Fallout series... developments?

[metaphorset]

As others have pointed out already, Steampunk involves steam. Like in steam engines. Bioshock Infinite is steampunk-ish, Fallout is not. If you want to define it by terms, maybe just call it atompunk.

 

About the "realism" thing: The way I see it is that people tend to think way too much about "realism" in such settings. The more you think about it the less things make sense, the less sense things make the less you probably are going to enjoy the game.

 

Why start with the music, when there's so much wrong with everything else in the setting? Why are there still boarded-up houses 200 years after the war? Why is Concord or at least its outskirts not completely destroyed, when it was clearly in the blast wave radius? Why did all those people on the elevator to Vault 111 survive and even completely unharmed, because... you know - physics? I mean, blast waves of that dimension tend to expand in every direction they can, not only horizontally. Even Kilometers away.

 

Accepting the setting as it is and then try to make sense about the things you experience within this setting is the easiest way to cope with it without loosing too much fun.

 

There is a line though, that shouldn't be crossed. If you have an established setting with established rules, you actually shouldn't bend or break them too much. This is why the music thing totally works for me but a kid that spent over 200 years in a fridge in the middle of a most likely highly frequented area does not. It's neither funny nor some kind of a reference - it's just awkward.

Edited May 4, 2018 by metaphorset

[Moksha8088]

Audiodef, Far Harbor is based upon Bar Harbor, Maine. It's not supposed to be part of Massachusetts.

 

One major failing I see is not including more Boston Clam Chowder into the game. I hope some mod has introduced a creamy Boston Mirelurk Chowder to correct this egregious oversight.

 

The Tales from the Commonwealth mod addressed the missing New England Patriots football team by having it recreated with Super Mutants carrying a mini-nuke on the field.

[madmongo]

Fallout 4 isn't supposed to be steampunk or dieselpunk. It's really 1950s/1960s cheesy sci-fi. At least it was, originally. They've made it a bit more punky with each Fallout game.

 

The original Fallout games didn't take themselves very seriously. It was all supposed to be fun. You have to picture yourself living in this weird 1950s version of what they thought the future would be like, so technology is big and clunky, like Robbie the Robot (for those of you who are too young to remember Robbie, he basically looked like a protectron). And socially, they are still kinda in the 1950s.

 

There's also a lot of Mad Max thrown into the mix, along with A Boy and His Dog.

 

In the older Fallout games, you had vehicles. There was a car called the Highwayman that you could repair and drive around. This was in the primitive days of computers though, so driving around back then was basically the equivalent of fast travel. Newer Fallout games don't have working vehicles mostly due to the limits of the game engine and how small the worlds are. If you could drive quickly, you'd really notice just how small the Fallout Commonwealth really is.

 

If you visit the Fallout wikis and really dig into the lore, the game makes a lot more sense. The older Fallout games were also true role playing games, so just by their nature you dug into what was going on a lot deeper than what is in FO4. There is actually a lot of thought that went into creating the Fallout universe, and it's a fun little playground to immerse yourself into. Just don't take it too seriously. It was never meant to be a serious simulation of what would happen after a nuclear war.

 

It's cheesy 1950s sci-fi.