Rules for Fallout

NMLevesque

NMLevesque

Commie Ghost
What sort of rules would you have in place if you had creative control over Fallout? Would there be strictures, or rules of thumb? What would it take in your mind to set things straight?

Please state each rule as a header to description or discussion thereof, or have them in a list.

These occurred to me.
  1. Originality
  2. Post-apocalyptic tone: brutal people in a chaotic world of harsh living. 'The world of Fallout has a lot of jokes, but it should never be the joke.' I heard something like that somewhere recently. Already forgot where...blasted insomnia.
  3. Thematic resonance: the settings, facts, and plotlines need to connect to an actual theme. AKA a narrative one; an idea or message, not the kind of theme that a party has...
 
1. Don't contradict the lore that is already established: Bethesda does this a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT. Case in point: A cure for being a super mutant, an ancient alien city underneath the Mojave, 300 year old vampires, a ghoul kid living in a fridge with no food or water for 200+ years. I could go on.
When there is already established lore, respect it and don't try to change it because you think your changes are cooler, more fun, less boring and better than the original. (Right Pete Hines? :evil:)

2. Make settlements be believable: Bethesda loves to make their settlements into theme parks as they go with the "rule of cool". As such, they make no sense. Like having a major settlement be in the middle of a atom bomb, a city that is a naval carrier, a city in a ball park, ect. It makes people ask questions like; "How are they able to farm for food?" "Why would they live in an area so dangerous?" "How are the people in the town able to support themselves?"
While settlements that should have a large population and business going on like Canterbury Commons, which we are told is the trade hub of the Capital Wasteland, is a pitiful small town when it should be something close to The Hub.

3. Post-apocalyptic tone: This, at least to me, can be described as being brutal, dark and with mostly grey morality. The post-apocalyptic world is rarely a black and white world. Desperate times make desperate men. Forcing them do things that they will normally never do in order to survive or support loved ones.

4. Don't be afraid to put in mature themes: Bethesda is either really scared to put in mature themes in their games or would rather pander to the Fortnite kiddie crowd. (I will go with both but is mostly the latter.)
A post-apocalyptic world is a brutal world. We see how humanity would be without laws and government enforcing a set of rules and consequences. Things like slavery (even child slavery), drug addiction, prostitution, murder and even rape should be, while sadly, all too common in a lawless wasteland.

5. No fucking aliens!: Just stop with this. Please. Aliens in the original Fallout's were just goofy, tongue in cheek jokes. They were never meant to be canon. Let alone be the cause of the Great War. (Jesus Christ Bethesda. What were you thinking with that?)

and finally, the most important rule, least for me is...

6. DON'T MAKE FALLOUT BE FOR CHILDREN: Jesus Christ Bethesda... This is, or at least was once, a Mature rated series that dealt with things like: drug addiction, prostitution, sexism, homelessness, bigotry, slavery, sexual abuse, murder, genocide, rape, violence, human experimentation, political intrigue, xenophobia, class disparity, war, ect...
You should not be making a series like this be for little kids. Hollywood and the entertainment industry need to stop with that. There is something like Star Wars and Marvel, which is for all ages, and then there is stuff that should only be for a mature audience. Fallout should be in the latter.
 
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Adding new lore that respects the original lore while that new lore is cool and well thought is far more impressive than contradicting old lore just to add "rule of cool" nonsense. It requires so much more thought and care.
 
RangerBoo said:
2. Make settlements be believable: Bethesda loves to make their settlements into theme parks as they go with the "rule of cool". As such, they make no sense. Like having a major settlement be in the middle of a atom bomb, a city that is a naval carrier, a city in a ball park, ect.
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I personally don't think there's anything wrong with using Rivet City or Diamond City as settlements honestly. They're kinda fortified and they grow crops in there (I think Rivet City uses planters on the flight deck or something).

Megaton would make more sense if the wastelanders who lived there were forced in due to more "dire" circumstances, like a last resort kinda thing. Not having a town down the street they could inhabit would help as well.
 
1. The main quest's antagonist(s) must adhere to one thematic philosophy or theme whose purpose is to challenge the player's views.

2. Bring back F1's rule for references. If a player does not recognize a reference, they should not even realize one is being presented.

3. No 4th wall breaks. Period.

4. Do not give a resolution to whom initiated the Great War and present all nations pre-war as equally corrupt, greedy and inept, regardless of the political or religious views they held.

5. No gameplay is to take place before the night of October 23, 2077. This includes playable flashbacks. Exceptions are artificial recreations like F3's Operation Anchorage with the condition that some form of proof is presented ingame that shades doubt upon the veracity of the events witnessed as Operation Anchorage did.

6. No aliens are to be presented as alive or as interactable NPCs. No DLC or vanilla content is to hint that they are anything more than wacky non-canon inclusions.

7. A dog must always appear as a companion but one that is not forced on the player and/or required for story content and/or sidequests.

