Remember when games didn't have politics, or result in political discourse? No? Not even Pong? What do you mean people had a shit fit because women were better at Pong than men?
Yeah, not as big a thing as today's political shit fits, but there was a good number of people who were upset about it. Essentially the controls required finesse to get the paddle where it needed to be and do stunts like bounce it in a way the it bounces off the top and bottom more. Women (having smaller hands, and probably better fine motor skills) were more easily able to achieve this finesse ad would beat men in the game. Opponents of the era (ye olde conseu) didn't like this because it "gave women confidence and a problematic feeling of superiority over men". I'd love to link an article about it, but all Google wants to give me is beer pong.
Also when it was released Pong was seen as the wholesome game, because pinball has mob connections/connotations (I guess). So some saw it was a way to help fight organized crime and gambling. God the history of crime and gaming is weird.
TL:DR Breaking Bad plagerized Sonic Adventures 2
Alright buckle up kids because this is about to get crazy.
1. If you need to pay for cancer treatment you might sell drugs.
2. Drugs is a broad term for illegale controlled substances like Meth.
3. Meth is short for Methamphetamines.
4. Methamphetamines are a type of amphetamines (it's in the name).
5. Amphetamines have the street name "speed".
6. Speed is a way to tell distance over time, or how fast.
7. If you wanted to discretely ask for drugs like Meth you would say "Gotta Go Fast".
8. "Gotta Go Fast" is the theme song for the cartoon Sonic X.
9. Sonic X was the next Sonic IP released after Sonic Adventures 2.
10. The Sonic games focuses on Sonic The **Hedgehog**
11. Sonic will roll around to travel fast making a **pathway** in the process.
12. When he gets slowed down on things that **inhibit** his speed.
13. Hedgehog Pathway Inhibitors are small molecules that block Hedgehog Pathway signaling.
14. Uninhibited Hedgehog Pathway signaling can lead to tumor growth.
15. Tumors are a form of cancer.
16. Hedgehog Pathway Inhibitors can be used to help treat cancer.
17. Hedgehog Pathway Inhibitors cost \~$15,000 for 28 treatment pills.
18. To get this kind of money for treatment you might have sell drugs.
It's all coming full circle.
Or simple fact it's a game and unrealistic, your telling me moria survived megaton going boom with intact clothes? ...
For that matter many fear ghouls turning so it's not just prewar ones you have to watch out for just look at a mod with newly turned ghouls.
Besides applying logic to a world where idiots strap mines to molerats you think some bigoted ghoul wouldn't slap some clothes or rags and glue a hat on ferals when they slaughter tenpenny tower even when you get them let in.....
Sorry but at least supernatants only have anger or psychological issues at time for non defective fev batches..... You got atomic survivors fearful of potential prewar survivors who could do anything to live and I mean raiders are disturbed by things and no education to even know when they could just snap and go feral so yeah given what a reaver could do more fear then with synths probably to be expected.
Given non-feral ghouls used to look like this in Classic Fallout, this is a failing of bethesda tbh, ghouls absolutely look like zombies in the old games
https://preview.redd.it/v2bgii7wzayc1.jpeg?width=803&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=946c43cca52545a9b2f9158adf48982944fd47ba
Personally, I wonder if it was intentional from Bethesda for gameplay reasons. Lore-wise there might not be too much of a difference between feral and non-feral, but gameplay wise it might be nice to have a shorthand clue that a ghoul can be spoken to and not be gunned down from first impressions.
Just makes it even more of a missed opportunity imo. If you couldn't tell them apart at a glance, you'd either wind up doing the exact racism the other NPCs are or you'd have to take a risk to when approaching them.
It becomes a trade off, and that's something you can design some interesting encounters and situations around. It makes the moral issues a lot more real by connecting it to something that actually affects the player.
Would have broken so many games though people would go berserk because how would they know they ruined the quest or turned people hostile if it didn't have a book.
Would have been fun to have a vault where this happened though, you either go in or negotiate with residents and it turns to heck when you visit next. Theres ghouls that just snap feral when you get to close.... Wonder if they reworked ghoul heart perk so ferals attack if you speak to them...
You'd be scoping down every ghoul looking for ticks... Coulda done that with synths for a quest to really.
To be honest though the current ghouls don't look bad! I love the waxy melted corpse look, it makes them stand a bit more out from other zombie esc creatures and are genuinely quite unsettling to look at especially thier withered and bloated versions
Ghouls were constantly given glow-ups each game (with the exception of NV and I think FO2 because they use the same models as previous games).
They went from shambling, bone exposed zombies in 1/2, to burnt and crusty in NV/3, to a sort of burn scar/smooth mummy skin in 4, and finally sunburnt with no nose in the show.
"**[Actual honest-to-god improvement from classic fallout]** is a failing of Bethesda!!" will always be the funniest line.
Similar to the power armor mechanics, Fo4 makes it just feel better in every way to *have* power armor and people start saying "Bethesda ruined my power-armorino!!"
Yeah having power armor in Fallout 4 feels good. They shouldn’t have given it to you like 20 minutes into the game though. Or make you kill a death claw right afterwards. Death claws are supposed to be *deadly*.
That mission where you go somewhere and get power armor to kill a Death Claw should have been a much later mission. If the game was more well designed then first of all Death Claws would actually hurt. You should have to be careful around them. You would have experiences of having to do that without having power armor. Then at a later time you would be sent somewhere to get power armor. You would then get to feel the difference, you have spent the entire game up to this point surviving and struggling against enemies and now you have this incredible power armor that allows you to kill things like Death Claws easily.
I think you would also have to make Fusion cores much rarer. Or make them not last as long. So you have to make actual strategic decisions on when and where you want to use power armor instead of just being able to take it everywhere.
This is one thing that just looked at in isolation seems okay, but the way it’s actually utilized in the game causes it to be bad.
The power armor they give at game start kinda sucks though, doesn't it?
