Is this Idiocracy?

[Moraelin]

An average military guy and a gal go into hyberanation, and awaken a couple of centuries later to a world that has taken a turn into idiocy and forged ahead ever since. Hmm, that sounds familiar.

 

Basically I wonder if it's actually intentional that the post-apocalypse world is one big "Second Order Idiot Plot". Seriously, it's like MA is one big American Football field, and people are actually tackling each other for the Idiot Ball. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are several idiot balls in play at any given time.

 

I could give examples, but in the last 3 years, more than enough have been given.

 

So do you figure it's intentional, as opposed to just questionable writing?

[Moraelin]

And just to make it clear, it's not just Fallout 4. Take for example the big purifier in FO3, and the BOS Outcasts splitting over it. Now let's look at that purifier and how it fits or doesn't fit the BOS philosophy:

 

- it's a unique piece of advanced technology. So, you know, EXACTLY what the BOS is supposed to be controlling, by their very ideology and founding principles

- it has the potential to wipe out every single living soul in DC and adjacent areas. (See the ending where you do what Eden asked.) So, you know, EXACTLY the kind of abuse of technology that the BOS exists to prevent

- having control of the main water source enables a LITERAL Hydraulic Empire, if the BOS wants the population to keep giving them their crops

- it's good PR at the same time as you control those guys

 

Basically it's got even more of a reason to keep control of THAT, than the Helios One had in New Vegas, and the BOS fought and bled for that one. But here, oh noes, it's also helping someone else, let's rebel and split.

 

And that's just one idiocy you have to run into, if you follow the main plot at all.

 

Basically it seems to me like Beth has been building a second order idiot world all along.

[HadToRegister]

It's Bethesda's writing.
They make notoriously short main plots, and hide that fact by putting it in an open world, because every experienced Bethesda game player knows to do one or two quests from the main plot, then do side quests for as long as possible, go back, do a couple more main quests etc.

I ruined Fallout 3 for myself when I first played it, because I did quests in Megaton, and then decided to explorre, and lo and behold, ran into Dad which bypassed ALL of the main quests leading up to finding him, so there I was, trudging along, following Dad to project Purity after rescuing him Inadvertently.

[CiderMuffin]

BoS doesn't go after every piece of technology, a water purifier itself isn't dangerous tech but was suppose to purifier the surrounding waters. Eden developed an FEV virus to turn it into a weapon which the scientists at Project Purity nor the BoS could expect that to happen because for the most part no group in D.C. has the knowledge to actually use FEV, even the super mutants barely understand FEV whereas the Enclave used FEV in Fallout 2 and had records of it before the Great War. The Outcasts didn't split over the change to recruit and help wastelanders, they split because Lyons halted all efforts to look for tech. If Lyons did both, like Maxson did, the split wouldn't have happened.

 

No, it's not idiocracy and no, 4 isn't doing a second order idiot plot. Expecting everywhere to be this developed republic like NCR itself is dumb because, well, the simple fact that the entire end of the world was caused by a lack of resources. Some areas like the west coast where mines are still being found even after a major rush to mine the west coast states dry and then you have groups like the Followers of the Apocalypse whose entire ideology is teaching people for free and providing aid as well as the BoS who made their living trading tech for food which was a major point of their organization changing after 1 where they become a R&D house. Then you have Vault City which was a control vault that began trading medical tech to get resources they couldn't get.

 

Even in New Vegas we're shown that numerous groups outside of New California are filled with tribes and groups that aren't technologically advanced and can do the bare minimum of farming and hunting to survive. Much like in the Commonwealth. Not everywhere, even after 200 years, is going to be an advanced republic or kingdom especially when resources are limited.

 

It's Bethesda's writing.

They make notoriously short main plots, and hide that fact by putting it in an open world, because every experienced Bethesda game player knows to do one or two quests from the main plot, then do side quests for as long as possible, go back, do a couple more main quests etc.

