Are aliens really that unwelcome in Fallout?

Atomic Postman

Atomic Postman

Vault Archives Overseer
Now that Fallout 4 has released and we've been exposed to exasperated sigh inducing lore about Lovecraftian cults/horrors and ancient civilizations buried underneath the Earth, it's got me thinking that perhaps little green men in UFOs aren't that out of place in Fallout.

Now, as a disclaimer I will say that regardless of what my thoguhts of aliens in Fallout are, Mothership Zeta was an awful DLC and the idea that aliens began the Great War is quite possibly the worst idea since placing a sex offenders clinic next to a school.

But yeah, are aliens really that out of place? I actually feel they're quite appropriate, what with the sci-fi craze of the 1950s with bulbous headed little green men being the most prominent among sci-fi images from that era. UFOs are an absolute classic pulp sci-fi story, and Fallout draws a lot of inspiration from that genre.

So, honestly I don't get the fuss. The odd reference or "They're out there" tier sighting would actually be a benefit to the setting in my book. Feel free to discuss and/or disagree.
 
I would say aliens are out of place, yes. At least as a full blown entity. In Fallout 1 we only found a crashed alien ship, and even then that was just meant as an easter egg, like the super rare encounter where you find a man trying to sell destroyed cars at an old car dealership.

Some might argue that Fallout 2 had some silly stuff, but it was still somewhat vague and out there compared to Bethesda. Sure there's a ghost in Fallout 2 but that's a very short side quest that you could completely miss unless you take the correct speech paths at this one particular museum. I can't speak for the "time travel" part as I haven't gotten there yet in the game.

New Vegas had aliens, but only 3 of them, and even then you had to have the Wild Wasteland trait to even see the aliens. Everything in Wild Wasteland is non-canon and just meant to be silly fun.

Meanwhile in Fallout 4 you have entire, LONG quests dedicated to the most stupid shit. Kid in a Fridge is fairly long and even has 3 ways to complete it, despite being the 2nd worst quest in the whole game. It's actually one of the few quests to have more than a single railroaded path. Cabot House takes it to a whole new level, incorporating multiple locations, people, paths, and so forth, for some of the most dumb stuff I've ever seen in a video game. Cabot House and Kid in a Fridge are not easter eggs like FO2's secrets and New Vegas's Wild Wasteland trait. They're out there right in the open for anyone to come across and are actually a big part of the game given how they're some of the only quests that aren't shoot n loots.

So basically that's the problem with Bethesda's take on aliens. They aren't subtle about it at all. Rather than taking something that should just be a fun easter egg, they make it a full blown DLC.

I mean fuck, Fallout 4 has a small cave out in the middle of nowhere that contains a single alive alien with a blaster, but that's it. That's the only alien. If they had kept it to just that, then I would say Fallout 4 did aliens far better than Fallout 3 in terms of handling it, but no, they had to go and make Cabot House which just throws all subtley and fun out the window in favor of retardation.
 
I disagree to an extent. Pre-MZ Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 handled aliens in the exact same way Fallout 1 did. I like that, too. A neat little one off encounter that makes you think "Hey, they're out there."
 
AlphaPromethean said:
I like that, too. A neat little one off encounter that makes you think "Hey, they're out there."
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This would be fine, but then we get things like Cabot House, load screens calling them zetans, and it just doesn't work for me. I don't want full fledged lore on aliens, just leave at a wink and a nod.
 
The only thing scarier than aliens are exploding cows. I would literally panic in real life if there were exploding cows. Like Annie in New vegas bounties III a mod for FNV. I think after dealing with exploding cows I probably would start a business called "the buttered biscuit" in hopes of recovering from the ptsd of seeing an exploding cow. Aliens are a whole nother deal. The aliens have been overplayed with Fallout 3 and now with Fallout 4? Damn it I wish bethesda would leave the shit alone.
 
Same as the consensus here.

"A wink and a nod", to paraphrase Spacemunkey, is great. Maybe bump into people having been abducted (or thinking they have), find a couple of artifacts...

