#yeah it sucks that the ncr got nuked

[grayrazor]

I don’t think it’s a change to canon that there’s ruined skyscrapers around the nuke crater in Shady Sands in the Fallout show.

I don’t think the idea was that Shady Sands was in the Los Angeles Boneyard, but that the New California Republic had built back up to a pre-Great War level before another nuclear conflict broke out.

I still have three episodes to go before I get caught up, so they might contradict that. The series trailer did show NCR and Brotherhood of Steel fighting in LA.

[jinglyjangly]

Major spoilers

So shady sands got nuked by a random vault dweller because his wife took their kids, and he wanted his kids, and he was mad his wife found a settlement when vault tec was supposed to be the ones settling the surface…he was mad the ncr “did vault Tec’s job before they could” so he blew…the fucking ncr’s main settlement up

I wonder if it’s like “oh yeah he was a protag of his own mind pretty much” kind of jab but even then it leaves a bad taste in my mouth? Because it is insane video game writing and it’s definitely insane bethesda video game writing, but it fucks up a very integral part of two major games

And I hate how much like…yeah the BoS is back to being technocratic and more cult like in the show but it’s also still praised kind of? And the random, and I mean RANDOM, nonbinary BoS member that’s there for like, 20 minutes was just…a waste. A nonbinary person that really does nothing but just be there and hurt themselves to forward the narrative of the cis het protag. Honestly they’re there to piss of the conservative gamers but I’m not conservative and I’m pissed shady sands and the ncr got did dirty like that so in the end every fallout fan is mad

Like…the ncr went from a huge mega power that is basically a country, to being blown up by a dude? And they don’t mention the hoover dam and how maybe they were weakened from the legion/ncr conflict…which would’ve made it believable. Nada. They just say it this guy blew up shady sands so I guess it happened. It’s canon.

They just made the ncr seem so small after fnv made it feel so big and menacing in its own way with hundreds of named npcs with stories and it was so gooooood and they made it feel like a shitty dinky settlement comparable to fucking…like…diamond city

Idk it’s like 5am and the final episode just pissed me off. They should’ve just set it in New York or Florida and made up new factions instead of establishing canon endings to the most favored game in the series. Or they could’ve done a prequel to fo4 if they wanted it to tie in the games so bad.

The ghoul also has the best scenes and story but I’m…idk the drugs suppressing the “feral” disease is also a weird thing. It’s new to the tv series and what only in la? What’s it made of that no one else makes? And why the fuck did he have to eat someone. I liked the scene because it was kinda just neat to watch in a way… but it’s like “oh he’s a ghoul so he eats people whoOoOo” They never really…explain…if he like…needs meat or something and idk. I dunno. And cold fusion? Like what. Wha…uh. I fucking hate the idea of power being harnessed from tiny object. It’s just a lame McGuffin they can pass around. I would rather it be like…they’re fighting over a wind farm to harness power and they need like a scientist/engineer to fix it. Something that feels big and really.

Anyway, I’m fine with watching it until I think about it, and then I don’t like the plot. So it feels like fo4 all over again but I’m more mad because I feel like it ruined fnv’s ending. Which sucks. So personally I do not see the show as canon but as like, fan fiction to like…maybe a independent/house/legion ending for fnv when the ncr is super week and some guy just bombs it…because he’s mad at his wife.

Big ooof, a 8/10 until episode 8 and then it’s a fat 2/10…one star for goggins making another badass ghoul in the series and one for the dog

[oroborosdreadwalker]

