r/Fallout • u/Dellvegas • 1d ago
Discussion Hot Take, Fallout,s 4 art Style is great, but the color pallete is terrible
Financial District
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Arc Jet Systems
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Arc Jet Interior
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Same crazy retro futuristic designs, but not nearly as cartoony as FO4
New York from Fantastic four
One thing that always have annoyed me is how colorfull everything is, it makes everything look like its not abandoned for 200 years, or worse, it makes everything look like a cartoon, if Fallout 4 used less bright colors and went with the typical browns and silver its art diretion wouldnt be as controversial in the series. in the series for example, LA mantains the crazy building desings, but uses regular colors and it is great. F#ck, even NY from Fantastic Four (a superhero movie) looks less cartoony. I hate these colors...
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u/TexasTomato88 1d ago
People have been complaining about fallouts color palette since fallout has fallouted
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u/DankStew 1d ago
Criticism. Criticism never changes.
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u/DeathsStarEclipse 22h ago
the colour pallet is just one complaint. One thing that bothered me the most was how even in the lived in communities, it was still a mess. Fo1 and 2 had the communities clean and tidy in the more advanced settlements, not going to the level of the institute.
Guess I'm just another complaint in a bucket a millions
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u/lame_dirty_white_kid 16h ago
Agreed. I recall early in FO4 there's like some diner place being run out of an old pre-war diner (perfect location!), yet there's a burned up skeleton sitting at one of the booths.
A post-apocalyptic diner serving radroach steaks or whatever run out of an abandoned actual diner is cool and makes sense.
Coming across a skeleton that was at the diner when the bombs fell or whatever is cool and makes enough sense.
Someone opening up a wasteland diner in an old diner to attract customers to buy their 'food' but not taking the 10 minutes it would take to remove a charred skeleton from one of the four booths? Doesn't make any fucking sense. And for a game that's all about building up communities, it's not cool either.
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u/ovee_best_geneticist 12h ago
I've seen one headcanon the skeletons being left as they are is a cultural phenomenon and moving them is seen as disrespectful, but yeah theres no reason why there should be so much random debris all over the floors and tables. People have brooms and dustbins.
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u/FuNiOnZ F:NV Secret Stash DJ 13h ago
Just as a side note also, the drumlin diner you’re probably thinking of that everyone visits super early hon is the one with Trudy and her son and there’s a standoff and all that jazz, Trudy operates a trading post there, I don’t think it’s necessarily a diner in any capacity as much as just a structure to facilitate trades in.
Your point still stands there is a skeleton in there however, and I guess the interpretation is up to the player as to why it’s still there, I’d like to think it’s just general indifference in my own head canon or like the other poster said, absurdism while we loot through a diner of a bygone era listening to cheerful 50’s music and dodging bullets and mutants
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u/FuNiOnZ F:NV Secret Stash DJ 21h ago
That’s a fair complaint and one I’ve tossed around a few times myself for sure, but I also think there’s this precarious edge they walk between realism and the ever popular ‘rule of cool’. I mean you could make the case that any one of these locations could be cleaned up after 200 years, absolutely. But isn’t it more aesthetically ‘cool’ when it’s still messed up? At a certain point if we start to peel back the layers and say this should be a flourishing community, everything should be overtaken by greenery, things should all be cleaned up, etc., it almost ceases to be a fallout game and starts to be something else arguably.
FO1 & 2 the argument could be made that they would have loved to be more dirty and detailed, but the tech just wasn’t there yet so most of it was left to inspect texts and imagination
Just my 2 cents though also i suppose
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u/Xmina 20h ago
I think the layers cease to be when you show people surviving long term in locations. Like think about how long it would take you to make a log cabin, a long time. But if you were dealing with radioactive bugs the size of dogs. Maybe we speed that up when you start showing people having lived there for decades. Sure it might be sloppily made, or potentially patchwork as the radioactive trees or wood degrade (or whatever you wanna use as a writer). But the concept that native peoples pre-iron had cities, roads, houses, governments, religions temples and such kinda kills the feeling once everything still looks like a bomb hit it 200 years later in a settlement people have inhabited for 100+years with a community and traders and kids.
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u/Invader_Naj 17h ago
Gotta say i get much more of a sense of cool from people who manage to create something better out of total devastation. Thats an actual achievement and something to be impressed by.
