I mean he is right, Bethesda's Fallout has bad worldbuilding that makes generally no sense. Counterpoint: It looks cool.
Genuinely this is one of the biggest reasons I was never able to get into Fallout. It’s been 200 years, pick this shit up! Why is there rubble in the middle of the floor in the house you live in!? Did the apocalypse also make everyone ridiculous slobs? Pick up a broom!
Even if nobody had picked anything up, it's been 200 years, the cities should look like this.
How the fuck did the Empire State Building end up in Brooklyn lol. This perspective makes no sense. Cool greenery though.
i think the correct answer is that they need a latin american cleaning lady to clean up their shit.
That almost makes more sense, in a weird way. If it were actually 200 years after the bombs, there would be a new high-tech society that had moved past living in burnt out buildings and shooting each other for radiation meds and expired MREs. Since they wanted to maintain the post-nuclear-chic aesthetic, they had to make everything look like it had been destroyed a week ago. If they tried to split the difference, where would it stop? You clean up the rubble on the floor, but there’s still trash everywhere outside. Clean up the trash, and you’re still living in makeshift buildings with no proper insulation, ventilation, heat, light, etc. I think you either have to go all the way in one direction or another for sake of verisimilitude, as silly as it is, and they decided that it’s Mad Max all day, every day.
Good comment.
Its everything wrong with Bethesda's Fallout world building in micro.
Neither F3 or F4 could ever hook me the way FNV did because of reasons like this that can be felt in the atmosphere of their respective worlds.
The fixation on the aesthetics of Fallout has led to its stagnation.
It's one of those things capitalism ruins. For Fallout to work as a brand, there needs to be brand recognition 
It's why they still use caps after it stopped making sense and why you see Power Armor, Vault Boys, and the Brotherhood of Steel everywhere. It's not Fallout without those aesthetics, so everything associated with those aesthetics will stay past any logical reason.
It's kinda sad really, if you think about the implications - since the aesthetics are tied up in Americana, it's going to be a lot harder to tell stories from perspectives other than those affected by American companies. That's cutting off worldbuilding for several countries they played a big part in the past. They won't sell without brand recognition.
So the world becomes smaller and less real. Nobody will break away from eating Sugarbombs or drinking Nuka Cola. Hairstyles and fashion will either reference the 50s or just have vague Mad Max vibes. You'll never spend the majority of your time outside of the US wasteland.
The world becomes less hopeful too. By virtue of the franchise's premise, clear in the title, the world will only ever be ravaged by nuclear fallout. Any happy ending you get in any of the games become divorced from one another to maintain the status quo. That or a retcon or later event ruins whatever changes meaningfully in the setting. The world will never heal because Fallout needs a broken world.
It sucks because Fallout still has great potential for political commentary and satire, but it's confined in its messaging because because it's owned by 
and they don't want to criticize shallow consumption if their profit relies on shallow consumption.
Started getting properly into Starfield and I had a thought pop into my head that I'd like to know if it's true or not:
Bethesda is a creatively bankrupt company. They can only take existing interesting settings (Fallout, Elder Scrolls) and build lackluster games to take place in them.
The people currently at Bethesda have never done a creative thing in their lives, so they just did Skyrim in space but without any of the interesting backing of the TES world. You've got the UC (Empire, order and bureaucracy) and the Freestars (Stormcloaks, liberty and old-fashioned values). They basically just did dragon shouts again. And the combat basically just feels like Fallout but - again - with anything unique or interesting stripped off.
It is a game utterly devoid of charm or originality because Bethesda as a company cannot create those things, they can only borrow the creative works of others to slap their shitty engine on top of.
There a scene in Starfield where you go to a night club on Neon and its just techno music with people awkwardly dancing in funny hats. I couldn't help being disappointed that THAT was what they thought a futuristic space night club would look like. Jesus. My high school prom was just some christmas lights hung in the gym and it was cooler than that
There a scene in Starfield where you go to a night club on Neon and its just techno music with people awkwardly dancing in funny hats. I couldn't help being disappointed that THAT was what they thought a futuristic space night club would look like. Jesus. My high school prom was just some christmas lights hung in the gym and it was cooler than that
That's one of my most common recurring criticisms of so-called future speculation, especially Reddit-style "futurology:" too many people can daydream about spaceships and superpowers and maybe immortality, but any actual social/cultural changes of actual significance are unfathomable or even scary.
It's what put me off from the Cyberpunkerinos from CDPR: it was outright boomer-tier stale in its supposed futuristic world.