Ahh yes, fallouts equivalent of the hit song boulevard of broken dreams, the lonesome road, filled with the blue men groups evil cousins the red men group or the marked men, basically reskinned non-feral ghoul enemies, the tunnelers of whom i loath because i swear their hitbox doesnt work half the time and unless they are hitting you in which your hotbox grows 70 sizes and theirs yet again shrinks. 95% chance to hit at medium range with a brushgun with 4 shots thing didnt even fucking move the entire time EVERY FUCKING SHOT MISSED ONE EVEN KILL CAMMED AND SHOWN THE BULLET PULLING A FUCKING XCOM AND JUST GOING THROUGH ITS HEAD AND NOT DOING ANYTHING, and death claws, walk the lonesome road with E-DE but not our E-DE a diffrent one with the same names and memories as his mojave counterpart due to what i have to say is an robo hivemind for the eyebots, grab a personal nuke detonator, and start making oppenhimer even more depressed then he was, while making old Kimmy-Un climax with how much he wants to do that, have E-De taken frim you by some dude named after historical figure Ulyesses S Grant, but just going by Ulyesses telling you "gonna be real cheif this was your fault, your last package contained a fucking supernuke and this place got thanks snapped my G, so yeah your fault fuck you dont care you weren't told what you had, and was told not to look, i could give less of a shit, i could kill you now but I want to tell you how much of a horrible person you are for causing this even though you had no way of knowing, face to face, so imma just steal your robot ok fuck you bye, oh one more thing did i tell you ever though you didnt know what you where delivering because even if you looked in the pakage you wouldn't of found it, that you are 100% the only one to blame for this, not the person who knew what it was and willingly set it off because they ordered it so knew what to do with it? Nah he is completely innocent, i see no reason to blame him, oh by the wayndid you know i mostly work for the legion but dont share the philosophies? Ok cool, you suck, see you soon" explode more nukes, get called an asshole by uylesses a few more times and then confront the man of the hour after getting your robodude back, now two ways this goes down you fight him, his healing eyebots and the marked men at the same time, or you talk him down and fight the marked men together, you then either disarm the nuke, or nuke the legion, NCR or both, lonesome road over. Gonna be real the only thing i like about this DLC is Uylesses and E-DE everything else sucks dick, and is glitchy is fuck to the point i actually cant kill certain creatures due to there hitbox not existing simetimes I swear to Atom. Anyways DLCs done, might do Fo4 next or find a new game to rave over while i take a break from Elden Ring so i dont burn myself out on the game.

[bloody-fists-beating-hearts]

It’s a Fallout76/Bethesda rant

Bethesda just released Fallout 1st, a horseshit pay-to-win subscription system for their absolute cum-bubble of a game, and while it’s getting the flack it deserves there are people already putting on their kneepads so they can gobble down Todd Howards entire turgid cock, and as someone who likes rpg’s way too much this irked me, so have a massive and barely coherent rant i took off the discord because why not.

I want to start off with this:  Every good thing about current fallout comes from the fanbase. The stories people tell, the headcanons, the fanfics, the art, everything fans do for it is made with more love, and more thought, than anything Bethesda’s writing and games design team has done in the last 10 years

Now first of all, I haven’t bought or played 76. People are gonna stop me right there and go ”well you haven’t bought it how would you know its bad!!” yeah, I’ve never eaten dog shit either but I can pretty well guess that I ain’t gonna fucking like it.

I knew the second he said "there are no npcs" with actual enthusiasm that this game was gonna be shit. And if you give me 2 seconds to gloat, I never bought the game and I knew this was gonna happen and I was RIGHT so suck my fat hairy nuts all those fanboys who pre-order things mindlessly just because there's a brand name attached to it. If there is anything you take from this its DO NOT PREORDER. BRAND LOYALTY IS FOR BOOMERS AND BOOTLICKERS. FOR FUCKS SAKE BE SMART WITH YOUR MONEY.

Games like this are fucking 80-90 dollars or more in Australia so I actually have to think about whether this momentary distraction is worth almost an entire days paycheck, and I’m still looking for employment which means I actually haven’t bought shit in a while (side note, anyone wants to commission me for 10 dollars I’ll draw damn near anything. God I need to make rent)

Every executive at Bethesda seems to be playing catch-up to EA's monetisation scheme. Beth has abandoned their model of single-player rpg's in favour of a "games as a service" model. Fallout 76 seems to me like its a weird experiment for just how far they can stretch this and still make money. It actually makes me wonder if they are 

 a) just completely unaware of fanbase response [no idea HOW]

b) are running into financial problems and are doing this out of desperation

 c) todd howard is still mad that obsidian made a better fallout than he ever could and he's doing this out of spite 

  Games as a whole has become much like the movie industry where publishers will throw big buckets of cash around to development teams, and those teams have CEO's and higher ups that throw lavish meet n greets and have nice fancy suits and cars and then treat their development teams like shit, overworking them to the point of exhaustion, because the product has to be on time for release dates that are scheduled to be the most profitable (christmas is a notable one). 

