Bethesda games have always been behind the curve when it comes to graphics, though they’ve always had a good excuse. Their games are set in huge open worlds, dense with NPCs, physics objects, and cheese wheels. What they have lacked in raw graphical fidelity, they compensated with aesthetic style.
Morrowind depicted a bleak, ash-covered, and alien island. Oblivion presented a more conventional Western setting, with lots of sunshine, greenery, and European architecture – all of which incidentally matched Oblivion’s lighthearted and somewhat unintentionally silly tone. Skyrim brought the Elder Scrolls Series back to a more serious tone, substituting Oblivion’s highly contrasting colours with a wash of greys, blues, and whites, and combining this with a desolate landscape, rough stone architecture, and NPCs with absolutely no personality.
Each aesthetic transformation within The Elder Scrolls series has fit, more or less, with the tone of each game. The appropriateness of each game’s aesthetic has contributed to a unity of effect within each game, for better or worse.
The same cannot be said for the Fallout series. Whereas most games within the series have featured an appropriate visual aesthetic, the most recent mainline entry, Fallout 4, lacks the same level of aesthetic appropriateness its predecessors had. That’s not to say it’s bad – it isn’t. But compared to what previous Fallout entries achieved, Fallout 4’s visuals are a downgrade. Its tone, themes, and, I would argue, its ability to immerse the player, are all weakened.
Shifts in aesthetic style in the Elder Scrolls Series were accompanied by shifts in tone and setting. Fallout 4, however, aims for a similar tone to that of Fallout 3 – often dark and gritty, with some humour and some old-world quirkiness occasionally mixed in. Its setting is technically different – being situated in the Commonwealth as opposed to the Capital Wasteland. But in essence, they are both post-apocalyptic wastelands filled with raiders, super mutants, warring factions, and no sense of law and order. Fallout 3 depicted such a setting well. Fallout 4 does not. A big factor in this disparity is the art style through which these two settings are filtered – literally and figuratively.
This reduction of aesthetic appropriateness is best highlighted by comparing Fallout 4 with Fallout 3, Bethesda’s other mainline Fallout game. Most of what I have to say, however, also applies to Fallout New Vegas – just replace all mentions of green with yellow and this essay could function as a Fallout 4 vs New Vegas comparison. I will focus on Fallout 3, though, because, in contrast with New Vegas, Fallout 3 is, in my view, the most visually attractive of the two and probably better in objective terms too.
As with any talk of aesthetics, subjectivity plays a large part in any argument, especially when compared to arguments about, say, mechanics or plot. Some will disagree with what I have to say about the visuals of these two games, even if I argue my case well. No matter how cleverly I articulate why Fallout 3 looks better than Fallout 4, or how many objective observations I make that you may not have considered, many will insist they prefer Fallout 4’s art direction. You would not be wrong to think that. Art styles are, after all, one of the most subjective elements of any visual medium.
But I will try to make you dislike Fallout 4’s aesthetics anyway. Misery loves company, and I have seen far too many people praise Fallout 4 as the best-looking Fallout game.
Not if I have anything to say about it!
Fallout 3
Fallout 3 brought the grim, desolate landscapes of its isometric predecessors’ into the 3D space. Although Fallout 3 was set on the East Coast, the land was as barren as a desert. It was bare of vegetation, all the pre-war settlements lay in ruins, and the roads were cracked and strewn with wreckage. It took the classic post-apocalyptic setting of the dusty desert and replaced the sand with radiation-baked dirt and the ruins of the United States’ political capital.
The Capital Wasteland’s pre-war architecture is predominantly of the art deco style, with towering, imposing buildings of steel and concrete. Such architecture will likely strike one as futuristic yet practical. The scale of the buildings, the thickness of their pillars, and the hardness of their materials signify strength. The detailed facades, statues, and lavish interior designs signify luxury.
These impressions contrast with the deteriorated state these structures have become. The steel is rusted, the concrete crumbling, the shininess stained by centuries of hellish weather. These buildings, which once stood as symbols of a high and mighty civilization, now stand in ruins, their interiors filled with ghosts, ghouls, and monsters of the post-apocalyptic world. How far they have fallen. How foolish they were.
