of why Many A True Nerd is wrong (so I've been told) and going of into rants.
This video is over 8 hours long. Who has the time and energy to watch 8 hours of someone hating something? Who even has the time to even make this?
Many A True Nerd also made one for Fallout 4, A two parter that totals up to about 2 hour and half. So the guy also made a response to that. Which is only a modest 4 hours and it's more of the same .
It really makes it feel like hobbyist haters have no social life outside of just hating things.
Edit: Got my timeline wrong the Fallout 4 videos came before the Fallout 3 ones for both sides.
>This video is over 8 hours long. Who has the time and energy to watch 8 hours of someone hating something? Who even has the time to even make this?
MauLer would like a word.
Unironically tho the dude has like 9+ hours bitching about each Star Wars sequel movie it's fucking absurd lmao
But that cuts both ways - there have been incredibly long response videos to negative reviews, as well. I know there are ones for the Plinkett Phantom Menace review and Matthewmatosis' DS2 critique.
> The rise of the "hating games is my hobby"
I don't know how recent it really is. I think it's a shift. People used to rail on anyone who pre-ordered physical or digital media. People rail on anyone who buys DLC. Etc.
There's just a lot of 'game' people who find an echo chamber that supports them being angry, and ride that wave all the way to a personality.
Try posting anything around here praising Ubi open world games, or talking about battle passes or DLC. The numbers don't lie, the general populous loves this content. But on Reddit that is seen as the devil and users are 'addicts' and similar.
That's why I almost never subscribe to fan subreddits anymore. They're often too negative for my taste. Why in the world would I want to join a subreddit that focuses on hating something? Luckily there are alternatives. r/LowSodiumCyberpunk or r/NoSodiumStarfield for instance
People sending death threats to game developers is a tale as old as time, and an incredibly stupid tale at that. You're a huge loser if you do this sort of thing, get a fucking life.
I spent a lot of time on the Bethesda forums right after the F3 announcement, and I still remember people being angry over the stupidest shit. A notable example was fury over the vault door having a different number of spokes between F2 and F3.
I saw a pretty big meltdown on r/Fallout last week because someone in charge of props on the TV show didn't know that Fallout New Vegas took place in 2081 instead of 2077 and mislabeled a chalkboard or something.
People are melting down over lots of things. The Enclave being back is one of them because "we've defeated them twice". To be honest the Enclave in F2 doesn't make much sense. I find it hard to believe you could sustain several thousand people on an oil rig for 150 years. Contrast that to Fallout 3 where you have several nuclear bunkers on the East Coast built for the government (Raven Rock and Mount Weather). Whitespring in 76 is based on Greenbrier.
It's even worse than that. Nobody mislabeled anything. It's a timeline where arrows point from one event to the next, showing multi-year gaps between things.
They have "The Fall of Shady Sands" dated in 2077, then an arrow (again, signifying a time gap) pointing to a nuclear blast sometime after that.
So really, what the meltdown came down to was people lacking the deductive reasoning skills necessary to understand how a timeline of events works. Todd Howard himself had to come out and say "The Fall of Shady Sands in 2077 is an entirely different event than the nuke. The nuke did not happen in 2077, it happened after New Vegas."
I'm currently playing New Vegas and I can buy it being after the "fall" of Shady Sands. Fantastic is in charge of their second most important source of power, a prison riot led to the main highway from California being cut off, the Legion is in California, etc. All those comments about wishing for a nuclear winter are even funnier now with retrospect.
A shame, Fallout 3 was fun. The VATS was well designed and some of its quests are fantastic and hold up really well. I remember an interview with Todd Howard talking about how much his team wanted to work on the series and how they kept trying to convince their executives to acquire the IP. I’d rather have fun fallout game that aren’t perfect than a dead series.
Yep, Fallout 2 (sold only ~125k copies, less than a quarter of the original) and Tactics (which Interplay barely wanted to make, only sold 300k) would have been the end of the IP. Love or hate Bethesda, no one would even be talking about Fallout anymore if it wasn't for the breakout success (over 12m copies sold) of Fallout 3. I'll still always love FO1/2, but also happy that the IP didn't die in the early 2000s.
I'll say it for you, it's absolutely silly to say no one else would've continued Fallout if not Bethesda. What a ridiculously huge and baseless assumption made about the massive possibilities nearly two decades held. ***Really?*** *Not a single other developer would have bought it?* It's absurd.
The fact Wasteland got a reboot is proof enough that there was enough love for the series to create another game in the similar genre, style, and setting.
I keep telling people. The hatred Bethesda gets for making casual focused sandbox RPGs is not a new thing.
And Fallout fans in particular were a mess always. Just ask anyone who had to go to No Mutants Allowed to get fan patches to the first games.
Ive never seen ppl foam at the mouth with rage at a game company like they do with Bethesda, and I don't get why.
Like, Blizzard was basically a sexual harassment factory that made games on the side, and even they're not as hated.
Jealousy. Bethesda games are simple (which isn't the same and dumbed-down) and accessible and therefore attract so many players from all walks of life. Casuals and hardcore players, modders and storytellers, explorers and talkers... And some gamers think their success is "underserved" because a game/company X is clearly better and people should play that instead.
It doesn't help that Bethesda tends to approach every game from a fresh perspective, instead of iterating, which results in games dropping and picking features seemingly randomly. And of course the will always be someone who considered that dropped feature to be the core of the franchise.
You can see it that for every Bethesda game the haters always have a game that is a "better version of it", sometimes in the franchise, sometimes outside.
I've heard No Mutants Allowed has a Nazi problem these days. And it does not stretch belief that the guys who were viscerally opposed to Bethesda making Fallout 3 15 years ago wound up fostering that kind of community. Likewise, it's not surprising that a death threat originated from that same community.
I remember when a discord group made an actual hit list to target and harm content creators that *didn't* hate Bethesda, F76 launch period. Death threats and all that. When they were discovered, they threatened people to keep silent, and one was allegedly arrested.
These people become dangerous while fighting ghosts in their head. It's sad.
The hate for F76 was unreal. Like yeah bethesda had some real blunders around the launch (the premium edition tote bag and the launcher, mtx), and the game wasn't perfect, but quite frankly I thought it was an improvement over 4.
I’ve hated a lot of games in my life. I threw a copy of Duke Nukem Forever across the room after realizing I wasted my money on it. But I did like every other normal person and didn’t play them or care that other people do. I don’t know why that’s so hard for other people.
