By Alec Meer on April 14th, 2009 at 6:14 pm.
I’d have enjoyed Fallout 3 a whole lot more if it had more than three colours in it. Fortunately, an enterprising modder felt the same way, and has taken it upon himself to restore the chlorophyll to the wasteland’s washed-out world. On paper, making the trees and grass clinging to life in a post-nuclear landscape a healthy shade of green sounds absolutely ridiculous, but in practice it makes an incredible amount of difference to a game that often coasts on limited artistic imagination. It doesn’t end up looking like Oblivion 1.5 – rather, it still looks very much like the devastated wasteland it’s supposed to. It’s just that, now, plantlife’s doing okay for itself even if humankind isn’t. And it makes me want to explore so much more.
Grab this green and pleasant mod-ette from here.
14/04/2009 at 18:16 Tei says:
Obligatory: Oblivium with guns.
14/04/2009 at 18:21 PeopleLikeFrank says:
Oblivion, even!
This actually makes more sense – plant life would be doing more or less ok, at least if Pripyat is any indication…
14/04/2009 at 18:23 cyrenic says:
(mild spoilers)
This would make a lot more sense if it was integrated with a particular optional quest you can find. I was disappointed when nothing came out of that one, especially during the ending.
14/04/2009 at 18:29 l1ddl3monkey says:
I agree with Cyrenic. It does look quite pretty though.
14/04/2009 at 18:30 clovus says:
I recently took a vacation that involved driving through the hills of Kentucky and West Virginia (ie, the sticks, backwoods, etc.) I’ve always enjoyed old barns, trailers, houses, and other abandoned areas. Nature quickly starts to heal over abandoned areas and it looks really cool. Much cooler than metal and concrete. I don’t know if this mod pulls that off, but I would like to explore that kind of landscape in a game.
I think previously dense jungle or forest couldn’t be rendered well, but Crysis and Far Cry 2 both come close. They just need to increase the foliage density a bit more.
14/04/2009 at 18:31 Sam says:
This reminds me very much of what happened with Morrowind: modders took a landscape lacking any color at all and gave it some. And it looked much better for it.
14/04/2009 at 18:32 Xercies says:
Obligatory: Morrowind with Guns
@PeopleLikeFrank
I don’t think the plant life would be able to survive a Nuclear Fallout actually. I don’t know because of the fact that radiation kills any living thing, not to mention the initial nuclear blast which would kill off a lot of trees.
14/04/2009 at 18:34 Xercies says:
And I didn’t really mind fallout 3 low colour pallet, it made me get immersed into the world a bit more. Alive plants would ruin the immersion for me. But then again I didn’t mind the low colour pallet of Morrowind for the same reason so maybe I’m just mad.
14/04/2009 at 18:35 frymaster says:
if this was diablo 2 and not fallout 3, there’s be an Angry Internet Men thread about making it look too colourful and “too like WoW” about now…
:P
14/04/2009 at 18:42 El Stevo says:
Plant life is doing OK in Chernobyl.
14/04/2009 at 18:46 PeopleLikeFrank says:
@Xercies
But this is centuries after the war. Plant life would have had plenty of time to grow back from the initial blasts. If there’s little enough radiation at this point for humans to be running around, then plants should be surviving OK as well.
14/04/2009 at 18:49 drewski says:
No actual nuclear devices were detonated at Chernobyl; it’s not really a good comparison.
But life is amazingly hardy; I’m sure plant life would survive in some form. Whether or not it’d be the exact greenery of today is another matter – I suppose if nothing else changed in the environment (nu nuclear winter, etc) then the same traits that give plants competitive advantage today would still be advantagous, and other mutations introduced by the high level of radiation that lessened a plant’s ability to compete for resources would be rapidly bred out.
14/04/2009 at 18:51 DigitalSignalX says:
Great mod, I can for sure see this as a “consequence” addition either after the druid quest or the climax in combination with a ‘play-after-end fix.
As some of the folks on the forum cited, the trees may suffer from LOD glitches as you draw closer and apparently might not have a collision mesh (you can walk through them). Hopefully either the author or other modders will patch that as well as offer options for density etc. Looks brilliant but might make sniping even more difficult.
