Vault-Tec experiments dumbest plot line ever

[Nodder]

There could be a lot more vaults than we know of, some of them running innocuous tests that didn't lead to madness and mayhem. And again, vaults not built by Vault-Tec and the government.

 

[TorontoReign]

Yeah all the vaults really should not be built by the government. I would like to see some regular bomb shelters and cellars more often the Fallout universe.
Maybe a few nuke missile silos or something.

 

[Chancellor Kremlin]

Like I said, perhaps only a fraction of the vaults were meant as social experiments, it wouldnt make sense to jeopardise all the vaults.

 

[Ravager69]

And, this little twist produces a "holy shit, that is what they were for?!" reaction in the player. Because come to think of it, how many of you thought of such a possibility? Sure, it's pretty far-fetched, but then, it is a nice twist.

 

[Alphadrop]

Like I said, perhaps only a fraction of the vaults were meant as social experiments, it wouldnt make sense to jeopardise all the vaults.

I always took it as all of them were social experiments but most of the experiments still led to the vault dwellers surviving, just in different circumstances. Only in a few cases did the experiments lead to the vault dwellers getting comepletely wiped out.
So you would still have a population left but also the social research conducted on them.

 

[Chancellor Kremlin]

Like I said, perhaps only a fraction of the vaults were meant as social experiments, it wouldnt make sense to jeopardise all the vaults.

I always took it as all of them were social experiments but most of the experiments still led to the vault dwellers surviving, just in different circumstances. Only in a few cases did the experiments lead to the vault dwellers getting comepletely wiped out.
So you would still have a population left but also the social research conducted on them.

I think the game is deliberately ambiguous about that. Maybe im right, maybe you are. Who knows? Only bethesda will tell...

 

[Spoonfeed]

I think the game is deliberately ambiguous about that. Maybe im right, maybe you are. Who knows? Only bethesda will tell...

Is it possible to bribe the mods to not let us know of this news?
I don't want ANOTHER properly fallout mystery to be raped by the "folks" at bethesda

 

[Mekorig]

IIRC, the Enclave original plan was to survive the nuclear war, and them get into an space ship, and the Vault experiments where to secure an stock of pre-war humans, and to experiment on closed enviorements and other situations. Later they found out that their spaceship was kaput, so they changed their plan to conquer the USa again.

I dont remember where i readed it, maybe in the Fallout Bibles?

 

[Jenx]

So what if the whole vault experiments is a bit far-fecthed? I like far-fetched.

And I really liked the plot twist with the Vaults not being just shelters (since they ARE shelters. They saved your ass, right? then they are a shelter) but also as some sick experiment run by the government. The whole "the world is destroyed. Everything you knew is gone...oh and your vault broke down since we wanted to see what happens when the radiation hits you!" is just so deeply twisted, messed up and depressing that I felt like reading one of Lovecraft's stories.

It's a bit silly I suppose, but so what?

 

[Shattering Fast]

I think that as a plot element it can work and I do see what they were going for - it is not unusual for Golden Era science fiction (which Fallout is based on, after all) to add an extra layer of human ingenuity and evil no matter how desperate the situation. You'd often find yourself think "they must be insane!" but that's human nature at its rawest - we are not pragmatists by nature, and sometimes our less than noble tendencies take over in spite of common sense.
)

Well said. Even in humanity's darkest hour, there will always be those opportunists seeking to reap the rewards. What is life without curiosity, after all?

 

[taag]

I agree with that they should have given a second thought to the Vault experiments idea. I think it evolved from the fact that in Fallout 1 every vault had some sort of failing (for the sake of humor): malfunctioning water system, earthquake in Vault 15 and door failure in Vault 12.
So they went a bit over the top with that idea in Fallout 2 and changed it to sinister "Vault experiments".

 

[torben]

So they went a bit over the top with that idea in Fallout 2 and changed it to sinister "Vault experiments".

Since arguably they went over the top with a lot of things in FO2 - New Reno, San Franisco, the multitude of pop-culture references, to name of few - this fits the picture.

I always thought since I first came across the "experiments" idea: What should it be good for? What do they need tonloads of data on the behaviour of social communities when there are no social communities left beside "the experiments"?

The idea would have made more sense in a different context, like, as already said, bored AIs were behind it, or space colonization was the real plan and they had stored away scores of people in cyrogenic stasis (the technology was available) for that purpose. As it is, the concept IMHO is similiar to New Reno: A cool idea and very nice for itself, but does not really sit well with the general setting.

 

[Chancellor Kremlin]

or space colonization was the real plan and they had stored away scores of people in cyrogenic stasis (the technology was available) for that purpose.

As far as I know, that was exactly the idea - to test people for the perils of future space travel to colonise another planet - since the Earth had been destroyed. The scores of people in cryogenic stasis were the vault dwellers, and the vaults their cryos. Those that survived anyway.