 

I ruined Fallout 3 for myself when I first played it, because I did quests in Megaton, and then decided to explorre, and lo and behold, ran into Dad which bypassed ALL of the main quests leading up to finding him, so there I was, trudging along, following Dad to project Purity after rescuing him Inadvertently.

Short plots isn't actually really a Bethesda problem, short plots is a Fallout problem in itself. It's less noticable in the old games because you were railroaded into doing side quests a lot, which is also how New vegas was designed. If you knew what to do you can skip all of the quests leading up to Benny and just go to Benny, you can skip most faction quests and choose to slaughter them all (which is actually a requirement for a lot of the Legion's quests). For the most part you can beat New Vegas's story in less then half a day.

 

It's really Bethesda doesn't railroad you into side content whereas Interplay/Black Isle/Obsidian pace their quests longer by making you do side quests as a mandatory thing.

Edited November 5, 2018 by CiderMuffin

[Moraelin]

I'm not talking about the lack of organization. Being actively destabilized by the Institute, including massacring every single delegate when they tried to unite, well, that would more than explain why it ain't NCR. I'm also ok with high tech being lost. But that's not what I'm talking about, because lack of structure or information are not the same as lack of basic intelligence.

 

People have managed to behave intelligently in low tech or low resource situations, like being stranded on some island. Ditto for anarchic situations. Conversely the people in the actual Idiocracy movie had a high level of organization, a president, laws (like the one against "not putting out";)), a working infrastructure, etc, and still managed to be complete idiots. The two are orthogonal, is all I'm saying.

 

What I'm saying is that nearly everyone in the world has to be a certified category 2 to 3 mentally retarded (as in, the medical term, not a random insult) for their behaviour to make any sense at all.

 

So, you know, if you're going to call my assertion dumb, it would be useful if you actually talked about it, not about something else that's fully irrelevant.

[JimboUK]

It's poor writing and Fallout 3 was especially bad, it's an area Bethesda really need to work on.

 

It's Bethesda's writing.
They make notoriously short main plots, and hide that fact by putting it in an open world, because every experienced Bethesda game player knows to do one or two quests from the main plot, then do side quests for as long as possible, go back, do a couple more main quests etc.

I ruined Fallout 3 for myself when I first played it, because I did quests in Megaton, and then decided to explorre, and lo and behold, ran into Dad which bypassed ALL of the main quests leading up to finding him, so there I was, trudging along, following Dad to project Purity after rescuing him Inadvertently.

 

Short and horribly linear, Fallout 3 had few choices and zero consequences for any of them.

[CiderMuffin]

It's poor writing and Fallout 3 was especially bad, it's an area Bethesda really need to work on.

 

It's Bethesda's writing.

They make notoriously short main plots, and hide that fact by putting it in an open world, because every experienced Bethesda game player knows to do one or two quests from the main plot, then do side quests for as long as possible, go back, do a couple more main quests etc.

 

I ruined Fallout 3 for myself when I first played it, because I did quests in Megaton, and then decided to explorre, and lo and behold, ran into Dad which bypassed ALL of the main quests leading up to finding him, so there I was, trudging along, following Dad to project Purity after rescuing him Inadvertently.

Short and horribly linear, Fallout 3 had few choices and zero consequences for any of them.

 

Short, linear, zero consequences for anything....So Fallout as a series. Y'all understand that until NV that the series was super linear in it's main quest right? NV and 4 are the first ones where supporting factions was an actual main focus of the game instead of side content.

 

I'm not talking about the lack of organization. Being actively destabilized by the Institute, including massacring every single delegate when they tried to unite, well, that would more than explain why it ain't NCR. I'm also ok with high tech being lost. But that's not what I'm talking about, because lack of structure or information are not the same as lack of basic intelligence.

 

People have managed to behave intelligently in low tech or low resource situations, like being stranded on some island. Ditto for anarchic situations. Conversely the people in the actual Idiocracy movie had a high level of organization, a president, laws (like the one against "not putting out":wink:), a working infrastructure, etc, and still managed to be complete idiots. The two are orthogonal, is all I'm saying.