And those products are consistently bland, shitty, shallow experiences. Narrative cum-dumpsters that are purposefully made to toe the line as safely as possible, to be open to as wide as an audience as possible so they can make the most money, and Bethesda is a huge offender. Skyrim was fun, sure, but it was watered down to fuck, it had shitty dialogue, it had bland one-note characters, it had a simplified skill system. It was impossible to lose. Seriously, try and fail a fucking quest in skyrim, other than one or two, it's a hand-holder of an rpg, but it has a huge community of fans that put in monumental effort, for free, because they like the Elder Scrolls, and they like the world bethesda made. 

  Then Bethesda goes "hey, that watered down thing we made got huge! lets release it about 12 more fucking times, with some of the SAME bugs, with the SAME content, with the SAME limitations and Yes, we absolutely expect you to pay for it, again. Then they release the remastered edition which, to their credit, is free to anyone who already bought the legendary edition (on PC), and does actually have updated 64bit capability and some graphical enhancements (that aren't anywhere near what some goober in his basement cooked up in his spare time, but whatever). Then, seeing that Skyrim was so popular, with kids especially, and made money, they turn their sights to fallout 4, a game that was so anticipated that someone made a fake countdown and caused a small meltdown on tumblr/social media when it was revealed to be fake (i was part of that fiasco, i remember the hype, i was there goddamnit)

So Fallout, a franchise that literally has its theme as its FUCKING TAGLINE, an ADULT game that is equal parts crude, gory and humorous. A game that satirises the cold war era of american my-country-tis-of-thee blind loyalty and openly mocks the way war was idealised, and shows that not even the literal end of the world could either stop humanity's lust for blood or its desire for conquest. Games that showed you the growth of the world - from shady sands to the NCR, from the vault dweller to arroyo, shit actually happened in the games, the world didn't just stop turning when the bombs dropped. A game where you you become a porn star for fucks sake, and it's funny. 

So Bethesda sees that, makes something like it (fallout 3) which is good, but a little rough around the edges when you look at it too hard. But the way they suck you into the vault, the way they build a relationship with your dad and your way of life is immersive as fuck, so when you leave the place you actually feel like you're leaving something important, not just finishing the tutorial

then they outsource a Fallout game to obsidian, because hey, we saved your franchise by buying it off you, but if you can make an entire game in one year and get a metacritic score of 85 we'll even throw in a bonus. And fuck me sideways and in the ear, if the obsidian devs didn't work themselves harder than a 4-armed hooker. And they made a game that on release was a clusterfuck of bugs, because they were given an unrealistic time limit and missed the metacritic score by ONE POINT so bethesda goes "nhey heh sucks to suck" and fucks them off the franchise forever. EXCEPT (and I admit I'm biased here) the game is good. The game is actually really good when you remove those bugs, and people start forming attachments to it, and mentioning how bad fallout 3's writing is by extension. 

  So Todd and Co. in his infinite wisdom, decide that the only thing a fallout rpg needs is 50s aesthetic and fuck all else, and he releases a game so watered down it can't even be called an rpg. And its not. There are no skills. There are barely any dialogue checks. Instead of dialogue, Nate/Nora is a flat, samrish individual that is either "yes sir right away sir may i have another", "yes but i'm gonna make an unfunny quip about it" "this option pretends to say no but its gonna give you the quest marker anyway". 

The game drops any pretence of difficulty by giving you a deathclaw, a minigun and some power armour in the first 10 minutes, allowing you to effectively reach late-game power levels with some minor scavenging for ammo or cores. Then the game ropes you into some inter-faction war that realistically you wouldn't give a shit about, because some spud in a cowboy hat fucking deputizes you into a military general because you shot like 4 raiders from a rooftop (with a minigun. in power armour. making you nigh-invulnerable to bullets). You're sad about your son about 3 times the whole game and then you're on your merry way to mowing down humans left right and center without a care in the world. God fallout 4's writing is so stupid it gives me an aneurysm.