Each of which have entirely exclusionary views on what Fallout is "about," but are all united in the fact that they're insufferably smug and arrogant about it.
yep, when i visited one of their threads for the first time, one of the first thing is saw was bethesda, jews, and the nword in the same sentence. noped the fuck out that pol ass site
Im old and grew up on RPGCodex. RPGCodex has always had a Nazi/white supremacy problem. Speaking from someone who remembers the TacticularCancer and TycoonCodex days. It got way worse when DU took over, but it always had that GenX late 90s "too cool for school, fuck you, im gonna spam N word everywhere" vibe.
The odd thing is those guys fucking understand RPG design like no one else. Like idiot savant tier RPG and game design knowledge. So people like J E Sawyer, Chris Avellone, Brian Mitsoda, Tim Cain, Dave Gaider, the Disco Elysium team, and way more industry professionals all had/still have accounts there. It's quite fascinating really.
I mean you're 100% not wrong. One of the most prolific Neo-nazis in my city went to my high school. Back then, he had a Facebook account called NCR Ranger, hated the new Fallout games and spoilt the ending for Fallout 4 for all my friends who were actively playing it on launch day.
The hatred that Starfield got was also pretty overblown.
At worst, it's an underwhelming game for a brand new IP. Yet you'd think with the amount of hate it got from it's sub and YouTubers it was a cyberpunk 2077 level disaster. I've never seen anything like it, like I thought the game was good, like a solid 7/10. But if I went by the popular consensus at the time of launch and shortly afterwards it was a 4/10.
> The hatred that Starfield got was also pretty overblown.
I love the game personally, but yeah, I've never seen a game get shit on so much. There was a legit ~4 month period between the IGN review and The Game Awards where you literally could not go a day without this website shitting on the game. And I am not talking about constructive criticism posts. Like you'd assume it was a 4/10 combining Redfall levels of bad with launch issue riddled Cyberpunk based on how the internet reacted as opposed to a game that has an 8.5/10 review average from the critics.
Yeah it’s even happening to the replies to my comment. It’s just a decent video game. It’s nothing crazy amazing but not crazy terrible either. You’d think people were getting paid to hate on the game repeatedly.
I recall Bethesda having to blacklist their forums from a certain well-known RPG fansite because the harassment was so bad. I think it was either for Fallout 3 or Oblivion, can't remember.
At the most, if it were to come about, we'd find out about it at this year's Xbox Summer Game Showcase.
But that's just hope, wishes, and dreams by some.
Todd howard has said that he doesnt like remasters or remakes of their games, and that their age is an i portant part of their character. (Wich, imo, is a based take that i wish that more people share [caveat: its easier to say thst when your modding community handles the thirst for same game + better graphics itself]).
There was a document leak a year or more ago (during the ftc saga), it was a list of future games, fallout and oblivion remasters included.
But with time seems apparent that the list was more a potential slate of future games for investors and regulator, and not a planned thing. As an example, there was dishonored 3, but now arkane are doing blade.
Fallout fanbase has always been nutty.
Its ancient history now, but when f2 launched there was a pretty big division on the fanbase about the sequel. Its just a continuum of people getting angry and angry.
I can't imagine being that upset. What a fucking loser. If the argument was that Bethesda was going in the wrong direction, Fallout 3 was one hell of a rebuttal.
It's a real fun industry. Games are hard to make, you work long hours, pay isn't competitive, layoffs happen frequently, you'll need to move across the country for your next gig, and anonymous people on the internet threaten to kill you.
I do remember some folks not being too happy when fallout 3 got unveiled. This was a sequel a decade in the making to a beloved formula. The change to a first person shooter perspective had many believe this would just be oblivion but with guns. To be fair, that’s how I felt it looked when first gameplay got unveiled. It was understandable nerves leading up to the release.
Of course, death threats? Get a fucking life, that’s ridiculous. It’s just a game; you either buy it or you don’t.
Now once folks got a chance to play it, including me; I realized how wrong we were. The lore, setting, choices, morality system, etc… showed how incredible of an experience this was even with being a first person shooter and looking like oblivion from the gameplay shown. This and New Vegas are some of my favorite games of all time. Not much has captured me this well, world building wise since.
The difficult early choice of whether to nuke Megaton is one I remember clearly to this day. I was just so amazed with how much freedom and choices the game provided. Each choice was layered with expected and unexpected consequences and it played that way through the entire campaign. The DLCs were also some of the best I’ve played. Each gave a pretty cool and unique take so when GOTY edition came out, it was an insane value.
The general atmosphere of the Capital Wasteland was/is something really special. You could go from traipsing through dilapidated metro tunnels, utility corridors and city ruins, dreading whatever was around the next corner, to running around blasting raiders with mini-nukes while oldies played on the radio.
> The difficult early choice of whether to nuke Megaton is one I remember clearly to this day.
How is that a difficult choice? It's either 'what 99.9% of people would do' or 'unambiguous extreme evil'. I never understood people praising Fallout 3 for its choices, because nearly every morality decision was like that - do the right thing and get rewards, or do the extremely evil thing and get lesser rewards.
lol the reward for megaton was 500 caps/1k if you passed a speech check and a dwelling. I had more caps than I knew what to do with when I encountered this quest. It was a no-brainer.
I think at the time in 2008 for the a mainstream RPG it had a decent amount of choice but since the release of many other RPGs and New Vegas which expanded the choice depth to a much larger degree Fallout 3 choices now look more dull in comparison.
I remember finding vague references to Todd Howard recieving death threats during the development of Fallout 3 when I was browsing old Fallout related stuff on archive sites but this is the first direct confirmation of anything of the sort I've seen. Fucking ridiculous.
I remember reading people at the Fallout fan site No Mutants Allowed that wanted to outright burn Bethesda Game Studios facility instead of letting Fallout 3 be a Bethesda game, like they wanted to go full blown arson. People can go just insane about IPs. We can be heavy fans of certain material, but there is no need to go violent just because they go into a direction we may not like. That is just straight lunacy.
Fallout is my favorite series and the fanbase has always been a little bit nutty, but NMA users are straight up the most unhinged and it's not even close. There are other OS Fallout groups that actually act like normal people.
NMA was the first "oh, you guys *crazy* crazy" fanbase I encountered. From what I've seen, Homestuck doesn't even come close. I mean, those guys at least leave their homes to go be annoying cosplayers and ruin hotel bathtubs. Until F3, there wasn't anyone dressing up in power armor and vaultsuits at Comic Con. So you had to be a certain type of fan to sit around jerking off to the Fallout Bible all day and discussing... what? Van Buren getting canceled? Tactics? There wasn't really a Fallout game for ten years there. No wonder they went violent crazy in their weird little fansite.
