There was NOTHING stopping me from building Roman Style walls with parapets and Medieval fucking castle in the middle with auto guns in the cornices. Save for the lack of imagination in the overall design team who insisted that every settlements wall had to be built out of plyboard, scrap metal and twine. If I wanted to build a market, it had to be with structures like a 7 year olds lemonade stand. WHY?! Why would anyone do that if given the opportunity to NOT do that?
I think what they could have done is make these old world scrap structures be immediate construction but better more useful constructions will require time and resources, thus it will justify you fucking off to get resources or/and just do quests and when you come back, it will be done. I think there is a mod called "Sim Settlement" that sort of does that.
The theme of the story was the next big step of rebuilding and you get to decide where it heads off towards to. Its just, like usual with Bethesda, poorly implemented.
Which is "fine", if you are using your own IP. But the entire central thesis of Fallout is Anti-Nihilism! Its how humanity when given a shit hand still plays the cards its dealt and manages to get through the game of life. It was never nihilistic. Unless the player deliberately made the choice to be so, and forced "the bad ending". Its like Bethesda and Amazon looked at "The Bad Ending" and said, yes. This is what we want. Who doesn't?!
The Master sort of had that vibe going on for him. He believed humanity couldnt ever change and thus becoming super mutants was the only way to move forward. The Vault Dweller proves him wrong by stopping him and his forces and building his own community after inspiring many to leave the vault after he was exiled.
Christ, to imagine that is in the same universe as the TV show blows my mind in the worst way possible.
The Master sort of hate that vibe going on for him. He believed humanity couldnt ever change and thus becoming super mutants was the only way to move forward. The Vault Dweller proves him wrong by stopping him and his forces and building his own community after inspiring many to leave the vault after he was exiled.
I actually did the Minuteman playthrough in Fallout 4, and I felt like there was something so...CLOSE there! I was literally pushing back the chaos! Creating order! Building electricity plants and water production! Getting people to move in! Man a big ass fucking artillery cannon that I could call down on a Deathclaw! I feel like that was a mechanic developed by the one solitary turbo autist who "got" the setting. And it just got buried in the bullshit done by the rest of the writing team and graphics design.
And then you have Preston Garvey telling you that more people are joining the Minutemen. I thought "nice, maybe the streets near a the settlements will be more safe, I will get to see minutemen patrolling, etc.". Nope. Nothing.
The settlement mechanic was also quite shit, you couldn't really remove the debris and clean up the place, you can't fix the walls, the windows or the roof of the existing houses.
I know there are mods for that although you have to be very careful about what you scrap or you will fuck up the map, lol.
What's funny about that is that the Master is that he actually had hope and a plan, it's only because that plan has a fatal flaw in it that he ends up committing sudoku, he lets you leave because you still have hope and can carve a future. He kills himself because he realizes that he almost doomed humanity when he was trying to achieve the opposite.
Bethesda is more akin to the Enclave in 3, where they just want to wipe the slate clean because they are the best hope for humanity, they are just going to fix it with nukes instead of helping actual humans. I don't know what is it about Bethesda but they have a raging boner for stories where the whole world is shit or is in a constant state of peril.
It drove me nuts in the end. There should have been something MORE there. The most frustrating thing about the settlement mechanic in Fallout 4 was that you just could not go all the way to the end zone. The lack of vision by the devs kept you perpetually 10 yards from the end zone. And they thought it was funny! No wonder everyone hated the settlement mechanic.
I think my favorite part about the whole building shit is that I can picture the marketing intern who told them that crafting games were all the rage and that they just HAD to find out a way to hamfist it in. I also love that you make a teleporter out of schematics done by a geneticist.
Why is anyone shocked about the nihilistic slant this show is taking? The rejection of morals, personal growth, and overcoming adversity is completely spit on my modern entertainment, which prefers hedonism and deconstructing what’s already been created. The people behind this show really can’t grasp that even in the harsh conditions of a post-nuclear war, people will still rise from the ashes and attempt to build a better life for themselves and others. Fallout 1 exemplified this so well, and even though it’s arguably the darkest entry in the whole series, the creators understood that there will always be hope for a better tomorrow. It’s rather touching, and I’m pissed that the Bethesda games and the show completely disregarded that.
I know I'm late, but I've just finished this cursed thing, and I need to vent, so sorry in advance for the (probably) long rant. I'll try to point some bullshit I've noticed instead of doing a review but I will need to ramble for a long time to make my points across.
