#and how being a fan of it means you like bethesda

[atn-antronach]

Be like me, who likes fantasy worlds and stories, find The Elder Scrolls to be such an interesting world, and then everyone (who understands your interests) suggest Starfield or Fallout. I can say "I like fantasy tho..." but still I am suggested space guns. Like, can someone suggest Dragon's Dogma 2 or Final Fantasy XVI please? They look pretty cool.

[vaulthistorian]

Announcement to those who do not like Maximus because they think his actor was awkward and didn't do well. Congratulations on not being able to read a character and or having little to no media literacy. The idea that Maximus' character is awkward isn't because of "bad acting" it's because he is supposed to be the awkward strong character who doesn't know about shit.

Maximus was played very well by his character, and in the first season his character growth is focused on second to Lucy, and near the end we focus a lot on the Ghoul because he is the more complicated character so it makes sense to start breaking him down in the first season more.

It gives strength to our three main characters and how they balance out the unravelling between the characters is based on how they see fit to bring out the amount of information needed or wanted.

It doesn't mean that Maximus is bland or was not promising, it's because he is supposed to be a character you don't know everything about.

It's honestly laughable seeing people getting upset and not liking a character purely because everything about that character, their actions, and their thoughts weren't laid on the table with giant neon signs pointing to them. You don't need to have your hand held and walked through every aspect of a media or its characters to like or understand.

If you genuinely can't understand or enjoy a media because of that, you lack media literacy or the ability to draw conclusions/enjoyment/thoughts from missing information.

This is another reason why New Vegas fans are getting upset. There is nothing to get upset about, and for some reason, they cannot understand that. Official directors from both the studio and Bethesda have denied any strength to the concerns of beloved NV fans, and they're still mad.

And last but definitely important: Just because you don't like a character doesn't make them a bad character. If they're a bad person, you're supposed to be uncomfortable and dislike them and their actions, but simply disliking a character's actions or speech doesn't mean they're a bad character.

So to the Fallout fans that lack literacy to the show, or are confused and sad there were no neon signs with info cards that showed up mid show to help you understand why a character did or said something, I hope you get better.

[thefallenangelsgang]

Fuck it, I'm throwing my hat on the ring about the Emil announcing Nate from Fallout 4 is the bystander Soldier in the Fallout 1 opener.

First and foremost, it was a stupid thing to say. As he backtracks to later, the conceit of Fallout's protags is they are supposed to be anyone (and that issue is precisely why some people hate the extensive prewar character background given to you in Fallout 4). For the lead writer to pull a JK Rowling (why would you do that? None of those went over well) is such a major marketing misstep that it wouldn't surprise me if Emil gets reprimanded for it before we even get into the implication of what he said.

Emil your voice is as good as God when it comes to the canon. You can't just say shit like that and expect it to go well. Especially considering the implications.

Speaking of the implications, I'm not mad about Nate being a war criminal. It's a coloring I actually would welcome if the games discussed concepts like Capitalism, Racism, and War in any meaningful way anymore. And if Emil also didn't say this.

Fallout's canon is rooted in reality. That is part of its whole thing. It's fun to do goofy shit like becoming the Silver Shroud and having a make believe superhero fight with the Mechanist or write a woman obsessed with Nuka Cola so much she traverses two games to basically kidnap the CEO's cryogenically preserved head so she can talk to him for all eternity, but the setting is very much rooted in reality.

You aren't dealing with fictional countries, you aren't dealing with fictional races, you aren't dealing with fictional hypotheticals. That is The Elder Scrolls job. You are dealing with actual countries, actual racism, actual history, and actual fucking politics. You have to be mindful of what you are doing and saying. You can't just do things because it's an interesting plot device without first thinking about the implications.

Fallout's world is a heightened version of our own, a path we seem to stumble towards with ever passing year unless we do something about it. It fucking sucks. I'm sure writing it feels like prophesizing the future and eats your soul a bit. It would mine. But that doesn't mean Fallout can just take a sharp left in terms of story and reality and get away with it.

To have Nate be the bystander Soldier and then meet him when he has a very good thing going for him (an expensive house during an inflation crisis, a robot butler, he gets into a vault for free for fucks sake) very much speaks to life rewarding him for his crimes. There is no hatred in his words when he looks at the flag of the country that made him kill innocents. His speech is speaks of remorse for leaving his family and the cycle of war, it does not speak of the horrors. Of watching you comrades bleed out in the Anchorage snow. Of the scream of shells overhead. Of the fear in civilians eyes as your buddy puts a bullet between them.

You all have to see how it looks like the man is fine with what he had to do during the war, right?

Not interacting with these concepts enough paints a picture of apathy and acceptance. In this day and age where being keeping the government honest and responsible for their actions is so important, that isn't going to slide without it being EXTREMELY purposeful, which it is not. It's tone deaf and lazy.

I respect a lot of what Emil has done in the past, but I am not above keeping him culpable when he has something so delicate in his hands. I hope this situation is what he needed to get his head on straight, or is the light bulb moment where he realizes he needs to pass the torch onwards. There is no shame in subject matter becoming too much as time goes on. There is shame in letting a previously critical series become the very thing it was criticizing.

He is going to keep getting dragged until he realizes that or he manages to convince the fans to be complicit in the degradation of setting. In doing so he is going to lose Bethesda most of its biggest fans who well and truly love the series and what it stands for.

But that's just my take, and I'm just a kid who studies polisci and history and can't shield myself from the inherent horror of nuclear war no matter how much I try.

War really never changes

[tleeaves]

Folks going "WHAT they made a show about the Fallout franchise?? I've been hearing people say Bethesda messed it up, but I haven't watched it myself, so I'm going to trust the word of other people -- some of which also haven't finished watching it" is driving me insane.

Being a hard core fan of something obviously brings with it a lot of passionate feelings when adaptations come into play. Of course, there's going to be people going "but in 8 episodes of the first ever season they made, they didn't explore Theme C or D, didn't introduce factions E and F and G, and because the source company is notorious for its scams, we and everyone else who's a TRUE fan should hate it".

The Amazon Original series Fallout follows the videogame franchise of the same name. It is a labour of love and you can tell by the attention to detail, the writing, the sets, and YES THE THEMES ARGUE WITH THE WALL. It's clearly fan service. I mean, the very characterisation of Lucy is a deadringer for someone playing a Fallout game for the first time. She embodies the innocent player whose expectations drastically change in a game that breaks your heart over and over again. Of course, she's also the vessel through which we explore a lot of themes, but I'll get to that.

There're some folks arguing that the show retcons the games, and I gotta say... for a website practically built on fandom culture, why are we so violently against the idea of someone basing an adaptation on a franchise that so easily lends itself to new and interesting interpretations? But to be frank, a lot of what AO's Fallout is not that new. We have: naive Vault dweller, sexy traumatised ghoul that people who aren't cowards will thirst over, and pathetic guy from a militaristic faction. We also have: total atomic annihilation, and literally in-world references to the games' lore and worldbuilding constantly (the way I was shaking my sister over seeing Grognark the Barbarian, Sugar Bombs, Cram, Stimpaks, and bags of RadAway was ridiculous). Oh, and the Red Rocket?? Best pal Dogmeat? I'm definitely outing myself as specifically a Fallout 4 player, but that's not the point you should be taking away from this.

The details, the references, and the new characters -- this show is practically SCREAMING "hey look, we did this for the fans, we hope you love it as much as we do". Who cares that the characters are new, they still hold the essence of ones we used to know! And they're still interesting, so goddamn bloody interesting. Their arcs mean so much to the story, and they're told in a genuinely intriguing way. This isn't just any videogame adaptation, this was gold. This sits near Netflix's Arcane: League of Legends level in videogame adaptation. Both series create new plots out of familiar worlds.

Of course, those who've done the work have already figured out AO's Fallout is not a retcon anyway. But even if it was, that shouldn't take away from the fact that this show is actually good. Not even just good, it's great.

