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Fallout 3: Green World
Previous in Game Reviews: Fallout 3: The Truth About Boys and Girls | Next in Game Reviews: The Path |
Top: The original game.
Bottom: the exact same location with the Green World mod installed. |
Yesterday I mentioned I’d been surfing through the Fallout 3 mod database. Mixed in with the nude mods, outlandish weapons, and endless clothing packs I found a lot of surprising things. Eventually I found myself playing and installing mods, and enjoying Fallout 3 far more than I did on my original trip through the game.
The most compelling mod I installed is clearly heretical in nature: Green world replaces the brown grass and dead trees with lush greenery. Now, the Fallout games are clearly established as taking place in a more or less lifeless world. It’s an endless wasteland of sterile dirt and rock. This breaks that. I will not defend the mod against the charge that it moves the setting of Fallout 3 even further from the originals, and in fact I admit I would probably have faulted Bethesda if they had made the game look this way by default. But I can’t let my small-minded hypocrisy stand in the way of fun. This is a drastic improvement in many ways. I could not believe how much of a difference this thing made to my enjoyment of the game.
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The trees introduce a bit of mystery to the horizon. It was often monotonous to march over the unbroken line of lifeless dirt. Now trees block your view in some places. Other places are open. Now when you travel it feels like you’re going somewhere.
The color variety is important as well. The 2D Fallout games had more colorful foes, pools of bright green goo, and slightly more colorful clothing and scenery. That’s been toned down with the move towards photo-realism. Worse, moving the camera to first person means that you’re now seeing all the way to the horizon, which makes the brown sort of pervasive and smothering. You can say that this is how the world of Fallout should look, and I won’t argue with you. But there is only so much brown I can look at in a session, and without the greenery the entire world is the color of dirt and ash. The splashes of green produce some desperately needed contrast to the view.
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But the biggest change of the mod is just to change our perception of the wasteland. Vanilla Fallout 3 presents a barren, lifeless world. No tress. Barely any grass, most of which is brown. This introduces a lot of questions as to how in the heck anything is still alive after 200 years. No vegetation means no food chain. No food chain means nothing for humans to eat. Humans should have starved about 20 years after the bombs fell, as the last of the old food stores were depleted. The idea that this world could support not just humans, but massive predators like Deathclaws, Yao Guai, Super Mutants, and Mirelurks is ridiculous.
But the wasteland presented in this mod is very different. This isn’t a world rendered uninhabitable by human civilization. This is a world that is simply forgetting human civilization. Grass and trees encroach on the borders of the city. Grass pokes up through the cracked pavement, inexorably reclaiming the land.
With this mod, the food chain is plausible. Sure, the game doesn’t show any crops being grown, but it’s easier to believe in farming that happens off-screen than it is to believe that people are still living off of 200 year old boxes of cereal.
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There are a few minor issues. The oasis region won’t make any sense now, since your character will make a big deal over seeing green trees even though they’re all over the wasteland now. The trees are non-solid to avoid breaking the AI pathfinding. There are a small number of places where the branches poke through walls, which looks wrong. Still, it’s amazing someone was able to make such vast changes with such minor side-effects.
The overgrown world has a kind of lonely, forlorn feel to it. It reminds me a bit of the New York we see in I am Legend. Lost and empty.
Maybe it’s not Fallout proper, but I like it better this way. Given the other betrayals to canon and continuity that were integrated into the game, this mod is a small deviation with pleasing results.
You can download Green world yourself if you want to give it a try.
Other mods I would consider essential:
* Something to make the interface less stupid on the PC.
* Fast VATS, to speed up the tedious cutscenes that play when you shoot someone. I’m not against a little slo-mo now and again for special moments, but having the game slow down every. single. time. you pull the trigger, and then having the camera linger over their corpse for several seconds, completely ruins the effect. I found myself ignoring VATS, and then turning down the difficulty (the game is much harder without VATS) which more or less reduced the game to DOOM. Which also becomes boring. Much better to play the game as intended, but with less slo-mo nonsense.
