Fallout 3 and NV for story and immersion

Fallout 4 for...er...I mean building mechanic is pretty cool.

Fallout 76 is Wild Wasteland on steroids and even canonicly people outta the vault are begged to stop nuking the everloving shit outta West Virginia xD

So yeah. New Vegas best immersion and roleplay, F 76 best building (for me, it's my own opinion - building here is less sandboxy but feels like it has a lot more meat - more pieces have usage etc.) and both for fun factor, just different flavor.

ive seen it. they are out there. its wild but its true

76 is a fun brainless Fallout multiplayer. I'd rather have a real Fallout MP instead of 76, but I can't lie and had over 100hrs of fun.

A lot of folks really live 76. And it’s the only game in the series that offers them what they like, so why wouldn’t they?

That's... Wait. That's the whole premise of all the games dammit.

Just about any game is someone's favorite, but that doesn't mean there's a lot of debate. Fallout 4 and 76 appear to have reached an audience much larger than the rest of the series' usual standards for copies sold, so the sense I get is that if you're calling one of those your favorites, you most likely haven't seen most of the rest of the series. I think 3 and 4 get a lot of criticism that may go too far, but the long and short of it is that the consensus is that Bethesda's entries are not among the strongest in the series.

Idk, The Elder Scrolls' fandom debates a lot too. There's still people fighting over whether the Stormcloaks or the Empire were right in Skyrim, or whether Morrowind or Oblivion are the best in the series

I'm not saying Metacritic is the end-all be-all, but it does confirm the most commonly held opinion about the popularity of the modern games. You may think that there is a real debate here but that just isn't the case. 4 and 76 are pretty firmly the less well received of these games.

Fight me.

Okay, sounds fun.

I could argue that there are more Fallout games than just 1 and 2, and that we should probably admit that if Fallout 2 gets to sit at the “true Fallout” table, Fallout: New Vegas should probably get a chair too. A bunch of the original Black Isle developers who worked on Fallout 2 helped make it, and it continues the same regional story and factions. But then again, maybe having the Fallout 2 developers is not enough to make something “truly” Fallout. Maybe it is the isometric (actually skewed trimetric) view, classic CRPG style. Although once we open that can of radroaches, we get a whole new pile of questions.

So maybe we can swing the other direction entirely and say there are fewer “true” Fallout games, and that only Fallout 1 really qualifies. That does have some logic behind it, since the original creators, Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson, left during Fallout 2’s development. Their absence changed the whole design philosophy, shifting the tone, with way more pop culture references and absurdist writing, de-focused the tight world design of 1 so we got a ton of fluff dungeons and encounters, and gave us a more scattered writing experience thanks to the team being split up to work on different sections of the game (Tell me San Fran feels even remotely in the same universe as New Reno). Honestly, the jump from 1 to 2 kinda reminds me of the jump from 3 to NV. They feel the same on the surface, but are radically different experiences once you actually play them. But even then, Fallout 2 still uses the same engine and gameplay loop, so you could just as easily argue it stays true to the original formula.

But if that's the case and we double down on the 'gameplay matters more than the writing and development teams' point of view, then Fallout Nevada and Fallout Sonora belong on the list as well right? They are fan-made, sure, but they run on the same engine and play almost exactly like Fallout 1 and 2. So now we are up to four “true Fallout games.” So our definition needs to rules those out to get back to "only 1 and 2".

So maybe the fan-made games do not count because they are not official releases? But if it being an "official release" is the only rule, then Fallout 76 suddenly joins the “true Fallout” club too, which probably tells us that the bar has to be higher than that.

So if we say that a “true” Fallout game needs a mix of all the things above, like the original devs from the original studio working on the original engine with the original tone and the closest connection to the original story, then we come full circle and land right back at "Fallout 1 is the only true Fallout game."

No matter how I slice it, I can't find a definition that only includes Fallout 1 and 2...

You know... thinking about it, I guess the only constant of every single Fallout game since 2 has been that fans of the previous entry look at it and say "this is too radical a departure, this isn't a true Fallout at all!"

fallout shelter >