Game News Fallout: New Vegas Opening Cinematic Revealed

[Ruprekt]

Herp derp they just fixed and reformed all those old buildings during all this time instead of building new ones.

You're right. It doesn't make sense however you look at it. 200 years on the world should be entirely new.

Compare america in 1800 with 1900. The NCR could have done that.

 

[Forest Dweller]

People in 1800 had centuries of progress before them to build off of. It doesn't compare.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

People in 1800 had centuries of progress before them to build off of. It doesn't compare.

But its mostly knowledge you are building off of. Knowledge of how to build buildings wasn't lost. There should be at least SOME new structures, with others that were just left to decay and die because they weren't needed to keep the whole post apocalypse feeling.

 

[Azrael the cat]

But keeping the same actor is the same as with keeping the same story?

No, it's not the same. It simply shows how they treat the legacy. Ron Perlman and "War. War never changes." are iconic for Fallout. The problem was Bethesda being retarded and giving Ron a stupid piece of shit to read which contained that line twice.

Well getting the same actor to say pretty much the same thing in game after game in the intro is pretty shitty. Keeping Ron around(he could still be there) is just a reason for them to get him to say the same stuff again. It was fine in the first 2 but how many times can he talk about how people dropped the bombs? Make Ron a character in the game or something, but for god's sake, no more 'War, war never changes' and the same old history lesson! Keeping this old intro now is just gimmicky, and since FO3 and NV is NOTHING like the first two, then they should come up with something else.

The 'War, war never changes' thing would be worthwhile IF the plot/themes of the sequel were about repeating the mistakes of the past. I could see merit in a series (not saying it's necessarily a fallout thing) where, no matter what the various factions and characters learned, no matter what they did, they all end up making the same apocalyptic mistakes again and again (presumably you'd need some smaller scale, 'personal story' TNO-style victory, maybe just the main character securing peace and shelter for one small community, to keep the game from having no victory goal).

 

[Azrael the cat]

People in 1800 had centuries of progress before them to build off of. It doesn't compare.

But its mostly knowledge you are building off of. Knowledge of how to build buildings wasn't lost. There should be at least SOME new structures, with others that were just left to decay and die because they weren't needed to keep the whole post apocalypse feeling.

Depends whether they're going with (a) probable reality, or (b) Mad Max. And when I played FO1, I was one of those guys that got a hell of a lot more 'Mad Max' than '1950s Americana' from it (not saying they weren't both there).

One of the things that is done well across all the Mad Max films, even the awful 3rd one (notice a pattern here?), is that even away from the areas that were bombed, humanity is moving backwards. Tech decreases across the films and it's heavily suggested that you have a scenario where the cities are all kaput, with the country towns left out there at first not all that affected, with all their modern tech, cars, radios etc. But there's no government and no centralised infrastructure. No means of carrying oil from one place to another, and no means of acquiring the materials to build local power stations, or anything to run them with. So nothing new is built - Max's car, whilst cool, is the standard-issue police car (you see a bunch more like it at police HQ), while one of the first things you hear in MM2 is 'Wow, last of the V8 interceptors' when someone sees Max's car still in running condition. Communities grow smaller as only the places with local oil have any means of civilised existence - and they have to spend most of their time defending what they have. Elsewhere, things just collapse and tribalise (the 'tribals' in FO2 were an obvious reference to the epilogue of MM2, where you hear of the community escaping to a northern riverina with fresh water/cropland, balanced out by the fact that they aren't a town or a city, but 'the great northern tribe' (indicating things have continued to disintegrate).


I'm not saying that FO series should slavishly follow MM - it was an influence, not 'Mad Max the game'. Just that the MM series does an excellent job of making it plausible that things are going to get a LOT worse for folk for a very long time, and that there's no guarantee of things turning around within a couple of centuries.

 

[ironyuri]

But keeping the same actor is the same as with keeping the same story?