14/04/2009 at 18:52 Flobulon says:
Yeah, I installed this after *that* quest. Also works story-line wise after the main quest.
You should really do a rundown of the best mods for Fallout 3, there’s a load of really brilliant ones out there.
14/04/2009 at 18:54 Matzerath says:
I hope you fine people realize that with the addition of greenery to Fallout 3, and its locale of Washington D.C., that the inevitable Logan’s Run mod is creeping ever closer.
14/04/2009 at 18:55 Leeks! says:
What? No song reference in the headline? “O, Green World” would have been so easy.
14/04/2009 at 18:56 jackflash says:
@drewski :
Nonetheless, the residual radiation there is still extremely high. In any case, atomic devices were detonated in Hiroshima, and there are plenty of plants there. I imagine there would be greenery somewhere in the world of Fallout 3 or everybody would be dead. Unless there really is *that* much canned food left. :)
14/04/2009 at 19:03 drewski says:
@jackflash – you might be surprised at how relatively low the background level of radiation is in many parts of the exclusion zone, considering what happened there.
14/04/2009 at 19:06 Schmung says:
gargh, now I regret getting this on 360, though in fairness when it was released my PC was utterly incapable of running the damm thing. One day, in our wonderful electronic future buying a game will mean buying the game and not just the game on one particular bloody format. We can but hope.
Mod looks splendid though. I wish that I could try it.
14/04/2009 at 19:10 Katsumoto says:
Sounds interesting, + 1 to the suggestion that a nice little round up of some of the better mods would be great!
One I found was a mod to put the soundtrack from Fallout 1+2 into the game, which is great. I always thought the soundtrack in F3 was too “orchestral-for-the-sake-of-it” and the older soundtracks fit right in.
Fascinating comments thread too guys, so far! Ever since Stalker came out i’ve had a morbid fascination in radiation and its effects.
14/04/2009 at 19:11 NateN says:
@jackflash: Since there is a ton of plant life in the Red Forest it’s hard to imagine a Fallout-style wasteland actually existing for very long.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Forest
14/04/2009 at 19:13 suibhne says:
This is an improvement not just for game aesthetics, but for game logic as well. The original FO was a wasteland because it was set in a semi-desert region, not because nuclear war killed everything green. Just as with Bethesda’s idiocy about irradiated water, their insistence on a lack of plant life betrayed a serious lack of scientific understanding.
14/04/2009 at 19:15 jsutcliffe says:
I saw this somewhere yesterday and leaped for joy. The brown gloom prevented me getting more than ~50% through Fallout 3. A more verdant wasteland is much more appealing.
@cyrenic: Wherever I read this yesterday suggested waiting til you’d done that quest to install it.
14/04/2009 at 19:26 James G says:
@suibhne
I don’t think the fallout series ever pretended to be scientifically accurate, it was based firmly in the realms of 50′s pulp sci-fi.
14/04/2009 at 19:35 suibhne says:
Sure, but there’s a difference between playing loose with the setting and basing your entire main plot on bald factual inaccuracy. FEV is pure fantasy, and an integral part of the setting; that’s fine. Project Purity otoh is a whole different kettle of fish.
14/04/2009 at 19:41 Jeremy says:
Does it make the wasteland all trees or is it more of a smattering of greens? I don’t know if I could accept a lush forest in the area, but it would make sense to see some trees here and there.
14/04/2009 at 19:42 jonfitt says:
Yeah, it would make *that quest* somewhat out of place if you installed this mod and started a game from scratch.
14/04/2009 at 19:42 psyk says:
“their insistence on a lack of plant life betrayed a serious lack of scientific understanding.” Its a game which in no way is realistic I dont think they give a crap if there lacking scientific understanding.
14/04/2009 at 19:47 Tangent says:
Why do pine for beauty in a wasteland?
On a totally unrelated note, those Civony ads make me feel funny in the pants.
14/04/2009 at 19:48 Tangent says:
Why do we pine for beauty in a wasteland?