* Fellout, which gets rid of the pervasive green tint in the world. Like green world, this gives some visual variety to the lighting and color, as opposed to “all green, all the time”.
* Some variety of level un-capper. It’s no fun hitting the level cap before you’re even halfway through the game, which can easily happen if you come from the Do Every Quest school of thought. You have to be careful here, because these aren’t mods so much as “hacks”. The level 20 cap is built into all sorts of game mechanics, and breaking it can break the game in annoying ways. (The most obvious problem is that you’ll quickly master all skills and accrue a massive, game-breaking load of hitpoints.) Really, I’d be happy with retaining the power of a level 20 character, as long as it still allowed me to clock more levels. There are a lot of mods with varying approaches to this problem. Your mileage may vary.
* Some sort of body mod. Some players want nudity. Some players just want better looking people in the wasteland. Some players just want the people (raiders, mostly) to have underwear that makes some kind of sense. No matter what your preference is, there’s probably a mod that will fix things up. (But above all, I wish there was some dang variety. No mods seem to offer that, sadly.)
* Hunger, Thirst, Sleep. I discovered this yesterday when Rutskarn mentioned it in the comments. I’ve only dabbled with it so far, but I will say that this might be the most interesting mod yet. Even better than Green World. It turns this game into a genuine fight for survival. Pure water is no longer Halloween candy to be handed out to idiot NPCs for free karma. It’s a precious resource, and you will need to fight for it. Last night I came across the random event where some escaped slaves are arguing with some ghouls over who should get some fresh water. In the past I made my decision on how to handle the encounter based on what my alignment was. This time, I made the decision based on TWO AND A HALF DAYS OF WATER? I NEED THIS! This is what playing a good-aligned character should feel like: A battle of need vs. conscience. If you share your water with an NPC, you deserve those karma points, because you have made a tangible in-game sacrifice. The only thing ruining it is your ability to get rid of all radiation for free at home. (Thus allowing you to drink dirty water for free.)
Previous in Game Reviews: Fallout 3: The Truth About Boys and Girls | Next in Game Reviews: The Path |
61 comments. Quick! Add another to see if this message changes!
The level cap was erased in the Broken Steel official addon, but it sucks a long way. Among other things, it has ridicolous perks, that are almost useless or game-breaking. The most game-breaking one is the “Almost Perfect” perk, which raises every stat to 9. Sum that to the fact of those vault-boy dolls, and you get to 10. In mmorpg therminology: WTF?!?!
Of course, you can always ignore it. If there was a mod that changed the perks to something useful (there are quite a bunch, but none deletes the old ones), it could be a noteworthy expansion.
Here’s a good one for variety in NPC’s: Mart’s Mutant Mod, http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3211. It also has a lot of optional things that change the game, but the main feature is a ton of variety for NPC’s and enemies.
Also, who called it? I called it.
There’s some mod that allows you to modify weapons by adding things like scopes, silencers, extended clips, and autofire mechanisms. I can’t remember the exact name, it was something like “Weapon Mod Kits.” It’s pretty neat. Can be slightly game-breaking in some cases though, such as adding an autofire mechanism and extended clip to the Terrible Shotgun.
It is, in fact, called exactly that, Inquisitor!
You know, every time you bring up the whole agriculture situation, I need to smack myself a few times to shove it into the back of my skull. Otherwise, it’s hard for me to think of anything else while playing Fallout 3.
I mean, if we were really surviving on epically stale sugar pops that had, in the meantime, probably been eaten, digested, and shat out again by three different kinds of roaches (not that that would affect the nutritive value), we would not be in very good shape. Plus, all that stuff’s irradiated–if you’re Joe Random trying to survive in a fortified shack in the wastes, all your food’s gonna be poison. You have no way of curing yourself besides using packs of Rad-Away…and after 200 years of this crap, you’d think most of that would have dried up by now.
