“No, I haven’t sat down to play the games,” said Walton Goggins, who plays pre-war movie star Cooper Howard and his post-war counterpart The Ghoul. “And I won’t. I won’t. I won’t play the games. I’m not interested.”
The reason is actually pretty simple: Goggins doesn’t want to think of the world or the characters of Fallout as elements of a game.
“All of a sudden, I’m looking at this world from a very different perspective, and as something on a screen in which I am an avatar in. I don’t believe that I’m an avatar. I believe The Ghoul exists in the world. I believe that Cooper Howard exists in the world.” he said.
“The best way that I can serve this world and serve the fans of this game, I think, is to go to work every single day and believe the circumstances that I’m presented with,” Goggins said.
You can have both fun gameplay and consistency. In terms of gameplay, Super Mutants are just big, tough humanoids, nothing unique. I do like what the addition of the suicider in 4 does for gameplay, but they’re bullet sponges in most of the games. Bethesda proved they can come up with a regional variant on that enemy type in Point Lookout with the Swampfolk.
As for the Super Mutants themselves, they have at least half-assed an excuse every time they appear in the games, with 76’s Super Mutants kinda fitting pretty well. The more they do it, the less valuable FEV is, but the Super Mutants are really the least of my problems with the lore. However, their constant reuse indicates a desire to establish series icons that they can use to market the game instead of good mechanics (look guys BoS again!). Above all, it really indicates a lack of creativity to me. They absolutely did not have to make a choice between their game being fun and their game having well-thought-out lore.