PaxVenire
Wasteland Peacemaker
There has been many different takes on what the pre-war world of Fallout looked like. From Fallout 1 to Fallout 76, we’ve seen a drastic change in the vision of the Old World between the various development teams who worked on the series. What I want to attempt to do is take all of these visions and see if through discussion we can’t share ideas and cram them into one, more cohesive concept of what we think the definitive pre-war world of Fallout looked like. There is very little examples of the actual pre-war era in the series for us to paint a complete picture of, so essentially we’ll have to create a pentimento using the wastelands of the games. In art, the word for painting over a painting is pentimento. This could be the artist fixing a mistake, the artist remastering his work and using the old as a base, or another artist painting over an artist’s work. The latter is what we'd be doing in a figurative sense. Before we can cobble together our visions however, let’s look at the various pre-war visions available. First up is Fallout 1 & 2’s take on the pre-war world:
Los Angeles as depicted here is enormous. A sprawling urban metropolis, it looks almost like New York City than Los Angeles. In our own modern day, Los Angeles is a relatively flat city containing only a handful of towers clustered in the downtown area as a result of a height restriction.
What this tells me of the Fallout universe is that cities can be much, much larger than the ones we know in the modern day, let alone what these cities looked like in the 1950s. Another example of this can be found in the same game via the city of Bakersfield, or as its known in the game, Necropolis.
Much like Los Angeles, Bakersfield is absolutely enormous. Bakersfield in our own modern day isn't even what one would think of first when imagining a "city".
There are no skyscrapers, the tallest buildings being relatively normal looking apartments and hotels. It looks more like a large suburban town than a metropolis. Fallout's Bakersfield is large enough to have skyscrapers stand tall even after being hit with a nuclear bomb. A common shared trait between sprawling cities in the original two games are it's take on the retro future aesthetic. I would describe the architecture as a fuse between art deco, neoclassical, and gothic. Giant statues hang off the sides of skyscrapers acting as gargoyles, statues of heads are sculpted into the walls of buildings even on the ground level as seen in this picture from Fallout 1 depicting The Hub, or Barstow in real life:
I've always loved this take on Fallout's pre-war world. It's seldom seen in modern games and really only was prominent in the first two games, resurging a little only in Fallout 3, but we'll get to that in a bit. The head statues on the corners and pillars of buildings are something you can imagine looked beautiful before the bombs fell, but now as ruins, they look to almost be screaming. As if the city was alive once and is now frozen in a perpetual state of pain, their bodies lying around them as rubble. Fallout 2 has a few examples of this too, though not as much as Fallout 1. According to the Fallout Bible, the Temple of Trials at the beginning of Fallout 2 is supposed to be the remnants of a museum or church. I personally lean more towards it being a museum, but either or, just look at the grand entrance to this building:
There's also the Enclave Oil Rig that features the neoclassical gothic statues on the sides.
Sadly, Fallout 2 doesn't give us much of a look at it's biggest city San Francisco. By biggest city I don't mean in terms of gameplay, but rather the locations in-game compared to their real life counterparts. San Francisco is a big city in our own modern day, and I'm not just talking about those rolling hills.
In-game, what we get from San Francisco is really just Chinatown. Aside from that we get the Golden Gate Bridge being used as a runway, a palace made of salvaged submarine metal, and the docks. The larger city at hand, most likely destroyed and uninhabited, isn't shown. If I had to guess however, I would be willing to bet that if you took that image above, doubled its size, and added that neoclassical art deco flair, you'd get a pretty good Fallout city.
Okay, so that's Fallout 1 & 2. The original games had a distinct sense of style in them that would be immediately changed in the next entry in the series, Fallout Tactics. The neoclassical architecture, art deco statues, and gothic influence would be traded for a more surprisingly modern take on the pre-war world. I'm talking about the only real city Fallout Tactics offers us in the entire game: Chicago.
Chicago offers us a much brighter more modern sci-fi looking metropolis compared to the cities of Fallout 1 & 2. The buildings aren't blocky, there's not a single statue in sight, the visible concrete look of Los Angeles and Bakersfield seems to be replaced by glass buildings that resemble our own Chicago today.