Of course they can hunt, but what are the animals eating? Dead grass? Burnt husks of trees? Sugar bombs?
Next thing you know, I’ve realized I zoned out midway through battling a raider and I am now contributing to the local ecosystem in my own special way.
I used to download a lot of mods for Oblivion, and there was a “basic needs” type mod for that, too. Hunger, drink, sleep, etc.
Just make sure your mods work right. I ruined a few game saves because that hunger mod breaks after about a week of in-game time. You either stop becoming hungry/thirsty/sleepy, or you never stop. One is crippling, the other just a waste of mod.
Nothing wrong with irradiated food. It’s great for milk!
The depth and variety to some of the mods available really shows up Bethesda (and perhaps many mainstream game designers).
When you play Oblivion or Fallout 3 with such mods, you begin to wonder what was going through the BS designers heads when they decided against (or didn’t even think of) such clever additions to the game.
I can imagine a more interesting difficulty setting being based around how much you were required to eat/sleep etc. or similar factors, rather than seemingly just based around enemy hit points.
The problem I have with FO3 is that it shouldn’t be lifeless like that. I mean, the first two looked that way because they were in southern California. No plants lived there anyway, excluding palm trees and what humans grew with sprinklers. Of course most of it would be a lifeless desert, because most of the area you explore in the first two was a lifeless desert beforehand.
Magnus: since they’d already seen the modding community rig that up for Oblivion, they probably figured they didn’t need to waste development time on it. Not saying that was the proper response, understand.
The Fallout world isn’t exactly lush with greenery, but it isn’t devoid of it either. Fallout 2 had trees, even though they were mostly scraggly brown things, with some greenish-grey and greenish-blue stuff thrown in. There were bushes, too.
Most of the first 2 Fallout games took place in the American southwest. I can imagine that being lots and lots of desert and scrubland, especially with a broken climate. But Fallout 2 started on the Oregon/California border, and trees/weeds/shrubs growing out of practically everything are just a fact of life the further north you go from there (well, until you hit tundra). Personally, I was glad to see them implement that, instead of falling prey to the usual sci-fi “one world climate” strangeness.
Hmm… Your recent loss of water service wouldn’t have colored your reaction any, would it Shamus? ;)
BTW, what video card are you using and how well is it running F3? I need to upgrade soon.
I never understood why Fallout 3 was a lifeless wasteland. Two hundred years is more than enough time for plant based life to populate the blast area again. Radiation isn’t going to keep the plants at bay for long.
For some reason, this reminds me of the Oblivion mod that added that extra touch of realism beyond just eat, sleep, and drink: the bucket. With it, you are required to “use” the bucket on a regular basis. Makes for interesting gameplay when you use it in, say, a shop.
@Rutskarn:
They seem to have spent their time making five lots of DLC instead. Which, from a business POV, makes perfect sense.
I finished FO3 the other day, uninstalled it and put it in the “sell at next opportunity” pile, so I won’t be trying the mods. When I played through Oblivion I think I used about a dozen though, and the game still annoyed me.
Playing Storm of Zehir now, and feel much better. Also managed to pick up Drakensang for £7, so things are looking up!
Isn’t there something in the fiction that allows for traders traveling outside the capital wastelands to bring in food from areas not so devasted? I seem to recall reading something like that on a terminal during my explorations. I never spent much time trading since the only trader who seemed to have a reasonable supply of caps was Moira in Megaton. Everyone else always seemed to have fewer than 100 caps. You could only sell like two things of any decent value before you had to move on — and that was just early game. Good luck finding someone to buy a dupe weapon worth 300+ caps. Thank Atom for fast-travel, I guess.
Video card – I’m running a GX275 right now. With an i7 920 and 6gb ram. Decent box, didn’t break the bank.
I’m the kind of player that hates to fail, hates to die, hates to lose. So I play with the godcode all the time. ALL THE TIME.
