Review MCA Wades in to the Wake of the Fallout TV Show

[Serious_Business]

Is this even worth producing coherent senten

or critique?

Who knows

Rough times

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

because let's be honest, if NCR succeeded, that'd basically be it for the setting.

Again, this is the dumbest, most Low IQ take on the Fallout world. First of all, there's absolutely nothing saying that if you want it less civilized, you can't set it earlier in the timeline. Not every single game has to be after the one before it. Secondly, even if the NCR is successful, it's not like there still won't be numerous challenges going forward in a post nuclear world. It's even amazing to think this way in a world where we have New Vegas, which is a Fallout game where we have a fairly successful NCR. You can even say that Fallout 2 had a successful NCR, but they didn't do dick about The Enclave.

In fact, there's absolutely no Fallout game that's post apocalypse. It's always been post-post apocalypse. There's settlements in Fallout, there's trade going on between settlements, there's an established regional currency and a central power that enforces that currency, most every town has some sort of law enforcement and civil defense, several of the towns are beyond a subsistence living meaning they have recreational facilities of some sort that's been capitalized, nearly all the settlements have full time commercial stores, both The Hub and Boneyards have libraries that are staffed and maintained, and so on. In fact, the only exception to this might be Fallout 76, but I can't say either way because it never interested me.

It's also completely stupid that Bethesda also thinks this way. Look at the Capital Wasteland. It's 2277, 200 years after the bombs dropped, and there's absolutely nothing much going on there other than gothy vampire fags, impossible kid colonies, and just little pockets of people holed up in one place or another, most of which with no obvious way of feeding themselves. Meanwhile, in their next game, in a world they refuse to let advance, they add gigantic air fortresses, teleporters, androids, sentient robots, and replicants but everything else is low tier shit. Even more stupid is that put a caravan in Fallout 3 and a caravan post in Fallout 4. You don't think trade is going to advance civilization? If you don't, that qualifies you to be a designer for Bethesda.

Good stories require change. Nothing is more interesting than seeing all the various parts of a setting adapt to a new axiom.

Not only that, but what's the point of playing a Fallout game and shooting for the "good endings" if the developers ALWAYS decide, "Yeah, but right after that, things went to shit." It's interesting that you mention Star Wars, because it kind of reminds me of that. What was the point of the Rebel Alliance bringing down the Empire when the First Order is right there for the next film, bigger and better than ever before? That's textbook shit writing right there. No explanation of how they got there, how they're way more power than the Empire at it's prime of power, and so on.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Muh Palpa came back.

Spoilers please!

Spoiler

Who shot JR btw?

 

[thesheeep]

First of all, there's absolutely nothing saying that if you want it less civilized, you can't set it earlier in the timeline. Not every single game has to be after the one before it.

Hard pass.
I don't give a fuck about prequels. Never have, never will.
What happened before is of no relevance to me, because I already know how the thing ends that happens after. It is a waste of time to me to even bother getting into prequels.

In fact, there's absolutely no Fallout game that's post apocalypse. It's always been post-post apocalypse.

Yeahhh.... to be honest, that was always a weak point in the Fallout universe.
Humans never really disappeared to begin with. They adapted and rebuilt (in lower numbers). Why the hell does everything still look like the bombs dropped ten years ago, even 200 years after, in areas that have been inhabited by people for decades or always?! Nobody bothered to clean up that collapsed bed for 180 years? You lose the knowledge of some technology and you lose the desire to have a somewhat clean home with it? Tribals in the games had their shit together better
This is really the part where you always had to suspend your disbelief, from the very start of the games.

Secondly, even if the NCR is successful, it's not like there still won't be numerous challenges going forward in a post nuclear world.

No, if the NCR is successful, there wouldn't be numerous Fallout-style challenges going forward.
Because those challenges would have been overcome.
Because NCR would have been successful - it's goal was never to get to the dam, become internally stable and then stop, but to rebuild everything. Congratulations, you won the game.
A successful NCR would be at the very least be stable North America.

At that point, the setting might still be interesting on a bigger scale, and I do like playing with the thought in something like HoI4:Old World Blues.
But it would no longer be Fallout.

Either way, the games (especially New Vegas) establish very well how absurdly thin the NCR is stretched at that point in time already - and yet with no apparent intention to slow down or shrink. At least from what was established in the games, the NCR was always destined to fail. And the series is what, 30 years later?
So, the NCR indeed failing (albeit facilitated with the help of a "new" faction) is not at all contradicting the games, it is in line with them.

I will agree that the NCR could have gotten a lot further before collapsing and that would have made it more interesting.
And I do believe that the NCR collapsing doesn't mean a reset of the setting, the series clearly shows that some things do survive and do move forward.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I don't give a fuck about prequels. Never have, never will.
What happened before is of no relevance to me, because I already know how the thing ends that happens after. It is a waste of time to me to even bother getting into prequels.