No, it's not the same. It simply shows how they treat the legacy. Ron Perlman and "War. War never changes." are iconic for Fallout. The problem was Bethesda being retarded and giving Ron a stupid piece of shit to read which contained that line twice.

Well getting the same actor to say pretty much the same thing in game after game in the intro is pretty shitty. Keeping Ron around(he could still be there) is just a reason for them to get him to say the same stuff again. It was fine in the first 2 but how many times can he talk about how people dropped the bombs? Make Ron a character in the game or something, but for god's sake, no more 'War, war never changes' and the same old history lesson! Keeping this old intro now is just gimmicky, and since FO3 and NV is NOTHING like the first two, then they should come up with something else.

The 'War, war never changes' thing would be worthwhile IF the plot/themes of the sequel were about repeating the mistakes of the past. I could see merit in a series (not saying it's necessarily a fallout thing) where, no matter what the various factions and characters learned, no matter what they did, they all end up making the same apocalyptic mistakes again and again (presumably you'd need some smaller scale, 'personal story' TNO-style victory, maybe just the main character securing peace and shelter for one small community, to keep the game from having no victory goal).

Don't you see though, Ron Perlman and groin shots and explosions and big gory death shots are what makes Fallout "Fallout-y"?

The whole exploring the ethics of a post-apocalyptic world in which the nature of war doesn't change is not Fallout, y r u so

 

[Zomg]

FO1 is pretty good about containing the retro-futurism stuff to surviving pre-war culture (including things like the shiny silver power armor and weapons as "culture"), and the nascent surface culture is like Wild West American Mad Max + I guess A Canticle for Liebowitz. Except I suppose giant bugs and rats are kinda '50s Attack of the X, but whatever. In FO2 the themes start bleeding together with the general loss of containment of everything and the Enclave is more Bill Hicks'/every '80s comedian's version of Reagan's America rather than a Strangelove riff

 

[commie]

Herp derp they just fixed and reformed all those old buildings during all this time instead of building new ones.

Well at least they fixed them. In Beths vision they just decided to build towns of scrap metal when mostly intact skyscrapers and malls are just a few hundred metres away.

 

[Dogffdog]

Depends whether they're going with (a) probable reality, or (b) Mad Max. And when I played FO1, I was one of those guys that got a hell of a lot more 'Mad Max' than '1950s Americana' from it (not saying they weren't both there).

One of the things that is done well across all the Mad Max films, even the awful 3rd one (notice a pattern here?), is that even away from the areas that were bombed, humanity is moving backwards. Tech decreases across the films and it's heavily suggested that you have a scenario where the cities are all kaput, with the country towns left out there at first not all that affected, with all their modern tech, cars, radios etc. But there's no government and no centralised infrastructure. No means of carrying oil from one place to another, and no means of acquiring the materials to build local power stations, or anything to run them with. So nothing new is built - Max's car, whilst cool, is the standard-issue police car (you see a bunch more like it at police HQ), while one of the first things you hear in MM2 is 'Wow, last of the V8 interceptors' when someone sees Max's car still in running condition. Communities grow smaller as only the places with local oil have any means of civilised existence - and they have to spend most of their time defending what they have. Elsewhere, things just collapse and tribalise (the 'tribals' in FO2 were an obvious reference to the epilogue of MM2, where you hear of the community escaping to a northern riverina with fresh water/cropland, balanced out by the fact that they aren't a town or a city, but 'the great northern tribe' (indicating things have continued to disintegrate).

I'm not saying that FO series should slavishly follow MM - it was an influence, not 'Mad Max the game'. Just that the MM series does an excellent job of making it plausible that things are going to get a LOT worse for folk for a very long time, and that there's no guarantee of things turning around within a couple of centuries.

One of the best posters around here.

I don't really care if 1,000 years have passed; the more 'civilization' is crept back in the lesser the FO vibe for me. Time passed is not a compulsory reason to make the wasteland more civilized with each new sequel.

 

[commie]

People in 1800 had centuries of progress before them to build off of. It doesn't compare.

