Are you happy for Fallout to remain Post-post apocalyptic?

Fallout is all about player choice and consequence for me; it's an idea of allowing the player to make decisions in an open world, in terms of gameplay systems, story and imagined role, and to see the consequences of those choices. You don't have to be a Fallout game to do this, but I've always felt Fallout handled it in a distinct style that pushed combat to the back of the focus and allowed for a lot of very legitimate, alternate play styles.

That said, essential to the Fallout experience, for me, is the post-apocalyptic theme. I'm not so much opposed to civilisation in the games as I am to a modern-day world. The idea of a society built on the bones of another far more successful one is fascinating to me, and in addition to providing a familiar-yet-different universe to live out a character, Fallout's setting allows for commentary on human nature, political organisation, human rights, the value of morality and ethics, etc. Beyond merely allowing for said commentaries, those commentaries are actually essential and integral to the Fallout world at a fundamental level, and that's something I don't think many other games can do.

 

I would like to see both actually which can easily be done with prequels and sequels, but then again i dont want Fallout to become the next Zelda where no one knows what happened when...
People rebuild so there is no way to avoid the rebuilding of society and technology, but then again another devastating war could happen

 

As far as NCR goes, I think it was a nice faction. I loved the idea that they were essentially america with a post-apocalyptic twist. But I think that 2 and a half (the last half was Van Buren) games where they play a central role is good enough. I think it is time to focus on other things. It would be nice to see maybe 2 or 3 NPC's from the NCR in future games but I think it is time to focus on new ideas.

 

yes, i always thank US that we are not barbarian
but seriusly, where do you get the idea that without US we ill decend to barbarism?

it dont matter where you live you are still saying stupid things

 

I never said that without the US Argentina would descend into barbarism.

But with a complete international systems collapse, most countries and nations would. I'd find it hard to fathom any country keeping its current level of civilization after a nuclear war in the west.

 

There's no point in stacking campaign after campaign (Fallout 4, Fallout 5, Fallout 6...), except for the sake of being thoughtless. Once a story arch is complete, move on. So, Fallout 4, would be approached as the first Fallout. Refining the rpg elements and setting, re-imagine the original. People and places might change, but Harold, fallout, and some incarnation of the Vault 13 jumpsuit would be featured in each. This way, the Vaults remain mysterious, and one wonders if Harold isn't the final Buddha.

So, am I happy to see that we're stuck in the same time line? No.

 

I'd hate for Fallout to be like Zelda where each is basically the same with one or two gameplay changes. Same kid, same jerk, same princess, same shit, different game. There's plenty of room in America for Fallout to explore new areas and themes. Hell, I'd be happy to keep Fallout games made centering around smaller areas of Fallout 1 size, exploring and interacting with communities forming. I also wouldn't mind a feature where you get to see what happens with these communities as they expand. You make your choices, do the things, and then the game skips forward a few years to show how things have gone. Similar to how the Fable games have done things, only without being, y'know, Fable.

 

I believe that time should advance a little bit more, but that would be the limit, the reason I like this is because I like the idea of small tribal groups fighting over high-tec stuff, yeah i'll stick with the group who says fallout should have a year limit and their not allowed past it, because North America is such a large place, they don't need a bigger time span, they can just go 'Hey instead of advancing the game 20 years in the future, how about we go 300 miles east and see what we can do with that!'.

Although I know that wouldn't happen, knowing the situation.

 

All the Fallout games are, by definition, post-apocalyptic, even as civilizations rebuild. Agencies like NCR, Caesar's Legion, the BOS, etc., are bound to grow in power over the years. But, remember the opening line of the narrations, "War, war never changes." There will be continuing conflicts between factions that grow enough in size to meet each other in the wasteland. There can be growth over the course of a few games, but a big enough war between them can bring things back to the level of FO1. Rome wasn't built in a day. It wasn't destroyed overnight either, but there's always that possibility.

A future entry in the series could have a protagonist caught up in such a conflict. After that, we could have a new vault dweller leaving a vault as a scout and exploring a new, and completely different post apocalyptic wasteland.

