Fallout's Government Apparently Stupid

[phoneyLogic]

There's nothing wrong with the more goofy stile of FO2 in particular.

I played FO1 first and I was thrilled by the desperate atmosphere and the whole design of the game and story. It even was funny in a very intelligent way. It's a very straight and genious paced piece of art with a very dramatic sense.

FO2 in my personal taste jumped the shark in some ways.

 

The tribes for example:

Yes, civilization may start again at some point. But why the heck they just adopt the Amerindian culture? How did they learn to style and life like them from scratch in only a few years? Their culture developed over many years. So why they don't know anything about the prewar culture but apparently everything about the Native Americans?

 

And why they live in tends while they feel comfortable enough to built a giant maya-stiled temple (!) of trials. - Just too much time? Where they got the inspiration from? If you manage built such an impressive temple then you may know how to built a small house.

Keep in mind that there is civilisation just a few miles a way.

 

I have the strong feeling that FO2 jumps out of the setting. FO1 was more logical and the story was better told. While the gameplay of FO2 is better, no question, and while it has way more items and content in general, the game simply is not the dramatic masterpiece FO1 was.

 

Well, hard to explain, FO2 is clearly NOT a bad game. But maybe it entertains more than it thrills?

 

Just my opinion, I'm not unable to bear another. :teehee:

Edited December 10, 2012 by tortured Tomato

[TrickyVein]

The actual native peoples in the Northwest have traditions and styles of clothing that are very unlike those of the 'plains' indians which most non-native people have associated with 'Native Americans' today: teepees, wearing feathers, spears, etc. The Arroyo tribe and the other tribe whence Sulik came look unlike these pre-war tribal groups, at least in the Northwest (Sulik's face-paint is original). The only similarity I think that's meaningful between Fallout's tribes and actual tribes is that both have organized themselves into a social structure that reflects a different kind of civilization from ours. It is not surprising to me that humans develop the same tools and culture given a similar environment and much diminished population levels, regionally, which limits large-scale trade and leads to some degree of isolationism. Tribes are still very much alive - though increasingly less so - in the Amazon today, despite their proximity to 'civilization.' This is entirely believable that you would have tribal groups in Fallout. It makes sense.

 

The only confusion I think is over whether Arroyo is a farming community or a hunter-gatherer group. If they are primarily agricultural, then it is more than likely that they would have more permanent settlement. And we know that they are, because this is the whole reason behind finding a GECK.

 

The temple at Arroyo, I thought was actually a pre-war structure, a library, and looks nothing like temples built by the Maya. The Olmecs are famous for carving the large stone heads which probably inspired the creative development behind the stone heads in Arroyo, and the Olmecs of course are not the only ones to have done this.

 

I think it's incongruous to attribute anything from Arroyo specifically to either pre-war indian cultures or other groups like the Maya. And the similarities are there precisely because society to a large degree is a product of circumstance and people are remarkably similar to one other across time and space.

Edited December 10, 2012 by TrickyVein

[phoneyLogic]

Iho they overdid it, it's just way too much. I can't recall to have seen exactly this Arroyo-Native-Americans like tribes in other post apocalyptic settings. Because they fell too exactly into it. Even though civilization may start again completely, there's no reason why they should exactly meet Natives in some regards. The environment is just too different from that and prewar stuff / knowledge / tech / philosophy has not been wiped out completely.

The Amazonas might be a different thing, since there they don't life in the ruins of another culture. And they really are separated from the modern world. And as said, just travel to Klamath and there is no reason why they should develop so differently in just a few generations. I just don't buy it.

 

Imagine, Arroyo has been founded by the Chosen One of FO1 and Vault Dweller joined him. What did he say? "I once read a book and despite of what we all know, the only way to survive it to form a native tribe."?

 

And regarding the Temple, I don't think this temple looks like a pre-war building.If they didn't build it, who else? So they built it and it feels not logical. Even if they found that structure, why didn't they use it in a more reasonable manner, like using it as hideout against the rough weather?

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110828005755/fallout/images/4/49/Temple.png

I'd buy it, if that temple would be located in the Amazonas. But it isn't.

This are some points where FO2 brakes the atmosphere or setting of FO1 which I loved.

There wasn't any tribe in FO1 either. I'm not saying, this is over the top important, but I'm not a fan of it.

Edited December 10, 2012 by tortured Tomato

[charwo]

Tomato:

 

In other posts I have referee to the Fallout Bible as the Book of Stupid for reasons you have mentioned. However, if you see the Enclave as the shadow government, not the real government, the. Things begin to make sense:

 

Project Safehouse was never supposed to be protecting the citizens in the Vault. It was national and civilization survival. Basically, safe spots to rude out the chaos of the disaster, after peopple rebuilt or died out, the Vaults represented seeds to pick up the pieces. The Enclave subverted this goal for their own ends as the war continued. The Behavior Program was a revision of Project Safehouse, not it's founding intent.