But don't use them as your magical way to explain something away. Because yes, technically, they're not out of place anywhere, by definition. Due to the massive mystery around the concept, you could even have a med-fan setting with aliens landing, and it would be something you can't argue against. Maybe Elminster is an alien, maybe the Lady of Pain is from the planet Zeist.

It's one of the cheapest way to get out of plot holes, with time travel and dreamscapes. We deserve better.
 
Basically what I bitched about in my post on the DLC as part of my retrospective series.

http://www.radkatsu.uk/2016/03/reconstructing-fallout-3-part-10/

edit: The way they should've been used is as a conspiracy kind of dealie. Some pre-war facility (Area 51 or the like) that the player ends up being transported to and has to figure out a load of weird shit happening there. Lots of spooky stuff and hints at aliens, but really it was a big conspiracy or propaganda or whatever the hell else you feel like. Lampooning the alien paranoia of the 50s in a tongue-in-cheek fashion but with a serious quest tied to it.
 
Ragemage said:
I can't speak for the "time travel" part as I haven't gotten there yet in the game.
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That was a Special Encounter, which the general consensus about is that they are non-canon things made for the fun of the player. There are several Special Encounters which would not bide well with canon The Cafe of Broken Dreams for example: Contains several characters who are confirmed to be dead, a younger version of Tandi, as well as Vault Dweller animation frames that didn't quite make it in to the game.
 
Mother ship Zeta was an awful piece of DLC. They should have at least made some efforts to make a cool individual alien race, not some lazy stereotypical trashy pulpy 1950's kickback.
I loved the 1950's gig they had going on in Fallout 3, but I think Mother ship Zeta and those aliens was a step too far.
I also hate the idea that they started the great war.
The Great War was based on complex Sino - American Geopolitical relations, and an Oil Crisis amongst other things, and it was not incited by some annoying parody of an alien race.
It denigrates the Fallout series to say that.
 
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Oh my god it would so fantastic if Fallout 5 revolved around the zetan invasion of earth!

Anyway, as to aliens in the 'real Fallout'...
I'm fine with them so long as they're kept in the background.
I wouldn't even mind a quest that is about like recovering a flying saucer that's crashed in some lake for some tech oriented faction.
They're there. They're canon, but we're never ever EVER going to have a MZ or alien encounter.
I don't see any harm in that. Even if they are canonized beyond easter eggs we'd still never actually get to see one.
Only teases. You see a blinding light over the desert and when you go where it originated you see that something has burned so hot that the sand has turned to glass. You're asked to find a drunk and get her home before she hurts herself and when you finally do find her in a nearby woods a light comes down on her and she's taken away, leaving you to having to go explain to her husband what just happened.

I'm fine with teasing. But no more than that. They should remain a mystery. You reveal too much and it stops being a mystery.
 
I am not even sure what I should add to this any more as all the points I would bring up (if I would remember them and can write them well) have already been said.

Is there alien life in the Fallout universe including intelligent space faring races? Perhaps, can't even say that there are not ones in our universe.
Should they be encountered in Fallout? Absolutely not as they don't add much to the setting despite how 50s inspired it is and how much alien invasions are a staple of it.

Fallout has always been about humanity, the mess we made of things, and how we try to recover and yet always seem to make the same mistakes again or run into those of the previous generations like the dangerous things they left behind.

A nod and a wink occasionally is a fun reference to the mindset that inspired Fallout but that should be the extend of it.

On Mothership Zeta. I had this idea of the player going to Dreamland/Groom Lake/Area 51 and discovering it to be a military research and testing facility where prototype planes and weapons were tested and new technologies were being developed. (this was before Old World Blues and Big MT were announced).

Though not directly hit the place had suffered from the War but there would still be intact buildings including several hangars.
In one of the hangars the player would discover the alien wreck from Fallout 3, the trigger to the Mothership Zeta quest, or at least a copy of it and discover that it is actually fake. It is just a hollow shell.

Elsewhere in the hangar the player would find alien bodies kept in cryogenic or preservation cylinders and the various alien gizmos and gadgets which are revealed to be all props and non functional.
Recovered alien weapons and rifles are revealed to be redesigned human energy weapons with an alien aesthetic appearance.