 

What I'm saying is that nearly everyone in the world has to be a certified category 2 to 3 mentally retarded (as in, the medical term, not a random insult) for their behaviour to make any sense at all.

 

So, you know, if you're going to call my assertion dumb, it would be useful if you actually talked about it, not about something else that's fully irrelevant.

People do behave intelligently in 3 and 4 though? Have you actually watched Idiocracy? They didn't have any infrastructure, their idea of farming was giving the plants energy drinks. Trash was everywhere, structure was basically "Strongest is right" and for the most part everything was built and operated autonomously by robots and computers. Take one of the first scenes where the main character was in a hospital and the doctor was a computer. Then we're treated with a scene of airplanes crashing down, buildings ruined, trash everywhere. In the case of Fallout we have that because lack of structure and resources which yes, that actually matters. Another point of idiocracy is that everyone basically didn't have jobs and was gorging themselves on junk food and tv, in the Fallout games characters are hunting, scavenging and farming.

 

The reason the BoS abandoned Project Purity, which was a major point in 3's story, is it didn't work. What got it to work was a G.E.C.K. and that didn't become clear until the BoS stopped helping with the project and the scientists gave up. The only person that still cared by then was James, part of the reason he entered into Vault 101 was 1. the safety and 2. the hopes of finding a G.E.C.K. which is why he entered into that VR realm Dr. Bruan set up.

 

The problem here is less "it's idiocracy!" and more you're ignoring important points and saying characters don't behave intelligently when, yes yes they do. The lack of examples in 4 doesn't help, what also doesn't help is you're ignoring what was already established in games and make assumptions just to enforce your point that, well, it falls apart when context to all of this is brought up.

Edited November 8, 2018 by CiderMuffin

[Moraelin]

I had written more, but the stupid nexus forum ate the message. I'm just about ready to give up on this stupid forum.

 

Anyway, the short and skinny is:

 

- you're still chasing your own irrelevant strawmen even after being told explicitly that that's not what I'm talking about. Lack of resources or of infrastructure does not equal stupidity. Nor does it excuse it in any form or shape. Ancient Greece and Rome had an incredible resource scarcity by modern or even Fallout standards -- e.g., even at the peak of Rome's economic might, the iron for a sword cost something along the lines of a farm's income for a YEAR -- yet they still managed to think long and hard about things, i.e., philosophy. The computer you write your defense of FO4 is STILL working by the logic principles the ancient Greeks came up with in that extreme scarcity situation.

 

So basically address the actual point, or, well, if you just want to argue against stuff you came up with yourself, you can do it in Notepad. Less lag that way.

 

 

- if you're going to accuse me of not having actually seen the movie, well, it would help if you didn't write made up and blatantly false nonsense about it. E.g., they had no jobs? Really? Who do you think gives those "lattes" at Starbucks, if not someone employed there? Who are those prison guards that the protagonist outsmarts if not employees? Hell, who's that guy at the hospital telling him where to stick the cables? Some random passer by?

 

Contrasting it with the Fallout characters farming? Well, what do you call those crops watered with Gatorade in Idiocracy if not farming? Hell, where do you think the Gatorade came from, if nobody had jobs? How do you suppose it got from the factory to the fields, if they had no infrastructure?

 

Did YOU watch the movie? Or are you just making random stuff up? Because so far it looks like the latter.

 

 

- But to return to the topic of idiocy and NPCs, if you want examples, and somehow missed 3 years of conversations on the topic, sure, catch:

 

Warning: spoilers.

 

* Nobody can figure out any more how to grab a couple of handful of mud and patch the walls, so they keep the wind and cold out. Which, frankly, is something stone age humans could figure out. It doesn't take a large NCR style state or resources to figure out adobe. (And yes, this applies to FO3 too.)