Were some references a little shoe-horned in to the themes by the end of the show, such as with "War never changes"? Yes, I thought so. But I love how even with a new plot and characters, they're actually still exploring the same themes and staying true to the games. I've seen folks argue otherwise, but I truly disagree. The way capitalism poisons our world, represented primarily through The American Dream and the atomic age of the 45-50s that promoted the nuclear family dynamic -- it's there. If you think it's glorifying it by leaning so heavily into in the adaptation, I feel like you're not seeing it from the right angle. It's like saying Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck glorifies the American Dream, when both this book and the Fallout franchise are criticisms of it. If you think about it, the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout is a graveyard to the American Dream. This criticism comes from the plots that are built into every Fallout story that I know of. The Vaults are literally constructed to be their own horror story just by their mere existence, what they stand for, what happens in each of them. The whole entire show is about the preservation of the wrong things leading to fucked up worlds and people. The missions of the Vaults are time and again proven to be fruitless, unethical, plain wrong. Lucy is our brainwashed character who believed in the veritable cult she lived in before she found out the truth.

So then consider the Brotherhood of Steel. I really don't think it exists in the story to glorify the military. We see just how much the Brotherhood has brainwashed people like Max (also, anything ominously named something like "the Brotherhood" should raise eyebrows). Personally, I don't like Max, but I am intrigued by his characterisation. I thought the end of his arc was rushed the way he "came good" basically, but [SPOILERS] having him embraced as a knight in the Brotherhood at the end against his will -- finally getting something he always wanted -- and him grimly accepting it from all that we can tell? Him having that destiny forced upon him now that he's swaying? After he defected? If his storyline is meant to be a tragedy, it wouldn't surprise me, because Fallout is rife with tragedies anyway. And a tragedy would also be a criticism of the military. That's what Max's entire arc is. It goes from the microcosm focusing on the cycle of bullying between soldiers to the macro-environment where Max is being forced to continue a cycle of violence against humanity he doesn't want to anymore because a world driven to extremes forces him to choose it to survive (not to mention what a cult and no family would do to his psyche). Let's not forget what the Brotherhood's rules are: humankind is supreme. Mutants, ghouls, synths, and robots are abominations to be hated and destroyed. If you can't draw the parallels to the real world, you need to retake history and literature classes. The Brotherhood is also about preserving the wrong things, like the Vaults (like the Enclave, really). They just came about through different method. The Enclave is capitalism and twisted greed in a world where money barely exists anymore. The Brotherhood is, well, fascism plain and simple.

Are these the only factions in the Fallout franchise? Hell no. But if you're mad about that -- that they're the main ones explored, apart from the NCR -- I think you're missing the point. These themes, these reminders, are highly relevant in the current climate. In fact, I almost think they always will be relevant unless we undergo drastic change. On the surface-level, Fallout seems like the American ideal complete with guns blazing that guys in their basements jerk off to. Under that surface, is a mind-fuck story about almost the entire opposite: it's a deconstruction of American ideals that are held so closely by some, and the way that key notion of freedom gets twisted, and you're shooting a guy in-game because it's more merciful than what the world had in store for him.

I mean, the ghoul's a fucking cowboy from the wild west character he used to play in Hollywood glam and his wife was one of the people who helped blow up America in the name of capitalism and "peace". There are so many layers of this to explore, I'd need several days to try and keep track and go through it all.

The Amazon Prime show is a testament to the Fallout franchise. The message, the themes? They were not messed up or muddled or anything of the sort, in my opinion.

As for Todd Howard, that Bethesda guy, I'm sure there's perfectly valid reasons to hate him. I mean, I've hated people for a lot less valid reasons, and that's valid. We all got our feelings. But the show is about more than just him. My advice is to keep that in mind when you're judging it.

[sexhaver]

ive been playing Cassette Beasts for a minute and it never stops being funny to me how flagrant they are about making this "Pokemon but with features you didn't know Pokemon has always needed". off the top of my head:

super effective/NVE hits have added benefits/debuffs beyond just doubling/halving the damage (hitting Electric types with Ground reduces their evasion and speed, hitting Steel types with Poison gives them poison-coated spikes that do contact damage, etc)

legally-distinct-Pokemon will learn new moves while in your party without having to battle, and you can then straight up steal these moves from them and put them on a not-Pokemon you actually care about using, which gives an actual incentive to hunt down and raise otherwise fringe not-mons beyond completing the not-Pokedex

we all played the Pokemon Infinite Fusion fangame right? we know how fusions work? okay so this game has them as temporary per-battle things instead of permanent ones, which is only marginally less cool while being infinitely easier to balance around

attempting to catch something shows you the percentage chance of success so you know whether you just got unlucky or if you should save your Pokeballs-i-mean-blank-cassette-tapes

leveling up is tied to your not-trainer instead of your not-pokemon, so you don't end up in the classic trap where your starter is way overleveled and everything else is underleveled and then you hit a fight your starter can't solo and have to spend an hour grinding to get the weaker not-mons up to par (funnily enough most Pokemon Nuzlocke romhacks have already figured this out and give you infinite rare candies with the only restriction being that you can't level past the next gym leader's ace pokemon, because Pokemon fans have realized that grinding is the worst part of the game way before Game Freak has)

moves, not-Pokeballs, not-PokeCenter visits, and healing items are all bought using entirely separate currencies which stops you from trivially breaking the economy in half

the soundtrack, fittingly, is pretty good! the vocals were a bit much for my taste but there's an option in the settings menu to straight up turn them off (letting the BGM play on its own), which i've never seen in any other game and really appreciate

downsides:

on a game design level, i understand why can i only carry a max of 5 not-Potions and 1 not-Revive at a time - it's to put a limit on how far away from fast travel points i can get by just running away from everything and healing off damage. on a gameplay level, however, this feels pretty bad

the pixel art style is trying to look as much like Pokemon as possible without actually being Pokemon so the overworld sprites look more like beta stuff from Pokemon that they cut for looking too weird. i have yet to find a haircut that doesn't look bad

this is super petty of me but something about the bloom and lighting of the 3d environments combined with pixelated 2d sprites that still cast shadows makes me painfully aware im playing a video game. it's like they were going for the same aesthetic as Octopath Traveler but fell just barely short. i can't think of a better way to articulate this feeling but if you know you know

it does that really obnoxious half-assed style of voice acting where plot-relevant characters will sometimes (maybe every third or fourth textbox) speak the first two or three words of dialogue before trailing off. mashing through textboxes (as one does) means constantly getting jumpscared by "hmm"s and "haha!"s "okay then!"s

i get that they wanted to make the player feel involved in the story, and it has a pretty decent hook so far, but oh my god. the amount of dialogue "choices" that just transparently do not matter. you know how people memed on Fallout 3 and 4's dialogue choices all leading to the same outcome, to the extent that you were basically choosing between "yes" and "yes (rude)"? and you know how Bethesda would at least attempt to justify how both options led to you accepting the quest anyways, even if it was really dumb? Cassette Beasts has streamlined this process even further by making the options in most of their binary decisions so identical that they don't even require different followup dailogue before rejoining into the main conversation thread. a solid 2/3rds of the dialogue options in this game so far feel like checks that you're still awake. i know this is a minor issue because people aren't playing Pokemon-likes for the engaging "choices matter" approach to storytelling, and i did ignore it at first, but it's so pervasive that you really can't ignore it

[moodcrab]

Fixing Skyrim's Daedric Quests

Introduction

Unlike my Oblivion character - a mere mortal who stumbled upon a shrine while lost in the wilderness, becomes somewhat obsessed with gaining the level requirement and collecting an offering, then undertakes the quest feeling like a dark god is testing their worthiness to be their champion - The Last Dragonborn has Daedric Princes falling over themselves to make them their champion straight out the gate. Level one? Who cares! No offering? No problem! Not my Summoning Day? We haven't cared about that since Morrowind! Literally told me to go fuck myself? Take the prize anyway Champ you've earned it!

Basically, much like factions, Skyrim shoves nearly all of the Daedric Quests in the player's face as soon as possible because they're widely considered to be the best and most rewarding by fans of the previous games. But the older games had them, to varying degrees, hidden away or locked behind mechanics, and Bethesda didn't want newer, more casual fans to miss them. In doing so the Princes and their cults lose that air of mystery and danger they once had.

On the other hand, it was nice to be doing something else entirely then have a surprise Daedric Quests blind side me, and it's not like the old Oblivion way was perfect. Find shrine, give offering, get quest for EVERY Prince? And just one quest and I'm the champion, dedicated my soul to your afterlife and all that jazz?

This series is going to try to maximise the good parts of Skyrim Daedric Quests, while bringing back some of the classic elements that it left out, starting with...