The player would also discover a copy of the alien beacon that is left when you finish MZ only to learn that it is not a transport device at all. It is actually a hypnotic indoctrination transmitter.

From the nearby computers the player would learn that there is actually no alien threat at all. All the alien stuff the player encountered in Fallout 3 Mothership Zeta are the result of a project the government and the intelligence agencies were working on before the War.
The US government knew that once the war with China would be over, one way or another, that public attention would quickly turn back to the resource crisis the nation was going through and the various violations of human rights and political misconduct.

In order to keep the emergency laws and measures in effect such as censoring the news and journalists and distract the public from real problems the US government came up with the idea of introducing an alien threat once the Chinese were out of the picture: aliens who were planning an invasion of the Earth and only the government could stop them.

To make it look as realistic as possible fake alien spaceships and equipment was made and using genetic engineering on primates, fake aliens were created based on popular science fiction stories and movies.

And to finish it off, transmitters such as the one the player encountered in MZ would placed throughout the nation at places where people could run into them.
The transmitter would put the idea of an alien invasion in their mind along with a complete sci fi adventure in which individuals believe themselves to be abducted and experimented on by aliens, only to escape along with several other captives and try to take over the ship in order to return to Earth.
During this they would come across the recordings of other abductees, people that have been experimented on and alien-human hybrids the aliens have created, and later on witness an attack on Earth when the aliens find out that captives have escaped and are now roaming through the ship.
People then manage to defeat the alien crew and defeat another alien ship before they transport back to Earth to warn the rest of the population that there are aliens out there who want to take over the Earth and turn Americans into alien-human hybrid slaves.

The public would demand that the government would protect them from these aliens and the government could impose even more emergency laws and continue as it has been doing for the last ten years.

This hangar and Area 51 would be guarded by androids dressed as the stereotypical Men in Black, however they would not be like the synths in Fallout 4. At best like the generation 1 and 2 synths only even dumber as their human shape and limits in scaling down computers in the Fallout universe would prevent them from having processors as powerful as that of a Mr Handy.
To overcome this problem their designers had them all networked so that they could share processing power and be able to undertake tasks as otherwise the androids as individuals would not be able to open even a door and would keep walking into walls.
They would also be very fake looking, only at a distance being non distinguishable from real humans.

Man, I wish Fallout 3 and 4 were declared non canon.
 
The Dutch Ghost said:
*snip*
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Pretty sure this is where I got the idea I mentioned earlier in the thread actually, I saw your original post while I was researching and gathering ideas to use for my Fallout 3 retrospective series. Good stuff, would've been infinitely better than the dreck we actually got in Zeta. Might actually do a final post with some ideas like this from other people (with credit and link to the post in question, naturally) near the end of my series.
 
I've always liked the idea that the proto-Enclave may have been formed in 1947 to keep a certain saucer landing under wraps. I'm a little skeptical when it comes to seriously confirming their existence in the game, but Black Isle Fallout had a lot of fourth-wall breaking jokes of debatable canonicity. They did it right. It was up to the player if he wanted to consider the 'crashed UFO' special encounter canon or not.

Frankly, the disaster that is Bethesda's Fallout and particularly Mothership Zeta makes me hesitant about their introduction; even if under a competent group of writers like Obsidian.
 
Radiosity said:
Pretty sure this is where I got the idea I mentioned earlier in the thread actually, I saw your original post while I was researching and gathering ideas to use for my Fallout 3 retrospective series. Good stuff, would've been infinitely better than the dreck we actually got in Zeta. Might actually do a final post with some ideas like this from other people (with credit and link to the post in question, naturally) near the end of my series.
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I am glad to see my thoughts and ideas inspire others, just like others inspire me and tingle my imagination.
Years ago when Fallout Yurop was around I learned about several ideas I thought were so much fun that I preserved them in my mind. Even today I would like to see those ideas in a Fallout mod or game but then transplanted to the US.