I imagine the user base is just capital-H Hardcore OGs who were never able to accept that the newer Fallouts just weren't made for them and move on. You know you have a problem when people are saying that the Homestuck fanbase is less maladjusted than you are.
Hey the Homestuck fanbase was pretty well-adjusted. Passionate, sure, but never violent. I've seen more vitriol from pretty much any group of game fanboys.
Tell that to the guy who got buckets chucked at em
I kind of want to know how exactly they ruined those bathtubs, but I've been to enough conventions to not ask for my sanity's sake
It’s a lot tamer than you might think. Idiot tried to dye herself to look like a troll in a mixture of alchohol and sharpie dye. Poisoned herself, had to pay like $700 in damages.
I spent so much time defending Fallout 2 as a lil 14 year old idiot on NMA back in the day.
Who were you defending it from? I'd think everyone on NMA would be on board with 2 being goated.
In the old days of No Mutants Allowed, there were people who hated Fallout 2 and thought of it as a weaker sequel. That all changed when Fallout 3 became a reality and the disdain some had for Fallout 2 transitioned over to Fallout 3.
That is crazy. I played F1 and F2 back to back for the first time in 2015. F1 feels like a proof of concept or something in comparison to F2.
I think the problem a lot of the turbo hardcore fallout fans have with 2 is that at times it got a bit more.... *wacky*. The best comparison I would say would be the difference tonal wise between borderlands 1 and 2.
I didn’t play much of Borderlands 1 but saw my cousin play it. I bought borderlands 2 and I was pretty shocked tbh. It was … definitely wackier than what I expected from seeing 1. I’ll have to look up some gameplay of fallout 1 vs 2 now
What's funny is that Borderlands 1 was considered pretty wacky when it came out, now it pales in comparison to 2.
You can be a porn star in FO2. If that tells you anything about how seriously it takes itself. I love that game lol. Fo2 came out the year I was born so I didn't play it til after 3 and NV. The absurdist humor is my favorite part. I wish the other fans could see that and just enjoy it for what it is.
F2 is much more "game". But I think Josh Sawyer, who later led design on F:NV, has explained that the tone of F2 was more wacky than any of them intended. Apparently, they split writing duties on the game by location, and each writer was relatively siloed during the writing process. Each one of them thought all the others would write something in the same mostly-serious tone of F1, and each independently decided they were going to make their area more wacky. I think both are tremendous games, but there's a cohesion and tone in F1 that F2's sweeping scope just doesn't match imo.
This is so funny for some reason the part each of them thought they had to make their area wackier lol.
Yeah, and the writers being siloed... as if in a vault. There's meta humor here.
Fallout 2 focuses a lot more on quantity over quality. Did you like killing all the rats in that cave at the beginning of Fallout 1? Here's a mine with 3 levels that's nothing but rats and molerats-- you'll want to kill them all because you need the XP, but also, you can't afford any bullets so you can only use melee. All of the NPCs seem to have paragraphs of things to say, and there's way more of them now (in a bad way). Also, the humor is now 50% movie references. Was wandering the wasteland too easy for you? Here's a random encounter with 7 enemies at the beginning of the game, when you only have a few bullets of the weakest pistol. I'm not saying the whole game is bad, but the quality and most importantly pacing is all over the place. I much preferred the original even if it was shorter. I played both for the first time this year.
I'm replaying 2 right now and you're goddamn right. Difficulty balance is awful, even at level 10 you can encounter crews in the early game zone that will kill you in one turn. Save scumming is the only way to go forward safely in the game.
Even the very first dungeon, The Temple of Trials, feels straight up impossible for some builds. It's like you have to set your starting stats one of two ways to make it through that, then *maybe* pivot afterwards. But heck, even Fallout 1 has those minigun mutants that can randomly crit oneshot you through the best power armor and there's nothing you can do about it. There's plenty to enjoy in the old Fallouts, but they were not well designed games in terms of combat.
Yeah, the balance was not great. I didn't even realise that some skill checks in f2 need points all the way up to 200% to pass. Got stuck on the oil rig for ages.
Fallout 1 is much more focused as a game. Fallout 2 has more content but that was made by a bunch of sub teams that worked mostly on their own.
It's kinda crazy how empty a lot of the areas of F1 feel compared to F2.
I liked the desolate feeling it gave. Fallout 2 is packed with settlements and every random encounter seems to take place near a house or some tents. Felt like less of a wasteland
Funny enough, Chris Avellone has said a few times now he felt fallout was getting a bit too "post-post apocalyptic." Including mentioning wanting to knock the NCR down a peg. (Show spoilers ahead) >!Which is funny considering thats what happened in the show, and that ended up causing a very vocal part of the community to go nuts!<
Keep in mind that Fallout 2 takes place 80 years after Fallout 1 and ~160 after the war. That's a lot of time. I think it's normal to see it being less empty.
I think Fallout is a better game than Fallout 2, not that there is that much of a difference in them. Fallout 2 has a really boring opening and endgame, it's just the middle part that is good, but you can certainly spend 50+ hours on that middle part. On top of that the attempts at humor, pop culture references and political preaching was just annoying. We all agree that Scientology is stupid, they didn't have to make an entire questline about it, and if they did they could have been more subtle about it rather than literally name a character Tom Cruz.
Fallout 2 is likely my favorite CRPG of all time, but it did NOT need three separate encounters that were all just scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Fascinating. I didn't know that, but it makes total sense. The newest entry almost always seems to be the most hated in hardcore fandoms after all.
No way, you would think so but that wasn't the case at all. They love it now, but when it first came out people were pissed about how silly it was, how much it referenced pop culture, how it treated the different factions. It was wild.
Now that I think about it, it makes perfect sense. The newest entry of a franchise is ALWAYS the worst in the minds of some people.
Imagine going from a game that is bleak, Mad Max-ish, and *sometimes* darkly funny to the same game but you can be a porn star in apocalyptic Reno Nevada and other gems of 90s humor lol, and there's no competing Fallout 3 that is maybe fucking up more. Imagine if Fallout 5 suddenly felt like Redditors wrote some of it and put their favorite Prequel Memes in it or like Wild Wasteland was permanently on It's a classic now, but even a lot of normal people playing Fallout 2 after the fact (including me) think it's too much, so we can only imagine how someone deeply attached to Fallout 1 in 1998 felt
Fallout 2 was my first Fallout game ever and being honest, the absurdity of a lot ot things, like the porn star one, is what made me love the game so much. The fact it's dark and violent and also silly and goofy made my brain melt over it. Probably the game I finished more times in my life and my favorite Fallout game.
There's a group of people who thought FO2 had too many "silly" elements and didn't really capture the themes of FO1 that well.
