Broken Lore in Fallout 4

[Wolfmod]

Who is the Lone Survivor? He/She woke up one morning and had breakfast. Later that day he/she woke up again - his/her spouse had been murdered, his/her child had been kidnapped and the world had suffered 200 years of Armageddon. But the Lone Survivor hadn't. It was natural for survivors in the first 20 years to be suffering from PTD disorder and content themselves with dragging a sheet of old tin over themselves to survive. The "Mad Max" raider-style of anarchy would prevail with enclaves of tribes surrounded by walls of tires and scrap fencing would be normal for all. However, their children would grow up without a sense of loss and very quickly these raider tribes would unite and form alliances to increase their power base and to protect farmers and their farm plots so as to provide non-contaminated food and clean water for the tribe. They would not kill settlers and scavengers - they would enslave them to work on their farms.

 

However, Bethesda ignored any sense of realism to put the Lone Survivor within a culture of 'Firefly-style' ravers. Fair enough. They also messed with the Lone Survivor's missing time. 2015 is exactly 200 years after the last Napoleonic battle of 1815 and while our ancestors from that time did not have the same devastation to deal with the idea that after 200 years no one in Diamond City has mastered concrete walls to extend the city, using brooms, or replacing the crap buildings with brick and mortar is... silly. Surely, someone 100 years ago thought that decontamination services and land reclamation was a good business to get into.

 

Still, Bethesda wanted to create a post-apocalyptic world with a lot less of the "post" and they did it. But when Piper interviews our hero, he/she says, "You are living in tin shacks and killing each other" and so Bethesda set the bar for the Lone Survivor to make a difference. It is for this reason that the LS is building settlements and offering shelter to the mysterious settlers - (settlers from where? Where are your parents, your grandparents, your great grand parents? How did you and your families survive for these last 200 years - 200 years of being lost, how did that work?). And while I can accept all of this strangeness concerning what others have done - the raiders, the settlers, the struggling farmers, and the factions, I cannot accept these inconsistencies when applied to my own behavior. I'm used to normal and find it strange that the people of Diamond City are still living in tin shacks - I make that quite clear to Piper.

 

So when mod authors and players alike try to add material that is "lore-friendly" by rejecting brand new shiny paint jobs for power armor in preference for faded, scratched, rust covered ones any sense of immersion I've gleaned goes right down the gurgler. I'm standing there with spray can in hand, the paint fumes are still in the air and I stand back and my brand new paint job is transformed into a faded, scratched disaster. What lore is this friendly to?

 

I'm cutting down trees to make furniture... oops, I accidently vomited over that, crapped and p***** over it, tore the fabric and broke the drawers. Like melting down wrenches and screwdrivers to make old aircraft wings for roofs, this is the lore of a scavenger who drags homes furnishings from rubbish piles. The LS has already told Piper that it is not his lore. What he/she makes and builds is new.

[Moraelin]

Well, if it makes any difference, I never understood why everything ever since FO3 supposedly had to be rusty, torn, etc, or "OMG IT'S NOT LORE FRIENDLY." It's not even just counting the years or anything. Ever since Fallout 1, way back in ye olde Black Isle days, it has been established that for example shiny new weapons are manufactured by the Gun Runners. Factions like the future NCR were also building shiny new concrete buildings, with pre-war tech. That's not even Bethesda stuff, it's the lore from the original makers of the series.

 

Only apparently they forgot how to do that, in the decades since the events of FO1.

 

But, in the end, lore aside, to each their own. I may not understand the mental process behind it, but I'm not gonna tell people what they should like. If someone likes rust that much, and that's what they're willing to put a lot of work into, they're certainly within their rights to.

 

Mods which add cleaned up textures or pre-war beds, furniture, good walls, etc DO exist too. So in the end, as usual, download what you like and ignore what you don't.

 

Or if you really want to make a difference, you can just make your own mods and/or help others who want to make such mods. That's how I started in ye olde FO3 days, which also launched without a GECK, and lemme tell you it's been a lot easier than to wait for others to do whatever I wished for.

[ekRapid]

Amen

[charwo]

I will explain this simply:

Post apocalyptic fiction is BAD. It's bad for the following reason: They all take trope notes from the Road Warrior, which is just a shitty, unrealistic, hyper violent shitstorm of "Ignorance is KOOL" "Research is for NERDS!" I love me the oringial Mad Max, but with people loving Fury Road for being a glorified Roadrunner cartoon, the buying public doesn't want ANYTHING CLOSE to a realistic post-apocalypse, because it quickly becomes Apocalypse not.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ApocalypseNot

Note this isn't all Bethesda's fault, that pissant Chris Avellone came up with the Social Experiment Project to sabotage the Vault program in his wretched Fallout Bible, and hates the NCR because he wants to wallow in Anarchy and ignorance like the Nietzschian pig he his (See KOTOR II, the hag was his author avatar).