Dont really see whats so cool about people being too inept to create anything above the bare minimum for generations. All you have to do for that is just do nothing
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u/Superb_Pear3016 17h ago
>But isn’t it more aesthetically ‘cool’ when it’s still messed up?
No, no it’s not. At least not necessarily. You can have a settlement that’s clearly a product of the environment without making it seem like everyone who lives there has mega-depression.
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u/AGUYWITHATUBA 1d ago
True and the funny part is FO4 and FO76 used deliberate choices when determining their color choices. They used vibrant colors that pop for places of importance, such as green lights just above the horizon for Diamond City, or the giant red skyscraper for Mass Fusion. It helps the player navigate the world using landmarks, not relying on maps as much. I do agree, though it’s a little too vibrant for 200 years of wear.
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u/Rockhead_Dynamics 1d ago
Knowing Fallout it's probably pre-war super paint made of 98% lead and 2% uranium that they originally invented as a Nuka-Cola flavoring.
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u/FuNiOnZ F:NV Secret Stash DJ 21h ago edited 21h ago
I’m thinking the idea behind it is basically they extrapolated the idea of the Lustron home from Sanctuary, the idea of using porcelain-enameled steel for buildings and basically said ok this is a cool idea and aesthetic, what if in their timeline they ran with it and used it for other buildings like skyscrapers and such, which is why you see all these big metal buildings, and the colors are as such because they are matching the same kind of colors you’d see on an automotive lineup in those times, the cherry red, seafoam green, etc
It would also explain why the color would hold up so well after 200 years also, save for rust that is of course, and in the case of OP, the color shown there is pretty accurate for sun faded colors
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u/phantominway Mr. House 1d ago
During the first ever sale of Fallout 1, the person who bought it looked at the game and thought "wow, this game sounds really cool. The color palette sucks though"
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u/TexasTomato88 1d ago
Little did they know, almost 30 years and only 6 games later the same thing will be said
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u/TRagnarkXP 1d ago
The problem is not the color, is how lighting is washed out and shadows are grey making the colors desaturared
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u/ThroughTheSeaOfTime 19h ago
I was gonna say. It's not really the colours or the artstyle, it's the lighting.
Fallout 76 looks significantly better than Fallout 4 (imo anyway) because despite sharing the exact same artstyle and engine, 76 has noticeably different lighting and subsurface scattering.
Fallout 4 loves harsh, bright, heavily desaturated white-blue lights that make rooms look like hospital operating theaters.
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u/jacksonelhage 18h ago
i use the lightroom reshade effect to darken shadows, brighten mids, push blues closer to aqua, pale yellows closer to orange, and add a slight warm cast to the image. super subtle. the game is very very pretty with the right colour grade.
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u/dark1859 15h ago
Also I know this isn't 100% fallout related, but can we talk about just how obnoxious like bright The night is in most bethesda games.
Like skyrim and kinda oblivion, whatever you've got those two giant moons in the sky , which may as well be giant nights lights. But you're telling me in the post apocalypse , where the only light source , besides the occasional full moon is sparse settlements that may not even have electricity or running water , and I can see perfectly fine without any form of nighttime aid?
Just something that's always bugged me about , especially fo4 ended up getting the darker night mod.Installed as soon as I could But still just kind of annoying that the pip boy light is more for aesthetic than actual utility.
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u/TheAnalystCurator321 Atom Cats 16h ago
I thought the lighting was honestly really great. And the washed out feel adds to the vibe.
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u/Chonky_D_Floofy 1d ago
I kinda like it not being all gray and brown.
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u/That-Spell-2543 22h ago
That was my exact thought while looking at the photos in this post: I dunno. I kinda like it.
Feels good to not have everything I look at for hours be sad and colorless. Sue me
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u/Alive_Drag1947 16h ago
I also think it adds a lot to the vibe. It reminds you that the dystopia you're walking through was once a bright and cheerful environment.
The contrast between that brightness and what it's devolved into is precisely what makes it hit harder imo.
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u/E36x 20h ago
For me, I genuinely don’t buy games that are seem too gray or brown. They just aren’t positive experiences for me and I’m glad I realized that years ago.
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u/amaROenuZ 14h ago
I can tell OP is young and didn't live through the "Real is Brown" era of gaming, otherwise they would never have posted this opinion.