I’m currently carrying over 5000 lbs of gear. I cannot sell it all to anyone, but I hit up everyone I meet and pawn off what I can. I have over 17k caps right now.
Cheezy? Munchkin? Yup. But I love this. :)
The difficult part of being in godmode is that your companions are not invulnerable. I have dogmeat and Charon following me around – charon is in outcast power armor & helmet. :)
I cleared out the outcast base because they annoyed me. If you repair all of the armor to 100% you end up with only like 3 full sets. I’m going after enclave armor asap – but my next project is to wipe the slavers in paradise off the map. Woohoo!
Thanks for the posts about Fallout 3 mods. All this discussion is making me regret buying it for the Xbox instead of PC. I sure wish they’d find some way to let console players download mods too.
The screenshots from the green world look great. One staple of post-apocalyptic fiction is how nature reclaims the earth, worming her vines and trees between the rebar and sundering concrete. Nice to see that visualized. Also it explains the branches clipping into the buildings :-P
Huh. I installed the green world mod briefly while messing about with Fallout 3 mods,[*] and uninstalled it after a couple of hours. It is quite pretty, but it makes sniping more difficult (and boy oh boy do I love sniping) and it made it easier for Deathclaws to sneak up on me and kill Dogmeat. The bastards.
*: One of them added quite a few more guns, which was rather nice. Stock Fallout has: two types of assault rifle, one submachine gun, two types of energy weapon, and a couple pistols. And that’s it for small arms, in the entire DC wasteland.
It generates the impression that there was one weapons manufacturer, who had an absolute monopoly on arms dealing throughout Washington DC, (like “Chryslus” Motors) which could have been interesting had they played it up at all. Instead, it just looks like they cut other weapons for budgetary reasons, and spent more time making horse armor.
“No tress.”? Wouldn’t you need one of the haircut packs to fix that?
One of the Oblivion mods I liked was the mannequin object that allowed you to “display” your various armor sets. Granted, Fallout’s armor is slightly less exciting, visually, and your house isn’t as large (and you don’t have as many) as in Oblivion, but — well, I guess I’m a loot whore.
After 200 years, you will have nicely vegetated lava flows, impact craters, etc. May not have reached the end stage of the ecological succession, but they will be green, barring further disturbances.
Not sure how radioactive the area is supposed to be, since I’ve never played Fallout, but if you look at the area around Chernobyl, you’ll see that life found its way back. Plant life adapts quite nicely to radiation… it’s the PEOPLE who shouldn’t be there.
Enhanced Weather – Rain and Snow v2
Works well with Fellout.
PROJECT BEAUTY
Better then it sounds.
Alternate Start – Roleplayers
Best ‘skip the intro sequence’ mod I’ve found.
Workbench Repairs
Lets you use you repair skill to repair items at workbenchs in exchage for caps.
I don’t get the contaminated water thing in Fallout. It doesn’t make any sense. Water doesn’t become radioactive when exposed to radiation, at least not for very long. Some materials do, but not water.
The heavy materials that contaminated the water should have settled out of it long before the events of the series. The water itself would no longer be radioactive.
Radiation does not destroy all life, just the complex stuff. Chernobyl is a lush greenland today, though it might kill you or I to walk around there.
For those talking about Chernobyl:
http://villageofjoy.com/chernobyl-today-a-creepy-story-told-in-pictures/
That’s got to be at least as creepy as anything I’ve seen in a video game in a while, and it’s REAL.
You know why Bethesda doesn’t do all the things done in the Mods? Because mods have the advantage of being published with no testing or quality control.
Yeah, once in a while there’s a ‘Duh, this would’ve been easy, why didn’t you do it?’ But for every one of those, there are a hundred useless mods, and a dozen ‘nice, but shame it breaks the game utterly’ mods.
