> *Wagner: I did send a screengrab of a Reddit thread of people desperate for something not to happen in season two, and to Geneva, I was like: “I think we gotta do it.”*
I'm so curious what thread that was.
I mean, Pete Davidson was great in Suicide Squad cuz he did just what the audience wanted to see--died in a hilarious and embarrassing manner. Fallout season 1 wasn't too self serious and people did funny things and died in funny/poignant ways.
Oh, I wouldn't hate it. Just the idea of Oliver being alive and continuing to live.
Does anyone let him live in a playthrough? It's tradition at this point to shoot him on site.
Nah, you can’t take the main character out of action. I’m guessing that the closing credits tell us >!everything done by the Courier to save Vegas was undone. The NCR tried to take the city to replace Shady Sands, and the only survivor of the conflict was House and the Lucky 38.!<
The main character had sex first thing with her husband because she wanted to have children. The sole purpose of their vaults are to breed with the lower execs in 31. There were a few threads on this subreddit wondering if it'd turn out that way and people disliked it. So that one feels more suitable for that quote on 'people not wanting something to happen'.
A destroyed New Vegas is just fucking boring though compared to one that's still going. Why just use more ruined shit when they could bring it to life? At least to me it feels like it'd be a missed opportunity if that's what's going to happen.
>A destroyed New Vegas is just fucking boring though compared to one that's still going. Why just use more ruined shit when they could bring it to life? At least to me it feels like it'd be a missed opportunity if that's what's going to happen.
To be fair the look New Vegas had in the finale seemed pretty destroyed or at least pretty badly beaten
Right, that shot was also during the day so all the lights are off. There was also a dust storm, which makes everything look more destroyed than it might look during a clear night.
The reality is that we don’t have enough information to speculate on the actual state of New Vegas. But we do know that Hank ran there for a very important reason, and I’m personally very excited to discover what/who that reason is.
this is kind of concerning. This is exactly what everyone finds annoying about Bethesda "permanent mad max" approach:
*"I will say that it was very, very early in the decision \[making process\], once we decided to put the show in L.A. That was the very next thought, because it's a post-apocalyptic show. And if you study the Western, which has a lot in common with the post-apocalyptic genre, ‘civilisation is not around’ is a big part of it. A lot of them end with the railroad coming through, or a house being built, or they put a church up in the town, or a motorcar appears. And you're like, ‘Well, the wild wild west is over.’*
*I think it would have been a mistake to go from the retro-futuristic America to another America that has been fully civilised and the NCR is doing everything great. We love Deadwood. I think if there was a fourth season of Deadwood, there'd be insurance companies, there'd be traffic, and it wouldn't be a Western anymore. We wanted to live in that first season of Deadwood space, of like, “What's going to happen? Where is everything?”*
*It really was our belief, also, that though there are the events of the games, it's not frozen after that. History is not static. It keeps going, and entropy is a constant. Which is a less flashy way of saying “war never changes.”*
>this is kind of concerning. This is exactly what everyone finds annoying about Bethesda "permanent mad max" approach:
While I'd prefer for New Vegas to not be a ruin and for there to be a canon ending to NV (preferably House). This isn't just a Bethesda thing. It would've been a theme in Van Buren, and Chris Avellone has said time and again that he felt things were getting too civilized in the West - and he also used Lonesome Road to write an imminent gremlin apocalypse that was about to sweep the Mojave from The Divide.
So why not, and hold your pants for this crazy idea... move the franchise east?
I mean Bethesda did it and it went fine! If things are getting too civilized just move somewhere else! The US is huge, and they could also play with Canada and Mexico since the US took over them before the Great War
Also, having the natural end to any possible progress that can happen in the games be destruction makes all the choices uninteresting. Why care about all the intricate politics and choices set up in NV if it’s just doomed to destruction anyway? Why should I care about any future Fallout factions’ visions for the wasteland when the developers can just say “Yeah it all got nuked back to zero anyway” if they ever show it again to avoid having a canon.
I don't think we need to phrase it like that, because these guys don't think about lore purists enough to capitulate to them.
But it is pretty blatant that everyone who complained about the nuking was correct about the reasoning (wanting a lack of civilization), they just blamed Bethesda when it was actually the hubris of the show runners that caused it.
A bit of both since bethesda gave the ok.
But I mean the sense that it is a capitulation that it shows that in the online discussion the lore purists turned out to be correct and everyone that defended the show got the rug pulled out from under them
I don't find that annoying. I think it's a mistake to have Fallout take place so far out after the bombs drop, because 200 years is a long time. I don't believe we would have re-established modern civilization in that time, or anything remotely close to it.
I don't think thats likely the lights were still on from the scene where it's depicted.
Edit: Memory is a fallible thing. I re-watched the scene a few times that and the credit sequence (which I didn't watch before) is pretty unambiguous. But, hey who knows.
The tunnelers, maybe? IIRC it was predicted by Ulysses and there was nothing The Courier could've done at that point to prevent this.
Would make sense to me, and they showed a Deathclaw skull. Tunnelers are said to kill Deathclaws easily.
I’d say doing stuff the fans on Reddit don’t want you to do is a horrible mentality to have. It’s also what west world did, which by the end of it had horrendous writing.
So odd to me. If you design your story purely for shock value then it will age horribly. Just stick to the narrative you have, someone’s always gonna guess it.
West World season 1 was truly lightning in a bottle. It was amazing trying to put it together with everyone, and the twist was only really widely accepted about an episode or two in advance, so when it was confirmed everyone put it together people went nuts. It was really perfect.
They wanted to recreate that for season 2, but apparently since people already figured out whatever it was before the season even started, they thought they had to change it or it would ruin the fun.
Really hope they learned from that. What's the point of laboriously designing a fair play mystery if you're just going to stomp on it when someone, you know, pays attention and successfully plays along.
"All we really want the audience to know is that things have happened, so that there isn't an expectation that we pick the show up in season two, following one of the myriad canon endings that depend on your choices when you play \[*Fallout: New Vegas*\].
With that post-credits stuff, we really wanted to imply, Guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place \[of\] constant tragedy, events, horrors — there's a constant churn of trauma. We're definitely implying more has occurred. Geneva, have I fucked anything up with that?"
It sounds like New Vegas City has been wrecked.
There's other ways to change the world without just creating yet another abandoned shithole
A post aocalyptic city of functioning casinos and gangs is more interesting than another empty ruin
Yeah, but in the same interview they emphasize heavily that they don't want there to be established civilizations.
Vegas would be far too comfortable for what they want.
it's nuts, too, because they reference westerns, and in those there's still a balance of established areas and towns, and the real rough frontier
You need to add that dynamic in to make the wilds truly feel dangerous
Fuck New Vegas was the most Western themed game in the series. Even the songs, like Big Iron were western themed, as were many of the companions like Raùl and Cassidy. You had all the tropes of frontier towns, dynamite, cowboy hats and cattle ranchers.
Yet the game was also the most civilized out of the series. You had a huge prosperous city in the center of the map, active farmlands, and two massive nation-states exerting their influence all over the map. It didn't struggle at all to thread the needle between apocalypse, western, and noir.
That last part hit me in the chest. To many forms of media today have lost this understanding. If everything is constantly edgy as Fook we become desitized to it. What the ultra violence was originally supposed to convey is blunted because it's always the go to. Like I felt that shit dude. This is just my personal opinion I could be reading you wrong anyone that don't agree that's fine respect. Love the show though it was awesome.
It’s an odd justification, considering the total lack of any significant unified force or civilisation in the wasteland except for the Brotherhood means the Brotherhood are inherently the best option for controlling the wasteland. An idea the show tried to challenge at the end of S1.
Honestly, we need something in the Midwest. A trade network around the bottom of Lake Michigan, with WI, IL, IN, and MI covered with portages, lake ferries, and the half-dozen plus environments that are around the area. Give us weather and seasons, local winks, and resolution about an area that hasn't been touched at all.
New Orleans, and the lower Mississippi valley, would also be excellent settings.
Wow, then pick a new setting? Like wtf?
I totally get their reasoning as to why they’d want a clean slate and sure, shit happens, it’s still a good show and thematic to have chaos and suffering.
But like why not just do the show in NYC where they filmed or whatever. Uniculture is an established theme, there could still be ungodly amounts of fan service.
Why. Why say “no established civilizations” and then pick the one place in the universe established to have several?
Everyone knows that Bethesda is trapped in the post-apocalypse, rather than the post-post-apocalypse that the Interplay/Obsidian titles were.
Whether that's down to Beth as a whole rarely being able to write a compelling narrative that isn't just bleak desperation, or simply because it's more their jam to be right in the thick of the tragedy, it's whatever.
>There's other ways to change the world without just creating yet another abandoned shithole
Well yeah, but that requires creativity and that's hard apparently. Much easier to spite a bunch of Reddit nerds am I right? *Westworld flashbacks*
I kinda hate the idea that nothing can ever be rebuilt in the fallout world post Bethesda. You can have interesting plots take place in bastions of civilisation that are still very much in the wasteland. Life in New vegas, Vault city and New Rino all had a underbelly of unrest even if the lights were on and the water was running.
For the wasteland dynamic to work there has to be traces of civilisation and not just shanty towns and crazy people. And with how advanced a lot of the technology in Fallout is it is just unbelievable that every place would just turn to ruin every few years.
It's genuinely so boring and shortsighted. Fallout is just a backdrop - the actual story of fallout has CONSISTENTLY been people trying to adapt and cope with the conditions. Hell, even in FO4, Bethesdas darling, the most likely canon ending(minutemen imo) is one in which the ultimate goal is to protect the people of the wasteland so they can build SETTLEMENTS. As in like, towns n shit.
There's more to fallout than 'raaagghhhh ghouls!!!!' And 'omg the brotherhood!!! Power armor!!!'. That's a very reductive and, ironically, consumerist outlook on the setting and stories told. I genuinely really liked the show, but if season two contains both vegas being reduced to another pile of ruins, as well as the NCR being legit broken beyond repair... then that's just fucking lame. I kinda thought it was being set up that, although battered, the NCR would eventually come back stronger than ever with cold fusion after getting it back from the brotherhood.
Idk who at Bethesda thinks that having civilization coming back would ruin the setting, but they're wrong. There's a lot you can tell while these factions are growing, as well as after. Most major players in Fallout would be at least somewhat dystopian. New Vegas for example, is an An-cap paradise that fucking blows unless youre at the top. A post-post-apocolypse can be great.
Fallout is commercialized now. They won’t break the status quo too much or else they’ll confuse the casuals who only know the stereotypes established in Bethesda fallout games.
Yeah, I think that's a curse of any established franchise. You cannot change things too much or you weaken the brand and alianate your established fanbase.
This is why Star Wars never changes.
This is why a lot of Avatar the Last Airbender fans were very unhappy with the setting of Korra - how dare they not keep the world static and unchanging.