A muted colour scheme unifies all these environmental features. The art direction emphasises dark greens, greys, and browns. Over this is layered a green filter, reducing the strength of primary colours and dirtying everything in sight with a noxious veil.
While Fallout 3’s environmental details have been subject to much praise, the green filter was controversial from the start. When reading opinions on Fallout 3’s visuals, it is easy to find criticism of the green filter and the game’s lack of colour in general. Some say it is too monotonous, dreary, and ugly. I’ll have more to say on this later, but for now, let’s look at what Fallout 4 did in response to Fallout 3’s feedback.
Fallout 4
Fallout 4’s landscape is notably more crowded than the Capital Wasteland. There are more trees and other types of foliage. The map is more compact, with a greater density of buildings and notable locations per square metre. There is also a dearth of wide open spaces; the moment is rare when the land opens up and invites you to appreciate a panoramic view of the world.
Instead, the image is usually crowded with trees, buildings, and places to explore. The Commonwealth is denser with content – making for faster pacing, which many players doubtless prefer – but its atmosphere suffers due to the game’s relentless efforts to stimulate the player with curiosity about the next place. While Fallout 3 is often desolate and sombre, Fallout 4 is more often ‘fun’.
The Commonwealth’s architecture is mainly of the Googie style. Buildings often feature primary colours and sweeping curvy shapes. Glass, plastic, and stainless steel are the most prominently used materials. This architectural style was originally designed for a coffee shop and has been used mainly in coffee shops, fast-food restaurants, shops, and drive-in theatres ever since. Googie architecture has consequently become associated with consumerism.
Due to the bold colouring, impractical construction, simplicity of their facades, and the fragility of their large glass windows and thin bendy features, Fallout 4’s buildings lack the imposing grandiosity of Fallout 3’s art deco buildings. The Commonwealth’s pre-war society is made to seem vapid and shallow, and consequently its fall is made less tragic.
The reason I say Fallout 4’s aesthetic is inappropriate is because I do not think this was the artist’s intention.
Even worse, the Commonwealth’s stainless-steel buildings don’t degrade very well. They don’t crumble – they remain standing. And the colour, while it may rust and chip away in some places, remains strikingly bright across most of the surfaces onto which it was painted. The bright orange steel buildings that comprise Boston skyline look more like a dirty Lego City than the ruin of a great American city.
One of the issues with Googie architecture is that it looks tacky even when newly built; there’s an uncanny fakeness to it, a too-perfect idealism such as advertisements strive to influence their audiences into believing is true. You either buy into the uncanniness of it or are repulsed by the tackiness of it. For me, Boston is rendered tacky – it looks fake, like a cheesy advert made real.
(The same could be said for many of Fallout 4’s weapons, but this post is getting long enough already so just pretend I talked extensively about the weapons and you agreed with everything I said.)
Looking at Boston and other pre-war structures in Fallout 4’s Commonwealth, there is very little sense that the pre-war Commonwealth was once a real place. Much of its architecture is literally a symbol of fakeness – and even if you can appreciate the commentary such architecture makes of the shallowness and cultural degradation of the pre-war world, it is hard to mourn the loss of a civilisation that fell in so completely with the consumerist mindset. If Fallout 4 wanted to inspire melancholy in the player, it fails for this reason (unless it subjectively it works for you, in which case your head must be nearly shaken off by now).
You can respect the people who built the Capital Wasteland’s Washington DC, Bioshock’s Rapture, and even Metro 2033’s metro network. They stood for something, even if, in the case of Rapture, the idea was an evil one. But it is hard to respect or mourn those who built the pre-war Commonwealth. If Fallout 4 is supposed to project the message that nuclear war is bad and that humans were foolish for doing it, making me glad the pre-war world is dead probably isn’t the best way to do it.