 

* Nobody can figure out how to put some thatch on a roof, so it doesn't rain right on their bed. Or how to put some asphalt from those roads on a bucket over a fire, and tar the frikken roof so it doesn't rain on their bed. Again, stone age humans and even Neanderthals figured THAT one out just fine. (And btw, not only this applies to both Beth Fallouts, it applies to Skyrim too. Look up in your Whiterun home. 'Nuff said.)

 

So far, frankly, that makes most settlers dumber not only than a 21st century human, but literally dumber than a dog or a ferral ghoul. Those have at least the sense to sleep somewhere covered, if available.

 

* Almost nobody can figure out any other kind of confrontation than a frontal assault at ground level, even when an OBVIOUS alternative exists.

 

E.g., it took several days of standoff at Quincy before ONE guy figured out that someone could shoot down on them from the overpasses. Both the defenders AND the attackers can't figure that one out on their own. Sad as that is.

 

E.g., the same lack of elementary brain power can be seen in fortified places like Goodneighbour or Hangman's Alley. Stringing some makeshift walls between tall buildings is frikken stupid, if you don't control those buildings too. Anyone can climb/jetpack/vertibird on top of one of those buildings and chuck grenades down at you with impunity. They don't even have to show their face to shoot at you.

 

* Not only nobody in the Railroad can figure out that having the password "Railroad" and telling people to follow a marked trail right to their door, isn't exactly good security, but almost nobody else seems to figure it out either. I mean, people talk about "follow the Freedom Trail" even in Diamond City, which is under Institute control, but the Institute somehow doesn't send a couple of coursers to follow that trail and see where it leads.

 

* Settlers who couldn't defend themselves from a couple of raiders in rags, would rather start it on an adversarial tone and escalate straight to waving a gun in the face of two guys in full power armour and miniguns who dropped by. (See, Tenpints Bluff. Or Abernathy also feels a need to threaten you that they're armed.)

 

Well, gee, how cute. Let's escalate it to an armed confrontation from the start. That has to be intelligent behaviour. Not.

 

Double points for escalating something they can't possibly win. They literally can't do more to me with those pipe pistols than damage my helmet lamp. Or I suppose he could shoot himself and bleed all over my new power armour paint job.

 

* People who seem to think their life depends on waving that gun around, can't figure out that it's smart to clean the rust and oil at least the bolt. You know, so it doesn't jam next time they escalate meeting someone new into an armed standoff. (Not only this applies to pipe weapons in Fallout 4, it applies to ALL ballistic weapons in Fallout 3.)

 

* The BOS consistently can't seem to remember their basic tenets. E.g., that they're supposed to have a chain of command. (Not only that applies to FO3 and FO4, it's actually a plot point in New Vegas too.)

 

* The Institute had two of their most advanced Gen 2 experimental prototypes escape, but can't seem to find and recover even the one that's running a detective agency in the middle of a city under their control.

 

* People will routinely follow you around, even through doors and stuff, to tell you that they don't have time to talk to you.

 

* People routinely are unaware of even the world around them.

 

E.g., people in settlements ENTIRELY dependent of my bringing in food from my other settlements, feel a need to tell me that the non-existent crop is coming in pretty well.

 

E.g., Anne Hargrave talks as if she's still working at a radio even after a year of working in Sanctuary Hills. Which not only doesn't have a radio sender, it doesn't even have a radio. I scrapped all of them.

 

E.g., Rhys not only seems unaware that you're his equal not his trainee when you become a Knight, or actually his superior when you make it to Paladin, but he spews two lines and then forgets it promptly again when you become a Sentinel. As in, literally, the highest ranking guy in MA after Maxson himself.

 

E.g., people can literally watch their teammate's head explode in front of them, and be like, "It was probably nothing." some 15 seconds later.

 

Etc, etc, etc.

[CiderMuffin]

Most of your post is just using gameplay stuff like the "settlers thinking there is a farm because a caravan was set up" as lore which in itself is extremely short sighted, straw grasping and dumb. It's still a game, NPCs will act like there is a farm because there is food showing up in the settlement window. That's a programming problem, not a lore problem. Same with "People can watch their teemmate's head blow up and then act like nothing" realistically yes the people would react, but again it's a VIDEO GAME. Realistically the raiders would also hear the gunfire echo and everyone would come rushing to it.