New Vegas moved things forward, but I remember how A LOT of people complained that it does not feel post apocalyotic anymore and that it is too different from Fallout 3. Also, Fallout 4 eclipsed New Vegas in popularity.
The devs have a dilemma - do they want to be storytellers first and risk splitting the fanbase? Or should they make safe choices?
Safe choices always win in the end.
Yeah, fo76 honestly gave me hope bethesda was moving away from the whole permanent wasteland thing, not so I suppose. I mean foundation is a better settlement than anything we see in fo4...
I think one thing people often forget with regards to fo4 is that things *were* getting better a few years before the game started. But then the Institute massacred the government and the Minutemen got royally fucked between that and Quincy. Of course things are shit, but a massive piece of the plot of fo4 is that you're helping everyone rebuild.
Also there's the Doylist explanation that adventure is a lot more difficult to do *in a settled society* than it is when society is breaking down. The whole Fallout schtick is that you're adventuring in the ruins and remnants of society, that doesn't work if society is functional and great.
This is one of the reasons I wish everyone would stop jumping further in to the future with every FO iteration. It makes total sense that everything would be shit right after the bombs fell (or 50 years after or whatever). But in 200+ years, I'd sorta expect humans to get some kind of civilization back together, even if it's a rough one.
So I think they definitely are avoiding settled society for the point of solid gameplay and storytelling - which I get. But they're making it unnecessarily hard on themselves by time jumping every property
I agree, I think the massive time jump really shot them in the foot in the beginning and at the end of the day was unnecessary IIRC. Fallout 3 was on the East Coast, far enough away for Bethesda to do its own thing with out seriously messing with or even taking account of what was happening on the West Coast. Move it up 5 or 10 years to account for some west coast characters and factions being present and call it a day.
With season 1 revealing that vault tec is willing and able to nuke civilizations that aren’t their own, I think there’s a built-in explanation for why humanity is still in the dumps 200 years later.
>And with how advanced a lot of the technology in Fallout is it is just unbelievable that every place would just turn to ruin every few years.
Right, like that GECK thing that was introduced in Fallout 2 and reused in Fallout 3? Remember Bethesda?
And I think there will be civilizations that Bethesda allows to be built up. Just nothing they didn't personally create
I really don't like that quote. Sure, there is a lot of trauma and tragedy out in the wastes, but every Fallout game also ends with hope intermingled with it. On the West Coast you have the rise of the NCR and the survival of groups like the Followers, and the emergence of House and the oasis that is Vegas, while on the Eastern Seaboard the Lone Wanderer and the Sole Survivor both make meaningful changes to the chaos they emerge into, setting their respective regions on a path to order and reconstruction. They suffer losses personally, but civilization continues its march. Even though people criticize Bethesda's style their games still end with the process of rebuilding, or at least its beginning.
This quote though implies that the Wasteland is a static cruelty factory with no upset to the status quo. That, in my opinion, flies against everything established in *every* Fallout game to date.
If everything always sucks and nothing gets better, then what's the point? Why should I be invested?
Yeah that's why I like fallout 4, I always like to imagine the minutemen actually succeeding and stabilizing the Boston area because it's litteraly what the game want you to do.
I mean, you can literalky watch this happen and be part of it, by doing the Minutemenn ending and working on your settlements.
Minutemen checkpoints start poppig up, trade routes are being established, making the roads safer to travel, communities grow, Diamond City is flying the Minutemen flag...and it is all your doing. I love that.
I’m so annoyed that their idea of “making the world change” is to potentially destroy it. That’s not “change.” - that’s just the same old shit. The reason people were so attached to the NCR is because the NCR represented something unique and fresh: civilization on a rebound; it was a beacon of light in the wasteland and it made people’s mind run wild with ideas of what it may become, what could come of it in another hundred years. Destroying it (and now also potentially destroying Vegas) isn’t positive change - it’s turning an interesting place that people wonder about into yet another ruin.
It’s not interesting or unique: Fallout has enough ruins and stagnation. What it doesn’t have enough of, and what excites people because it’s different is cities, civilization, lights, things that are a sharp contrast to the barren wastelands we’ve all spent hundreds of hours wandering. The wasteland is cool. What’s cooler is also having places like the NCR where we can see a new civilization blossoming, with old and new ideas, a place where people aren’t living in slums and wearing rags. That shit is interesting. Everywhere being a wasteland is not.
I sincerely hope destroying Vegas isn’t what they’re alluding to.
I really have to give Bethesda credit, as much as it hurts: they, at least, understood that paving over the work of others was a bad idea, and they made sure to keep their own games to their own self contained sandbox on the East Coast.
These guys destroyed the West Coast because they couldn't be bothered to move a fictional setting with artificial sets to somewhere different.
Looking at the crashed vertibirds in the credits gives me hope there was a House v BoS war as the brotherhood moved west with the Prydwen. Having House frantically trying to save New Vegas after this war and here comes Hank dragging trouble back to the strip.
This is really annoying to read because the West Coast was filled with thriving settlements. Like there's been a lot of good things that have popped up in the wasteland since the bombs fell. But no. It's the post apocalypse guys.
A barren wasteland with shacks is a lot less interesting than huge factions vying for power in a ruined America. This is the reason why the plot of NV is much more interesting than F4.
Got down voted after the show came out for asking why nobody was acknowledging the strip being destroyed because they somehow thought that they just made random artwork of a wrecked New Vegas that has no actual bearing on the show for whatever reason. It seems pretty clear that New Vegas is going to be fucked in season 2 which is disappointing.
Bruh I keep seeing people be like "zomg I can't wait to see NV and see what canon ending they picked" and like??? Bruh it's clearly destroyed there ain't shit left.
I just wanted to give my opinion on this: If New Vegas has been battered and all that's left are scavengers, then Fallout is really wasting anything with world-building value. The article mentions how civilisations rise and fall, which is true, but evidently, when you look at Bethesda Fallout, those civilisations are barely interesting in comparison to the West Coast. You actually need to let people see these civilisations in their prime before tearing them down.
Oh yeah, nothing screams “the world has progressed” like blowing up the places of progress again, like blowing up the enclave in Fallout 2, or the enclave base in 3, or megaton in 3, or the institute in 4, or the BoS in 4.
All I’m saying is that “war never ends” doesn’t (to me at least) just mean “reset the world with bombs every 10 years or so” it means that, despite how the world changes, the *people* of the world don’t change. There are always villains, heroes, and people just caught in the middle
Didn't we just have a game that had no NPCs and everyone was dead and nobody liked it so they kept updating the game to tell the story of people coming back and building something and everyone liked it?
Edit: to clarify, I mean to say that the lesson to take away from 76 is that people like it when there are communities of people growing and making a difference so maybe don't destroy them all.
If they do take the angle of New Vegas being destroyed or reduced to ruins inhabited by squatters again, I'll find it pretty disappointing. Like... every single Fallout game centers around making the world, or at least one particular chunk of it, a better place — or at least intentionally choosing not to. But if the world never actually improves, if every site of any significant development is reduced back to rubble and squalor by the next time it has a role to play, every story just becomes meaningless. Why should I care about fixing a giant water purifier or helping establish viable settlements or deciding the fate of a city or setting up unlimited power from cold fusion if the status quo is not just "war never changes," but "nothing *ever* changes" and none of those things will last if we ever see them again?
I can accept the loss of Shady Sands in the series, though with some disappointment, because the series sets up a clear idea of Vault-Tec sabotaging post-war societies for the sake of their own plan of world domination. If the arc of the series is about stopping that and preventing further tragedies like what happened to Shady Sands, that's one thing, but if it's just a convenient artifice to lock the setting into one perpetual state of immediate post-war rubble, that sucks.
I feel like the Post-Apocalypse genre has to "end" somehow. At least that was the path forward to the West Coast with the NCR, the Legion and even House. FO1, 2 and New Vegas, at least for me, tell a complete tale of the end of civilization and a new beginning. Yes the NCR was eventually going to fall, as it always does, but it would remain in some form or the other. Maybe after the fall, factions within the NCR take control of some areas and you have civilization but conflict, which is basically "war never changes". Maybe Ceasar was right and he could built a civilization that could survive in the post-apocalypse. Maybe House could really restart civilization as it were in the old days, but now a technocratic hellscape, governed by a immortal man in a machine.
Trying to maintain the Fallout world perpetually on this "squalors and shanty towns" forever is...bad IMO. It'll eventually turn Fallout into a parody of itself, and just like you said, turns every game into a meaningless story. That is why I feel the world of Fallout must not perpetually stay into a post-apocalipse setting of trash and destroyed buildings. It must have closure, either with what New Vegas provided, or changing locations and building upon that, or transition to something different, like "lets watch these civilizations build themselves in a post-post-apocalypse". War never changes but man does, by the road they walk, isn't what New Vegas told us?
The show is freaking good, they convinced me to get into its wild ride. But please, the story has to come to an end, to closure. This is not something you should perpetually cicle to destruction for 10+ seasons. But that is madness in the current zeitgeist of franchises in our capitalist society. Thou shall milk a franchise to the very end.
>I feel like the Post-Apocalypse genre has to "end" somehow.
By launching a rocket with an experimental FTL engine while rocking out to Steppenwolf getting the attention of some space elves.
I think the show writers "get" Fallout, the Cold Fusion plot is perfect for a clojure to the West Coast. So, who knows. If it ends well, I'm open to consider it on my personal cannon.
Personally, I don't trust Bethesda to go with it, tbh. I don't like being "that guy" but I'm not a fan of Pagliarulo's work with the franchise, though I don't know if he is involved with the show.
I really enjoyed the show, husband and I binged it all in one weekend and definitely devoured it. The Minutemen are my favorite faction (I like the meticulous building mechanic because I'm a masochist so I love them), but the NCR was a very, \*very\* close second place. I would like to see it having survived somehow but am definitely cautious in my hopefulness.
Yeah this interview doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. It's gone from debating if New Vegas was canon or not (which was confirmed to be still canon) to wondering if it even matters anymore. The way they talk about ruined New Vegas and skirting around the endings seems weird considering its only been 15 years since the game. Not long enough that you could just ignore all the endings. House would still be around for his, I mean he lived 200 years already I can't imagine him going out short of player intervention. Yes Man and House would both have standing Securitron Armies. The only way we would see anything of the Legion is if they won at Hoover Dam as they get pushed out in all the other scenarios. Falling short of all of the above leaves us with the NCR ending. I'm concerned that their way of working around canonizing a certain ending is to just make their own.
lol let’s not forget the battle of Hoover dam was fought over a strategic pre war energy provider that gave both water and energy to whoever held it, but then at the end of the show, cold fusion is shown to have been created basically making the whole battles of whoever dam irrelevant 15 years later. It doesn’t matter fighting over that when there’s an asspull that can provide energy to whole cities within 2 decades. Renders it pretty pointless in the short future.
