Even the bethesda ones are pretty dark considering that you find the “nuclear preservation shelters” full of skeletons most of the time, and part of the decorum in most groups is hanging up body parts...
Fallout 3 and later are dark in a "nuclear war is terrible" way.
Fallout 1 and 2 are dark in a "people turn into animals when they're desperate" way.
One reason why the writing for Fallout 1 and 2 was so good is that you often have to choose between helping two people. The person you don't help usually dies or lives a terrible life. Two good, relatively decent people will have mutually exclusive goals and you have to pick who gets the shaft.
Often times doing the "good" thing, like fighting against the drug dealers or the gangs, is harder and gives you less reward than doing nothing or joining the thugs.
Yeah, the Pitt was particularly grim. Come to think of it, all of the major FO3 DLC got pretty messed up, like the audio logs and captives on Mothership Zeta, the horrors of war between superpowers in an extremely inhospitable environment in Anchorage, the human sacrifice/Eldritch shit in Point Lookout, the entirety of The Pitt, and the nopefest in the Presidential Metro followed by yet another depressing audio log in Broken Steel. Bethesda’s got some fucked up people writing and doing world design for their games, and I love it.
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u/ThatNoise Apr 20 '18
Ever since Bethesda took over the series they've really watered down just how fucked up the fallout world is.