On a totally unrelated note, those Civony ads make me feel funny in the pants.
14/04/2009 at 19:53 Optimaximal says:
Chernobyl is like a dirty bomb to Fallout 3′s theoretical nuclear war – plant & animal-life thrives when there are no humans to hunt & control them, but I cincerely doubt much can withstand the nuclear fire of an atomic bomb.
Still, I think the Oasis quest works as a small example of life trying to start again – it’s like Wall.E
14/04/2009 at 20:30 Dreamhacker says:
Look, you people seem to have missed one important piece of information:
The Chernobyl Zone is a radiation hazard caused by a NPP meltdown.
The Fallout Wasteland(s) were caused by ABC weapons, which means Atomic, Biologic AND Chemical weapons. In other words, it’s a veritable smorgasbord of murderous, lingering “spoils” of war.
“Just” radiation is seemingly somewhat healthy: Research shows that modern day inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (for those of you who skipped out on history lessons: the two inhabited nuclear weapon “test” sites of WWII, located in Japan) show fewer cases of cancer than neighbouring and less radiated areas.
14/04/2009 at 21:19 piphil says:
I’ve been putting off buying Fallout 3, despite liking Oblivion. I was however put off by the rather grey-looking world, so this mod gets me a couple of steps closer to buying. However, I’ve also realised that what I really enjoyed in Oblivion was simply exploring, thus my installation of a Main Quest delayer mod. Other mods also added to my enjoyment, so I’m also in favour of some kind of “Top of the Mods” post on this find site. :-)
14/04/2009 at 21:22 Erlam says:
“Plant life is doing OK in Chernobyl.”
Chernobyl wasn’t a nuclear war. Though. Try dropping a few dozen nukes around Washington and see how the plants do then.
I mean like, think about.. not actually… oh God the FBI is probably on it’s way to my work right now.
14/04/2009 at 21:28 Trollwind says:
Does it come with mutated zombie bees that pollinate the plants and trees?
14/04/2009 at 21:32 Mad Doc MacRae says:
This thread makes me want to play stalker
14/04/2009 at 21:47 Jason Moyer says:
Using real-life science to justify anything in the Fallout universe is seriously weird. Although, while we’re on the subject, I have a hard time imagining the earth being a tropical paradise after nuclear winter, even though it doesn’t apply to Fallout’s world.
14/04/2009 at 21:52 simonkaye says:
Guys, it’s been a LONG time since the bombs dropped in fallout 3. Anything that moderates the “freshly nuked” feel of that game works for me. It wasn’t remotely believable.
14/04/2009 at 22:01 Riaktion says:
I like trees, this will make this game a lot more appealing to get through.
14/04/2009 at 22:04 Man Raised By Puffins says:
Nice idea, but it kind of kills the ‘wasteland wanderer’ vibe for me. Without that the game loses a significant chunk of its appeal.
14/04/2009 at 22:28 Eschatos says:
I’m not saying the game is colorful, but Fallout 3 has a lot more color than either of the first 2.
14/04/2009 at 22:30 suibhne says:
@everyone arguing that it’s “seriously weird” to want scientific/physical consistency in the world of Fallout: does that mean you’d accept that water had a different freezing point in the game, or that gravity is 0.2 Gs, or that the sun was green? The setting has always been real-world but with a cultural twist; the gameworld has introduced new technology but has never (prior to Fallout 3) suggested that basic physical laws operated differently in Fallout versus our world. I guess I could accept the continued mass pollution of water, 200 years after the war, if some new Chinese biological weapon had been introduced into the setting to explain it…but the meager explanation that it’s irradiated is simply ignorant.
14/04/2009 at 22:30 Hidden_7 says:
As to people saying that the artistic design betrays Bethesda’s lack of scientific understanding, they knew exactly what they were doing wasn’t accurate. They did research both into the sort of vegetation that would be around (quite a bit, actually) and the state of city ruins that would be around (basically nothing, actually). Having decided that would be less interesting from a game point of view and less in keeping with the aesthetic of the original games they decided to just do it the way it ended up, saying screw the science.
