I think I'm getting tired of Fallout

C

Charwo

Look, Ma! Two Heads!
I'll be frank, when I first played Fallout I loved it, but......thanks to Bethesda, I'm not sure I like post-apocalyptic anything anymore.

I just hate the aesthetic, I mean it was fine in Fallout 1, but this notion of still listening to old-world tunes 200 years after the bombs fall, cultural stasis that never ends (As wisecrack puts it, the 50s never died even when most of humanity did), the desert punk where it makes no sense, people building out of scrap instead of handcrafting being rediscovered.

I'm interested in the post-apocalypse, but I'm more interested in what people would ACTUALLY do, not play to the tropes, but take trip or read up on slum construction in India, especially slum industry, watch life after people, and have some communities decide to rebuild cities and some to abandon them because the sewer system has collapsed under the streets making the roads impossible to walk through.

Where's the the Vault-educated specialists who make a fortune in the wasteland from say, repairing electronics and reprogramming robots? Why is it these settlements don't have as many Mr. Handy's as possible running construction crews 24/7? Where are the carpenters and small-scale smeltering so they're actually making new metal out of the debris of the old world? Where are the local cement mills recycling old cement chunks into new cement to build new buildings?

Where in Fallout is there a new idea? Everything is either wastelanders living in squalor or raiders running around preying on trade which is way to small to support any amount of banditry, and no one is trying to take control of ports, boats for fishing, desalinization plants, rail lines to move things into the interior? The big problem is that even by the time of Fallout 2, humans have to be stupid in order to keep the aesthetics, the look and feel of the series rather than seeing the setting grow and change.
 
I have gotten tired of Fallout myself. Once you immerse yourself in something for so long the sameness of the genre begins to lessen the unique aspects of the series (50's theme, Vaults, BoS), leaving a sour taste on all media that resembles it. Retro futuristic Mad Max is not that unique in the first place.

Fallout was never good because of the lore which frankly isn't that great. It was good because of character building, C&C, and serviceable writing. When you take that away...
 
TorontRayne said:
I have gotten tired of Fallout myself. Once you immerse yourself in something for so long the sameness of the genre begins to lessen the unique aspects of the series (50's theme, Vaults, BoS), leaving a sour taste on all media that resembles it. Retro-futuristic Mad Max is not that unique in the first place.

Fallout was never good because of the lore which frankly isn't that great. It was good because of character building, C&C, and serviceable writing. When you take that away...
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See I had my own lore when Fallout first came out: the retrofuturism was a reaction against a world that looked much more like ours before the resource wars, a world that clung ever tighter to the nostalgia of the golden age and craved the security of it. In my vision the world of Fallout looked almost exactly like ours. The wasteland TVs were only in black and white because they were failing and in disrepair, pre-war TV was holographic, high definition, and fully in color. Only a badly broken TV would be on it's third or fourth failsafe mode like that.

The Vaults were arcologies, and with expanding populations, tech like from the Sierra Madre, and large construction crews constantly making more farms and quarters for people. They were dynamic and changing and full of craft art. Of course, I condensed the Fallout timeline by half New Vegas is just 104 years after the exchange. That really helps for Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas. Imagining there are rebuilt city states in Alexandria and Baltimore and their exiles form those huge raider gangs in DC certainly helps, but that would require some invention.
 
Charwo said:
I just hate the aesthetic, I mean it was fine in Fallout 1, but this notion of still listening to old-world tunes 200 years after the bombs fall, cultural stasis that never ends (As wisecrack puts it, the 50s never died even when most of humanity did), the desert punk where it makes no sense, people building out of scrap instead of handcrafting being rediscovered.
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I think that this is marketing crap, that they did to utterly simplify the elevator pitch... To great detriment of the source material, and the fanbase.