Part I - Namria

Quest A) A Taste of Death.

If you visit the Treasury House in Markarth you might overhear an argument between Brother Verulus and Thongvor Silver-Blood. This location change means you are unlikely to just run into this quest immediately as in vanilla, but also gives you a high chance of encountering it during The Forsworn Conspiracy, in which case it has the double benefit of acting as a kind of red herring in that quest and linking this quest with Markarth's corruption and secret society vibes.

Brother Verulus wants the city guard to stop their lockdown of the Halls of the Dead and to actually go in and deal with the draugr head on (in my alternative "Fixed" Skyrim the increased draugr population is connected with Alduin's return, who is raising his Dragon Priests to serve him, even within cities). Why doesn't he go pester the Jarl or the Captain about this, asks Thongvor, dismissively. Oh come on, don't act coy, we all know who really controls the guard in Markarth, why not let them do their job, replies Verulus. Thongvor counters that that would be a desecration of the Nordic dead, that guards putting them down like a pest would be dishonourable. What's more, perhaps if the glorious Nordic dead of the city weren't being tended to by a poncy Imperial Priest of Arkay instead of a proper old fashioned Orkey Shaman, maybe none of this would have happened. Verulus starts to lose his temper at this, and in anger implies that he knows that the draugr problem that plagues the other cities isn't the real issue here, that most of the ancient dead here are Reachfolk not Nord, and begins to demand a true explanation for being locked out but stops himself, he has said too much and leaves.

The quest begins by talking to Verulus who will ask you to investigate what's really going on in The Halls of the Dead. How you get in is up to you. If you're a sneaky type or a smooth talker you'll get in that way. You can also commit a crime to lure the guard away maybe. You could go find Thongvor who can be convinced to give you an alternative - take care of Verulus, but more on that later.

However you get into the Halls, on entering you start finding evidence of cannibalism, butchered bodies, cooking stations and so on. As you delve deeper you hear Eola, a Reachman Namira Devotee, goading and teasing you; "Not many would walk blindly into a crypt, smelling of steel and blood, but not fear... Don't you see what I am about down here in the dark? Is that disgust? Revulsion?... Or curiosity? Why don't you come deeper, and scratch that itch?" You can question her about who she is, what is her purpose here, why is Thongvor protecting her etc. but it will come down to convincing her to leave, killing her, or accepting her invitation to eat human flesh.

Now, IF you sided with Thongvor, the plan is to lie to Verulus to get him to follow you into the Halls of the Dead, this time you'll be confronted directly by Eola and Thongvor together. They intend to kill and eat you both and blame your deaths on Draugr. You can fight your way out and try to save Verulus, or you can prove yourself by killing Verulus yourself and tasting him by way of a test.

If you partake in cannibalism you will get a monologue from Eola about Namira, waxing poetic about the oldest god, The Black Fly, being the Daedric Prince of decay and squalor and all things ugly and repulsive... But also her significance to the Reachmen. To them she is the Spirit Queen who is the true god of death, not Arkay, the primal darkness that gives and takes life. You will gain the power to feast on a corps once a night or when underground, and unlock the second quest.

Quest B - A Guest for Dinner

The second quest will be even less obvious to the player and will hopefully take most people completely by surprise the first time it happens. The quest will only begin after the following criteria are met: You have used the lesser power to consume 10 or more corpses. You own a fully furnished player home. You spend the night there with either your spouse or a follower. When you sleep, a slow, loud, ominous knocking at the door awakens you.

At your door is a stranger in rags and a hideous face asking to come in. You can refuse or invite them to stay. Once inside they will take a seat at your table and ask what is being served for dinner. At this point your follower/spouse will be freaking out a little. You can offer food, like regular food, which will disappoint him and he'll leave. You can offer your spouse or follower as the meal and you'll have to attack them, the screen will darken for an gruesome audible muckbang. Or you can tell the Stranger he is on the menu, which will please him greatly and he will warn you against choking on him, depending on the disposition of your specific follower or spouse they will either join in or abandon you forever.

The Stranger, if he survives the night, will give you the Ring of Namira as thanks. If you ate him Eola, who incidentally will now double as a replacement spouse/follower, will arrive and give you the Ring. The Ring is a powerful reflect damage/magic ring, a unique enchantment in Skyrim.

[malwaredykes]

I know you mostly post about fnv but I'm curious to know whats your opinion on the other fallouts?

fallout - really Really REALLY good. unforgiving, yes, takes some time getting used to. not without its flaws of course. for example i couldnt for the life of me figure out some very basic shit at first because the UI was designed by rodents i think. very Very engaging once you get past all of that. phenomenal first entry in the series. music, plot, worldbuilding, themes, major characters, mwah. mwah. They Dont Make Em Like That Anymore and there are many good reasons for it but time passed doesnt disappear so you can always play classic fallout.

fallout 2 - thing get weird. some of the highest highs, some of the lowest lows. the highs are really high though. unfortunately has a particular kind of needless edginess to it that gets extremely tiresome. "heeheehhee SECKS *begins to warp violently* heeiiuhehyehye" type. bizarrely racist and misogynistic at many points. contains some of the best voice acting moments in video game history. at many points its just very very tedious, like if with fo1 at some points i was like Well this is kinda rough, with fo2 there were stretches of the game where i was like What the hell am i even doing here Who are these people what is this crap. the enclave as this games evil fucked up faction is so great i love how theyre gradually introduced and then shit hits the fan. has a lot of texture to its worldbuilding and some really good fun moments but again it goes off the rails so much. i rly need to replay it but every time im like God do i really have time for this. i love that you drive a car

fallout 3 - weird fucking game. some truly unjustifiable design and worldbuilding decisions despite having also introduced a lot of rly good things. fun gameplay i mean its that classic falloublivionrim buggy grimy versatile ps3 pure brick ass gravel gamebryo bethesda. VERY funny to have so much of the games plot be like I Gotta Find My Dad like girl i dont care about my dad he can go die. oh wait he does. it has what i call The Martin Septim Problem and i think its kind of self explanatory. fawkes best boy hes my little birthday boy. fun to explore and do your own thing and discover whatevers going on out there. i HATE the brotherhood of steel in fallout the third. i HATE the enclave in fallout the third but i dont think it even comes close to how much i hate the brotherhood of steel in this game and what precedent it set for the rest of bethesda fallout. these creeps. im supposed to find any of this awesome? fuck no. oh also im ENDLESSLY amused by the prologue its like a nightmare sequence akskfnckxjnc. im being BORN?? ive just slid out of my mothers WOMB and CERVIX and VAGINA and theyre bringing up a screen to show her what an ugly monstrosity im gonna be when i grow up and shes like Waoww and she dies??? im a TODDLER? Release Me. Unhand Me You Fool. oh also that sequence where youre in a CRAZY SCIENTISTS SIMULATION is so stupid i love it

fallout 4 - havent played it for longer than 15 minutes (made me barfy). everything i learn about it is bizarre. like WHAT the fuck happens in that game. your old wrinkly son tells you youre stupid and dont need to know anything hes doing and then is like im dying can you take over for me??? also the intro is truly something i mean i dont mind having Some backstory to my character but youre saying i had to be straight married with a baby and living in a nice suburb, with a robot house servant? fuck no

everything else i havent played and have no real Thoughts about

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’m thinking about starfield again because I haven’t had the desire to redownload it and try another playthrough. And that’s weird. Because I replay games to death. That’s basically how I consume video games. I only play a few and I replay them until I know them inside and out and then put them down until I pick them up again a few weeks or months later. It’s very rare that I don’t want to replay a game that I’ve spent a lot of time with.

I think reflecting on it if they ever make a sequel to starfield they need to commit to one thing. Just any one thing. Just pick a thing to commit to. Commit to something.

It’s like starfield doesn’t want to commit and go all the way with any one thing. Starfield isn’t saying anything. Like even more so than usual with Bethesda games.

Like why am I collecting all of these artifacts? Why am I going to the next universe? Why am I helping any of these people in this city with very few named NPCs? Why am I cataloguing all of these plants and animals? Why are these gigantic procedurally generated environments here if there’s nothing to do in them?

Bethesda was trying to make it no man’s sky and a Bethesda game and not be weird or controversial in any way. What? This is the same studio that made giant radioactive bipedal alligators native only to one amusement park.