Now you can then say that was a poor decision of artistic direction, which is fine, but they made it knowing full well it wasn’t accurate.
14/04/2009 at 22:35 Serondal says:
Yah I mean there is an alien ray gun in here, it has more relation to old Sci-fi movies to actual science.
14/04/2009 at 22:55 Sciere says:
@clovus: for a real forest, try playing The Hunter, it runs on Avalanche’s upcoming Just Cause 2 engine.
14/04/2009 at 22:55 Jason Moyer says:
@everyone arguing that it’s “seriously weird” to want scientific/physical consistency in the world of Fallout: does that mean you’d accept that water had a different freezing point in the game, or that gravity is 0.2 Gs, or that the sun was green?
If that were SCIENCE! then yes. But it’s not. Fallout is a depiction of a post-apocalyptic future as viewed through the goggles of late 40′s atomic paranoia, not some attempt at showing a realistic portrayal of post-apocalyptia. If it were aiming for realism based on current best theories about the effects of a global thermonuclear war, there would be little to no vegetation, it would be freezing all the time, and the “smokey sky” effect you get closer to the city would be persistent everywhere.
14/04/2009 at 22:57 FourQueensCasinoVegas says:
great mod!!!
14/04/2009 at 22:59 Chis says:
If only this did something about the colourless, bland writing, the tremendously artificial AI, and the general feeling that the game has been made by folks that have a lot of talent but no imagination.
14/04/2009 at 23:01 jamscones says:
Fallout’s “cheery nihilism” colour palette is just fine as it is, thankyouverymuch. The only green I want to see is the sort that clicks when you get near it.
14/04/2009 at 23:02 Alex McLarty says:
“a game that often coasts on limited artistic imagination”
What a claim!
14/04/2009 at 23:12 Chis says:
It’s not just a claim, it’s an accurate description of Fallout 3 as a whole. Having played both Fallout 2, and 3, it seems obvious to me. (Not to mention games displaying truly appreciable imagination and talent, such as Thief, Stalker or System Shock)
14/04/2009 at 23:30 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Yeah, the Pripyat comparison seems apt. Perhaps saying “screw the science” may have been a bit hasty, at least as far as vegetation goes.
The scenery’s more bleak and atmospheric in the relatively lush Chernobyl than it is in the Capital Wasteland. Then again hearing Malcom MacDowell’s Eyebot-broadcasted voice wandering around the gameworld would probably cheer anybody up.
14/04/2009 at 23:32 DD says:
@ Matzerath:
Holy crap i would play the Logan’s Run mod with joy!
14/04/2009 at 23:41 Rabbitsoup says:
this is kind of on topic, those arguing about the possibility of plant life after the theoretical nuclear war what about the new niches for black goo.
A bacteria lives on the reactor walls at Chernobyl and eats radiation. : http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20070422222547data_trunc_sys.shtml
14/04/2009 at 23:46 Serondal says:
Like was said before you can’t compare what happened at Chernobyl with a nuclear war. Washington was probably bit by several war heads and even if it was only one it would be a LOT more destructive then a nuclear power plant exploding, and it was only ONE of the reactors the others did not explode. It didn’t even kill all that many people O.o Where as a MIRV nuclear war head from a russian ICBM could destroy the entire east coast. Between the russians and the US we could destroy the entire world and still have 99% of our nukes left just incase . . . incase of what I don’t know :P Plants and things can’t come back when they’re not there any more to come back! Maybe some weird mutated plants would be interested like killer crab grass lol.
15/04/2009 at 00:52 Paul Moloney says:
“Research shows that modern day inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (for those of you who skipped out on history lessons: the two inhabited nuclear weapon “test” sites of WWII, located in Japan) show fewer cases of cancer than neighbouring and less radiated areas.”
Bizzarro! Linkie?
P.
15/04/2009 at 01:01 Serondal says:
Well I’ll be! Are these two sites still more radiated then surrounding areas or has the radiation died off over the years? I’ve heard the suffered from all kinds of birth defects but I dunno if that was true or just Liberal anti-war clap trap from the left media machine.