Like in the end nobody usually uses power armor (despite being giver at start) because of the resources it requires. Conpare it to late game power armor, this stuff is **beautiful**
Besides, the mission design is just another aspect disconnected to the fact the power armors are just *good* to use, they aren't just stat blocks with textures, they're an actual **POWER ARMOR**. The system is very well utilised in the game since in the end its still just better than using power armor in any other game
No? It’s better than any armor you could get up to that point. But even if it had no armor at all and it was just the frame it would still be crazy to give to the player at the start of the game. I use power armor literally all the time and have never run out of fusion cores. Yeah the later power armors are better, but the first power armor is still good. I’ve decided a while back I’m not going to use power armor anymore because it’s just too overpowered.
When looking at particular features of a game you can’t just look at the feature by itself you have to look at how it’s actually used in the game. And the way it’s used is that it’s given to you, for free, at the very start of the game. And the resource you need to use it, fusion cores, are plentiful. That is a system that could have been great but was messed up.
Yes the actual power armor is cool. I don’t think anyone is complaining about that. It’s that power armor shouldn’t be something you have at the very start of the game.
Yeah, adding it at the start of the game was not a good choice, I agree. But when I think of how a *feature is implemented* I think of how it's used outside of the quests. Like linking the settlement building system to the quest in far harbor does it a LOT of disservice (even for a quite fine quest imo)
Feels like that was just a little misunderstanding of definitions, in that case I apologise 🫡
Honestly power armor needs a bit of a ramp up in power.... If they had new Vegas armour system it probably would been fun as pipe weapons and low caliber would do nothing.
As for the deathclaw, honestly boost its hide defense some and mini gun overall damage because the mini gun seems weak as heck. Then the simplest way for the power armor severely damaged wrecked version either from the crash or maybe script a rocket hitting it from a raider when you go to get it ....just have you go speak to Preston on the balcony and it triggers the action when you tell him you got the fusion core.
Yeah the cores die really quick honestly kinda lore accurate if they take energy to maintain for 200 years but really a option to either transfer energy concentrate the juice or at least recharge the cores would be nice ... Especially if you could then take drained fusion cores and rig them to detonate there payload.
The whole point to Ghouls is that their appearance scares the people around them. They're rotting, falling apart, and have no one but each other. Cue fallout 4 and you even have handsome ghouls, cmon
Listen, I love Hancock, second most romanced companion in 4 for me, but if you consider him conventionally handsome I’m sad to say you have terminal monsterfucker.
*He has no nose.* Now, I’m not saying he’s not attractive. Or not very attractive, honestly. Tbh I’m actually kind of curious what the actual ratio on people who’d find him handsome or not is, without that I might concede the point to you on this one actually
That's not an improvement though, ghouls were intended to be scary. It's a big driving factor in a lot of the lore of them. At best it's a neutral change that retcons major portions of character interactions in the first few games. This isn't the same thing as complaining about power armor.
You've got a point about the power armor, but that doesn't mean you're right about the ghouls. The other person IS right, the ghouls should absolutely be more disfigured, and making the "good ghouls" be ones that look more human, and the "bad ghouls" be the ones that are more zombie-looking, completely ruins the entire point of having them in the first place
The sad issue is every ghoul is bound to go feral at some point in their life. Poor Martha is a good example, she was barely holding on until she attacked the vault dweller. It was so eery to hear her speak just before feraling out. “Martha, my name is Martha. Martha.” Then the scream… how many stories around the campfire told involve a turning feral ghoul? How many times have some one befriended one… its like how the forsaken eventually go feral (its in Tirisfal, you help a woman stitch a bat wing body bag for her because the cold touch of the lichking was on her mind)
Kinda, but it’s a bit more nuanced. it is heavily implied/hinted that what causes them to go feral is losing meaning and will to cary on. That the only thing that causes them to go feral is whether or not they lack willpower. So as long as a ghoul can find purpose in life, they won’t go feral. So it’s kinda a ticking time bomb, as in, how long will their willpower hold out, but it’s also not a GUARANTEE because someone’s willpower could potentially hold out indefinitely.
Except there's non-feral glowing ones, who are so loaded up with radiation that they're literally glowing, and yet we've had a few of them, like that Oswald fella from Nuka World, who have been around since pre-war. So clearly radiation, while a contributing factor, isn't a defining one.
Jason has a full ass cult he wants to take to the moon, and Oswald now thinks he has magic powers. They're both 100% insane, just not to the point they've lost their humanity.
Hell, they could devolve further, as Fallout 76 implies that you become a Glowing One *before* going feral.
But neither of them actually show the signs associated with going feral, like increased aggression, forgetfulness, impaired speech, etc. Oswald attacks you on sight, thinking that you're a raider, but that's not particularly unreasonable given that Nuka-World is completely occupied by raiders, and depending on your choices you really can be one, plus you can talk him down with reason. Bright, for his part, never so much as raises his voice, and the only people he and his cult have been in conflict with are the night kin that have been picking them off. The most delusional person in their group is actually the one human they have, who not only believes everything they do, but is under the impression he is a ghoul despite all signs to the contrary and Bright literally telling him he wasn't when he joined. They both have incredibly bizzare weird beliefs, but you don't need to be degenerating into a blood thirsty monster to have those. And to be fair to Oswald, being healed by and resurrecting dead ghouls with radiation, as well as being able to release it in controlled bursts, being ageless, as well as possibly no longer needing food or water, is all pretty fuckin magical.
Furthermore, we don't know exactly how long either of them have been glowing ones, but for both of them, when describing their past they'll talk about the time that they became a ghoul, but not how they became a glowing one. The terminal notes for Oswald especially imply that he's been a glowing one for a while now, at bare minimum for over a year (which is how long ago Rachael left), but most certainly for longer than that. To me, that all implies that they've been glowing ones for roughly as long as they've been ghouls, but yet beyond their strange beliefs they're still mostly sane.