You know the terror of coming across Swan emerging from the lake for the first time in Fallout 4? You know that oh crap moment when you realize you can kill Astrid in Skyrim? I had zero moments like that playing starfield.

They should’ve done way more with the faction they created that was a bunch of murderous zealots worshiping a giant snake. Freaky fictional cults are Bethesda’s bread and butter. They’re very good at making comically evil cults and parodies of religious extremists.

Where’s the famous lines everyone is quoting from starfield? I’ve found none. No “I used to be an adventurer like you then I took an arrow in the knee” no “I’ve fought mudcrabs more fearsome than you” no “war never changes”

Perhaps the most memorable NPC interaction in Starfield is a) optional based on a box you check at the beginning of the game and b) Is a freaking reference to Oblivion. A game from 2006 with better writing. I’m of course talking about the adoring fan. That entire thing is a tribute to and almost carbon copy of the oblivion character and it’s the only fun NPC interaction I can remember from Starfield.

Like starfield doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t add anything. It’s not even uniquely bad. It’s just there. It’s not even an exploration game. Everywhere you go has already been settled. There’s random abandoned research stations and pirate outposts everywhere. Constellation aren’t explorers. The cataloguing you do with your scanner means nothing.

Starfield needs a direction. It needs to commit. It needs something on par with deathclaws. It needs to establish an antagonist that’s worth revisiting or being a major world event in the history of this world. The star born are just stupid to me. Just people trying to collect a bunch of rocks and go to another universe again and again and again so they can get dragon shouts or something. They’re lame. They’re disorganized. Picking sides between their different philosophies has no tangible impact on the world.

[vinxwatches]

fallout (2024)

WARNING: i did not finish this. i didn't want to finish this. do not read or watch if you like happy stories. do not read or watch if you like the darkness in the fallout games. this show is dark in gruesome, permanently damaging ways. fuck this. the show may fucking nail the aesthetic of fallout, it doesn't get the vibe of fallout. fallout is set in a serious world where video game characters go through a video game plots in a world that's also often goofy. an equivalence would be if the mario movie had a serious burial of Luigi half way through and he just stayed dead. a clear sign that it doesn't get it.

trigger warning: gore, dismemberment of the living and dead. the dog dies.

as a big fan of fallout 4, even fallout 76, and a letsplay of Fnv this is very hype. and the references they are putting in straight is so cool to see. and damn, that's how you start a fallout. and now jus the references, seriously the vault hallways looks straight up lifted from fallout 4 (with high definition mods)

a vault having connections with a different vault? so that either is a process of kicking people the fuck out, or the evil experiment from vault tech... probably both. also love that they don't avoid the fucked up lore that really makes fallout fallout.

oh yea, this is how you start a fallout part 2, the personal angle. kind of bummed that she doesn't start with the classic bulky 10mm. and of course there's something about the protaganists family, because this is bethesda fallout (not derogatively, just perfect adaptation)

me, out loud: "ohhh, that's the pridwin, that's so cool" if you get me to talk out loud you did good. petty power politics? how very fallout of you. "i'm bringing him home". i'm very sorry but that's not how fallout works.

also loves that bethesda continues with inclusivity. Dane is nonbinary, played by a trans actor. it's so small, it plays no role (at least i find it HIGHLY unlikely that it will. nb people are just part of reality, and so they are now (finally) entering media.

the fucking junk jet made it in?

just "the ghoul". i wonder if we'll get more info on what ghouls are. i mean i know. i've probably heard more false things then there's true stuff about ghouls to know. but if you're new to fallout i think the vault is relatively obvious, and the brotherhood is pretty well explained. but the concept of a ghoul? practivally nothing outside of them being scary, can go "feral", and are weird. but it is only the first episode.

02

it wouldn't be fallout without skeletons in strange positions and/or environmental story telling. did they use fallout sound effects for the weird man drinking water? it may not be but that is diamond city. at least based of it. it looks so fallout that i can't even remember which of the places i've had a shootout in it reminds me of, it's too many.

not a fan of living gore. like fallout game gore is fine. shooting limbs of completely mindless things? fine. but not on a person, espcially not one that's then crudely taken care of. i'm way too terrified of something happening to me, it tends to roam in my mind anyways, even more so now that i've a reason to give a shit about my body, so the dismemberment of the living... ew, please, no more. at least it doesn't stick around too long (in which case why? just to be gross?)

"cyanide was the most humane product vault tech ever made"... accurate yet horrifying.

03

oh... so that's who the ghoul is. and that, well it'll create drama, and i'm curious how close it's to the story of nuka break. haven't seen that show in too long.

me, out loud, after wondering what that monster was "oh of course it was a gulper. wait, no, those are east coast, this was west coast." not really a plothole, monsters from one side often make their way to the other. harder for a water based creature. unless the same thing evolved twice.

oh, those eyes weren't just more human then expect. that thing was human... once.

the golden rule is severely lacking. don't do onto others as you'd have them to onto you. if i was into bondage and often horney how do you think it'd treat people if the golden rule was. a good rule is "treat others how they want to be treated" or "treat others how you can reasonably expect they want to be treated". the golden rule of the wasteland is pretty accurate though: "thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time". this rule is, in fact, recursive.

of course the waterchip is broken. this is fallout after all.

04

ok, no, i'm done. no dismemberment of main characters. fuck you. even if she does get it back. i'm done.

[radmule]

I'm still in middle (or rather, start?) of watching the new Amazon Fallout series, sadly am chewing through it on slower pace, as I need to foremost finish my thesis and Uni work. Already have few things on my mind that I'd love to discuss in future, will try to keep remembering them until I finish watching it all :P

...anyway, I am horrified of the god awful discussion that's happening right now over on Twitter?? Some souls might remember my old post about Ulysses and my rookie experience with Fallout fans on Facebook before joining Tumblr, and how I couldn't grasp the sometimes mean-spirited or genuienly stupid takes people have on the games. Felt like these "faithful fans" stayed on FB but... nope, alot of them are supposedly dwelling Twitter now aswell. After on one single Fallout article there, my feed is now full of posts straight out of 2015 and HOOOLY CHRIST. All these 100% Fallout fans who sound like they play the games with flaps on eyes and ears, or that make you question why do they even -like- the games in the first place. Genuienly feel delirious from reading few of the comments and I really hope the discussion is gonna soon settle in direction of the show's story, rather than politics, made-up drama and "why the protagonist does not have big juicy butt like my Sole Survivor".

In the middle of this sh*tshow though, came across a post from Bethesda Studio Design Director claiming Nate is one of the soldiers from FO1 opening, that's laughing on his collegue killing bunch of people. He eventually retracted from it, as people were genuienly pissed Nate is now canonically (?) a big piece of sh*t person approving of warcrimes, but honestly... while these big-brained-on-paper-but-outside-kinda-eh retcons are not my cup of tea, Beth making one of their protagonists a living representation of everything wrong with Old World America (and actually using it in the game as a narrative) would be the most boldest, craziest and probably interesting thing they'd narratively done with Fallout. But alas, we never got it (thought the person behind this post claims him being the soldier in the vid was one of "headcanons" he had during FO4 develpment).