8. All skills, level-up perks and SPECIAL attributes must be represented in dialog as checks at least once and all NPCs the player can speak to must have at least one available dialog check the player can pass or fail.

9. If intelligence is set to 3 or below, the character is considered too dumb to properly interact with NPCs, represented with appropriate dialog. Skill checks remain unchanged.

10. Traits must be included at character creation along with the ability to change them once at some point later on.

11. A customizable player home must be available for the player with plentiful storage space.

12. The player must not be from a Vault if a place of origin must be given. Descended from Vault dwellers is fine.

13. Space is not to be reached by the player. All content must be confined to Earth.
 
Pwener said:
4. Do not give a resolution to whom initiated the Great War and present all nations pre-war as equally corrupt, greedy and inept, regardless of the political or religious views they held.
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A 100 times this! Bethesda seems to really want to explain who shot first when it came to the Great War or at least their fans do for some reason. They can't say that it was America as that would piss off Americans and they can't say that it was China as that would piss off the Chinese. So they pull the stupid aliens out of their ass and say; "Hur dur! It was aliens this whole time!" Cuz:
1. They hope it won't offend anybody. (But it ends up offending everyone far worse. Insulting someones intelligence is far worse than insulting their sense of nationalism. At least in my eyes.)
2. It's a call back to wacky 50's sci-fi and things like the Roswell Incident. Gotta have those 50's references!

In the original Fallout's and New Vegas it is implied that nobody knows who shot the first nuke but the end result was going to be the same regardless of who shot who first. Why Bethesda didn't go with that and tell their fans that is beyond me.
 
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Core members of the dev team should have played at least the original game, and possibly a couple of other significant titles, before starting the work on another sequel.
 
Big No said:
I personally don't think there's anything wrong with using Rivet City or Diamond City as settlements honestly. They're kinda fortified and they grow crops in there (I think Rivet City uses planters on the flight deck or something).
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Rivet City has no planters or food production at all. The flight deck has some jets and a makeshift baseball field instead. :lmao:
That was why we had to create a new room in TTW with planters and fresh harvesteable crops adjacent to the Rivet City Lab (so it makes some sense). :lol:

They have some fresh potatoes, carrots, pears and apples in a table in the lab, but nowhere they have a production for them. :look: There's no inaccessible doors in there either, so we can't even say they have it "hiding" in some area the player can't access.

We also added (at least) maize crops to most settlements in the Capital Wasteland. :nod:
 
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RangerBoo said:
a city that is a naval carrier, a city in a ball park
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Actually these two locations aren't bad. Rivet City was just very badly developed.
Edit: Diamond City (I think it is called that) focused way to much on baseball memorabilia.

Interesting Risewild, could you link those mods? I would at least like to have a look at their screenshots.


Another rule perhaps. Not this overdone obsession with the past such as the Minutemen wanting to dress like Independence War style soldiers or the mentioned Diamond City.

Caesar/Edward choose Imperial Rome as an example to shape a military hierarchy/political structure after because he felt it was the most functional and effective in the current state the world was in and how alien it was to most of the wastelanders, not because he wanted to cosplay Romans.

The minutemen would work much better without all the direct Independence War stuff, more that the organization choose the name because they want to continue a tradition; a militia of the people.
They would wear combat armor and use other pre war military equipment, so no stuff like laser muskets. (I hate those things because Bethesda's people designed them on purpose to be a reference to real muskets) and tricorne hats (or wigs).

Most of the people in the wasteland outside organizations like the BOS, Followers of the Apocalypse, and others that have archives or time to study history, have absolutely no idea about the past, let alone an obsession.
All they know was that there might have been a time that things were better.
 
Cobra Commander said:
1) It's not necessary to have BoS to be Fallout :)
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Resurrection works fine without it, it has its own tech oriented faction; the (Vault) Empire.

In my own idea for a Fallout game the player would instead encounter the Followers of the ATLANTIS; post humanist cyborg paramilitary traders that sell anyone advanced technology that can pay their price.

Personally and this may sound a bit extreme which I admit; outside of the Mojave BOS faction I want to wipe out the BOS on the West Coast (East Coast version does not exist in my opinion).

They have become a useless xenophobic technology hoarding organization that stand in the way of recovery and governments such as the NCR (it was the NCR that dealt with Navarro and not the BOS) and city states like the Shi.
They seek to control all advanced tech like weapons, power sources, and computers because their power is based on this monopoly.
 
The Dutch Ghost said:
Another rule perhaps. Not this overdone obsession with the past such as the Minutemen wanting to dress like Independence War style soldiers or the mentioned Diamond City.
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It is worse than that. In fo1-fo2-fot, the people living in the post-apocalyptic world were products of this environment, with occasionnal theorical knowledge of what came before, but that they never lived themselves.