 

Well if Fallout stoped being post apocaliptic how would you call it? Reconstruct? NCR Wolrd Police? Fallout 4000?

 

Well, civilization historically never "progressed" consistently. There were always golden ages and dark ages. Societies in Fallout wouldn't magically be an exception to this iron clad law. The Mutants were on the verge of nationhood before they were wiped out, Caesar's Legion is in a preeminent position to wipe out the NCR if it holds the momentum. I don't think the post apocalypse is going anywhere.

Doesn't even have to be that extreme. Broken Hills is a perfect example of how unlikely a small, self-sustaining civilization will be to build in the wastes.

 

less

I would really like to see a fallout where less is the way of things. Where like in [Mad Max: The road Warrior] you've got two shotgun shells and a knife and you are already rich. And maybe it doesn't have to be a prequel, but just set somewhere less urban like, i dunno, Nebraska. It's not like the scenery is all that interesting any way dirt, rocks, rubble. Though I would prefer along the Canadian border somewhere, post apocalyptic mounties could be hilarious if done right. But, back to my point, there could still be weapons, just a lot more melee and less guns and the guns that others have should be almost out of ammo as well. At least at lower levels. I had hoped that I might find it in FNV, i even didn't choose guns nor energy weapons as a skill, but was still given a pistol, found a laser, and repaired a sub machine gun, and then was handed a rifle by Sunny with a bunch of ammo.

It would be nice if the game was set somewhere actually desolate, the desert just seems too alive in the new games [maybe even in the older ones too], I live in the desert now and there isn't a bunch of people wandering through it now and we have potable water at our disposal.

 

I do want the series to continue with the West Coast, watch it be rebuilt and the problems that come along with it.

But on the other hand i still like the Capital Wasteland, if they went back and did things different (even thought I think bringing clean water to the wasteland is pretty important...) and more grandiose without being too epic 9like fantasy RPGS nowadays). the capital Wasteland has a lot of potential and could be good if the factions are better represented.

 

I think, assuming that the NCR ending is canon (would make sense), they're getting to the point where they can start to develop their own technology and now have enough transportation range that they can start to colonize parts of the world that have up until now been untouched by 'civilized' cultures, probably now being looked at in a resource struggle to fight off the still-tough Legion.

As a result, the next Fallout game could start pretty much anywhere (well, I'd honestly expect within the western hemisphere/Europe). We could even have an FO3-style immersive introductory section where the protagonist grows up as a tribal in some remote part of the world that suddenly (at some determinate point in the protagonist's life, perhaps upon reaching the beginning of the real game) gets visited by the NCR/Legion who now want to exploit the region for some reason.

With this in mind, we could visit multiple parts of the world plausibly and introduce new technology to the player without having to continually excavate old world prototypes (via research and production facilities of groups like the followers, gun runners, NCR and legion), keeping the survivalist aspect of the game together since the protagonist is probably considered an ignorant savage by all the more modern groups for at least the first part of the game. And since both the NCR and Legion are trying to exploit the protagonist's home in this thought experiment, there might actually be room for more than one morally 'right' choice in the game.

 

Just posted something about this in another thread, then decided to do a bit more reading and found this one.

In terms of how civilized the world is, Fallout 2 was probably even more civilized than NV. I know the game has weathered a lot of complaints regarding that, but I felt it was done well. It explored a lot of issues that are relevant to post-apocalyptic society in a timeline-appropriate way - the world shouldn't look the same 160 years after the apocalypse as it would 16 years after. In FO2 you had slavers, racists, ghouls, all the problems of a world without unified government but what is essentially city-states with competing interests.

NV was a little less civilized because it involved an essentially productive, America-like NCR encroaching into unclaimed territory. I agree that the problem is that the timeline is too far advanced now. Nevada was unclaimed by any large faction, but 200 years after the bombs fell, it is still fairly developed, so it loses some of the pioneering aspect that it could have had.

I also agree that our world's history is one of fluctuations. It could be interesting to see a post-post-post apocalyptic game, where the NCR is fragmenting apart and people are once again left to fend for themselves. That might be the only viable way to portray a truly ruined world in the year 2300, IMO.

