So Fallout Seaon 2 is halfway through, ep. 4 premiered the other day and the reaction has been... mixed to be mild. I just wanna preface this rant before I go any further and admit that I am bit biased, I really like the show and all the Fallout games so my perspective is a bit scewed overall
1. The Bad
So yeah this show is NOT without its faults and I will be the first person to admit this, some jokes definetly go on too long (Thaddeus in Power Armour got old near the end), character development, especially Lucy, can feel like its regressed or jumps around. And as much as I loved the Legion bits it did feel a bit over exxagerated with the tiny gap even seperating them by a larger field would have worked better. I wanna be 100% clear, many if not most of these criticisms of this show are super valid and I definetly understand them, unfortunately a few bad actors online have taken this opprotunity and ran with it which has in turn led to some fans getting super defensive about the show in general and not accepting criticism
2. The Good
On to the stuff I really do like, first of all its a really good looking show especiallly with its props (PA in particular) it really looks like everything was ripped straight from the games. Secondly most of the characters are pretty enjoyable, Cooper and Lucies dynamic is still good (if a bit repetitive) and I cant wait to see it continue, Maximus is really great this season and his conflict is very well done, additionally Norms plot continues to look interesting, from what the trailers see we will also hopefully finally be seeing some real civilisation in the second half of the season (I'll touch on this in a bit), the callbacks like with Victor are just really cool despite the series other issues
3. The Ugly
So the elephant in the room is pretty obvious, the destruction, unfortunately the series creators seemed to go so far to not canonise any choice that they ended up making none matter (at least it seems that way so far) and have left the Mojave in a worse state then where we left it, personalyl I sorta predicted this with the fall of Shady Sands in S1 (Still hoping for some more NCR remanents tho), it is dissapointing and I almost wonder if the creators should have just done what Halo show did and make a seperate timeline for the show, but I digress, obviously the creators of the show and Bethesda in general prefer a more apocalyptic Wasteland but I still am pretty dismayed at the state of the Strip (Freeside seem to be doing good so thats nice tho) other examples like the ghoulified Kings being killed has only added flame to the long-standing rumour that Beth secretly hates Obsidian and Interplay (I dont buy it tbh, even the more anti-bethesda NV devs have denied it) and in tandum this has left the fandom in open civil war basically, Fallout has always had a toxic Fandom but its is pretty bad rn,
Conclusion
I realise this has sort of devolved into a rant about the fandom in general and my hopes for the shows future but still. Fallout isnt a perfect show, hell sometimes the fanbases reactions makes me wonder if its even a good show and I just like bad stuff. Anyways I genuinely do look forward to the rest of the series and House in particular. Thanks for taking a moment to read my thoughts!
I think that the obsession with not canonizing anything from NV has been a major handicap for the writing this season. They keep using the iconography of the game while Matrix-dodging any kind of interesting implications that could come from it and it is really annoying.
People like to make fun of toxic NV fans, but it is really frustrating how nothing that happened in that game is allowed to matter.
This implies that the show runners wanted to deal with anything from the games in the first place. They did not. Before Season 1 even launched they literally stated that they didn't want to deal with civilisational baggage of the West Coast so asked to nuke the NCR, so the West Coast could be a wasteland again. I am not making this up.
If that's the case, why didn't they have the show take place in a new location? Instead of nuking the West and NCR, they could've had the show take place somewhere else.
One word, Memberberries. Season 1 was pretty bad with trying to force connections between the existing franchise and the show (but for Bethesda Fallout most hilariously Emil with Nate "the Rake"). They utilised the iconic materials of the setting without regard. But it took place in California, where the old games were set, so comparatively didn't have much to mine except the higher concepts and certain location names, which they botched. Season 2 mines New Vegas with a gusto. Every episode features something notable from New Vegas even if it horribly implemented, be it locations or factions.
What’s your source
Source: He did, in fact, make it up.
