I skipped straight to this because this is really the main point I'd like to address. No, I said no such thing, nor presented either as a positive, negative, or superior to the other. If that was your takeaway from that post, I'd strongly recommend re-reading it.Happyninja42 said:
What I did say, and went to great effort to point out, is those two groups of games are representative of different design philosophies, with appeals to different types of gamer (goal-oriented, versus exploration-oriented). The two groups of Fallout players -- new versus old -- are at ends due to this shift in design philosophy, and this is why fans of the first two games will almost certainly prefer FONV to FO3 or FO4. FONV espouses the "classic Fallout" design philosophy, and players of the isometric games strongly trend towards an expectation of Fallout to follow that philosophy.
I'm entirely aware of how Outer Worlds is structured. I've also seen how players are largely free to pursue objectives within each area at their leisure, which strikes me as an attempt to meet both types of gamers in the middle, particularly in the world-building and dialogue aspect of the game which plays strongly to the key implication of "classic Fallout" design philosophy. Through exploration, environmental storytelling, and dialogue, players are invited to immerse themselves in the game world and shape their own opinions of the players and factions within it over time, and that immersion itself is the quality from which players are expected to derive enjoyment. Case in point, and spoilers ahead,
The entire game being "Idiocracy: the Video Game" is hidden in plain sight just in Emerald Vale and Edgewater. As far as I can tell, no single source outright says "the plague" is just scurvy; the closest you get is Adelaide mentioning eating a balanced diet is "the cure", but the player is left entirely to their own devices to figure it out. Her garden being full of citrus trees is the big environmental clue. The whammy moment Adelaide is reprocessing human corpses as fertilizer, informs the player the planets of Halcyon aren't ideal for humans -- they might have an appropriate atmosphere and climate, but not the right ad-mix of trace elements to sustain human life, and the colony nor its constituent settlements were never really terraformed.
That very few, and certainly no "trained" medical personnel, knows how to identify or treat one of the longest-known, best-documented, and easily-treated diseases in human history is the earliest, biggest tip-off you're dealing with a society that lacks in even basic levels of education, research, or technical expertise beyond producing marketable commodities. The flavorist was the one to figure out the "plague" mystery -- that alone should tell you what's up.
Then, Welles straight up implies what happened in his dialogue when you fix Unreliable, and that's supplemented by early dialogue on the Groundbreaker. The laborers, bureaucrats and administrators, and executives were on the Groundbreaker, to start work on the colony and build the infrastructure. The scientists, researchers, and engineers who would have been able to do the terraforming, societal engineering, and other work to make the colonies sustainable were onboard the Hope. When the Hope was lost, so went the expertise, and without it Halcyon was never sustainable to begin with.
Which is why the key endgame decision is about whether to awaken the Hope colonists, initiating the work making the colony sustainable that should have started 70 years before the game begins, or to put the majority of current colonists in stasis, reducing the population to sustainable levels.
That very few, and certainly no "trained" medical personnel, knows how to identify or treat one of the longest-known, best-documented, and easily-treated diseases in human history is the earliest, biggest tip-off you're dealing with a society that lacks in even basic levels of education, research, or technical expertise beyond producing marketable commodities. The flavorist was the one to figure out the "plague" mystery -- that alone should tell you what's up.
Then, Welles straight up implies what happened in his dialogue when you fix Unreliable, and that's supplemented by early dialogue on the Groundbreaker. The laborers, bureaucrats and administrators, and executives were on the Groundbreaker, to start work on the colony and build the infrastructure. The scientists, researchers, and engineers who would have been able to do the terraforming, societal engineering, and other work to make the colonies sustainable were onboard the Hope. When the Hope was lost, so went the expertise, and without it Halcyon was never sustainable to begin with.
Which is why the key endgame decision is about whether to awaken the Hope colonists, initiating the work making the colony sustainable that should have started 70 years before the game begins, or to put the majority of current colonists in stasis, reducing the population to sustainable levels.
Now, to put that in the context of something like New Vegas. Provided the player takes the roundabout way to the Strip on their first playthrough, they're going to have a distinct, borderline preordained, impression of the Legion. Not that the reality of the Legion is really that different, but that's not the point; the point is for the player to go to Fortification Hill and talk to Caesar, and in talking to Caesar learn matters aren't always as they appear. Caesar's choices are deliberate based upon his experiences with the Followers, and what he believes to be necessary to create a sustainable society in the wasteland; whether Caesar's beliefs can survive his death, and whether the Legion's brutality is really necessary or justified, are the real bones of contention.
It's no coincidence this occurs generally at the same time players will find their way to Bitter Springs, Red Rock Canyon, Forlorn Hope, and deal with the Crimson Caravan Company through a number of quests but most notably Heartache by the Number. Because at the same time the players are learning the Legion is cold, calculated evil for the sake of survival, the NCR who are traditionally understood as Designated Good Guys are getting knocked down a few pegs as a corrupt, ramshackle bureaucracy barely capable of seeing to the welfare of its own soldiers on its most strategically-important front, let alone enforce discipline or instill a sense of military justice.
