@Ms Oranje Disco Dancer My own understanding of the matter is this:
So Fallout initially had a niche appeal, it was then sold to Bethesda. Bethesda reinvented the series (turning it from a "pure" CRPG into a post-apocalyptic Skyrim of sorts), and the series became very popular after they bought it. And it's not necessarily incorrect to say that Interplay and Bethesda have different design priorities.
This means, basically, you have an "old guard" of dedicated fans of a series that became popular after making significant changes that don't necessarily appeal to their preferences. And indeed, Bethesda-Fallout fans might like the series for very different reasons than the "Old Guard". For example, I couldn't get into the old-school CRPG combat of Fallout 1, but love newer Fallouts.
As a disclaimer: While I use the term "Old Guard" I'd imagine there's lots of newer Fallout fans in that group. Maybe "Interplay Loyalist" is a better term. I'm also not sure how much these two groups quarrel with each other, but The Old Guard is grumpy towards Bethesda at least.
Another factor is also Counterfactuals here. You see, whenever Bethesda screws up, one can imagine that the old devs would done it better. You can always imagine what could have been.
Edited by Protagonist506 on Apr 24th 2024 at 6:38:55 AM
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"
Pretty flower
Speaking as someone who's been witnessing this back and forth for over a decade, it really is one sided and can be boiled down to Obsidian stans being cringe.
They love their Sacred Cow studio, and attack anything that's not it. They tried this same shtick over in Star Wars with KOTOR 2, but their gatekeeping failed from the start because Star Wars was always a massive property.
Fallout was a popular but ultimately niche series before 3, and even after Bethesda brought it into semi-mainstream (and now definitely mainstream with the show) the Obsidian stans were able to get a lot of mileage over that fact since nobody could fact check them over the quality or contents of the series pre-3.
Edited by Spirit on Apr 24th 2024 at 9:36:32 AM
#IceBearForPresident
Not sure how much I appreciate the insinuation ![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
there that the original games aren't actually that good compared to Bethesda's releases and are only held up as such by gatekeeping snob weirdos. They may have a lot of dated gameplay and their graphics / artstyle may be extremely YMMV, and 2 in particular may have a lot of weird tonal shifts and juvenile / awkward dialogue in places, but their worldbuilding remains top-notch IMO, far and away superior to Bethesda's offerings and that of the show.
I recently started replaying the first game and was reminded just how much even it doesn't fall into that many of the apocalypse cliches so common in After the End stories these days. You see little to none of the old "small groups of starving nomadic scavenger survivalists wandering the ruins in search of food and water" that Fallout 3 and especially this show leans on.
Grandfather of the current Sheriff negotiates an end to the conflict, establishes a police force and a city council made up of representatives from the largest merchant companies, sets a limit on the price of water. Settlement continues to grow and prosper; by the time you arrive it's considered a bustling city by many people in surrounding settlements like Adytum, Junktown, Shady Sands, etc.
And you feel that; you arrive and there's lines of caravans preparing to leave, police guiding the traffic along the main road into the town, ranches and farms along the side that you pass through showing that the city is self-sustaining. You head down and get to the bazaar, there's more shops with more diverse inventories than anything you've encountered yet (including a bank and a dedicated library), a police department with armored officers patrolling the streets, and a big casino lounge where the local crime lord operates from.
To the east is the slum district where you can score drugs in an old garage, high-end weapons from a shady dealer, and chat with local hoboes for gossip. To the west a "heights" district where all the rich merchant bosses live in luxurious and well-guarded estates — admittedly the least well-realized of these areas, not feeling too distinct from the others, but still a nice touch to the worldbuilding.
In fact, it struck me how every settlement has some kind of law and order in the first game, really. Shady Sands has Seth's militia, Junktown has Killian and his deputies, The Hub has its police, and Adytum has the Regulators, corrupt as they may be. And all these settlements are linked in a big, well-established trade network that you can learn the schedule of and follow from the Hub as a sort of fast-travel mechanic.
There's this sense the TV show increasingly gave me as it went on, which I really didn't like, that the surface world is — and has been since the bombs fell — dying a slow painful death. Moreso than any other entries in the series, even Bethesda's, there's this underlying sense of desolation, that nothing even remotely resembling large-scale society or civilization can ever survive in this setting long-term.
IMO Fallout is at its best when nuclear war and the fall of modern civilization is the distant backstory to a sort of quasi-neo-medieval period of feuding warlords and factions, with intrepid merchants and wandering adventurers navigating the untamed wilds between major city-states and smaller settlements — and this show really doesn't seem interested in exploring a setting like that, but rather in exploring a desolate, dying wasteland where nobody can be trusted and civilization thrives only in hidden enclaves away from the horrors of the surface world.
Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Apr 24th 2024 at 8:01:23 AM
Pretty flower
Nah man, 1 2 and Tactics are still plenty good. Not so much on the gameplay front, that's outdated. But the plotting and storytelling is still good even without grading on curve for modern sensibilities.
But yes the Black Isle/Interplay/Obsidian fanboys are gatekeeping snob weirdos. The whole "'The show retcons New Vegas' because NV fans don't know what an arrow on a timeline means bit is but the latest bit of media illiteracy if not outright lying that is their norm.
Edited by Spirit on Apr 24th 2024 at 11:12:38 AM
#IceBearForPresident
Part of it is the fact that NO MUTANTS ALLOWED, the most far lasting and important Fallout community, which I have been a long time member of is a place with some incredibly nasty toxic elements. So much so that it is a regular place where Far Right Nazis (and there's been actual Nazis that took forever to kick off) versus the far more liberal/progressive fans (like myself) got into many a heated debate. But the old timers utterly hate Bethesda and aren't that much fonder of Fallout 2.
It's the kind of place that has/had strong 4chan "Free Speech absolutist" vibes.
The fact Tim Cain and Josh Sawyer and Avellone all seem to like the new stuff and have come out with no issues against Bethesda have really fucked with them.
One of the longstanding Common Knowledge things that got debated on NMA on both sides was the idea that Fallout was a lot less funny/whacky than it was. Also, that Tim Caine wanted to create this society rebuilding in the aftermath of the apocalypse. I feel like they bend things WAY out of proportion to fit this narrative that Fallout 1 is a society that's mostly rebuilt and Fallout 3 is the product of Bethesda envisioning a Death World instead.
They argue:
- The Master was a much deeper more nuanced antagonist than the Enclave.
- That society was much better described with deeper history
- It had moved on past the lawless period.
- They argue ghouls were not feral zombies but intelligent radiation victims.
They kind of ignore:
- Fallout 1 is about to have all of civilization wiped out again by the Master and his Super Mutants.
- A lot of towns like Shady Sands and Junktown (Killian isn't actually law enforcement but pretending to be—why the original ending turns Junktown into a fascist hellhole)
- The Boneyard is ruled by the Followers of the Apocalypse who are explicitly anarchists and the Church of the Cathedral.
- The massive bands of Raiders
- The mindless ghouls were not invented by F3 but live in the underworld beneath Vault 34.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 24th 2024 at 8:41:28 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Feel like you're strawmanning the arguments of people who like FO1 most (like myself — more or less, at least, it's tied with NV in my book :P) a little bit there. Then again, my experience with those debates is second-hand. To your counterpoints:
- No argument there, but I fully assert that as far as doomsday villains go the Master is by a wide margin the most interesting and unique one that Fallout has had and the writing on his backstory is impeccable.
- I don't recall any indication in any dialogue that Killian and his deputies aren't recognized by the people of Junktown as their legitimate law enforcement, or that they don't have a legal system of some kind. They have a jail, and Killian's whole quest revolves around him not being willing to take out Gizmo — even after an assassin came into his store yelling "Gizmo sends his regards" — until he gets solid, admissible evidence in the form of an audio recording.
- The Boneyard decidedly isn't "ruled" by the Followers of the Apocalypse, lol, and even the Children of the Cathedral don't bother too much with the area. Adytum is ruled by the Regulators (a corrupt local militia) and later the Blades, a non-malevolent survivalist gang, assuming you help the townsfolk overthrow the Regulators.
- There's only really one band of raiders that you see, the Khans, who are basically just a small gang as in future entries — Vipers are mentioned periodically due to having been cut at the last minute due to time constraints. The only other indication of "massive bands of raiders" is the random encounters you can have with, again, small gangs of 3-6 hostile bandits of unspecified affiliation while travelling the wastes
- "Underworld" is from Fallout 3, Vault 34 is from New Vegas, and the sewer-dwelling ghouls in Necropolis are actually the friendly ones.
I assume you're referring to the "Mindless ghouls" / "Ghoul crazies" random encounters, which yes is true, but none of the Necropolis ghouls are really implied to be "feral" as we've come to understand it — they only attack if you try to talk to them, and that's because they're a bunch of isolationist ghoul supremacists who barely tolerate your presence. Even the glowing ones are fully capable of speech and using weapons.
I wouldn't say that I think the series as a whole should be about civilization progressively rebuilding or anything, to be clear, and I definitely wouldn't argue that FO1 represents a society that's "mostly rebuilt" as you phrased it — my point is more that the series is at its most interesting when there is some level of society that exists, ideally disunited despite what my love of the NCR as a faction may suggest.
Fallout 2 actually does that aspect better than 1, IMO, despite having a much more "civilized" feel to its world — you really do get a sense through a lot of the sidequests and such of many of the major settlements being in competition, on the macro scale of NCR / Vault City / New Reno vying for dominance of NorCal and on the smaller scale of things like Gecko and Vault City's tense relationship. It feels like you're stepping into a complicated mess of interconnected power struggles and I really love it.
Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Apr 24th 2024 at 10:05:44 AM
To clarify, I like Fallout just fine. I just like Fallout 2, 3, and NV more.
I also don't begrudge its fans anything, it's a fantastic and fantastically written game. I just got very tired of the arguments there from people who were not nearly interested in polite debate or argument.
Thank you for responding and I think you raise many valid points.
Oh and to clarify, I meant the underworld in the fact that it is literally underground.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 24th 2024 at 10:00:39 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Entirely fair! ![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
As to this circling back to the show... like I said, season 1 was by far the bleakest portrayal of the wasteland that we've seen yet. The only semblance of civilization we see outside of the Vaults is Filly and Griffith Observatory.
Both are conquered by the Brotherhood as military outposts and their inhabitants implied to be run off into the wastes, and outside of that all we see is slavers, cannibals, and lunatic weirdos like the Chickenfucker and DJ Carl, who has to surround his radio station with a massive amount of deadly boobytraps to keep out all the people trying to murder him for... playing boring music.
There's no sense that there's anything resembling society or civilization in existence in Los Angeles, and that's supremely disappointing because the cool wacky settlements and their politics are half the fun of the series IMO. That goes for Bethesda's entries too; places like Megaton, Rivet City, Diamond City, etc are the highlights of those games for me. And it felt like we didn't get any of that from the first season of this show.
Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Apr 24th 2024 at 10:02:08 AM
Ironically, I suppose my reaction to Season 1 is a bit kinder because NV implied the Brotherhood of Steel had been exterminated by NCR and this showed them making a return and proceeding to get a little revenge against the people who had tried to exterminate them. The Brotherhood is making a comeback thanks to Arthur Maxson and the actions of the Lone Wanderer in the Capital Wasteland and Sole Survivor in the Commonwealth.
I tend to think of NCR as an imperialist bunch of conquerors so their fall didn't really seem like a tragedy to me. It's not the death of the New Republic but the death of the Old Republic.
But I do hope that the New Vegas we encounter in season two is not a bleak hellhole but as full of factions and civilization as the game.
I mean, Vault 4 and 33 are shown as thriving civilizations. Which is good numbers for a Vault.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 24th 2024 at 10:05:49 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
True, but like I said, the vibe is decidedly off — it's less "there exists a cool and diverse collection of societies/settlements to explore, and a weird "scavengerpunk feudal dark age" civilization on the surface" type deal, and more a "society flourishes only in hidden enclaves away from the savagery of the world above" type deal, which I'm not a fan of :P
And the Brotherhood aren't a bunch of imperialistic conquerors?
Owl House / Infinity Train / Inside Job Fan
This is my first real exposure to the series myself but the whole world seems like a case of Grey-and-Grey Morality throughout.
The Owl House and Coyote Vs Acme are my Roman Empire.
Having Faun
Yeah, flawed as they might be, the NCR are significantly better than the Brotherhood (except, maybe, Lyon's Brotherhood).
Edited by king15 on Apr 25th 2024 at 2:25:56 PM
Planeswalker
Guys, please, Caesar's Legion are the real imperialistic conquerors.
Honestly, this NCR seem a lot more like the "good" guys compared to this region's Brotherhood of Incompetence, but Moldaver is very brutal.
Edited by PhiSat on Apr 25th 2024 at 10:00:18 AM
Oissu!
Ugh.
"All we really want the audience to know is that things have happened, so that there isn't an expectation that we pick the show up in season two, following one of the myriad canon endings that depend on your choices when you play [Fallout: New Vegas]," showrunner Graham Wagner said in an interview with GQ (via Eurogamer).
"We really wanted to imply, guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place [of] constant tragedy, events, horrors—here's a constant churn of trauma. We're definitely implying more has occurred."
"I think it would have been a mistake to go from the retro-futuristic America to another America that has been fully civilised and the NCR is doing everything great," Wagner said in response to a question about the controversial decision to nuke Shady Sands. "We love Deadwood. I think if there was a fourth season of Deadwood, there'd be insurance companies, there'd be traffic, and it wouldn't be a Western anymore. We wanted to live in that first season of Deadwood space, of like, 'What's going to happen? Where is everything?'
"It really was our belief, also, that though there are the events of the games, it's not frozen after that. History is not static. It keeps going, and entropy is a constant. Which is a less flashy way of saying 'war never changes'."
"It seems inevitably the message of the Fallout games is that we will veer towards destruction of some kind, and our best efforts to restart civilization may be doomed," Robertson-Dworet said.
"We do hope to continue that, and create story on top of story... That's been the entire exercise from the jump, right? 25 years of games, how do you do something on top of it, like a teetering Jenga tower. But that was always the goal. So we are hoping to do that again in another area that is strongly implied by the finale of the first season."