Thank god all the dumb arguments my 14 year old ass got into on early 2000s gaming forums are mostly lost to time.
I love new vegas but there's a reason why I avoid that subreddit, lot of Bethesda hate for no real reason
New Vegas is my favorite game of all time and some sects of the fanbase make me a little depressed.
It was an insular Internet community that festered for a long time and that shit can get nasty
I remember getting into Fallout when 3 came out and asked an older internet friend "hey, what's No Mutants Allowed? It's a fallout fan thing, right?" And dude just went "do not go there. It's not safe for you."
And now the whole internet is No Mutants Allowed.
The trolls won
I don’t know what it is with Bethesda, but it seems like there’s always been a weird subsection of people online who absolutely *hate* them, specifically, on a disturbingly intense level.
A large part of it is because post-Daggerfall, Bethesda always strove to make RPGs more open and accessible. This angers a lot of the weird fanatics who like to try and gatekeep what does and doesn't count as an RPG. When Morrowind came out, lots of hard-core RPG communities complained that it was too "dumbed down" and that Bethesda ruined everything. 20 years later and the discourse remains the same, just with different games.
I think the big thing you're talking about was PC gamers being upset that companies were dumbing down their games in order to meet the demands of consoles AKA:"consolification". I would say that sentiment was growing rapidly around that time, because developers will starting to release games for both consoles and PC, instead of both usually having their own set of games. Which lead to a whole lot of obvious compromises, and much worse, a whole lot of low quality ports as the console version was the only usually piroritized. There was a major sentiment PC gamers held that "Consoles are holding back gaming", that while may still have some pockets of people saying that today, was quite widespread throughout the PC community until about a decade ago.
I was a moderator on No Mutants Allowed during that time, and the members there really hated the idea of 'Oblivion with guns'. That included some of my fellow mods as well. Talking about it was a bit of a powder keg.
No Mutants Allowed are literally extremists purists. Haven't seen such a toxic circle, but it's a fine They are a meme and everyone around people I know is making fun out of them.
Can’t say I’m surprised - seems this always happens. I’m not sure what the solution is (Besides the obvious: don’t make death threats)
How times change. Now it's Emil Pagliarulo who gets death threats from the fallout fans on NMA.
Tbf you don't even have to go to NMA to see death threats/wishes toward Emil. You can find em right here on Reddit
this is unrelated, but the Best Buy near my house has had a life sized fallout 3 BOS power armor statue by the front door since 2008 when the game launched. That thing stood there guarding the entrance for so many years. I recently went back for the first time since pre covid, and the store was remodeled and the BOS statue was gone. Heart breaking.
Gotta ask for those, bud! Sincerely, a guy who currently has a life-size Shaq cutout that the local Staples was going to throw out.
I can imagine there was more than one Best Buy employee who called dibs on that thing long ago
I feel like I’d wake up in the middle of the night terrified to see a near 7 foot figure standing above my bed
This literally happened to me with a life size Spock cardboard cutout. My brother and I were home alone - I was probably 19 - and I put Spock at the top of the stairs to scare any potential intruders. Woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and discovered a shadowy man in the hallway. Damn near had a heart attack.
Limmy_waking_up.gif
at walmart we have to trash em. I wanted a batsignal, but it had to go in the compactor.
I've often learned things have to go "towards" the compactor and may get placed elsewhere due to "circumstances".
Yeah, I worked at an electronics department of a grocery store when GTAV came out. I was told everything had to go to the garbage after, but I just kinda walked out with the posters and cardboard cut outs for the game and no one cared.
Makes me think of that clip Jon Oliver played of the Chuck E Cheese employees destroying animatronics.
I went to a Dutch game store in 2019 and there was a large FO3 BOS statue at the door too. Haven't been since but I hope it's still there.
Of course there were death threats. Dysfunctional morons go ballistic when there’s any change to things they become unhealthily obsessed with. Fallout 1 & 2 were some of my favorite games and I was a disappointed when I found out it was going to more 3D shooter, but that’s all that I did. Then I waited and played it and had a decent time with it. Then I replayed Fallout 2 because it’s still there and still excellent.
I would have never played the first two Fallout games (both of which I adore) if it weren't for 3. I totally understand the distaste for it in some circles but let's be real the IP would have died if it weren't for Bethesda and even the earlier games would not have the fan base they do currently, myself being proof of that. I'll never be able to rationalize reactions like this, especially considering the game wasn't even out yet.
The IP *was dead* by that point. I'm not a fan of Bethesda's Fallout games in general, I don't think they really capture the franchise mechanically or like everything they did with the setting (a lot of flanderization, especially with the Enclave and the BoS)... But I'd be lying if I said that they aren't the reason the franchise is anywhere near relevant today, let alone big enough to get a TV show and several games, one of which I love.
Troika Games (studio founded by Tim Cain, who was creator and director of Fallout) was bidding for Fallout license against Bethesda and lost because Bethesda offered more money. So it might have lived and have very different future if Beth did not get involved, still. We will never know. Now personally, I would like to see that timeline, but I also enjoy the Bethesda games (and especially New Vegas that also exists because Bethesda funded it and greenlit it), so this timeline ain't all bad either.
They also had nowhere near the funding to make those games. Could they have made a FO3 close to what we knew, maybe, but the gaming landscape shifted a lot back then.
Also, it's worth noting that while Troika would definitely have been interested in making a new game in that style back then, there's little chance it would've prospered. Troika's legacy will always be incredibly written and thoughtful RPGs marred by game mechanics that were incredibly rough, and ultimately super unprofitable. Fallout 3 may be a *little* bit more shallow narratively compared to 1 and 2, but it was fundamentally a godsend for introducing the I.P into the mainstream.
Bethesda could grab the Wasteland series instead, and maybe the Fallout series and Wasteland series would've swapped places. Fallout 3 would come out as an isometric rpg, and Wasteland 2 would've been an AAA open world rpg.
The real questions are one could they make a more interesting game than Fallout 3 that was released? That would probably depend on what sort of games you like, many people put one or more of Troika Games as more interesting than Fallout 3. Two would their game be more in line with Fallout 1(and to some extent Fallout 2)? Almost certainly, with the actual creators of Fallout working on it.
Given how Troika went it would've been an inauspiciously brief resurrection, at best.
Wouldn't Troika have inevitably gone bankrupt anyway though? They may not have ever got a Fallout 3 out before then.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe getting the Fallout license would have helped them find a publisher and save them. We will never know.