Aside from Chicago though, Fallout Tactics as I said doesn't give us a real good look at any other city, despite the fact that the map size for this game is astronomically, almost comically large. The map is so big as a matter of fact it sprawls from Chicago/St. Louis all the way to the Colorado Rockies. For the most part, it's really just desert overworld much like the original two games, adobe tows and all.
Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel can be skipped as the game only offers three main location, none of which show us much of anything. So let's move onto Fallout 3 with Washington D.C..
Now I have a lot of problems with Fallout 3, and this has been discussed to Hell and back, however I never had a problem with the look of Washington D.C. from a visual standpoint. I think the D.C. ruins look rather great! One thing that immediately strikes me though is the city of D.C. is not nearly as grandiose as Los Angeles or Bakersfield. This is because Bethesda seemingly actually chose to abide by the height restrictions imposed on Washington D.C., and so while the city retains the art deco neoclassicalism, it's very similar in height to that of actual Washington D.C. as seen in this photo:
Anyways, I'm of the belief that the transition in style from Fallout 1 & 2 to 3D with Fallout 3 was done pretty great, and that's in huge part to the late Bethesda artist Adam Adamowicz. Something to note however is that Fallout 3's D.C. while more similar to the style of cities on the West than Fallout Tactics' Chicago, continues the trend of being it's own distinct style. Looking closely at the pictures of the Capital Wasteland, you can clearly see a more apparent 1950s style than the originals. This gets more apparent when you visit suburban ruins outside of the immediate DC area such as Springvale or Andale:
The suburbia in Fallout 3 looks ripped straight out of Leave It to Beaver, something solidified even more during the Tranquility Lane quest, which is really the only look at the Fallout 3 vision of pre-war America we get.
Compared to say -- Klamath in Fallout 2, which is based on the real life Klamath Falls in Oregon, Fallout 3 suburbs are really indistinguishable from the actual 1950s. While being a small suburban country town much like its real life counterpart, Klamath in Fallout 2 still has elements in the ruins of its architecture that looks like it belongs in a retro future, and not just the 1950s verbatim.
Before we move onto Fallout: New Vegas, I wanted to take a moment to appreciate The Pitt DLC's take on post-war Pittsburgh. I think The Pitt is the closest we have to seeing a Fallout 1 & 2 styled city in 3D, and aside from my similar gripe with D.C. and Fallout 3 overall where it's supposed to be set 200 years after the bombs fall but looks like the first decade still, I think Adam Adamowicz outdid himself on the design for The Pitt.
I don't really have much to say about Pittsburgh other than it looks fantastically dystopian like the original games did. We unfortunately don't get to explore more of the city in the DLC aside from the mini map we get, but it just looks amazing.
Moving on however, we arrive to Fallout: New Vegas which is going to have to be covered a bit differently from the rest so far. The reason being is because sadly the conceptualized version of New Vegas was by and far absolutely not the New Vegas we got. We all know Obsidian made this game in roughly eighteen months, and had to cut enough content to fill a book. As a matter of fact, there's an amazing channel on YouTube that documents just that. This led to New Vegas looking like this:
It sure looks big until you realize, really the main part of Vegas in this game is just the Strip that looks like this:
If Fallout: New Vegas were an isometric CRPG like Fallout 1 & 2 were, perhaps it would be more forgiven for the Strip to be the main hub world of Vegas while the city surrounding it was regular overworld map with chances of random encounter in the city ruins to how Adytum was the main hub of Los Angeles within the huge Boneyard in Fallout 1. Sadly when playing a 3D game, the underwhelming size is way more apparent. What's even sadder is when you see how New Vegas was conceptualized.
So because we couldn't get the full New Vegas the developers had in mind, I will be going off these concept arts. And something that immediately strikes me is how modern the city of Las Vegas looked compared to California. The dystopian look of Los Angeles and Washington D.C. aren't present in Las Vegas. There's little to no neoclassical, art deco, or gothic architecture really at all, and when you look at this two images compared to the modern day Las Vegas of our own world, nothing really looks to dissimilar in design.