15/04/2009 at 01:14 Schadenfreude says:
Looks pretty, but I imagine the whole secrecy and whatnot surrounding the Oasis would become pretty dumb.
15/04/2009 at 01:24 bhlaab says:
Fallout 3 looked fine. If you zoom the camera out all the way you can see how gorgeous it wouldve been as an isometric game. (sigh)
It could do with a bit less desaturation, though. Fallout isn’t meant to be overwhelmingly depressing unless Ron Perlman is speaking.
15/04/2009 at 02:24 MetalCircus says:
“now, plantlife’s doing okay for itself”
But it wouldn’t though. It’s a nuclear bloody wasteland not a garden center. I really hate this elitist, condescending attitude to Fallout 3, as if it’s some ungodly piece of shit that steals from your purse. It’s a very good VIDEO GAME. The writing is piss-poor but for what it is, it’s a bloody good romp.
And yes yes Fallout 2 is one of my faveourite games *rolls eyes* but I hate that I have to mention that so I can convince people i’m a “PROPAR” fan of the series. SIGH.
15/04/2009 at 02:26 DigitalSignalX says:
Fallout science is based on the optimism/fiction from an early 50′s standpoint… just like watching an old black and white sci fi movie. Atomic powered cars, ray guns, you name it. What could survive or the future of a nuclear war/winter was pure speculation. It’s like nostalgia, not science.
What makes me laugh the most from a modern perspective is that all a survivor needs is a bucket, rags, dirt and gravel to make the entire clean water issue solved.
15/04/2009 at 02:28 MetalCircus says:
Whoops, went off on a bit of a tangent there. Aren’t peanuts lovely?
15/04/2009 at 02:56 Ben Abraham says:
YOU ARE ALL WRONG, FALLOUT 3 WAS GAME OF THE YEAR AND AS SUCH IS PERFECT /not
I installed this mod a while back (or a similar version) because I was totally sick to death of the ugly-as-the-business-end-of-a-brick-s***-house environment. And yet I still found the game to be less than worth 10/10, even when it was much, much prettier!
Oh yes, I’m still smarting from the ridiculous hype from you Eurogamer, et. al. Only Mister Meer here was sensible enough to moderate my expectations in advance with a (more than generous!) 8.8.
Sheesh! Game of the Year… what a joke.
/end angry internet man rant
15/04/2009 at 03:08 Moonracer says:
Regardless of whether you think it is “realistic” or not, this mod is highly recommended for a replay through the game. It drastically changes the feel of the wasteland and creates added cover for NPCs and medium range landscape so you don’t have quite as good an idea of your surroundings. So if you don’t use the map and remove those compass pointers it is much harder to get around.
15/04/2009 at 04:18 Hidden_7 says:
Another thing to remember with FO3′s Science! setting is the power of the warheads. We’re not talking ICBM MIRVs here; A-Bombs not H-Bombs. They are absolutely not as powerful as current warheads. They are as powerful as what a newly atomic society would think they could be. Remember this is all Retro-Futurism. I imagine the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki where pretty bewilderingly powerful to the people of the time. I’d wager it’d be pretty difficult to imagine that destructive force being made 100 times more ‘effective.’
The bomb in Megaton is what we are thinking here. That was one of the undetonated Chinese bombs. Destructive, especially paired with several others, but a handful wouldn’t completely obliterate the East Coast.
Basically, another point towards greenery being able to survive all that, and exist 200 years later.
15/04/2009 at 04:41 Serondal says:
I guess the areas outside of the blast would survive unharmed and the plant life would slowly but certainly grow back into the blasted areas. It might not look normal with all that radiation causing it to mutate a little more than normal but it would still be plant life yes?
15/04/2009 at 05:00 Atalanta says:
That looks fantastic.
I only recently bought Fallout 3, and I’m really digging it, but the constant brown/grey/more grey is kind of exhausting to look at.
15/04/2009 at 05:24 Clockwork Harlequin says:
I think the whole discussion of “plant life would /would not survive” is slightly beside the point. I won’t play Fallout 3 until there’s a mod that removes all humans. Because whatever might survive, us bipeds would be toast.