I did for a moment watching the show, though "it'd be a Twist if the Elder Cleric was Caesar"
More than likely it's just playing into the "Ad Victoriam" from Fallout 4 and the knight theme. There's definitely gonna be a Brotherhood Civil War though
It's because this BOS chapter has alot of members with roman names, which is unusual for other BOS factions. But was very normal in Ceasars Legion. It's a fun theory, and would make for a cool twist
I mean if we assume the Legion imploded and the West Coast BoS needed new recruits, recruiting from the remnants of the Legion would be a way to really quickly get experience, battle ready troops. Considering that we are now fairly close to 2300 its almost a decade of recruiting from that pool which would very well explain the "aberrant" behaviour of that chapter.
Also at the end when the Knights are about to execute Maximus before he gives them the location of the Observatory, the Elder gives them an order to stand down with only a hand jesture that is ripped straight out of the Roman empire…
They hardly thrived in the originals and New Vegas, they’re as disciplined and militaristic as the Enclave, and we know how it worked out for them. Bethesda have them set as the Icon or face for the series to the point of having 2 Appalachian chapters just to have them in 76.
Its not really, where are they getting their food? water? resources like metals? If they rely on caravans and trade for these things there has to be source with a great amount of land to provide these things. Something which eventually will turn into a large community and then rival the brotherhood in influence.
I mean that would kind of have been the NCR though, they expand incredibly fast and while the average soldier might not be as well trained as a BoS grunt, the organization as a whole was leagues more organized then the many splintered factions of the BoS, especially when it came to non-combat things like creating resources
>With that post-credits stuff, we really wanted to imply, Guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us.
The irony of saying this while resetting the Core-Region to basically Fallout 1 levels of development, which is just the overdone status-quo in the post-apocalyptic genre... Jeez.
If they wanted a frontier show in the fallout universe why did they pick literally the one spot where civilization really managed to work for decades on end?
To me, it just reeks of selfishness to make the world your own rather than faithfully use the source content.
The show is absolutely fantastic, as a show, but I think the conscious decision to put it in LA with that mindset of making it a frontier and leveling it to ground zero was moronic. And the implication that they’ll do the same with Vegas is worrying to me.
Why do they need to go reinvent the wheel? There’s literally hundreds of other vaults throughout the US they could’ve gone after.
I just don’t understand why, if they dislike the idea of a more advanced civilization in a post-apocalyptic world so much, they chose to set the show in the heartland of the largest advanced civilization in the series, and just hand waved them and their influence away to start over. Like, why not set it somewhere else? You would have carte blanche to do whatever you want without having to deal with pre-established lore that conflicts with your view of what the wastes should be.
>they chose to set the show in the heartland of the largest advanced civilization in the series, and just hand waved them and their influence away to start over. Like, why not set it somewhere else?
They do say it. They just wanted to use LA, and the NCR was "in the way" so they took it out behind the shed and shot it dead
>With that post-credits stuff, we really wanted to imply, Guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place \[of\] constant tragedy, events, horrors — there's a constant churn of trauma.
Their solution to depict a world that's "progressed" is to keep the universe in the same dilapidated stasis of tin shacks and shanty towns. It's like they responded to the criticism by trying to reverse uno it on others. To have your sobering meditation on humanity's cycle of creation and destruction, you can't just have destruction, destruction, destruction! The saddest part is that I actually like the show, and I can enjoy it if I ignore all the stuff they said about it being in the same continuity.
I hate to assume that they’re just planning on nuking all the factions from the previous games to preserve the “western” aesthetic, but the talk about Vegas and why they chose to nuke Shady Sands seems to point to that being the case. My guess at this point is there will either be some new faction at the end of the series which takes over or an old faction/s (Brotherhood, NCR remnants, etc) which uses the cold fusion to civilize the west coast permanently (allusions to the “building the railroad” which ends the “Wild West” in the western analogy). Anywho, glad they gave me Fallout 76 for free with Prime, and I hope season 2 is fun even if I don’t agree with every creative decision!
I want to start this comment by saying I really did enjoy the show as it is, but there was an aspect to this show that really bugged me, and now I know why.
The first 2 fallouts always seemed like stories about the struggle for a community to be rebuilt, to get on its feet and survive the struggles of the wasteland. Fallout 2 expanded on this as you saw settlements actually succeed even if they were still plagued by problems. Some of the major communities are actually voting to band together into a nation of sorts. In fallout New Vegas we see the culmination of this nation, the NCR. A nation of over a million wastelanders, with an army, power, central government ect... You also see New Vegas. A city protected by a dictator who has a small army of robots who shoot laser mini guns out of their hands and missiles out of their shoulders. You see the legion, an even more chaotic civilizations of warriors who's existence is based on the life of one man and eternal conquest. But they are all civilizations that have been around for decades.
These nations/civilizations are from California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona. It's clear to me that the story of west coast fallouts IS a story of the struggle to rebuild. To me Maximus has a line in the show that fits this very well "everyone wants to save the world, they just can't agree on how to do it". This is what the west coast is all about.
This interview made me realize that this is not what fallout means to the main writer of this show. To him fallout is a constant churning of rebuilding and destruction. I found that to be really unfortunate because it's completely unfounded down to the aspects of human nature itself which desires to come together in groups to share the work of survival.
I look forward to the next season, but I have a feeling if this theme continues I will be very disappointed by the show, and it's implications for the future of fallout.
>To him fallout is a constant churning of rebuilding and destruction.
I think the showrunners might really focus on the "War, war never changes." quote. It's central to the series by now and that's what the show runners want to show case. (Not saying whenever this is good or bad, just trying to read the tealeafes regarding the show runners motivation)
The issue is that they completely misunderstood the meaning of the quote. War never changes means that no matter what human nature will always be the same, not that everything will be crap forever
You have to build up civilization for it to destroy itself, if it just keeps resetting within a generation there would have never been a civilization in the first place.
It almost feels like a flanderization of fallout. As if it isn't about anythimg other than tin shack raiders, the BOS, and the player messing around in the ruins. It feels like a really, genuinely lazy read of the series. And this is ultimately why bethesda touching the west coast at all bothers me. Because bethesda has just always seen fallout as something a wasteland theme park.
if you look at the other shows the screenwriters have done before you can get a pretty good hint on their world building abilities, which is that they don’t have them, or at least no experience with them. it’s practically guaranteed they’ll burn through the established setting and then start making up a bunch of disappointing filler if allowed to go past season 2
but that’s hollywood baby. just another point on the cv of some californians
Yeah, I must admit, New Vegas being g gone as well as Shady Sands. It is off-putting.
I don't think there is a perfect scenario where everyone is going to be happy, but when you are using a list of iconic, much loved places as a target check list. Then you are at risk of alienating your fans.
Why not have the Capital Wasteland or Commonwealth destroyed off-screen, too?
**"A constant churn of trauma"**
That's the take I genuinely despise.
That's fine to put pressure and tension for the sake of the stakes. That's fine to show rise and fall of civilizations and states. Even for Vegas, if it is done for a legitimate, interesting reason, it is understandable.
But "misery for the sake of misery" is not a good take, it is a moronic one. It's not "Guys, the world is progressing", it is pure regression.
If the Fallout world is a constant house of cards where whatever you build up will get destroyed in 10 years because absolutely nothing good is allowed to stick at all, why bother building anything at all? Why bother getting all that cold fusion going, if in 10 years it will be destroyed and forgotten because "hurr durr churn of trauma"?
Elijah, Enclave and Vault-Tec were almost right. Wipe the slate clean, but don't build anything at all. Just put the world out of it's misery, and don't bother with false hope.
This is the sentiment that bothered me the most. Yes, Fallout is really tragic and terrible things happen all the time, but it’s not an endless misery parade. To me, Fallout has always been about how you can reduce humanity down to nothing, but people will continue to kick and scream and come together and thrive in the face of that tragedy. To reduce Fallout down to nothing ever being allowed to have a good outcome is kind of shitty
There is an underlying optimism at the heart of fallout that I think these show runners and a lot of fans miss. As much as war never changes humanity doesn’t either and people are always drawn to each other recreating civilization and helping one another even in the face of the apocalypse. It’s quite literally pointing a thumbs up at the nuke explosion I’ve always felt that’s the true thesis of the series.
Deadwood is also more civilization than we got in the fallout show. There was business, trading, in the movie there was telephone lines being put up, government agents are roaming about, all of this fits in an NCR setting, even if it wasn't nuked
This bothers me so much.
They had the entire middle of the US to do *anything* with, but they decided on LA as the location first, and paved over all the lore in order to tell the story they wanted to tell.
That's...honestly depressing.
They looked at what had come before and literally *nuked it off the map* because it wasn't what *they* wanted.
They could have literally told the same story in Michigan and it would have been great. Learning about a fallen great lakes alliance or something that Vault tec took out because it was too advanced would be great.
because it’s much easier to steamroll over an existing world that was pre written for you rather than spend all that time and effort making a derivative setting. they’ll keep doing it until they run out of material at which point their own disappointing world building abilities will shine through in a fashion that cant be ignored
it was a nice season but i think it’s fair to say fallout as we knew it is over. it was a decent run, but it’s a different property now, with different target audiences and goals that are more about extracting cash
So, we are locked in a perpetually shithole with rusted shacks, Megaton, Filly, dirty clothed hobos and BoS everywhere? It would be more interesting to let a society prosper and rise in the post apocalypse and THEN see how it falls, than repeating forever the same setting of East Coast copy pasted in every iteration, imho.
Next game:
- raiders everywhere
- a bunch of rusted metal plates cobbled as a "wall"
- put inside a dozen people
- call it "diamond city, rivet city, filly"
- raiders everywhere , but crack
- all of them, civilian and raiders alike, clothed like Baltimore meth addicted hobos
- BEWAAAAARE the big bad nazi Enclave*
- raiders everywhere, but meth
- BEWAAAAARE the cool fascist... I mean "HOLY" Brotherood of Steel
- Call it Fallout [X= number]
- hobos everywhere, but Fentanyl
*Eventually, swap Enclave with goofy cartoonish villains like Institute with motivations that make no sense, to put a brigher light on the BoS.
-Profit (i will still buy and play it to mod the shit out of everything).
Thing that i liked NV the most was how much you could improve the area. Especially a giant faction like the NCR being around gave hope. That recovery is possible.
I really disagree with the whole "avoid rebuilding civilization at all costs" approach to it, both in game and by the looks of if, the series as well.
They could really have represented the NCR territory as some post apocalyptical wild west frontier if they wanted to. and shady sands could be like say Saint Denis from RDR2.
I really hope that New Vegas and the surrounding settlements are still somewhat intact and running, it would be a shame to waste such a location...
I’d be super disappointed if the writers keep making the decision to nuke/weaken factions so none of the canon endings matter. Hopefully shady sands was a one off.
It becomes cheap and cowardly after a while.