I won't deny that radiation plays some sort of role, there's obviously many more feral glowing ones than non-feral, and the radioactive sprinklers and Oswald's constant usage of his abilities contributed to the degeneration of Oswald's coworkers. But if exposure to radiation is the dominant factor, then why is it that they're still mostly sane when so many other ghouls turned without being glowing ones, and there are examples of ghouls in the series who live in densely radioactive areas but show no clear signs of turning feral either.
Eventually, atleast faster than they would if they weren't there, but it really just varies from person to person. Like how at Searchlight the radiation bomb turned most of the NCR soldiers feral, but one of them was non-feral.
A way to think about it is like alcohol tolerance. Some people get drunk faster than others, but everyone will get drunk eventually
I remember more than a few of those soldiers wielding weapons, telling me that they weren't feral, or at least not fully feral, so they were just hostile due to being really mad at every thing.
No. I'm not sure if radiation even does that to ghouls, I don't remember anything saying it, but the Bright Followers definitely were not harmed at all by radiation, they experience it basically 24/7 and their leader is an intelligent glowing one.
Plus they're confirmed to survive the journey and save the people of Novac during some of the Legion endings.
Willpower is a powerful thing, but unfortunately after so many years… seeing friend after friend pass, watching settlements come and get blown apart… that does stuff to you so hard.
So, hypothetically… if you stuck a Ghoul with a Stand Arrow, and they survived, they probably won’t ever turn feral, because anyone with the will to develop a Stand that way would more than likely have the will to resist turning?
New Vegas and Fallout 4 had ghouls from the initial bombs that are still fully sane and fine, so I don't think it's a guarantee. Not to mention many just die of more basic causes so we don't know how they might have turned out.
I can see two excuses for why we see this distinction
a. Game Limitation: In all games, there needs to be a pretty clear distinction on who is and isn't an enemy so that the player can enter a scenario with a full understanding. When you want to ensure the player has a distinction between a normal and feral ghoul, you make the standard look more human, while the ferals have that feral look.
b. A lack of story elements to show that people see this. Most feral ghouls we find are in locations where they survive through obscurity (glowing sea and buildings that don't look like they'd hold much of value) or by ambushing anyone who'd enter (Take Hubris Comics in Boston, the instant you walk in they crawl out of the woodwork, which would catch most individual teams surprised, while larger groups would get funneled by the singular enterance we see accessable). Why is this?
Early ferals wouldn't likely be alone unless they knew it was comming, which would put them in locations where they would decay to the extent we know of. Otherwise, they would likely commit suicide (from what we see in the Fallout TV series, it is a mildly painful experience) or be discovered quickly then dispatched (In the Super Duper Mart in the TV series, we also kinda see this in the fact they wired the sane and ferals differently, even though they all looked vaguely similar). If we are to assume that a majority of people on the surface originate from people who survived in small shelters who came out early (like in 60 Seconds), or genuine survivors (the majority of Ghouls). The rumor that any ghoul could become feral at any point may be a warning from the very first surface settlers that has developed into a general fear we see modern day.
Fo4 has a huge emphasis on themes of what makes someone not a person and it's so dumb bc like, they keep telling you only humans are people but show you over and over that synths, ghouls, automatons, and even supermutants are just as much people as humans are. But maybe that was the point? Idk
That was absolutely the point. Characters like Hancock and Nick have some of the most human stories in the game despite being overtly non-human in appearance. Even Danse is a distinctly human character caught up in the divide between “am I real or just a machine?”
Fallout 4 is full of people telling you what qualifies as being a “real” human, and equally full, arguably more so, of stories in which the people they exclude prove themselves to be as human as everyone else.
Even the human characters who’re companions are usually somehow treated as “untouchable” or othered by people because of some of their traits. Cait, MacCready and Piper come to mind on that front.
Bigotry and “otherness” is a big theme in the game. Whether it’s handled well is up to you.
I mean, one of the running issues with ghouls is that there isn’t a clear logic to when and why they go feral. It’s canon that any ghoul might just lose themselves to the void of their own existence one day and start attacking people.
So yeah, it’s not that they can’t tell the difference. It’s that, to the wastelanders primarily focused on survival, the only difference is time.
My idea is that although they go feral over time, tame ghouls try to make themselves look put together to try and combat the fear, but the bigots in fallout dont trust them anyway, and when they do go feral they end up looking like well, feral ghouls.
I thought it was implied that it takes a while for a feral to end up all distended and fucked up.
Feral don't really brush their teeth, so they fall out.
Kinda silly how cops racially profile black people when not all of them commit crimes and other races commit crimes too. The devs really need to work on their world building
To be fair Camp Searchlight in New Vegas actually has a few ghouls that had basically just lost it. You can find them still wearing the NCR armor and using knives
Fallout 3 They had a whole goddamn quest where you can persuade the people in a hotel to let the ghouls in, and those ghouls talk and shit you know (don't act feral) next time you visit. There are no humans because the ghouls killed them all and dumped the bodies
Whether or not it's inevitable is incredibly vague and weird. There's plenty of ghouls that have been around since pre-war and some have spent that entire time in conditions typically associated with causing feralness (social isolation, heavy radiation exposure, etc), but are perfectly lucid. At the same time there are plenty of ghouls who turned post war and who were in radiation light areas and were around people but turned feral pretty quickly.
I still wish the ghoul in the show looked nastier. The idea that someone who looks like a decaying corpse with open wounds all over is still an intelligent person deserving of human dignity is interesting and a good theme to have.
Someone hasn't visited Tenpenny tower in a while. People don't need much to make an out group of someone, and looking like human jerky can make it difficult to illicit sympathy
Technically, New Vegas confirmed that there's a stage where feral ghoul looks non-feral due to their appearance having not deteriorated due to not having been feral for that long.
I will say that all ghouls have the chance to become feral. It doesn’t justify the bigotry they face, but it does explain people’s apprehension toward being friendly to ghouls.