The bright colours of the Commonwealth’s buildings might not have been so bad if the air was thick with a gloomy haze, muting the colours with a gloss of green, brown, or orange. Unfortunately, due to the widespread criticism of Fallout 3’s green filter, Fallout 4 doesn’t have one.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – a thick atmosphere of radioactive dust and pollution can do the job just as well, if not better. But outside the occasional radioactive storm, the Commonwealth’s air is seemingly cleaner than your average modern city.
Bold colours remain bold. The sky is clear and blue and streaked with fluffy white clouds. The brightness and contrast of everything is high, making everything from the landscape to the enemies pop. This is a first for the Fallout series – a series which has historically been dark, gloomy, and somewhat depressing, with the occasional quirky dialogue and funny robot rising from the gloom. Fallout 4 makes the Fallout universe looks cheerful and inviting, if a bit messy with all that trash lying around and the occasional local rambling about synths.
The wonderfully oppressive atmosphere of Fallout is lessened; and thus is lessened Fallout 4’s ability to inspire mystery, dread, morbid awe, and melancholy through its visuals.
Why Fallout 3 is Better (and if you disagree you are blind and have no taste :D)
Overall, I believe Fallout 3 has a stronger visual aesthetic than Fallout 4.
Fallout 4’s aesthetics aren’t bad, exactly. They’re just inferior to what Bethesda accomplished with Fallout 3. Rather than build upon Fallout 3’s aesthetic, they transitioned the series to a more colourful, visually crowded, and shallow visual style. The landscape was made denser, making long panoramic sights across desolate wasteland less common. The architecture was less grand, less melancholy in its deterioration, and less spooky. The removal of the colour filter and the failure to replace it with sufficiently thick atmospheric effects left the world looking too colourful and clean.
While I am sure many people enjoy Fallout 4’s architecture, I am also sure most players wouldn’t have minded or even noticed if the architecture was more like Fallout 3. Most players, I’m guessing, don’t think about things like architecture as long as it’s not distractingly bad. I haven’t seen any evidence of a widespread dislike of Fallout 3’s art deco architecture. Nor have I seen any widespread praise of Fallout 4’s Googie architecture. Gamers mostly accept what’s there and don’t consider the impression different architectural styles make on their subconscious. So I doubt most people would bother to disagree if you told them that Fallout 3’s architecture was superior for its ability to evoke stronger feelings of melancholy for a lost civilisation and for more strongly highlighting the foolishness and irony of such a proud and mighty culture destroying itself so foolishly.
To a lesser extent, the same goes for landscape design. Players will undoubtedly notice the difference between a wide-open desolate landscape, such as is featured in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, but I have not seen any widespread criticism of Fallout 3’s more sparse and spacious landscape or Fallout 4’s blasted wastes region – again, the criticism is usually focused on the bleakness of Fallout 3’s colour scheme. I have, admittedly, seen much criticism of New Vegas’ landscape, many having faulted it for being too empty and monotonous. Clearly, there is a limit to how desolate players are happy for a map to be before they become frustrated by a lack of visual stimulation and exploration opportunities.
In summary, people did not seem to have an issue with Fallout 3’s architectural or landscape styles, at least from what I have seen. Fallout 4’s changes in these departments thus seem to have been done not in response to criticism but for other reasons, likely relating to the change in art director and Bethesda’s obsession with stimulating the player with new places to explore every five steps.
The one area where Fallout 3’s aesthetics received a lot of criticism and thus likely directly influenced Fallout 4’s aesthetic style is that damned green filter.
For some reason, people really didn’t like it. It made the Capital Wasteland too ugly and monotonous, they said. They said it was boring. Fallout 4, by contrast, with its colour and environmental density, was found by many to be more visually stimulating and just nicer to look at.
But I argue that there is beauty in the bleakness of Fallout 3’s visuals, even if I am in the minority. Fallout 3’s muted colour palate excellently contrasts the Capital Wasteland with the idyllic world of the past depicted in the advertisements and in Vault 47’s idealised simulation of the past.
Visuals should not be judged by superficial details like how colourful and eye-catching they are – they should be judged by how they elevate the story’s emotional core. Fallout 4’s visuals harm it. Fallout 3’s visuals are perfectly suited to the universe it strives to depict.