@Factoid: Part of the problem is that BS just kind of shoe horned what they thought was cool into the setting. So while a lot of things would make more sense if the game was set a few years after the Great War, BS felt the need to include content from the other game (read steal) and so felt the need to set it after all the other games in the series.
On topic: seeing as how many game crashes I had at the start of the game, and the darth of patches from BS, it’s a shame I can’t really participate in all the mod love.
Re: GreenWorld vs. Wasteland so how is anything living?
HAve you seenn Life After People on the History channel
Only problem with Greenworld is that the trees conflict a bit with the ground, but you’d have to paint every bit of ground around each tree with the grass texture so yeah.
Re: Chernobyl, most of the “impact” from that was completely overblown. Only 56 people died directly from radiation, and there were about 4K cases of thyroid cancer attributable to exposure to increased radiation, 99% of which were NOT fatal.
I worked with a medical doctor who lived directly in the path of the worst fallout from Chernobyl–he attended a scheduled “people’s march” *outside* the day after with thousands of other people. Ill effects? Nyet.
Radiation is a sneaky and erratic killer. If you don’t get enough of a burn to kill you right away chances are you’ll be fine.
I hate you for making me want to play Fallout 3 now, and I don’t even own it…
Just to offer an alternate perspective, regarding vegetation and radiated water:
It’s absolutely true that these make no real scientific sense. Water is not activated by radiation and Pripyat is a shining example of vegetation’s resistance to radiation. But these things don’t necessarily indicate either that Bethesda didn’t perform adequate research or that they are simply doing what they think is “cool.” In fact they are remaining true to the spirit of the Fallout scenario, which was never “realistic.”
Fallout is a satire of 1950′s cultural standards and fears. It is the realization of the nightmare held by many members of the uneducated masses living in those times. (I don’t mean to imply that the fear of nuclear catastrophe was unwarranted, simply that most of the people suffering from this fear didn’t have the scientific expertise to know how such a scenario would really play out.) I mean, no one seriously thinks that nuclear fallout would lead to giant rats and humanoid alligator-monsters, right? Perpetual desolation and contaminated water can be seen as existing in that same mold.
Of course, that said, one should absolutely reimagine the world as they wish, including game-changing mods, if that facilitates enjoyment.
So my radiation experiments with rats and alligators are all for naught?
@Allerun
Shining pets are never a waste. Except if they are Nuclear waste.
For anyone interested in what Chernobyl looks like, circa 2004, here’s a photo diary of a woman who rode through the area on her motorbike:
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html
You start talking about Fallout 3 mods the week after I finish Mothership Zeta and decide that I’m happily finished with the game.
The only mod pack I ended up using was the Ultimate Perk Pack. Because there weren’t many perks I was interested in between levels 21 and 29.
@acronix Almost Perfect sets all stats to 9, including ones that are at 10, only way to get 10 in all stats would require you not getting the stats bobbleheads until after you hit level 30. Meaning you miss out on the benefit for a lot of the game. If you want to complain about overpowered, then the Chinese Stealth Suit is probably one of the most in the game, the stealth field effect means that with high stealth and melee weapons you almost never need fear being detected again, even when you fail to one hit kill enemies with your sword/auto-ax, they just start looking for you in vain.
In a sort of fan-fiction-esque penchant for filling gaps in the world I always assumed that what food chain there is in the Fallout universe is based on water-based microbes that live on radiation, perhaps even carrying bits of nuclear material around in vacuoles or something. Once you have the bacteria you can support a whole ecosystem like the kind around deep-sea vents, only in Fallout the crabs are much larger. This also has the neat trick of explaining why the water is irradiated and why conventional methods of purifying it don’t work; killing the bugs would just cause them to release their fallout and irradiate the machinery. (It’s only slightly less far-fetched than it sounds. Look up Deinococcus Radiodurans.) Too bad there’s probably not much of a market for a pop science book like “The Science of Fallout 3.” :)
While browsing the various available mods at fallout3nexus, I was given quite a dose of malware. Just so you know.
