It was the same FEV, so it makes sense that the SMs would be similar. Perhaps they could have gone for a little more variety, yes, but I imagine they were worried about getting a reaction from the fans of "That's not what the SMs look like! Betrayal!"
Actually, Vault 87 FEV is a modified strain, and supposedly inferior to Mariposa FEV—kind of weird that a test vault in the government's back yard would be using inferior FEV, come to think of it. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any traditional looking SMs either, just that it would have been nice to have some variety in an enemy that you spend a lot of time fighting. Also, I'm glad they brought back centaurs, since they're creepy as all hell, but the creation process was a specific invention of the Master, it seems kind of odd that a bunch of effectively retarded SMs who don't really have any connection to their Mariposa counterparts would know how to make them.
This probably goes back to what I was saying earlier about them wanting to start off slowly with their world-building and get new players accustomed to the Fallout universe. However, there is one thing that the Enclave had in this game that they didn't have in F2 - Malcolm McDowell. Come on, you have to admit that you liked Eden at least a little. McDowell gleefully chewed the scenery anytime he spoke, and he was obviously having so much fun with the role that it was impossible not to enjoy it along with him. In fact, I'd say that he was one of the best parts of the game.
As much as I love Malcolm, that's window dressing, and doesn't change the fact that the Enclave as presented in the game doesn't need to be there. I think Eden would have been better as a living breathing character equal in influence to Autumn, that way the tension between the two could have been brought out in the form of an internal conflict or faction split. That would have been awesome. Still, I have to admit that a supercomputer with Malcolm McDowell's voice is one of the better things in the game.
When you make a complaint like this, is it any wonder that Bethesda decided not to throw in any new twists with the Enclave? In any case, it's made very clear all throughout the game that this chapter of the Brotherhood has abandoned its original mission, and that the higher-ups are not at all happy about it - but what can they do? Go to war? Send over more men and slaughter them all? You could make the argument that this conflict of principles wasn't handled very well, and maybe it wasn't, but the concept itself isn't a bad one, and it's quite plausible that a situation like this would arise at some point during the Brotherhood's long history. After all, Lyons wasn't the only member to grow disillusioned with the Brotherhood's goals and purpose; he just took it further than anyone else.
If they already knew the changes would be poorly received by anyone who knew the series prior, why did they bother making them at all? It all comes back to my feeling that at some point Bethesda's goals became a hybrid of wanting to please both the Elder Scrolls audience (i.e.: people who perhaps don't know
Fallout and will buy the game because it's a major Bethesda title) and old fans, ultimately missing the mark when it came to the latter. Anyway: I never said that it couldn't happen, just that there's no way Lyons would have faced so little resistance, nor that the outcasts would be so few in number.
I can't disagree with any of this - well, the one thing I will say is that the guy in Girdershade is a badass who's capable of protecting the two of them, but it's still a silly setup, and so are all the other places you mentioned. Someone down the line must have thought that eccentricity was the way to go for pretty much everyone in the game. Maybe they thought it would be funny?
I seem to recall Girdershade-man just straight up dies if you convince him to the Nuka-Cola factory on his own, but maybe I'm remembering that wrong. Eccentricity is fine, and indeed has its place in the originals, but it's just so hamfisted here that I would rather have the whole game played totally serious. If you can't do humour, don't.
Yeah, I think Bethesda was more interested in depicting a post-apocalyptic world than one that was post-post-apocalyptic. That certainly wasn't what Fallout was about. And I also agree that the comedy, writing, and voice acting were almost entirely crap. I think the funniest part of the game is when Autumn is interrogating you, and you have the option to reply with "Fuck you," and follow it up with, "No, seriously. Fuck you." That really tickled me for some reason.
I wouldn't be complaining about the setting if they'd set it at a more reasonable point in the timeline, say in between 1 and 2, but having it set so far after either just makes it seem silly. I think Bethesda has tried to TES-ify the universe, this is apparent right off the bat as the main action takes place in 2277, 200 years after the bombs fell (incidentally, that's why the “2299” thing made this hoax so believable) and combined with the biblical quote about the water of life, the hailing of the Lone Wanderer as some messianic figure by Three Dog, a sort of wasteland prophet in his own right, the fact that you are expected to sacrifice yourself to complete your father's work and so on, the whole thing reeks of the prophecy and fate stuff that is rampant in TES games. All that stuff works in those games, but you can't just transpose it to some completely different universe and have it work as well, if at all.
Anyway, thanks for the lengthy response. I don't suppose you've played the DLC, by any chance?
I have played them all. I liked
Mothership Zeta best because it was just goofy fun, and a welcome tonal contrast to the vanilla game. It felt like an expanded version of one of the silly random encounters from the original games, and in fact I'd say it's the closest they got to the humour of the originals, like the holodisk where the aliens are trying to interrogate a cow. Of course, the obvious criticism there is “how come aliens with highly advanced technology are using holodisks?” and yet, taking the DLC as a send-up of hammy science fiction shows, that kind of technological gaff is at just the right level of conceit. I really wish there had been more silly fun in this vein and less of the omen and portent of the main quest in the game proper.
Broken Steel at least fixed the super-dumb ending, but it's yet another totally pointless resurrection of the Enclave. A name like “Broken Steel” suggests something else; the chapter in turmoil, Lyons being taken to task for his betrayal of the Codex, internal faction wars, the player perhaps becoming a key figure in determining the future of the chapter. Something like NV's Brotherhood/Veronica side-story but on a grander scale.
Point Lookout had promise, I really like the opening sequence, the hallucination sequence is pretty good too, but overall it's just more of the same bland colour scheme and 90% of everything you encounter trying to kill you. Also the “English” ghoul who is obviously an American doing a sort of posh-ified take on Brick Top from
Snatch just doesn't sit well with me.
Operation Anchorage, which I think most people disliked, I actually thought was one of the better things in the game. It was a part of Fallout's history we hadn't seen up close and personal before, and I think it was handled pretty well. It was also nice to have something other than green and brown on the screen. Incidentally, I think the other VR sequence in the game, Tranquility Lane, was perhaps the best moment in the main story.
I have a feeling that
The Pitt could have been the best of the bunch, but for me it lost its punch rather quickly. I like the atmosphere of the opening, but by the time the story is in full swing I feel like I'm missing something. Ultimately your choice of whether the baby is with Ashur or the other guy doesn't seem to matter, nothing happens either way, and this makes the baby seem not so much a person of great importance as a possession, and the player the middleman in a petty argument between two people who both claim sole ownership of a block of wood. It's difficult to make player decisions genuinely weighty, but I just couldn't take this one seriously. File under “missed opportunity” along with
Point Lookout and
Broken Steel.
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