The members of No Mutants Allowed often talk about the difference of tone between Fallout and Fallout 3 in some pretty severe ways. This is a far more nuanced issue than they make it out to be, but they still have a point. Take the drill sergeant from Fallout 2. He unleashes the greatest Full Metal Jacket impression of all time if you approach him without your power armor. Take The Master, the final boss in Fallout. He’s a pink biotech horror who speaks in a friendly mid-atlantic accent punctuated with words spliced from audio files. Or what about Myron? The horny, pasty-faced adolescent drug dealer who comes on to you relentlessly if you’re playing a female. Those characters are still vibrant nearly 20 years later. As much as I enjoyed Fallout 3, I can’t remember a single face that populated the Capital Wasteland.

Advertisement

Sander is an administrator on No Mutants Allowed, and has been a member of the community for over 10 years. “Fallout 3 was a huge success, and a lot of people in video games still like that game, but I think it was only us, RPG Codex, and Duck and Cover who rejected it,” he told me. “The community did turn fairly hostile towards anyone who saw that game as a valid sequel.”

NMA’s shredding of Fallout 3 was probably most savage in the period just after the game’s release. Fans streamed into the bee’s nest to defend the honor of their new favorite game. Here’s colonelmustard in 2009: “I must say I’ve seen quite a bit of bashing against Fallout 3, and I don’t mean to offend, but that’s just stupid,” he wrote. “I may have lower expectations because this is my first Fallout, but this game is amazing and the DLC is nothing to bitch about either.”

Advertisement

The first four responses are:

Advertisement

A 15-page, constantly-bumped thread titled “why is Fallout 3 so hated?” captures No Mutants Allowed at their worst and most mean-spirited. Between the complaints about minor minutia like the placement of the Brotherhood of Steel or the irrigation system in Megaton, you’ll find some embarrassing all-out attacks.

“It is truly unfortunate that you can’t tell the difference between the immersive and reactive universe of Fallout 1, and the nonsensical mishmash of schizophrenic vignettes that is Fallout 3. The world of Fallout 3 makes zero sense, blatantly and in your face, at every single step it works to destroy any semblance of believability or immersion,” writes a very audacious user named shihonage. “It is also truly unfortunate that you can’t tell the difference between decent and horrible writing when you see it. If anything, the sum total you should get from this, is that you should read more books and develop an actual feeling for language and taste in storytelling.”

Advertisement

That’s how you earn yourself a reputation.

The backlash against Bethesda became the dominant topic for years on No Mutants Allowed, and it’s only springing back up with the announcement of Fallout 4. The same feuds are recreated day, after day, after day.

Advertisement

“It never ends,” said Sander, who admits he doesn’t participate in these debates anymore. “The argument is played out. But people identify with the products they choose, and that includes Fallout and Fallout 3. People feel the need to defend them because it’s part of their identity. It’s self-defense. I think a lot the anger comes from that place.”

Advertisement

No Mutants Allowed is a bitter place. Even its most faithful members would admit that. But this community is rooted in a certain compassion. As the millennium turned over, top-down CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and yes, Fallout went extinct. There’s been a revival lately, with indie studios producing spiritual successors like Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity, but for years No Mutants Allowed watched angrily, as studios drifted toward profitable, console-based audiences.

“In it’s heyday No Mutants Allowed had a real community feeling,” says Sander. “The site was a place for commiseration for the games that we really liked and we just couldn’t find anymore.”

Advertisement

Maybe you’re rolling your eyes at what seems like a bunch of grizzled men and women writing corrosive forum poetry about how PC gaming is ruined forever. But here’s the thing. No Mutants Allowed aren’t wrong. Fallout 3 is a massive departure from what that series meant in the mid-’90s. The NMA users’ cynicism may be loud, but you have to remember, this is about ownership. It’s a battle as old as time. The hardcores. The casuals. The blood runs deep. These people love Fallout, and they saw Fallout become something else. Yeah it’s just a video game, but that helplessness is profound.

This was captured by longtime user Alec, who posted this just after Fallout 3 was released in 2008.

Advertisement

“Kids nowadays are developing new standards for what they think gaming should be all about,” he writes. “Even though we dislike the idea, Fallout 3 will be remembered by them. As a really awesome game. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The sentiment is echoed by user Eyenixon in the same thread.

“Go look at the GameFAQs forums for a second and read some posts on various RPGs. To many people Oblivion is a standard for RPGs. It’s the first major RPG release of this console generation and as such it’s held in pretty high esteem by people who don’t know anything about anything.”

Advertisement

It’s a losing battle, but if you listen close you can comprehend the pain. Fallout and Fallout 2 are the dying gasps of an entire generation, one where you rolled D20s for stats and drew your own maps. Maybe it’s odd to miss the punishment, but that’s what a wasteland is. Bethesda offers you a gift, while Black Isle gave you a world, just as savage and unfair as the real thing. How could they possibly understand?

“The Super Mutant is a great example,” Sean said. “In Fallout 3 Super Mutants are just mob bad guys. It completely ruins the entire aspect of their place in the fiction. You’re not supposed to meet these fuckers until late into the game when you’re level 20 and have been doing some things around the wasteland. It has that escalation to it. In a Bethesda level-scaled open-world RPG, where you can just run all over the place and say ‘oh look a Super Mutant,’ that’s kind of ruined.”

Advertisement

(Above: Super Mutants from Fallout 3 via the Villains Wikia)

There are millions of kids who claim to be huge Fallout fans that are missing out on a foundational piece of the story. In the media, there will dozens of reviews for Fallout 4 that won’t analyze its place as a follow-up of Black Isle’s blood, sweat and tears. Maybe they don’t have the knowledge, or maybe they just don’t care. Yes it’s a fact of life, yes there’s nothing you can do, but amidst universal praise and GameFAQs screeds, No Mutants Allowed will forever honor what they think is right.

Advertisement

“Since Bethesda now owns the name, the whole purpose of [No Mutants Allowed] is to make sure that these games are preserved, and celebrated, and that people in the future know what to do and what not to do,” Sean said.

I don’t know if someone who was nursed on Bethesda’s philosophy can sit down in front of that old top-down Fallout adventure and feel the magic. There’s a chance that modern game design has permanently broken those old titles.. But No Mutants Allowed is steadfast. Decades from now the Fallout license will have long shook off its CRPG tradition. Fallout 3 will be the origin story. Fallout 3 will be the classic. They yell, they scream, they beat down newcomers, but they need to, because no one else will. When No Mutants Allowed ends, so does Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.

Advertisement

“You have to understand that this community is mostly about fun and games, and when people show up they have a hard time realizing that the shitstorm is a party,” Sean said. “We like great storylines and dialogue and artwork and dedication. Even if it comes from one guy in his basement, the end product is what we’re looking for. If you don’t get it, if you don’t want to listen to us about why Fallout 3 isn’t the best representation of the Fallout universe and just want to say that it’s the best game you’ve ever played, well then that’s fine.” He pauses. “You’ve become part of the joke.”

Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker from San Diego and living in Austin, Texas. He writes about music, video games, professional wrestling, and whatever else interests him. You can find him on Twitter @luke_winkie.

Advertisement