200 years is too long

[gyashaa]

Seriously, it seems like cultural evolution simply came to an abrupt halt after the bombs hit. I'm okay with lots of 50s stuff a little bit after the bombs but 200 YEARS?? Come on. Look at how much our culture has changed in only 50. There should be new music created by the people in the wasteland, new fashions, new buildings, new art, etc. But no. People are still listening to the same old thing, wearing the same old clothes, wearing the same 200 year old haircuts, using the same old technology. I know this isn't everyone like raiders or the institute. But look at the Triggermen! Were they trying to look exactly like the mafia or was it just a coincidence? Where is the innovation? I think 200 years is enough for the wasteland to not even be a "wasteland" anymore. The game should've been set maybe 50 years after the bombs hit. What do you guys think?

[Ethreon]

Humanity came to a literal halt. No evolution was made aside from very isolated pockets (enclave mainly, since BoS are simply tech hunter-gatherers). This is the initial tone of the game as well, which wanted to created intended to be a light-hearted post-apocalypse with loads of references, jokes, and some dark tones here and there (unlike last games which seem to become more serious). I don't know for others, but changing the music or generic art style would make this completely into another game which would NOT be Fallout. Not for me at least, as the current game already alienated part of me. If trend continues, I feel like next one will be skipped on my part.

[BrknSoul]

When a group is focused on survival, cutural evolution tends to cease. There's no time to hold a concert or paint pretty pictures when you're fending off raiders every other day.

[Kalell]

I think the idea is that humanity is just now starting to recover from the war. It's a bit harder to tell now, but the world was seriously messed up by the bombs. There were supposedly lots of earthquakes and even volcanoes on top of the initial destruction. What you see in the Glowing Sea was likely what most of the world was like for the first 100 years or so after the war. It's amazing that anyone outside of the vaults survived at all.

[Spacemunkey79]

200 years is ridiculous to still be squatting in craters. Bethesda is stuck on the 1950's meets mad max,and showing a functioning society and rule of law means less npc's to shoot.

[Ethreon]

200 years is ridiculous to still be squatting in craters. Bethesda is stuck on the 1950's meets mad max,and showing a functioning society and rule of law means less npc's to shoot.

You know who has a functioning society? NCR. They grew from the tiny Shady Sands to become the largest civilized society around the wastes of US. You know what they have plenty, aside from cattle? Corruption, theft, law breaking etc. The so called functioning society is a mess.

[charwo]

Bethesda has never been interested in telling a good sotry story that challenges the player or their pre-concieved notions in any way. Most people expect the post-apocalypse genre to look a certain way after a terrible terrible movie (Road Warrior) and Bethesda builds em to order. Nothing in a Bethesda game is ever original. The last thing they did that was was they made the Dwaves into Elves.

[Spacemunkey79]

 

200 years is ridiculous to still be squatting in craters. Bethesda is stuck on the 1950's meets mad max,and showing a functioning society and rule of law means less npc's to shoot.

You know who has a functioning society? NCR. They grew from the tiny Shady Sands to become the largest civilized society around the wastes of US. You know what they have plenty, aside from cattle? Corruption, theft, law breaking etc. The so called functioning society is a mess.

 

I'm not even talking about the NCR. The random dialogue from the BOS comment on how the DC wasteland is a lawless pos, why? Lyons and the BOS stomped the Enclave gained a metric sh*t ton of tech in the process, started the purifier, and know the source of the super mutant infestation; all that considered they should have set up a militia similar to the minutemen and established trade. Even the Legion has rule of law and they're tribal slavers. The Commonwealth makes way more sense taking place at the same time as FO1.

[JimboUK]

Bethesda has never been interested in telling a good sotry story that challenges the player or their pre-concieved notions in any way. Most people expect the post-apocalypse genre to look a certain way after a terrible terrible movie (Road Warrior) and Bethesda builds em to order. Nothing in a Bethesda game is ever original. The last thing they did that was was they made the Dwaves into Elves.

 

The "story" is the there to link one shooting gallery to the next.

[oldspice2625]

The reason being that the Fallout world is vastly unlike our own. The world in Fallout never developed clean energy or even efficient dirty energy extraction, and they never discovered Fracking, so they had only access to crude oil, not the stuff like in the Canadian tar sands that is much harder to extract.

 

The world of Fallout is a world of scarcity in resource shortages. There were many riots over shortages in the U.S. and around the world it was much, much worse, where nuclear war brought the "European Commonwealth" to its knees, I doubt they'd have much innovation since they were all starving to death with no aid from the US pouring in like it did in our world, so it was a shattered, broken Europe without the US's aid.

 

The US in this Fallout world is a selfish one that only looks out for its own interests and no one elses, which is kind of a good thing from a Political Realism perspective, and the Fallout world never really developed a stronger reliance on Neo Liberalism and the tendencies of using soft power and institutionalism to solve international problems.

 

The thing is, it was pretty much McCarthyism red scare mode from their 1950s until the bombs hit in 2077. That's essentially over one hundred years of being on the brink of total war, a century of always preparing to fight with everything we had, and all resources, culture, etc... being in a "Duck and Cover" state of affairs. That's right before the war, so the people who survived without the vaults, they had that programmed into their psyche pretty firmly and that's how they operated and saw the world. In a very "Us or them" way.

 

So the world was so resource poor, that luxuries like music, entertainment, etc... couldn't be experimented on, because all experiments, research, resources, were siphoned off by the government, so that people who were barely scraping by before the war (most people) were not able to go off and start new bands and stuff, because the only influence for music was atomic/nuclear war, which inspired a lot of things, even cars and robots were powered by atomic fuel, so the entire world never got out of the "Atomic Age". That's all they have to go off of in the Post War Fallout World. They have nothing else because nothing else was produced, there were no influences to go off of because all that mattered was war war war war war NUKES NUKES NUKES NUKES COMMUNISM COMMUNISM COMMUNISM!!!!!

 

Culture, in essence, was locked into place by the most important/influential thing, war.

 

Our society "progressed" (I use that term lightly) and new, radical influences took over, like Vietnam, the Space Race, END of the Cold War, America's ascension to sole world super power (relative, if unstable peace), and so forth. New things took the place of the Atomic Age and nukes, so we had more material to work with like Civil Rights struggle and other things to inspire people. None of that, that happened after 1950, ever happened in the Fallout World, so there was no other thing that was big, other than nukes and impending wars.

 

Also, by 2050, all travel in the world simply ceased to exist because all other countries were too oil poor to trade internationally, so commercial flights (and the range and exchange of ideas via air travel) was destroyed and halted as well. No one, unless it was super important, was traveling from place to place, and there was no internet, so there was no big exchange of international, globalized culture going on either.

 

We were stuck in the super nationalist state that never ended.