[gothicprep]

Does the “woke” critique ever really go beyond “this has gay people/poc/women in if they’re pushing their agenda” type stuff? Personally I don’t think I’ve heard “Mary sue” get used since Rey Starwars, everything I’ve seen lately is just foaming at the mouth when a story doesn’t exclusively center white men

there’s a version of the critique that’s just that, and there’s another version of it that’s something to the effect of “it seems like some writers use IP to tell a story *they* would like to tell, regardless of how it works in the IP”. the former one is just whiny. the second one, as far as I can tell, is probably a real critique, because i can think of examples of this being brought up where representation isn’t involved in ~the discourse~ around it at all.

this happened in like 2015 back when fallout 4 came out. if you don’t know anything about fallout, here’s the quick TL; DR. nuclear war happens. americans take shelter in vaults built by the vault-tec corporation. some of the vaults turn out to be weird social experiments set up to study human behavior. vault 95 was housed with only drug addicts and there were no drugs in the vault, except 5 years in, a massive stash of drugs would be revealed in a hidden location in the vault. the problem is that one of the logs the player can find is written by a delivery man where he says he’s delivering a shipment of jet, a fictional drug in the game that’s a weird cross between meth and jenkem, made from fumes of radiated cattle dung. but this was invented after the bombs dropped, so there was no way for a pre-war delivery man was bringing a shipment of it.

this is a problem that’s very easy to fix in a video game. just change the text in the next patch. instead, what happened was the guy who wrote that quest doubled down, and did it again when fans were pointing out the clear flaws in his logic. and the writer responded with “not interested in discussing how realistic things are in an alternate universe post-apoc game w/ talking mutants and ghouls.” and a lot of game and tech news sites backed him up on making fun of fans for daring to complain about lore inconsistencies.

and like, on some level, yeah. it’s just a story. maybe you shouldn’t take it too seriously. but part of the flip side of that is that if you stop taking it seriously, you stop consuming it. bethesda didn’t create fallout, they’re just it’s current owners. people working there might care about fallout to some extent, but when push comes to shove, they prioritize their own visions. and stuff like this is ultimately how they view it. if you’re a fan of fallout, it means something to you. that’s why you enjoy it. but to them it’s only a vehicle for their new story. if they can get away with not respecting old lore – not just to save face, but also because the old lore gets in the way of the story they want to tell – and they believe that you’ll continue consuming the product, what incentive do they have to respect the old lore.

and, how many times have you heard a story like this? how many tv shows? how many video games? how many movies has something equivalent has this happened to? people take these things seriously because they love them. when they see inconsistencies, they’re worried that the new stewards don’t actually care. and when those new stewards lash out like this, it just confirms to fans that these creatives only want to wear a skin suit of the thing that they love.

that’s the best steelman I have for that, anyway.

[typosandtea]

Actually Emil Pagliarulo deserves to get shit on for a lot of reasons not least of all the fact that he was apparently the brains behind having a character in 4 who calls you the r slur no matter how you interact with him

His stupid tweets are just the surface of how much he sucks as a person, in fact

Hi Anon!

Agreed that some of the writing things in fallout and Bethesda are awful, like you said, the r slurs credit card guy, awful horrible stupid why ugh. I hate that interaction so so much.

But I personally think that there is an important difference between A. Rightfully yelling about Bethesda’s garbage writing (and documentation process) and by extension, Emil’s weird / dumb takes and his apparent lack of understanding of fallout’s core themes. And B. Hating on Emil or the other Bethesda writers and sending them hate / pointless nasty tweet etc. Just because someone sucks as a person and writes garbage quests doesn’t mean they should be getting attacked constantly in my opinion.

I’m not and won’t defend him, there is a lot of awful and garbage and downright stupid writing decisions in Bethesda, and him being lead has a LOT to do with it, and I hope he either gets some understanding of the series, the fans and being a decent person, or is replaced by someone who does understand those very important things!

My point it “Your writing is awful” and “you are awful” are very different sentences!

We probably don’t see eye to eye Anon, and that’s ok!, I don’t mind, it is only MY opinion after all.

[tap-tap-tap-im-in]

With another Bethesda release looming somewhere in the ether of the future (bets are split between it being released on track with the delayed timeline or being delayed again), I want to take another crack at explaining why their games tickle my brain quite so much.

It is of course memetic now that their games are usually a buggy mess on release. Everyone remembers backwards flying dragons and horrible system destroying crashes. Everyone makes fun of them for releasing Skyrim on every platform imaginable (I myself am downloading it on the PS4 right now because it would be nice to play it in the living room without having to drag my computer in there). So it's easy to wonder why a studio that regularly releases such clearly unfinished games gets such good will.

I think it's ambition. I've mentioned previously that their games are immersive sims, but ones that are created purely by the design patterns of least resistance. What that means is that the studio sets out to create a huge sprawling RPG with hundreds of hours of content, but they are going to take the cheapest route to get there while still checking all the boxes. To me, each and every one of their games has that feel of a student project where halfway through someone just accepted that they weren't going to be able to put their best work into it, but it was going to be *finished* at least.

So why do I think these are systemic designed games, when that is the kind of thing that kills other studios? Because systemic design is the easiest way to fill out a world that's too big.

Bethesda RPGs have always been like that. From Arena and Daggerfall using entirely randomly generated worlds and dungeons, to the way Oblivion relies on poorly designed level scaling, Bethesda builds systems and then bends them to what the plot or quest needs. No quest or gameplay gimmick is so important that new systems will be built just to accommodate it, but that doesn't mean that they can't... fudge it a little.

My favorite example of this is in Fallout 3. In Fallout 3, there is a train you take from one area to another. For most loading transitions this is just a fade to black and then back up as one cell is unloaded and another is loaded in its place, but they really wanted to give the player the feeling of riding the train. So in this one instance, you can get in the train and you get to watch it drive down the track. There are no other moving or pilotable vehicles in the game so of course the engine doesn't support this by default. How did the designers accomplish this then? They gave an NPC a train hat. (https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/07/22/fallout-3-broken-steel-train-is-actually-just-a-giant-npc-hat). There's no reason to program the engine to move another kind of mesh around when the engine already fully supports NPCs.

This kind of creative reapplication of existing resources should be familiar to anyone involved with game design or theatre. That's the magic of creating something from a budget that could never fully realize it. But what's unique about the Bethesda games is that the games are so big that they are basically nothing but choices like this. Why do horses suck? Why does dragon riding suck? Why do the vampire and werewolf mechanics rely so heavily on the spell system? Why do these legendary items you hear about in quests often seem pretty lackluster when you get them? Because they are all tied to strict systems that weren't ever really designed with them in mind. Everything has to follow the rules of the engine, the player, the npcs, the quests, the weather.

But where Bethesda is almost solely unique is that they never let this hinder their creativity. Sure the quests never really live up to their potential, but you can tell how much joy the designer must have had in coming up with it. The only quests that Bethesda fans complain about are the so called "Radiant" quests, because those are randomly generated. If you bring up any quest that was written by one of the many many Bethesda quest designers, and it will have its fans.

It's the gaming equivalent of a long running show on a shoestring budget, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Buffy. It's not what you were expecting, but if you can tap into the joy that's put into it, it's such a good time. Plus, there's the joy of system driven design. Everything is run by rules in these worlds, and because the rules weren't made with all the other rules in mind, you can do some pretty ridiculous things once you understand all the systems and their interactions.

And on top of it all, Bethesda engine design is iterative to a fault. They walk away from every game with an understanding of what the last version of the engine did well and what it didn't (usually a lot) and they spend some extra time addressing this over time. The best example of this is the evolution of the crafting systems between Skyrim and Fallout 4. The crafting system in Skyrim was interesting. Long running systems like Alchemy and Enchanting were much streamlined from previous versions, cooking introduced both a new healing system and a way to use a bunch of items that were in the game for immersion but basically useless, but smithing was a pain. It was a system that was super rewarding to interact with, but the map didn't tell you where ore deposits were and without a mod you couldn't note where they were on the map for yourself, and ore was uncommon enough that if you were doing any extensive smithing you found yourself going to the few mines you could remember having what you wanted or spending a bunch on buying the resources from merchants. But Fallout 4 applied what was done with cooking to all of the crafting systems. It reprioritized player behavior with items and provided much more choice on how to obtain resources.

Bethesda games are good bad games, and with every release they get a little better at everything they've done before, but because they are too ambitious for their own good, every game tries to do more than it really can.

[butterfliesonthewall]

Game Recommendation for Fellow HeR Nancy Drew fans!!

I know I can’t be the only fan of HeR Interactive’s Nancy Drew series searching for more games with adventure, mystery, and intrigue, right? So I figured: why not? I’ll just throw up a post talking about one of my Special Interest™ games that isn’t one of the Nancy Drews: The Last Express.

If you just want the quick TL;DR version, I would summarize it with: captivating artwork and animation, excellent score and sound design, intriguing mysteries and storylines, brilliant writing and character dialogue, superb acting, and literally the most in-depth real-time mechanic I've ever seen. If you purchase a copy, I would urge you to get the original version on GOG, not Steam’s “Gold Edition” of the game which fubbernucked the menu and has tons of audio glitches. Also: be sure to check the game’s ratings and content warnings beforehand, to make sure you’re a player of appropriate age. Enjoy, friends!