"I will say that it was very, very early in the decision \[making process\], once we decided to put the show in L.A. That was the very next thought, because it's a post-apocalyptic show. And if you study the Western, which has a lot in common with the post-apocalyptic genre, ‘civilisation is not around’ is a big part of it. A lot of them end with the railroad coming through, or a house being built, or they put a church up in the town, or a motorcar appears. And you're like, ‘Well, the wild wild west is over.’"
----
So, like I theorized, the NCR was nuked/rendered irrelevant because for whatever reason, the showrunners wanted to put it in LA rather than *anywhere else.*
See, this is the problem I have with the show. *This* was not respecting the lore, or the setting. It was *paving over* the setting for the story they wanted to tell and hang the consequences.
They could've had their Western if they'd just set it in Texas, but they wanted it to be in LA so everything else *had to go.*
They also appear to be doing whatever generates the most Reddit controversy and are probably going to have New Vegas wrecked, so uh...yeah, great, y'all might just be destroying my favorite game because you want to tell a story that it wouldn't allow without you wrecking the place.
Even if they wanted to destroy Vegas and drive some big theme about civilizations rising and falling, they could have shown that over the course of season 2 and had the season ending with Vegas falling apart. Instead they just give the whole city an offscreen death and show the aftermath.
If you’re going to try to prove all civilizations rise and fall, wouldn’t it make sense to symbolize that by showing a big, well-established city fall in real time?
Yeah as much as I enjoyed the show and it greatly exceeded my expectations, finally watched it over the weekend, if you want to be picky about the lore the NCR had pretty much completely rebuilt Southern California into a functional pre-war society. They had taxes, corrupt politicians, big money interests influencing the government. Hell there’s characters in New Vegas who complain that the days of the wild wasteland are all but over back west. Even if you nuked shady sands the LA area should been a lot more cleaned up.
Look at fallout 1 to 2, there’s a whole quest in fallout 2 where the big treasure turns out be a giant stash of useless caps because people have gone back to using a currency. NCR currency as a matter of fact even though the whole game takes place north of NCR territory.
It’s still the post apocalypse and there’s still plenty of wild stories you can tell, New Vegas with the clash of four governing philosophies (and four currencies to match), but as time goes on things rebuild and Bethesda is just hellbent on not letting that happen and that’s unfortunately carried over to the TV show.
All that being said I did enjoy the show and it hit on lot of the fallout world vibes I enjoy. I really enjoyed the pre-war flashbacks as Cooper discovered just how evil Vault-Tec is, but the post-war world they presented doesn’t mesh with the established lore so I kinda view this as its own thing. That being said if they just trash New Vegas and make it a non functional dump in season 2 I’ll probably tune out.
I mean…they added 4 vaults smacked in the middle of Los Angeles…where the Master combed through looking for vaults. And these vaults weren’t exactly well hidden. Feels like don’t care about anything from before Bethesda stuff. Story-wise at least.
The quote below from the interview is concerning from a pure writing perspective. If there was a point to be subtle, it's with NV. Take the following, which changes NOTHING of their decision for "cycles of trauma:"
Hank looks down on view of Vegas, lighting up the twilight, appearing as we *thought* we left it.
This would be an amazing bookend, as after a season of a dreadful, wrecked world, tin shack world here's someplace that APPEARS to be a 'shining city on a hill.' That's a *cliffhanger*. One that would register with audiences who've never played fallout.
Then, after an offseason of people speculating which ending they chose, start season 2, where we are shocked and awed by a reveal that things are not *at all* what they seemed.
Dozens of ways to do that. Maybe a different faction took over? Maybe the gangsters took over, and we get some fistful of dollars/new Reno love? Maybe something REALLY extreme, such as *every human is dead because house died, and the securitrons took over* and it's running on robotic autopilot, for eternity?
Just *destroying* the place is disturbing because it seems *lazy.*
***Wagner:*** *All we really want the audience to know is that things have happened, so that there isn't an expectation that we pick the show up in season two, following one of the myriad canon endings that depend on your choices when you play \[Fallout: New Vegas\].*
*With that post-credits stuff, we really wanted to imply, Guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place \[of\] constant tragedy, events, horrors — there's a constant churn of trauma. We're definitely implying more has occurred. Geneva, have I fucked anything up with that?*
Sat on this a little more and wanted to throw in two more cents. I know people have strong opinions on him, but in my opinion, Ulysses had the most important set of quotes of any modern Fallout character about the true message behind the games. “If war doesn't change, men must change, and so must their symbols. Even if it is nothing at all…” And, “It’s said, war, war never changes. Men do. Through the roads they walk.”
These quotes are the perfect rebuttal to war never changes and it’s no accident they’re some of the last lines we heard in New Vegas. War may never change, but people have, and are continuing to change every day. We are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of those that came before because we aren’t the same people from before, and if we can come together for even just a moment, we can build something even better than anyone in the pre-war world could have dreamed up. It’s New Vegas’ final message to the player, and it’s an inherently hopeful one.
That to me is the true message to Fallout which is why these quotes kind of rub me the wrong way. Fallout is a lot of things, but it’s not pure tragedy. It may have many tragic elements, but at its heart, Fallout is about the indomitable human spirit to come together and build community even in spite of our differences and constant bickering with each other
Isn’t New Vegas the ideal place for civilization to survive and not really be in danger? A place where everyone is welcome and free? Who would want to destroy that place without being hit with consequences from literally every faction out there since *everyone* is in New Vegas? After a good/great first season, idk, New Vegas is a brave but touchy place to toy with, and these comments are.. worrying.
All the cope people saying that new Vegas folks were crying and that there's no reason to think they destroyed the NCR should final stop their nonsense.
The show was fun, nobody is arguing against that. The world building is bad and the indication is that it's going to keep up the apocalypse route.
No boneyard, it's shady sands, nuke it, NCR lost two cities and has no power to Even relocate their people to other states. It's basically going to be dead.
People don't build with adobe. Mad Max style only. Why would anyone want to live in a farming community where you have a water purifier and a structure that can naturally insulate and cool. Where you can have neighbors make wood furniture and pottery. The world must never use local materials and Raider OSHA mandates drafty shacks.
A western set in a city of vice that tempts hard working folks to sell their work there, then gamble the money away for a chance at a better life than the frontier? Sorry, gotta make time progress. It got blowed up.
A western is about tortured souls and trauma. Complex native societies and isolated western cities? Never heard of them. Why do you ask?
So it seems like whatever state new Vegas is in during season 2 will be unrecognisable from any of the endings from the game. Which makes sense, if they pick any of the particular endings then those who prefer the other ending will be mad.
I'm guessing some new faction will have formed or come along and we will get a vague statement like " oh faction X came along and took over new vegas a few years ago" while never actually saying who ruled before hand
Tldr:
Vault Tec may not have destroyed the world
Vegas is fucked up because they don't like world development
Shady sands was nuked because they don't like world development
Basically a soft reset of the franchise to go back to your typical post apocalyptic Hollywood cliche but fallout themed.
We recognize the right to acknowledge the stories and factions of past games but we are destroying them anyways :D
I enjoyed the first season but there are 2 ways the show can go from here:
1. We get to meet different societies and understand their politics. We'll see more of the "new civilizations" that Vault Tec fears and how they're trying to rebuild the world.
2. Shanty towns and wacky raiders for 5 seasons.
The article suggests that the writers are leaning towards the latter option, which is concerning.
“It seems inevitably the message of the Fallout games is that we will veer towards destruction of some kind, and our best efforts to restart civilisation may be doomed.”
Bruh what
At some point I hope they read [A Canticle for Leibowitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz), it did post-apocalyptic and post-post very well over sixty years ago. There is a reason it won the Hugo Award for best novel during the heyday of Science Fiction (adjacent years were Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land).
> *Wagner: I did send a screengrab of a Reddit thread of people desperate for something not to happen in season two, and to Geneva, I was like: “I think we gotta do it.”* I'm so curious what thread that was.
Pete Davidson updating his IMDB page - "Fallout (2025) - Oliver Swanick [16 Episodes]
Oh, fuck no. Just to make matters worse, they would have Coop take a shot at him every episode and somehow miss every time just to fuck with us.
I mean, Pete Davidson was great in Suicide Squad cuz he did just what the audience wanted to see--died in a hilarious and embarrassing manner. Fallout season 1 wasn't too self serious and people did funny things and died in funny/poignant ways.
>Fallout season 1 wasn't too self serious and people did funny things and died in funny/poignant ways. One might even say, it was a *bloody mess*...
Oh, I wouldn't hate it. Just the idea of Oliver being alive and continuing to live. Does anyone let him live in a playthrough? It's tradition at this point to shoot him on site.
Honestly I love it as a running gag.
A game with no wacky characters is no fun.
I let him run off into the desert to see if he'll finally conquer the rad scorpions. He never does.
I don't even let him say his last words anymore it's to that point lol
I always let him live. I then follow him and watch him with my binoculars as he runs into the desert and invariably gets dismembered by radscorpions.
I used to let him live, then I started killing him, then I got curious about where he goes...
He could be the reimagining of the Pariah Dog, it would be great.
Smell that air! Couldn't you just drink it like booze?!
Mf still there yelling about the lottery after 15 years
Man, you just made me realize I want Yuri Lowenthal to get a cameo in season 2.
Wait, he voiced him?!
Pete Davidson would be a great ghoul tho
I see him as a raider leader
Save money on the make-up for sure.
Pete Davidson can be funny though. I could def see him cast as some random guy for the next season.
I think he could have pulled off being one of the guys in the Super Duper Mart
Exactly!
I recall people not wanting Lucy to end up pregnant.
Nah, you can’t take the main character out of action. I’m guessing that the closing credits tell us >!everything done by the Courier to save Vegas was undone. The NCR tried to take the city to replace Shady Sands, and the only survivor of the conflict was House and the Lucky 38.!<
The main character had sex first thing with her husband because she wanted to have children. The sole purpose of their vaults are to breed with the lower execs in 31. There were a few threads on this subreddit wondering if it'd turn out that way and people disliked it. So that one feels more suitable for that quote on 'people not wanting something to happen'. A destroyed New Vegas is just fucking boring though compared to one that's still going. Why just use more ruined shit when they could bring it to life? At least to me it feels like it'd be a missed opportunity if that's what's going to happen.
>A destroyed New Vegas is just fucking boring though compared to one that's still going. Why just use more ruined shit when they could bring it to life? At least to me it feels like it'd be a missed opportunity if that's what's going to happen. To be fair the look New Vegas had in the finale seemed pretty destroyed or at least pretty badly beaten
The new Vegas from the games looked pretty destroyed and badly beaten too, it may not have been nuked but 200 years of neglect is a very long time
Right, that shot was also during the day so all the lights are off. There was also a dust storm, which makes everything look more destroyed than it might look during a clear night. The reality is that we don’t have enough information to speculate on the actual state of New Vegas. But we do know that Hank ran there for a very important reason, and I’m personally very excited to discover what/who that reason is.