Well how about Ancient Egyptians coming up with pyramids from primitive mastabas to Khufu's in a couple hundred years(and the general architectural leap in that time as well). A society can pretty much go a long way in a short time even without prior knowledge AND IN FALLOUT, there's knowledge of old times everywhere: buildings mostly intact, computers working etc. For a Fallout society you'd be able to rebuild in no time if reasonably organised, just like Vault City some few decades after the war, even taking into account the GECK.

I don't really care if 1,000 years have passed; the more 'civilization' is crept back in the lesser the FO vibe for me. Time passed is not a compulsory reason to make the wasteland more civilized with each new sequel.

Why always set things one after the other? I would have thought that the early years after a nuclear war would be the most interesting to use to make a game about survival in the wasteland, the general lawlessness and chaos, petty warlords, desperate refugees etc. Why not make more games in THIS early period rather than make them about a rebuilt world centuries later?

What Beth, Oblivion and even Black Isle(with F2) did was try and make a modern(future) RPG from a post-apocalyptic setting which kind of misses the point. If you want Gangsters and Vegas then make a Mafia RPG!

 

[skyst]

People in 1800 had centuries of progress before them to build off of. It doesn't compare.

But its mostly knowledge you are building off of. Knowledge of how to build buildings wasn't lost. There should be at least SOME new structures, with others that were just left to decay and die because they weren't needed to keep the whole post apocalypse feeling.

Depends whether they're going with (a) probable reality, or (b) Mad Max. And when I played FO1, I was one of those guys that got a hell of a lot more 'Mad Max' than '1950s Americana' from it (not saying they weren't both there).

One of the things that is done well across all the Mad Max films, even the awful 3rd one (notice a pattern here?), is that even away from the areas that were bombed, humanity is moving backwards. Tech decreases across the films and it's heavily suggested that you have a scenario where the cities are all kaput, with the country towns left out there at first not all that affected, with all their modern tech, cars, radios etc. But there's no government and no centralised infrastructure. No means of carrying oil from one place to another, and no means of acquiring the materials to build local power stations, or anything to run them with. So nothing new is built - Max's car, whilst cool, is the standard-issue police car (you see a bunch more like it at police HQ), while one of the first things you hear in MM2 is 'Wow, last of the V8 interceptors' when someone sees Max's car still in running condition. Communities grow smaller as only the places with local oil have any means of civilised existence - and they have to spend most of their time defending what they have. Elsewhere, things just collapse and tribalise (the 'tribals' in FO2 were an obvious reference to the epilogue of MM2, where you hear of the community escaping to a northern riverina with fresh water/cropland, balanced out by the fact that they aren't a town or a city, but 'the great northern tribe' (indicating things have continued to disintegrate).


I'm not saying that FO series should slavishly follow MM - it was an influence, not 'Mad Max the game'. Just that the MM series does an excellent job of making it plausible that things are going to get a LOT worse for folk for a very long time, and that there's no guarantee of things turning around within a couple of centuries.

Great read.

Made my "8:00am reading gaming forums while I drink my coffee and pretend to be working" routine much more enjoyable.

Go make FO4.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Isn't the whole New Reno/Vegas thing a nod to Wasteland it's Lovely Vegas?

 

[Luzur]

Herp derp they just fixed and reformed all those old buildings during all this time instead of building new ones.

Well at least they fixed them. In Beths vision they just decided to build towns of scrap metal when mostly intact skyscrapers and malls are just a few hundred metres away.

well The Pitt (haha The Pitt...funny name of a DLC if you are a swede ) DLC kinda fixed that, there the guys living in Pittsburgh had actually reused the skyscrapers to live in.

too bad Beth got lazy with it, they could have let us explore the whole city.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

well The Pitt (haha The Pitt...funny name of a DLC if you are a swede

Dictionary
noun
COCK
DICK
PRICK
DONG
PENIS

I love how the guy who inserted that definition put it in allcaps