 

Also, with due respect, it IS all Cheng's fault. Because for 11 years the US and the international community, such as it was, worked to keep World War III conventional. It was, by the Fallout Bible, the Chinese who were the first to deploy chems, then bios, then nukes. Cheng opted to violate every weapon of mass destruction convention and treaty, and the US followed in retaliation, as is custom and the only rational response under the so called laws of war. By every indication, the US was bad because it fought a monster even worse. He who fights monsters....

 

This was no a mutual responsibility thing, any more than World War II. Cheng was a Hitlerian douchebag, who unlike Hitler had the ability to nuke the world when his enemies took his capital. The Chinese fired FIRST. And the US, having won the ground war conventionally, had overran all of China's major population centers. The US had no reason at all to think of using nuclear weapons. Cheng took the world with him. That is the act of a psychotic manchild. Even if the US was brutalizing the Chinese like the Japanese did (and we have no proof either way, although some manner of atrocity was gaurenteed) ending the world because your plans to dominate it has turned to s*** means everyone else was blameless.

 

The US of 2077 was a horrible place. But it did not need to be destroyed, it did not cause it's own destruction, and it bears no blame for the Exchange. There was no MAD, people worked hard to avoid it. The blame falls alone on Chairmen Chang and anyone who carried out his mad scheme of omnicidal vengeance.

[TrickyVein]

Yea. The 'library' certainly doesn't look like anything else we've seen that's pre-war. Methinks a fair bit of artistic licence was taken. I think it's probably an example of how Cool^TM beats logic :confused:

 

With regards to the Amazons, recent archaeology suggests that a more 'advanced' or different state of civilization actually existed in the forest which may even have been responsible for massive building projects in ancient history. Concurrent with the Moche civilization on the coast or earlier...so in some ways maybe the tribes in the Amazon are living amongst the ruins of a more complex civilization, and if they're not, other examples of this abound. Look no further to the North, to the Maya who were living in the Yucatan at the time of contact. They had lost the knowledge of how to read the glyphs which adorned the steps of their pyramids and covered the stele in their courtyards. They had lost their institutions, writing being a big one, and their ability to 'read' the heavens and predict astronomical events. And they were still living in the same area.

 

I get what you're saying that perhaps how the tribe(s) in Fallout 2 are presented is gimicky and not very well researched. But the implications for how people change and adapt to societal collapse are provocative, and important because the bomb *didn't* spell the end of everything. People continued on in the way that - so far - has been the longest running and enduring way for us, which is to live in smaller numbers, in tribes or bands and be semi-nomadic.

 

The Chinese fired FIRST.

 

Again, as much as this makes sense and I admit it probably happened this way, it hasn't been confirmed (Like seriously, if you or anyone can point to contrary proof of this than I want to see it, and I can stop making a fool of myself!). You're creating a grey area where you are projecting too many of your own ideas into the canon for the game simply because they make sense to you. And putting it in caps isn't going to make it 'more' true :thumbsup:

[charwo]

Well, the caps part is true.

 

As for the rest, you can infer every broad trend post divergence to 2077 by simple reductive analysis. I'm not one for deductive arguments but there are things I can tell you:

 

Computer tech was compatible to our own and the lack of powerful modern computers was a deliberate act of Governememt censorship, either before the end of the Cold War proper or at the start of the resource wars.

 

That final exhaustion had nothing to do with inefficient tech, it was the end of new oil.

 

The USSR collapsed much like our world, even if it technically survived. The Warsaw Pact dissolved, because thats the only way a US-USSR repapproachment could occur.

 

China had to liberalize like our world then fall to a Mao revanchism. The economics will prevent no other conclusion other than Cheng's regime wasn't actually Maoist at all.

 

There was almost certainly a Vietnam War and if not Vietnam, an equivalent. I say this without a doubt because the American homefront was a replay of The Vietnam war, war without sacrifice, war with a peacetime feel, but with every lesson of Vietnam brought to bear to make it work. It was flawless. Up to an including a nearly all volunteer military (food riots, not draft riots).

 

The 50s style warfare was only because of the advancement of area denial weapons. Sorta like the lack of armor up to WWII was because rifle penetration made any attempt at armor a metal casket.

 

The PRC failed to take Taiwan or failed to anticipate the Americans retaking swiftly and with virtually no causlties.

 

The Gobi Campaign means an overland advance form Korea through Manchuria to the Gobi. The only other way is with the USSR an a US ally. But then American troops would not be the main actors in theater.

 

And so on.

[Moraelin]

Actually, if you REALLY want to over-think the whole pre-war / post-war setup and how it would realistically go, consider this:

 

The worst estimates in the 60's-70's were that the nukes themselves would kill about 10% of the population, tops. When they told you to duck and cover, they really meant it. Unless you're near the epicentre, you can duck behind a wall. The huge damage would be to infrastructure. And that is what keeps us all alive. Without all those trucks and trains hauling in stuff, we wouldn't have cities this big. And what would happen next is millions of people still getting hungry, thousands of diabetics still needing their insulin, and a lot of people still needing water, and so on. The survivors would live a few days on whatever they can still find locally, then about another 80% of the population would starve to death before the infrastructure is anywhere near repaired. Well, some would shoot each other first, but same idea.

