Fallout LORE is far from being perfect

[Ultramutant]

Hello. I’ve been thinking about this topic quite a while, but haven’t seen anyone talking about it. The premise is this: despite people praising it, Fallout lore is not well written. I’m not talking about Bethesda’s Fallout for obvious reasons. And I will mostly talk about Fallout 1 & 2.
Important: I do not blame original decelopers for they still did a great job in creating the Fallout universe.

HISTORY

I like the idea of retrofuturism where there is no complex electronics and overpowered cyperpank stuff. Fallout managed to do it. Unfortunately, there’s too little information about pre-war society.

MAIN IDEAS

Vaults: Fallout 1 was already on the verge of silliness & unrealism. Some say it is Encalave’s idea ro test people in bunkers. But I think it’s still stupid. It’s not how experiments work and I hardly believe Enclave would get anything useful from them. I think those ”experiments” are possible only if the government in prewar America was completely corrupt and dystopian and people didn’t care at all about anything.

Ghouls: feral ghouls are just radiation zombies. Non-ferals are intelligent zombies (though I think radiation makes them more unique). Even original developers didn’t agree on how they came to being. Van Buren wanted to retcon them.

Supermutants: orcs (though from mysterious FEV).

Brotherhood of Steel: mysterious and secret (fantasy) knights who fight orcs and don’t allow anyone to join their club.

Enclave: generic bad guys with strange motivation. Why do they want to poison all water and kill all people? I don’t think there’s a big generic difference between ”muties” and enclave personnel. There’s too few enclave members to populate the world.

FALLOUT 1
This waterchip malfunction ”experiment” is very strange.

FALLOUT 2
There is too much time skipped since the end of Fallout 1 (though I heard it was changed involuntarily). Anna’s ghost, Hakunin. I already mentioned enclave. 4 mafia families in one city? Intelligent deathclawes? Don’t think I have to continue for many people have already discussed these issues.

FALLOUT NV
A choice between 4 different factions is an improvement over previous games. It could be such a good game only if they had more time and didn’t have Gamebryo…

FALLOUT VAN BUREN
I’m a bit skeptical about Van Buren. From what I know, it seems like VB is more like silly Fallout 2 (crazy german scientist in space, supermutants who live on a dam, other small things). I think that NV with some original ideas from VB would be the best thing because I feel like NV is the most mature Fallout game, but it lacks new gimmicks and ideas.

It’s not a fully comprehensive analysis of Fallout Lore. Many things in this post are not mentioned. I’m just tired of Nuka-Cola and power armor fanboys. My opinions is that people compare older games to newer ones and start to think better about older ones. But imagine what would fallout 4, 5, 6 etc from original developers look like…
And I also just wanted to hear your take on the topic. Please share your opinion (for expample how would you change the lore)

 

[TheGM]

Unfortunately, there’s too little information about pre-war society.

which is a good thing. If everything is shrouded in mystery you have plenty a leeway to pull things from a the depth of the pre-war world. If you tell everybody this is how this works, you set up a set of rules the world runs on, which makes some of the more erroneous asspulls look even more absurd.

Sometimes you should keep how the sausage is made a secret.

 

[Ultramutant]

which is a good thing. If everything is shrouded in mystery you have plenty a leeway to pull things from a the depth of the pre-war world. If you tell everybody this is how this works, you set up a set of rules the world runs on, which makes some of the more erroneous asspulls look even more absurd.

Sometimes you should keep how the sausage is made a secret.

Yes, but it makes the world less believable. Why didn’t they created nuclear cars earlier? Didn’t they already have nuclear power? Why are bombs so weak? Why so few people went to bunkers (during the cold war so many had own bunkers)? What’s the matter with the vaults? And other questions

 

[Norzan]

A lot of the minute details of the pre-war world don't matter because the series is (at least in Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas) about human society after a nuclear apocalypse. Wasting time explaining things that don't really matter for the post-apocalyptic human civilization is just wasting time that could be used to develop said civilization.

 

[TheGM]

Yes, but it makes the world less believable.

Ah yes, people should be well versed it the world that was cleansed in a atomic fire centuries prior. I for one really want to know the tax laws of the commonwealths prior to the apocalypse.

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

I agree that some people (particularly people who claim to be big fans of the originals but have mostly just played New Vegas) overrate the original games in terms of the quality of the writing. I still think they are miles ahead of what Bethesda has given us, but you’re right, they’re far from perfect.

But a lot of what you wrote isn’t even an accurate representation of the games.

Vaults: Fallout 1 was already on the verge of silliness & unrealism. Some say it is Encalave’s idea ro test people in bunkers. But I think it’s still stupid. It’s not how experiments work and I hardly believe Enclave would get anything useful from them. I think those ”experiments” are possible only if the government in prewar America was completely corrupt and dystopian and people didn’t care at all about anything.