 Remember the part about resources wars and america only having the veneer of a strong country while riots, inflation, and resource shortages tore it apart from within? Bethesda doesn't, have an eerily stepford pastel coloured glimpse at a world that was totally fine, nothing wrong here, shame it got nuked oh well moving on

Your spouse? yeah you love them, they're said 2 whole sentences to you then they died, be sad because you totally loved them and it is totally sad that they are dead. Your weird play-dough son shaun, you love him so much, you even tickled him on the chin once, okay he's gone off you go to chase him - woah now, don't chase him too hard we have all these side quests for you to do! What would be the narrative reasoning for a supposedly distraught parent to fuck around boston instead of finding their goddamn child? fuck knows! just go pick up some goddamn wood and get to base building sonny-jim! 

Companions? yeah, they're fun, we gave them a romance questline and it's thus: if you pick enough locks and pass a minor charisma check maccready will be ready and willing to tell you about his sick child, and then he'll ride you like a stallion. Talk to him like, 4 times, and he will be your bosom buddy for life in about 3-5 days if you just pick locks like a fucking madman, because character growth is hard and counting beans is easy.

 Also your son is a part of the faction we were talking about! something about synths, remember that one questline from rivet city that barely anyone actually remembers and was an interesting time waster at best? Well get ready to do that same quest but about! 15! more! times! because we could not think of anything else to write about synthetically produced humans that assume peoples identities other than having them as a hamfisted metaphor for slavery. Why do they take over people's identies? Well because the institute needs them to aasdkfjdh kshshshsh t9oe of course. 

Speaking of hamfisted metaphors, here's the underground railroad, named after the underground railroad that actually mattered, except this time its the same thing but synths. They are so top secret that the only way to find them is to follow the only bright red line in a street that is exclusively green-brown otherwise, and then enter their super secret password, which is "password"

They are then, like every other faction, absolutely willing to trust you, at face value, no questions asked, because have to actually do something or require a skill check might make this hard for people under the age of 12 to play. Then you go do whatever fuckin shit you do, I stopped playing at this point, and then you find out your son is actually 60, you guys have a tearful, 10 sentence reunion, then he diesthe whole reason you were out here in the first place dies, and you react appropriately, which is to say you say his name really sadly, and then go back to mowing down raiders with reckless abandon

And then 76 gets released, bethesda drops all pretense of fallout still being an rpg. You want a story? Fuck you, pay up. Its retro future and thats all that makes falloutSatirizing war mongering? You can nuke things in this game and its totally fine, its actually the goal, because fallout has nukes in it right? Pay us 10 dollars and you get army olive drab spraypaint because hurrgh war is fun and great, wasnt that the tagline from the first game?The more i rant the more angry i am because people put their heart and soul into writing this. The lore and dialogue is actual work that someone researched and loved and felt proud of and now  it's becoming a hilariously meta parody of itself. 

Honestly FUCK bethesda and and fuck todd howard for his pisspoor cash grab. Not even worth calling it a video game anymore

[ninjakittenarmy]

So, I started playing Fallout in middle school, and at the time I had no fucking clue what was going on because I never played the first two games. I had A LOT of misconceptions. I had no idea that it was parody or alternate history, no clue that it wasn’t our time line. I thought the outdated computer tech was an aesthetic choice and nothing more.

I was unwilling to fight the Enclave, not just because I, like many others, found Colonel Autumn sympathetic, but because I HATED the idea of fighting US soldiers. I had no idea how sinister Pre-war America was in this universe. And while I know now and largely resent our own leaders, I STILL hate the prospect of fighting the Enclave, and can never play the second game.

I failed to put two and two together even when reading about the BOS backstory and the FEV experiments. Oh yeah, I read all of the backstory on the wiki. When playing New Vegas, I only got the MASSIVE amount of references because of the wiki. A man just got beaten by drunken NCR soldiers and refers to the leader as “Lou Tenant” because he’s dazed and misheard Lieutenant? I only found out that this is a nod to one of the Master’s minions in the first game when I accidentally looked him up on the wiki while reading about the quest. Marcus, a companion from the previous games and one of the first sympathetic super mutants, has a town now? Who’s Marcus? Shady Sands has a Republic now? What’s Shady Sands? I only found out recently that the NCR was NOT introduced in New Vegas but was the setting of Fallout 2. Those assholes from Vault City got annexed into the NCR? Never heard of ‘em. The Remnants of the Master’s army have fractured into various sub factions? I think I read about him once. Even in Fallout 4 I was confused by the elderly psychic and the Scientology parody in Nuka World.