Bethesda's attempt at a Fallout sequel does not show the series' gameworld, or its populace; it shows their own fantasy 50's obsessed future—instead of the (proper) future that the Fallout's 1950's expected to happen. They certainly didn't expect to be listening to the same music, and driving the same cars in their 'World of Tomorrow' future... They expected the Jetsons.
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As far as culture and music go... Perhaps it actually could have been a national preference for 50's style music... But it would have been new artist making new music in the preferred style... not 170 years of Elvis and his contemporaries—repeated ad infinitum on every radio station. They would have had 70's artists, like Cameo and Iggy Pop,
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and even 2070's artists... like who knows...

Bethesda are not stupid, but I think they are ruthless, and mercenary about it, and that they altered it to be simple as hell, in order that absolutely everybody understands it... by making it the commonest misunderstanding. Yes there were professional game reviewers that thought FO3 was set in the 1950's. Others see it as how they present it; "The future, but it's all wacky and 50's like".
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Post-apocalyptic is a pretty overdone genre TBH, esp when you add zombies *cough* I mean feral ghouls to it. I think that the genre really doesn't work when the implications of living in such a world are not really thought out, and just an afterthought to the rule-of-cool.
 
President_Peaches said:
Post-apocalyptic is a pretty overdone genre TBH, esp when you add zombies *cough* I mean feral ghouls to it. I think that the genre really doesn't work when the implications of living in such a world are not really thought out, and just an afterthought to the rule-of-cool.
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I took the Ghouls in Fallout 1 & 2, for being Fallout's twisted version of elves.
  • Ugly
  • Stiff jointed and slow
  • Practically immortal, though killable.
  • The only living creatures (known) that can remember the world as it was; pre-war.
Feral ghouls didn't make any sense. The mental state sure, but the speed & agility of football players—when in the first two games they could barely walk? Silly, 'rule of cool' nonsense.
 
Gizmojunk said:
I took the Ghouls in Fallout 1 & 2, for being Fallout's twisted version of elves.
  • Ugly
  • Stiff jointed and slow
  • Practically immortal, though killable.
  • The only living creatures (known) that can remember the world as it was; Pre-war.
Feral ghouls didn't make any sense. The mental state sure, but the speed & agility of football players—when in the first two games they could barely walk? Silly, 'rule of cool' nonsense.
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Actually discussed this in a fanfic from LONG ago (it was very meta) and my Vault Dweller said that by comparison meant she was the rarest thing in literature: a female Dwarf protagonist. She actually found this very cool.
 
At this point, there's no hope in anything official, fans are doing better job at making Fallout games than bethesda itself does (or current Obsidian would with their current staff. I mean, loot at PoE2, they even dropped the writing quality).
 
I can't comment on everything you wrote right now (need to be in a clearer state of mind for that) but I am also getting rather tired of Fallout, Bethesda's Fallout that is.

Ever since they have taken over the franchise there has been a big decline to me in content such as main storylines, character writing, quests, developing an interesting world and with FO4 even gameplay, even if the shooting is a lot more smooth now.

Fallout has been reduced to its "tropes", recurring elements that the Bethesda designers apparently think constitutes Fallout.
Things like Vaults, recovering society/civilization, raiders, mutant animals, Power Armor, are of course part of it but first couple of games and FNV also showed progression where as in FO3 the world seems to be in some kind of stasis, mostly because Bethesda's designers think that that and only that is Fallout and must always be brought back.

They even added some tropes of other creations such as making Ghouls zombies (I think I have told here many times that when I found out that the Ghouls I had been shooting in Necropolis were actually sentient beings and not zombies my reaction was "Oh shit!", and most of the Super Mutants into orcs (not to mention making them pop up at places where they should not be)

And they have rather mishandled some of the previous established lore.