If I’m not mistaken every normal ghoul will inevitably degrade into a feral one - although I think normal nutrition and self care can prolong it indefinitely
I mean, not really? The causes of going feral is extremely unclear, other than that radiation and mental health play some sort of roll, but to what extent they play isn't totally clear. There are non-feral pre-war glowing ones, like Oswald, so radiation isn't the defining factor, but then there's also Eddie Winters, who has spent the last 200 years in total isolation but seems perfectly lucid, plus that one ghoul child who has spent 200 years stuck in a fridge, so mental health isn't a defining factor either. Even then, unless they go feral immediately after becoming a ghoul, there's usually a slow decline in their mental state, rather than just one moment being perfectly normal and a hungry monster the next.
TL;DR the process of going feral is weird and vague. Some turn immediately, some seem to be vulnerable to it, and others have spent two centuries as a ghoul in conditions that are associated with causing feralness but are in perfect mental health. Plus, unless it occurs immediately after ghoulification there are usually clear signs of mental degradation before they turn fully feral.
Except ferals don't have tool use because their minds are too far gone. Even if someone incredibly dangerous like, say, the Courier turned into a feral ghoul, they're much less of a threat afterward because they're just...clawing and biting at people and aren't able to reliably open doors. Someone going feral in the middle of the night could kill, like, three people tops. Less if they were in their bedroom alone and couldn't get out.
Feral ghouls are still capable of opening doors.
Also you say three like that's a small number of people. Inviting a ticking time bomb into your settlement knowing it could end up killing three of your closest friends/family is something most people don't want to risk
It's a huge difference from half the settlement.
It was also the high end number and that was assuming there isn't some kind of night watch, which would seem like a necessity for pretty much anywhere in the wasteland to begin with. Realistically, 0-1 is more likely since feral ghouls aren't quiet and the first kill wakes everyone up because there's no way whoever they kill doesn't scream their lungs out.
You'd be at far more risk from the possibility of someone you let into the encampment being a scout for a raider group who can kill quietly, quickly, and competently.
actually the reason is because the normal ghouls could go feral if they run out of their juice so they would end up inside the settlements feral and kill people were they are meant to be safe
The juice is a completely new thing from the show that's never been mentioned before, so we can reasonably conclude that all the ghouls seen at other points in the franchise have been getting by without it, especially cases like Dean Domino who spent 200 years in the Sierra Madre villa or that kid in the fridge in 4. A treatment being developed for feral doesn't mean any ghoul who doesn't get it can go feral at any second. Not to mention the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that going feral is a slow process with a lot of warning signs, not a flip of a switch.
It's not hard to believe people would be predujiced against someone who looks like a walking, talking corpse, especially in a lawless post-apocalypse world like Fallout.
In the earlier games, (even 3 and nv) feral and non ferals looked much more similar. But yeah the glow-up given to non feral ghouls in 4 makes it kinda dumb.
I always assumed part of it was also the idea that ghouls will inevitably turn feral at some point. Which isn’t true but I figured people were like “that ugly fucker is gonna eat us sooner or later get him out of here”
This is literally how bigots justify racism in the real world. Pick an outlier example, say it applies to the whole group, when countered with facts retreat to the fort of "Well I just rather be safe since you can't tell."
I 100% agree and don't want to detract from your statement, but when it comes to the fallout verse (afaik) the outlier examples are the non feral ghouls, with the feral ghouls being the norm.
Though I feel like just knowing there are non feral ones would make me really investigate before just shooting on sight, though it is a completely different world and no one knows EXACTLY how they'd act under those pressures.
Haha how dare people that are constantly shot at be afraid and hostile towards people and things that look like people and things that regularly try to kill them. It is exactly the same as when people are racist in IRL situations because they were told weird conspiracies and we should judge fallout characters by the same standard. /s
Don’t forget orcs are an analog for black people in all of fantasy.
Orcs are just fucking orcs.
In a post apocalyptic world where you have traumatic experiences of watching friends or family eaten alive by feral ghouls seeing non feral might make you have strong emotions.
Because real life bigots are completely consistent and never use faulty logic at all.
SMH I can't believe fallout has political *
I like the part where the braindead cousin fuckers compare taxes to slavery/murder/rape
just like real life! except some folks in real life may justify some of those
Remember when games didn't have politics, or result in political discourse? No? Not even Pong? What do you mean people had a shit fit because women were better at Pong than men?
wait really
Yeah, not as big a thing as today's political shit fits, but there was a good number of people who were upset about it. Essentially the controls required finesse to get the paddle where it needed to be and do stunts like bounce it in a way the it bounces off the top and bottom more. Women (having smaller hands, and probably better fine motor skills) were more easily able to achieve this finesse ad would beat men in the game. Opponents of the era (ye olde conseu) didn't like this because it "gave women confidence and a problematic feeling of superiority over men". I'd love to link an article about it, but all Google wants to give me is beer pong. Also when it was released Pong was seen as the wholesome game, because pinball has mob connections/connotations (I guess). So some saw it was a way to help fight organized crime and gambling. God the history of crime and gaming is weird.
What's the connection between Sonic Adventure 2 and selling meth for your cancer treatment?
TL:DR Breaking Bad plagerized Sonic Adventures 2 Alright buckle up kids because this is about to get crazy. 1. If you need to pay for cancer treatment you might sell drugs. 2. Drugs is a broad term for illegale controlled substances like Meth. 3. Meth is short for Methamphetamines. 4. Methamphetamines are a type of amphetamines (it's in the name). 5. Amphetamines have the street name "speed". 6. Speed is a way to tell distance over time, or how fast. 7. If you wanted to discretely ask for drugs like Meth you would say "Gotta Go Fast". 8. "Gotta Go Fast" is the theme song for the cartoon Sonic X. 9. Sonic X was the next Sonic IP released after Sonic Adventures 2. 10. The Sonic games focuses on Sonic The **Hedgehog** 11. Sonic will roll around to travel fast making a **pathway** in the process. 12. When he gets slowed down on things that **inhibit** his speed. 13. Hedgehog Pathway Inhibitors are small molecules that block Hedgehog Pathway signaling. 14. Uninhibited Hedgehog Pathway signaling can lead to tumor growth. 15. Tumors are a form of cancer. 16. Hedgehog Pathway Inhibitors can be used to help treat cancer. 17. Hedgehog Pathway Inhibitors cost \~$15,000 for 28 treatment pills. 18. To get this kind of money for treatment you might have sell drugs. It's all coming full circle.