Speaking of Chernobyl, you shouldn’t use the red forest as an example of trees surviving a good ol’ nuking; it’s called “red” because radiation swept over swathes of the forest, killing the pine trees (which are now petrified, and rust colored). Wikipedia is wonderful ; )
15/04/2009 at 06:21 Lukasz says:
If people survived so did animals and plants. and if they survived even if whole east coast was sterilized it wouldn’t be more than fifty years for wind to carry pollens, seeds and stuff. and where plants grew animals move in.
no matter how much radiation there was, or what is in soil. if human can walk on it it is safe for other species.
15/04/2009 at 06:40 Heliocentric says:
Yeah, the plantless look is kinda stupid, but can you imagine the nma reaction if fallout 3 had shiped with plants? “Oh my god, they forgot to take the oblivion gayness out.”
15/04/2009 at 07:01 Serondal says:
I guess they’re going for the (Every single fucking inch of the whole world was nuked individually)look. All I can say is when you blow up Megaton it is AWESOME
15/04/2009 at 07:33 Tei says:
Re: Morrowind
Everything need more fungus. And a city built inside a shell. And a volcan. And a swamp. And a fortress on the wall with guards geared in cristal armor. Morrowind is teh awesum.
15/04/2009 at 08:27 Albides says:
This is not something I ever thought of or wanted to think about while playing Fallout 3. Also seems like a poor excuse for some people to get angry. I thought Fallout 3 was a briliant game. Bethesda nailed the exploration just right which I thought they made so terrible in Oblivion.
I don’t know squat about science, but I thought the lack of growing things had something to do with bomb-induced global warming happening too quickly for plants to acclimatise, effectively rendering everything a desert. I don’t even know if this is scientific.
Tei: Yes!
15/04/2009 at 08:39 Dreamhacker says:
Paul Moloney: Sorry, I dont have a link, I in turn heard it from a friend. I guess it should be taken with a grain of salt ;)
15/04/2009 at 08:43 Dingo says:
If you don’t care about the timeline (like me), try the Dusty Sky mod to make it really depressing. Post-apocalyptica here I come!
Then add in the Nuclear Winter mod for some new colors like… well, dirty white.
Green is definitely overrated nowadays! Nonetheless, GreenWorld is a great mod.
15/04/2009 at 08:55 sfury says:
For any of you saying that we should consider not only the high radiation like in the case of Pripyat, Chernobyl etc. but also that the place was heavily bombarded and that would obliterate any greens for centuries ahead – check out how Tunguska is doing 100 years after taking one of the biggest blasts on Earth (about 1000 times the Hiroshima bomb says the Wiki)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
http://sciencedude.freedomblogging.com/2008/07/02/oc-congressman-urges-hunt-for-asteroids/
http://www.crystalinks.com/tunguska2.jpg
Looks pretty lush to me.
Also Fallout 1&2 looked many times more colourful and less depressing than Fallout 3, and were just genuinly fun and interesting to me, which is not something I feel about F3 after playing it all through for 85 hours. How Bethesda managed to create so dull game, when parts of it and the concept were so perfect, is beyond me, that’s not what a 10/10 AAA “Game of the Year” should look like, not in my opinion.
It’s actually up to the modders make their games play better and create quality content, and yeah that doesn’t make me love Bethesda more.
15/04/2009 at 09:12 psyk says:
Stop with the real world science it doesn’t transfer to the game world.
15/04/2009 at 09:19 psyk says:
Also I dont have fallout one or two installed at the moment but where in the either game did it look more colorful and less depressing than fallout 3.
15/04/2009 at 09:37 sfury says:
psyk says:
“Stop with the real world science it doesn’t transfer to the game world.”
and that’s the problem :)
anyway if you had read my whole post you’d see that I don’t mind the craziness in Fallout 1&2, but those two are just not so !#@!@ GREY and DULL.
Damn, I’d welcome even some orangy desert ladscape, just to break that monotonous palette of F3.