Star Citizen is laughably backward in what it claims is almost a millennium in the future: that fantastical far future is bleak 90s malls with hot dog stands and push-carts to deliver packages via private space trucks to grease the wheels of Roman-style space fascism with corporate characteristics. Oh, and the head grifter directly inserted himself into the fiction's lore as the savior of humanity, 
style:
I remember the first time I got to Vivec city in Morrowind and how astounded I was. It seemed so alien and it was really cool to see a city not built by or for humans. Now 20 years later they had the opportunity to really outdo themselves. Make it weird, make it gross, make it fantastic, even if they didn't entirely stick the landing it would have been cool to experience a sense of wonder at what maybe the future could look like.
They didn't do any of that. They built the futureland section of a second rate amusement park
They didn't do any of that. They built the futureland section of a second rate amusement park
It was a glorified Fallout settlement. I took one look at what was supposed to be the future capitol of space neoliberalism and never felt the temptation to play it again.
They built the futureland section of a second rate amusement park
This is so on point. New Atlantis looks like store-brand Tomorrowland.
but any actual social/cultural changes of actual significance are unfathomable or even scary
This is definitely a giant problem in Starfield, but I don’t think it’s why the clubs are so lame. Cause the problem isn’t just that it isn’t a cool club for a magic space future, it isn’t even a cool club for now. If I walked into that club tonight I would be like “this place is lame and dead.”
For one, it’s the most incredibly sex-less club I’ve ever seen in my life. If you’re gonna have dancers on a stage in your space bar can you try to make it at least slightly sexy?
Mass Effect 1 had a better nightclub and it’s not even very good and that game came out like 15 years ago.
I'm not even sure if making the Starfield club superficially hornier would actually help that much if nothing else was changed about it, not at this point, considering how bleak and bland the setting is to the point of being its own meme.
Exactly. This is supposed to be a club in the grittiest, most drug addled city in the known universe and they offer dancers in funny neon hats? Wtf
but any actual social/cultural changes of actual significance are unfathomable or even scary.
It's why I fucking love The Expanse. The Belters feel absolutely distinct, with a unique culture and language that would develop from being exploited, poor, and forced to work in space without any support. It's one of the few sci-fi series to actually have a thought about what culture would look like in space and how even the (relatively, in scifi terms) short distance between Earth and Ceres would still contribute to massive social changes.
This is a rather common point, like I've seen the points on your comment basically almost everywhere actually but I'd just mention just because they are not creative it doesn't mean they can't be.
Look at hollywood now vs 20 or 30 years ago. The big studios converged into the mega franchises because it was profitable not because they can't find or don't have access to creative talent. Heck the same people that made those relatively better movies decades ago are still working today(though that is also another critique mfers never actualy retire).
People say Bethesda can't make things more creative than cookie cutter FO and TES, its true from observation but we will never know if its actualy true in a vaccuum, if you gave those teams a lot more freedom and backing to actualy be creative.
Although as I write all of this, maybe Anthem is the best counter example lol tl;dr fucked by a lead dev/designer that simply couldn't get the idea together for years
Anthem...should have been called Icarus for coming so close to greatness but sputtering and falling instead.
It feels like Bethesda is creatively bankrupt. But a lot of studios are like that these days. I'm pretty sure with Bethesda, idea pitches probably start with working from previous games' formats and then going from there.
Doing everything they can to say Skyrim but in space without saying Skyrim.
Throw in development times, crunch, and changing ideas, the creativity will be wrung out way before the game hits the shelves.
i've spent many many hours in that game, but i dropped it like a rock at some point and never looked back. it's just not got any charm to it whatsoever, there's a few specks of interesting story threads and ideas out in the cosmos that kept me clinging on, but it never really feels alive, or like the people who worked on it had a genuine vision for their universe. it's like a 6 or 7 out of ten, not because there's peaks of 10/10 and troughs of 3/10, but because every single aspect is just sorta mediocre across the board, with little to no variation
Ouch, I feel like "creatively bankrupt" is a bit harsh but I can't really think of how they aren't. It seems obvious their best days are behind them.
Starfield could've been so much better if it didn't do the "transcend humanity" which is just such a tired sci-fi trope at this point. Rehash the civil war plotline if they have to, just done right. Planet to planet, take it by means of diplomacy, intrigue, or just violence. It wouldn't have been original, but at least it would've been more entertaining than going around, faffing about in 0g while trying to hit some floating lights for 15 times, and then the story ends.
They fixed a lot of what skyrim and fallout did wrong, there are some skill checks and the character's background becomes at least a conversation item, but everything else is just so limp dicked. Ugh, I'm still mad about it even when I did not expect anything else than what we got.