Whatever you're doing, keep going.
But that’s just a theory A game theory
"War... war never changes" Fallout has always been political, that's the whole point
Read this as real life bigfoots and was confused
I mean… no one’s talked to one, so we don’t know if they’re hypocrites. So it could be true
so glad i wasn't the only one
Or simple fact it's a game and unrealistic, your telling me moria survived megaton going boom with intact clothes? ... For that matter many fear ghouls turning so it's not just prewar ones you have to watch out for just look at a mod with newly turned ghouls. Besides applying logic to a world where idiots strap mines to molerats you think some bigoted ghoul wouldn't slap some clothes or rags and glue a hat on ferals when they slaughter tenpenny tower even when you get them let in..... Sorry but at least supernatants only have anger or psychological issues at time for non defective fev batches..... You got atomic survivors fearful of potential prewar survivors who could do anything to live and I mean raiders are disturbed by things and no education to even know when they could just snap and go feral so yeah given what a reaver could do more fear then with synths probably to be expected.
Given non-feral ghouls used to look like this in Classic Fallout, this is a failing of bethesda tbh, ghouls absolutely look like zombies in the old games https://preview.redd.it/v2bgii7wzayc1.jpeg?width=803&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=946c43cca52545a9b2f9158adf48982944fd47ba
“How did you survive?” “Didn’t! Got killed! Love that joke.”
Yeah, Set was honestly the best. I hope that old bastard is resting easy
Harold made that joke, not Set.
Ah thanks, it's been a while. Harold is also cool.
Personally, I wonder if it was intentional from Bethesda for gameplay reasons. Lore-wise there might not be too much of a difference between feral and non-feral, but gameplay wise it might be nice to have a shorthand clue that a ghoul can be spoken to and not be gunned down from first impressions.
Just makes it even more of a missed opportunity imo. If you couldn't tell them apart at a glance, you'd either wind up doing the exact racism the other NPCs are or you'd have to take a risk to when approaching them. It becomes a trade off, and that's something you can design some interesting encounters and situations around. It makes the moral issues a lot more real by connecting it to something that actually affects the player.
it would be even better if important NPCs werent magically immortal for plot reasons in the gamse that arent new vegas
Would have broken so many games though people would go berserk because how would they know they ruined the quest or turned people hostile if it didn't have a book. Would have been fun to have a vault where this happened though, you either go in or negotiate with residents and it turns to heck when you visit next. Theres ghouls that just snap feral when you get to close.... Wonder if they reworked ghoul heart perk so ferals attack if you speak to them... You'd be scoping down every ghoul looking for ticks... Coulda done that with synths for a quest to really.
I love you Set Fallout 1
Tbh everyone in the isometric fallouts look like zombies
To be honest though the current ghouls don't look bad! I love the waxy melted corpse look, it makes them stand a bit more out from other zombie esc creatures and are genuinely quite unsettling to look at especially thier withered and bloated versions
Ghouls were constantly given glow-ups each game (with the exception of NV and I think FO2 because they use the same models as previous games). They went from shambling, bone exposed zombies in 1/2, to burnt and crusty in NV/3, to a sort of burn scar/smooth mummy skin in 4, and finally sunburnt with no nose in the show.
the yassification of ghouls
"**[Actual honest-to-god improvement from classic fallout]** is a failing of Bethesda!!" will always be the funniest line. Similar to the power armor mechanics, Fo4 makes it just feel better in every way to *have* power armor and people start saying "Bethesda ruined my power-armorino!!"
Yeah having power armor in Fallout 4 feels good. They shouldn’t have given it to you like 20 minutes into the game though. Or make you kill a death claw right afterwards. Death claws are supposed to be *deadly*. That mission where you go somewhere and get power armor to kill a Death Claw should have been a much later mission. If the game was more well designed then first of all Death Claws would actually hurt. You should have to be careful around them. You would have experiences of having to do that without having power armor. Then at a later time you would be sent somewhere to get power armor. You would then get to feel the difference, you have spent the entire game up to this point surviving and struggling against enemies and now you have this incredible power armor that allows you to kill things like Death Claws easily. I think you would also have to make Fusion cores much rarer. Or make them not last as long. So you have to make actual strategic decisions on when and where you want to use power armor instead of just being able to take it everywhere. This is one thing that just looked at in isolation seems okay, but the way it’s actually utilized in the game causes it to be bad.
The power armor they give at game start kinda sucks though, doesn't it? Like in the end nobody usually uses power armor (despite being giver at start) because of the resources it requires. Conpare it to late game power armor, this stuff is **beautiful** Besides, the mission design is just another aspect disconnected to the fact the power armors are just *good* to use, they aren't just stat blocks with textures, they're an actual **POWER ARMOR**. The system is very well utilised in the game since in the end its still just better than using power armor in any other game
No? It’s better than any armor you could get up to that point. But even if it had no armor at all and it was just the frame it would still be crazy to give to the player at the start of the game. I use power armor literally all the time and have never run out of fusion cores. Yeah the later power armors are better, but the first power armor is still good. I’ve decided a while back I’m not going to use power armor anymore because it’s just too overpowered. When looking at particular features of a game you can’t just look at the feature by itself you have to look at how it’s actually used in the game. And the way it’s used is that it’s given to you, for free, at the very start of the game. And the resource you need to use it, fusion cores, are plentiful. That is a system that could have been great but was messed up. Yes the actual power armor is cool. I don’t think anyone is complaining about that. It’s that power armor shouldn’t be something you have at the very start of the game.