Back to the main post. So, just for a quick bit of backstory: I first got into the Nancy Drew series when I was around 8-years-old, thanks to the recommendation of a friend I had at the time, and I also somewhat got into more difficult puzzle games like those from the Myst series as I got older. Around 11 or 12, my parents brought out an old copy of The Last Express and said they figured at that point I was probably old enough to play it without being scarred for life by its more mature themes. So one night, I popped the first of three discs into my mom’s old Windows Vista (barf), and within mere seconds of the opening, it became one of my favorite games of. all. time. No, really: this game completely changed my understanding of exactly how good storytelling in games could actually be, if done right. I have seen so many games try (and fail) to do what The Last Express does seemingly effortlessly: blend together cinematic storytelling and gameplay in a smooth and balanced way.

(Trigger warning for the trailer!! Contains a few brief shots of blood and violence.)

Seriously, I don’t understand how underhyped this game is. Supposedly the company that released it, Broderbund, really screwed it over by giving it basically no advertising or exposure at all leading up to, and even following its release. My main theory is that this may be due to possibly believing it might not turn out profitable enough to make up for such expenses, since it’s a game that was highly experimental for its time and dabbles in rather niche and esoteric interests, making it a rather enigmatic piece even to this day. I guess the, “Why?” doesn’t really matter now, though.

Either way: I feel that truly did both the game itself and the gaming community as a whole a disservice, since I firmly believe that if this game had been successful, it could have changed the entire frontier of gaming for years to come, particularly in terms of storytelling and character writing. (This game also really makes you appreciate how much “small” details actually matter, modern BETHESDA / HeR.) A big part of the reason I'm writing this review is that I'm hoping at some point this game will get a second chance at glory with the help of the internet.

Now what’s so great about it? Well probably the very first thing you’ll notice about this game is its rather unique art style. The technique used was a blend of rotoscoping both still shots and filmed sequences of live actors and props against blue-screened sets, which were later filled in using digital 3D modelling.

I’ve heard some people describe the art in this game as “ugly,” and while I can agree that it is certainly dated by both modern rotoscoping and 3D modelling standards, personally I can’t say I agree that it’s “ugly” by any means. This was incredibly revolutionary for the time period the game came out in, and while not all of it looks flawless, the game still manages to achieve some truly visually stunning moments. Not to mention, seeing characters that appear so much like real people makes the game incredibly immersive, to the point that once, while waiting in the corridor for a specific time of day, a woman walked past me and excused herself, and I actually replied, out loud, to my computer, “Oh, sorry,” and it took me a solid minute after that to even realize what had just happened.

Don’t worry, though: if the visuals alone aren’t enough to grab you, more good things are on the way.

Another great thing about this game that you’ll notice straight-away is the score: this is hands-down one of the best soundtracks I’ve ever heard in a game. It sets up the tone and emotions for every moment perfectly, and can be quite chilling during the more dark scenes. The music in particular is one of the aspects that I think will appeal highly to fellow Nancy Drew fans, since it’s in a similar vein to many of the soundtracks in the ND series.

In fact, the all-around sound design for this game deserves praise. The sound effects used were all perfectly balanced and created a palpable ambience to the game, making you effectively feel like you’re really on the train. There’s also a very effective use of train sounds in general, particularly in regards to the sound of one braking hard. I swear, this chilling stinger that is heard each time you get a game over is permanently seared into my brain. (As heard in the trailer video, for those curious.)

So brushing away the game’s more “superficial” pros for a moment, what’s it even about? Well, the year is 1914, and you play as a doctor named Robert Cath, who has been wrongly accused of murder and is currently on the run from both the British and French police. Prior to the start of the game, Cath received a telegram from an old friend named Tyler Whitney, claiming he had come across something “exceptional” that required Cath’s assistance. Managing to hop aboard the Orient Express, Cath eventually discovers that Tyler has been murdered, finding him dead and bloody on the floor of his compartment. The rest of the game is a dive into the deepest secrets and personal lives of the other passengers while you, as Cath, adopt Tyler’s identity and attempt to figure out who killed him, why, and where his “exceptional” finding has disappeared to.

The story is a complex web of secrets, lies, puzzles, romance, political conspiracies, art, war, and bloodshed. To give away anything further would enter dangerously into spoiler territory. It’s best to go into the game as blind as possible so you can be totally swept up in its many twists and turns.

This game also has excellent writing, particularly in terms of character interaction and dialogue. Each character is uniquely written and memorable, making it very easy to want to engage with them and learn more about them.

I also have to give praise to the acting. Every single actor gives a stellar performance, even in the more “modest” roles. There’s not much more to be said there; it speaks for itself.

But by far the biggest selling point to the game, at least in my opinion, is its real-time mechanics. This is a game that can not only be played fairly non-linearly, but has a great deal of replayability as well since every character operates on their own schedule of events. The ability to rewind and, to a limited degree, fast-forward time in the menu allows you to explore multiple possibilities, as different events are taking place at the same time all over the train. Not only that, but the creators were quite thorough in making sure that players could explore every single possible decision, which resulted in a highly detailed script at nearly 800 pages long. I am not exaggerating the least bit when I say I have played this game to completion more than a dozen times, and have discovered something new I'd never seen before every time I've played it. Even to this day, I’m still learning things about this game I didn’t know before.

Much like the artwork, the real-time and time-rewinding mechanics were both revolutionary in the industry at the time of this game’s release. Jordan Mechner, the game’s designer, was the original creator of Prince of Persia, and implemented similar time mechanics in that series to those he would go on to use in the Last Express, albeit with a heavier emphasis on storytelling than action in the latter.

Two very important things to note before I wrap up this little review. First of all, while I do recommend this game to fellow Nancy Drew players, I'm recommending it specifically to older players. While I wouldn’t describe this game as particularly “edgy,” it does contain a fair amount of adult themes, such as: nudity, low-level (mostly implied) sexual content, smoking and drinking, a few mild profanities, onscreen violence and bloodshed, and some very grim deaths. It is not child-friendly, so be advised of that.

And secondly, be careful about where you purchase this game. GOG and Steam are the two main sites peddling it, but they’re both selling versions that are different enough to really impact your gameplay, depending on which one you choose. GOG’s version is completely faithful to the original and far less buggy, but Steam has what it calls, “Gold Edition,” and while it cleans up the UI a little and comes with a Hint System to assist players, (as well as the admittedly interesting addition of character screens, though I prefer the mystery and intrigue of not knowing the other passengers’ backgrounds, getting to learn them for myself as I play and explore) I can’t recommend it on the grounds that it’s super buggy, particularly with audio, and completely ruins the charm of the original menu screen. Obviously whichever you choose is your decision, but I would strongly advise purchasing The Last Express on GOG, rather than Steam.

So if this little review persuaded any of you to try it, please feel free to reply to this post, or reblog it and share your opinions and theories! I’d love to see what response my fellow members of the Clue Crew would have to it in particular!

[jazzmckay]

i finally finished the fallout show, so here are my thoughts. i will talk about both things i enjoyed and things i didn't enjoy. be aware that i'm one of Those west coast fallout fans so this will be bethesda-critical, although it's never my goal to be a hater or make fans of bethesda games feel bad for enjoying them.

spoilers for not only the show, but most fallout games ive played, which includes: fallout, fallout 2, fallout 3, and fallout: new vegas

lets start with the positive!