There were several interviews done around when Season 1 released. I sadly cannot find them at the moment. It was some interview of Todd Howard about how the show runners wanted to nuke Shady Sands. The other was about how the show runners stated that doing a Deadwood story after it became more civilised does not work, same with Fallout. It almost has been two years. Sorry, I cannot tell you an exact source.
here's the interview in question
/u/NeoAA, this guy has the original source for the latter part of my claims regarding Deadwood.
This might be the Todd Howard interview you were thinking of.
I agree, I feel like it would be better if they had ripped off the bandage and made the House ending canon, its nkt even my favourite one but its the most "Vegas" one imo
I used to be annoyed at the idea, but now think the House ending would be a solid canonical choice. It is the most straightforward mercenary route, and makes sense for an independent contractor to do regardless of alignment.
Exactly im an NCR fanboy and think they would have been the best choice but House is such a big presence it makes sense
Nothing in any of Bethesda’s games is allowed to matter. They want everyone’s choices to matter and don’t wanna tell everyone they were wrong but effective by doing so they say no one’s choices actually matter.
I've always said my issues with the show aren't issues with the show itself, but with the general Bethesda era of Fallout, but yeah, I really dislike how Fallout now is fixated on his idea of an eternal apocalypse where nothing is ever allowed to genuinely change or improve, because everything has to get nuked back into oblivion whenever things are looking up. It's completely outside the spirit of the original games. I also really dislike how obsessed Fallout is with the pre-war world and the Vaults over actually developing the Wasteland as an interesting setting. I don't really care about the 50s-but-its-the-future world, that world should only exist narratively speaking to get destroyed and become the Wasteland.
Ironically, the show seems to suggest that apparently the Master was right back in Fallout 1 - his whole argument was that humanity is not capable of transcending the flaws that caused the Great War nor thriving in the Wasteland and so need to be replaced by a new master race of superhuman beings. And it's been 120 years or so since the Master's death by the time of the show and somehow California is even worse off than it was back then!
No, he's wrong because that wouldn't work. There's no escape. It's just humanity being incapable of transcending the flaws. Humanity can't create something that is capable of it, and most certainly not create something from humanity like that. He's just a human with immense power and ego, he's not capable of transcending it. The Think Tank are just humans in robots. They're not capable either. Synths are made in a human image, and also are not capable. AI are made in a human image, and also are not capable. There is no escape.
100% should’ve made it a separate timeline. I hope we eventually redirect the west coast without needing to account for the absolute savaging this show has done to that part of the setting. If they want a more apocalyptic wasteland they should either stop moving the timeline forward, continually move to ever more remote locations, or at least give us a non-shit reason why everything fell apart (NCR civil war after winning at 2nd Hoover Dam perhaps? If the NCR was aa doomed state let its internal contradictions be its undoing, not a nuke fired by a group only slightly less contrived than alien invaders).
Yeah, the nonsense of "someone bombed Shady Sands, so every major population centre in California collapsed simultaneously" was absurd last season and is still absurd. What happened to Vault City? What happened to the Hub, which is confirmed to still be around and thriving at the time of New Vegas?
Even if the NCR collapsed, that should have caused California to collapse into a series of squabbling city-states like it was back in Fallout 2, not actually regress to become worse off than it was in Fallout 1.
Yeah Bethesda seems to actively dislike the idea of Fallout being a post-apocalyptic setting, much less the post-post-apocalypse setting which was emerging as of Fallout 2, and instead wants to imagine the world in a stasis where the bombs have fallen this decade for the last 20 decades. The west coast never behaved like that though, so they had to blow up their civilization and did it in a very contrived way.
Also, weirdly, the show seems to think that we can't really empathize with characters who grew up in the wasteland. Almost every wastelander in the show is a joke, cannon fodder, or a drooling weirdo. And while there are plenty of those characters in the games, there are also plenty of well-rounded, regular people with interesting personalities. In the show though every main character is a vault dweller, a pre-war person, or in the Brotherhood of Steel and so insulated from the actual wasteland. You would never get a main character like the Chosen One in the show.