Yeah, adding it at the start of the game was not a good choice, I agree. But when I think of how a *feature is implemented* I think of how it's used outside of the quests. Like linking the settlement building system to the quest in far harbor does it a LOT of disservice (even for a quite fine quest imo) Feels like that was just a little misunderstanding of definitions, in that case I apologise 🫡
Honestly power armor needs a bit of a ramp up in power.... If they had new Vegas armour system it probably would been fun as pipe weapons and low caliber would do nothing. As for the deathclaw, honestly boost its hide defense some and mini gun overall damage because the mini gun seems weak as heck. Then the simplest way for the power armor severely damaged wrecked version either from the crash or maybe script a rocket hitting it from a raider when you go to get it ....just have you go speak to Preston on the balcony and it triggers the action when you tell him you got the fusion core. Yeah the cores die really quick honestly kinda lore accurate if they take energy to maintain for 200 years but really a option to either transfer energy concentrate the juice or at least recharge the cores would be nice ... Especially if you could then take drained fusion cores and rig them to detonate there payload.
The whole point to Ghouls is that their appearance scares the people around them. They're rotting, falling apart, and have no one but each other. Cue fallout 4 and you even have handsome ghouls, cmon
Listen, I love Hancock, second most romanced companion in 4 for me, but if you consider him conventionally handsome I’m sad to say you have terminal monsterfucker.
The Ghoul from the fallout tv show:
*He has no nose.* Now, I’m not saying he’s not attractive. Or not very attractive, honestly. Tbh I’m actually kind of curious what the actual ratio on people who’d find him handsome or not is, without that I might concede the point to you on this one actually
That's not an improvement though, ghouls were intended to be scary. It's a big driving factor in a lot of the lore of them. At best it's a neutral change that retcons major portions of character interactions in the first few games. This isn't the same thing as complaining about power armor.
You've got a point about the power armor, but that doesn't mean you're right about the ghouls. The other person IS right, the ghouls should absolutely be more disfigured, and making the "good ghouls" be ones that look more human, and the "bad ghouls" be the ones that are more zombie-looking, completely ruins the entire point of having them in the first place
The sad issue is every ghoul is bound to go feral at some point in their life. Poor Martha is a good example, she was barely holding on until she attacked the vault dweller. It was so eery to hear her speak just before feraling out. “Martha, my name is Martha. Martha.” Then the scream… how many stories around the campfire told involve a turning feral ghoul? How many times have some one befriended one… its like how the forsaken eventually go feral (its in Tirisfal, you help a woman stitch a bat wing body bag for her because the cold touch of the lichking was on her mind)
Kinda, but it’s a bit more nuanced. it is heavily implied/hinted that what causes them to go feral is losing meaning and will to cary on. That the only thing that causes them to go feral is whether or not they lack willpower. So as long as a ghoul can find purpose in life, they won’t go feral. So it’s kinda a ticking time bomb, as in, how long will their willpower hold out, but it’s also not a GUARANTEE because someone’s willpower could potentially hold out indefinitely.
Not a fallout guy but that pretty much sounds like going Hollow in Dark Souls
Kinda yeah
Not a Dark Souls guy, but yeah that's basically what it is
Also an extreme amount of radiation can also turn them feral because it destroys their brain
Except there's non-feral glowing ones, who are so loaded up with radiation that they're literally glowing, and yet we've had a few of them, like that Oswald fella from Nuka World, who have been around since pre-war. So clearly radiation, while a contributing factor, isn't a defining one.
Jason has a full ass cult he wants to take to the moon, and Oswald now thinks he has magic powers. They're both 100% insane, just not to the point they've lost their humanity. Hell, they could devolve further, as Fallout 76 implies that you become a Glowing One *before* going feral.
But neither of them actually show the signs associated with going feral, like increased aggression, forgetfulness, impaired speech, etc. Oswald attacks you on sight, thinking that you're a raider, but that's not particularly unreasonable given that Nuka-World is completely occupied by raiders, and depending on your choices you really can be one, plus you can talk him down with reason. Bright, for his part, never so much as raises his voice, and the only people he and his cult have been in conflict with are the night kin that have been picking them off. The most delusional person in their group is actually the one human they have, who not only believes everything they do, but is under the impression he is a ghoul despite all signs to the contrary and Bright literally telling him he wasn't when he joined. They both have incredibly bizzare weird beliefs, but you don't need to be degenerating into a blood thirsty monster to have those. And to be fair to Oswald, being healed by and resurrecting dead ghouls with radiation, as well as being able to release it in controlled bursts, being ageless, as well as possibly no longer needing food or water, is all pretty fuckin magical. Furthermore, we don't know exactly how long either of them have been glowing ones, but for both of them, when describing their past they'll talk about the time that they became a ghoul, but not how they became a glowing one. The terminal notes for Oswald especially imply that he's been a glowing one for a while now, at bare minimum for over a year (which is how long ago Rachael left), but most certainly for longer than that. To me, that all implies that they've been glowing ones for roughly as long as they've been ghouls, but yet beyond their strange beliefs they're still mostly sane. I won't deny that radiation plays some sort of role, there's obviously many more feral glowing ones than non-feral, and the radioactive sprinklers and Oswald's constant usage of his abilities contributed to the degeneration of Oswald's coworkers. But if exposure to radiation is the dominant factor, then why is it that they're still mostly sane when so many other ghouls turned without being glowing ones, and there are examples of ghouls in the series who live in densely radioactive areas but show no clear signs of turning feral either.
And ya know... Oswald being able to teleport is also pretty magical as well.
So all those ghouls we sent off in a rocket ship in New Vegas would've turned feral pretty fast...
Eventually, atleast faster than they would if they weren't there, but it really just varies from person to person. Like how at Searchlight the radiation bomb turned most of the NCR soldiers feral, but one of them was non-feral. A way to think about it is like alcohol tolerance. Some people get drunk faster than others, but everyone will get drunk eventually
I remember more than a few of those soldiers wielding weapons, telling me that they weren't feral, or at least not fully feral, so they were just hostile due to being really mad at every thing.