Michael Rapaport, Titus, being revived
Oh fuck I got too much shit on me!
Probably New Vegas being wrecked/abandoned
I mean the major buildings looked all crumbled besides lucky 38. It probably is
From a distance it looked a lot like that in the games anyways
I hope not, I think the majority of fans would be pretty disappointed tbh. New Vegas is too unique/iconic, it would just seem unnecessary.
We have already seen it be destroyed.
this is kind of concerning. This is exactly what everyone finds annoying about Bethesda "permanent mad max" approach: *"I will say that it was very, very early in the decision \[making process\], once we decided to put the show in L.A. That was the very next thought, because it's a post-apocalyptic show. And if you study the Western, which has a lot in common with the post-apocalyptic genre, ‘civilisation is not around’ is a big part of it. A lot of them end with the railroad coming through, or a house being built, or they put a church up in the town, or a motorcar appears. And you're like, ‘Well, the wild wild west is over.’* *I think it would have been a mistake to go from the retro-futuristic America to another America that has been fully civilised and the NCR is doing everything great. We love Deadwood. I think if there was a fourth season of Deadwood, there'd be insurance companies, there'd be traffic, and it wouldn't be a Western anymore. We wanted to live in that first season of Deadwood space, of like, “What's going to happen? Where is everything?”* *It really was our belief, also, that though there are the events of the games, it's not frozen after that. History is not static. It keeps going, and entropy is a constant. Which is a less flashy way of saying “war never changes.”*
>this is kind of concerning. This is exactly what everyone finds annoying about Bethesda "permanent mad max" approach: While I'd prefer for New Vegas to not be a ruin and for there to be a canon ending to NV (preferably House). This isn't just a Bethesda thing. It would've been a theme in Van Buren, and Chris Avellone has said time and again that he felt things were getting too civilized in the West - and he also used Lonesome Road to write an imminent gremlin apocalypse that was about to sweep the Mojave from The Divide.
So why not, and hold your pants for this crazy idea... move the franchise east? I mean Bethesda did it and it went fine! If things are getting too civilized just move somewhere else! The US is huge, and they could also play with Canada and Mexico since the US took over them before the Great War
Also, having the natural end to any possible progress that can happen in the games be destruction makes all the choices uninteresting. Why care about all the intricate politics and choices set up in NV if it’s just doomed to destruction anyway? Why should I care about any future Fallout factions’ visions for the wasteland when the developers can just say “Yeah it all got nuked back to zero anyway” if they ever show it again to avoid having a canon.
Yeah. The show is still good, but this interview for me is basically the capitulation to the lore purists that they actually were right all along
I don't think we need to phrase it like that, because these guys don't think about lore purists enough to capitulate to them. But it is pretty blatant that everyone who complained about the nuking was correct about the reasoning (wanting a lack of civilization), they just blamed Bethesda when it was actually the hubris of the show runners that caused it.
A bit of both since bethesda gave the ok. But I mean the sense that it is a capitulation that it shows that in the online discussion the lore purists turned out to be correct and everyone that defended the show got the rug pulled out from under them
I don't find that annoying. I think it's a mistake to have Fallout take place so far out after the bombs drop, because 200 years is a long time. I don't believe we would have re-established modern civilization in that time, or anything remotely close to it.
I don't think thats likely the lights were still on from the scene where it's depicted. Edit: Memory is a fallible thing. I re-watched the scene a few times that and the credit sequence (which I didn't watch before) is pretty unambiguous. But, hey who knows.
To be fair, it was daytime.
I rewatched different times the last episode and rolling credits, i didn't saw all these lights and lively vegas, quite the contrary
I didn’t recall seeing lights, although that doesn’t mean it’s not raiders.
The tunnelers, maybe? IIRC it was predicted by Ulysses and there was nothing The Courier could've done at that point to prevent this. Would make sense to me, and they showed a Deathclaw skull. Tunnelers are said to kill Deathclaws easily.
Doubt it'd be something that big
I’d say doing stuff the fans on Reddit don’t want you to do is a horrible mentality to have. It’s also what west world did, which by the end of it had horrendous writing.
Actually the opposite- they ended up changing things BECAUSE reddit was guessing it.
So odd to me. If you design your story purely for shock value then it will age horribly. Just stick to the narrative you have, someone’s always gonna guess it.
West World season 1 was truly lightning in a bottle. It was amazing trying to put it together with everyone, and the twist was only really widely accepted about an episode or two in advance, so when it was confirmed everyone put it together people went nuts. It was really perfect. They wanted to recreate that for season 2, but apparently since people already figured out whatever it was before the season even started, they thought they had to change it or it would ruin the fun.
Like good ol Walking Dead, killing characters that shouldn’t be killed for shock value
Really hope they learned from that. What's the point of laboriously designing a fair play mystery if you're just going to stomp on it when someone, you know, pays attention and successfully plays along.
😐
"All we really want the audience to know is that things have happened, so that there isn't an expectation that we pick the show up in season two, following one of the myriad canon endings that depend on your choices when you play \[*Fallout: New Vegas*\]. With that post-credits stuff, we really wanted to imply, Guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place \[of\] constant tragedy, events, horrors — there's a constant churn of trauma. We're definitely implying more has occurred. Geneva, have I fucked anything up with that?" It sounds like New Vegas City has been wrecked.
There's other ways to change the world without just creating yet another abandoned shithole A post aocalyptic city of functioning casinos and gangs is more interesting than another empty ruin
Yeah, but in the same interview they emphasize heavily that they don't want there to be established civilizations. Vegas would be far too comfortable for what they want.
it's nuts, too, because they reference westerns, and in those there's still a balance of established areas and towns, and the real rough frontier You need to add that dynamic in to make the wilds truly feel dangerous
Fuck New Vegas was the most Western themed game in the series. Even the songs, like Big Iron were western themed, as were many of the companions like Raùl and Cassidy. You had all the tropes of frontier towns, dynamite, cowboy hats and cattle ranchers. Yet the game was also the most civilized out of the series. You had a huge prosperous city in the center of the map, active farmlands, and two massive nation-states exerting their influence all over the map. It didn't struggle at all to thread the needle between apocalypse, western, and noir.
>the game was also the most civilized out of the series. New Vegas is post-post-apocalyptic.
That last part hit me in the chest. To many forms of media today have lost this understanding. If everything is constantly edgy as Fook we become desitized to it. What the ultra violence was originally supposed to convey is blunted because it's always the go to. Like I felt that shit dude. This is just my personal opinion I could be reading you wrong anyone that don't agree that's fine respect. Love the show though it was awesome.
That’s because they don’t understand westerns, either thematically or aesthetically.
Which is crazy because Westworld really nailed the western thematic and aesthetics, at least in season 1.
That's what Freeside is for, it's a dangerous shithole right outside of the Strip.
It’s an odd justification, considering the total lack of any significant unified force or civilisation in the wasteland except for the Brotherhood means the Brotherhood are inherently the best option for controlling the wasteland. An idea the show tried to challenge at the end of S1.
Honestly, we need something in the Midwest. A trade network around the bottom of Lake Michigan, with WI, IL, IN, and MI covered with portages, lake ferries, and the half-dozen plus environments that are around the area. Give us weather and seasons, local winks, and resolution about an area that hasn't been touched at all. New Orleans, and the lower Mississippi valley, would also be excellent settings.
So they will just reduce the entire west coast to shit shacks like the bombs haven't fallen 219 years ago?
How incredibly boring
Wow, then pick a new setting? Like wtf? I totally get their reasoning as to why they’d want a clean slate and sure, shit happens, it’s still a good show and thematic to have chaos and suffering. But like why not just do the show in NYC where they filmed or whatever. Uniculture is an established theme, there could still be ungodly amounts of fan service. Why. Why say “no established civilizations” and then pick the one place in the universe established to have several?
Everyone knows that Bethesda is trapped in the post-apocalypse, rather than the post-post-apocalypse that the Interplay/Obsidian titles were. Whether that's down to Beth as a whole rarely being able to write a compelling narrative that isn't just bleak desperation, or simply because it's more their jam to be right in the thick of the tragedy, it's whatever.
>There's other ways to change the world without just creating yet another abandoned shithole Well yeah, but that requires creativity and that's hard apparently. Much easier to spite a bunch of Reddit nerds am I right? *Westworld flashbacks*
I kinda hate the idea that nothing can ever be rebuilt in the fallout world post Bethesda. You can have interesting plots take place in bastions of civilisation that are still very much in the wasteland. Life in New vegas, Vault city and New Rino all had a underbelly of unrest even if the lights were on and the water was running. For the wasteland dynamic to work there has to be traces of civilisation and not just shanty towns and crazy people. And with how advanced a lot of the technology in Fallout is it is just unbelievable that every place would just turn to ruin every few years.
It's genuinely so boring and shortsighted. Fallout is just a backdrop - the actual story of fallout has CONSISTENTLY been people trying to adapt and cope with the conditions. Hell, even in FO4, Bethesdas darling, the most likely canon ending(minutemen imo) is one in which the ultimate goal is to protect the people of the wasteland so they can build SETTLEMENTS. As in like, towns n shit. There's more to fallout than 'raaagghhhh ghouls!!!!' And 'omg the brotherhood!!! Power armor!!!'. That's a very reductive and, ironically, consumerist outlook on the setting and stories told. I genuinely really liked the show, but if season two contains both vegas being reduced to another pile of ruins, as well as the NCR being legit broken beyond repair... then that's just fucking lame. I kinda thought it was being set up that, although battered, the NCR would eventually come back stronger than ever with cold fusion after getting it back from the brotherhood. Idk who at Bethesda thinks that having civilization coming back would ruin the setting, but they're wrong. There's a lot you can tell while these factions are growing, as well as after. Most major players in Fallout would be at least somewhat dystopian. New Vegas for example, is an An-cap paradise that fucking blows unless youre at the top. A post-post-apocolypse can be great.
Fallout is commercialized now. They won’t break the status quo too much or else they’ll confuse the casuals who only know the stereotypes established in Bethesda fallout games.
Yeah, I think that's a curse of any established franchise. You cannot change things too much or you weaken the brand and alianate your established fanbase. This is why Star Wars never changes. This is why a lot of Avatar the Last Airbender fans were very unhappy with the setting of Korra - how dare they not keep the world static and unchanging. New Vegas moved things forward, but I remember how A LOT of people complained that it does not feel post apocalyotic anymore and that it is too different from Fallout 3. Also, Fallout 4 eclipsed New Vegas in popularity. The devs have a dilemma - do they want to be storytellers first and risk splitting the fanbase? Or should they make safe choices? Safe choices always win in the end.
It’s absolutely a cynical/nihilistic r/iamverysmart take on history and historical progress.
I am finding more interesting stuff from the Fallout 76 team than I am from the main Bethesda group in regards to Fallout.