Apocalyptic wasteland is the Fallout aesthetic. Maybe you guys just don’t like Fallout? I am being serious. You keep saying you want the world to be something other than what it has been in literally every single game from the start.
The point is that Bethesda is obsessed with keeping the setting immediately post-apocalyptic in the sense that it needs to always feel like the apocalypse just happened (which is why in the Bethesda games everything is filthy and there are corpses inside people's houses and there is edible food just sitting in old supermarkets and such). But "the world ended last week" is not the only type of post-apocalyptic aesthetic, and most significantly it wasn't the aesthetic of Fallout prior to Fallout 3. That was an innovation, and in my opinion a bad one.
If you go and play Fallout 1 and especially 2, people (who have a choice in the matter) aren't living in filthy, bombed out old ruins. They are living in houses they have built/repaired in towns. Even The Den in Fallout 2, which is supposed to be a crime-ridden shithole, is significantly nicer in terms of physical structures and space than Megaton or Rivet City or Diamond City in the Bethesda games. Even Junktown is nicer, and it's literally called Junktown. This is logical, because people realistically wouldn't just sit there for decades after the bombs fell doing nothing to secure reasonable shelter for themselves in all that time. People aren't just going to live in a house with pre-war corpses in their bathroom. But that's exactly what they do in the Bethesda games, because Bethesda wants the apocalypse to have happened last week and not more than a century ago. But that's simply not what Fallout was about.
I have played the first two Fallouts. They look exactly like the Bethesda Fallouts. New Vegas has a shit ton of ruins and skeletons. You are misremembering or confused or something. Fallout is post-apocalyptic atompunk. Every single game has a post-apocalyptic atompunk aesthetic. Whatever it is you guys want is not that. Why would you expect one of the most popular franchises in the world to change its signature aesthetic and lose its identity? Do you expect Elder Scrolls to drop the castles and other medieval elements to focus on an industrial era? Do you want GTA to become about neighborhood violence intervention programs? Just what exactly do you guys want from these games?
We want logically progression, GTA is entirely different because it is rebooting, 3, VC and San Andreas are in a different universe then 1-2 and 4-5 are again in another universe then the past ones
OK, but people don’t want to play rebuild civilization simulator. That isn’t Fallout. Fallout is post-apocalyptic. That is never going to change because that is what the franchise is. It’s actually really simple. People do not watch Mad Max movies because they are invested in how Furiosa changes water rationing policies after Immortan Joe’s death. They watch Mad Max movies for the exciting wasteland chaos.
There’s plenty of things that are post apocalyptic and don’t necessitate “Wasteland Chaos”. Metro, Stalker, Wasteland, Nier. All of these have people actually living as humans would after an event like this. In Metro, they raise pigs and eat off the radioactive mushrooms! Mad Max is structured entirely different than fallout as the former has no continuity even between installments so it gets away with not having to deal with lore building. Mainly because they’re practically myths people in universe would probably tell. Fallout New Vegas had the most functioning governments and is the most popular fallout to date.
I don't know what to tell you. You're just incorrect about what the first two games were like.
Fallout 2 and New Vegas exist. Not everything should look like the bombs fell last week.
Fallout 2 and New Vegas look like the other Fallout games. because they are Fallout games. Fallout games look a certain way. A way that you apparently do not like and want to change?
I really dislike how literally every faction in the show must be undergoing through some sort of downfall to keep them in check. Which greatly limits any possible cool lore developments since everyone just sits in their place and does almost nothing. The fact that the only limiter writers come up with seems to be civil war definitely doesn’t help.
Agreed. I think the show is a good adaptation of the East-Coast style Bethesda Fallouts, but it's a poor adaptation of the West-Coast Fallouts since it doesn't engage with any of the interesting factions, settings, or themes that people liked about the West-Coast Fallouts.
If they had set it in a different continuity or somewhere elsewhere in America, most of my problems with the show go away. I could enjoy it as its own thing instead of thinking "Dang, looks like this cool and interesting settlement/faction I liked in New Vegas got wiped out and replaced by boring generic post-apocalyptic wasteland stuff."