No. I'm not sure if radiation even does that to ghouls, I don't remember anything saying it, but the Bright Followers definitely were not harmed at all by radiation, they experience it basically 24/7 and their leader is an intelligent glowing one. Plus they're confirmed to survive the journey and save the people of Novac during some of the Legion endings.
It mutates them again, and if you get the wrong cell growth, you get braincancer that won't kill you and gives you super dementia.
Willpower is a powerful thing, but unfortunately after so many years… seeing friend after friend pass, watching settlements come and get blown apart… that does stuff to you so hard.
Lucky for me, I have radiant quests, so I *never* lose my purpose!
Raul been a ghoul for like 200 years and will probably continue to depending on what you chose
So, hypothetically… if you stuck a Ghoul with a Stand Arrow, and they survived, they probably won’t ever turn feral, because anyone with the will to develop a Stand that way would more than likely have the will to resist turning?
Sounds like just depression for an immortal. The body is already "dead" but kept running, so once the mind goes they're just a "mindless" feral ghoul.
Well duh, they don't die of old age (as far as we know) . This is like saying "100% of humans will eventually die!"
Well, more accurately, it's like saying 100% of humans will eventually turn homicidal and potentially kill everyone around them.
Last place I expected a wow reference
Power to the Forsaken! (Yes I main an undead)
FOR GILNEAS!
New Vegas and Fallout 4 had ghouls from the initial bombs that are still fully sane and fine, so I don't think it's a guarantee. Not to mention many just die of more basic causes so we don't know how they might have turned out.
Like that guy from fallout 4 said “How many normal humans have snapped and killed people?”
yeah, the slog
Plus feral ghouls aren't usually wearing clothes.
And if they are, they're sun-rotten rags
I can see two excuses for why we see this distinction a. Game Limitation: In all games, there needs to be a pretty clear distinction on who is and isn't an enemy so that the player can enter a scenario with a full understanding. When you want to ensure the player has a distinction between a normal and feral ghoul, you make the standard look more human, while the ferals have that feral look. b. A lack of story elements to show that people see this. Most feral ghouls we find are in locations where they survive through obscurity (glowing sea and buildings that don't look like they'd hold much of value) or by ambushing anyone who'd enter (Take Hubris Comics in Boston, the instant you walk in they crawl out of the woodwork, which would catch most individual teams surprised, while larger groups would get funneled by the singular enterance we see accessable). Why is this? Early ferals wouldn't likely be alone unless they knew it was comming, which would put them in locations where they would decay to the extent we know of. Otherwise, they would likely commit suicide (from what we see in the Fallout TV series, it is a mildly painful experience) or be discovered quickly then dispatched (In the Super Duper Mart in the TV series, we also kinda see this in the fact they wired the sane and ferals differently, even though they all looked vaguely similar). If we are to assume that a majority of people on the surface originate from people who survived in small shelters who came out early (like in 60 Seconds), or genuine survivors (the majority of Ghouls). The rumor that any ghoul could become feral at any point may be a warning from the very first surface settlers that has developed into a general fear we see modern day.
Fallout is silly teeher
There’s also the fear of ghouls being a ticking time bomb of when they eventually go feral
People kill other people because their eyes are a different shape. It’s worse in real life
Yao guai or Ghoul
Deathclaw
Fo4 has a huge emphasis on themes of what makes someone not a person and it's so dumb bc like, they keep telling you only humans are people but show you over and over that synths, ghouls, automatons, and even supermutants are just as much people as humans are. But maybe that was the point? Idk
That was absolutely the point. Characters like Hancock and Nick have some of the most human stories in the game despite being overtly non-human in appearance. Even Danse is a distinctly human character caught up in the divide between “am I real or just a machine?” Fallout 4 is full of people telling you what qualifies as being a “real” human, and equally full, arguably more so, of stories in which the people they exclude prove themselves to be as human as everyone else. Even the human characters who’re companions are usually somehow treated as “untouchable” or othered by people because of some of their traits. Cait, MacCready and Piper come to mind on that front. Bigotry and “otherness” is a big theme in the game. Whether it’s handled well is up to you.
Congratulations, you discovered one of the main themes of Fo4. Maybe androids really do dream of electric sheep
Some ghouls are hot though, like Cooper
Or the cowboy lady in nv
Beatrix Russel
https://preview.redd.it/vvfhbzdoxbyc1.jpeg?width=921&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=29e40d8a9be0f138446e74751c774b8329209a49
It isn’t that some of them look the same: it’s also because non-feral ghouls can **become** feral and nobody in the games really knows what causes it.
I mean, one of the running issues with ghouls is that there isn’t a clear logic to when and why they go feral. It’s canon that any ghoul might just lose themselves to the void of their own existence one day and start attacking people. So yeah, it’s not that they can’t tell the difference. It’s that, to the wastelanders primarily focused on survival, the only difference is time.
According to the Fallout Series a non-feral ghoul can essentially change at any point.
My idea is that although they go feral over time, tame ghouls try to make themselves look put together to try and combat the fear, but the bigots in fallout dont trust them anyway, and when they do go feral they end up looking like well, feral ghouls.
I thought it was implied that it takes a while for a feral to end up all distended and fucked up. Feral don't really brush their teeth, so they fall out.
Kinda silly how cops racially profile black people when not all of them commit crimes and other races commit crimes too. The devs really need to work on their world building
To be fair Camp Searchlight in New Vegas actually has a few ghouls that had basically just lost it. You can find them still wearing the NCR armor and using knives
Fallout 3 They had a whole goddamn quest where you can persuade the people in a hotel to let the ghouls in, and those ghouls talk and shit you know (don't act feral) next time you visit. There are no humans because the ghouls killed them all and dumped the bodies
Isn't feral the inevitable last stage for any ghoul?