 

Rhys was already covered that he doesn't trust easily, dude has an attitude and being in a high ranking position doesn't mean that someone will instantly like you. Nick and DiMA were prototypes, why would the Institute really care about irrelevant prototypes that don't even know where the Institute is? They aren't a security threat, Institute tech is too advanced for any group in the Commonwealth to reverse engineer and they're outdated tech by modern standards. Which is why the Institute sends Gen 1 and 2 synths up to the commonwealth for missions that require force instead of Gen 3 despite being more advanced and sturdy, the Institute doesn't care about gen 1 and 2 and they are actively being replaced by Gen 3. As for DiMA who begins to mod himself and could be considered a potential threat, he flees far from the Institute's presence and drops from their radar, especially with the radiation the fog gives off which we learn in the quest to find Virgil that radiation can throw the Institute's sensors and teleportation off.

 

"No body knows how to build houses made of mud" You're right because architecture is not an easy thing to learn. Most settlements are basically shanty towns because that's what is on hand. Adobe houses aren't as common as you're making them out to be. Even in 1, 2 and NV we see people living in shacks made of scrap metal and wood, a major point of Vault 15 where the founders of Shady Sands came from was filled with numerous groups of people from different cultural backgrounds hence why Shady Sands is filled with different kinds of people and has numerous philosophies and religions to them, which is a major point in 1 as the mayor at the time was Indian and spoke about dharmic ideology. This is also the background of the Great Khans who have a mongol aesthetic to them. You're comparing people from a vault based around diverse cultural heritage to people who are trying their best to survive in a area where the most accessible resource is old buildings and scrap.

 

For instance here is Junktown https://fallout.gamepedia.com/Junktown

Here is the Boneyard where people live in buildings with broken roofs https://fallout.gamepedia.com/Boneyard

Which is also a thing in the Necropolis https://fallout.gamepedia.com/Necropolis

Gecko https://fallout.gamepedia.com/Gecko_(town)

New Reno which by lore is a thriving town of casinos with a seedy underbelly yet ruined buildings are a still a thing, there is even a ruined building right at the entrance of New Reno across the street from one of the main casinos https://fallout.gamepedia.com/New_Reno

 

Fallout 2 is about civilization rebuilding yet even then we still see a ton of settlements consisting of people living in ruined buildings and shack homes. Again, the important thing to remember about the NCR is that it's ancestors were from a vault, a vault designed to see how numerous cultures interacted and the vault was designed to actually open up. It was suppose to open up fifty years after the great war and build a civilization, which it did. So yea, the people of Shady Sands would need to know how to build homes given they're a combination of a social experiment and a control vault, it even had a G.E.C.K. https://fallout.gamepedia.com/Vault_15

 

Another factor about adobe, and most stuctures that use stuff like sandstone, dirt brick and any other earth type mineral that isn't stone is those only work well in dry locations like California or Nevada, in Boston which is less dry and more wet and rainy the mud wouldn't be as effective. Another factor is is that adobe isn't just "slapping mud onto a building" it's turning mud into a brick and then building on that, there is actual construction involved. Adobe isn't also the oldest type of structure, for a good while human settlements were typically yurt-like tents and living in caves and in places where adobe wasn't common we used stone. It took a long time for people to learn how to actually build homes out of stone and mud.

 

"Why isn't everyone in Goodneighbor living in the buildings and why are raiders in Hangman's Alley not living in the buildings." The decaying buildings that are boarded up and mostly have the floors collapsing in on themselves? You know buildings need to be maintained right? That a building can look fine on the outside but the inside it's a wreck and actively collapsing. This isn't that hard to figure out. "The BoS are breaking chain of command" but they're not, is the thing and another thing is is that the Chain that Binds is not a regularly enforced thing, even in Fallout 1 the Chain that Binds is broken by John Maxson who issues orders to the Vault Dweller who was an initiate https://fallout.gamepedia.com/Chain_That_Binds the chain that binds is a obscure rule even at the time John Maxson, the grandson of Roger Maxson, was in charge of the BoS and the point of Hardin was that he was trying anything to oust McNamara. The Chain that Binds wasn't even that known to the BoS in NV, it's an old obscure rule that tbf didn't exist in the series until New Vegas.