Las Vegas was always a city of spectacle, so it makes sense that it wouldn't conform to the uniformity of other regions nor the traditionalism seen in neoclassical cities. Aside from the 1950s googie looking signage in the concept art and official game, buildings in New Vegas (especially the Ultra-Luxe which is just the Bellagio) resemble very closely to the city today. So other than New Vegas itself, we have a lot of smaller towns that go for a more classical look. Goodsprings, Primm, Nipton, and Searchlight for example all have that basic small western town look to it, nothing really screaming retro future to it. It's similar to Fallout 3 having towns that look straight out of the 1950s, except this looks just straight out of normal small Nevada towns.
Before moving onto Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, I want to take a moment to show pictures of a recreated pre-war using the assets in the Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas engine. We don't really get a look at the pre-war era in these games, as I've said the closest we have is Tranquility Lane and it's world-space reusage in Old World Blues. Someone has however taken the time to use the assets in the engine, clean them up, and give us a look at what the pre-war world would look like according to Bethesda and Obsidian's world design:
Credit to the author of these images here.
Okay so for Fallout 4 & Fallout 76, I won't dwell on them long since we not only get a clear and concise vision of the pre-war world in both games via the intro sequences, but I personally don't play these games enough to want to dig into them that much. So here is Boston in Fallout 4 and official concept art of pre-war Boston compared to a photo of the modern day Boston skyline:
What's there for me to even say? Clearly the 1950s retro future has been dialed up to 11,000. The buildings are colorful and shaped strangely, concrete and glass for skyscrapers have been replaced by metal sheet panels, and the architecture is what I would describe simply as "Jetsons-esq". The concept art doesn't necessarily match up to the city we see in the final product, however I include it because it shows how Bethesda conceptualizes pre-war America going forward. These large colorful buildings are also found in West Virginia in locations like Charleston and Watoga. You can see some colonial architecture in the game in locations like Concord, Salem, and even in the city of Boston itself mixed in with the Jetsons buildings with towns like Good Neighbor.
I personally like the colonial architecture for this region of Fallout, but I'm not much a fan of the rest.
I can't confirm this as I don't play Fallout 76, but I believe Watoga as pictured above has a reason to look like this. If I recall, it's supposed to be like a World's Fair that was going on when the bombs fell, the "City of Tomorrow, Today" type deal.
And well.. That's Fallout 4 & 76. Like I said, I can't put too much input into this as not only do I not play those games anymore, but these games also give us a good look at their vision of pre-war America without having to dig into it.
That's all we have for the series! This is how each game, each development team, and each artist thought the Fallout pre-war world looked like. Now with all these examples and comparisons in mind, I leave it to you to tell me what your definitive pre-war world would look like. What examples from outside the games from other media would you use or think would fit well in Fallout? How would one region of the country look different than another? Do you like and prefer a specific game's style? How would you improve the examples here you don't like?
Los Angeles as depicted here is enormous. A sprawling urban metropolis, it looks almost like New York City than Los Angeles. In our own modern day, Los Angeles is a relatively flat city containing only a handful of towers clustered in the downtown area as a result of a height restriction.
What this tells me of the Fallout universe is that cities can be much, much larger than the ones we know in the modern day, let alone what these cities looked like in the 1950s. Another example of this can be found in the same game via the city of Bakersfield, or as its known in the game, Necropolis.
Much like Los Angeles, Bakersfield is absolutely enormous. Bakersfield in our own modern day isn't even what one would think of first when imagining a "city".
There are no skyscrapers, the tallest buildings being relatively normal looking apartments and hotels. It looks more like a large suburban town than a metropolis. Fallout's Bakersfield is large enough to have skyscrapers stand tall even after being hit with a nuclear bomb. A common shared trait between sprawling cities in the original two games are it's take on the retro future aesthetic. I would describe the architecture as a fuse between art deco, neoclassical, and gothic. Giant statues hang off the sides of skyscrapers acting as gargoyles, statues of heads are sculpted into the walls of buildings even on the ground level as seen in this picture from Fallout 1 depicting The Hub, or Barstow in real life:
I've always loved this take on Fallout's pre-war world. It's seldom seen in modern games and really only was prominent in the first two games, resurging a little only in Fallout 3, but we'll get to that in a bit. The head statues on the corners and pillars of buildings are something you can imagine looked beautiful before the bombs fell, but now as ruins, they look to almost be screaming. As if the city was alive once and is now frozen in a perpetual state of pain, their bodies lying around them as rubble. Fallout 2 has a few examples of this too, though not as much as Fallout 1. According to the Fallout Bible, the Temple of Trials at the beginning of Fallout 2 is supposed to be the remnants of a museum or church. I personally lean more towards it being a museum, but either or, just look at the grand entrance to this building:
There's also the Enclave Oil Rig that features the neoclassical gothic statues on the sides.