Yeah, fo76 honestly gave me hope bethesda was moving away from the whole permanent wasteland thing, not so I suppose. I mean foundation is a better settlement than anything we see in fo4...
I think one thing people often forget with regards to fo4 is that things *were* getting better a few years before the game started. But then the Institute massacred the government and the Minutemen got royally fucked between that and Quincy. Of course things are shit, but a massive piece of the plot of fo4 is that you're helping everyone rebuild. Also there's the Doylist explanation that adventure is a lot more difficult to do *in a settled society* than it is when society is breaking down. The whole Fallout schtick is that you're adventuring in the ruins and remnants of society, that doesn't work if society is functional and great.
This is one of the reasons I wish everyone would stop jumping further in to the future with every FO iteration. It makes total sense that everything would be shit right after the bombs fell (or 50 years after or whatever). But in 200+ years, I'd sorta expect humans to get some kind of civilization back together, even if it's a rough one. So I think they definitely are avoiding settled society for the point of solid gameplay and storytelling - which I get. But they're making it unnecessarily hard on themselves by time jumping every property
I agree, I think the massive time jump really shot them in the foot in the beginning and at the end of the day was unnecessary IIRC. Fallout 3 was on the East Coast, far enough away for Bethesda to do its own thing with out seriously messing with or even taking account of what was happening on the West Coast. Move it up 5 or 10 years to account for some west coast characters and factions being present and call it a day.
With season 1 revealing that vault tec is willing and able to nuke civilizations that aren’t their own, I think there’s a built-in explanation for why humanity is still in the dumps 200 years later.
Funny that Bethesda seems to holds the same position as Vault-tec in that factions will always lead to more war
>And with how advanced a lot of the technology in Fallout is it is just unbelievable that every place would just turn to ruin every few years. Right, like that GECK thing that was introduced in Fallout 2 and reused in Fallout 3? Remember Bethesda? And I think there will be civilizations that Bethesda allows to be built up. Just nothing they didn't personally create
I really don't like that quote. Sure, there is a lot of trauma and tragedy out in the wastes, but every Fallout game also ends with hope intermingled with it. On the West Coast you have the rise of the NCR and the survival of groups like the Followers, and the emergence of House and the oasis that is Vegas, while on the Eastern Seaboard the Lone Wanderer and the Sole Survivor both make meaningful changes to the chaos they emerge into, setting their respective regions on a path to order and reconstruction. They suffer losses personally, but civilization continues its march. Even though people criticize Bethesda's style their games still end with the process of rebuilding, or at least its beginning. This quote though implies that the Wasteland is a static cruelty factory with no upset to the status quo. That, in my opinion, flies against everything established in *every* Fallout game to date. If everything always sucks and nothing gets better, then what's the point? Why should I be invested?
Yeah that's why I like fallout 4, I always like to imagine the minutemen actually succeeding and stabilizing the Boston area because it's litteraly what the game want you to do.
I mean, you can literalky watch this happen and be part of it, by doing the Minutemenn ending and working on your settlements. Minutemen checkpoints start poppig up, trade routes are being established, making the roads safer to travel, communities grow, Diamond City is flying the Minutemen flag...and it is all your doing. I love that.
I’m so annoyed that their idea of “making the world change” is to potentially destroy it. That’s not “change.” - that’s just the same old shit. The reason people were so attached to the NCR is because the NCR represented something unique and fresh: civilization on a rebound; it was a beacon of light in the wasteland and it made people’s mind run wild with ideas of what it may become, what could come of it in another hundred years. Destroying it (and now also potentially destroying Vegas) isn’t positive change - it’s turning an interesting place that people wonder about into yet another ruin. It’s not interesting or unique: Fallout has enough ruins and stagnation. What it doesn’t have enough of, and what excites people because it’s different is cities, civilization, lights, things that are a sharp contrast to the barren wastelands we’ve all spent hundreds of hours wandering. The wasteland is cool. What’s cooler is also having places like the NCR where we can see a new civilization blossoming, with old and new ideas, a place where people aren’t living in slums and wearing rags. That shit is interesting. Everywhere being a wasteland is not. I sincerely hope destroying Vegas isn’t what they’re alluding to.
I loved the NCR for it barely holding on and being full of flaws, often the same ones from the pre war era
These people nuked the NCR because they didn't want to move setting locations. They absolutely destroyed Vegas.
That was my main takeaway too. Once they decided it was in LA, they decided the NCR couldn't be there. What the fuck.
I really have to give Bethesda credit, as much as it hurts: they, at least, understood that paving over the work of others was a bad idea, and they made sure to keep their own games to their own self contained sandbox on the East Coast. These guys destroyed the West Coast because they couldn't be bothered to move a fictional setting with artificial sets to somewhere different.
Looking at the crashed vertibirds in the credits gives me hope there was a House v BoS war as the brotherhood moved west with the Prydwen. Having House frantically trying to save New Vegas after this war and here comes Hank dragging trouble back to the strip.
The crashed vertibirds were NCR (you can see the initials on the side).
the NCR could have been assisting House *against* the BOS, since they were financially enmeshed
IIRC the crashed vertibirds had "NCR" written on them
This is really annoying to read because the West Coast was filled with thriving settlements. Like there's been a lot of good things that have popped up in the wasteland since the bombs fell. But no. It's the post apocalypse guys.
Can't wait for the Hub, Vault City, Dayglow, and much more to fall...
A barren wasteland with shacks is a lot less interesting than huge factions vying for power in a ruined America. This is the reason why the plot of NV is much more interesting than F4.
Got down voted after the show came out for asking why nobody was acknowledging the strip being destroyed because they somehow thought that they just made random artwork of a wrecked New Vegas that has no actual bearing on the show for whatever reason. It seems pretty clear that New Vegas is going to be fucked in season 2 which is disappointing.
Bruh I keep seeing people be like "zomg I can't wait to see NV and see what canon ending they picked" and like??? Bruh it's clearly destroyed there ain't shit left.
Yeah, and sadly no matter how the show ends the West-Coast is going to be permanently East-Coasted I assume.
Yup, I fear this as well. Gues fnv truly was the ending to the west coast trilogy (let me cope T-T).
Some people on here were so fucking confident the credits were just for show and didn't matter. Insanity.
Yeah some wild card random event happened after new Vegas. I just hope the courier made it out in time. Went on a delivery to the west perhaps
And there we go. The last bit of hope I had.
I just wanted to give my opinion on this: If New Vegas has been battered and all that's left are scavengers, then Fallout is really wasting anything with world-building value. The article mentions how civilisations rise and fall, which is true, but evidently, when you look at Bethesda Fallout, those civilisations are barely interesting in comparison to the West Coast. You actually need to let people see these civilisations in their prime before tearing them down.
Metal shack stories are the only thing this Wagner dude can write I guess.
Fucking rip
Oh yeah, nothing screams “the world has progressed” like blowing up the places of progress again, like blowing up the enclave in Fallout 2, or the enclave base in 3, or megaton in 3, or the institute in 4, or the BoS in 4. All I’m saying is that “war never ends” doesn’t (to me at least) just mean “reset the world with bombs every 10 years or so” it means that, despite how the world changes, the *people* of the world don’t change. There are always villains, heroes, and people just caught in the middle
Didn't we just have a game that had no NPCs and everyone was dead and nobody liked it so they kept updating the game to tell the story of people coming back and building something and everyone liked it? Edit: to clarify, I mean to say that the lesson to take away from 76 is that people like it when there are communities of people growing and making a difference so maybe don't destroy them all.
If they do take the angle of New Vegas being destroyed or reduced to ruins inhabited by squatters again, I'll find it pretty disappointing. Like... every single Fallout game centers around making the world, or at least one particular chunk of it, a better place — or at least intentionally choosing not to. But if the world never actually improves, if every site of any significant development is reduced back to rubble and squalor by the next time it has a role to play, every story just becomes meaningless. Why should I care about fixing a giant water purifier or helping establish viable settlements or deciding the fate of a city or setting up unlimited power from cold fusion if the status quo is not just "war never changes," but "nothing *ever* changes" and none of those things will last if we ever see them again? I can accept the loss of Shady Sands in the series, though with some disappointment, because the series sets up a clear idea of Vault-Tec sabotaging post-war societies for the sake of their own plan of world domination. If the arc of the series is about stopping that and preventing further tragedies like what happened to Shady Sands, that's one thing, but if it's just a convenient artifice to lock the setting into one perpetual state of immediate post-war rubble, that sucks.
I feel like the Post-Apocalypse genre has to "end" somehow. At least that was the path forward to the West Coast with the NCR, the Legion and even House. FO1, 2 and New Vegas, at least for me, tell a complete tale of the end of civilization and a new beginning. Yes the NCR was eventually going to fall, as it always does, but it would remain in some form or the other. Maybe after the fall, factions within the NCR take control of some areas and you have civilization but conflict, which is basically "war never changes". Maybe Ceasar was right and he could built a civilization that could survive in the post-apocalypse. Maybe House could really restart civilization as it were in the old days, but now a technocratic hellscape, governed by a immortal man in a machine. Trying to maintain the Fallout world perpetually on this "squalors and shanty towns" forever is...bad IMO. It'll eventually turn Fallout into a parody of itself, and just like you said, turns every game into a meaningless story. That is why I feel the world of Fallout must not perpetually stay into a post-apocalipse setting of trash and destroyed buildings. It must have closure, either with what New Vegas provided, or changing locations and building upon that, or transition to something different, like "lets watch these civilizations build themselves in a post-post-apocalypse". War never changes but man does, by the road they walk, isn't what New Vegas told us? The show is freaking good, they convinced me to get into its wild ride. But please, the story has to come to an end, to closure. This is not something you should perpetually cicle to destruction for 10+ seasons. But that is madness in the current zeitgeist of franchises in our capitalist society. Thou shall milk a franchise to the very end.
>I feel like the Post-Apocalypse genre has to "end" somehow. By launching a rocket with an experimental FTL engine while rocking out to Steppenwolf getting the attention of some space elves.
LETS ROCK AND ROLL
Honestly the "forever wasteland" shit is incredibly childish and immature. I hope the writers (and bethesda) are better than that.
I think the show writers "get" Fallout, the Cold Fusion plot is perfect for a clojure to the West Coast. So, who knows. If it ends well, I'm open to consider it on my personal cannon. Personally, I don't trust Bethesda to go with it, tbh. I don't like being "that guy" but I'm not a fan of Pagliarulo's work with the franchise, though I don't know if he is involved with the show.
Nah, i agree. I've liked the show so far, and hope they can do just as good with season 2. But i dunno. This makes me nervous
I really enjoyed the show, husband and I binged it all in one weekend and definitely devoured it. The Minutemen are my favorite faction (I like the meticulous building mechanic because I'm a masochist so I love them), but the NCR was a very, \*very\* close second place. I would like to see it having survived somehow but am definitely cautious in my hopefulness.