I had this same conversation with most of my friends like if they set fo4 in the commonwealth I wouldn't mind because I don't care about that game
Mine aren't complicated - if you're just there for the basic shit like ghouls/power armor and can easily go ooh!/aah! at simple visual references, it's tolerable.
If you want it to be a decent representation of the games, nope. It may actually be an ok copy of the shitty Bethesda parts of Fallout, not the good parts without the crap lazy writing.
I had SOME hopes with Jonathan Nolan producing. After all I loved all of Person of Interest and S1 of Westworld - but it's clear they just cherry-picked the recognizable elements of the franchise and gave zero fucks about staying true to the lore, and even if they didn't stay true to the lore the writing could've been better. As it stands it's key-jangling for simpletons.
It's in the same vein as Alien:Earth - mostly great production values and a big name property making its TV debut made people go 'this is great!' when it painfully wasn't. That show was absolute dogshit, and while Fallout isn't AS BAD as that, it's still kinda bad. Only it will take a bit for the deluded peeps to admit they like it just for the production values and nothing else.
Kept seeing Alien Earth get hyped up in every r/Television reddit thread that it was mentioned and I was only able to get through 4 episodes. It was painfully average and really just not very interesting.
Don't worry, it gets worse. To me the initial idea of sticking child brains into adult droid bodies for no reason (or bullshit handwavy reason, same difference) was bad enough - considering what situations you send them and have to manage them in - but it gets worse.
I mean you could have given ypur critique without insulting the people who like it but go on I suppose.
Tired of being diplomatic about things when people like absolute slop. Own it, because I wont twist myself into pretzels reframing the slop into something likeable for so and so reason.
Its hard to take any critique seriously tho if youre just gonna be a dick about it, please feel free to critisece the show (it deserves criticism) but the incessant "slop, slop. tourist, slop" does nothing but devaulue your points
Imagine admitting you have childlike emotional maturity so proudly on the internet
I've seen this enough times with tv series, movies, games, etc. Everytime the initial discourse is months of people pussyfooting and avoiding comments that may seem too sharp, and those people who really like the actually really poor thing ganging up on those who offer detailed criticism.
Then 4-5 months later the initial wave of hype has died down, the people who all insisted on being super positive about the thing left (always people who pop in to consume the content no matter its quality and leave), and suddenly critiquing the thing became absolutely okay - and the general consensus switched from 'good but flawed' to 'this was pretty bad actually'.
Took about a week after Alien:Earth was done for opinions to shift - I dropped it 2 episodes in, then binged the rest before the final episode just to be able to discuss it, and wouldn't you know, what I expected (for it to stay poor or get worse) happened. People were like 'I wanted to stay optimistic and not judge it too fast' and I was like 'but those first 2 episodes were enough'.
I want us to reach that stage with the Fallout show, so I don't care for anyone who pretends this is good in any aspect but production value and the occasional isolated scene taken on its own - the overall picture taken together is poor.
Starfield was the same thing - pirated it because I've already been burned by Bethesda and the 2 hr refund policy of Steam ain't enough to judge a game like that - I needed about 20 hours to rush a bunch of questlines to see it for what it was - a complete turd. In that first month it was a blasphemy to shit on it so hard. But I came back to that sub in november-december (it released in early september) to see opinions having shifted to the same criticisms I listed and was downvoted to hell for.
In summation, fuck the Fallout show as someone who's well familiar with the universe. Anyone not familiar with it can have some dumb fun. Show is still slop. And fk you for acting like shitting on the poor quality thing is 'having low emotional maturity'.
Agreed. I didn't even PLAY the game, but even I can see past the bullshit. 200 years after the war yet somehow there are NO functioning societies. FO5 is going to be a shit show, and ES6 too.
I had some greivances with Season 1 but still liked it, and for them to completely shit on the lore is disgusting to me. I'd hate to see them even come near the Commonwealth. Bet Diamond City and Goodneighbor just get blown up and raiders took over.
Bethesda story telling is udder dogshit nowadays, but what can you expect from a game studio carried by modders?