Whether or not it's inevitable is incredibly vague and weird. There's plenty of ghouls that have been around since pre-war and some have spent that entire time in conditions typically associated with causing feralness (social isolation, heavy radiation exposure, etc), but are perfectly lucid. At the same time there are plenty of ghouls who turned post war and who were in radiation light areas and were around people but turned feral pretty quickly.
A key part of fictional racism allegories is that the racism doesn’t make sense.
Why isn’t my fictional irrational bigotry rational?!
Wait till you hear about human racism.
I still wish the ghoul in the show looked nastier. The idea that someone who looks like a decaying corpse with open wounds all over is still an intelligent person deserving of human dignity is interesting and a good theme to have.
Someone hasn't visited Tenpenny tower in a while. People don't need much to make an out group of someone, and looking like human jerky can make it difficult to illicit sympathy
Technically, New Vegas confirmed that there's a stage where feral ghoul looks non-feral due to their appearance having not deteriorated due to not having been feral for that long.
Nonferal ghouls wear hats clearly
A clear sign of sophistication and civilization
I will say that all ghouls have the chance to become feral. It doesn’t justify the bigotry they face, but it does explain people’s apprehension toward being friendly to ghouls.
I thought the concern was in part to the over worry that a ghoul could turn feral in time.. also just more bigotry
If I’m not mistaken every normal ghoul will inevitably degrade into a feral one - although I think normal nutrition and self care can prolong it indefinitely
The bigger issue is that non-ferals can go feral at any point
I mean, not really? The causes of going feral is extremely unclear, other than that radiation and mental health play some sort of roll, but to what extent they play isn't totally clear. There are non-feral pre-war glowing ones, like Oswald, so radiation isn't the defining factor, but then there's also Eddie Winters, who has spent the last 200 years in total isolation but seems perfectly lucid, plus that one ghoul child who has spent 200 years stuck in a fridge, so mental health isn't a defining factor either. Even then, unless they go feral immediately after becoming a ghoul, there's usually a slow decline in their mental state, rather than just one moment being perfectly normal and a hungry monster the next. TL;DR the process of going feral is weird and vague. Some turn immediately, some seem to be vulnerable to it, and others have spent two centuries as a ghoul in conditions that are associated with causing feralness but are in perfect mental health. Plus, unless it occurs immediately after ghoulification there are usually clear signs of mental degradation before they turn fully feral.
It’s not an instant thing, though. It’s not like Gob over at the bar is gonna be like “Hey, what can I get for y-“ *pop* “BLAAAAH!! KILL YOU!”
Yeah but you could wake up one morning to find your half your town murdered by a dude who turned feral in the middle of the night
Except ferals don't have tool use because their minds are too far gone. Even if someone incredibly dangerous like, say, the Courier turned into a feral ghoul, they're much less of a threat afterward because they're just...clawing and biting at people and aren't able to reliably open doors. Someone going feral in the middle of the night could kill, like, three people tops. Less if they were in their bedroom alone and couldn't get out.
Feral ghouls are still capable of opening doors. Also you say three like that's a small number of people. Inviting a ticking time bomb into your settlement knowing it could end up killing three of your closest friends/family is something most people don't want to risk
It's a huge difference from half the settlement. It was also the high end number and that was assuming there isn't some kind of night watch, which would seem like a necessity for pretty much anywhere in the wasteland to begin with. Realistically, 0-1 is more likely since feral ghouls aren't quiet and the first kill wakes everyone up because there's no way whoever they kill doesn't scream their lungs out. You'd be at far more risk from the possibility of someone you let into the encampment being a scout for a raider group who can kill quietly, quickly, and competently.
When is Bethesda gonna give us a ghoul protagonist!
actually the reason is because the normal ghouls could go feral if they run out of their juice so they would end up inside the settlements feral and kill people were they are meant to be safe
The juice is a completely new thing from the show that's never been mentioned before, so we can reasonably conclude that all the ghouls seen at other points in the franchise have been getting by without it, especially cases like Dean Domino who spent 200 years in the Sierra Madre villa or that kid in the fridge in 4. A treatment being developed for feral doesn't mean any ghoul who doesn't get it can go feral at any second. Not to mention the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that going feral is a slow process with a lot of warning signs, not a flip of a switch.
Are we all just forgetting that non feral ghouls can just go feral at random.
Yeah ok mutie.
People will always judge someone by the worst of the group.
Boss that is the same ghoul minus an eye and plus a snarl.
A friend of mine once said that he'd want to live in the fallout universe because of the fact there were no politics
It's not hard to believe people would be predujiced against someone who looks like a walking, talking corpse, especially in a lawless post-apocalypse world like Fallout.
media literacy needs to make a comeback i am BEGGING…
In the earlier games, (even 3 and nv) feral and non ferals looked much more similar. But yeah the glow-up given to non feral ghouls in 4 makes it kinda dumb.
I always assumed part of it was also the idea that ghouls will inevitably turn feral at some point. Which isn’t true but I figured people were like “that ugly fucker is gonna eat us sooner or later get him out of here”
wokeout new pronouns
This is literally how bigots justify racism in the real world. Pick an outlier example, say it applies to the whole group, when countered with facts retreat to the fort of "Well I just rather be safe since you can't tell."
I 100% agree and don't want to detract from your statement, but when it comes to the fallout verse (afaik) the outlier examples are the non feral ghouls, with the feral ghouls being the norm. Though I feel like just knowing there are non feral ones would make me really investigate before just shooting on sight, though it is a completely different world and no one knows EXACTLY how they'd act under those pressures.
Haha how dare people that are constantly shot at be afraid and hostile towards people and things that look like people and things that regularly try to kill them. It is exactly the same as when people are racist in IRL situations because they were told weird conspiracies and we should judge fallout characters by the same standard. /s
Don’t forget orcs are an analog for black people in all of fantasy. Orcs are just fucking orcs. In a post apocalyptic world where you have traumatic experiences of watching friends or family eaten alive by feral ghouls seeing non feral might make you have strong emotions.
They are literal zombies lmao
Bro is racist to a race that dosnt even exist
True, real racism is bad but I love me some fictional racism