I mean – someone above mentioned that they dumped the realism in order to make the game look more interesting – well great job there, Bethesda…
15/04/2009 at 09:51 psyk says:
This is what I remember from fallout one and two – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fallout_01.jpg
http://www.slowdays.org/mortis/reviews/fallout1/fallout1-06-commonsentiment.jpg lot of grey,black and yellow/brown
apart from vault city due to having a geck http://wikicheats.gametrailers.com/images/thumb/5/59/FO2_VaultCity02.jpg/300px-FO2_VaultCity02.jpg
and I think I remember NCR being quite bright as well but thats it was basically the same colour palette used everywhere.
vault city
15/04/2009 at 10:27 MultiVaC says:
I thought Fallout 3 was pretty compelling, visually. It’s not scientifically accurate to have all the plant life dead like it is, but thematically it works very well. It’s called a wasteland, and I feel like they nailed that feeling. It’s true that STALKER is just as apocalyptic feeling, but I wouldn’t call The Zone a “wasteland”. The wasteland is a hallmark of Fallout, and in FO3 I really felt like I was wandering the surface of a dead world. And there was some subtle differences in the colors as you went to different area in FO3. For example, the DC ruins are somewhat blue-green tinted, and feels completely different than the orange-yellow sunlight in the outer wastes.
15/04/2009 at 10:40 TooNu says:
Thanks for linking this :) great mod and oh so pretty.
15/04/2009 at 11:12 Rei Onryou says:
Looks pretty. I agree with the commenters that say nature claiming the earth back from urban sprawl is impressive looking. Plant life adapts very well.
I woulda enjoyed seeing some sort of petrified forest, blown to a 30 degree angle by a nuclear blast, but that’s still brown/grey.
Creative thinkers needed for applying colour (on that note, Mirror’s Edge is pretty).
15/04/2009 at 11:34 Xerxes says:
I imagine it will make Three Dogs “Have you ever seen a tree” speech less poignant.
15/04/2009 at 12:01 Dave says:
“limited artistic imagination”
Are you nuts? I can’t think of a game with a keener sense of its own Aesthetic.
15/04/2009 at 12:24 Jacques says:
And so the battle line is drawn, between people that like the game with trees and people who believe it was descendant from video game heaven to save us all and is perfect.
Green world is OK, Greener World, plus the autumn mod, makes the world beautiful and haunting still.
We can argue forever about whether or not Fallout 3 should have had more plant life from day one, but the fact is, it didn’t have much of anything living, and now if you want shubberies, you can have your shubberies, NEAT NEAT NEAT
15/04/2009 at 12:41 Jason Moyer says:
In the Fallout universe, the water is irradiated, and plantlife is completely nonexistent without a GECK.
In the real universe, nuclear annihilation would result in nuclear winter, creating the worst ice age in earth’s history.
So basically trees in FO3 = the ghey.
15/04/2009 at 12:47 Oak says:
Heavens, not the ghey!
15/04/2009 at 13:00 Jacques says:
if you feel that trees don’t belong in fallout, don’t download the mod, don’t install the mod, don’t bitch about it
15/04/2009 at 13:26 chaves says:
Ok, all this is neat and cool. We all love trees. Now, just think about the level of bashing Bethesda would have received if they even slighltly mentioned the possibility of having some vegetation… Yeah, angry internet men fodder.
As a mod, it’s perfect. Looks pretty. And, who knows, maybe even realistic?
15/04/2009 at 13:27 Panzeh says:
I love how people decry the grayness of FO3 and then completely ignore the brown brown brown of FO2 and FO, which seems just as bad. I like what the mod does, though, makes it easier on the eyes.
Also FO2 and FO both had problems in some of the writing, especially FO2 which seemed to descend into caricature very fast. About the only thing those games have on FO3 is the fact that you can skip to the end of the main quest fairly quickly in both.
15/04/2009 at 14:01 sfury says:
“About the only thing those games have on FO3 is the fact that you can skip to the end of the main quest fairly quickly in both.”