Somalia is actually good news: yes there are warlords, yes there are bandits, yes there are weaponized vehicles that would made Mad Max proud. But Somalia has come through swimmingly from state collapse. Turns out State collapse and social collapse are two very different things, and for the record Somalia had a kleptomaniacal, viscous government before 1991 very close to the Old Enclave in terms of inhumanity, corruption, greed and incompetence, and Somalia actually improved in several degrees in spite of the warlordism.

I would LOVE to see an American version of Somaliland, an autonomous part of Somalia that survived with government in tact and carved out territory that's fairly well run by regional standards, despite the warlords and such. I wanted Boston to by a Somaliland, American, free proud, self governing, and glad to be rid of the Old Enclave. I did not get this unfortunately.

[jcdenton2012]

I will explain this simply:

 

Post apocalyptic fiction is BAD. It's bad for the following reason: They all take trope notes from the Road Warrior, which is just a shitty, unrealistic, hyper violent shitstorm of "Ignorance is KOOL" "Research is for NERDS!" I love me the oringial Mad Max, but with people loving Fury Road for being a glorified Roadrunner cartoon, the buying public doesn't want ANYTHING CLOSE to a realistic post-apocalypse, because it quickly becomes Apocalypse not.

 

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ApocalypseNot

 

Note this isn't all Bethesda's fault, that pissant Chris Avellone came up with the Social Experiment Project to sabotage the Vault program in his wretched Fallout Bible, and hates the NCR because he wants to wallow in Anarchy and ignorance like the Nietzschian pig he his (See KOTOR II, the hag was his author avatar).

 

Somalia is actually good news: yes there are warlords, yes there are bandits, yes there are weaponized vehicles that would made Mad Max proud. But Somalia has come through swimmingly from state collapse. Turns out State collapse and social collapse are two very different things, and for the record Somalia had a kleptomaniacal, viscous government before 1991 very close to the Old Enclave in terms of inhumanity, corruption, greed and incompetence, and Somalia actually improved in several degrees in spite of the warlordism.

 

I would LOVE to see an American version of Somaliland, an autonomous part of Somalia that survived with government in tact and carved out territory that's fairly well run by regional standards, despite the warlords and such. I wanted Boston to by a Somaliland, American, free proud, self governing, and glad to be rid of the Old Enclave. I did not get this unfortunately.

 

You mean like Legion Territory... :pinch:

[Boombro]

 

I will explain this simply:

Post apocalyptic fiction is BAD. It's bad for the following reason: They all take trope notes from the Road Warrior, which is just a shitty, unrealistic, hyper violent shitstorm of "Ignorance is KOOL" "Research is for NERDS!" I love me the oringial Mad Max, but with people loving Fury Road for being a glorified Roadrunner cartoon, the buying public doesn't want ANYTHING CLOSE to a realistic post-apocalypse, because it quickly becomes Apocalypse not.

http://tvtropes.org/...n/ApocalypseNot

Note this isn't all Bethesda's fault, that pissant Chris Avellone came up with the Social Experiment Project to sabotage the Vault program in his wretched Fallout Bible, and hates the NCR because he wants to wallow in Anarchy and ignorance like the Nietzschian pig he his (See KOTOR II, the hag was his author avatar).

Somalia is actually good news: yes there are warlords, yes there are bandits, yes there are weaponized vehicles that would made Mad Max proud. But Somalia has come through swimmingly from state collapse. Turns out State collapse and social collapse are two very different things, and for the record Somalia had a kleptomaniacal, viscous government before 1991 very close to the Old Enclave in terms of inhumanity, corruption, greed and incompetence, and Somalia actually improved in several degrees in spite of the warlordism.

I would LOVE to see an American version of Somaliland, an autonomous part of Somalia that survived with government in tact and carved out territory that's fairly well run by regional standards, despite the warlords and such. I wanted Boston to by a Somaliland, American, free proud, self governing, and glad to be rid of the Old Enclave. I did not get this unfortunately.

I agree, humans will rise swiftly.

 

I think it more realistic to make it more like middle ages at least. None the less, humans would have built large cities, farms and etc and tamed many animals. The only concept that is funnier is zombies driving the world to it knees.