"transcend humanity" which is just such a tired sci-fi trope at this point
"Transcend humanity" is a cliche that is most often put forward and consumed by people that aren't really that interested in humanity to begin with and want to "escape" it in a lazy selfish way.
Oh absolutely! I totally agree!
As a beginner game developer, I really can appreciate Starfield for it's technical complexity, and even though I want to keep playing, the game doesn't make me feel anything.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more Starfield feels like it could have been planned as an MMORPG and then pivoted to a single-player game halfway through development.
And because Bethesda insists on just cycling through their IPs, the games come out so fucking far apart. And it's only going to increase with Starfield being added. So fallout 5 will be "wow guys, remember that game fallout 4?" And Fallout 6 will be "wow guys, remember back when you played fallout 5 over a decade ago?" So it will always be locked in the nostalgia trap, and they'll never feel the need to say "ok we are mixing up the formula for this bi-yearly release, by going to the wastelands of southern China" or something
That's why I like Fallout 1 because of the first town being sandstone buildings and people with robes on. It isn't until later on that you find people living in bombed out garbage and generally those are bad people.
I hate this! The farther they go from the nuclear apocalypse, the closer it looks. It's so fucking bad.
One of the worst parts of fallout 4 is all the fucking NPCs CONSTANTLY complaining about the fact that they live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Like motherfucker, you have never met anyone, who ever met anyone, who knew anything different. The buildings look like they're 20 years after, but the people act like it's 1 year after!
Holy fuck Fallout 1 and 2 had these fully lived in environments, these diverging little societes full of people that took their lives seriously. Ninety percent of people had nothing to say about anything prior to last week. They had some basic, broken background knowledge of the past, and often only in particular areas they were interested in. One or two guys could tell you the make and model of the car wrecks strewn about. Some scientists had a wealth of knowledge of certain areas. Vault dwellers were more immersed in history but still primarily concerned with their own lives. Sentient ghouls lived the pre-apocalypse and sounded like rambling old folks.
It annoys me so much that the Bethesda games take place 200 years after the bombs fell. Like the first two games took place 70 years after and they were building new societies, but 200 years later people are still scavenging for parts in Boston and the power is still on from before the war
It looks cool for sure, but I still don’t understand why 200 years. The first Mad Max film starts just as society is collapsing, and it ends up in basically the same place as Fallout after only a few years. I don’t really care that it doesn’t make practical sense so much as I don’t get what purpose it serves narratively.
Fallout 2 took place about 80 years after Fallout so as to give the player a glance at how progress occurs post-apocalypse and also give the excuse for putting in new characters and factions
The small town of Shady Sands grows into the massive capital of the New California Republic, completely changing the landscape of California
Bethesda saw this and went "yes"
So each of their games pushes the timeline further and further, but they also want the excuse of "We want this to feel lawless and wild" so they keep the world very much unkempt and wacked-out
It's theme park design at the end of the day
I want to see a post postapocalypse world. Kings hold millennia-old rifles, no longer functional, as a symbol of authority. Scavengers "mine" steel from the bones of long dead cities. Priests view sites like hydroelectric dams as built by gods. Radioactive wastes are feared, said to be demon-cursed. Basically a medieval story but the ancient empire is modern society instead of elves or some shit.
Hoi4 also got a mod for that. From playing as Mormon cranks experiencing their own protestant schism to playing as a Mexican skynet larping as Santa Anna
Old World Blues? greatest excercise in trying to pin a setting and mechanics on a completely incompatible game
I dunno. I think its sort of a step in the right direction lore-wise since on a macro level you can actually start rebuilding a society out of the shithole post-apocalyptic America is, not mentioning that since it takes place on the west coast its building off of the writing of two more logically consist world building done by the game devs of fallout 1, 2, and new vegas.
i just dont think hoi4 serves the narrative goals the devs have (which are cool) nor does hoi make sense for fallout scale warfare
More or less. There's the old world and the new world and a point of stark disconnection between them.
That makes enough sense. I haven’t played the original Fallout games in many years, I couldn’t remember what the deal was with the timeline.
Is the idea that only vault-dwellers survived the bombs? I thought there were people who survived on the outside, just not well or in great numbers.
That actually makes things make a little more sense. I thought the vault dwellers showed up after the rest of the world had been surviving in the rough for decades/centuries, but if a lot of the communities were sheltering for most of that time then the sorry state of everything is more understandable.
