Are Gen 3 Synths People?

Lol no shit that how it should work, anything organic needs food, sleep etc. Unfortunately the lore is all we have to go on and the institute says no food, sleep, or aging required. Explicitly. Better luck next game when Bethesda retcons them

Just saw this post now and had no idea the legal definition of person until now. I apologize for shitting up the thread. My bad.

 

Yeah, but no one should be bound to bad lore because bad lore simply doesn't make sense, the world simply cannot function as described. Plus the fix is easy enough, as far as Synths go. Boson being a ruin despite its massive geographic advantages AND not being nuked, that's the one I can't get around, that's the one that makes Fallout 4 impossible to play for me (unless someone turns all of Boston into Feeside which ain't gonna happen at this point)

 

Saying we shouldn’t be bound by bad lore sounds good but at the same time, it just opens the door to head cannon everything to your liking. Can interesting questions be brought up initially by bad lore then refined separately? Yeah definitely. Just like this synth business. Unfortunately gamelore is kinda the only definitive answer for fictional settings and how they function. Obviously this doesn’t shield shitty lore and world building from criticism, but it does mean players are forced into dealing with it.

 

Don't apologize. It's good to have debate on these games beyond "Fallout is dead" or "Beth is shit" so keep posting.

 

Yeah at least you stirred up some posting and it wasn't like you were just here to troll people into repeating the same debate we've had a thousand times over.

Yeah, if we're going to listen to the game's lore then we need to account for what it actually says.

 

If Synths are able to run without any external input, no food or electricty, then the Institute instead of building either synths, supermutants, or fusion reactors should be investing their time into big vats of whatever the heck is going on with synth mitochondria to get power out of it.

 

I still think apeing Blade Runner was a bizarre direction to take Fallout

 

If thinking critically about synth biomechanics is bad, try figuring out whats wrong with mannequins in fallout 4.

Its definitely strange that it seems like Bethesda wanted to go in that direction from the start. Fallout 3 hinted at it, even Eden's inclusion could be considered some interest in the topic. Would it be safe to assume that was the plan from rights acquisition? Stuff like this makes me wonder why buy Fallout and ape Blade Runner if your writers either arn't up to the task of creating a deep and engaging world full of believable people and well developed stories, or the game director wont allow focus on these things. Well, besides money.

 

Because you buy Fallout to ape anything having to do with sci fi and pop culture and horror and then throw it in the game. Then you get fallout 3 and 4.

 

But isn’t that creatively bankrupt?

 

Yes.

 

Yeah...but they did that both with Fallout 1 and 2, way more in 2,, but if you think that meta humor is just in the random encounters and don't count, you've been away from Fallout 2 for too long. Fallout 1 had a fucking Robinhood ripoff complete with an English accent running the thieves guild in the Hub. Fallout has always been a "rip off" of all kinds of genres and IPs. It had supernatural stuff in it, biological horror, 50s sitcoms.

Fallout is at once very serious story under all it's wacky references and pop culture banter, but that 'creatively bankrupt' stuff is baked into the formula. Fallout as an IP started out as a time travel story involving lasers and dinosaurs. This is why I believe in the poet's truth, that some stories are things "from the gods" and not the visions of their creators, because up to Fallout 4, the series was way more than the sum of it's parts and way more than the gravitas of it's creator's visions. Because Fallout has ALWAYS been conceived of as a shoddy commercial product for nerds who play TTRPGs in their parents basements between the ages of 16 and 23. Thus it's dark, edgy, and meta.

If you don't believe in the spiritual side of storytelling, and I mean the mysticism/new agey level spiritualism and not symbolism, Fallout is and was intellectually worthless from the beginning because how it was designed (a purely commercial product), to whom it was designed for (teenage and college level proto incels, to which I plead the fifth, who were not interested in actually learning anything but just having a good time), and the utter lack of care for how it's tropes were used in relation to how the world actually works (the dead brown nuclear desert).

Fallout as an IP has always been an interactive Saturday Morning Cartoon. That's why Todd 'loved' Fallout and convinced Wager to buy it for him. Todd understands what Fallout is supposed to be, and that Fallout 4 operates on Saturday Morning Cartoon logic is exactly the point, if too on the nose. Tim Cain and Brian Fargo have a slightly more sophisticated technique but the goal and RESEARCH are the same, practically nil. If it weren't, Fallout 1 wouldn't look like Mad Max and Fallout 2 would have looked more like Arcanum, at least outdoors.