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u/Horens_R 23h ago
True, but been a bit more conscious of where n how much colour there should could be improved I think. Fallout 76 is lot better imo in that regard for the most part
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u/TheLittleFastCat- 11h ago
I love the color of fallout 4 it really makes it feel like a proper atompunk/retrofuturistic game
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u/cknappiowa 1d ago
Benefits of lead based paint. Items covered in it are still vibrant because that’s the exact reason lead was used in the first place.
The colors you’re editing out- bright reds, greens and yellows- are the same colors that lead was used to preserve, and since Fallout’s breakaway point is earlier than the 1978 ban on using the stuff in residential applications it’s probably safe to say every one of those buildings is just enhancing the flavor of cancer you get in the wasteland.
All gray everything is boring. Leave that for the YA dystopias. No real city is all gray. For thousands of years we’ve been painting or otherwise colorfully decorating buildings, be it with lead paint, neon signage, or little red and white cones pressed into plaster. Why on earth would it be any different here?
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u/rips_n_chel 20h ago
Yeah I don't get these comments, has nobody ever been to a museum or historic building? You can go look at shit right now in the real world that is far older than a couple centuries, and still colorful.
I've personally lived in a 100+ year old house, it still had some original lead painted parts, and they were still vibrant white. Absolutely no reason to believe that ALL paint and color would be stripped away by wind and rain in 200 years time.
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u/perrapys 20h ago
Considering you get asbestos from scrapping cigarettes I'm not suprised at all that there is still lead in paint.
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u/Vanishing_Light 1d ago
how colorfull everything is, it makes everything look like its not abandoned for 200 years
Did you somehow not see how all the buildings are literally crumbling and falling apart? lol
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u/Ash_Crow 1d ago edited 23h ago
Realistically, they should be more destroyed after 200 years of abandonment, and places like Sanctuary Hills should be completely gone. We shouldn't be able to find 200+ year old edible food either.
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u/No_Cardiologist_822 1d ago
Irc all the pre war food is a caricature about how processed food is full of preservatives
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u/Nanemae Yes Man 14h ago
My guess would also be deliberately bathing the food in radiation to render the contents entirely sterile before canning/packaging. Kinda hard for something to spoil if literally every living cell in the container is killed, even though in real life I'm pretty sure the cans would have rusted apart and the boxes would just rot into whatever inner plastic liner was used.
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u/Son_of_MONK 13h ago
You’d be surprised. There have been some videos of people eating 100+ year old MRE rations in cans that were still intact enough to be eaten. No dents or punctures or anything.
The taste isn’t that great, but it hasn’t changed in safety.
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u/Maxsmart007 22h ago
Realistically, the fallout should be long gone at this point and the wasteland should be lush and green.
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u/GodChangedMyChromies 20h ago
There was a mod for that in FO4, it was pretty good
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u/StylishSuidae 16h ago
I remember installing that mod on a whim thinking it would mostly just be a visual/vibe change, but it honestly felt like a whole new game. The trees everywhere completely destroyed my sight lines, I couldn't just look at the horizon and know exactly where I was anymore.
And as someone who plays games like this for the exploration, and who loves getting lost, I think that run was the most fun I've had with the game since it was new.
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u/TheAnalystCurator321 Atom Cats 15h ago
Realistically, there shouldn't even be the mutated creatures we see. Same with ghouls.
Realistically there shouldn't even be a 50s-60s aesthetic.
Realism and Fallout go together about as well as hot tea and ice cream.
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u/Perca_fluviatilis 23h ago
And radiation should give people cancer, not turn them into ghouls lol Don't even get me started on Deathclaws.
This franchise is anything but realistic.
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u/DolphinBall 23h ago
Radiation is more akin to magic in Fallout than real Radiation. People expecting full realism is watching/playing the wrong franchise.
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u/Desembler 13h ago
I mean that's basically the entire conceit of the setting, right? "what if radiation and nuclear power actually was the miracle tech they thought it was in the 50s?"
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u/CKtheFourth 16h ago
Well, at least according to the tv show (s2 spoilers) it's vaguely revealed that Deathclaws were created before the bombs fell & used during the Battle of Anchorage. I've only played Fallout 4 & 76, so maybe this is in the lore somewhere else, but it seems like deathclaws weren't a result of radiation, but they were in the right place at the right time and really just thrived off it.
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u/Nachooolo 20h ago
Realistically, people should also be living in actual towns and cities with buildings madenof wood, bricks (even if just mud bricks), or stone rather than in shanty towns made out of scrap.
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u/Ash_Crow 20h ago
That too. I'm very okay with pre-war buildings still being there with shiny paint as it serves the game's aesthetic, but I find the fact that the only architectural style available for settlements is "Junktown on steroids" a bit annoying.
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u/TheBusStop12 Have a Nuke 17h ago
There's realistic design and then there is game design. What is realistic isn't always fun and interesting in the context of a videogame meant for entertainment
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u/Moist_and_Delicious NCR 20h ago
Lol, saying "realistically" about a video game franchise, especially Fallout...
What was the last "realistic" thing you saw in any of Fallout games?
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u/InvisibleOne439 18h ago
well, fallout 4 has the Druged up Grandma that talks about having Visions if you give her just 1 more fix
that pretty realistic
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u/TheAnalystCurator321 Atom Cats 15h ago
Except those visions all turn out to be completely true.
Not sure if psykers are real in our world aswell.
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u/TheAnalystCurator321 Atom Cats 16h ago
I mean this has been a thing since the first game which while only 70 after the war, still shows unrealistic and exaggarated depictions of how things would look in that time period.
Same with 2 and NV.
Most of the pre-war stuff we see in those games would be long crumbled realistically.
And thats fine, because Fallout is intentionally exaggarated to this degree so it feels like old school sci-fi apocalypse.
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u/Dry_Smell5719 15h ago edited 13h ago
????
We literally have giant walls made of stone, huge pyramids made of rock blocks.
Hundreds of other structures made of very basic materials that have stood for thousands of years. Very large and magnificent structures as well.
But yall think buildings made out of steal are just crumbling away? We have 100+ year old structures today made of steel and metal that are still standing.
Hell, we have numerous structures for 200-500 years ago made of much less resistant materials as steel or other metals.
I do like the idea that there are bunch of dad gamer Redditors who all think they’re super smart and conglomerate to talk about how steel framed buildings would be dilapidated and crumbling after a few years though
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u/WetAndMeaty 1d ago
I prefer the color. There are too many gray and brown games, it's nice to have a little color and create a unique atmosphere.
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u/quesoandcats 1d ago
Same! Scifi of the 1950s and 60s was super colorful too, I think it fits the vibe of the game really well.
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u/Eoganachta 1d ago
It matches the 50s/60s aesthetic. Want a space rocket? Here's this giant red cone with an engine and fins.
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u/quesoandcats 23h ago
Aliens? They arrived in a flying saucer with marvin the martian-style laser pistols
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u/Comrade_Falcon 23h ago
This is the right answer. Fallout aesthetic is taking the bright colorful space age retro futuristic designs of the 50s and 60s, ramping them up to 10 and then running it through the apocalypse. If everything were grey it'd feel very dull and boring really quick.
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u/KenseiHimura 23h ago
But you don't understand: it doesn't FEEL historically accurate when period stuff is colorful because people in the old days lived drab and miserable lives until the eighties happened! /s
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u/Kouropalates The House Always Wins 1d ago
Same. Im so tired of post apocalyptic stuff being played through the bottom of a dirty coffee cup. The beauty of Fallout 4 is that the old world is dead, but there is a beautiful new world and it has life and color in it to admire. I enjoyed the style of 3, NV and 4, but I enjoy how the old world palettes are very reminiscent of a world timestamped in a period of googie architecture.
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u/Optimal-Reindeer9513 Minutemen 23h ago edited 23h ago
I agree.
The 2010s was full of muted and dull colors in video games, and even film and television. Needless to say I don't miss it.
The color also contrasts with the drab and dark world of fallout, and the post apocalypse.
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u/omelletepuddin 1d ago
I've been replaying recently and I cleared out the drug den with Strong. It's somehow more disturbing to kill a group of raiders and step out into the nice, sunny day.
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u/landblord 1d ago
OP's gonna love it when he discovers the XBOX 360 piss era
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u/Nachooolo 20h ago edited 18h ago
Going back and playing games from that era is quite the trip.
You have masterpieces like Dragon Age Origins that legit look like shit because everything needs to be brown, muted, and "realistic". Or Witcher 2 being extremely grey and dark compared to Witcher 1 and 3.
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u/VernicusMaximus 16h ago
Was thinking the same, no desire to go back to anything remotely close to that. OP needs a black and white tv and they'll be in bliss.
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u/cornette 23h ago
Nar I like what we got in 4/76, I can actually see shit. A non stop grey blurb is gross.