In case that wasn't quite pointed enough, referring to the closing shot of New Vegas at the end of the final episode, he added, "It sure would be strange if we went off to New York City after that."
Double ugh.
ETA: It's interesting, because I usually think of video games, even most RP Gs as being way more combat heavy and dialogue light than even the most action-heavy of TV shows, but I think without the necessity for a quest and merchant hub, they've gotten so interested in the scenery and their tiny handful of characters that the worldbuilding basically doesn't exist.
Edited by ECD on Apr 25th 2024 at 12:28:33 PM
Triple ugh.
Like I said — the show and its runners seem to be deeply invested in giving us the bleakest, most hopeless and dead portrayal of Fallout's setting yet and I am not here for it at all. Fallout: Dust was cool as a nail-bitingly hard survival horror sandbox but I never liked its story and tone. I would never have wanted a canon outcome akin to it, but that seems to be what we're getting :P
This is honestly kind of laughable as an excuse to just destroy major locations and factions offscreen because like... the wasteland is famously static in the games and their lore. Every game in the series has featured settlements that are implied or outright stated to have existed for multiple decades in relative peace and prosperity, even if they do face constant threats from the outside world.
This goes for Bethesda's entries too. Megaton was founded by the grandfather of one of the settlement's most elderly residents, likely around the time Fallout 1 takes place. Diamond City has existed for at least 107 years by the time Fallout 4 starts, likely decades more than that given the context of the reference giving that info.
Honestly, I can't recall the last time in the series the wasteland was characterized as this hell on earth churn of constant horrors and tragedy as opposed to just... dangerous wilderness. Fallout 3, maybe? But even that one carried the strong implication that the locales you were visiting — D.C., Pittsburgh, Point Lookout — are just particularly nasty compared to the rest of the wastes.
And 4 by no means stomped on your accomplishments during its story — canonically, per some incidental dialogue, you did fix Project Purity. D.C. has abundant clean water now, the Brotherhood (jerkish as they may have become) are keeping some semblance of order there. Things are, canonically, better off in the Capital Wasteland than they were before, even if you don't get to see it directly. There really isn't much of a precedent at all in the series for just blithely annihilating the locations and factions from a previous entry and waving it off as "yeah world sucks, that's how it always goes."
Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Apr 25th 2024 at 1:10:49 AM
These people seem kinda dumb, don't they?
Pretty flower
Lame.
I need to dig around for one of those maps that showed all the area covered in all the Fallout games, but the point being that there's still like 80% of the country that hasn't been visited yet.
It's basically canon that every location already seen is shit until our video game protagonist fixes all the areas problems, so it's not like there isn't plenty of precedence for why a new locale is still hostile to life.
Get set it in one of those places! It you want a bit of nostalgia, then do what New Vegas did and set the new location next to one of the old ones, so you can have your cake and eat it too!
#IceBearForPresident
"Cool. Coolcoolcool."
I do wonder if it is relying to much on New Vegas. Like I love New Vegas but I wouldn't mind some locations and characters from the other games.
Fan-Preferred Couple cleanup thread
Pretty flower
This is about the best I could find on places covered in Fallout so far. Includes Bo S, but doesn't cover the areas seen in Fallout 4 (Boston, plus the norther Massachusetts coastline) or Fallout 76 (basically the entirety of West Virginia).
That's plenty of area you can still cover if you want to keep moving forward in the timeline but don't want a story set in a "civilized" area.
—
While looking for the above I got reminded of these two vids that fit into my point from earlier about NV fans. Both vids being about heavily modded NV gameplay passed off as "better" than 4's.
They aren't memeing by the way.
has 80 mods installed
Edited by Spirit on Apr 25th 2024 at 7:53:45 AM
#IceBearForPresident
You might want to add descriptions on those 2 videos. Last time I clicked on something like the 1st video, the youtube algorithm kept spamming me w/ pro-Republican videos.
EDIT: And now I have to keep blocking a crapton of videos and channels in my youtube feed after clicking on the 1st youtube link.
Anyway regarding what they said for season 2, so they're really going for a "No matter w/c ending you chose, New Vegas is screwed", huh?
Edited by KRider on Apr 25th 2024 at 4:48:00 AM
Pretty flower
Fair enough, and sorry.
No worries. To add back to my thoughts on their comments on season 2, I'm now legitimately more worried for the fates of Freeside, Westview, and especially Jacobstown than I am w/ whoever canonically controlled New Vegas. And it'd be really annoying if my left-field suspicion of Cook-Cook surviving and showing up in season 2 ended up becoming true.
Edited by KRider on Apr 25th 2024 at 5:04:58 AM
Edited by KRider on Apr 24th 2024 at 6:09:51 AM