Sadly, Fallout 2 doesn't give us much of a look at it's biggest city San Francisco. By biggest city I don't mean in terms of gameplay, but rather the locations in-game compared to their real life counterparts. San Francisco is a big city in our own modern day, and I'm not just talking about those rolling hills.
In-game, what we get from San Francisco is really just Chinatown. Aside from that we get the Golden Gate Bridge being used as a runway, a palace made of salvaged submarine metal, and the docks. The larger city at hand, most likely destroyed and uninhabited, isn't shown. If I had to guess however, I would be willing to bet that if you took that image above, doubled its size, and added that neoclassical art deco flair, you'd get a pretty good Fallout city.
Okay, so that's Fallout 1 & 2. The original games had a distinct sense of style in them that would be immediately changed in the next entry in the series, Fallout Tactics. The neoclassical architecture, art deco statues, and gothic influence would be traded for a more surprisingly modern take on the pre-war world. I'm talking about the only real city Fallout Tactics offers us in the entire game: Chicago.
Chicago offers us a much brighter more modern sci-fi looking metropolis compared to the cities of Fallout 1 & 2. The buildings aren't blocky, there's not a single statue in sight, the visible concrete look of Los Angeles and Bakersfield seems to be replaced by glass buildings that resemble our own Chicago today.
Aside from Chicago though, Fallout Tactics as I said doesn't give us a real good look at any other city, despite the fact that the map size for this game is astronomically, almost comically large. The map is so big as a matter of fact it sprawls from Chicago/St. Louis all the way to the Colorado Rockies. For the most part, it's really just desert overworld much like the original two games, adobe tows and all.
Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel can be skipped as the game only offers three main location, none of which show us much of anything. So let's move onto Fallout 3 with Washington D.C..
Now I have a lot of problems with Fallout 3, and this has been discussed to Hell and back, however I never had a problem with the look of Washington D.C. from a visual standpoint. I think the D.C. ruins look rather great! One thing that immediately strikes me though is the city of D.C. is not nearly as grandiose as Los Angeles or Bakersfield. This is because Bethesda seemingly actually chose to abide by the height restrictions imposed on Washington D.C., and so while the city retains the art deco neoclassicalism, it's very similar in height to that of actual Washington D.C. as seen in this photo:
Anyways, I'm of the belief that the transition in style from Fallout 1 & 2 to 3D with Fallout 3 was done pretty great, and that's in huge part to the late Bethesda artist Adam Adamowicz. Something to note however is that Fallout 3's D.C. while more similar to the style of cities on the West than Fallout Tactics' Chicago, continues the trend of being it's own distinct style. Looking closely at the pictures of the Capital Wasteland, you can clearly see a more apparent 1950s style than the originals. This gets more apparent when you visit suburban ruins outside of the immediate DC area such as Springvale or Andale:
The suburbia in Fallout 3 looks ripped straight out of Leave It to Beaver, something solidified even more during the Tranquility Lane quest, which is really the only look at the Fallout 3 vision of pre-war America we get.
Compared to say -- Klamath in Fallout 2, which is based on the real life Klamath Falls in Oregon, Fallout 3 suburbs are really indistinguishable from the actual 1950s. While being a small suburban country town much like its real life counterpart, Klamath in Fallout 2 still has elements in the ruins of its architecture that looks like it belongs in a retro future, and not just the 1950s verbatim.
Before we move onto Fallout: New Vegas, I wanted to take a moment to appreciate The Pitt DLC's take on post-war Pittsburgh. I think The Pitt is the closest we have to seeing a Fallout 1 & 2 styled city in 3D, and aside from my similar gripe with D.C. and Fallout 3 overall where it's supposed to be set 200 years after the bombs fall but looks like the first decade still, I think Adam Adamowicz outdid himself on the design for The Pitt.
I don't really have much to say about Pittsburgh other than it looks fantastically dystopian like the original games did. We unfortunately don't get to explore more of the city in the DLC aside from the mini map we get, but it just looks amazing.
