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.
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.
i think the correct answer is that they need a latin american cleaning lady to clean up their shit.
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.
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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.
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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.Started getting properly into Starfield and I had a thought pop into my head that I'd like to know if it's true or not:
Bethesda is a creatively bankrupt company. They can only take existing interesting settings (Fallout, Elder Scrolls) and build lackluster games to take place in them.
The people currently at Bethesda have never done a creative thing in their lives, so they just did Skyrim in space but without any of the interesting backing of the TES world. You've got the UC (Empire, order and bureaucracy) and the Freestars (Stormcloaks, liberty and old-fashioned values). They basically just did dragon shouts again. And the combat basically just feels like Fallout but - again - with anything unique or interesting stripped off.
It is a game utterly devoid of charm or originality because Bethesda as a company cannot create those things, they can only borrow the creative works of others to slap their shitty engine on top of.
There a scene in Starfield where you go to a night club on Neon and its just techno music with people awkwardly dancing in funny hats. I couldn't help being disappointed that THAT was what they thought a futuristic space night club would look like. Jesus. My high school prom was just some christmas lights hung in the gym and it was cooler than that
This is a rather common point, like I've seen the points on your comment basically almost everywhere actually but I'd just mention just because they are not creative it doesn't mean they can't be.
Look at hollywood now vs 20 or 30 years ago. The big studios converged into the mega franchises because it was profitable not because they can't find or don't have access to creative talent. Heck the same people that made those relatively better movies decades ago are still working today(though that is also another critique mfers never actualy retire).
People say Bethesda can't make things more creative than cookie cutter FO and TES, its true from observation but we will never know if its actualy true in a vaccuum, if you gave those teams a lot more freedom and backing to actualy be creative.
Although as I write all of this, maybe Anthem is the best counter example lol tl;dr fucked by a lead dev/designer that simply couldn't get the idea together for years
It feels like Bethesda is creatively bankrupt. But a lot of studios are like that these days. I'm pretty sure with Bethesda, idea pitches probably start with working from previous games' formats and then going from there.
Doing everything they can to say Skyrim but in space without saying Skyrim.
Throw in development times, crunch, and changing ideas, the creativity will be wrung out way before the game hits the shelves.
i've spent many many hours in that game, but i dropped it like a rock at some point and never looked back. it's just not got any charm to it whatsoever, there's a few specks of interesting story threads and ideas out in the cosmos that kept me clinging on, but it never really feels alive, or like the people who worked on it had a genuine vision for their universe. it's like a 6 or 7 out of ten, not because there's peaks of 10/10 and troughs of 3/10, but because every single aspect is just sorta mediocre across the board, with little to no variation
Ouch, I feel like "creatively bankrupt" is a bit harsh but I can't really think of how they aren't. It seems obvious their best days are behind them.
Starfield could've been so much better if it didn't do the "transcend humanity" which is just such a tired sci-fi trope at this point. Rehash the civil war plotline if they have to, just done right. Planet to planet, take it by means of diplomacy, intrigue, or just violence. It wouldn't have been original, but at least it would've been more entertaining than going around, faffing about in 0g while trying to hit some floating lights for 15 times, and then the story ends.
They fixed a lot of what skyrim and fallout did wrong, there are some skill checks and the character's background becomes at least a conversation item, but everything else is just so limp dicked. Ugh, I'm still mad about it even when I did not expect anything else than what we got.
Oh absolutely! I totally agree!
As a beginner game developer, I really can appreciate Starfield for it's technical complexity, and even though I want to keep playing, the game doesn't make me feel anything.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more Starfield feels like it could have been planned as an MMORPG and then pivoted to a single-player game halfway through development.
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 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.
There are kids in Diamond City IIRC. I think there's even a school?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
If I was making a Fallout game I’d set in Montana/Wyoming.
With the setting being that while there’s new towns and functioning small communities (some who are First Nations a group notably absent from Fallout), there is also a gold rush situation because radiation levels are finally dropping enough for prospectors to crack pre-war missile silos and bunkers, which would have been nuked more heavily. They would be the dungeons and sources of pre-war loot. There would not be raiders instead prospectors who turned bandit.
Other factions would have moved on. The Khans would have left with the Followers and now are a new nomadic people breeding herds some sort of post FEV/radiation horse. The Chicago Brotherhood of Steel would have abandoned that name for something else and are diverse faction (tribal, ghoul, mutant, deathclaw) with a small presence trying to establish a trading foothold and no functioning power armor left.
I know it might be over done but maybe adding in Yellowstone would be a cool addition to the map
It could be done with an over map system like the originals.
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.