 

Have you ever saw at world end (2013)? By the same guys who made hot fuzz and Shaun of the dead? I liked that idea more, It makes more sense.

[Moraelin]

You have to remember, though, that Fallout was never supposed to be either a realistic future world, nor a world stuck in the real 50's-60's, but rather retro 50's-60's SF. Some of it is even lampshaded int the, such as the "Attack Of The Fishmen" issue of Astoundingly Awesome Stories being a blatant redo of the "Creature From The Black Lagoon" poster.

 

So I don't think realism was really high on the list of priorities there. Being just like that "bad" post-apocalypse fiction is actually intentional.

 

That said, I will concur that the whole setup made more sense in Fallout 1, which is still just 84 years after the nukes, than it makes a whole 210 years after the nukes. Plus, as I was saying, people were already starting to make new stuff, including concrete buildings and whatnot, by Fallout 2, set about 164 years after the nukes. Now in another 50 years or so, the world seems to have actually regressed, which feels kinda weird to be honest.

[Pthalo]

The series is struggling with a change of medium and it affects so many aspects of FO4. It's gone from an isometric turn-based game to a first-person real-time one. Graphics have gone from 2D images on a grid to 3D models rambling about under the guidance of a physics engine.

 

I think they're having a hard time deciding on the amount of realism they want to portray, while still honouring the game's roots. Same goes for the game's sense of humour, old perks, details of vault design, past lore/plot... I mean, you want to make a world look quite realistic when you know your players can get their/their character's face up real nice and close to squint at the details. Or actually interact with it. Achieve that, and now all the goofy sci-fi just looks...... really poorly-thought out. You want to keep those classic easter eggs in, but it's 200 years after a very-real looking nuclear blast and skeletons just do not last that long without getting raided. Cartoon violence just doesn't look cartoonish when everything's bleeding in realtime.

 

 

The clearest example of this is VATS. Makes perfect sense in a turn-based isometric setup. Conflicting and redundant to have a second, time-breaking, method of using guns in an FPS.

 

FO4 manages to hybridize by making VATS into bullet-time rather than a pause feature. I am surprised that after FO3 as a playground to encounter all these challenges, not just VATS, that FO4 has not better hybridized lore/humour/retro atompunk content with hard realism and style of play.

 

 

 

 

Caveat: I still really love the game.

Edited December 17, 2015 by Pthalo

[Raycheetah]

As a side issue regarding immersion, I've seen folks complain about the very strongly Russian Bobrov brothers in Diamond City. Where is the Russian community which explains their accents (and ostensible cultural characteristics)? This is actually explicable, to some extent, simply as a matter of perceived scale. Diamond City isn't just the handful of people the player sees, any more than the sparse few NPCs in, say, Whiterun, in Skyrim, represent the majority of the population in that setting. The Bobrovs, Cait, and the handful of Asian and Hispanic characters in Diamond City represent the (little "e") enclaves of ethnic diversity extant in contemporary Boston, and it may be presumed that those communities survived to exist in some form up to the time of FO4.

 

A more significant issue, where ethnic diversity is concerned, is self-contained vault populations. In FO3, Vault 101, with its dwindling population, still had distinctly black characters, as does Vault 81 in FO4, for example. However, the result of two centuries of (presumably) managed breeding would result in a much more homogeneous population. Short of some pretty backwards social constraints, there would be no reason to sustain separate ethnic gene pools. It's not really a big deal, but it is one of those things which, if you stop to think about it, simply shouldn't work that way.

 

I find it amusing to watch playthroughs in which the player disdains using VATS as "un-immersive." VATS is a lore-based technology which provides the Sole Survivor a plethora of useful observational data, from a statistical breakdown of the chance to hit an enemy while assisted by the Pip-Boy, to target sensing and acquisition, to alerts to some forms of danger (including detecting mines), and indicators of hostility prior to contact. I know, VATS-spamming is often seen as "cheesing" things, but then, the capabilities are there, and easily explained within the lore. Also, not every player is equally skilled with free-hand shooting, though it can be advantageous to cultivate.

 

FO4 is never going to satisfy everyone, especially where immersion is concerned. There are subtle violations of lore, such as the BoS Proctor mentioning "transistor radios," but they are either so low-key or obscure that most players will never catch them, or even care if they do. FO4 is a flawed jewel, but it's still entertaining, and at least it gives us all something to talk about. =^[.]^=

[Boombro]

 

FO4 is never going to satisfy everyone, especially where immersion is concerned

*Beth is never going to satisfy everyone, especially where immersion is concerned.