The only successful game setting to show adaptation I know of is CP:Edgerunners, but atleast it's base game had solid writing.
I'll just ignore the show when I eventually play NV, what a clusterfuck
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I mean, what do you expect me to say as someone who's loved Fallout for 25 years now and sees the level of storytelling/writing the tv show has? Just call it as I see it.
Yes, I think it kinda sucks. I'm not saying nobody should watch it - if people aren't familiar with the games they can have some dumb fun with it, though IMO the writing is mid at best even if you're unfamiliar with the source material.
The Fallout is the definition of a "turn your brain off or you won't get any enjoyment" type show, which is within the spirit of the games
One thing that's gonna be blamed on Todd when it's definitely not his fault:The destruction of the Mojave and NCR is something Chris personally kept trying to push,and something Todd definitely let be a main focal point given it.
Despite the love for the setting Obsidian themselves had this almost bizarre obsession with setting up like......20 death flags for Vegas near the end.Todd gave the go ahead but all he and the writers really did was take what was already shoved into the games and turned it up a bit in the comedic department.
Why does everyone bring up Avalone, when it was never made canon and he changed his mind on his previous stance.
Outside the Tunnellers, what threats do you mean?
I do apprectiate you mentioning this, as mich as I dont agree with Beths approach at this moment, it is worth mentioning they are not the 1st to want to go back to more apocalyptic roots
Hell Obsidian/interplay kept trying to push for certain places being nuked to hell like the Shi as far back as 2,and according to Van Buren multiple chances to also do so for several endings.
Bethesda has unironically been trying to push away from that despite how fans will (understandably)hate them for their decisions.I can guarantee a lot of the shows problems stem from trying to work with new Vegas's many MANY "everything's falling apart" scenarios built-in.
If you work in an industry you don't openly disparage others in said industry. It's asking to be blacklisted in an industry as small as game development.
You are giving those fans too much credit. The common Bethesda fandom is always super defensive of and lenient towards new entries unless they somehow completely botch a release (FO76, FO4 Next Gen Update). The "bad actors" are generally just people criticising the quality of the products.
I didnt mention it in the rant but the exessive use of the word "tourist" in relation to this show may drive me mad!
I never played the games but I loved season one. Some of my concerns with season two are just based on the story they are presenting us.
I’m not sure why Lucy has regressed this season. The fish outta water trope made prefect sense in season one, but shouldn’t she be a little more savvy this season? Cunning? Understanding of the harsh realities of the outside world? It’s tough watching her getting into situations that her progression from season one should have her avoiding.
Maxus was one of my favorite characters and his backstory of his youth was very well done and touching. Probably the best episode of the season, but he feels very disconnected from the story and his motivations do not feel earned. I would like to see where his arch is going now that they have him on the road.
I will continue to watch, but even the biggest fans of the show have to agree the quality has dropped.
Yeah I partly agree with you, especially with Lucy, I will say I do wonder if the episodic release somewhat affects this. With the first season we could better see a continuous evolution over the 8 episodes and the new weekly releases make it feel a bit disjointed tbh
The weekly release absolutely is causing the majority of pacing issues, especially because it’s pretty clear to me season two was produced to be a binge. But my main issue with Lucy is the regression. She should just be a little more cutthroat and ruthless and much less naive. Her character went through a full arch season one and it feels like they hit the factory reset.
I agree again, my main issue with Lucy is mlre of a moment to moment thing, like in ep 4she was high on chems and killing ghouls pretty ruthlessly, only to go straight back to joking a few mins later
I'm honestly sick of people complaining about the "eternal apocalypse" of Fallout. I'm so sorry that not everything ever made is "humanity fuck yeah" slop and that cynical media is allowed to exist without your consent.
