Fallout
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It literally all boils down to wanting to reference Fallout 1 or some other post-apocalyptic IP instead of coming up with lore that made sense.
Now, I will say Fallout 3 got me into Fallout. So maybe there is some merit to what Emil was thinking. But even still, it's agonizing to see someone stare at a giant reservoir and think that the area around it should probably be lacking water in your lore.
I played 200+ hours of Fallout 3. It's a fun game. But as you say - so much box ticking. Got to have super mutants, deathclaws, BoS, etc. etc..
...or you could write something new, if you're going to set it 200 years post war and on a different coast. Society has been rebuilt for decades on the west coast but on the east coast they're still eating pre-war canned goods?
You nailed it. They're ticking off boxes.
I think it's an attempt to create something like Nintendo has with Zelda.
Zelda fans will let Nintendo know if they don't like something about a game, don't get me wrong. But, they can still do pretty much whatever they want and it will sell, it just has to have: Link, Zelda, Triforce, Master Sword, Fairies.
Bethesda wants the same for Fallout. They cannot conceive a Fallout wasteland without Super Mutants, Deathclaws, or BoS. Their reasoning for having those groups/creatures in the areas they choose at the times they choose gets weaker every time. Deathclaws are supposed to be Jackson's chameleons ffs. When was the last time you saw a chameleon living in the American Southeast? (Credit where credit is due, Mirelurks and Radstags were good ideas). It's even lamer, because there are also some things that are ubiquitous in the world of Fallout, like Nuka Cola, that they decided to change up for some reason.
They just don't get the franchise. And have successfully turned it into an imposter that's garnered a bigger fandom.
I've been impressed by the TV show - it feels like they get the setting, even if Bethesda don't.
Gotta disagree with you.
The setting of Season 1 is in the middle of NCR territory, a nation with multiple large cities that controlled almost all of California just 15 years prior and started expanding their resources into Nevada enough to drive the regional Brotherhood of Steel underground and defend Hoover Dam from The Legion, which conquered 87 tribes and exists for the sole purpose of military might.
Among other things, the NCR had firearm manufacturers with Pre-War capabilities, concrete manufacturing, railroads, prisons with chain gangs, and a currency backed by gold.
And there's no evidence of them in the region apart from word of mouth and a nuked city.
Don't get me wrong, the NCR was failing. It was a matter of time before they completely fell. But almost no trace of what was essentially a modern nation is insane.
Furthermore, one of the main points of the NCR was that they were failing, because they were making the same mistakes as Pre-War America. West Coast Fallout from 2 onward is post-post-apocalyptic. Civilization is back, and we're fuckin it up again.
"War never changes" doesn't mean humans will always fight, it means that we will always fight over the same things, making the same mistakes. The natural conclusion of their story is stretching themselves too thin and falling, like all empires.
But, instead of some war or politics taking down the nation, because humans repeat our mistakes, because war never changes, they're gone because Hank's wife left him.
Where the Fallout timeline left off in that area was a great point to thrust our protagonists into the conflict that destroys the NCR. Or even if they kept their half-baked contrivance for the NCR's total annihilation, Lucy could be exploring the ruins of California and slowly discovering the ruins aren't America, they're NCR. Many ways to work with the timeline, but they just destroyed the nation in one fell swoop and basically ignored its existence other than to name drop.
I can give them props for a lot of things. Vaults, for instance, are represented at a proper scale. The show is shot well, some of the scenes look gorgeous. Cooper Howard's turn from caring to grizzled by the apocalypse is really interesting, even I think we spend too much time in the Pre-War.
But the plot is sloppy and pretty bad at representing the factions it pulls from the established world, and I can't stop thinking about what we were just talking about: needing to have BoS, Super Mutants, Deathclaws, etc. It felt less like they were building onto the lore of the West Coast and more like they were showing me a series of images that I recognize and hoping that would be enough.
I'm glad you're enjoying it though. At this point, tuning in for the new episodes for me feels like playing Russian roulette with a bullet in every chamber.
I instead see it as a different continuity, much like how every Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a different continuity.
I was speaking more of the tone of the show being what I wanted. It's dark but also humourous. I enjoy their interpretation of the BoS, for example.
That's cool you see it that way, I wish I could too. But, the creators are insistent the show is canon. All they had to do was make it non-canon or alternate canon, similiar to Hitch Hiker's Guide.
Yeah, the show's tone can be pretty spot on. But again, I can't enjoy the writing. They turned the BoS into an Enclave stand-in instead of writing something fresh. I also don't think we see the BoS scavenging tech like, one time. Which is pretty much their mission statement.
Would have been alright if they didn't insist it was canon. Would have been alright as another IP. I'm very tired of this trend of writers doing whatever they want because they'd like to "make something their own" rather than do the work to fit your part of the puzzle in with the rest. I guess that assumes intent, but I find it hard to believe that the writing results from seriously studying the region.
The Legion in Season 2, for example, are having a civil war, but the enemy camps are touching each other. They're having a civil war because Caesar died and his corpse is literally holding a piece of paper that says, "My Heir is..." and it's covered up. Instead of fighting to the death to follow the will of Caesar, they're locked in a stalemate and Macaulay Culkin's complaining about getting shot at.
Remember that Legion soldiers usually had to kill members of their own tribes to join The Legion.
Or how Ghouls have always been a commentary on xenophobia. Nobody knows why they go feral, they assume all Ghouls go feral. They attempt to continue the commentary in this show, except they change the lore so that Ghouls actually always go feral unless they take drugs.
That kinda weakens the commentary in my mind. It used to be, "humans treat them like shit because they assume they'll become feral. Now it's just, "Well, I guess the racists were right. Don't treat Ghouls bad though."
The tone is dark, yet humorous, but the attempts at humor are usually someone doing something weird and wacky instead of something darkly funny. Props to that scene where Lucy bites off The Ghoul's finger, and he cuts hers off, though. I kinda wish they had the gumption to keep her without a finger, showing the wasteland's mark on her. That's just my opinion, though.
It just doesn't seem like a good representation of the franchise if we have to pretend it's disconnected from the main timeline to enjoy it. We could give the same excuse to Fallout 3, but just as Fallout 3 checked off boxes, so does the show. The Brotherhood in California and Nevada were essentially wiped out by the NCR in the timeline up until the show, but Bethesda needs the BoS so they nuked the NCR and had BoS come in from Boston. That's how they approach writing lore now. "What can I do to fit this story into a place it doesn't fit well?" Rather than looking at the huge swaths of America previously unexplored by the series and come up with something that fits the region, they change the region to fit whatever story or references they wanted initially.