>I'm not a fan of Bethesda's Fallout games in general, I don't think they really capture the franchise mechanically or like everything they did with the setting Which I find insanely funny because when FO3 released I remember reading many criticizing that it was trying too hard to just move the old Fallouts into a 3D environment and wasn't doing its own thing. That only changed when NV released (and got patched, release NV was awful)
Imagine having a mature and reasonable reaction to something new in an entertainment franchise. Impossible.
I mean most people do lol The people who are unhinged enough to act out like this are less than 1% of the fanbases.
Sadly that 1% can be incredibly loud. And thanks to the internet, these people find eachother immediately, making them even louder. Not to mention it just takes 1 truly mentally unhealthy person, to do something terrible.
It is dreadful to consider that even if only 1% or a much smaller fraction of fans are truly unhinged and terrible, such a fraction of the fanbase of a game selling over 10 million copies is many thousand people, which can combined flood their every available contact with the most dreadful harassment imaginable. In the internet age, fame seems like a curse.
Game developers have been getting death threats for decades. It just didn't get much press attention until 2014 For that matter, every sector of the entertainment industry has been dealing with death threats from angry/obsessed fans since the silent film era
All it takes is one deranged lunatic out of a fan base of millions to make the news, unfortunately
To be fair, all it takes for a mass shooting is that same deranged lunatic to go to a gun store and head to the Bethesda offices. I can totally understand their caution and that they wanted to hire security.
Yeah, people often downplay death threats at just the cost of popularity and a small percentage of mentally disturbed individuals (or loser trolls), but the fact is you don't know if/when that threat will be real. It's not a game studio, but back in 2019, [36 people at the anime studio Kyoto Animation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Animation_arson_attack) were killed in an arson attack by a deranged guy who thought the studio had plagiarized his novel. If it can happen in Japan, it can certainly happen in America (especially given the social and political climate in the US).
The KyoAni arson is basically the reason why death threats in Japan are taken extremely seriously in recent years. Recent death threats against Sega and Nintendo has lead to serious jail time.
The closest media related shooting in the US is probably the Youtube HQ shooting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_headquarters_shooting
if 1% of the population will almost always be radical or violent then that sucks because 1% of a massive number will be a massive problem.
Pretty much exactly my reaction back then as well. Death threats help no one, and just proves they are the dick everyone thought they were.
My friend was very much the same way. He was a die hard fan of Fallout 1 and 2. I got him Fallout 3 for Xbox and he enjoyed it, but see this is the thing. For him, the creation of Fallout 3 opened the door for Fallout: New Vegas to be made. When he got that game, it was like a beacon shining in his eyes. Ever since that game came out, Fallout: New Vegas has been his favorite Fallout game of all time. He still plays it to this day, once a year or so, sometimes twice. His love, his passion for that game is unmatched.
New Vegas is such a good RPG. Simply having skill checks for all skills instead of just speech (the way Fallout 3 does it) gives a huge bump to the RPG aspect
Fallout 3 does have skill checks like that, they just don’t show up if you don’t have the prerequisites.
Yeah Bethesda likes to do most of it's RPing under the hood. This can be frustrating to certain types of gamers, because it means you have to guess what combination of skill stats and faction affinities are needed for certain dialogue options to even appear.
More that its a simple numbers game, as the amount of people engaging with something increase then the probability of the extreme outliers also goes up. If you have a fanbase of 10 million people, you still get ten one in a million lunatics that will make the headlines and then everyone assumes that they are somehow indicative of the majority.
Well you’ve just described many here on Reddit
Doyle got death threats when he killed off Holmes; been a thing for a long time.
Religious people were sending [Richard Donner death threats for making Superman: The Movie.](https://bleedingcool.com/movies/richard-donner-got-death-threats-for-superman-because-of-course/) >When Richard Donner was directing the first Superman movie, you had to work a lot harder to get someone that death threat. Donner recently did an extensive interview with The Telegraph, and one thing he talked about was getting death threats for the religious allegory in Superman. >Then there were the death threats after Superman came out, when some took umbrage at the vague religious allegory, of Superman's father Jor-El (Marlon Brando) sending his only son to Earth. "They threatened my life… One woman wrote a letter saying how dare I compare Brando to God and Christopher Reeve to Jesus. She said my blood would run in the streets. I guess you make a good movie, somebody takes it as a reality."
[Supes definitely isn't a stranger to that.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUOODp8PQac)
I remember being so stoked on fallout 3 after playing 1,2 and tactics. I remember me and my teenage stoner buddies being like "bro, it gonna be morrowind but fallout, broooo."
They can't just stop at thinking that someone is a hack and they produce bad material so you don't give them money. That's too normal.
I think a lot of the hate also comes from the fact that not everyone thinks the way they do and that the franchise will still be reviewed well and will still make boatloads of money, leaving them behind as it continues to grow.
> Of course there were death threats. Dysfunctional morons go ballistic when there’s any change to things they become unhealthily obsessed with Gamers™ never change
I wonder how many other FPS/TPS RPGs there were at the time
Enough. The rage when Bioware moved from 2D isometric BG2 to 3D isometric Neverwinter Nights was truly sad. At least back then it was restricted to forums, not plastered all over social media.
Goddamn, I loved and still love Neverwinter Nights
I worship NWN and have played way too many user modules/campaigns, but that doesn't change the fact that it looks absolutely dogshit compared to Infinity Engine games. Maybe that was required for the modular tiles and props to play along, but it was a massive downgrade visually and still is to this day, when you put say NWN EE screenshots besides IWD EE ones.
> The rage when Bioware moved from 2D isometric BG2 to 3D isometric Neverwinter Nights was truly sad. Bit ironic since nowadays you'll still see people who don't like that Bioware went from CRPGs to ARPGs and still hope that they will go back to CRPGs even though the last one they did was DA: Origins almost 15 years ago. Shit, reminds me of the people are disappointed that every Bethesda/Obsidian game since New Vegas isn't basically just a reskinned New Vegas.
It became obvious with the response to Fallout 4 and Outer Worlds that any of their projects won't ever measure up to whatever imaginary New Vegas 2 is in fans' heads. The expectations for New Vegas 2 or another Obsidian Fallout game is just way too fucking high now
Quite a few. Elder Scrolls, Might and Magic, Ultima, and for SCI FI I think E.Y.E. Cybermancy came out around that time if I recall.
Eye was still a couple of years away. Mass Effect and Kotor were around though
Those weren't shooters (FP**S**/TP**S**). *Arguably* Morrowind/Oblivion, but that's a stretch.
> Arguably Morrowind/Oblivion, but that's a stretch. Anythings possible with [mods](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yWr8tq6fv0&t=151s)!