Moving on however, we arrive to Fallout: New Vegas which is going to have to be covered a bit differently from the rest so far. The reason being is because sadly the conceptualized version of New Vegas was by and far absolutely not the New Vegas we got. We all know Obsidian made this game in roughly eighteen months, and had to cut enough content to fill a book. As a matter of fact, there's an amazing channel on YouTube that documents just that. This led to New Vegas looking like this:
It sure looks big until you realize, really the main part of Vegas in this game is just the Strip that looks like this:
If Fallout: New Vegas were an isometric CRPG like Fallout 1 & 2 were, perhaps it would be more forgiven for the Strip to be the main hub world of Vegas while the city surrounding it was regular overworld map with chances of random encounter in the city ruins to how Adytum was the main hub of Los Angeles within the huge Boneyard in Fallout 1. Sadly when playing a 3D game, the underwhelming size is way more apparent. What's even sadder is when you see how New Vegas was conceptualized.
So because we couldn't get the full New Vegas the developers had in mind, I will be going off these concept arts. And something that immediately strikes me is how modern the city of Las Vegas looked compared to California. The dystopian look of Los Angeles and Washington D.C. aren't present in Las Vegas. There's little to no neoclassical, art deco, or gothic architecture really at all, and when you look at this two images compared to the modern day Las Vegas of our own world, nothing really looks to dissimilar in design.
Las Vegas was always a city of spectacle, so it makes sense that it wouldn't conform to the uniformity of other regions nor the traditionalism seen in neoclassical cities. Aside from the 1950s googie looking signage in the concept art and official game, buildings in New Vegas (especially the Ultra-Luxe which is just the Bellagio) resemble very closely to the city today. So other than New Vegas itself, we have a lot of smaller towns that go for a more classical look. Goodsprings, Primm, Nipton, and Searchlight for example all have that basic small western town look to it, nothing really screaming retro future to it. It's similar to Fallout 3 having towns that look straight out of the 1950s, except this looks just straight out of normal small Nevada towns.
Before moving onto Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, I want to take a moment to show pictures of a recreated pre-war using the assets in the Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas engine. We don't really get a look at the pre-war era in these games, as I've said the closest we have is Tranquility Lane and it's world-space reusage in Old World Blues. Someone has however taken the time to use the assets in the engine, clean them up, and give us a look at what the pre-war world would look like according to Bethesda and Obsidian's world design:
Credit to the author of these images here.
Okay so for Fallout 4 & Fallout 76, I won't dwell on them long since we not only get a clear and concise vision of the pre-war world in both games via the intro sequences, but I personally don't play these games enough to want to dig into them that much. So here is Boston in Fallout 4 and official concept art of pre-war Boston compared to a photo of the modern day Boston skyline:
What's there for me to even say? Clearly the 1950s retro future has been dialed up to 11,000. The buildings are colorful and shaped strangely, concrete and glass for skyscrapers have been replaced by metal sheet panels, and the architecture is what I would describe simply as "Jetsons-esq". The concept art doesn't necessarily match up to the city we see in the final product, however I include it because it shows how Bethesda conceptualizes pre-war America going forward. These large colorful buildings are also found in West Virginia in locations like Charleston and Watoga. You can see some colonial architecture in the game in locations like Concord, Salem, and even in the city of Boston itself mixed in with the Jetsons buildings with towns like Good Neighbor.
I personally like the colonial architecture for this region of Fallout, but I'm not much a fan of the rest.
I can't confirm this as I don't play Fallout 76, but I believe Watoga as pictured above has a reason to look like this. If I recall, it's supposed to be like a World's Fair that was going on when the bombs fell, the "City of Tomorrow, Today" type deal.
And well.. That's Fallout 4 & 76. Like I said, I can't put too much input into this as not only do I not play those games anymore, but these games also give us a good look at their vision of pre-war America without having to dig into it.
That's all we have for the series! This is how each game, each development team, and each artist thought the Fallout pre-war world looked like. Now with all these examples and comparisons in mind, I leave it to you to tell me what your definitive pre-war world would look like. What examples from outside the games from other media would you use or think would fit well in Fallout? How would one region of the country look different than another? Do you like and prefer a specific game's style? How would you improve the examples here you don't like?