In fo3, it felt like you had pre-war people just dropped there five minutes before you came. Some of the people you meet have more knowledge about the pre-war world than about the world they actually live in (and were born in). There is even a crazy lady on arefu that thinks she is stilll in the pre-war world, a world she never lived in in the first place. And there is that whole Wasteland Survival Guide nonsense that i don't want to think too much about or i will want to puke.
 
  1. Try to stick to lore, only small accidents are preferable. It's bound to happen eventually though. Even Fallout 2 got mixed up in something it established.
  2. Isometric/Top-Down/whatever view. Make it like a cRPG. Not an action-RPG, not a Bethesda game.
  3. Post-apocalyptic of course.
  4. Tim Cain's rule of references
  5. Make every part of SPECIAL matter. Especially Charisma. Intelligence being 1 or 2 will have bad consequences just like old Fallouts. Charisma should have some similar effect. Anything being below a 3 should have detrimental effects. I've beaten Fallout 1 with 1 Charisma and high speech.
  6. New setting must be not in the original area of 1, 2, or New Vegas. It can expand further East from the West kinda following NCR expansion and troubles. Otherwise, just go to a new area.
  7. If a new area does not have Super Mutants and Centaurs (wtf was this, seriously, that was totally just a Master thing) migrating there from where they were on the West Coast, then there are no Supermutants.
  8. New mutants that aren't just whacky fun but can provide substance to the world. Maybe have another series that takes place in what we could have seen with Supermutants. Like them living and warring with humans, different people distrust them, others trust them as equals. Have them change as a people over the course of the next games they appear in or something. Kinda something I wanted to do for a game of my own if I ever did anything like that.
  9. Stay true to the original Fallout in tone and themes but have its own unique major theme that is shown throughout the game.
I guess that would be it.
 
The Dutch Ghost said:
What are Tim Cain's rules of references?
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If a reference is not understood by the player, they should be unable to even perceive it as being a reference at all. A perfect example is the "Maltese Falcon" as the name for the bar in the Hub.
 
This emphasis on Post-Apoc just churns out 76s, 4s, and 3s.

Fallout is Post-Post Apoc. The Post-Apoc was 2077-2100ish. Fallout is about everyone dusting themselves off, getting on their feet, and moving beyond simple primary concerns. Fallout should be about these people looking around and saying "Well, shit, the stuff from before didn't work, what do we do now?"

I also want it to continue being grander and grander. Think of the Fiat Lux and Fiat Voluntas Tua chapters from A Canticle for Leibowitz. Fallout NV was a good start, the stage was set between bona-fide nations. Keep doing that. Single people, small Hamlets, and the like: they can 'survive' the wasteland but they have no real impact on it. It's statism and ideology that'll dig up mankind from the grave-world they've made.

I have no problems with it being a FPSARPG. If you want to make a Isometric one, go ahead, but I would never make that a standard.

I would have simple rules like 1) Super Mutants are a West thing that is rapidlly diminishing and if the NCR/CL/Whomever killed them all then that's okay. 2) The Enclave is gone. Gone and buried. You can have other American remnants, but the Enclave itself was already weirdly specific, small, and of no real consequence. 3) BoS is a Western Thing, again, if the NCR broke them, so be it. There could be states that were formed by the BoS, like whatever happened in the Midwest, but they're not BoS anymore. 4) Basically, once a faction is dead, they're fucking dead. While IRL we have some Fascist remnants, some Baathite or Commie holdouts, most of the time they sell their membership cards and are absorbed to someone else and have no real power/can't switch the new organization to being the old one. This extends to stuff like the Khans.

Stuff like that.

Space is fine, but it needs a lot of beefing up to do and has to be anthrocentric. House looked at Space as a solution, if he was being honest about it. I would rework some Space Lore so that Mankind had some orbitals, Moon-bases, Martian outposts; and hell, they could have their own struggle in the stars as they realized before 2077 shit was going south and they all declared self-sufficiency and independence-in-fact as main priorities.
 
Yeah, New Vegas was too clean to be post apocalyptic, it is close to post-post apocalyptic. And it was honestly a good thing. Humanity, regardless how bad it gets, will always strive to improve its living conditions and survivability. That means starting to form large factions and civilized territory.


The franchise being perpetually in post-apocalyptic will start to feel artificial and forced after a certain number of games that continue the timeline forward. And this is already happening with 3 and 4, two games where the setting makes no sense to be in the state it is.
 
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I would go as far as to say NV is post-post-post war (apocalypse is Greek for "revelation") with F2 being post-post war and F1 being mono-post.

But the Mojave is a frontier region which is why they went with the wild west cowboy theme and why it fits so well. Being a frontier means more dangers as civilization takes hold. I really wouldn't attribute many of the natural dangers in the Mojave to the war; who's to say the nightstalkers and cazadors wouldn't have escaped from Big MT even if the Great War hadn't happened.
 
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