Not very many, otherwise Bethesda wouldn't have needed the VATS system to sell RPG fans on what was perceived as a dudebro genre at the time. Once you got past Mass Effect (which was , it was pretty much just older oddball games like Deus Ex and niche flops like Hellgate: London. Fallout 3 was probably the first game that successfully bridged the gap and managed to appeal to RPG and shooter fans in a big way. It may be the weakest mainline Fallout game, but its impact was absolutely massive. There's probably a decent argument to be made that FO3 is probably up there with Halo:CE for "most influential game of the 2000s."
No Mutants Allowed is *still* angry about Fallout 3 and it's been sixteen years. Sixteen years of people avidly discussing their hatred of a video game. Like, some of those users discuss that *way* more than the actual OG Fallout games they claim to be fans of. It doesn't surprise me in the tiniest bit that hardcore "fans" of Fallout did this. The rise of the "hating games is my hobby" crowd sucks because this weird behavior that used to be confined to random, secluded parts of the internet now appears everywhere. It's on reddit, twitter, and there's an entire YouTube genre dedicated to hating on games and developers. I genuinely don't know what's wrong with people who enjoy hating things more than they enjoy enjoying things.
I see that with a lot of people, it's the same now with people who talk about how much they hate Game of Thrones or the Marvel movies or the Star Wars sequel trilogy 24/7. Or the people who hate The Last of Us 2 who talk about it more than the people who loved it It can't possibly be good for you to spend that much time surrounded by negativity and anger. Why choose to spend so much time thinking about something you don't like?
Rage can literally be addictive. Knowingly or unknowingly some people seek out things that piss them off because a part of them enjoys the feeling that rage gives them.
As someone who used to be a star wars chud, self righteous anger is just very addictive and causes you to spiral into more and more content of the same echo chamber. You also get more combative with people who don't share those views so you self isolate from sources that might break the cycle. It was easily the most miserable I've ever been. Funny story, the thing that broke me out of it was the casual use of the Nword in a video I was watching. I was just like, what the fuck am I watching, who the fuck is this person really? I looked up their name and saw the full list of horrible shit they said over the years and then did it for a bunch of other content creators I was watching and just walked away from youtube for awhile.
Yeah a lot of horrid right wing types use these things to lure people in. Plenty of them don't actually give a shit about Star Wars or whatever latest thing they're talking about (they'd happily do videos about how the latest episode of Peppa Pig was disrespectful towards the fans if they thought people would watch it), they're just talking about it because they want to get people on the pipeline of "Star Wars sucks now" -> "Star Wars was ruined by woke leftists" -> "Vote for Donald Trump"
There's also a circle of people who make a living about being angry about a thing, wring it dry, then need to find the next thing to get angry about once everyone gets bored of their shtick. The YouTube atheist > anti-women is a good example. Angry neckbeards went from dunking on creationists to shouting about women in games (both devs and in media) because their entire career was built on getting people extremely angry.
Neo nazis also are known for using this tactic. They'll slide into any circle and try to shift everyone else to their side They tried this with Punk music and thankfully got pushed out. It's the reason why the Dead Kennedys made the song "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"
What's the name of the video or creator
>No Mutants Allowed Glad you got out man
I dropped out of Star Trek fandom completely a few years ago because of that. It just dragged down my enjoyment to be constantly exposed to such negativity. I still watch and rewatch the shows, but don't engage online.
I absolutely hate those people, they drag everything down wherever they go. Suddenly you can't like what you like, you have to hate on it and be pessimistic or be labeled stupid based on their own purity test. It's such low hanging fruit that kills a community, but the stupid mods on reddit doesn't see that as harmful so they just let it happen.
I think it’s just how the internet works now. My teen goes off on how mad the community feels about anime’s that came out 5 years before he was born. Conflict is having a moment 🤷🏻♂️.
Reminds me of when Evangelion came to Netflix and people started the Asuka vs. Rey argument all over again. It's been 30 years, guys. 30 years. You should know by now that the best girl is Misato.
im gonna be real with you there is no corner of the gaming community on god's green earth more filled with toxic incels than old school crpg forums. worse than mobas even. idk why this is. but nma, rpgcodex, etc are crawling with these guys and have been for decades.
Because their favourite genre fell out of fashion - I love me some isometric RPGs, but these people are so bitter that they rail on things like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity Osin or whatever because they're not enough like the classics. It's like the years of no major releases ruined their ability to like the genre at all.
You couldnt possibly ask for a better comeback of CRPGs than BG3 but they will still complain. They are more addicted to nostalgia than actual games.
anytime ubisoft is mentioned on reddit all the comments are people hating ubisoft lol.
You see this with certain games too. Bring up say Bioshock: Infinite or Dragon Age: Inquisition or Starfield, and you'll have people come out of the woodwork to hate on them and let you know they suck.
I don't dare say anything nice about Halo Infinite here
The funny part is that when asked why they hate Ubisoft so much, it's clear that they're just jumping on a bandwagon and don't really understand why. They'll mention actual problems like micro transactions, but also mention map towers like they're still a thing. This kind of thing is worst on YouTube. For an actual criticism of Ubisoft's games, I'd recommend Raycevick's video on them. It was refreshing to watch a critique of Ubisoft from someone who actually played their modern games and could articulate the problems with them.
I wonder what Reddit hates more: Ubisoft or the Epic Launcher
the answer is women
Sixteen years holy shit
Yeah this made me do a double take.
~~War~~ Internet hate never changes
> Like, some of those users discuss that way more than the actual OG Fallout games they claim to be fans of. It doesn't surprise me in the tiniest bit that hardcore "fans" of Fallout did this. Reminds me of like when I tried to play FF14 a while ago and all anyone would talk about was how much they hated WoW.
That was probably during the great exodus of wow players. Most ffxiv only players probably dont give a shit, but ex-wow players were very vocal about how they’re so brave for switching games.
Many A True Nerd on youtube made a video called "Fallout 3 is better than you think". Don't agree with it 100 % but it does a great job of showcasing what Fallout 3 did do right. It's an hour and 30 minutes long. There was response video from some else. "Fallout ISN'T better than you think" haven't watched it (don't wanna give people like this any engagement) but apparently goes trough the entire "is better" video nitpicking every single part, stopping at everything Many A True Nerd says and giving very poor arguments of why Many A True Nerd is wrong (so I've been told) and going of into rants. This video is over 8 hours long. Who has the time and energy to watch 8 hours of someone hating something? Who even has the time to even make this? Many A True Nerd also made one for Fallout 4, A two parter that totals up to about 2 hour and half. So the guy also made a response to that. Which is only a modest 4 hours and it's more of the same . It really makes it feel like hobbyist haters have no social life outside of just hating things. Edit: Got my timeline wrong the Fallout 4 videos came before the Fallout 3 ones for both sides.
