• he/him

trying my best


dante
@dante

guys in the world of Fallout love to live in dirty shacks and never clean up the pile of garbage and literal human skeletons in the living room. even though they've lived in the shack for like four years and there's a broom like literally right there. i have thought about this every day since i played those games


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

this is literally why i won't play fallout. like i'm not going to get all Podcast about it, i don't feel like having a Big Picture conversation, but i just personally think that the FO3 devs took a really lazy stab at "post apocalyptic", went with the first thing that came to mind, everyone embraced it, and all of culture just said "welp i guess that's what post-apocalyptic looks like"

humans aren't like this. people aren't going to just not pick up broken plates that fell off the shelves 120 years ago when the bombs fell. yeah for like a couple years, sure, but by the time you have infrastructure and you're on your like fifth or sixth generation, i swear to fucking god mom is going to tell you to pick up a broom before you're allowed to go outside and play with your drop-and-runs


Great-Joe
@Great-Joe

Oh right, MrBtongue did a whole thing on this way back in the Obama years. Then it disappeared, then it got reuploaded here.


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in reply to @dante's post:

what if it's just ironic and fashionable at this point, like how the whole 50s aesthetic in Fallout is actually just a re-hash of 50s nostalgia in-universe that was happening at the time of the apocalypse, now everyone just keeps skeletons and garbage around because all their media references it and it's just some post-apocalypse nostalgia fad

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

this is one of the worst crimes of the fallout worldbuilding
stuff exposed to the elements like WOOD furniture is perfectly fine
corpses and garbage everywhere, everything is still destroyed CENTURIES later

for crying out loud the world looked like the war just ended but its been 60-200 years

As I understand it the original Fallout was set not-actually-that-long after the bombs fell so it made sense that everything was still a mess; Bethesda did the "200 years later" thing in both Fallout 3 and Skyrim but didn't update the visual aesthetic because in their zeal to copy Fallout 1 they forgot that things change as time passes.

I see what you mean, but this is a world that got depopulated drastically, I'm pretty sure there's still like less than 20% of the population of pre-war humanity centuries later. It's unrealistic that basically everywhere looks like nobody's touched it since the bombs dropped, that's fair. But that vast stretches look like the hollowed out ruins of real life neighborhoods that experienced depopulation? Compelling honestly. It's just missing the places that have managed to actually put themselves back together.

i'm talking about, I walk into someone's house or business, there's dirt on the ground, dust motes in the air, their clothes are all dirty and the walls are splotchy and brown. it's not like paint got blown up by the bombs, and you can make whitewash from stuff that's pretty easy to find. i know potable water is at a premium, but water clean enough to wash clothes and floors must exist, humans can't function without process water of some kind.

it's one thing to say "they're barely getting by," but it's hard to suspend disbelief at the conceit that humanity has persisted for a century or two after the war, continuously on the absolute razor's edge of survival, without a single amenity to make life less hopeless, yet hasn't collapsed entirely. bethesda fallout makes sense if it's been three years since the survivors came out of the vaults, but not 200 or 80 or even 50. sure, at first people are just going to crash in the less messed up houses and lay around and be miserable and not bother washing their clothes in the river, but not for centuries.

to wit, paraphrasing the video someone linked (which I can't find now) about how New Vegas had better worldbuilding: what do the people in FO3 eat? It can't just be old cans of beans from before the war. At some point they have to build farms, there's just no way around it after the first couple decades, and likewise, at some point they're going to go "okay, let's see if we can't find a way to make life feel a little better," because they have nothing else to do all day.

Yeah, I suppose you're right. It kinda takes the ennui of existing under the yoke of capitalism, not really able to meaningfully better the state of the world, and assumes that lack of motivation would persist in the apocalypse. The concept of a full time job was bombed off the face of the earth too, people will be fine lol

in reply to @Great-Joe's post: