I don't understand complaints about Beth's take on pre-war society

I don't think a lot of Americans, besides some of the old timers, really have all that much love for the 50s themselves.

Racism was very bad, we had McCarthyism, the red scare, and nuclear destruction was all too real.

Its yet another example of Beth and its bent for 50s americana nostalgia blown way out of proportion.
 
But hey fifties are cool right?

Now everyone knows Fallout as that retro future 'rpg' set in a nuclear apocalypse! Why? CAUSE FIFTIES!!!
 
DarkCorp said:
I don't think a lot of Americans, besides some of the old timers, really have all that much love for the 50s themselves.

Racism was very bad, we had McCarthyism, the red scare, and nuclear destruction was all too real.

Its yet another example of Beth and its bent for 50s americana nostalgia blown way out of proportion.
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A lot of people do though, still. They think it was magical funtimes. It's a theme they went with, what's the issue? It makes the games better to me.
 
frajaq said:
Dr Fallout said:
But hey fifties are cool right?

Now everyone knows Fallout as that retro future 'rpg' set in a nuclear apocalypse! Why? CAUSE FIFTIES!!!
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And that's bad because....?
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Because a product has been changed, from one thing, to another - from A, to B.

When we ask for A, and get B, we complain. It's the same in a restaurant, and then you got those "kitchen nightmares" candidates, who do not understand why customers complain - when after all, B is totally fine. But they asked for A.
Yes, but B is fine too.

But they asked for A, they were willing to pay for A, and they even believed that they recieved A after paying for it, but got B.

"So typical of you snobs to hate B!"

We never said we hated B, and those people visiting restaurants never said they hated dry chicken, or bland fish. They probably eat dry chicken and bland his at home, all the time, they're perfectly fine with it - but they asked and paid for something else this time.

A friend of mine is an expert proponent of "All changes Bethesda made should be welcomed, because change happens, and that is that. Now love FO3! Love it I say!", but that is simply not how it works.
Nobody here hates 50s music, nobody is against shooters, and nobody has something particular against the combination of the two.
It's just that we asked for something else than that.
 
zegh8578 said:
frajaq said:
Dr Fallout said:
But hey fifties are cool right?

Now everyone knows Fallout as that retro future 'rpg' set in a nuclear apocalypse! Why? CAUSE FIFTIES!!!
Click to expand...

And that's bad because....?
Click to expand...

Because a product has been changed, from one thing, to another - from A, to B.

When we ask for A, and get B, we complain. It's the same in a restaurant, and then you got those "kitchen nightmares" candidates, who do not understand why customers complain - when after all, B is totally fine. But they asked for A.
Yes, but B is fine too.

But they asked for A, they were willing to pay for A, and they even believed that they recieved A after paying for it, but got B.

"So typical of you snobs to hate B!"

We never said we hated B, and those people visiting restaurants never said they hated dry chicken, or bland fish. They probably eat dry chicken and bland his at home, all the time, they're perfectly fine with it - but they asked and paid for something else this time.

A friend of mine is an expert proponent of "All changes Bethesda made should be welcomed, because change happens, and that is that. Now love FO3! Love it I say!", but that is simply not how it works.
Nobody here hates 50s music, nobody is against shooters, and nobody has something particular against the combination of the two.
It's just that we asked for something else than that.
Click to expand...

When you go to a restaurant you need to get what you pay for, video games aren't comparable at all. It's like demanding a musician play the way you want them to, that isn't how it works. If it is like a restaurant it's like ordering the same thing you didn't like before and complaining again. You don't like it, but you don't get to dictate what you get in games, music or movies.
 
zegh8578 said:
Because a product has been changed, from one thing, to another - from A, to B.

When we ask for A, and get B, we complain. It's the same in a restaurant, and then you got those "kitchen nightmares" candidates, who do not understand why customers complain - when after all, B is totally fine. But they asked for A.
Yes, but B is fine too.

But they asked for A, they were willing to pay for A, and they even believed that they recieved A after paying for it, but got B.

"So typical of you snobs to hate B!"

We never said we hated B, and those people visiting restaurants never said they hated dry chicken, or bland fish. They probably eat dry chicken and bland his at home, all the time, they're perfectly fine with it - but they asked and paid for something else this time.

A friend of mine is an expert proponent of "All changes Bethesda made should be welcomed, because change happens, and that is that. Now love FO3! Love it I say!", but that is simply not how it works.
Nobody here hates 50s music, nobody is against shooters, and nobody has something particular against the combination of the two.
It's just that we asked for something else than that.
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Alright got it. Even if I don't agree with it.

Thank you for your reasonable post and stance on this issue, something of a rarity in NMA really
 
No one's "dictating" anything, though. No one here has any kind of power to do so. They're airing their opinions about what they'd like to see.

It should also be noted that Fallout was always an amalgamation of many different inspirations. The core of it was certainly a 1950s vision of the future -- not the stuff that was around in the 1950s itself, but the way the 1950s saw the future and especially the pulp sci fi of the time. That's a crucial difference that Bethesda never quite seemed to grasp, instead opting for a lot of straight 1950s stuff like Greaser gangs. Bethesda's vision is closer to a post-apocalyptic vision where everyone's really into 1950s culture/aesthetic.

But Fallout had a lot of other aesthetic influences too, most noticeably Mad Max's desert vision, 1920s Art Deco (especially in architecture) and Escape from New York noir. Very little of those influences shows up in Fallout 3 and seemingly in Fallout 4 -- and we see it significantly more in Fallout: New Vegas.

We can point to some other concrete differences between Interplay's and Bethesda's visions, though. Robots and a farcical interpretation of 1950s pulp sci fi technology seem to be a lot more common in Bethesda's vision of pre-war society. There's very little evidence of the lack of resources that drove the wars of the 2070s in the first place.
 
If I pay for a Devin Townsend concert on the Royal Albert Hall and instead I get a shitty cover band playing only Punky Brüster tracks I think I'll be more than entitled to call bullshit on that. Same if someone is playing Christina Aguilera music while using the name of Pink Floyd to promote their concert.

Games are more expensive than a fucking dish on a restaurant, and if they serve your food cold on a restaurant you can compalin, why is the more expensive product now protected from criticism and forcing you to just shove it down with a smile? Talk about being a shill.
 
frajaq said:
Alright got it. Even if I don't agree with it.

Thank you for your reasonable post and stance on this issue, something of a rarity in NMA really
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If you think reasonable posts and stances are "rare" here, then maybe the internet is not for you, as this is pretty much one of the few websites that can actually sustain reason.
 
Pre-war society seems to be very unique in that it can't be summarized in one word.

There seems to be a huge basis on the 1960s-1980s, where the youth were punks rejecting the classic American way of life while the adults tended to be very traditional and rooted in the past. There was a hippie culture, seen in Fallout: New Vegas. Hackers were also prominent, so from this we can infer that nerds were strong and alive, still playing Tragic: The Garnering in their basements. XD

In terms of music, Blues seems to have dominated the midwest if we interpret the intro song of Fallout Tactics as a popular pre-war piece of music. In the southwest, it seems that Country and Rock and Roll were popular. Meanwhile, adults such as those who worked at Big Mountain or visited the Sierra Madre Casino were into jazz and softer music from a century ago, such as Maybe by the Ink Spots. It is possible that the 2050s/2060s saw a revival in jazz before the next generation came of age in the 2070s and rejected it.

Back to the punks. Crime was prominent, as always, and the abundance of leather jackets and blunt weapons suggests that they proved a big problem in the pre-war days. In that regard, there was probably a huge underground 80s-type counter culture that fueled the riots in Denver and elsewhere.

The public's response to the Sino-American War seems to be very much based on the Vietnam War, in which there was a lot of resistance and a call for peace. It was far from the peaceful, ideal world depicted in Fallout 4. In fact, I'm guessing that some spots of the US became practically uncontrollable and nearly Mad Max level.

How about the rest of the world? According to Dean Domino, jazz was popular in Europe before the civil war started. Any surviving culture in Europe was dead by 2060, where most of the continent was a mess of trenches. From this we can infer that they were in a cultural situation very similar to that of the World War I period. The Middle East, of course, was said to have destroyed itself in limited nuclear exchange long before the Great War, so they were gone. I'm assuming that the Soviet Union and China were extremely militant and devoid of any constructive culture.

Bethesda has produced a sad, miserable parody of what Fallout once was.
 
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Considering that they were selling Combat armor to civilians it's obvious the situation on the pre war world was almost complete social collapse.
 
There was also the fact that the American military, by and large, was completely devoid of morality beyond doing what was "best" for America. Just the opening cinematic of the first game with the soldier in power armor blatantly executing a Canadian prisoner and his buddy laughing about it. Then he turns to the camera and waves, basically saying "Hey, I'm on TV! Hi ma!" without an ounce of shame.

I think they did a good job of painting just how far America had fallen by that point with just that. I feel like the fact that the people you meet who were alive before the War, specifically ghouls or just long lived mutants rarely talk on it with any kind of nostalgia.
 
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Gah, the annooooying discussions I'm gonna have w my friend after this, I caaan't waaaaaaait

FO4 will become "the elephant in the room" the one game none of us will ever mention, just to keep the peace.
It's also an unbalanced attitude to it:
I am critical to FO3, but I played the damn thing!
He LOVES Fo3, and HATES FO2 and 1 "by proxy" - through his love of FO3 which he knows is different from FO2 and 1, he MUST HATE them with a passion - but never ever played them OR saw gameplay of them...

At least I give him credit for playing FONV, which he immediately hated the shit out of (he was also confused by quests suddenly failing, as well as radscorpions posing a danger to a Level 1 character. No kidding, I had to explaaaaain that dangerous creatures at L1 should be an improvement, as well as it is a "strategical cut-off" forcing you to travel south, towards Primm, instead of happy-go-lucky =D your way to Vegas. This baffled him, and he admitted it kindov made sense. THAT baffled ME, because I guessed right-a-stupid-way that the radscorpion valley was there to force me to go south!)
 
zegh8578 said:
At least I give him credit for playing FONV, which he immediately hated the shit out of (he was also confused by quests suddenly failing, as well as radscorpions posing a danger to a Level 1 character. No kidding, I had to explaaaaain that dangerous creatures at L1 should be an improvement, as well as it is a "strategical cut-off" forcing you to travel south, towards Primm, instead of happy-go-lucky =D your way to Vegas. This baffled him, and he admitted it kindov made sense. THAT baffled ME, because I guessed right-a-stupid-way that the radscorpion valley was there to force me to go south!)
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If you ask around Goodsprings, they flat out tell you not to go north as some nasty critters have infested the road towards Vegas. I think multiple NPCs have this dialogue. Consider me baffled on your side of things here.
 
Indeed, one of the aesthetic inspiration was "how the people of the 50s would see the future". But not only it was just one of the inspiration, not the only one, but also, the war didn't happen in the 50s at all. Even if you haven't played the faithfull games of the series, you can do basic maths and see that we had 120 years between the 50s and the war. Some stuff evolved the same way as in our worl, some other evolved on a different way, some others didn't at all. It is a divergent history, not a stuck history. Otherwise, there wouldn't be any point to add 120 years after the 50s.
 
Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas: The Great War was the climax of a chain of events that consisted of wars and depleting natural resources.

Fallout 3 and 4: Everything was flowers and wacky 50's until the Chinese Nation attacked.
 
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