It wouldn't be a prequel if it didn't happen in the same area, would it? What's Fallout 76 the prequel to when it was originally launched? Of course, they later had to toss in supermutants, The Enclave, the Brotherhood of Steel, Ghouls, etc. because "muh Fallout", so they janked up some lore in other areas, I'm sure. But when it was originally release, it was in an unexplored part of the very same world.

No, if the NCR is successful, there wouldn't be numerous Fallout-style challenges going forward.

You mean the same NCR which didn't do dick against The Enclave, which I already mentioned? There's an ending that said they later cleaned up the remnants of The Enclave, but that's because that's all you left for them. Furthermore, even though they beat the Brotherhood at Helios One, they still weren't able to tackle Caesar's Legion. And depending on the day of the week since Bethesda can't seem to decide if Fallout Tactics is canon or not, the Midwest Brotherhood is occupying the area to the East of the Legion. So, even if they NCR beats Caesar's Legion, that road may or may not be smooth sailing after that. Furthermore, what's North of Mariposa? What's North of that? There's bound to be a lot of nice toys laying around in Alaska and not too many good targets. No telling who would have gotten them, what agenda they'd have, and so on.

Even if you set it in a fully functional NCR around the time of New Vegas, it's not like there still wouldn't be raiders, deathclaws, ghouls, geckos, supermutants, and so on. It's also not like there wouldn't be little surprise bunkers with deadly robots roaming around. It's not like every cop in every settlement is honest, either. Same thing with NCR Rangers. Same thing with settlement officials. Same thing with NCR politicians. There's also quite a few factions already in previous games which would be likely to butt heads but never have in the games, like the Gunrunners and the Brotherhood of Steel. It wouldn't be too hard to envision a scenario where the Followers of the Apocalypse wouldn't run afoul with a different group because they took in a member of that group for any number of reasons. That might be a great time to show what Talius has been up to all these years as well, since he's an FEV mutant and a member of the Followers and he'd be a nice tie back to Vault 13.

If you can't come up with ideas around all this, you're just not thinking very hard.

 

[Cohesion]

Saint_Proverbius, man, you are too invested in this. Just disregard anything past New Vegas. The battle for canon and whole franchise is already lost.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Saint_Proverbius, man, you are too invested in this. Just disregard anything past New Vegas. The battle for canon and whole franchise is already lost.

And give up now after 25 years of doing this just because there's no hope left? Never.

 

[luj1]

Why even post this? Ofc he aint gonna say a bad thing about it, duh

He did. He says quite a few negatives about it. Tyranicon even quoted the part where he said it wasn't a well crafted show.

Idk man. He said it becomes worse from episode 5. Which insinuates that up to that point it's okay to him.

 

[luj1]

Just disregard anything past New Vegas.

Anything past SWKotOR II

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Anything past SWKotOR II

Yeah, I know it's off topic, but I still don't get the hate for this game. It's probably one of the most unique Star Wars stories to ever be put to media. It kind of pisses me off that the Disney stuff they've been shitting out since they bought LucasFilm is canon, but things like KotOR II aren't anymore.

 

[deuxhero]

MCA's comments on ghoul transformation reminds me of how the series settled on radiation alone causing ghoulification (which some of the staff of F1/2 were on board with and others opposed), yet ghoulification is seen as a strange post-war thing despite the nuclear exchanges of the Euro-Middle Eastern War because over a decade behind the US's Armageddon. (Best explanation I've seen on is the bugged to be unreadable terminal entry in F3 theorizes ghoulification only happens to people with particular genetics is correct, and those genetics weren't present in previous radiation deaths. The sheer number of ghouls that were explicitly Chinese does support the genetics idea, but the complete lack still seems implausible for something so widespread in the former US.)

 

[thesheeep]

If you can't come up with ideas around all this, you're just not thinking very hard.

You are either moving goalposts or missed the point from the get-go.
All the stuff you say is still Fallout with a struggling NCR - it is not what a world after NCR succeeded would be like.
All I was saying was that a successful NCR (such as I described above) would have been the death sentence to the Fallout setting being the Fallout setting.

And that, as you described yourself, it was struggling hard to begin with and the logical conclusion to that is that its demise wouldn't be surprising at all.
Did the series writers do the NCR justice by ending it off-screen? Nah. They just fucking nuked it
I get being pissed about the off-screen-ness of it all, but being pissed about darling NCR ultimately failing (no matter if it was due to internal strife or as it is now with a "new" kid on the block appearing guns blazing) is just rose tinted glasses.