 

So, no, the bombs wouldn't kill 99.9% or more like in the games, and leave America with a cities of a dozen people living happily off looting supermarkets for the next 200+ years. It would leave it with a lot of people, and all supplies already looted clean before you were even BORN in the vault. You wouldn't be the great hero with an endless supply of ammo and food to be found all over the place, but the guy who better take a shovel and start working, because there's nothing more to loot. You wouldn't find even the Nuka Colas still in their crates, because someone would have drunk them even for their sugar content to delay starvation for a day or two.

 

So, yeah, better not overthink it.

[phoneyLogic]

The worst estimates in the 60's-70's were that the nukes themselves would kill about 10% of the population, tops.

 

No, this are in fact the more "optimistic" estimations. They range from "a few" megadeaths to full extinction. Your 10% are extremely unrealistic btw. During the cold war, there were enough nukes to completely wipe out life on earth multiple times.

Edited December 14, 2012 by tortured Tomato

[charwo]

The nuke wiping out all life, is ONLY human life, and only if the tonage is evenly distributed. And it's not.

 

But, and here's the important part, the nukes themselves did virtually nothing. DC got nuked to s***, but frankly it's Tokyo firebombing in March 1945 was much worse.

 

It was the radiotropic weapons, the mutagens, the bio weapons and social collapse that did the US in. Although the Dead World concept is bulls***, the description of the Black Rain and the three month nuclear winter as described in Honest Hearts (expect the snow glowing) is on the worst side of possible. Most people died from the Black Rain, witness the Germantown Nurses. Now, even if Europe and such were destroyed too, for a whole host of reasons, Europe came out a lot better. It's strongly hinted at in Fallout 3: sure Dashwood says Europe must be terrible for immigrants to come in from there. But its probably better run, and more lawful, which is why bastards like Tennpenny and the Moliartys would flee to DC: an outlaw can find refuge in the wild lands. Plus, that Black Rain would be either exclusive to North America or much reduced elsewhere owing to the fact the Reds were trying to destroy the US, which had already conventionally conquered China.

 

In any case, it was the social collapse. Europe would do better simply because they had no chickenshit Enclave. If the Federal Government had manned up in the days and weeks after the Exchange, the US would have lost close to 50% of it's population (worst realistic outcome of real MAD exchanges) but it would have survived. The local National Guard Units were left without any coordination, no facilitates to treat the bio warfare infected and to produce radaway. Chaos toppled the US because the Enclave, while claiming to be the government of the United States, failed to govern in America's most desperate hour. Without coordination, the local peacekeeping areas fell.

 

Also, given Dead Money, it's likely all that food was actually made after the war in still functioning vending machines. In any case, the die off was so rapid in this perfect storm of immediate post war clusterf*#@, the die off was probably much like in the Stand.

[TrickyVein]

The US Civil Defense thought about this and other logistics after a worst case scenario quite a lot, it turns out. I'd like to ask, Moraelin, where you found that 10% figure and what it represents. The number of people who are killed instantly, i.e. vaporized or die from exposure to gamma radiation some distance away from ground zero? Does it include the numbers who suffer varying degrees of radiation poisoning and die in the weeks, months and years following? Here's a flowchart detailing how survivors may have dealt with the sheer numbers of dead bodies following an attack:

 

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/1956-Mortuary-services-flow-chart.jpg

(Source)

 

You may also want to consider the health-risk posed by leaving corpses out to rot and the introduction of disease into the survivor population. Not an insignificant risk, it turns out.

 

I find your post interesting, because when most people talk about 'Duck and Cover' they mean to be ironic, because it really wouldn't matter. And this concerns some analysts and politicians is that recent generations are becoming increasingly detached from a conservative stance on using nuclear weapons, and a real understanding of their effects. During the 60's, in fact which is the time frame you mention, the BBC had produced a documentary on nuclear war and its societal effects called The War Game. It was, and still is pretty accurate, based on data gleaned in the aftermath of WWII and the emergency-response infrastructure that was in place in Britain at the time. They didn't air it because it was decided that it was too realistic and would have caused unnecessary panic and fear.

 

There's nothing inherently 'special' about the bomb, and we shouldn't idolize it's destructive power. Like what has been mentioned, firebombing cities during WWII was just as destructive to those cities, Dresden, Tokyo, and others as the bombs were to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Nuclear war isn't any different in this way, which seems like the point you're trying to make. It's the poisonous fallout which is the true destructive legacy of the bomb (something explored pretty grimly in the documentary Threads) and which, hopefully, we will never have to find out for ourselves.