Genuinely this is one of the biggest reasons I was never able to get into Fallout. It’s been 200 years, pick this shit up! Why is there rubble in the middle of the floor in the house you live in!? Did the apocalypse also make everyone ridiculous slobs? Pick up a broom!
Americans lol
The trash gnomes come at night and get everything dirty again if you clean the floor.
Even if nobody had picked anything up, it’s been 200 years, the cities should look like this.
How the fuck did the Empire State Building end up in Brooklyn lol. This perspective makes no sense. Cool greenery though.
That almost makes more sense, in a weird way. If it were actually 200 years after the bombs, there would be a new high-tech society that had moved past living in burnt out buildings and shooting each other for radiation meds and expired MREs. Since they wanted to maintain the post-nuclear-chic aesthetic, they had to make everything look like it had been destroyed a week ago. If they tried to split the difference, where would it stop? You clean up the rubble on the floor, but there’s still trash everywhere outside. Clean up the trash, and you’re still living in makeshift buildings with no proper insulation, ventilation, heat, light, etc. I think you either have to go all the way in one direction or another for sake of verisimilitude, as silly as it is, and they decided that it’s Mad Max all day, every day.
deleted by creator
Good comment.
Its everything wrong with Bethesda’s Fallout world building in micro.
Neither F3 or F4 could ever hook me the way FNV did because of reasons like this that can be felt in the atmosphere of their respective worlds.
deleted by creator
The fixation on the aesthetics of Fallout has led to its stagnation.
It’s one of those things capitalism ruins. For Fallout to work as a brand, there needs to be brand recognition
It’s why they still use caps after it stopped making sense and why you see Power Armor, Vault Boys, and the Brotherhood of Steel everywhere. It’s not Fallout without those aesthetics, so everything associated with those aesthetics will stay past any logical reason.
It’s kinda sad really, if you think about the implications - since the aesthetics are tied up in Americana, it’s going to be a lot harder to tell stories from perspectives other than those affected by American companies. That’s cutting off worldbuilding for several countries they played a big part in the past. They won’t sell without brand recognition.
So the world becomes smaller and less real. Nobody will break away from eating Sugarbombs or drinking Nuka Cola. Hairstyles and fashion will either reference the 50s or just have vague Mad Max vibes. You’ll never spend the majority of your time outside of the US wasteland.
The world becomes less hopeful too. By virtue of the franchise’s premise, clear in the title, the world will only ever be ravaged by nuclear fallout. Any happy ending you get in any of the games become divorced from one another to maintain the status quo. That or a retcon or later event ruins whatever changes meaningfully in the setting. The world will never heal because Fallout needs a broken world.
It sucks because Fallout still has great potential for political commentary and satire, but it’s confined in its messaging because because it’s owned by
and they don’t want to criticize shallow consumption if their profit relies on shallow consumption.And because Bethesda insists on just cycling through their IPs, the games come out so fucking far apart. And it’s only going to increase with Starfield being added. So fallout 5 will be “wow guys, remember that game fallout 4?” And Fallout 6 will be “wow guys, remember back when you played fallout 5 over a decade ago?” So it will always be locked in the nostalgia trap, and they’ll never feel the need to say “ok we are mixing up the formula for this bi-yearly release, by going to the wastelands of southern China” or something
ironically that stagnation due to fixation on americana is very fallout
That’s why I like Fallout 1 because of the first town being sandstone buildings and people with robes on. It isn’t until later on that you find people living in bombed out garbage and generally those are bad people.
I hate this! The farther they go from the nuclear apocalypse, the closer it looks. It’s so fucking bad.
One of the worst parts of fallout 4 is all the fucking NPCs CONSTANTLY complaining about the fact that they live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Like motherfucker, you have never met anyone, who ever met anyone, who knew anything different. The buildings look like they’re 20 years after, but the people act like it’s 1 year after!
Holy fuck Fallout 1 and 2 had these fully lived in environments, these diverging little societes full of people that took their lives seriously. Ninety percent of people had nothing to say about anything prior to last week. They had some basic, broken background knowledge of the past, and often only in particular areas they were interested in. One or two guys could tell you the make and model of the car wrecks strewn about. Some scientists had a wealth of knowledge of certain areas. Vault dwellers were more immersed in history but still primarily concerned with their own lives. Sentient ghouls lived the pre-apocalypse and sounded like rambling old folks.
It annoys me so much that the Bethesda games take place 200 years after the bombs fell. Like the first two games took place 70 years after and they were building new societies, but 200 years later people are still scavenging for parts in Boston and the power is still on from before the war
It looks cool for sure, but I still don’t understand why 200 years. The first Mad Max film starts just as society is collapsing, and it ends up in basically the same place as Fallout after only a few years. I don’t really care that it doesn’t make practical sense so much as I don’t get what purpose it serves narratively.