MZ was simply a joke taken to seriously, Bethesda has this tendency to be as subtle as an rampaging horde of elephants. Almost all their creations are forced into things where they don't really work.
 
I wouldn't say they are unwelcome, if handled correctly.
I mean, MZ could have been good, it could have been a fun piece of DLC that didn't take itself too seriously. But what we got... was kind of strange.
Bethesda are absurdly odd.
Not even to the point they are so odd it's fun.
They are just odd.

Personally, I would have set MZ in a different location, away from a Easter Egg, and the whole thing just plays out as a rather bizarre adventure (much like how Old World Blues was to New Vegas).
But instead, Aliens are wacky so lets put them in there for the Hell of it.

I don't mind dumb shit in games, as long as they aren't there to try to expand lore or something and just there to put in an extra fun quest or item.

In all honesty, Bethesda should just stop with the Aliens.
 
Bethesda could have mixed up Aliens and the Dunwich building in one and get on with it. I'm gonna get a lot of hate for this, but it could have been a sort of Slenderman thing.

Imagine going around the building, ocasionally catching a glimpse of something. Then you eventually turn into a corner and BAM, it's the Alien right in front of you, and your character passes out.

Eventually you discover that the building was some sort of disposal treatment plant and some logs (hurr durr) tell you that the machines in the building stopped working and toxic fumes starting to leak, perhaps explaining that way that you were just hallucinating.

Even better, this encounter would be triggered only if you read another log near the entrance of the building talking about aliens, so that your hallucinations are partially influenced by the ramblings of a mad man.

For the record, I never found Dunwich Building as spooky as everyone in the internet claims it is. Lonesome Road and those fucking Tunnelers, on the other hand...

And for the record 2, Mothership Zeta is, by far, the worst Fallout DLC I've ever played and it's the one DLC I would never do in a second run of Fallout 3. Too linear, too boring, too stupid, too annoying, and too ugly.
 
AlphaPromethean said:
Now that Fallout 4 has released and we've been exposed to exasperated sigh inducing lore about Lovecraftian cults/horrors and ancient civilizations buried underneath the Earth, it's got me thinking that perhaps little green men in UFOs aren't that out of place in Fallout.

Now, as a disclaimer I will say that regardless of what my thoguhts of aliens in Fallout are, Mothership Zeta was an awful DLC and the idea that aliens began the Great War is quite possibly the worst idea since placing a sex offenders clinic next to a school.

But yeah, are aliens really that out of place? I actually feel they're quite appropriate, what with the sci-fi craze of the 1950s with bulbous headed little green men being the most prominent among sci-fi images from that era. UFOs are an absolute classic pulp sci-fi story, and Fallout draws a lot of inspiration from that genre.

So, honestly I don't get the fuss. The odd reference or "They're out there" tier sighting would actually be a benefit to the setting in my book. Feel free to discuss and/or disagree.
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There's a fucking difference between "Oh, pffft ALIENZ! Hah!" easter egg of something whizzing by you in the sky, a dead alien and a crashed ship in an obviously far off area/difficult spot to find, thus being an easter egg, to a full fledged, super-fucking-serious DLC that even conveys that the Aliens were responsible for the destruction of Humanity.

The only reason we despise them is because of THAT SPECIFIC DLC, and it only gets worst with Fallout 4, since they literally pulled the same shit again, at least for me. Saw the alien ship, saw the crashsite, killed the 'ayy lmao' while going "oh, cool, nice little easter egg"...but then I found Cabot's House, and that was just an entire quest of "Fuck You". "Oh Remember New Vegas? Guess what, we decided that an alien ruin is underneath it, and will probably destroy the entire area as it turns out to be an Alien Mothership". That entire quest just felt like Bethesda was pissing on Obsidian's New Vegas, hell, we'll probably get an add-on that allows the SS to travel to New Vegas, but as he/she gets there, the place is nothing but a pile of ruins because a massive alien ship rose from the ground or so. Zetans were never supposed to be taken seriously in this entire series, but judging by how they comprehend shit, Bethesda can't really understand what a joke is.
 
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