things i enjoyed:

the aesthetics: it just plain looks good. it matches the games pretty accurately, it brought the world of fallout to this new medium very well. visually, it definitely looks like fallout, and i thought it had some nice cinematography and shot framing. i like that it was never too dark to see what was going on, i like that it was fairly vibrant even with the unavoidable Brown Wasteland, Metal Grey Vault palettes. the costumes were great. i liked how the people looked realistic for the world they're living in. i would have liked cooper to be more standard ghouly, but after having seen the full show, i'm fine with it. the ghouls have a lot of range, physically, and it does make sense for cooper to be more human-like because he's actively preserving himself, and probably did so pre-war as well. all in all it was visually great

the main characters: lucy is a fantastic main character. i love how shaped she is from living in vault 33 specifically, with her moral compass, view of the world, social uniqueness, and relationship with sex. i adore that she's such a positive person, always wanting to see the best in others and make the best of any situation, but that doesn't mean she can't get hurt and angry, can't fight when she has to. she's fun and badass, i really like her. maximus is just as complex, shaped by the brotherhood instead of the vault--again, moral compass, view of the world etc all coloured by where he's spent most of his life, just in a different way from lucy. more grey, more skewed, more manipulated, in my opinion, even though of course vault 33 was quite manipulated as well. his struggle with identity is awesome. i like how both of them are a little weird, a little socially unhinged, and majorly biased about the world. i enjoyed maximus' struggle and journey with coming into his own. i'll be eager to see that continue in s2. cooper took me almost the ENTIRE season to warm up to. at first he was the kind of character i found interesting, but difficult to like. right from the start, you know he wasn't always like this, and 200 years in the wasteland has understandably changed him, but i was still very "fuck this guy, hes a prick and he annoys me" for most of the show. the final episode finally tipped me over onto the "okay yeah im properly into this character now" side. he's definitely layered, just takes a bit to see more than the outer one that makes him just look like... a major piece of shit. i love a dark character as much as the next guy, but i prefer if it Makes Sense, and i didn't fully get him until the last ep. eager to see how he develops going forward as well. don't have a lot to say about norm, i just really like him. hell yeah fuck shit up, little bro

the side characters: betty and stephanie fascinate me, especially after learning who they really are. moldaver is SO COOL and a milf for real oh my god i'm a little obsessed. thaddeus surprised me with his depth. ma june was really cool and felt sort of quintessential fallout to me. even just the one-off people of the wasteland were really interesting to me. they were real people with a place in this world, no matter how small. (you'll notice i havent mentioned dane, even though being nb myself, a nb character should be a big deal to me. well. i still dont entirely know how i feel about dane, unfortunately)

the vault lore: from start to finish, i was HOOKED on everything to do with the vaults. the concept of 3 vaults being connected and able to trade with each other when necessary was interesting. i liked the concept of vault 33 and how it gave the characters a different culture about relationships and sex. then i enjoyed the suspense of the lie unravelling, of following norm's arc of defying what he'd been raised with to figure everything out. it was very tense and mysterious.

vault lore part 2: historically, i've not been a fan of pre-war society actually being shown. didn't like that they did that in fo4, though part of that could be that i just massively dislike the choices they made for it, including how it locked the player too much into an unchangeable (heterosexual) backstory. i guess i'm not fully against the pre-bomb time being shown as long as it's lore-friendly, and i'm pleasantly surprised that the show was pretty lore-friendly indeed. not entirely. i have some major gripes that i will get into later, but i liked the tension and intrigue of the big corporations doing their gross capitalism shit, and cooper finding out just how fucked up they are. the idea of the vault ownership being split up between different companies and therefore different ideals so "the best ideas of how to continue civilization can win" was interesting! i think it's more grounded to say that most vaults were trying to make something viable for the future, not just fucked up experiments for the sake of it, but the ideas were extreme and many doomed to failure. i wouldn't even say this is a retconn, a lot of the vaults, even the ones that got really messed up, can be viewed as an attempt at making something good, just with amoral methods

how the brotherhood was portrayed: FINALLY bethesda has written the brotherhood in a way more reflective of what they're supposed to be. the brotherhood are not the ultimate heroic knights in shining armour. they're not just a grandstanding military faction. caveat that i don't know the fo4 brotherhood personally, but fo3!brotherhood was so incomprehensible. in fo1, the brotherhood is reclusive and focused on technological / scientific information. they are a force to be reckoned with when convinced to take good action, but they're on the insular side. in fo2, they're a destroyed shadow of what they were, with barely any presence. in fnv they're even more reclusive, entirely xenophobic to anyone outside of the brotherhood and further stuck in their ways. you can help them improve, but there are cult vibes. and the show? i am impressed by how they focused on those cult vibes! the brotherhood doesn't have to be 100% the same every time when there's a lot of geography between chapters and different points in the last 200 have different needs, different goals and enemies, but the brotherhood should, imo, always be a grey area. when lucy asked "this is good right, the brotherhood are the good guys?" and maximus and thaddeus were like....... eh... it's. a complicated organization. THATS THE REAL SHIT. complex. a bit uncomfortable because they're reclusive and teach their people biased ideas of the wasteland. an ideology that makes sense in-verse, but isn't a simple dichotomy of good or bad. some parts of it were uncomfortable for me in a "well thats an odd writing choice" but most of it was uncomfortable in the way the brotherhood is SUPPOSED to be uncomfortable, and i am here for that

the scene where maximus comes clean to lucy and she accepts him, because she's learned how complicated the surface world is, and she has been travelling with him enough to see who he really is

the fnv theme cue when the ncr flag was shown. got me emotional fr

lucy is down to fuck and i LOVE that for her. it's great to see a female main character be so into sex without it being for any reason other than... she thinks sex is good and fun

the lucy/maximus ship. im officially on team "people who say its boring and lacking in chemistry might be not giving the black character the consideration he deserves because of internalized racism" sorry

i can ALSO get behind the lucy/cooper ship, after the last episode. it feels like theyre on somewhat even ground now. i can go for a begrudging allies pair. they should have rough, angry sex and remind each other it doesn't mean anything after and then they both go and pine and/or brood about the people they wish they were with, or wish they were with but in a happier story

the music in general

cx404 my beloved <3

things i did not enjoy:

the biggest issue is, of course, the way the show completely fucked with and/or retconned fallout: new vegas. in my opinion, it was very disrespectful, to the point where it's hard to see it as anything but maliciously intentional for mr. todd 'liar' howard to literally nuke the center of west coast fallout's world. it feels scummy. it feels tone deaf. it feels like a kid stomping on another kids sand castle at the beach because all they understand is destruction and coming out on top. and it also makes NO sense. the show says shady sands was bombed in 2277, which is the year of the first battle of hoover dam, and 4 years before the start of fnv. it renders everything in fnv void. the thing is that shady sands is just one small part of the ncr--in fo1, its a small farming village just getting started and a couple generations later in fo2, it isnt even recognizable as shady sands anymore, its just. The New California Republic. it's huge! it's sprawling! bombing a single city wouldn't have wiped out the ncr--and even the show acknowledges this with vault 4 and moldaver's people--but it's still too significant a calamity that fnv could have happened the way it did proceeding it. you can't just add an event like this and think it'll work when no one in fnv mentions it, when it can't retroactively impact the ncr's future that is already shown. and even though the show does allow that remnants of the ncr have survived, they didn't do it in the way that makes sense, in my opinion. what would make sense is having an entire nation losing its capitol, but the rest being able to continue on. it doesnt make sense for them to become what they did in the show, nor having it be a non-issue during fnv. the ncr could not have had a continued presence in the mojave if that nuke really happened. ive seen pieces of articles and such about how they were careful to follow the timeline and "dont worry, fnv still happened!" but.... they most certainly did not follow the timeline, and what they did utterly fucks up fnv's narrative

the answering of the question "who fired the first bomb". while i enjoyed the backstory, i did not enjoy this question being answered. the point of fallout is not who was right and who was wrong. the point isnt about there being a good side, a bad side, a justification for anything. the point is that nuclear bombs are horrific and what happened to the world is the ultimate tragedy. and it's about communities still being able to rise from the ashes and make something real. it's about people being able to survive and thrive. yes, conflict persists, but the world has not ended, and in west coast fallout, entire cities have grown up from nothing to take on a way of life all on their own, different from the pre-war days, but no longer weighed down by the tragedy, either. east coast fallout is post-apocalypse. west coast fallout is post-post-apocalypse. it's supposed to be post-post-apocalypse, and who dropped the bombs does not matter. the point is that war never changes--but people do. the old world is gone, what happened happened, and society has to move on. answering the question of who dropped the bombs serves no narrative purpose

and if america dropped the bombs on themselves--what does that mean for the rest of the world? of course, we have never known if the rest of the world is still out there continuing as normal, but making the bombs in america an inside job has new implications for china's part in everything. i do wonder if the shift away from the american-chinese conflict is a sensitivity issue. i'm not knowledgeable enough on the topic to speak on it further

robert house's potential/likely character assassination: the best way i could possibly read it is that house was being reticent about his true feelings because it wouldn't have been very tactful to oppose an entire room of capitalism moguls. but his part in planning the bombs is, if taken at face value, utterly opposed to his actual goals as stated in fnv. i want to believe he was just flying under the radar to get information. but it either doesnt make sense, or we dont have the full story yet, because house's intentions were to save new vegas from the bombs, and he wasn't able to save the entire area, which he should have been able to do if in the know, and he also would have been able to get the platinum chip on a better timeline if he was in the know. i'm trying to reserve judgement in case they elaborate on him in s2, but s1!house is.... not fnv!house

needed more pre-existing rad creatures. i'm guessing the bear was supposed to be a yao guai even though they didn't name it, but the gulper was new, and i wouldve liked to see geckos, maybe nightstalkers or cazadors if possible, just... anything properly reminiscent of west coast fallout. based on the final scenes, i'd like to think we'll see deathclaws in s2. please.