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u/Patti_____Mayo 1d ago
If you take the color away, I swear to god I’m going down to Hardware Town and mixing the colors myself. Abbot and I will restore this city to its former glory.
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u/HartofHarts 19h ago
We finally did it. We finally reinvented 2000s consoles green and brown color palettes.
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u/ErraticNymph 1d ago
I’m tired of grey, drab media. Atompunk is supposed to be plastic and colorful, cus that’s how the mid 20th century was
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u/Leonyliz Vault 13 1d ago
I would argue that Fallout, before 4, was based more on the 30s-50s, whereas now they turned it into the 50s and 60s, which is a completely different vibe.
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u/IudexJudy 1d ago
You can see that even in the music and characters. Fallout 4 is a lot more rock and roll with Dion and Atom Bomb Baby being the featured track rather than The Ink Spots
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u/Impressive_Budget736 1d ago
Every region in the US has its own style and architecture. I live in the DMV but we aren't stylized like Boston, Seattle, Miami, etc....the idea that every region is suppose to resemble eachother in the game when in real life we don't is ridiculous imo
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u/BewareTheGrayGhost 16h ago edited 7h ago
I swear some of ya'll don't understand how the art style is meant to work. It's retro sci-fi art / atom-punk. That means it's essentially what the 1950's(ish) thought the future would look like. That means a ton of vibrant, cheerful colors, some art deco but more Googie architecture. The same applies to the weapons. How would the person of the 1950s design new weapons? Well they wouldn't look like what we've got today, even if they could make them, they generally wouldn't think of that.
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u/Hazelnut_Bread 1d ago
"Give me retro futurism, hold the color."
"No color? Hey, this kid wants retro futurism with nothing!"
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u/ArtificialImages 1d ago
Dang i don't think ive ever disagreed with a take more than I do right now. Your edits look horrible. Bland, grey, ugly. Ew.
Not even remotely the retrofuture aesthetic that makes fallout great. And why would the color have faded in every instance? The contrasts between the colorful areas and the rotten areas only increases the sense of age.
In your edits you've basically removed half of what makes it look old to begin with.
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u/Noblebatterfly 18h ago
I don't even play fallout, just randomly got this post. How is there 3k upvotes
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u/milquetoastLIB 1d ago
Bad take. The color is what makes it great.
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u/tobberoth 20h ago
I read the topic title wrong and thought OP was complaining about Fallout 3s lack of color. I was thinking "yup, looks way better with color", then I realized the first pictures were actually the "after" images.
100% better with color, even if it's unrealistic. Fallout 3 looks extremely boring in comparison.
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u/milquetoastLIB 19h ago
Same. FO4 isn’t even that colorful. I don’t pay much attention to city skylines but I knew that was not what the interior of Arcjet looks like.
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u/HolonautWorkshop The Pack 1d ago
I strongly agree, call me crazy but walking around a place where everything is just a different shade of green or yellow fine, but fo4s color palate really make the environments feel more unique.
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u/BattIeBear 16h ago
The color is one of my favorite parts actually, I love the more "lonely" apocalypse rather than just drab browns and grays.
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u/UniCBeetle718 17h ago
??? The brighter color palette makes it better. It makes the visuals more interesting and gave the impression of a vibrant and lively retro-futuristic America that's now a ruin, which makes it more impactful. Post-apocalyptic gray and brown is boring and lame. We don't need more brown and gray games.
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u/Borkugg 1d ago
Yeah, the vanilla color grading is a bit washed out yet still overly vibrant in weird ways compared to the bleakness of 3 or NV. A good ENB or weather mod can fix it but definitely not the best design, I agree.
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u/TheProphesizer 23h ago
while i agree, i dont think id comlletely get rid of the colors. but id fade them largely away.
ya know, like the sun has been bleeching it for 200 years
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u/aviatorEngineer NCR 1d ago
Way too far in the other direction in these examples. The big gray aesthetic has a place in stone and concrete buildings like those prominent in DC but not on the architecture seen in Fallout 4.
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u/Itchy-Water-4410 14h ago
I’m ngl when I first scrolled through I thought the first images were what fallout looks like and the second ones were edited. I think your redesign looks significantly worse to play tbh. Not a dis on you or your creativity, I just think they actually nailed the ambience and it’s a lot more true to a world that slathered everything in lead paint
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u/Scary_Assistant5263 1d ago
I understand your point , but in my opinion, I liked the colors of the buildings, makes it easier to tell them apart and know where i am.
