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!

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Amerikkkans can't build anything without indigenous people to genocide

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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