 

[Tagaziel]

Basically, I considered the Vault Experiments to be implemented so that they can nail down solutions to problems of interstellar travel, so that they could be avoided while en route to their target location.

 

[Relentless666]

Basically, I considered the Vault Experiments to be implemented so that they can nail down solutions to problems of interstellar travel, so that they could be avoided while en route to their target location.

Wow, that actually makes sence. Everything could happen to a spaceship, a colony on Mars or the Moon or wherever the Enclave was going. And the Enclave are crazy and selfish enough to make a bunch of experiments, so they could troubleshoot furute problems in their own situation.

Maybe the vault experiment had a few agendas:

1 Kill the unfitting, the weak and the ones that can't adapt to new situations.
2 Gain usefull information in the process. Use that information for future Enclave problems.
3 Repopulate the world with the strong adaptable survivors.

Ofcourse, things didn't go acording to plan for various reasons:

1 Some Overseers chose not to play ball. Some vaults that were supposed to malfunction got fixed from the inside.
2 The Enclave didn't go anywhere, making most of the data obsolete.
3 A lot of humans survived outside the vaults.

 

[torben]

I concur with the previous posters that the experiments idea runs well if the vaults had two main purpose:

1) To shelter enough people to restart civilization (in space or whereever) after the war
2) To gain social research data at the same time from experimenting with some or all of the vaults

However, of these two 1) must logically be the primary purpose, because 1) can be achieved without 2), whereas the data achieved through 2) is worthless if 1) is not achieved. In other words: Experimenting is ok, but would have to be limited as not to imperil the achievement of goal 1).

But in this case it would not correct to say that the "true purpose" of the Vaults was social experimenting, as the OP correctly critized, because it was only one of two purposes, and a secondary one anyway.

 

[Keegah]

This is what's always bugged me... The Enclave has this whole stash of normal, totally unmutated human beings. In other words, the only people they even consider human.
According to the Enclave, vault-dwellers are gold mines... even more so if we go with the space-travel idea, which seems logical to me.
And yet, they're perfectly willing to expose the vault-dwellers to the outside world, thus destroying what was maybe the biggest asset to the Enclave's goals.

 

[Aaron]

After all, the Vault experiment went great. The only malfunctioning bit in the Enclave's plans was their escape spaceship, which got destroyed (idk how). The Vaults provided the data, and they even saved humanity on the other hand - as most people out there came from them, with some rare exceptions. And the Vault experiment was part of the plot from the beginning of Fallout 1, one of the core developers mentions it in one of the NMA interviews.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

I think the Enclave considered Vault Dwellers to be from inferior Pre War stock.
Sure they were pure humans but unlike the Enclave the descendants of common civilians, not scientists, soldiers or statesmen.

 

[danielje]

I for one love the vault-tec social experiments as being part of the plot.

You guys arent looking at things correctly if you think it's "lame".

The worlds resources HAVE BEEN DEPLETED. Gasoline has been officially exhausted by the worlds major super powers. Each country is preparing a contingency for the survival of the human race. Vault-Tec is one of those mega corporations with obvious ties to the government who WILL save a small portion of the American population, all the while they will conduct a massive data-mining operation about the integrity of the human mind, body and soul.

This is the big picture anyways.

Some vaults were meant to fail and were clearly made to be broken fast, or meant to have its population go into social break down mode.

If youve ever read the fallout bible, there are Vaults where all the population is male, except one woman, and vice versa. I don't know about you, but the Diabolical implications of such things are enough to make your shiver.

That kind of clever-horror is something completely beyond Bethesda's "yuk,yuk, Lets make their heads explode in slow motion, yukyuk".

The only reason Fallout 3 exists right now, is because the writing involved with Fallout 1 and 2 was so damn good, that Bethesda recognized they couldnt make anything similar without it beind a complete rip-off. So they did the reasonable thing by buying the rights to the Fallout franchise.


I think we take for granted our imaginations when tyring to leverage video games up to the oscar award winning movie plots some people seem to think they need.

Fallout is short, sweet and good enough to play more than once. What else can you ask for in a video game besides that?

I never laughed at Fallout, except fallout 3, when I headshotted two super mutants to death at level 5(oh how lame Bethesda has made it).

Fallout was always something that entranced me, made me feel like I was part of that twisted, perverted version of the United States. And cast me into the role of Ultimate Destroyer who's purpose was to simply cleanse the wasteland of any and all life, or the role of Supreme Savior who was meant to make right all the wrongs the world governments had done to the world.

Yes, I am a fallout fanboy. But atleast I'm fanboying for a game that is actually good. Even in the hands of Bethesda it has alot of promise still. And Fallout Online will be nothing less of holy-shit amazing.