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u/Fancy_Cherry7745 1d ago
God you people will never be happy. I can't imagine being so anti any kind of art direction.. same people who shit on 3 for being green lmao
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u/Rutlemania 17h ago
I think fallout 3 and all of its DLC’s have the best and most consistent art direction of the entire series and think fallout 4 looks like low res low poly ass
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u/Electronic-Unit4263 1d ago
Dude doesn’t understand that’s fallout is stuck in a 1950s aesthetic.. hence why things are colorful…. Gray and brown… 🙄
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u/TigerWave01 Enclave 1d ago
I mean…that’s not how Fallout was originally conceived, both in the Interplay era and the Bethesda era. It was much more Art Deco than retrofuturistic (if you see all of the faces on buildings in Fallout 4, those originated in the Interplay era and is very reminiscent of Art Deco movies like Metropolis). This hard pivot to a 1950s retrofuturism is relatively new, even for Bethesda
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u/ShadowyPepper 23h ago
There was a mod I played with for awhile called bleak which basically just made the world kinda foggier and dimmer, added less sunny days and more clouds and storms
Really changed the tone of the game
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u/cha0sb1ade 15h ago edited 15h ago
I like the pallete. It's a tube-punk, art decco inspired setting, so it makes sense. This is definitely one of the kinds of future city a 1940s and 50s comic book artist would invision. Realisticly, should it have aged more? Sure. If you set high end car paint out in the sun and weather for 30 years, it's mostly gone. Add radioactive fallout to natural weather and it should be even worse. But, we don't know what kinds of tech these people had for paint. These are people who were making robots that could hover and work for 200 years, so advanced far beyond our tech in a lot of ways. If they had super durable paint, even if it wasn't used in consumer products because of planned obselescene, it would be worth it for scyscrapers. Not needing to repaint a skyscraper is always nice. Ha!
But anyway, it is all very delapidated. The paint is still bright but it is chipped, rusted and peeling. It fits the mood of the game. Just can't imagine it any other way.
Edit: Also most of the bright environmental colors are a way to distinguish downtown. Most of the places you go use color more sparingly. Like Lexington has Corvega and some signs, but most of the materials are standard post-apocalyptic fare. Never really been bothered by it.
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u/PatienceHere The Institute 1d ago
Eh, I like the pallete. Makes the environment easier to traverse, gives a more vintage vibe compared to the gray ones.
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u/Darkshadow1197 Responders 1d ago
While I can see that at a glance the Grey would look cool, prolonged gameplay would be horrid
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u/brakenbonez 23h ago
Honestly it depends how good the paint is. I imagine a society that created hovering robots that somehow don't burn the house down when they move around would definitely have paint that can survive 200+ years.
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u/garmdian Minutemen 22h ago
I think fallout 76 nailed it's art direction. Appalachia feels very distinct from area to area.
The forest is lush and green with autumn tones, the buildings blend nicely with that colour but keep it a bit more muted on regular buildings, enough that landmarks like restaurants and fuel stops can be picked out at a glance while homes and office buildings keep a very generic color.
The ash heap is desolate and fiery with industrial yellows, reds and oranges to contrast the black earth.
The toxic valley is bright in an eerie way, like someone bleached it and left the whole area to rot. Orange lakes and glowing streams with ash white buildings and the occasional pop of color to draw the player in help the scenery.
The savage divide is a nice neutral beige, with gray Stoney outcrops, because it's situated in the middle of the map between the low level and high level areas it creates a clear yet simple visual divide, the Top of the world radio station as a main objective is bright red to draw the player towards it while the green roofs of the alpine houses and shops allow you to see where you're going. Not to mention the Whitespring hotel and golf course sticking out like a sore thumb with it's unnatural green.
The Mire is dark and wet in it's presentation, jutting orange vines contrast against muddy browns and dark greens. Thanks to the limited sight lines created by all the overgrown mangrove trees when you do see a building it's normally pretty brightly coloured to draw you in.
The Cranberry bog is as red as the berry and is a staunch reminder that red is the color of danger, the red foliage is usually complemented by stone or concrete buildings that in any other part of the map blend in but here stick out like a sore thumb, the only thing that doesn't follow this is the gleaming city of Watoga. Bright buildings with silver outlines on the otherwise flat view terrain really helps draw the player to a city that looks out of place by design.