 

Again, all of this is actually covered in the game, you are blatantly ignoring facts and making assumptions.

Edited November 7, 2018 by CiderMuffin

[Moraelin]

Before I go any further, let me just say that I'm not opposed to the idea that that's just the level of design or programming that went into the game. But regardless, the net result of that programming is that the people in the game end up looking like complete morons. If I script an NPC that acts like a complete moron, it's still an NPC that acts like a complete moron. It being scripted is the explanation for why it's acting that way, but doesn't change the fact that it acts that way.

 

I also have no problem with the fact that the Interplay iterations were equally populated by an assortment of beefheads, boneheads, dolts, dunces, harebrains, idiots, knuckleheads, morons, nincompoops, numbskulls and allied trades. Sure, it's lore. It's still a case of the NPCs being morons. It just becomes lore, then, that that world is populated by the intellectual proletariat :tongue:

 

But more importantly, I never said it wasn't lore or wasn't the way the game is programmed, so I'm still somewhat confused about who you're arguing with. I'm not sure if anyone ever said it wasn't lore, or wasn't programmed, but I'm not it. In fact, I'm not seeing them in this thread either. So, dunno, maybe answering those objectons would be more productive to do in whatever thread you saw them in, rather than do a merry cavalcade of fully irrelevant stuff here :tongue:

 

 

That said, about "architecture not being easy to learn." Heh. Dude. Seriously. SERIOUSLY. Humans have repeatedly shown that they can QUITE EASILY discover stuff like putting a newspaper in a broken window to keep the cold out, without having to get a degree in architecture. Or, yes, patching the roof if it rains in their beds.

 

Yes, including in shantytowns. Go to some of the worst shantytowns on Earth, or just look some photos online by journalists. Surprise, you'll discover that even in the worst parts people don't just look at water raining in their bed and think "derp, me no know what to do about that." In fact you'd be hard pressed to see big open holes in the wall and roof in ANY shantytown or photo of one, unless it's a war zone and they just got shelled by artillery or something.

 

Or piling some dead grass on the roof to keep the rain out is something that even the most primitive tribes have figured out. Hell, we're pretty sure that even Neanderthals had figured THAT out.

 

And we're talking about MA, for crying out loud, which averages 120 rainy days per year and occasional low temperature which routinely get waaay below freezing point almost every year. Even before such stuff as the nuclear winter. A whole population living through over 200 YEARS worth of rainy and and windy winters and still NOBODY figuring out how to dump some grass on the roof or put a newspaper in the window, because that kinda "architecture" is too hard for them to learn, sorry, that IS a Second Order Idiot World right there. We're talking thousands of people, across two CENTURIES, not "just got nuked yesterday, will fix the roof tomorrow". We're talking them spending literally THOUSANDS of days where it rains right in their bed. Not a hyperbole, but LITERALLY, even by the time someone got to puberty, there have been anywhere between 1500 and 2000 rainy days in MA. And STILL that combined population can't rediscover at least the level of "architecture" tech of getting a handful of mud or a newspaper to patch the holes? Sorry, that IS a population of even lower IQ than in the actual Idiocracy movie. You have in fact made my case better than I could.

 

 

So, no, what's "short sighted, straw grasping and dumb", to use an exact quote from you if that's the level of conversation you prefer, is excusing it as being "because architecture is not an easy thing to learn." We're not talking about building a cathedral. In fact the silly idea that you have to get an education in architecture to put a newspaper in a broken window or slap a handful of mud over a hole in the wall, is in a new category of its own even as ridiculous fan excuses go.