OT: Was the cityscape in the background of SQ Entertainment’s performance on America’s Got Talent… Procedural City?
Wonderduck: seriously? Wow.
How embarrassing would it be to have your system laid low by a nudie mod, anyway?
Ah yes! The Green World mod is very nice indeed! If you play Fallout 3 for a while all the desolate wasteland atmosphere becomes kind of depressive. This mod helps a lot to improve that.
Wow! Looks great. How in the world is it only 4Kb?! Or did I misunderstand something?
Vukodlak: 10 bucks says it’s procedural.
Rutskarn, vukodlak:
It’s a simple model-swap. The mod replaces all of the “dead tree trunk” models with the “living tree” models, both of which ship with the game.
The green world mod does make Fallout3 look better, but it makes it look even less like fallout. A game looking like that will have some nice atmosphere, but then the disaster that wiped out civilization will need to be something other than nuclear war. Like biological or chemical weaponry or something.
But when I play Fallout3, I pretend I’m playing a random game that is not set in the Fallout universe. Its the only way I can stomach it. On my first play-through, I made the mistake of selecting skills and attributes in the a similar way to how I would have in Fallout 1 or 2. Yeah. That was useless. Lockpicking and speech don’t carry as much weight anymore.
Why can’t anyone make good Turn-based games anymore? Is there so few of us left that like turn-based combat?
The only enviromental mod I might try is Fellout.
Personally I like the level cap; in fact I think the setting handles the endgame poorly; FO3 is most fun when you are below level 10, before you KNOW that there is no way those freed slaves would get further than across the next hill before they get eaten by Reavers, Deathclaws, Giant scorpions… And me.
I have now restarted the game with a “less XP” mod to compensate a bit, so I might not hit lvl 30 halfway through the game.
I finally found a repair mod I have been needing a long time, one that lets you repair custom weapons by the parts, so you don’t have to build a whole new railway rifle to repair the one you are using… Incidently I plan to let my character’s main weapon be that one this time, just for fun!
@ Avilan
Yeah, I think I got that mod as well… It also lets you use appropriate junk items to repair standard weapons and armour; for instance, leather belts and glue to repair armour, tin cans to repair weapons, and baseball bats to repair shotguns and rifles.
It can make the game a little easier as it’s much easier to repair all your weapons, but it really makes a difference to the atmosphere; instead of rifling through a box and saying, “Bah, no ammo, let’s move on”, you stop whenever you see a pile of scrap to see if there’s anything you can scavenge.
I like the idea of installing mods to make the game a proper survival game; adding the need to eat, sleep, drink, hunt for scrap to bodge your weapons and food to survive all sounds pretty cool.
Oh, another Mod I recommend is the one that adds the original Fallout 1&2 music to a radio-station on your pip-boy; I was surprised at what a difference this made to the game!
@Untitled:
I had that mod before… This is a newer one that ONLY changes the repair rules for the custom weapons.
@ Avilan
Ah right, my apologies!
The problem with these BS games is that I get into a mod spiral, and just can’t stop installing them… Eventually, I have to draw a line under the mods and refuse to install more!
Combine Fellout and Green Mod, and FallOut 3 would becomes. . .beautiful. It almost reminds me of Riven, only not on islands. You put it wonderfully, “This is a world that is simply forgetting human civilization.” If I ever up my computer to run this, I am so downloading those mods by default. The default look, while stylistic, is rather oppressive.
Hmmm, I wonder what it would take to make a flower mod, just some procedurally generated blossoms here and there.
@#40 Rutskarn
It’d be awfully embarassing. Fortunately, that’s not what happened. I was just looking at the available weapon mods (a lightsaber? Really?), hadn’t even downloaded anything, when bang.
I just finished re-installing Windows. Darn ickware broke my antivirus program, prevented me from booting in safe mode, AND was causing random shutdowns after a couple of minutes.