Fallout though, is more than it's design philosophy. The first game in particular is so smart I don't think any writer intended it. It looks and sounds like a B 50s/60s sci fi movie the whole way through, and it was probably intended that way, certainly Tim meant it that way with radiation causing ghouls. But with FEV, you find it's not a B movie, it only LOOKS like a B movie. All the mutations are localized and explained through the horrors of that one horrid thing getting nuked and disseminated all over southern California via the air. Suddenly the farce dips away, and the suspension of disbelief pulls to back to an even stronger position than from where it was at the beginning of the story. Once you know the whole story it becomes MORE believable, not less. Because now you have seen a way these hokey cliches might actually happen through more sophisticated means than radiation bad/Hulk smash.

Fallout took something very stupid (that which is set in the real world but actively contradicts how the real world operates is stupid) and made it smart, or smarter depending on your POV.

The problem is not the pop culture references. The problem is the belief that artistic license allows you to engages in solipsism that because the work belongs to you and you can do anything you want with it. Only legally is this true. Morally, intellectually,, spiritually nothing could be further from the truth. Fallout 4's crimes against storytelling stem from this solipsism, and a lack of organic worldbuilding. The Atom Cats are not a bad idea, but they need a rebuilt, functioning Boston to work, and possibly day jobs like they hotrodding construction workers, maybe with only steel plates because the local government doesn't allow most civilians to own the actual power armor plate because it's too rare to be used on anyone but security and trade personnel, kinda like NCR servoless suits but in the opposite way: plenty of frames, but the plating is rare.

The synths are not a bad idea IF their lore is well thought out, it's details researched (like the gut bacteria and such) and firm answers given on their physiology. So challenging the lore in WELL THOUGHT OUT AND RESEARCHED WAYS is not only OK, it's vital. If not for this IP for the ones people would create thereafter. The only solution to bad ideas are better ideas, so instead of dismissing all of Bethesda's crap, engaging with it and seeing how it could work is a productive use of time, particularly for creative types. It's a diagnosis, it's strengthens our critical thinking skills, our actual imagination and not just flights of fancy.

 

I don't think that. I think the IP is filled to the brim with stupid shit. It's why I no longer care for the series partly. The game I grew up loving ( Fallout 2 ) is now one I rarely want to play due to the shit writing.

 

The issue with Bethesdallout is that it's written by a hack and a bunch of programmers who probably don't really engage in writing even as a hobby but the workflow encourages it. There is no unifying vision or plan, everything feels disjointed and the result of chance rather than intentional. You can compare it to SKyrim, where it's shallowness does actually seem intentional because while most NPCs are shallowly written there is a clear line of logic unifying everything and it's goal is to be a wish fullfillment DnD campaign.

Fallout 4's factions are so shallow and the "decision point" so arbitrary and presented in an almost Mod like fashion that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that originally you simply sided with the BOS again, but they saw the rave reviews about New Vegas' main quest and hastily reworked Fallout 4 to have "something" like it, even if it made no sense.

 

That's very true! Bethesda's game design is creatively so bankrupt it boggles my mind, but then again, I don't play a lot of video games. Sometimes this no grand vision thing works WONDERS. Fallout 2 I'd say is better because there's no unifying vision. Every region feels very distinct. The problem is both bad writing and the fact that open worlds are a BAD idea. You spend too much time and resources on shit that don't matter, which is the details between mission cores and dungeon/mission areas. If Fallout 4 had a world map and I didn't have to see the ruined mess in between locations, and could fill the space with my imagination, I would have had SUCH a better time with Fallout 4.

And Fallout 4 could have encompassed all of New England. You could have had an Innsmouth setting, you could have had mutant Sasquatch in Vermont, a whole quest in Maine in a sea side town called Cabbage Cave where a little old lady who writes murder mysteries keeps getting her neighbors murdered and you follow along with her investigations while just barely distinctive Not Murder She Wrote music. When you find out that contrary to TV lore Jessica Fetcher isn't a serial killer, you tell her she has shitty friends and should move somewhere else and she says she's going back to England and gets on her bed screws on a bedknob and peaces out to parts unknown while humming "Age of Not Believing."

But only with Wild Wasteland selected at the beginning of the game.

This is the only fun part of Fallout 4....discussing how it could have not sucked. There's a bunch of ways: I personally DO NOT WANT a post apocalyptic story unless it's set closer to 2077 than Fallout 1, I want something that's at least zany in Wild Wasteland but is definitely post post apocalypse.

Honestly the Lovecraft shit is the one thing Emil has passion for, and it's the best addition to Fallout Bethesda's ever done, the runners up being Desmond and Ashur and in that order and that's it. Fallout is more than capable of handling some cosmic horror on he side as long as it doesn't turn into the all encompassing mess of say creepypasta or analog horror. Fuckers under 40 don't understand subtlety at all.

I wonder why?!