Fallout series... developments?

[Klipperken]

A simple discussion, really, but how do you see the settings of FO4?

 

I mean, yes, there has been a nuke war.

Sure, a LOT is gone.

 

But let us be a tad realistic...

The time setting in FO4 is 2287, and although it's a steampunkish theme, things do not add up.

Let only take music... it NEVER changed since 1960?

No new music was made since?

 

Vehicles... the same (save for a few oddities like the Vertibird)?

 

Housing (no skyscrapers, things like that)???

 

Furniture (with exception of the institute)?

 

Technology?

 

Sure, I do get it, the steampunkish take on it, but even then, it was 2077 when the Great War began, and then this "apeman" time feel?

 

It surely does not add up, unless that world ran behind with everything for like 1'000 years or so compared to us...?

 

A wee sad, really, I am not complaining, I just feel this is well... not right....

 

Thoughts?

Do share, but keep it polite please.

 

Thank you.

Klip.

[jkruse05]

Definitely not Steampunk. Fallout is post apocalyptic atompunk with some dieselpunk thrown in.

 

That lack of development is actually a notable difference between Black Isle/Obsidian's Fallout and Bethesda's. If you go to places like Vault City, or just the NCR in general, particularly in the more central locations of their territory, you see trade, manufacturing, electricity, all kinds of new stuff being produced. New Vegas makes it clear that they (or at least the Gun Runners) have the manufacturing capability to outfit a reasonably large military with new equipment equal to that of the mid 20th century. The West Coast story, as a whole, tends to be more focused on rebuilding and recovering, and has had more time in the limelight for that to happen. Fallout 1-2 are commonly referred to as Post-Post Apocalypse.

Bethesda, on the other hand, has just started the story of the East coast rebuilding. Apparently it took them a lot longer to get things going on that side of the country, not to mention the Institute's sabotage of centralized government in the Commonwealth. So, at this point on the East Coast we're at roughly the same point that the West Coast was after Fallout 1. Bethesda wanted to make a full on Post Apocalypse game, more akin to the feel of Fallout 1 than where Fallout 2 was leading.

 

If Bethesda maintains the developments seen in their last two games we should see something more developed eventually, but it could take a while.

The lack of vehicles is largely due to game-play balance, and since everything runs on fusion or fission power I doubt many people have the knowledge or equipment to get more fuel, or produce new engines (or to switch to gasoline, since it's been out of use for so long). I'd be interested to see some inventive wastelanders start using some steam powered stuff as we advance, but for the moment most vehicles are going to be repaired prewar ones or animal-driven.

 

Standardized housing requires organization first, something we haven't seen much of on the East Coast. Expect to see wooden houses modeled after the designs of prewar homes, then a move to stone/brick/concrete/adobe as new methods are rediscovered. With the significantly lowered population skyscrapers are simply not necessary.

 

The music choice is more to emphasize that 1950's-ish prewar society. The old games only used it to introduce the game, but Bethesda decided to make it a big thing that could help hold the mood throughout the game. If you consider Tactics as canon, or at least partial canon, it implies that rock and roll at least made it to the sounds of the 70's. It's also cheaper from a development standpoint to license old music that may not even be under copyright anymore than to write and record new stuff.

 

The big takeaway is that the prewar world largely stagnated socially, even as technology progressed. They focused heavily on fission and fusion(something we still haven't harnessed in the real world) which ended up creating a world with immense power supply technology and things like weaponized lasers, but lagging far behind our own in things like communication. This focus on other areas means the transistor, and technologies that need it, weren't developed until the 21st century rather than the 20th. The cold war was with China instead of Russia, and lasted much longer, eventually becoming a hot war. In that time society seems to have advanced in certain ways, but for the most part social change seems to have come with less fuss, meaning 1950's values more easily transitioned to the future. With the world in a constant state of conflict the people of the United States may have been more willing to unite against actual threats to their borders, rather than seeing their people die in proxy wars that seemed unnecessary. That means things like the civil rights movement went though with less opposition and less militant idealists, and the peace and love message was less appealing than movements for isolationism and strong defense. Again, the general idea is that everything that has happened in the last 70 years or so happened at different rates, or just differently altogether, then the bombs dropped and everything stopped completely for around 80-100 years before people were able to start getting organized again. It takes another 80-100 or so before we see vaguely modern towns and governments emerge (on the West Coast).