There aren't any brave attempts at expanding the established Fallout world in interesting new ways. The Institute for example was pretty much the Enclave 2.0 with some Big MT thrown in. Perhaps not an organization with genocidal tendencies but whose interaction with the surface world was highly questionable including replacing people with Synths (which was never properly explained, the Institute wants to control surface societies for their own protection? Or to experiment on them)

I want to let go of Fallout (like so many other former interests such as Star Wars) because these are not the franchises any more that I once enjoyed and became very fond off.
These days when I think about these IPs it is more about the elements that I hate and dislike than the things about them that I enjoyed and what they did well.

I also start to see a growing separation between myself and the main fandom of these IP regarding opinion and there is little we can talk about any more on which we both agree.

I would rather remember the franchise as it used to be instead of being frustrated and angry of what it has become.
 
Fallout (especially New Vegas) was really interesting to me because it was like speculative United States history. I mean, that game's overarching plot is essentially about a post-government society based in Flagstaff, Arizona who sustain themselves through war and conquest, coming into opposition with a revived constitutional democracy based in Southern California. And they're fighting over the Hoover Dam, which is still providing power to Las Vegas. I mean, that's fucking cool. Like that's a story I want to see play out.

The Bethesda games just don't have that same level of pseudo-historical sophistication (among other things). And truthfully you can't expect that caliber of writing to come around very often. Personally, I'm thankful for what we did get as fans.
 
I no longer care about future Fallout games, if they are made by Bethesda. I'll stick with the first two and New Vegas and that's more than enough.

Call me when Bethesda get its head of its ass or a more component developer picks up the series. If neither happens, i don't care.
 
Excluding 3 and 4, I never get tired of Fallout 2 and New Vegas.

Fallout 1 I can get tired of sometimes. A 2-3 day session is enough to cover everything in the game.
 
Been tired for some time already. The series has no future as far as I'm concerned. I'll keep replaying the originals and hope that some day there'll be another series that picks me up the way Fallout did, if not for two+ decades, at least for a while.

The funny thing is, though, things seemed dead after VB so I gave up, then with Beth I got back in, I gave up again little after Fallout 3 came out, then got back for New Vegas, and then dropped out during Fallout 4 hypetrain again... As tired, bored and hopeless as I am about the series future, I'm still kinda expecting to get picked up by again by some miracle at some point.
 
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Fair enough.

As for me, it's not my favorite genre of setting (I'm a sci fi space guy) I just can not really connect too deep into this world to have high criteria of criticism.

But one thing is for sure, Bethesda bust my balls with that fucking Vault Boy everywhere. Now I hate that guy.
 
Einhanderc7 said:
Expecting a worthwhile modern RPG Fallout title is like expecting the US national debt to go away.

That's not going to happen.

While the original titles had an interesting formula that was great, the modern titles completely lost what it was.
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See that's where I disagree with you. I don't like open world games for Fallout because I want the scale Fallout 2 had, but even still Fallout 3 is a great game outside of the main quest, just don't take it too literal and add some green mods. New Vegas was so epic I'm still playing its mods. It's simply Fallout 4 was garbage and Fallout 76 is a complete waste of time.
 
I gave up on Fallout since F4 came out. Now I'm just waiting for Wasteland 3, which is basically my only hope for a good post-apocalyptic RPG in these times.
 
Charwo said:
See that's where I disagree with you. I don't like open world games for Fallout because I want the scale Fallout 2 had, but even still Fallout 3 is a great game outside of the main quest, just don't take it too literal and add some green mods. New Vegas was so epic I'm still playing its mods. It's simply Fallout 4 was garbage and Fallout 76 is a complete waste of time.
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Yeah. I kind like FO3 too. I think it have the heart in the right place, and I SINCERELY believe that all reuse of things from the old games like BoS, Enclave, Harold etc was more a attempt to show that "hey guys, this is still the Fallout you love" than lack of creativity. (Ok, maybe 50-50 lol)

The problem is that writing . Damn, there are only a few characters I like in the damn whole game, and they are all mere supporting, minor actors. Bittercup, the mr. Gusty companion, Knock Knock, Wadsworth, Crazy Wolfgang......
 
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