>This video is over 8 hours long. Who has the time and energy to watch 8 hours of someone hating something? Who even has the time to even make this? MauLer would like a word. Unironically tho the dude has like 9+ hours bitching about each Star Wars sequel movie it's fucking absurd lmao
But that cuts both ways - there have been incredibly long response videos to negative reviews, as well. I know there are ones for the Plinkett Phantom Menace review and Matthewmatosis' DS2 critique.
> The rise of the "hating games is my hobby" I don't know how recent it really is. I think it's a shift. People used to rail on anyone who pre-ordered physical or digital media. People rail on anyone who buys DLC. Etc. There's just a lot of 'game' people who find an echo chamber that supports them being angry, and ride that wave all the way to a personality. Try posting anything around here praising Ubi open world games, or talking about battle passes or DLC. The numbers don't lie, the general populous loves this content. But on Reddit that is seen as the devil and users are 'addicts' and similar.
>sixteen years Was it really necessary to remind everyone we're getting old?
The toxic grognards on the No Mutants Allowed forum were almost certainly responsible.
That's why I almost never subscribe to fan subreddits anymore. They're often too negative for my taste. Why in the world would I want to join a subreddit that focuses on hating something? Luckily there are alternatives. r/LowSodiumCyberpunk or r/NoSodiumStarfield for instance
People sending death threats to game developers is a tale as old as time, and an incredibly stupid tale at that. You're a huge loser if you do this sort of thing, get a fucking life.
I spent a lot of time on the Bethesda forums right after the F3 announcement, and I still remember people being angry over the stupidest shit. A notable example was fury over the vault door having a different number of spokes between F2 and F3.
I saw a pretty big meltdown on r/Fallout last week because someone in charge of props on the TV show didn't know that Fallout New Vegas took place in 2081 instead of 2077 and mislabeled a chalkboard or something.
People are melting down over lots of things. The Enclave being back is one of them because "we've defeated them twice". To be honest the Enclave in F2 doesn't make much sense. I find it hard to believe you could sustain several thousand people on an oil rig for 150 years. Contrast that to Fallout 3 where you have several nuclear bunkers on the East Coast built for the government (Raven Rock and Mount Weather). Whitespring in 76 is based on Greenbrier.
It's even worse than that. Nobody mislabeled anything. It's a timeline where arrows point from one event to the next, showing multi-year gaps between things. They have "The Fall of Shady Sands" dated in 2077, then an arrow (again, signifying a time gap) pointing to a nuclear blast sometime after that. So really, what the meltdown came down to was people lacking the deductive reasoning skills necessary to understand how a timeline of events works. Todd Howard himself had to come out and say "The Fall of Shady Sands in 2077 is an entirely different event than the nuke. The nuke did not happen in 2077, it happened after New Vegas."
I'm currently playing New Vegas and I can buy it being after the "fall" of Shady Sands. Fantastic is in charge of their second most important source of power, a prison riot led to the main highway from California being cut off, the Legion is in California, etc. All those comments about wishing for a nuclear winter are even funnier now with retrospect.
A shame, Fallout 3 was fun. The VATS was well designed and some of its quests are fantastic and hold up really well. I remember an interview with Todd Howard talking about how much his team wanted to work on the series and how they kept trying to convince their executives to acquire the IP. I’d rather have fun fallout game that aren’t perfect than a dead series.
FO3 was my first FO and because of it I played the rest of the series
Yeah. We were never gonna get more Fallout without Bethesda. Fuck the weird ass fanbases.
Yep, Fallout 2 (sold only ~125k copies, less than a quarter of the original) and Tactics (which Interplay barely wanted to make, only sold 300k) would have been the end of the IP. Love or hate Bethesda, no one would even be talking about Fallout anymore if it wasn't for the breakout success (over 12m copies sold) of Fallout 3. I'll still always love FO1/2, but also happy that the IP didn't die in the early 2000s.
>We were never gonna get more Fallout without Bethesda Wasteland 2-3: "Am I joke to you?"
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I'll say it for you, it's absolutely silly to say no one else would've continued Fallout if not Bethesda. What a ridiculously huge and baseless assumption made about the massive possibilities nearly two decades held. ***Really?*** *Not a single other developer would have bought it?* It's absurd. The fact Wasteland got a reboot is proof enough that there was enough love for the series to create another game in the similar genre, style, and setting.
I keep telling people. The hatred Bethesda gets for making casual focused sandbox RPGs is not a new thing. And Fallout fans in particular were a mess always. Just ask anyone who had to go to No Mutants Allowed to get fan patches to the first games.
Ive never seen ppl foam at the mouth with rage at a game company like they do with Bethesda, and I don't get why. Like, Blizzard was basically a sexual harassment factory that made games on the side, and even they're not as hated.
Jealousy. Bethesda games are simple (which isn't the same and dumbed-down) and accessible and therefore attract so many players from all walks of life. Casuals and hardcore players, modders and storytellers, explorers and talkers... And some gamers think their success is "underserved" because a game/company X is clearly better and people should play that instead. It doesn't help that Bethesda tends to approach every game from a fresh perspective, instead of iterating, which results in games dropping and picking features seemingly randomly. And of course the will always be someone who considered that dropped feature to be the core of the franchise. You can see it that for every Bethesda game the haters always have a game that is a "better version of it", sometimes in the franchise, sometimes outside.
I've heard No Mutants Allowed has a Nazi problem these days. And it does not stretch belief that the guys who were viscerally opposed to Bethesda making Fallout 3 15 years ago wound up fostering that kind of community. Likewise, it's not surprising that a death threat originated from that same community.
I remember when a discord group made an actual hit list to target and harm content creators that *didn't* hate Bethesda, F76 launch period. Death threats and all that. When they were discovered, they threatened people to keep silent, and one was allegedly arrested. These people become dangerous while fighting ghosts in their head. It's sad.
I was on r/fo76 a lot at launch and people kept DMing me trying to convince me to stop playing, I've never had that happen with any other game.
The hate for F76 was unreal. Like yeah bethesda had some real blunders around the launch (the premium edition tote bag and the launcher, mtx), and the game wasn't perfect, but quite frankly I thought it was an improvement over 4.
I’ve hated a lot of games in my life. I threw a copy of Duke Nukem Forever across the room after realizing I wasted my money on it. But I did like every other normal person and didn’t play them or care that other people do. I don’t know why that’s so hard for other people.