After the first trailer, I knew that I should approach it with low expectations. What I exactly mean by low expectations is the following:
No nitpicking about lore about any specific game, including Bethesda ones. The advantage with Fallout is that is that it has been raped so thoroughly and so frequently that any sane person with an interest in Fallout should be used to seeing the interesting parts of the setting ignored at best, and should have understood by this point that good Fallout is never coming back. As long as it follows the most basic rules that make a Fallout game, well... Fallout-y (not just the classic ones) that any person with a passing familiarity or a Bethesda lead writer could agree on, I'm OK with it.
No high hopes for writing and plot. As long as the stupidity levels don't surpass F4's and it has some internal consistency, I'm OK with it. Marvel quips, failed attempts at comedy during tense moments, eternal references instead of world building, anything goes as long as at least it makes some sense and it stands on it's own merits at a little.
Woke content is to be expected and ignored. It's an Amazon production, hoping it won't be full of the usual current-day bullshit is foolish and complaining about it is screaming at the void at this point. I know it will be there and it's my fault for watching it, so being mad at it is pointless. At least Fallout as a franchise is much more diverse from the start that something like Lord of the Rings, so a competent writer could theoretically check most diversity boxes required by Amazon's standards without being as jarring as Rings Of Power.
So basically, a show where wacky fallout-y things happen, with a basic plot that just works would be enough for me to give it a 5/10. What I got was a total disappointment even with my faily generous approach.
First, the lore; Not much point talking about the insistent, almost gleeful metaphorical carpet bombing of classic Fallout since it's been discussed to death already but I will point out that the way it's handled is almost fascinating. Usually when shows or games or whatever bulldoze over a previous installment's lore it's because they didn't care to do the research, they find a reason outside the narrative to do so (marketing, change in target audience, ownership rights, etc), or just do out of spite for it's product's audience. Here, they made the effort to reference classic Fallouts enough that the second half of the show's plot relies heavily on them, just to blow everything the fuck out of existence and piss on the ashes. They could have easily ignored it, retconned it away or brush it aside but they make it the fucking central point of the plot. Heavy flashbacks to the Star Wars sequels here, but on steroids.
The other thing about the show and the lore is that it doesn't get many very basic superficial things right; things that even Bethesda understands, and we're talking about "not interested in discussing how realistic things are in an alternate universe post-apoc game w/ talking mutants and ghouls"-bethesda here. Vaults are fucking palaces with unlimited access to every kind of luxury and a nearly perfect and perennial solution to the bomb problem while vaults have always been a kinda sucky place to live even in Bethesda games (the intro of Fallout 3 illustrates this, for example) and often the victims of corner-cutting and lack of foresight. The show can't decide if the bombs dropped in a 50s-style retrofuturistic version of 2077 or the actual 50s as far as culture and technology are concerned, the ghoul lore is just what the plot needs it to be at the moment. The outside would, despite the dialogue pointing the contrary frequently, is not nearly as dangerous as it should be for the general themes of the franchise to work; it seems that the main dangers of living outside a vault are caused by a profound retardation of its populace and maybe a few creatures that don't really bother you if you don't invade their habitat. It's weird that a show so focused on bombarding the viewer with a reference to some obscure tidbit of lore every two minutes fail to understand the things that makes people think of Fallout, but that's because those small changes are not mistakes, but done on purpose on service of the plot, and most importantly it's message.
Talking about the writing and the plot, the second point is where the show falls completely flat on it's face for me, and I'm surprised I'm not seen much talk about it: scrap the Fallout coat of paint from it and what's left is a completely incoherent mess of a plot built with contrivances, lucky coincidences, absolutely stupid decision all in a rush to a plot twist that doesn't work in any level if you think two minutes about it. The basic meat of the narrative is a bunch of characters in a desperate fight for the ultimate MacGuffin to end all MacGuffins, that they don't even know what it's supposed to do or that it is actually a device and not just some dude's head until the final 20 minutes of the show where its intermediately used without any of the main characters even having an say on the matter. At that point, the thing could have been the last, biggest and nastiest stash of furry porn surviving from the old world and the plot wouldn't change that much. The main three characters orbit around it while the plot fights a losing battle to kept the excuses for the characters constantly losing and regain control of it remotely believable. The Pipboy having a tracking device is a little bit stupid but it's forgivable as a quick handwave for how Lucy knows what scene to walk to next, but CX4 just being abandoned or lost constantly until the next character needs to find the directions to the next stupid scene is almost comical by the end. He's a crossbreed between a Belgian Malinois and a plot device.