sometimes there were bouts of confusing / weird writing. episode 6 in particular had me a bit "what the fuck is going on and why are certain characters acting like this????". the scene where maximus reveals himself to thaddeus was also lackluster in my opinion. i think it should have been drawn out at least a bit. maximus trying to explain, thaddeus being conflicted--not just an immediate flip. it's hard to believe maximus would injure thaddeus THAT badly without trying something else first. whiplash for real. maximus was a little weird in vault 4 and i genuinely don't know what vibe they were going for. at first i thought he'd been drugged and the people there were going to experiment on him. (also how did cooper NOT SEE the "test subjects" over the door when he was doing the vault-tec ad? i dont remember if the name plate was shown in the commercial itself but i sure hope not or, uhhh... people would have known something bad was up). it was just a bit ??? for me, that whole damn episode. what was with the ncr remnants acting Like That? i don't get it and it was never addressed again? am i just supposed to believe that a couple decades or whatever separated from the ncr society has turned them into a cult? what association do they even have with moldaver anymore? its all so weird and unexplained. and if moldaver opposed vault-tec, how did she end up in cryo with them? i guess she didn't actively walk away from it? maybe im missing something here

on that note, the portrayal of the ncr: moldaver and her people end up being ncr but they were played the whole time like raiders. only for the end of the show to have moldaver's settlement be totally normal people just living their lives. what the hell? and the vault 4 people, again, were unsettling and confusing, i don't understand what i'm supposed to take away from this. i suppose the point is that time has changed both groups, and moldaver's been pushed to extremes, but the framing was just.... weird and iffy for me. it's a far cry from the ncr i'm used to

final thoughts:

i did overall enjoy the show, but i suppose, as they say about games like fo4, "it was a good show, but it wasn't a good fallout show". i was pleasantly surprised in a lot of ways, but the fact remains that bethesda misses, or disregards, the whole point of fallout. often they go directly against the original message of fallout. most modern fallout just isn't what it was when it started or what it is when created by people who were there at the beginning. it's painful being a west coast fan specifically, sometimes, because todd is always finding new ways to massacre my boy. but if i pretend this isn't canon and that it has no bearing on one of my favourite games, if i look at it just as it is instead of something that hinges with a bunch of other stories... it was surprisingly enjoyable. i just have to turn off the part of my brain that wants to fight mr howard in the dennys parking lot at 4am

[agentnico]

Fallout - season 1 (2024) review

The evolution of the phrase “okey dokey” throughout this show says so much for the good old fashioned writing of this season.

Plot: Over 200 years after a nuclear apocalypse devastates America, a violent raid by bandits on an underground fallout shelter forces one of its residents to set out into a barren wasteland filled with radiation, mutated monsters, and a lawless society of those who remained on the surface.

For a very long while in the cinephile and gaming community there has been this shared agreement over the video game adaptation curse. Video games have been plagued with adaptations that end up being met with terrible reception due to a combination of bad writing and poor visuals that don’t live up to the original game. To this day this fact arguably still continues with the likes of Resident Evil and Uncharted. And look, I love Hiroyuki Sanada as much as the next person, but that Mortal Kombat flick from a few years back was not great either. That being said, in recent years there has also been a trend of genuinely successful attempts that have translated surprisingly well. Detective Pikachu banked a lot on Ryan Reynolds sarcastic persona and the Pokémon creatures were utilised well; Netflix’s The Witcher has done pretty well for itself, well until now when they’ve swapped their lead actor for one of the cheaper Hemsworth brothers; Super Mario Bros. Movie and the Sonic flicks I’m not a fan of myself, but evidently from the box office numbers and audience reactions they seemed to have hit the right spot in the fans’ hearts. Then there’s The Last of Us. The original game won people over for its heart-wrenching human drama against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, and the TV show has done a perfect job of capturing that. Every episode has recreated the game down to the last detail, and even when things are changed, the spirit of the source material is still kept alive. All of that makes it a rare adaptation that succeeds in giving people a new version of the original game and then some, giving it plenty to offer for old and new fans alike.

Now it seems that positive trend continues, furthermore underlining that the video game adaptation curse is now a myth. Well maybe, as that upcoming Borderlands movie is a looking suspiciously clunky but we’ll see how that one turns out. As for presently, Prime Video has shocked us all by giving us a truly fantastic show in Fallout. And I say shocked as the last time Prime Video adapted a famous property was The Rings of Power series and they butchered that one hard! I mean I’m sorry, but making an entire over-bloated season about the mystery of who is Sauron, and at the end the reveal is he’s some teen-Twilight-era dude and we’re supposed to all gasp in awe?? Look, I get that it’s not Prime Video themselves to be blamed, but the show runners and writers, but naturally Prime has left a sour taste in my palette. HOWEVER - Fallout is actually genuinely a good time!

I’ve never really played any of the Fallout games. Never appealed to me, and I have always found it difficult to get into any Bethesda games. My fiancée however tried Fallout 4 half a year ago and apparently gave up as she found it too confusing and she got stuck at a monster boss fight early on. I do hope she wasn’t stuck fighting one of those tiny little bugs, surely not. That would be embarrassing. So I went into this show without being a fan of the games, though I was aware of its post-apocalyptic backdrop. One of the best things about Fallout the TV show is that it’s very accessible whether or not you’ve played the games. Yes, fans of the games will notice a lot of fun stuff from the source material, but even if you’re a total newcomer, you can watch and follow along without any issues.

The story revolves around three main characters 200 years after a nuclear war basically destroyed everything, driving some survivors into underground bunkers called Vaults. Ella Purnell (that’s right, one of Miss Peregrine’s peculiar children!) plays Lucy MacLean, a Vault Dweller who, through unfortunate circumstances, leaves the relative safety of Vault 33 and travels to the surface on a life or death mission. She’s joined by Maximus (Aaron Clifton Moten) a squire in the secretive Brotherhood Of Steel - Power Armor-wearing knights who roam the land looking for lost technology. Maximus is almost as green as Lucy, venturing out on a quest he’s not very well prepared to tackle. Finally, rounding out the main trio, we have Walton Goggins as The Ghoul, a gunslinging bounty hunter and mutant who’s managed to live for well over 200 years. We learn more about his past as celebrity Cooper Howard through a number of flashbacks. Naturally more characters pop up along the way. I just want to urge anyone sitting on the fence to give this series a shot. It’s great fun, with plenty of humour, action and mystery and its creators clearly put a lot of effort into making it true to the game universe, while also being inventive with their storytelling.

It’s also really gory. You get to see a lot of human flesh out on display (heck, there are even zombies in this thing!) and it’s all visually looked really well done. Again with Bezos’ Amazon budget, like The Rings of Power show, Fallout looks like an expensive series. It just so happens that unlike Rings of Power this one happens to also have good writing, characters and narrative. There’s some impressive world-building, with every shot filled with various details that I’m sure will please the game fans. The story is really engaging, and I loved getting into the politics of this world and how companies like Vault Tec have more to them that meets the eye.

The primary element that works for Fallout is that’s its easy. As in it’s really enjoyable and straightforward and makes for a solid binge watch. Walton Goggins is superb as the Ghoul. Johnny Pemberton as Thaddeus, a squire for the Knights, was a great use of using a comedic actor and making them play things straight by simply trying to survive in this world, so that when the funny lines did come up they hit strong. Oh, and did I mention that Agent Dale Cooper himself, my boy Kyle MacLachlan is in this show?? Honestly, Fallout is a great time! Amazon, I still haven’t forgiven you for Lord of the Rings, but this is a good attempt for an apology.

Overall score: 7/10