Okay, I'm not sorry at all. The HFY types honestly act the same way about anything that dares to not bend the knee to their ideology as the Brotherhood acts towards ghouls, and it's so goddamn infuriating. It's not enough to go "this isn't to my tastes", it always has to be "it is pure evil to make something that dares to view humanity as doomed instead of fellating the awesome might of the human race, for you may lead others astray and cause them to not worship at the might of the supreme beings that are humanity!" It's giving "unironically celebrates and worships The Imperium of Man". I swear, y'all are a year or two out from "thou shalt not suffer a cynic to live".
I love Fallout for being something so mainstreamly cynical. I love that we have at least one property that can go "nah, humans fucking suck, our fate is going to be extinction at our own hands, if we fail we'll just try again and again until we finally wipe ourselves out". It's the most true to Post-WW2 views on war and nuclear weaponry that exists, and I adore it for that.
I think what it best embodies is the Einstein quote. "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." Everyone focuses on the part where he's saying that World War 3 will send us back to the Stone Age, undo all our technological might, but they overlook the second part. What will humanity do after getting sent back to the Stone Age? Try to wipe each other out immediately afterwards. It's not "will there be a World War 4", it's "of course there will be, we'll never stop no matter how many we kill". The death spiral of the human race, an infinite series of wars. We built new technology to go to war. We build industry to go to war. We build societies to go to war. It's all war, baby. War never changes.
That's what Fallout is best as to me. War never changes. You know what we'll do after a nuclear war? Go to war. You know what we'll do after that? Go to war. After that? Go to war. We will go to war again and again until there's nobody left to go to war. We'll kill each other down to the last over conflicts great and small, over bigotry and greed, over ideology and hope. We'll go to war to prove who's right. We'll go to war to prove who's wrong. We'll go to war to stop others from going to war. We'll go to war for pure madness. We'll go to war to survive. We'll go to war for revenge. We'll go to war for any fucking reason at all. That's it. Humanity is defined by war, war is what we do, and we won't stop until every man, woman, and child is dead. We'll kill each other endlessly in a violent cycle of suffering until we're out of people to kill. That's humanity.
And I am so sick of "NUUUUU IT NEEDS TO ESPOUSE THAT HUMANITY IS BETTER THAN THAT AND WILL ALWAYS TRIUMPH AND OVERCOME AND THRIVE AND WIN AND HUMAN GOODNESS WINS AND IT HAS TO BE PUPPIES COVERED IN SUNSHINE WEARING A FLOWER CROWN UNDER A RAINBOW!!!" Let us have something that isn't your propaganda piece.
I do kinda sorta agree lol. I saw someone saying that a greedy corporate representative (Hank) destroying an actual attempt at civilisation (Shady Sands) was an interesting direction to go, I will say I do wish there was a bit more built up settlements tha we have seen tho
If it is a foregone conclusion then why watch? I am 100% on board with cynicism in media, but a story where the same things happen over and over forever is going to get really boring really fast.
The problem isn’t that they didn’t have a happy ending, the problem is that they are setting the precedent to just tell the same story again and again with minor changes.
I'm sorry to be blunt, but your mindset just does not present a solution to humanity's problems, and humanity has undoubtably much improved across the board since the dark ages. And the only reason we have improved is because people believed in something and said new and risky things.
This is exactly what I mean. “Present a solution”? You are once again demanding that everything be your propaganda piece. You are opposed to the existence of art that isn’t. It doesn’t need to present a solution.
And I’d say that really, the reason we have improved is to win wars. New technology? It’s developed firstly for war. New supply lines? To win wars. Societal improvements? It’s not done out of the goodness of people’s hearts, it’s done because you need your population in a good shape to win wars, to prevent your population from going to war with its leadership, and to make sure the population is down to go to war with others instead of going “why the fuck should we?” It’s just war. After World War 2, we created a system where the ruling powers no longer feared losing power to war, believing that nuclear weapons meant that no major war could ever really happen again thanks to MAD, so why give a fuck about the masses anymore? You can do whatever you want. The only risk is civil war, so they’ve spent seventy years preemptively waging it against us to make sure we can’t. Every major societal improvement was gained via the threat of the poor rising up, or via the poor rising up. The last time it happened in the US was the labor movement in the 30s.
I think you need some IRL friends