 

(amounts of time not exact, just going off of vague memory)

[audiodef]

I see it as a fictional universe only tangentially related to ours. Possibly, the themes of the 1950's rolled around again in the 2070's, so cars and houses were designed to reflect that. Style and fads come and go in cycles. Just look at the film "AI," where Joe's internal song banks contained old-style tunes.

 

There are tall buildings downtown. I imagine for the purposes of building the game, having an actual skyscraper with 70 floors would be a bit much.

[Klipperken]

Nice writing, sir @jkruse05 .

 

I called it steampunkish, because of the way the whole is constructed, it gives a steam, or dieselpunkish feeling.

Hence the -ish.

 

But take fission or fusion power: we got these nifty tiny mega-powered batteries, but no fission/fusion reactors, where they should have been born.

I mean, we are working towards things like nuclear batteries further down in time, or fusion typed, or whatever we will invent, but it all begins a LOT bigger.

Not so in the Beth stories, seems.

They apparently invented batteries before the reactors.

And no, I am not talking the micro reactors, of course.

Which also should have been born out of the big plants.

That is of course, following our invention line.

 

Vehicles, I was not speaking of the lack there-off, but more the 1960 style of them.

Another quite weird evolution, as if since the 1960 the time just... near grinded to a halt.

No, not TIME, but evolution, rather.

Save for a few oddities.

 

But like music, has nothing been made anymore since 1960?

 

So weird, compared to our world...

 

Then again, like sir @Audiodef said, it is a world on itself, of course, which had followed a different tech path...

Still, some things still do not add up, IMHO...

 

Klip.

[AGreatWeight]

The 1950's era aesthetics are what's known as 'Atomic Age'. Some also refer to it as 'Americana'. In the Fallout universe, they never went down the technological route of miniaturization (which IRL led to the development of the silicon-chip etc) as previously mentioned.

Your question regarding music is an interesting one. The original games were full of atmospheric ambient music (courtesy of Mark Morgan) throughout, with only a single instance of 1930's-1950's era music used at the very beginning. Bethesda on the other hand, did a complete about turn and made the decision to use 30's/50's era music throughout, via the in-game radios etc, with the ambient music more in the 'background' so to speak - and even then, a lot of the OST for both Fallout3 and Fallout4 lacks it's own unique personality & suffers from mostly being too similar sonically to something that could be straight from an Elder Scrolls game imho, via the use of strings, violin and other accoustic instruments. A simple comparision of the soundtracks between the Interplay and Bethesda versions shows this stark contrast. Don't get me wrong, there are some good compositions in 3 and 4 that stand out, but generally I prefer the electronic representation that's in 1 and 2 - it's more evocative, and fits the apocalyptic world better.

[Klipperken]

@AGreatWeight Thank you sir for replying.

 

I would not have mind a metal radio station, or punkish stuff, or at least something DIFFERENT than this music, as it tends to bore me after a while.

Maybe Cyberpunk a la Sigue Sigue Sputnik, which would have suited the setting a wee (post-apocalyptic, war based songs like Mutual Asssured Destruction (or MAD)

 

or Love Missile F1-11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfHxsjH0bUI

 

things like that.

A more heavier sound, especially for the Super Mutants, a Mutant Radio station for example.

 

Now that I think of it, had New Vegas not such a radio station?

 

But yes, the Fallout 1/2 atmosphere is not there.

 

As for miniaturization, the very opposite more: we have them tiny batteries, but I am missing the large nuclear/fusion/fission plants?

I simply cannot imagine they invented these batteries without the large plants been born first.

Aside, how does one power a whole city, if not having these plants?

There's a lack of industrial sized power plants in the Fallout series.

You can't tell me, everyone ran their household on batteries, right?

 

The water plant too, it should have given the whole 'state' purified water, but look at the size of it, it would barely have 1 shower and a toilet it could keep watered, hyperbole.

 

Then... the Vaults are pathetically small as well.

I remember the "live-size" Vault 24 for NV, now THAT was a Vault I would have loved to see implemented in FO4.

Then, the PC's back then when it got released...

Need to take that in mind as well, ofc.

Although, they could have "Compartmentized" it in small sections, like they did in some vaults afore.

Still.

 

The tech side is very underwhelming, ESPECIALLY for the time line!

 

Naturally, I feel this way, does ABSOLUTELY not mean I got it right, or I have a valid point.

 

Still, loved to see more logical tech throughout FO4...

 

Klip.

Edited May 1, 2018 by Klipperken

[AGreatWeight]

There are remnants of a few nuclear power plants in Fallout4 (one just to the nw of Atoms Crater, and the other is situated near to Chelsea) although they're admittedly tiny; especially when compared to the concept art for nuclear power plants that appear in Fallout3 art book - they were intended to be huge hulking concrete structures. I think (regarding Fallout4) this is a byproduct of just how much BGS scaled down the Boston/Commonwealth region in the game unfortunately. With the lack of tech in the game, I agree up to a point, but attribute this to the dev team running out of time... but who knows.

If your wanting more modern music in-game, there's a number of quality radio mods on Nexus, personally I can't recommend Boston Pirate Radio enough.

[jkruse05]

A lot of your issues with the lack of large locations, like power plants and other industrial centers, are more because of the scale Bethesda uses when making these games. Large infrastructure stuff tends to be about a third the size it should be, and even houses are about half what you would realistically expect. They aim to make things just big enough that it's believable, but small enough that they can fit a large variety of locations on a map around 15 to 20 square miles, scaled down from a real world location that's probably double that size, or even much more. That artistic and game design decision does not mean such things don't exist in the universe, simply that we, as players, are not seeing a full scale representation.

 

If you look back at the older games things are a bit different. Black Isle went for a larger scale with fewer locations philosophy, and some of that size is implied rather than shown. The original vaults, for example, all had the same layout, but it is implied that there are more floors, at least residential ones, than what you can visit. The Town of Gecko in Fallout 2 is built around a Poseidon Energy nuclear power plant that is actually just barely a larger scale than Bethesda's versions, but is labeled as Reactor 5, implying there are more nearby that are connected.

 

In fact, in Fallout 4, there are at least two scaled down reactor sites, one in the Glowing Sea and one roughly in the center of the map, right next to County Crossing. There's another one in Nuka World.

Along with Poseidon energy turbine plants and several transformer stations and mini reactor stations scattered throughout the Commonwealth, there's plenty of power generation and other infrastructure present. Just imagine them about 3-4 times larger for true scale.

Edited May 1, 2018 by jkruse05

[audiodef]

As a Massachusetts native, I'd like to put in a word about locations. It would have been interesting if Far Harbor were actually the tip of Cape Cod, and it had become an island because of human activity - the war, or other causes. When I go out to the Nakano residence and look at the map, my eye wants to trace down the shore, around the the curve of the cape and out around the arm, but that doesn't exist in the game. That would be a huge chunk of land to scale down, but my point is it would have been cool for the cape to be more directly represented in the game somehow.

 

I agree with comments about music, although I'm not sure mutants are smart enough to run a radio station. They can barely string a full sentence together. "What? A noise! HULK SMASH!" Whoops, no radio station. The Commonwealth's superior race, ladies and gents.

[Klipperken]

@jkruse05 Yes, true, but a fullblown version would be nice, especially on nowadays systems...

Can't wait to see something realistic in that regard... :)

 

@audiodef Well, as said, and it has been a while, I believe to remember a more rocky, metally station in NV?

gonna reinstall NV, see if I am right, I will add about this once i know. ;)

 

Thank you both, kind to respond.

Klip.