I’m not sure if you’re saying that the Vault experiments were a Fallout 1 thing, but if you are, that isn’t true. The idea for Vaults being experiments was come up with during development of Fallout 2. Also, not sure what you mean by “that’s not how experiments work.” The Vaults are just about the best way to conduct a social experiment, considering so many factors are under your control.

Ghouls: feral ghouls are just radiation zombies.

Feral ghouls (if you can call them that) are hardly present in the original games. The whole point of ghouls is that they look like zombies, but they’re still people (most of them are assholes in Fallout 1 though).

Supermutants: orcs (though from mysterious FEV).

Not really? They aren’t portrayed the way orcs tend to be in fantasy (monolithically stupid and evil). This is a better criticism for the Bethesda games.

Brotherhood of Steel: mysterious and secret (fantasy) knights who fight orcs and don’t allow anyone to join their club.

Again, more of a criticism of Fallout 3 and 4. They don’t even really know about the mutants in the first game, and they have to be convinced to go fight them. In Fallout 2 they don’t even mention super mutants.

Enclave: generic bad guys with strange motivation. Why do they want to poison all water and kill all people? I don’t think there’s a big generic difference between ”muties” and enclave personnel. There’s too few enclave members to populate the world.

They want to poison the water in Fallout 3, not 2. In 2 they want to release their poison FEV into the jet stream. And they explain why. To kill everyone that’s been mutated by the war. Of course there isn’t likely a significant difference between wastelanders and those who survived on the Oil Rig. But there’s probably more of a difference than there are between Germans and Jews, and look how that turned out. It’s not unrealistic to be genocidal. I do find the Enclave to be not particularly compelling a faction though, in Fallout 2 at least.

This waterchip malfunction ”experiment” is very strange.

Not only were there no experiments in Fallout 1, but this isn’t even the experiment. The experiment was to keep the Vault closed for like 200 years or something (as opposed to “control” Vaults like Vault City that got an all-clear signal about 20 years after the war).

4 mafia families in one city?

What’s wrong with this? New York has five.


Most of your other points are fair.

 

[Baron of Arizona]

Since people here point out issues with your arguments already, I'll simply say what I would change with the lore.
Entirety of San-Fran. City build by chinese survivors could be such unique location and then they made it into... Big Kung-Fu reference with Not-Scientology church. Even if we accept the silliness of it, the place doesn't feel like a part of the F2 map at all. They also have power armor and very advanced guns, but barely uses them there for some reason. I wish Bethesda would let Avellone to nuke the damn thing like he wanted to.
Arroyo is just dumb. They sent us to look for GECK when all they need was to change location. Also how vault dwellers turned tribals over one generation? Elder is supposed to be daughter of the Vault dweller, right?
I really wish devs had more time to think about those ideas and came up with something better then going with the flow because of the release schedule.

 

[TheGM]

They sent us to look for GECK when all they need was to change location. Also how vault dwellers turned tribals over one generation? Elder is supposed to be daughter of the Vault dweller, right?

But somehow found time to build a Olmec Temple in Oregon.

 

[Ultramutant]

Thank you all who wrote here. I must admit that I created this thread hastily and forgot to mention a few things (like no consensus on ghouls’ origin and if radiation and other laws the same as in our Universe). I also mixed up some things, thanks for correcting me.

I think it’s a consensus that Fallout died. It's sad. But I’m still not sure if it would be as good as original ones if it was by Interplay. Because there already was BoS before Van Buren. Fallout 2 wasn’t also very serious game. And in Van Buren there were some strange concepts. But I guess maybe they would change VB while developing it or the next Fallout would be better.

Also, some people say that Bethesda brought Fallout to masses and that’s why they’re not so bad. I disagree. Bethesda gave people its feces. The growth in popularity was too sudden, and there was too much time in between the old games and F3. But the main reason is that people either don’t appreciate Fallout, or don’t understand it and think Power Armor and Nuka-Cola is all that’s there is. They just don’t belong in the community. In a better world without Bethesda owning Fallout, the franchise would gradually gain popularity.

So there’s no way that Bethesda would give Fallout rights to people with hands and a functional brain. Yeah, there can be Fallout NV ”2”, but as I know the show ruined the West Coast. And even if it came out, when would it happen? 10 years from now? So my question is what are people from NMA going to do? Maybe some of you should create your own lore or somerhing. I saw a thread with a similar question about creating a game, but the answer was ”we can’t draw”. But you can create a story and for example write a book. Or request AI to generate images. It won’t be perfect, but you can add description to it to elaborate.

Condolences to everyone who watched the show. Amen.

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

Honestly, if Bethesda let Obsidian make a “New Vegas 2” I doubt they’d even care if it just completely ignored the events of the show.