I was so ridiculously baffled by the conflict between Vault and Enclave citizens and wastelanders because I thought EVERYONE was descended from vault dwellers. How else are there still people around? Only in High School did I find out from Raul the ghoul companion that yes, there were survivors, no, the bombs didn’t kill everyone else. I was thus very confused about how ANYONE survived when I found out that the Vaults were all experiments and not actual shelters.

I also only found out later that Ulysses was written by Chris Avalon, lead writer of KOTOR 2. I also learned that his mad, nihilistic ravings about new nations rising from the ashes of the old and the story of The Divide was all a metaphor for Chris’s beliefs that the Fallout universe should never have any permanent nations, that everything should always suck, and that madness and chaos must always reign supreme despite any attempts to improve things, which is why the NCR can get nuked in the end. He wants that IRL.

What I love about Avalon is that he always makes his author mouthpieces evil because he KNOWS everyone will hate his opinions! He knew nobody would like Ulysses or his ideology because nobody wants to fucking play a game like that.

He also tried to add sympathetic qualities to Caesar’s Legion by saying that they “brought order” and that there were traders and farmers and the like that the Legion let be while fighting off the raiders. The idea was that while TECHNICALLY Caesar’s Legion only has soldiers and slaves there is a de facto citizenry that benefits from their brutal regime because they have eradicated crime and are let be because Caesar’s Legion actually knows they need them. The issue is that not only would these people be collaborators but WE NEVER SEE THEM BECAUSE THAT AREA OF THE GAME WAS CUT! I actually assumed that Caesar’s Legin was all soldiers and forgot about the slaves! And the other issue is that one can easily deduce that there’s no crime because every psycho and sadist that would be a raider otherwise just joined the Legion where rape and murder and a steady supply of slaves to be abused on a whim are the norm and you get paid to do it with no repercussions. It’s like saying the murder rate is zero because you just legalized killing and thus it’s not TECHNICALLY murder.

I also love how one NCR soldier says that the Legion is more tolerant of gays, oddly enough, given that they’re really less Rome and more if Sparta as viewed by the nightmares of actual Spartans and the Lord Humungous from Mad Max and his goons hate fucked and birthed an unholy hell child that was then left in a dumpster. This all falls apart when an escaped slave says that they’re actually INCREDIBLY homophobic. This, my friends, is what happenes when the writers can’t agree on anything and put everything in the game anyway.

This all culminated into my first Lonesome Road playthrough. You see, the way it’s supposed to go is that after defeating Ulysses, you still have to stop the nukes. The only way to do so now is for the copy of ED-E you’ve traveled with to sacrifice himself. It’s supposed to be this tear jerking moment where the companion you’ve gotten to know throughout the DLC, and who was really the victim in all of this, sacrifices himself, and then a really happy moment when you find that he uploaded himself to the main ED-E and thus is still alive. I had to read all of that because that didn’t happen to me.

See, when you go to stop the nukes, you also have the option to launch them at the NCR, thus rendering the whole quest pointless. You ALSO have the option to nuke the Legion. Obviously you’re supposed to shut down the nukes. Only a mad man would actually consider launching them! I nuked the Legion. OF COURSE I nuked the Legion. Why wouldn’t I? There aren’t any innocents in the Legion! I’d have heard about it! They’d have shown that! What moron WOULDN’T take this opportunity to nuke the Legion? The radiation, the ecological damage? Look around you! That ship sailed a couple CENTURIES ago!

My dad (playing with me at the time) called me out because HE thought the Legion DID have civilians despite not knowing about the lore I just explained because he didn’t know that officially they didn’t. I panicked at the time when he said this but you know what? I still think I did the right thing and continued to do it on subsequent playthroughs.

See, The legion was an existential threat to anyone living anywhere near them. If you kill Caeser and Lanius, they just splinter into rival factions still do the same shit. It’s like Alexander the Great’s empire from hell. If you spare Lanius he will prove a disappointment to the legion and everyone kind of gives up on it. This is inevitable because there’s no replacement for Caeser who has his cult of personality and even if he didn’t have cancer, he’ll pass eventually. Can’t pull a Mister House on him, he hates technology! Even with its total disillusion, those people will probably become raiders and kill more people. I did what I had to do. I will die on this hill like Caesar died on his. On my second playthrough. Because I forgot about him on my first. Glory to the NCR bitches!