I mean he is right, Bethesda's Fallout has bad worldbuilding that makes generally no sense. Counterpoint: It looks cool.
I mean he is right, Bethesda's Fallout has bad worldbuilding that makes generally no sense. Counterpoint: It looks cool.
You're viewing a single thread.
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
Well for the first part there, I suppose it depends on which devs we're talking about with regards to at least how similar the narratives the old world blues nerds and the dev nerds are riding with each other.
And looking and all the doohickies and tweaks the old world blues nerds made in making divisions like a scant hundred or so men per division slot for a block of infantry being drawn up in context of how large west coast America actually is, adding in the fact that the two largest factions being NCR and Caesar's Legion, have plenty of land with people living on to draw from, I'd reckon its still a bit generous but a fair heaps closer to realistic scale warfare in the fallout universe.
the problem of scale is fundamental, hoi4 can't simulate real events that happened in ww2, the rare infiltrations of regular units beyond fronts...
but down to a certain man-scale "fronts" just don't exist. armies were distinct, small scale entities that manouvered around each other in ways hoi4 can't simulate.
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
Permanently Deleted
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a book about pretty much that. I think Fallout actually borrows a lot from it
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.
Even in the original Vault 13 was an outlier. Its water purification chip was probably not expected to last 120 years. Most of the communities you encounter have been around for a couple of decades since coming out of their vaults.
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.
Permanently Deleted
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