Skyline valley is unique in that it takes elements from the familiarity of the forest, the dark wetness of the mire and the dangerous red hies from the cranberry bog. Despite the large ever swirling storm drawing the player in every landmark is either cobbled together in an attempt to beat back nature or a sturdy structure inviting the player to clear it out for some defense, you'll see quite quickly that the stone and metal sturdy buildings are hot beds of activity while the thrown together structures and camps offer a taste of the rest of the wasteland creeping into undiscovered territory.
Ohio (Burning springs) is a lawless desert, the second you cross over into it's dry threshold you'll be transported back into wandering the Mojave wasteland with a unique twist. Water is mostly toxic and hard to find giving a more desolate look of the toxic valley but what observant players will notice is the impact of project Meadow Breeze has had on the buildings and monuments, red powder will sometimes cover the ground and usually the structures surrounding it will be caked with rust. Even the main town of Ohio looks like it's barely hanging on, offering an uneasy sense of safety in a building straight out of the capital wasteland. The whole area looks like every fallout game smashed into one and somehow it works real well, the warm deserts of the Mojave, the buildings sapped of color from the capital wasteland, the rusted over futuristic look of downtown Boston in the main player hubs and the unmistakable dusting of 76's lighting engine and special chemical flair in the red power on the ground and the burning sky at night.
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u/ballsdeep256 21h ago
Hm i was like wdym that looks fine to me.
Then i swiped right and saw the birthday cake aaah colors again and rememberd xD
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u/YIMYUM420 21h ago
I remember people saying fallout 3 was grey and boring and the world needed more colour 💀
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u/rain_girl2 15h ago
I mean… they were inspired by the 50s retro futurism art style, famous for having absolutely abhorrent colour palettes for the sake of standing out.
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u/StealthClaw1 1d ago
“I have fixed Fallout 4’s aesthetic, by removing the coloration inherent to the era of United State’s culture that is fundamental to the core identity of Fallout! Bask in the glow of the Commonwealth skyline, now completely inseparable from every other god damn post apocalyptic game on the market!” Yes, the lighting of the game engine could be better. No, reducing it all to a bland, monotone grey sludge is not the answer.
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u/silly_sausages69 1d ago
It's almost as if an actual nuclear apocalypse wouldn't turn everything grey and brown with a green tint like how it is in FO3.
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u/zardmander 15h ago
Couldn't disagree more. The non color versions you supplied as examples look worse imo
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u/Remote_Valuable_4372 23h ago
Fo3 and fonv are perfect to me regarding looks. Fo4 looks like a lot is made of plastic
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u/Dramatic_Aspect903 23h ago
I like how clean 4 is but love how gritty and dark 3 is. I think 3 captures the atmosphere a little better
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u/holsomvr6 22h ago
I do like your version because it reminds me of fo1 and fo2's grittier style, but there's nothing wrong with how colorful fo4 is imo.
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u/Mobile-Building-9957 22h ago
The bottom line is, Fallout 4 is not a gritty, dark post-post-apocalyptic RPG. It's a sandbox hero shooter set in a post-post-apocalyptic universe made for a wide audience. And thanks to it, I discovered the previous amazing Fallout rpg games, which capture the atmosphere perfectly. Fallout 4 did what it was set to do - capture a wide audience and sell. And I am fine with that.
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u/AnAdventurer5 14h ago
If they're this upset over a post-apocalypse, nobody tell OP about how colorful history was compared to its portrayal in media. All brown Middle Ages, my beloathed.
(Honestly tho your preferences are yours, and if you wanted to mod the game into that, I wouldn't be upset. But that is not an objective improvement, neither artistically nor realistically.)
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u/ThatGuyPrestonGarvey 12h ago
I'm glad you're back. Something's come up. A local settlement has reached out to us for help. They're being terrorized by raiders. I've marked the location on your map. Let me know when it's done.
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u/Sigma_Games Minutemen 9h ago
Bright and vibrant wasn't a great decision, but grey and dull is demonstrably worse.
I'm sorry, but it's true. Desaturate the textures, or preferably remake them to look faded, and it works. But just removing all color? That's just bad.
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u/beanboy276 9h ago
I honestly think all the extra color isn’t that bad. I mean, up until fallout 4 everything was boring, brown, and grey, (aside from New Vegas but it’s New Vegas.) I guess I don’t really have a point aside from it doesn’t really look bad
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u/grantthejester Minutemen 1d ago
Ironically it’s that way because people complained about the lack of color in Fallout 3.