What did you all think of the worldbuilding?

DaMailMan

DaMailMan

First time out of the vault
When it comes to the show's strengths, I think that worldbuilding is definitely not one of them. I kept putting myself in the shoes of someone new to the Fallout series and asking myself "What is this? Where are we? How does this work?" and I can't imagine they were anything but confused.

Lucy emerges from Vault 4 in the middle of a vast sandy desert...somewhere. There's a pier nearby so apparently on a coastline, but which one? The vault door is exposed and visible, has no one come by this way in all this time? Lucy and Maximus just walk through a vast desert dotted with rundown shacks and nothing else, and there are people just kinda living there. In a desert, what do they drink and eat? Why haven't they fixed and cleaned up these shacks? Why are so many living alone instead of in communities or family groups, like humanity has done since forever? We then find a town, Filly, in the middle of a forest. Who runs this town? Who keeps order and protects it from raiders? Why didn't this area become a desert? Why doesn't everyone just live here?

Similarly, the BOS. I know what the BOS is all about being a Fallout nerd, but for new fans: why do they have power armor and vertibirds and no one else? How come their base has no walls or fences? What is their ideology, history, motivations, worries, short and long term ambitions? Why don't they just take over everything if they have such superior technology?

Also The Enclave exists...somewhere...and that's it. Who are they, what do they want, how do they survive?

Finally, the NCR. Shady Sands is the capital, but it's also just one city in a nation with many settlements. Where is everyone? Did the entire country fall apart when once city was taken out? Why? If so, where are the remaining trade routes, roads, flags and banners, literature, artwork, police and military, medical services, irrigations systems, farms, currency, energy production, etc? Why is there almost no evidence that they existed just a handful of years after collapsing? As a diehard New Vegas nerd, I admit this one has me a bit testy.

What did you guys think? From a hypothetical new fan perspective to veteran fan perspective, how well did they establish the world?
 
If I truly disassociate my love for the series and look at the show merely as a post-apocalyptic sci-fi show, it's still an extreme letdown with abysmal writing. It's not boring like Rings of Power and I can turn my brain off and just follow along, but it has an aftertaste of time wasted.
 
The worldbuilding is fucking stupid as Hell. None of it is taken seriously because the show was directed by people with comedy writing backgrounds. This is a cartoon world setup to be as ridiculous as possible for the sake of jokes that aren't funny. When it does take the time to demand it be taken seriously, it's the most idiotic shit ever conceived. Way worse than anything in the Bethesda games. What does work is like a gleaming puddle of piss floating in a lake of shit.

This is the worldview of upper class creatives made as real as it can possibly get. The common person is a cretinous imbecile literally too stupid to survive without the guiding hand of liberal technocrats, which is why the villains are - liberal technocrats. This is the world of office politics where everyone more or less shares your same worldview, because you literally share a third of your lives together doing the same things, going to the same places, living in the same culture. An artistic triumph of nihilistic solipsism. The petty ideology of those on the middle rungs of the corporate ladder blaming all their problems on their immediate superiors - the apolitics of interpersonal grievance.
 
If the Bethesda games weren't bad enough, this show I think is the final nail in the coffin for Fallout. Every new entry, no matter what studio or creative team makes it, is gonna be tethered to the series which has cast a fishnet for the lowest possible common denominator -- the casuals who are now fans of Fallout thanks to the show. We already saw millions of new fans flock to Fallout 4 after the show aired. The modern games (F4/F76) and the show are now the baseline for anything to come, it's already started with the new Fallout 4 Creation Club update and Fallout 76 expansion that inserts TV show lore into the games. And as someone who interacts with multiple Fallout communities, I notice the revisionism for Fallout 4 and 76 skyrocketing as well as revisionist hate for New Vegas and its fans. Whereas we could've had the tiniest bit of hope for another West Coast game by a better studio some time down the road previously, this show ultimately shatters the setting that new entries will have to abide by. There is nothing for me with the future of the series, TCMs and fanfic are all I care about now tbh.
 
Fallout was already over because Bethesda/Zenimax/Microsoft were going to mismanage it one way or another. They couldn't even capitalize on the tv show's popularity because the "next gen" update for Fallout 4 broke the game.
 
Yeah, ngl, I'm counting on some good fan-made games or spiritual successors to save us at this point.
 
The things which annoyed me the most about the worldbuilding:

- The Boneyard essentially got written out. I don't know what is the point of the location being Los Angeles, It's pretty much irrelevant aside from set-pieces like Flooded Hollywood, Santa Monica Pier and Griffith Observatory. Fallout's LA had its own lore from Fallout and mentions in Fallout New Vegas. It was the rough n' tumble part of the NCR, known for hard life and crime issues. Yet, not a mention, zilch. No Adytum (and no canon ending to the Blades vs Regulators struggle), no Gunrunners' Fortress, no Followers' Library, no NCR Reserve, no Cathedral Crater. Nothing. Change the three set-pieces I talked about, and this series could have easily happened in Santa Barbara or Oxnard or even San Diego.

- The Shady Sands location thing. Shady Sands' location floats in FO1 and FO2 due to map-making reasons, but its location is generally recognized to be somewhere west of Death Valley. It got moved 300km. Even if its another town called Shady Sands, its still kinda dumb.

- Fall of the NCR: I feel having the NCR fall to nukes is cheap. I always thought the NCR should have fallen apart because of its own contradictions. FNV even said the NCR was going to face water and food issues in a decade. It's a bit funny for Maximus to say that the NCR didn't work out, when it got murdered.

- Enbies in the Brotherhood: Whoever wrote Dane never finished Veronica's companion quest. The Brotherhood couldn't even tolerate homosexuals, am I supposed to believe the Brotherhood would tolerate non-binary people?

I actually enjoyed the series, but it does have some serious canon problems.

Bradylama said:
Fallout was already over because Bethesda/Zenimax/Microsoft were going to mismanage it one way or another. They couldn't even capitalize on the tv show's popularity because the "next gen" update for Fallout 4 broke the game.
Click to expand...

Yeah its surreal how they weren't ready to use the success of the show at all. Honestly, they should have had a spin-off to release timed with the show, or even a FO3 remaster (which could easily backport FNV mechanics and then be used as a base for a remastered FNV).
 
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