Or we could have a game where your character has to travel through a radioactive no-man's-land that really has been untouched by civilization. Perhaps an area where there was a concentration of power plants that melted down, or a region of nuclear waste dumps. Or a region that was already emptied of technology before the war - what kind of civilization would pop up there after? In the Fallout storyline, peak oil was impacting America hard. I could see entire regions becoming fairly depopulated as people moved closer to cities and services that were no longer available in their area. What about nuclear meltdowns? Some regions of America are thick with nuclear power plants, like the upper half of Illinois, which has 10. In Fallout 2 we see one that is struggling and it's being maintained to the best of their abilities...what about an area that was covered with them, and heavily damaged during the war? It could easily become an unrecoverable nuclear wasteland, and a game in which your character has to travel into it could be a lot of fun.

 

Sorry but you obviously don't know anything about nuclear energy, you should read something about it,
At least wikipedia article or some mild science book.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown

You see nuclear meltdown doesn't contaminate the environment, what contaminates the environment is explosion of reactor because of steam from cooling system (Chernobyl) and even that isn't so bad as it looks, in fact the land is habitable very soon after that and even nuclear waste isn't such an issue because only few metres of dirt can be used as good isolation material to contain this kind of "threat".

What could cause a contamination on such a grand scale would be a massive testing of nuclear weapons (actually more of the artificial radiation in our environment is caused by this then by Chernobyl, Fukushima and TMI combined).

 

Its honestly a shame that the planned Fallout Van Buren was never released as Avellone also brought up the fact that at some point the post apocalyptic atmosphere would be lost

"Someone should drop a load of nuclear bombs again." and that was sort of the purpose of BOMB001.
Not just the plot device of Van Buren but also a way to reset the Fallout universe a little to maintain the post apocalyptic vibe.

Whatever the player did to prevent the launches, at least several missiles would be launched.

I fear that if Bethesda's writers would do something like the results would be very underwhelming, no clear long term results of such an impact and other consequences as the danger of nuclear weaponry has been really downplayed by them in the past.

Personally I do think there should be something like this again if they want to main the Fallout atmosphere of FO1, 2, and FNV, but not on the level that for example the entire NCR is out.
That would feel more like a cheap excuse to pretend that the last two hundred years never happened.

Other solution would be to set future games before FO1, between FO1 and FO2, or between FO2 and FNV.
If games do take place after FNV I don't think the leap in time should be decades again, years at best.

 

Well I have to say you'r right, we need either prequel or some kind of reset.

 

I know many people don't share my opinion, but I'd like for Fallout to go on with the post-post-apoc feel.
Sure, you may lose some of the fallouty feel, but a Gamebryo game (or whatever the engine would be used) that is a prequel to Fallout (2) would be horrific, if you ask me. It would ruin my fond memories.

So I guess Obsidian/Bethesda should go on chronologically as the series has been going so far - so that in some future game we may see trees and green fields again etc. or as civilization develops bigger conflicts etc.

As for the reset, it could be refreshing, but not something global. As Dutch said, something like BOMB001 would be refreshing for the series, but not on the global scale.

I know people don't approve much of the Fallout 3, and Mothership Zeta especially, but remember that Death Ray cannon at the end of Zeta, how it was shot on some part of America? It wasn't global, but it was certainly cataclysmic for that part of the world.
Also (again in Fallout 3), you find a nuke storage, and moreover, you find one nuke Control Tower (something like that) which fires ICBMs...somewhere (China, I presume). Well, something like that fired (only this time vice-versa) could make some sort of reset.
Again, I don't approve of Fallout 3 and most of its contents, but well, it's just a thought.

 

Having the next game pick up not far off from where NV ended, with the war between NCR and Ceaser escalating; one group (or both groups) gain access to some sort of nuclear device; The NCR find some Enclave or BOS weapon or something the Enclave or BOS scavenged/repaired/made and and Caesar finds something similar and repairs it; through the course of the game, you get caught up in it, and devices are detonated and a lot of people die, and the wastes get that much more dangerous.