Yeah, this is one of the points that the modern Fallout games really don't get across, especially since they leaped whole hog into the "The Vaults were never meant to save anyone" reveal from Fallout 2
The Vaults were a mix of various social and scientific experiments, ultimately designed to help the Enclave establish a working society which would then make an grand exit from planet Earth and leave all the undesirables (anyone who wasn't a member of the Enclave) behind to die
Would be kind of hard to do this if every single Vault were a deathtrap
Most Vaults were simply controlled populations, never really meant to do anything aside from staying alive and maintaining their population
Some of these Vaults opened earlier than others, and some were never meant to be opened at all (at least by the inhabitants)
But every single one of the completed 100 and change Vaults held thousands (or was supposed to, the shift to 3D made the abstractions harder)
And those are just the known public Vaults, as Vault-Tec was also in the business of making smaller private shelters for both members of the US government and private businesses
The Survivalist's journal entries in Honest Hearts describe how after the bombs there was black radioactive rain, followed by a two month period of such high radioactivity he couldn't go outside, followed by glowing green snow. And all this in a national park away from anywhere particularly hard hit (he counted 7 nukes on/around SLC). Also noted that the Army said fallout should fade out within 2-4 weeks, so months on end of lethal radiation was something unexpected.
Later entries discuss cannibals wearing Vault jumpsuits.
the initial conceit of 200 years is probably a concession to the fact immediately during/after a nuclear war would be no fun. it seems long enough that consequences and weird shit are around, but every character wouldn't be actively dying
It makes more sense if you interpret the extremely low population numbers displayed onscreen as canonical.
The baseball stadium shantytown has 85 people in it and they don't seem to be having kids. The only conclusion is everyone is nearly sterile, so population sizes are so extremely low that cleaning up entire destroyed cities is basically impossible.
Though uh, nature should have destroyed a lot more stuff. This only makes sense if nuclear winter also reduced basically all weather.
Oh shoot, yeah.
But like, were there even more than 4? That's not even a village or a hamlet. In terms of pure population size, they're basically just a campsite.
Something screwy is going on, so, infertility makes the most sense imo
In response, I present Todd Howard's Razor: never attribute to subtle worldbuilding that which is adequately explained by bad worldbuilding.
Doyalism is boring though! I prefer to torture a Watsonian interpretation of a setting until it makes sense, no matter how badly it's written.
And those cities are lucky that high level creatures like Deathclaws tend to mind their own business in their territory because holy shit if an endgame Deathclaw wandered into Boston it would fuggin solo Diamond City
I don’t know the lore of FO4 but since it’s post apocalypse wouldn’t there be roaming bandits and splintered factions which would make unification and community planning difficult?
If the reason for the bombing was due to government bullshit then people would likely be very reluctant to form larger communities.
Fallout is a stagnant setting that can't move on past the "collecting canned food and le bottlecaps while being a gun toting nation unto oneself" vibes or it'd lose its deeply entrenched audience that wants more of that forever and ever.
The original game makes fun of an America that became trapped in 1950s vibes out of some sense of normalcy and nostalgia and the gamers that live fallout now are trapped in 1950s vibes out of some sense of normalcy and nostalgia
The worst thing about it was that the series moved past that in Fallout 2. There was even a quest where the PC finds a giant stash of bottlecaps which proved to be worthless because people in Fallout 2 don't use bottlecaps as currency.
I remember that.
Even the first game had signs of society moving past the scavenging stages after the nuclear war, which makes all the after-the-fact excuses made for the setting still being in its scavenging stages game after game for centuries afterward more and more hollow.
Okay, so then stop moving the timeline forward! Just cover the adventures of survivors in Arkansas and Michigan and Alaska and Louisiana, all within the same few decades. No need for hundreds of years to pass and make the setting into an anachronism of itself.
Meanwhile, my passion project, Fallout: Great Midwest sits as a mishmash of drawings and design documents on my hard drive
I must have spent actual weeks of time putting it together and my professor said it was the most effort he'd ever seen anyone put into a project
In fairness, there's a big difference between
and
You can still get out a broom in the house you have, though. That's my biggest problem with Fallout's set design: the settlements are all grimy and covered in dirt. People are sleeping next to literal piles of trash. Nobody thought to give the place a scrub in 200 years? It takes like an hour.
I understand why huge parts of the countryside haven't been explored and might still have skeletons on toilets, but the inhabited places shouldn't look like the bombs just fell.
Also if you try to form alliances with other villages, synthetic humans will assassinate people and conduct black flag operations to ensure no actual power can form. Or the faction with the most guns by several armories worth “enclave” rolls up to take your shit.