Most of the plot relies on pure chance, specially anything related to Lucy, who seems to be the first Fallout character to glitch out and both have a Luck score of 20 and an Intelligence score of 1 but without special dialogue options. By the second episode, Lucy, who is searching for his dad with the foolproof plan of stepping out of the Vault and walking in a random direction, instead of thinking for a moment, investigating Vault 32 or finding the entrance that must be half a mile away at most and following the dozens of fresh footprints left by the raiders, happens to find the most wanted man in the wasteland, who is directly related to his dad's past, his location, her origins and her antagonist's location not once but twice in 24 hours. It's not a sin to use some contrived excuse here and there in a story to cut some fat, but here it's a constant: I could spend all day listing the stupid things that move the plot forward by unlikely events if I wanted to waste my time even more.
There's a point by episode 7 where something so stupid happened that I needed to see what kind of retard could be writing this embarrassing slop and what they have worked on before
Lucy and Maximus recover the MacGuffin for the Nth time, and a brotherhood Ventibird called by a third character is coming down to collect it. For some reason not communicated to the audience, Maximus decides that giving it to the Brotherhood, (which at that point was the plan all along, he had no reason to believe that the Broterhood would not help them, it would probably fix all the problems he had gotten into and probably even a promotion to boot and give Lucy some allies for finding his dad who would want to reach Moldaver anyway) is wrong and to pull the old switcheroo on them. By that point this might be me not paying attention to the plot for obvious reasons, but as far as I know it wasn't explained. If I'm wrong please let me know.
what I found shocked me (pun intended):
Unless some fuckery is going on with IMDB (which could be the case, sometimes IMDB can be outdated or point to the wrong person) this "writer" has 3 writing credits, one for fallout (as a "executive story editor", too), one for a pretentious short film nobody has seen with a estimated budget of 6000$ (probably a student project) and another for something called "Quaranteens" that even IMDB doesn't know what the fuck it is but the title should give enough information about it. His most prevalent credits in the industry are for the guy in charge of making sure the camera stays on place and that bulbs and outlets work. He is a fucking electrician, not the guy in charge of the lighting but the guy who installs and maintains the electrical equipment for movies (which in his defense must be a very difficult job at times). This is it, folks, this is the kind of people Amazon is hiring to write for their multi-million project: some guy who has worked a couple of times in movies hanging cables (no wonder the MacGuffin turns out to be a power source). I wonder if at some point during production the writer's strike hit and they just handled the task to the first person who walked into the set. To be fair to Chaz here, he probably was just putting into paper whatever mumblings the three dozen producers were telling him to, but in the end it's just sad that the bar for writing is so fucking low.
All the little changes and the stupid plot are done in service to the real goal of the show: the plot twist that Vault tech is the ultimate evil of the setting because the writers had to make the mildest take of the decade on the tired "Capitalism bad" message. The Vaults are flawless palaces not because they misunderstood the setting, but because they had to paint the Vaulters as unfairly privileged elites, the inconsistencies with the 2077s flashbacks are there just to drive their hamfisted message home, the almost Star Wars-esque background of Lucy and the nonsensical idea of having three connected Vaults were there just for this stroke of genius and a moral so subtle, so strong, so powerful the likes of which haven't been seen since the last season of Captain Planet. To avoid making this even longer let me put in simple words what the twist and the message this show is willing to fuck everything up for is: In this multi-million dollar Amazon production of a Microsoft-owned IP, a corporation representing the excesses of late-stage capitalism, in order to sell a perfect, flawless product which at the end of a day is a ticket for a safe life in a state of almost Utopian pseudo-communism for its clients and their descendants in the face of a possible end of the world scenario (without any visible competition), hatches a plot to willingly destroy the world and by extension, the concept of money and even capitalism itself. For this plot for the ultimate act of capitalism to success, they need to develop devices so advanced that would be even more useful for the intended goal of the original product like perfect life-preserving stasis chambers and stop by any means possible the development of a proprietary source of infinite power that only they can use and would make them even richer than the Vaults. Once this perfect form of ultimate capitalism without capital or even consumers or people to have control over is reached, it's decided that the only logical way of maintaining their control over their absolutely useless mountains of money and radiated holes in the ground filled with human filth is to destroy at least 2 of the only 3 known factions to even reach the point to make their own currency instead of the feudal bartering system the rest of the worthless world they "own" seem to prefer.
Once the final reveal is done any mystery unsolved is handwaved away in the laziest way and by that point and the show's internal logic falls dissolve into a puff of smoke once you think about it for a minute. I won't point any more inconsistencies because again, I could be here all night.