 

[Risewild]

Honestly, if Bethesda let Obsidian make a “New Vegas 2” I doubt they’d even care if it just completely ignored the events of the show.

I think they would care. Because if they didn't care about "their own" fallout then they wouldn't have limited or forbidden Obsidian from using some locations, factions, DLC endings or even told Obsidian that New Vegas had to chronologically be after the events of Fallout 3.

 

[Norzan]

I think they would care. Because if they didn't care about "their own" fallout then they wouldn't have limited or forbidden Obsidian from using some locations, factions, DLC endings or even told Obsidian that New Vegas had to chronologically be after the events of Fallout 3.

Didn't Bethesda forbade Obsidian from referencing San Francisco because Bethesda apparently has intentions of doing something with it down the line? I recall there was gonna be a line of dialogue in New Vegas claiming San Francisco was destroyed, but Todd shot it down.

So my question is what are people from NMA going to do?

Do what exactly? We have no effect whatsoever on the future of the franchise. We can either make mods for the games or discuss stuff about the franchise, that's really all we can do.

I myself consider the franchise dead, i'm still here because i'm a fan of three of the games in the franchise.

 

[TheKingofVault14]

But somehow found time to build a Olmec Temple in Oregon.

Wasn't it stated by one of the developers on that game, that The Temple of Trials was a pre-war library or museum of some sorts?

Do what exactly? We have no effect whatsoever on the future of the franchise. We can either make mods for the games or discuss stuff about the franchise, that's really all we can do.

Heh, it's funny you bring that up @Norzan because honestly, I think the last time NMA had any REAL effect on the franchise whatsoever, was Fallout Tactics. And that's thanks to the famous(or rather infamous) NMAer Roshambo, for being the one of the most vocal of them all at the time. I mean my gosh, he's one of the reasons why we even had a world map in Tactics to begin with!

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

I think they would care. Because if they didn't care about "their own" fallout then they wouldn't have limited or forbidden Obsidian from using some locations, factions, DLC endings or even told Obsidian that New Vegas had to chronologically be after the events of Fallout 3.

Ok, fair enough. I guess what I meant was, if New Vegas 2 had the NCR at full force and Shady Sands was referenced as a thriving city, I don’t think Bethesda would really care. They’d hand wave it away as “oh, the NCR rebuilt themselves in the couple years after the events of the show.” They’d still want everything to be “canon”, but I don’t think “internal consistency” is in their vocabulary.

 

[TheGM]

Wasn't it stated by one of the developers on that game, that The Temple of Trials was a pre-war library or museum of some sorts?

No idea. My personal head cannon is that it is part of a mini golf course.

 

[Ultramutant]

Do what exactly? We have no effect whatsoever on the future of the franchise. We can either make mods for the games or discuss stuff about the franchise, that's really all we can do.

I myself consider the franchise dead, i'm still here because i'm a fan of three of the games in the franchise.

I meant do a game or a book or a story. Or at least a script for the game. Create your own lore or something. Fallout has no future. And you are also restricted by Bethesda’s copyright. So as you yourself said, people can only do mods and discuss. But I don’t think there is much left to discuss. And mods are taking long time to make and the games are 10-25 years old. The community won’t grow, because IMO it’s hard to play older Fallout games. Also, mods will have lower quality than original products. Even if not, then they’ll be smaller by size. NMA will die out

Original developers liked Wasteland. They created Fallout.

 

[Risewild]

Wasn't it stated by one of the developers on that game, that The Temple of Trials was a pre-war library or museum of some sorts?

No idea. My personal head cannon is that it is part of a mini golf course.

It's the Fallout Bible that mentions the possible origin of the Temple of Trials:

BTW, the Temple of Trials was built on the ruins of an older Pre-War building, most likely a church. The carved head at the entrance and some of the carvings/wall decorations on the three sub-levels were done by the Arroyo inhabitants.

Anyway, the story I'm sticking to in the official universe is that the Temple of Trials is actually built on an existing abandoned church - or museum.

 

[dreamcatcher40drank]

authentic

 

[The_Proletarian]

One thing I always wondered is why they have both fission batteries and microfusion. With fusion available why was there resource war? That's my number one lore bit I'm confused about.

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

One thing I always wondered is why they have both fission batteries and microfusion. With fusion available why was there resource war? That's my number one lore bit I'm confused about.

Yeah, tell me about it. People will say that that technology was introduced too late to save the world, but I feel like that’s a cop out. I like to think that the energy needs of the world just kept increasing exponentially so that even a highly efficient energy source like fusion power still required ungodly amounts of uranium/plutonium to keep everyone satisfied. Thats kind of a cop out too, but whatever.

Given that oil-powered technology was so fuel-inefficient in the Fallout world that they had pretty much run out of oil before the end of the 21st century, one could argue that their nuclear technology was similarly inefficient.