Fallout 2 took place about 80 years after Fallout so as to give the player a glance at how progress occurs post-apocalypse and also give the excuse for putting in new characters and factions
The small town of Shady Sands grows into the massive capital of the New California Republic, completely changing the landscape of California
Bethesda saw this and went “yes”
So each of their games pushes the timeline further and further, but they also want the excuse of “We want this to feel lawless and wild” so they keep the world very much unkempt and wacked-out
It’s theme park design at the end of the day
I want to see a post postapocalypse world. Kings hold millennia-old rifles, no longer functional, as a symbol of authority. Scavengers “mine” steel from the bones of long dead cities. Priests view sites like hydroelectric dams as built by gods. Radioactive wastes are feared, said to be demon-cursed. Basically a medieval story but the ancient empire is modern society instead of elves or some shit.
that crusader kings mod… after the end i think it’s called? is basically this
Hoi4 also got a mod for that. From playing as Mormon cranks experiencing their own protestant schism to playing as a Mexican skynet larping as Santa Anna
Old World Blues? greatest excercise in trying to pin a setting and mechanics on a completely incompatible game
I dunno. I think its sort of a step in the right direction lore-wise since on a macro level you can actually start rebuilding a society out of the shithole post-apocalyptic America is, not mentioning that since it takes place on the west coast its building off of the writing of two more logically consist world building done by the game devs of fallout 1, 2, and new vegas.
i just dont think hoi4 serves the narrative goals the devs have (which are cool) nor does hoi make sense for fallout scale warfare
That’s kinda Horizon Zero Dawn isn’t it? I didn’t get very far in it tho
More or less. There’s the old world and the new world and a point of stark disconnection between them.
Was going to say this too. Played through both games and you’re pretty much dead on.
Rimworld is a lot like this actually
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
That makes enough sense. I haven’t played the original Fallout games in many years, I couldn’t remember what the deal was with the timeline.
deleted by creator
Is the idea that only vault-dwellers survived the bombs? I thought there were people who survived on the outside, just not well or in great numbers.
deleted by creator
That actually makes things make a little more sense. I thought the vault dwellers showed up after the rest of the world had been surviving in the rough for decades/centuries, but if a lot of the communities were sheltering for most of that time then the sorry state of everything is more understandable.
Yeah, this is one of the points that the modern Fallout games really don’t get across, especially since they leaped whole hog into the “The Vaults were never meant to save anyone” reveal from Fallout 2
The Vaults were a mix of various social and scientific experiments, ultimately designed to help the Enclave establish a working society which would then make an grand exit from planet Earth and leave all the undesirables (anyone who wasn’t a member of the Enclave) behind to die
Would be kind of hard to do this if every single Vault were a deathtrap
Most Vaults were simply controlled populations, never really meant to do anything aside from staying alive and maintaining their population
Some of these Vaults opened earlier than others, and some were never meant to be opened at all (at least by the inhabitants)
But every single one of the completed 100 and change Vaults held thousands (or was supposed to, the shift to 3D made the abstractions harder)
And those are just the known public Vaults, as Vault-Tec was also in the business of making smaller private shelters for both members of the US government and private businesses
The Survivalist’s journal entries in Honest Hearts describe how after the bombs there was black radioactive rain, followed by a two month period of such high radioactivity he couldn’t go outside, followed by glowing green snow. And all this in a national park away from anywhere particularly hard hit (he counted 7 nukes on/around SLC). Also noted that the Army said fallout should fade out within 2-4 weeks, so months on end of lethal radiation was something unexpected.
Later entries discuss cannibals wearing Vault jumpsuits.
the initial conceit of 200 years is probably a concession to the fact immediately during/after a nuclear war would be no fun. it seems long enough that consequences and weird shit are around, but every character wouldn’t be actively dying
It makes more sense if you interpret the extremely low population numbers displayed onscreen as canonical.
The baseball stadium shantytown has 85 people in it and they don’t seem to be having kids. The only conclusion is everyone is nearly sterile, so population sizes are so extremely low that cleaning up entire destroyed cities is basically impossible.
Though uh, nature should have destroyed a lot more stuff. This only makes sense if nuclear winter also reduced basically all weather.
And those cities are lucky that high level creatures like Deathclaws tend to mind their own business in their territory because holy shit if an endgame Deathclaw wandered into Boston it would fuggin solo Diamond City
No worries there, it’ll be level-scaled to the weakest NPC in town
There are kids in Diamond City IIRC. I think there’s even a school?
Oh shoot, yeah.
But like, were there even more than 4? That’s not even a village or a hamlet. In terms of pure population size, they’re basically just a campsite.
Something screwy is going on, so, infertility makes the most sense imo
In response, I present Todd Howard’s Razor: never attribute to subtle worldbuilding that which is adequately explained by bad worldbuilding.