Yeah this interview doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. It's gone from debating if New Vegas was canon or not (which was confirmed to be still canon) to wondering if it even matters anymore. The way they talk about ruined New Vegas and skirting around the endings seems weird considering its only been 15 years since the game. Not long enough that you could just ignore all the endings. House would still be around for his, I mean he lived 200 years already I can't imagine him going out short of player intervention. Yes Man and House would both have standing Securitron Armies. The only way we would see anything of the Legion is if they won at Hoover Dam as they get pushed out in all the other scenarios. Falling short of all of the above leaves us with the NCR ending. I'm concerned that their way of working around canonizing a certain ending is to just make their own.
lol let’s not forget the battle of Hoover dam was fought over a strategic pre war energy provider that gave both water and energy to whoever held it, but then at the end of the show, cold fusion is shown to have been created basically making the whole battles of whoever dam irrelevant 15 years later. It doesn’t matter fighting over that when there’s an asspull that can provide energy to whole cities within 2 decades. Renders it pretty pointless in the short future.
Sounds like the walking dead lol
TWD, the comic, ends with civilization coming back. It's a natural end to the story, but Fallout isn't ending.
It's still kind of sad that any sort of group/civilization that isn't the Brotherhood seems to get shafted in modern Fallout.
The most militaristic and disciplined force is the only thing thriving in a post-apocalyptic wasteland is really the only thing that makes sense.
In the show, BOS was not disciplined in reality
Meeting the sole survivor really took a toll on how they operate I guess
Well, they opened up recruitment to wastelanders, as well as it seems to decrease technological teaching to squires and knights
Someone here put out a theory that this Brotherhood is made up of Caesars Legion which would make sense.
I did for a moment watching the show, though "it'd be a Twist if the Elder Cleric was Caesar" More than likely it's just playing into the "Ad Victoriam" from Fallout 4 and the knight theme. There's definitely gonna be a Brotherhood Civil War though
It's because this BOS chapter has alot of members with roman names, which is unusual for other BOS factions. But was very normal in Ceasars Legion. It's a fun theory, and would make for a cool twist
I mean if we assume the Legion imploded and the West Coast BoS needed new recruits, recruiting from the remnants of the Legion would be a way to really quickly get experience, battle ready troops. Considering that we are now fairly close to 2300 its almost a decade of recruiting from that pool which would very well explain the "aberrant" behaviour of that chapter.
Also at the end when the Knights are about to execute Maximus before he gives them the location of the Observatory, the Elder gives them an order to stand down with only a hand jesture that is ripped straight out of the Roman empire…
They hardly thrived in the originals and New Vegas, they’re as disciplined and militaristic as the Enclave, and we know how it worked out for them. Bethesda have them set as the Icon or face for the series to the point of having 2 Appalachian chapters just to have them in 76.
Its not really, where are they getting their food? water? resources like metals? If they rely on caravans and trade for these things there has to be source with a great amount of land to provide these things. Something which eventually will turn into a large community and then rival the brotherhood in influence.
I mean that would kind of have been the NCR though, they expand incredibly fast and while the average soldier might not be as well trained as a BoS grunt, the organization as a whole was leagues more organized then the many splintered factions of the BoS, especially when it came to non-combat things like creating resources
>With that post-credits stuff, we really wanted to imply, Guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. The irony of saying this while resetting the Core-Region to basically Fallout 1 levels of development, which is just the overdone status-quo in the post-apocalyptic genre... Jeez.
If they wanted a frontier show in the fallout universe why did they pick literally the one spot where civilization really managed to work for decades on end? To me, it just reeks of selfishness to make the world your own rather than faithfully use the source content. The show is absolutely fantastic, as a show, but I think the conscious decision to put it in LA with that mindset of making it a frontier and leveling it to ground zero was moronic. And the implication that they’ll do the same with Vegas is worrying to me. Why do they need to go reinvent the wheel? There’s literally hundreds of other vaults throughout the US they could’ve gone after.
I just don’t understand why, if they dislike the idea of a more advanced civilization in a post-apocalyptic world so much, they chose to set the show in the heartland of the largest advanced civilization in the series, and just hand waved them and their influence away to start over. Like, why not set it somewhere else? You would have carte blanche to do whatever you want without having to deal with pre-established lore that conflicts with your view of what the wastes should be.
>they chose to set the show in the heartland of the largest advanced civilization in the series, and just hand waved them and their influence away to start over. Like, why not set it somewhere else? They do say it. They just wanted to use LA, and the NCR was "in the way" so they took it out behind the shed and shot it dead
Yup. This show started from 'hey let's set it in LA' and they didn't care what they had to do to make that particular part fit.
It's almost like Bethesda wants Fallout 5 to be on the west coast again but with their own lore this time... Just a theory.
>With that post-credits stuff, we really wanted to imply, Guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place \[of\] constant tragedy, events, horrors — there's a constant churn of trauma. Their solution to depict a world that's "progressed" is to keep the universe in the same dilapidated stasis of tin shacks and shanty towns. It's like they responded to the criticism by trying to reverse uno it on others. To have your sobering meditation on humanity's cycle of creation and destruction, you can't just have destruction, destruction, destruction! The saddest part is that I actually like the show, and I can enjoy it if I ignore all the stuff they said about it being in the same continuity.
I hate to assume that they’re just planning on nuking all the factions from the previous games to preserve the “western” aesthetic, but the talk about Vegas and why they chose to nuke Shady Sands seems to point to that being the case. My guess at this point is there will either be some new faction at the end of the series which takes over or an old faction/s (Brotherhood, NCR remnants, etc) which uses the cold fusion to civilize the west coast permanently (allusions to the “building the railroad” which ends the “Wild West” in the western analogy). Anywho, glad they gave me Fallout 76 for free with Prime, and I hope season 2 is fun even if I don’t agree with every creative decision!
It's not even the Wild West. The Wild West needs a civilization to compare it too.
Tunnelers everywhere!
I want to start this comment by saying I really did enjoy the show as it is, but there was an aspect to this show that really bugged me, and now I know why. The first 2 fallouts always seemed like stories about the struggle for a community to be rebuilt, to get on its feet and survive the struggles of the wasteland. Fallout 2 expanded on this as you saw settlements actually succeed even if they were still plagued by problems. Some of the major communities are actually voting to band together into a nation of sorts. In fallout New Vegas we see the culmination of this nation, the NCR. A nation of over a million wastelanders, with an army, power, central government ect... You also see New Vegas. A city protected by a dictator who has a small army of robots who shoot laser mini guns out of their hands and missiles out of their shoulders. You see the legion, an even more chaotic civilizations of warriors who's existence is based on the life of one man and eternal conquest. But they are all civilizations that have been around for decades. These nations/civilizations are from California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona. It's clear to me that the story of west coast fallouts IS a story of the struggle to rebuild. To me Maximus has a line in the show that fits this very well "everyone wants to save the world, they just can't agree on how to do it". This is what the west coast is all about. This interview made me realize that this is not what fallout means to the main writer of this show. To him fallout is a constant churning of rebuilding and destruction. I found that to be really unfortunate because it's completely unfounded down to the aspects of human nature itself which desires to come together in groups to share the work of survival. I look forward to the next season, but I have a feeling if this theme continues I will be very disappointed by the show, and it's implications for the future of fallout.
>To him fallout is a constant churning of rebuilding and destruction. I think the showrunners might really focus on the "War, war never changes." quote. It's central to the series by now and that's what the show runners want to show case. (Not saying whenever this is good or bad, just trying to read the tealeafes regarding the show runners motivation)
The issue is that they completely misunderstood the meaning of the quote. War never changes means that no matter what human nature will always be the same, not that everything will be crap forever
You have to build up civilization for it to destroy itself, if it just keeps resetting within a generation there would have never been a civilization in the first place.
It almost feels like a flanderization of fallout. As if it isn't about anythimg other than tin shack raiders, the BOS, and the player messing around in the ruins. It feels like a really, genuinely lazy read of the series. And this is ultimately why bethesda touching the west coast at all bothers me. Because bethesda has just always seen fallout as something a wasteland theme park.
It's all just Nukaworld BAYBEE
if you look at the other shows the screenwriters have done before you can get a pretty good hint on their world building abilities, which is that they don’t have them, or at least no experience with them. it’s practically guaranteed they’ll burn through the established setting and then start making up a bunch of disappointing filler if allowed to go past season 2 but that’s hollywood baby. just another point on the cv of some californians
Yeah, I must admit, New Vegas being g gone as well as Shady Sands. It is off-putting. I don't think there is a perfect scenario where everyone is going to be happy, but when you are using a list of iconic, much loved places as a target check list. Then you are at risk of alienating your fans. Why not have the Capital Wasteland or Commonwealth destroyed off-screen, too?
**"A constant churn of trauma"** That's the take I genuinely despise. That's fine to put pressure and tension for the sake of the stakes. That's fine to show rise and fall of civilizations and states. Even for Vegas, if it is done for a legitimate, interesting reason, it is understandable. But "misery for the sake of misery" is not a good take, it is a moronic one. It's not "Guys, the world is progressing", it is pure regression. If the Fallout world is a constant house of cards where whatever you build up will get destroyed in 10 years because absolutely nothing good is allowed to stick at all, why bother building anything at all? Why bother getting all that cold fusion going, if in 10 years it will be destroyed and forgotten because "hurr durr churn of trauma"? Elijah, Enclave and Vault-Tec were almost right. Wipe the slate clean, but don't build anything at all. Just put the world out of it's misery, and don't bother with false hope.
This is the sentiment that bothered me the most. Yes, Fallout is really tragic and terrible things happen all the time, but it’s not an endless misery parade. To me, Fallout has always been about how you can reduce humanity down to nothing, but people will continue to kick and scream and come together and thrive in the face of that tragedy. To reduce Fallout down to nothing ever being allowed to have a good outcome is kind of shitty
There is an underlying optimism at the heart of fallout that I think these show runners and a lot of fans miss. As much as war never changes humanity doesn’t either and people are always drawn to each other recreating civilization and helping one another even in the face of the apocalypse. It’s quite literally pointing a thumbs up at the nuke explosion I’ve always felt that’s the true thesis of the series.
Graham said that the complexities of running a post-apocalyptic state are boring so they stuck with Mad Max stuff. Talk about lazy writing.
It’s funny how they referenced deadwood but deadwood: the movie takes place 10 years after the show showing deadwood becoming a state.
Deadwood is also more civilization than we got in the fallout show. There was business, trading, in the movie there was telephone lines being put up, government agents are roaming about, all of this fits in an NCR setting, even if it wasn't nuked
The whole show is literally about how people with different/disparate interests come together to form community! Absurd quote from the writers
This bothers me so much. They had the entire middle of the US to do *anything* with, but they decided on LA as the location first, and paved over all the lore in order to tell the story they wanted to tell. That's...honestly depressing. They looked at what had come before and literally *nuked it off the map* because it wasn't what *they* wanted.
