Blowing the dust off this account to go on a rant about fallout because I donāt want to pay for X premium to not be subject to a character limit.
Seeing posts on X criticizing Fallout for the world still being shitty after 200+ years. And how āsocietyā should have been rebuilt in those two centuries. That itās only because Todd Howard has some personal vendetta against the notion of recovering from nuclear war. Blah blah blah
I donāt know how well I can properly articulate it but Fallout games we play shouldnāt be in a rebuilt society. Itās indicative of progress, and the franchiseās tagline and central theme āwar never changesā is very much the antithesis of progress.
For my argument/rant we will focus on the NCR.
The NCR started small and quickly grew and grew and grew as a result of the player characterās actions in Fallout 1 & 2 helping to stabilize the regions and enable their exponential growth leading to the events of Fallout: New Vegas where most fans get familiar with the NCR. On the surface level, the NCR is full of good folks with sensible morals and thatās largely true. But youāre also quick to learn that the NCR is rife with corruption at almost every level. That their armyās supply lines run thin. That theyāve been pursuing an aggressively expansionist agenda to secure more territory, more production resources, more taxpayers. That half their military command is inept and constantly getting good young men and women killed. Just as the NCR came to embody pre-war Americaās ideals and values, so too did it come to embody many of its flaws. Itās implied as well that the NCR had working cars for its citizens in addition to the vertibird that flew President Kimball to Hoover Dam for his ill-advised speech. For all its flaws, the NCR was a beacon of progress, a shining example of post-war prosperity.
And then the fallout show nuked Shady Sands. The NCR is likely not totally extinct as a major faction on the west coast, but itās been majorly hurt by forces beyond its ability to control or counter.
And that was good for the series.
Not interested in arguing whether or not Todd Howard has a personal vendetta against New Vegas and the NCR, I donāt know the guy personally. But when a faction in Fallout rises to prominence, they eventually fall back to the dirt all that much harder.
They all get big, and then they fall right back down. Usually they get to move to some other region to try again, but even so āwar never changes.ā
Itās not that society canāt be rebuilt because of a lack of technology, the legion disproves that. Itās not that society canāt be rebuilt because bureaucrats canāt get it right, the NCR disproves that. Society can be rebuilt in Fallout. But when you rebuild society, that society eventually either goes to war or has war waged upon it. And that destroys will destroy one or more of the societies engaging in it.
The player character should be free from the trappings of such societal conflict. Your initial goal in a main quest-line is not āI will pick my favorite side and weāll win the war.ā Itās āI need to save my vault,ā āI need to save my tribe,ā āI need to find my dad,ā āI need to find that guy who shot me,ā āI need to find my son.ā It is in pursuit of these goals which are seemingly unrelated to the greater conflict of the region that you properly explore the wasteland. That you help or hurt the people living there. Your character is the fish out of water, the odd one out, the free agent with the means to get shit done. You are the catalyst for change. What would be your motivation to change shit in a functional society like the NCR had? Even if you had an interesting story to tell, a conflict to resolve, would you really be playing Fallout? Or would you be playing some other IP pretending to be Fallout?
Anyway yeah, running out of points to make without repeating myself or getting wildly off topic.
gummygunk
pixelskylines
dededos
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