Doyalism is boring though! I prefer to torture a Watsonian interpretation of a setting until it makes sense, no matter how badly it’s written.
I don’t know the lore of FO4 but since it’s post apocalypse wouldn’t there be roaming bandits and splintered factions which would make unification and community planning difficult?
If the reason for the bombing was due to government bullshit then people would likely be very reluctant to form larger communities.
Those bandits would become communities unto themselves given enough time.
Fallout is a stagnant setting that can’t move on past the “collecting canned food and le bottlecaps while being a gun toting nation unto oneself” vibes or it’d lose its deeply entrenched audience that wants more of that forever and ever.
The original game makes fun of an America that became trapped in 1950s vibes out of some sense of normalcy and nostalgia and the gamers that live fallout now are trapped in 1950s vibes out of some sense of normalcy and nostalgia
The worst thing about it was that the series moved past that in Fallout 2. There was even a quest where the PC finds a giant stash of bottlecaps which proved to be worthless because people in Fallout 2 don’t use bottlecaps as currency.
I remember that.
Even the first game had signs of society moving past the scavenging stages after the nuclear war, which makes all the after-the-fact excuses made for the setting still being in its scavenging stages game after game for centuries afterward more and more hollow.
:posadas-wistful:
Okay, so then stop moving the timeline forward! Just cover the adventures of survivors in Arkansas and Michigan and Alaska and Louisiana, all within the same few decades. No need for hundreds of years to pass and make the setting into an anachronism of itself.
Amerikkkans can’t build anything without indigenous people to genocide
Meanwhile, my passion project, Fallout: Great Midwest sits as a mishmash of drawings and design documents on my hard drive
I must have spent actual weeks of time putting it together and my professor said it was the most effort he’d ever seen anyone put into a project
deleted by creator
I know it might be over done but maybe adding in Yellowstone would be a cool addition to the map
deleted by creator
Aren’t the White Legs in Honest Hearts supposed to be first nations?
deleted by creator
also honest hearts leans far more into the great white saviour trope than savages with its native depiction
it also deconstructs it a bit because Joshua Graham is clearly unbalanced and just likes killing and has picked this cause because it squares that with his conscience.
Meaningfully Graham is the only character of honest hearts. All the plot points are only really there for the narrative purpose of developing Graham’s character and representing aspects of him. Daniel representing his conscience, and the white legs representing his past misdeads
it’s a story that works far better read symbolically and as metaphor than as literal
yeah they’re slightly more indigenous than the legion are roman
The fact no one even cleans the floors of dirt in houses.
In fairness, there’s a big difference between
- Building colonies when you come to fertile land in large numbers organised specifically to build new societies, where you get to pillage tons of local resources and slaves with your superior tech. Food and edible animals grow everywhere, freshwater is plentiful and threats to human life are relatively few.
and
- Rebuilding society in small, disparate and poorly prepared numbers, almost certainly ravaged by madness, injury and/or disease. Every other square metre gives off lethal radiation, or hides poorly understood tech, creatures, robots and mutants that will kill you in a heartbeat even if you are a hardened adventurer. Every other room is filled with ammunition and explosives that aren’t hugely conducive to rebuilding society but are conducive to dying more. Fruit and game grow practically nowhere, and a massively enhanced amount of effort needs to go into growing any kind of crop or harvesting any water that is even slightly suitable for consumption.
Also if you try to form alliances with other villages, synthetic humans will assassinate people and conduct black flag operations to ensure no actual power can form. Or the faction with the most guns by several armories worth “enclave” rolls up to take your shit.
Bethesda cannot and will not care about writing a good story. Their company has never really done the writing part well and never had much of an original idea. Morrowind is the high water mark of their creativity as a company and what is that really? A revenge story about a god that some other gods failed to kill, in a setting where you replace trees with mushrooms half the time and there are big insects.
Besides this one outlier, none of their games have had good writing and have leaned in on gimmicks. Large worlds to find generic quests in. Randomly generated quests to fill those large worlds with some sort of content. Samey, boring dungeons that are populated by one of three enemy factions. It’s all the fucking same shit, different game
And Fallout? They mindlessly copy the aesthetic and that’s it. It could be 2 million years in the future and there would still be skeletons on toilets and in office chairs next to working CRT computers. It’s the best they can do, copy what other people have set up/written.
Stop buying this crap. I don’t care if boycotting works or not just stop spending your money on mediocre garbage.
But i like dragon
I like dragon too, but you can have better then Skyrim dragon so so easily.
These critiques are like 15 years old at this point. Yes, Oblivion with guns and Skyrim with guns have trash worldbuilding that makes no sense. I’m not sure what else do you expect from a game dev where their last good game is more than 2 decades old.