Lastly and briefly, regarding the woke stuff, I'll only say this: Fallout is probably one of the most diverse-friendly setting of its time; there's not only a lot of prominent characters of all races and genders since it's release in 1997, it makes sense that the wasteland is as diverse on all definitions as one setting can be, you can put a character or any race on almost all situations and wouldn't feel out of place as long as you do think about it for a second. Hell, the second and most popular president of the republic the writer so quickly blow the fuck away for the stunning and brave message of "Capitalism bad" for was a woman of color.
Except in this show they decided to say fuck it, sacrifice any coherency or logic and put their mandated diversity just in the places where it would stick like a sore thumb and even contradict their own writing: the main reason that starts this stupid chain of unlikely events that the show pretends is a plot at the beginning depends on the fact that small populations like a Vault's lack the genetic diversity to maintain a healthy population in the long term. Which is a fair point, but it is communicated after a scene where, in the same shot you can see a man of african descent dressed like father Kwanzaa, an indian looking man, some latinos, and more than a handful of afros. You get the idea, there's a lot of people in that Vault that clearly aren't Lucy's cousins. Either you have you genetic diversity plot and make your vault dwellers have some sort of uniformity or you have this almost comical ensemble right out of a coca-cola ad. You can't have both. If you are discussing with somebody in good faith and they tell there's no such thing as"forced diversity" this is an absolutely perfect example to prove them wrong while not sounding like a grand wizard. The non-binary whatever is a little more tricky to work with even in a setting like Fallout, but I'm pretty sure it could be done with some effort and hand-waving AS LONG AS YOU DON'T PUT THEM IN THE FUCKING BROTERHOOD OF STEEL OF ALL PLACES. Moldaver, our antagonist, is the only person on the whole show to die with dignity and is painted like a sympathetic villain by that point . The oh-so-progressive writers seem to have forgotten this very same character's first plot in episode 1 leads to the rape by deception of our protagonist for no fucking reason at all (the daughter of her friend, I might add); there was no point in faking the wedding once the vault doors were opened besides making an action scene more shocking I guess. Luckily Lucy forgets about it but I would love to see the reaction to a version of that episode where the raider hunk looked like every other male wastelander in the show instead.
To end this schizo rant on a more positive note, there's a lot of things I liked about the show like the use of practical props over CGI when possible, the casting is pretty good (except Maximus) most characters are nice in concept if not in practice (except Maximus) and the costume design that looked like somebody cared. It looks cheap-ish sometimes and a little too focused on F4's aesthetic for my taste, but somebody tried hard. Making the vault jumpsuit not look goofy is not an easy feat. If only the writing wasn't insulting even for modern disposable stream show standards it could have been some fun spot-the-reference forgettable show that looked like fallout if you squinted a little. But finding the references isn't the hard part. It's letting go.
Not sure what all to add here as I’m only a casual fan of the Fallout series, so I don’t quite know what the uproar over the show is.
All I’ll say is that Chris Avellone, one of the writers for the Fallout New Vegas DLC and such, actually shares the idea that Fallout shouldn’t be Anti-Nihilist, and that the series rebuilding itself from the initial post-apocalyptic setting is a bad call, so it’s not like the show is doing anything new if what I’m hearing is correct.
I think it's telling that in the original lore all evil stemmed from the government.
The nukes, the military experimenting with FEV, giving the vault projects to the lowest bidder and letting them use the vaults for experiments, the Enclave, the Chinese communists invading Alaska, the US government invading Canada.
Now it's all about how evil capitalism ended the world
I won’t go out of my way to defend it, but I won‘t shit on anyone for enjoying it either. Having watched the whole thing over the weekend, there’s more I enjoyed about it than disliked. My gf really liked it, so it was good to have something together even though I bill burred on it a couple times, like the boardroom scene.
The only Lonesome Road path I remember taking was firing on both the NCR and Legion to free the strip. I would hope they don’t go with NV being desolated. Independent or NCR success at Hoover would leave a lot of characters alive for a second season, like the Kings & Jacobstown.
I think it's telling that in the original lore all evil stemmed from the government.
The nukes, the military experimenting with FEV, giving the vault projects to the lowest bidder and letting them use the vaults for experiments, the Enclave, the Chinese communists invading Alaska, the US government invading Canada.
Now it's all about how evil capitalism ended the world
To be fair modern Hollywood would probably prefer to say that evil capitalism is the cause of all the problems rather then blame the US government or Chinese for anything. It does have very real financial and political interests intertwined in both cases after all.
I would agree with this although I did think the plot kind of fell apart in the final episode. There was also way too much stuff they set up and then never explained. Like vault 33's water chip failing and them only having enough water for a few weeks. They just introduce that and then never go back to it. Also what happened with the ghoul's daughter? He says in the final scene that he wants to know where his family is but you see in the opening scene that he's running with his daughter, so he survives and she doesn't? Also they never properly explain how the raiders were able to successfully infiltrate vault 32 and nobody is suspicious. So vault 32 and 33 never had any direct contact with each other before that? Also Moldaver living for 200+ years is something they don't bother explaining at all. It's just lazy writing to expect the audience to fill in all the blanks for stuff like this.
First x-men 97 now a fallout show made by Amazon. Ideas we all thought and feared would be woke preachy trash on par with halo and last of us but surprise us being ok at best. Better than we feared at least.
It ls almost like getting a glimpse into the timeline were harambe never died.
How anyone can still bring themselves to care about Fallout in any capacity at all is beyond me. Bethesda will guarantee that the series has no future, trannies have co-opted the good games to the point that now anybody who isn't a tranny huddles around the shit ones out of contrarianism, and then you have shit like this that shits on the old, old stuff that not even Bethesda cares about.
Fallout is, appropriately, nothing but radioactive waste.
Aren't ya excited for Elder Scrolls 6? Since they tried to push the shitty DLC/mod shop in Fallout 4 (and whatever shitshow happening in 76) you can bet they gonna make Elder Scrolls 6 with micro transactions in mind... they will bombard you with that shit from all sides constantly.
I think Big Null said something earlier this month about how Bethesda is most likely researching a way to somehow make TES 6 un-moddable or at least where you can only get 'mods' via the Todd Howard approved Creation Club and ngl, that kinda scares me...
If I didn't already knew TES 6 was already going to be shit even without this hypothetical predatory monetization scheme anyways seeing how Starfield didn't exactly give me high hopes for Bethesda game design coming foward. If I have to be forced into doing a shitty house or village building mini-game, then TES is dead to me. I want to go on an adventure! Not collect resources and build shit, I play Minecract for that.
But personally I kinda doubt TES 6 is even going to be a thing. See Fallout 76 and ESO O and their constant expansion packs. They're probably going to keep these two games on life support with probably a 76-2 and O-2 update since it's cheaper to produce Toddslop that way rather than a new full-fledge game like Starfield. Seeing how I'm already seeing said game being forgotten in real time, like fr once that game dropped I see hardly a mention of it these days. Not even MXR style coomer mod compilations that usually make front page and rake up a few millions of views and my YouTube algorithm is usually watching a few Fallout/TES videos every now and then.
Personally I'm just on the look out for a new fantasy RPG franchise to latch onto or maybe visit a series I never tried before.
I saw elsewhere that Betty, the old lady from Vault 31, might have sabotaged the chip to cause further incentive for people to vote for her to be Overseer. Then later she fixed it.
Personally, I could see her having doomed Vault 33 to silence any troublemakers as the more loyal contingent builds up Vault 32. A sacrifice to maintain the experiment.
Also what happened with the ghoul's daughter? He says in the final scene that he wants to know where his family is but you see in the opening scene that he's running with his daughter, so he survives and she doesn't?
My guess is that they’ll have some scenes take place after the bombs fall where Cooper reunites with his wife but his wife and daughter get taken by Vault-Tec because they are still “part of the company”. Cooper’s divorce meant he was no longer reserved a spot in a Vault.
Also they never properly explain how the raiders were able to successfully infiltrate vault 32 and nobody is suspicious. So vault 32 and 33 never had any direct contact with each other before that?
Vault 32 found out about the experiment and collapsed two years before the show took place. There’s a line in the first episode about Vaults 32 and 33 doing a trade every three years.
The two Vaults don’t see all their occupants so the majority of Vault 33 wouldn’t know if anyone from Vault 32 wasn’t there. While Hank would know Moldaver from before the Great War, he couldn’t let up the experiment by revealing his origin.
It’s definitely a plot thread they want to resolve in the future.
You know how the ending credits for the last episode showed a billboard for cryo-reservations at the Tops? Maybe that will play a part in the 2nd season? Moldaver saves her skin by copping a deal with Mr. House. She gets frozen in time, reawakens when House reactivates, and then heads off to the NCR to help reform this new society at Shady Sands.
approved Creation Club and ngl, that kinda scares me... 