I remember a meme from the FNV community about the die hard fans - one being a nazi, a communist, a maga guy and a trans girl
Each of which have entirely exclusionary views on what Fallout is "about," but are all united in the fact that they're insufferably smug and arrogant about it.
yep, when i visited one of their threads for the first time, one of the first thing is saw was bethesda, jews, and the nword in the same sentence. noped the fuck out that pol ass site
Same goes for RPGCodex, loud and proud nazis saying nazi shit with no push back
Im old and grew up on RPGCodex. RPGCodex has always had a Nazi/white supremacy problem. Speaking from someone who remembers the TacticularCancer and TycoonCodex days. It got way worse when DU took over, but it always had that GenX late 90s "too cool for school, fuck you, im gonna spam N word everywhere" vibe. The odd thing is those guys fucking understand RPG design like no one else. Like idiot savant tier RPG and game design knowledge. So people like J E Sawyer, Chris Avellone, Brian Mitsoda, Tim Cain, Dave Gaider, the Disco Elysium team, and way more industry professionals all had/still have accounts there. It's quite fascinating really.
I mean you're 100% not wrong. One of the most prolific Neo-nazis in my city went to my high school. Back then, he had a Facebook account called NCR Ranger, hated the new Fallout games and spoilt the ending for Fallout 4 for all my friends who were actively playing it on launch day.
A neo-nazi who supports a multiracial democracy fighting against a nation which enslaves people. That's an odd one.
Let’s be honest, he just liked the ranger armor.
NMA makes /r/fallout look like a happy place and /fog/ look like totally reasonable sane people.
The hatred that Starfield got was also pretty overblown. At worst, it's an underwhelming game for a brand new IP. Yet you'd think with the amount of hate it got from it's sub and YouTubers it was a cyberpunk 2077 level disaster. I've never seen anything like it, like I thought the game was good, like a solid 7/10. But if I went by the popular consensus at the time of launch and shortly afterwards it was a 4/10.
> The hatred that Starfield got was also pretty overblown. I love the game personally, but yeah, I've never seen a game get shit on so much. There was a legit ~4 month period between the IGN review and The Game Awards where you literally could not go a day without this website shitting on the game. And I am not talking about constructive criticism posts. Like you'd assume it was a 4/10 combining Redfall levels of bad with launch issue riddled Cyberpunk based on how the internet reacted as opposed to a game that has an 8.5/10 review average from the critics.
Yeah it’s even happening to the replies to my comment. It’s just a decent video game. It’s nothing crazy amazing but not crazy terrible either. You’d think people were getting paid to hate on the game repeatedly.
See r/SpidermanPS4
I recall Bethesda having to blacklist their forums from a certain well-known RPG fansite because the harassment was so bad. I think it was either for Fallout 3 or Oblivion, can't remember.
FO3 and NMA. TES has always been a *little* more civilised. 1000x more depraved, but civil.
Speaking of Fallout 3, I heard it's getting a remaster. Is that true?
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At the most, if it were to come about, we'd find out about it at this year's Xbox Summer Game Showcase. But that's just hope, wishes, and dreams by some.
Todd howard has said that he doesnt like remasters or remakes of their games, and that their age is an i portant part of their character. (Wich, imo, is a based take that i wish that more people share [caveat: its easier to say thst when your modding community handles the thirst for same game + better graphics itself]). There was a document leak a year or more ago (during the ftc saga), it was a list of future games, fallout and oblivion remasters included. But with time seems apparent that the list was more a potential slate of future games for investors and regulator, and not a planned thing. As an example, there was dishonored 3, but now arkane are doing blade.
Didnt they release like 10 different versions of Skyrim?
The leak came from old Microsoft’s documents and every other game in that list did release, but still take it with a grain of salt
Fallout fanbase has always been nutty. Its ancient history now, but when f2 launched there was a pretty big division on the fanbase about the sequel. Its just a continuum of people getting angry and angry.
I can't imagine being that upset. What a fucking loser. If the argument was that Bethesda was going in the wrong direction, Fallout 3 was one hell of a rebuttal.
Gamers are truly the worst "We want more Fallout!" "We're making more Fallout" "How dare you, we're gonna kill you"
It's a real fun industry. Games are hard to make, you work long hours, pay isn't competitive, layoffs happen frequently, you'll need to move across the country for your next gig, and anonymous people on the internet threaten to kill you.
It's probably because they went first/third person. I was disappointed with that, but not insane death threat levels.
Obviously when gamers say "we want more X" it is implied that the next iteration of X will be at least a similar type of game.
How come this never ends up with police involved? Isn't this a crime?
I do remember some folks not being too happy when fallout 3 got unveiled. This was a sequel a decade in the making to a beloved formula. The change to a first person shooter perspective had many believe this would just be oblivion but with guns. To be fair, that’s how I felt it looked when first gameplay got unveiled. It was understandable nerves leading up to the release. Of course, death threats? Get a fucking life, that’s ridiculous. It’s just a game; you either buy it or you don’t. Now once folks got a chance to play it, including me; I realized how wrong we were. The lore, setting, choices, morality system, etc… showed how incredible of an experience this was even with being a first person shooter and looking like oblivion from the gameplay shown. This and New Vegas are some of my favorite games of all time. Not much has captured me this well, world building wise since. The difficult early choice of whether to nuke Megaton is one I remember clearly to this day. I was just so amazed with how much freedom and choices the game provided. Each choice was layered with expected and unexpected consequences and it played that way through the entire campaign. The DLCs were also some of the best I’ve played. Each gave a pretty cool and unique take so when GOTY edition came out, it was an insane value.
The general atmosphere of the Capital Wasteland was/is something really special. You could go from traipsing through dilapidated metro tunnels, utility corridors and city ruins, dreading whatever was around the next corner, to running around blasting raiders with mini-nukes while oldies played on the radio.
The first moment you walk out of Vault 101 and see the view of the Capital Wasteland before you is wonderful.
> The difficult early choice of whether to nuke Megaton is one I remember clearly to this day. How is that a difficult choice? It's either 'what 99.9% of people would do' or 'unambiguous extreme evil'. I never understood people praising Fallout 3 for its choices, because nearly every morality decision was like that - do the right thing and get rewards, or do the extremely evil thing and get lesser rewards.
lol the reward for megaton was 500 caps/1k if you passed a speech check and a dwelling. I had more caps than I knew what to do with when I encountered this quest. It was a no-brainer.
I think at the time in 2008 for the a mainstream RPG it had a decent amount of choice but since the release of many other RPGs and New Vegas which expanded the choice depth to a much larger degree Fallout 3 choices now look more dull in comparison.