Oh, come on now! Sure FO 1&2 are not masterpieces like Planescape story-wise, but to claim something like that – maybe you really skipped to the end of the main quest fairly quickly in both? ;)
Brownish or not, no vegetation – I played both for the first time 3 years ago – and the atmosphere was spot on for me. Fallout 3 was very off-putting, felt very different and damn all that bloom on top was nauseating. And that’s not even one of the major problems I had with the game, bu I’ll stop here because the post is about the Three Mod.
15/04/2009 at 15:08 Bobsy says:
*snigger*
Oh you guys.
“FALLOUT SHUD NOT HAV TRESE!”
Well that’s okay, because it doesn’t.
“BUT DERE R TRESE HERE LOOK!”
It’s a mod.
15/04/2009 at 17:02 Danarchist says:
The internet would be awesome if it wasnt for all the people.
15/04/2009 at 19:05 Dreamhacker says:
Can’t you respect us poor souls who believe Fallout 1 and 2 were god-given gifts to humanity?
;)
15/04/2009 at 19:15 drewski says:
I love the guy who reckons FO3 sucks.
After playing it for 85 hours.
Worst 85 hours of entertainment ever!
15/04/2009 at 19:22 Serondal says:
If only the people in the world of Fallout had listed more closely to Russians by Sting all of this would have been avoidable and we’d all have pretty grass and trees to run around in.
15/04/2009 at 20:33 sfury says:
“I love the guy who reckons FO3 sucks.
After playing it for 85 hours.
Worst 85 hours of entertainment ever!”
My thought exactly.
15/04/2009 at 20:34 daysocks says:
I don’t even think that Fallout 3 is even remotely realistic. 200 years after? I don’t think so.
Little Lamplight would be deserted because the kids would be long grown. The Garys (from the vault) would be long dead. Vault 101 would have few people left and they would pretty much all be related.
Let’s keep it in perspective, guys, it’s an unrealistic game. Don’t argue about what would happen because it’s not real, it’s not even remotely realistic.
15/04/2009 at 20:45 sfury says:
To be fair there was only 20-30 worst hours of entertainment in those 85 though. :]
I just don’t get the hype about it – it’s an average 7/10, 8/10 game – one that holds many promises but fails miserably on some of them in the end.
15/04/2009 at 22:33 Serondal says:
I have to say I like it, people hold these games up to crazy standards when the only standard you should be worried about is “Is this game fun” to me it is. Sneaking around a super market shooting raiders in between isles, running into crazy robot brain machnies in the middle of the waste land and cracking their brain case, finding a city that is run by kids that got to old and had to move out :P Thats all very interesting and fun to me. Realistic or not, WELL writtten or not I don’t really care. I don’t have enough free time to care.
15/04/2009 at 22:56 Klaus says:
Y’know, I don’t like Fallout 1 much, and I can’t get past the boredom in Planescape to even leave the city? (I have low planes lore), and I have tried a half-dozen times.
Anyways, since I enjoy trees, grass and the general color green I would install this. But I uninstalled Fallout 3 while upgrading to Vista Ultimate. (bleh)
I enjoy analysis’s of fiction… because it’s funny.
16/04/2009 at 00:58 Jimwoo says:
The real issue with trees in fallout 3 is the lack of useful water. Most of the water available is highly radiated. Rain water would be highly irradiated as well. The rain cycle would serve to keep the radiation around enough for plants not to be able to thrive. Chernobyl has had a major foliage revival, true, but that area gets rain from other areas around it, which aren’t radioactive. Fallout 3 is a much bigger ground zero than Chernobyl, it is assumed that most of the surrounding area has suffered the same fate. I think the lack of plant life in FT3 was adequate.
22/03/2010 at 03:12 John Gron says:
Um? Stupid mod. His time would have been just as well spent making a mod for a soccer game that lets players touch the ball with their hands,
Why the hell would I play a post-apocalyptic game to look at the native flora and fauna?? Stupid.
If I was actually worried enough to complain (or write a stupid mod) about how little colour there is in a post-apocalyptic game, I’d probably go outside and enjoy the current pre-apocalyptic world a bit instead :\