I know it might be over done but maybe adding in Yellowstone would be a cool addition to the map
also honest hearts leans far more into the great white saviour trope than savages with its native depiction
it also deconstructs it a bit because Joshua Graham is clearly unbalanced and just likes killing and has picked this cause because it squares that with his conscience.
Meaningfully Graham is the only character of honest hearts. All the plot points are only really there for the narrative purpose of developing Graham's character and representing aspects of him. Daniel representing his conscience, and the white legs representing his past misdeads
it's a story that works far better read symbolically and as metaphor than as literal
Bethesda cannot and will not care about writing a good story. Their company has never really done the writing part well and never had much of an original idea. Morrowind is the high water mark of their creativity as a company and what is that really? A revenge story about a god that some other gods failed to kill, in a setting where you replace trees with mushrooms half the time and there are big insects.
Besides this one outlier, none of their games have had good writing and have leaned in on gimmicks. Large worlds to find generic quests in. Randomly generated quests to fill those large worlds with some sort of content. Samey, boring dungeons that are populated by one of three enemy factions. It's all the fucking same shit, different game
And Fallout? They mindlessly copy the aesthetic and that's it. It could be 2 million years in the future and there would still be skeletons on toilets and in office chairs next to working CRT computers. It's the best they can do, copy what other people have set up/written.
Stop buying this crap. I don't care if boycotting works or not just stop spending your money on mediocre garbage.
These critiques are like 15 years old at this point. Yes, Oblivion with guns and Skyrim with guns have trash worldbuilding that makes no sense. I'm not sure what else do you expect from a game dev where their last good game is more than 2 decades old.
I really love the aesthetics and a lot of the worldbuilding of Fallout, but so much of it is just nonsense, especially when Bethesda writes it. There is no good reason for the Brotherhood of Steel to exist in West Virginia or for the Institute to also be making super mutants in Boston but they're marketable so they have to be in the games.
People obsessed with what rather than why. World building literally doesn't matter. There are story telling reasons for why the world is this way. It's telling a soon after post apocalypse story regardless of whether they say it's 200 years or 1000 years after the bombs. Sure "the lore" doesn't make sense but who cares? The writing is bad for other reasons than nerd bs like "um actually human zombies made by radiation couldn't exist, skeletons would deteriate if left in the open for 200 years, etc..."
This way of reading stories aggravates me to no end. They wanted the reader to be reminded of the sins of the past at every corner. They wanted American capitalism and fascism to strike fear into the players heart. Did they succeed? Not really in fallout 4.
They wanted the reader to be reminded of the sins of the past at every corner. They wanted American capitalism and fascism to strike fear into the players heart. Did they succeed? Not really in fallout 4.
By Fallout 76, the "nuclear war is frightening to even imagine" vibes of The Glow in Fallout 1 had been completely swept away in favor of "LOL GET TEH LAUNCH CODES TO NUKE TEH MAP TO SPAWN LE EPIC LOOT" 
Makes perfect sense. Those thirteen colonies were built on genocide, with slavery and support from existing European empires. Without those, particularly the first two, the US is nothing. Bethesda is holding up a mirror: this is what you would achieve without socialism, America, if you couldn't exploit the resources, strength, and minds of those you have oppressed for centuries.
As great as that would be, I think you're really giving them too much credit. Fallout 4 is shanty towns because Fallout 1 and 2 were, that's as much thought as went into it.
Also the Fallout setting is full of slavery.
Are there actually people playing Bethesda games for the plot?
Their only game with any passable writing was Morrowind. All the games after that were basically just sandboxes for mods.
look, Captain Picard told me to close shut the jaws of Oblivion and I'm not about to disobey a direct order
a) diamond city is dope
b) nuclear war is extraordinarily underappreciated. like 0.3% of the former population is dwelling in a tomb, there literally haven't been enough people to clean up the trash and loot all the stuff. the fertility rate and life expectancy are rock fucking bottom. and fallout is optimistic about what humanity could do after global thermonuclear war. most analysts are going to be surprised a viable population survives the collapse, fallout, and famine at all.
c) i think the fire and radiation would put a pretty severe damper on the capability of natural processes to overgrow and degrade the ruins---which also have shittons of metal and concrete in them which have a life expectancy well over 200 years. ecological collapse will have fucked over the termites molds and bacteria so now a structure that should've rotted might stand up decades longer
d) the energy/powerlines stuff is waved away by miniature modular nuclear technology. a tiny fission/fusion reactor could keep a light on a loooooong time, though any lights people weren't actively replacing should be out