You can still get out a broom in the house you have, though. That's my biggest problem with Fallout's set design: the settlements are all grimy and covered in dirt. People are sleeping next to literal piles of trash. Nobody thought to give the place a scrub in 200 years? It takes like an hour.
I understand why huge parts of the countryside haven't been explored and might still have skeletons on toilets, but the inhabited places shouldn't look like the bombs just fell.
For sure I agree with that, that part did always bother me.
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.
The fact no one even cleans the floors of dirt in houses.
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.
I really love the aesthetics and a lot of the worldbuilding of Fallout, but so much of it is just nonsense, especially when Bethesda writes it. There is no good reason for the Brotherhood of Steel to exist in West Virginia or for the Institute to also be making super mutants in Boston but they're marketable so they have to be in the games.
supermutants in boston? what, mark wahlberg wasn't enough?
Makes perfect sense. Those thirteen colonies were built on genocide, with slavery and support from existing European empires. Without those, particularly the first two, the US is nothing. Bethesda is holding up a mirror: this is what you would achieve without socialism, America, if you couldn't exploit the resources, strength, and minds of those you have oppressed for centuries.
As great as that would be, I think you're really giving them too much credit. Fallout 4 is shanty towns because Fallout 1 and 2 were, that's as much thought as went into it.
Also the Fallout setting is full of slavery.
People obsessed with what rather than why. World building literally doesn't matter. There are story telling reasons for why the world is this way. It's telling a soon after post apocalypse story regardless of whether they say it's 200 years or 1000 years after the bombs. Sure "the lore" doesn't make sense but who cares? The writing is bad for other reasons than nerd bs like "um actually human zombies made by radiation couldn't exist, skeletons would deteriate if left in the open for 200 years, etc..."
This way of reading stories aggravates me to no end. They wanted the reader to be reminded of the sins of the past at every corner. They wanted American capitalism and fascism to strike fear into the players heart. Did they succeed? Not really in fallout 4.
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They wanted the reader to be reminded of the sins of the past at every corner. They wanted American capitalism and fascism to strike fear into the players heart. Did they succeed? Not really in fallout 4.
By Fallout 76, the "nuclear war is frightening to even imagine" vibes of The Glow in Fallout 1 had been completely swept away in favor of "LOL GET TEH LAUNCH CODES TO NUKE TEH MAP TO SPAWN LE EPIC LOOT"
World building literally doesn't matter.
how DARE you
Are there actually people playing Bethesda games for the plot?
Their only game with any passable writing was Morrowind. All the games after that were basically just sandboxes for mods.
look, Captain Picard told me to close shut the jaws of Oblivion and I'm not about to disobey a direct order
a) diamond city is dope
b) nuclear war is extraordinarily underappreciated. like 0.3% of the former population is dwelling in a tomb, there literally haven't been enough people to clean up the trash and loot all the stuff. the fertility rate and life expectancy are rock fucking bottom. and fallout is optimistic about what humanity could do after global thermonuclear war. most analysts are going to be surprised a viable population survives the collapse, fallout, and famine at all.
c) i think the fire and radiation would put a pretty severe damper on the capability of natural processes to overgrow and degrade the ruins---which also have shittons of metal and concrete in them which have a life expectancy well over 200 years. ecological collapse will have fucked over the termites molds and bacteria so now a structure that should've rotted might stand up decades longer
d) the energy/powerlines stuff is waved away by miniature modular nuclear technology. a tiny fission/fusion reactor could keep a light on a loooooong time, though any lights people weren't actively replacing should be out
I feel like they were SO CLOSE to things making relative sense in FO4. It's established that the Institute went west and found out about the Enclave (that's how they have super mutants, they got the FEV from the remnants of Mariposa instead of just having another completely different program to create the same virus like in FO3) and there's plenty of stuff that points to the commonwealth being such a shithole is because of a deliberate program of destabilization. The obvious conclusion to come to is that the Instituted has deliberately released mutants and infiltrated with synths in order to prevent the formation of an NCR equivalent, which would wipe them out.
Except then you infiltrate the Institute, and it turns none of that shit was planned, the super mutants got unleashed by mistake, and they're not infiltrating with any purpose other than making better synths and seeing what happens.
IIRC there's repeated mention of the Institute infiltrating and wiping out some local federation that was starting to get off the ground. Then you join the Institute and they don't have any explanation for why they'd do that anywhere.
Thank you Todd
There are problems, but I think this person doesn't understand that the American colonists didn't need to deal with nuclear fallout, like the thing the game is named after. The main problem is abandoned buildings and infrastructure surviving with no intervention in America when it is barely holding on as it is now.
