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.
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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)
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.
@ Matzerath:
Holy crap i would play the Logan’s Run mod with joy!
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
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.
“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.
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.
Looks pretty, but I imagine the whole secrecy and whatnot surrounding the Oasis would become pretty dumb.
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.
“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.
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.
Whoops, went off on a bit of a tangent there. Aren’t peanuts lovely?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 ; )
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.
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.”
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
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.
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!
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 ;)
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.
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.
Stop with the real world science it doesn’t transfer to the game world.
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.
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…
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
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.
Thanks for linking this :) great mod and oh so pretty.
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).
I imagine it will make Three Dogs “Have you ever seen a tree” speech less poignant.
“limited artistic imagination”
Are you nuts? I can’t think of a game with a keener sense of its own Aesthetic.
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
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.
Heavens, not the ghey!
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
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?
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.
“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.
*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.
The internet would be awesome if it wasnt for all the people.
Can’t you respect us poor souls who believe Fallout 1 and 2 were god-given gifts to humanity?
;)
I love the guy who reckons FO3 sucks.
After playing it for 85 hours.
Worst 85 hours of entertainment ever!
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.
“I love the guy who reckons FO3 sucks.
After playing it for 85 hours.
Worst 85 hours of entertainment ever!”
My thought exactly.
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.
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.