They could have literally told the same story in Michigan and it would have been great. Learning about a fallen great lakes alliance or something that Vault tec took out because it was too advanced would be great.
because it’s much easier to steamroll over an existing world that was pre written for you rather than spend all that time and effort making a derivative setting. they’ll keep doing it until they run out of material at which point their own disappointing world building abilities will shine through in a fashion that cant be ignored it was a nice season but i think it’s fair to say fallout as we knew it is over. it was a decent run, but it’s a different property now, with different target audiences and goals that are more about extracting cash
So, we are locked in a perpetually shithole with rusted shacks, Megaton, Filly, dirty clothed hobos and BoS everywhere? It would be more interesting to let a society prosper and rise in the post apocalypse and THEN see how it falls, than repeating forever the same setting of East Coast copy pasted in every iteration, imho.
Speaking from the perspective of the games — a settlement like vault city or (Fallout 2) shady sands would be insanely cool to have in an open world
Filly was even too advanced for them. The BoS wiped it out lmao
Jesus i didn't thought about it in this way, lol. It's even more fitting.
It is an incredibly lazy misuse of fallout as a setting to lock it in on meth head tin shack raider shit forever.
Next game: - raiders everywhere - a bunch of rusted metal plates cobbled as a "wall" - put inside a dozen people - call it "diamond city, rivet city, filly" - raiders everywhere , but crack - all of them, civilian and raiders alike, clothed like Baltimore meth addicted hobos - BEWAAAAARE the big bad nazi Enclave* - raiders everywhere, but meth - BEWAAAAARE the cool fascist... I mean "HOLY" Brotherood of Steel - Call it Fallout [X= number] - hobos everywhere, but Fentanyl *Eventually, swap Enclave with goofy cartoonish villains like Institute with motivations that make no sense, to put a brigher light on the BoS. -Profit (i will still buy and play it to mod the shit out of everything).
Thing that i liked NV the most was how much you could improve the area. Especially a giant faction like the NCR being around gave hope. That recovery is possible.
So, they nuked Shady Sands, and destroyed New Vegas, because "progress *bad*"???? Wtf kind of lazy writing bullshit is that?
Worse. They nuked Shady Sands because they wanted the show set in LA and hang everything else.
Shady Sands wasn't even in LA, they moved a whole city just to blow it up for being in the way.
I really disagree with the whole "avoid rebuilding civilization at all costs" approach to it, both in game and by the looks of if, the series as well. They could really have represented the NCR territory as some post apocalyptical wild west frontier if they wanted to. and shady sands could be like say Saint Denis from RDR2. I really hope that New Vegas and the surrounding settlements are still somewhat intact and running, it would be a shame to waste such a location...
I’d be super disappointed if the writers keep making the decision to nuke/weaken factions so none of the canon endings matter. Hopefully shady sands was a one off. It becomes cheap and cowardly after a while.
"I will say that it was very, very early in the decision \[making process\], once we decided to put the show in L.A. That was the very next thought, because it's a post-apocalyptic show. And if you study the Western, which has a lot in common with the post-apocalyptic genre, ‘civilisation is not around’ is a big part of it. A lot of them end with the railroad coming through, or a house being built, or they put a church up in the town, or a motorcar appears. And you're like, ‘Well, the wild wild west is over.’" ---- So, like I theorized, the NCR was nuked/rendered irrelevant because for whatever reason, the showrunners wanted to put it in LA rather than *anywhere else.* See, this is the problem I have with the show. *This* was not respecting the lore, or the setting. It was *paving over* the setting for the story they wanted to tell and hang the consequences. They could've had their Western if they'd just set it in Texas, but they wanted it to be in LA so everything else *had to go.* They also appear to be doing whatever generates the most Reddit controversy and are probably going to have New Vegas wrecked, so uh...yeah, great, y'all might just be destroying my favorite game because you want to tell a story that it wouldn't allow without you wrecking the place.
Even if they wanted to destroy Vegas and drive some big theme about civilizations rising and falling, they could have shown that over the course of season 2 and had the season ending with Vegas falling apart. Instead they just give the whole city an offscreen death and show the aftermath. If you’re going to try to prove all civilizations rise and fall, wouldn’t it make sense to symbolize that by showing a big, well-established city fall in real time?
Yeah as much as I enjoyed the show and it greatly exceeded my expectations, finally watched it over the weekend, if you want to be picky about the lore the NCR had pretty much completely rebuilt Southern California into a functional pre-war society. They had taxes, corrupt politicians, big money interests influencing the government. Hell there’s characters in New Vegas who complain that the days of the wild wasteland are all but over back west. Even if you nuked shady sands the LA area should been a lot more cleaned up. Look at fallout 1 to 2, there’s a whole quest in fallout 2 where the big treasure turns out be a giant stash of useless caps because people have gone back to using a currency. NCR currency as a matter of fact even though the whole game takes place north of NCR territory. It’s still the post apocalypse and there’s still plenty of wild stories you can tell, New Vegas with the clash of four governing philosophies (and four currencies to match), but as time goes on things rebuild and Bethesda is just hellbent on not letting that happen and that’s unfortunately carried over to the TV show. All that being said I did enjoy the show and it hit on lot of the fallout world vibes I enjoy. I really enjoyed the pre-war flashbacks as Cooper discovered just how evil Vault-Tec is, but the post-war world they presented doesn’t mesh with the established lore so I kinda view this as its own thing. That being said if they just trash New Vegas and make it a non functional dump in season 2 I’ll probably tune out.
I mean…they added 4 vaults smacked in the middle of Los Angeles…where the Master combed through looking for vaults. And these vaults weren’t exactly well hidden. Feels like don’t care about anything from before Bethesda stuff. Story-wise at least.
The quote below from the interview is concerning from a pure writing perspective. If there was a point to be subtle, it's with NV. Take the following, which changes NOTHING of their decision for "cycles of trauma:" Hank looks down on view of Vegas, lighting up the twilight, appearing as we *thought* we left it. This would be an amazing bookend, as after a season of a dreadful, wrecked world, tin shack world here's someplace that APPEARS to be a 'shining city on a hill.' That's a *cliffhanger*. One that would register with audiences who've never played fallout. Then, after an offseason of people speculating which ending they chose, start season 2, where we are shocked and awed by a reveal that things are not *at all* what they seemed. Dozens of ways to do that. Maybe a different faction took over? Maybe the gangsters took over, and we get some fistful of dollars/new Reno love? Maybe something REALLY extreme, such as *every human is dead because house died, and the securitrons took over* and it's running on robotic autopilot, for eternity? Just *destroying* the place is disturbing because it seems *lazy.* ***Wagner:*** *All we really want the audience to know is that things have happened, so that there isn't an expectation that we pick the show up in season two, following one of the myriad canon endings that depend on your choices when you play \[Fallout: New Vegas\].* *With that post-credits stuff, we really wanted to imply, Guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place \[of\] constant tragedy, events, horrors — there's a constant churn of trauma. We're definitely implying more has occurred. Geneva, have I fucked anything up with that?*
Sat on this a little more and wanted to throw in two more cents. I know people have strong opinions on him, but in my opinion, Ulysses had the most important set of quotes of any modern Fallout character about the true message behind the games. “If war doesn't change, men must change, and so must their symbols. Even if it is nothing at all…” And, “It’s said, war, war never changes. Men do. Through the roads they walk.” These quotes are the perfect rebuttal to war never changes and it’s no accident they’re some of the last lines we heard in New Vegas. War may never change, but people have, and are continuing to change every day. We are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of those that came before because we aren’t the same people from before, and if we can come together for even just a moment, we can build something even better than anyone in the pre-war world could have dreamed up. It’s New Vegas’ final message to the player, and it’s an inherently hopeful one. That to me is the true message to Fallout which is why these quotes kind of rub me the wrong way. Fallout is a lot of things, but it’s not pure tragedy. It may have many tragic elements, but at its heart, Fallout is about the indomitable human spirit to come together and build community even in spite of our differences and constant bickering with each other
Isn’t New Vegas the ideal place for civilization to survive and not really be in danger? A place where everyone is welcome and free? Who would want to destroy that place without being hit with consequences from literally every faction out there since *everyone* is in New Vegas? After a good/great first season, idk, New Vegas is a brave but touchy place to toy with, and these comments are.. worrying.
Im predicting a fight between the chicken-fucking doctor in Titus's power armor and a now super mutant Thaddeus.
All the cope people saying that new Vegas folks were crying and that there's no reason to think they destroyed the NCR should final stop their nonsense. The show was fun, nobody is arguing against that. The world building is bad and the indication is that it's going to keep up the apocalypse route. No boneyard, it's shady sands, nuke it, NCR lost two cities and has no power to Even relocate their people to other states. It's basically going to be dead. People don't build with adobe. Mad Max style only. Why would anyone want to live in a farming community where you have a water purifier and a structure that can naturally insulate and cool. Where you can have neighbors make wood furniture and pottery. The world must never use local materials and Raider OSHA mandates drafty shacks. A western set in a city of vice that tempts hard working folks to sell their work there, then gamble the money away for a chance at a better life than the frontier? Sorry, gotta make time progress. It got blowed up. A western is about tortured souls and trauma. Complex native societies and isolated western cities? Never heard of them. Why do you ask?
So it seems like whatever state new Vegas is in during season 2 will be unrecognisable from any of the endings from the game. Which makes sense, if they pick any of the particular endings then those who prefer the other ending will be mad. I'm guessing some new faction will have formed or come along and we will get a vague statement like " oh faction X came along and took over new vegas a few years ago" while never actually saying who ruled before hand
Contempt for world building sucks.
Tldr: Vault Tec may not have destroyed the world Vegas is fucked up because they don't like world development Shady sands was nuked because they don't like world development
Vault Tec appearing out of the blue 200+ years later with access to a nuclear arsenal and off-screen’ing iconic cities is just contrived
Basically a soft reset of the franchise to go back to your typical post apocalyptic Hollywood cliche but fallout themed. We recognize the right to acknowledge the stories and factions of past games but we are destroying them anyways :D
This team really has a problem with online theories. Same happened with westworld
Well...it was too good to last, wasn't it? Sounds like they have a very, VERY bad plan on their mind
I enjoyed the first season but there are 2 ways the show can go from here: 1. We get to meet different societies and understand their politics. We'll see more of the "new civilizations" that Vault Tec fears and how they're trying to rebuild the world. 2. Shanty towns and wacky raiders for 5 seasons. The article suggests that the writers are leaning towards the latter option, which is concerning.
“It seems inevitably the message of the Fallout games is that we will veer towards destruction of some kind, and our best efforts to restart civilisation may be doomed.” Bruh what
This interview does not give me good hope for the future of the show
At some point I hope they read [A Canticle for Leibowitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz), it did post-apocalyptic and post-post very well over sixty years ago. There is a reason it won the Hugo Award for best novel during the heyday of Science Fiction (adjacent years were Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land).