And I do like that the series put a new faction on the map, VaulTek so far was never really presented as a threat, or even an active faction. Just a shady tech comp creating vaults with shady purposes some 100+ years ago - but it being more than that, and actually alive and doing things, is an idea I quite like for the setting.

You don't like the story premise of the series.
Okay.
That's just, like, your opinion, man.

 

[Bulo]

because let's be honest, if NCR succeeded, that'd basically be it for the setting.

I disagree. Great states like the NCR can crumble within a few generations, even assuming they win Vegas and the Dam

It's also worth noting that Fallout's setting is on an irreversible technological decline. Not only the low hanging fruit, but every natural resource is gone; the Enclave's oil rig was said to be the last source of crude oil in the world. There is no ore or coal left to mine on (or near below) the surface, which means the enabling conditions of the Industrial Revolution will never be met again. Once the remaining nuclear batteries (Fusion cells and cores and so on) are depleted, electricity will be very difficult to come by. This is why Helios One and Hoover Dam (and the cold fusion reactor in the Institute which the Brotherhood of Steel BLOWS UP! LOL!!!!!) are so important: Once they're gone, that's probably it. Forever.

This applies to everyone, even the most high-tech factions in the setting, such as the Shi and the Institute. They make trivial progress (e.g. the Shi turning seaweed into biofuel), but ultimately they are still standing on the shoulders of the old world, reliant on highly entropic processes like recycling and repurposing.

How many AIs will be built in Fallout's future? GECKs? Nuclear power plants? Pip-Boys? Light-emitting diodes? Microchips? Plastics? Automobiles?

The answer is a few, maybe, for a while, then none ever again. Why is this all relevant? Well, because technology is the only reason Caesar's Legion doesn't stretch from river to sea. The Shi and Brotherhood seeded the NCR all their tech know-how, yet they can't get a suit of power armour running reliably. In half a century's time, how much worse are things going to be?

 

[thesheeep]

It's also worth noting that Fallout's setting is on an irreversible technological decline.

Hard disagree.
The claim that there is only one path to improving technology (and obv it is gone when the resources for it are gone) reminds me of the claim that the Earth is flat or man will never take to the sky. It is based on the assumption that what we know now is all there is to know and that is both short-sighted and arrogant.

I would agree that most high tech as we see in the setting will decline and eventually stop. But I would entirely assume that given enough time passing, other technology would show up. It wouldn't be a hard reset to medieval times and then nothing ever again.
But also, all of that is so far into the future of the setting that I don't think it really matters unless the setting starts spanning millennia.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

You are either moving goalposts or missed the point from the get-go.
All the stuff you say is still Fallout with a struggling NCR - it is not what a world after NCR succeeded would be like.
All I was saying was that a successful NCR (such as I described above) would have been the death sentence to the Fallout setting being the Fallout setting.

No matter how successful they are, they're still going have a relatively small population compared to the amount of land area it covers. Even a successful NCR isn't going to be able to control everything within their borders because they can be successful without achieving the full tech level that there was before the war, and it will take quite a while before they really have the manpower to deal with everything. It's going to be quite a while before all the factions that are under the umbrella in the NCR are totally on board with being in the NCR.

It's also worth noting that Fallout's setting is on an irreversible technological decline. Not only the low hanging fruit, but every natural resource is gone; the Enclave's oil rig was said to be the last source of crude oil in the world. There is no ore or coal left to mine on (or near below) the surface, which means the enabling conditions of the Industrial Revolution will never be met again. Once the remaining nuclear batteries (Fusion cells and cores and so on) are depleted, electricity will be very difficult to come by. This is why Helios One and Hoover Dam (and the cold fusion reactor in the Institute which the Brotherhood of Steel BLOWS UP! LOL!!!!!) are so important: Once they're gone, that's probably it. Forever.

Every single GECK has a cold fusion power source per the Vault Survival Guide, circa January 2077. You find a GECK, you've found a working cold fusion reactor.

Now, that said, you're absolutely right about some things being gone forever. You're no longer going to be able to replicate the technology path from the industrial revolution because those sources of power were depleted. The big problem is that Bethesda made fusion power more common before the war than the original canon with all the cars being fusion powered a la Fallout 3, meaning that fusion power was consumer level. Go through Fallout 4 and look at how many places have lights, despite there being much in the way of unifying to form a larger homogenized city.

So, what would it take for the NCR to get cars? The TV show has Shady Sands having trolleys, which are powered by the city power grid. Even if they have fusion powered smelters, they have to get the scrap metal to those smelters. You're going to have to scrap things for what type of metal those things have. You'll need motors and a good motor is going to need copper. You're going to need a means of chopping things down to where they fit in the smelters. Once you get the metals separated and smelted down to a raw source material, you still have the problem of turning that source material in to something useful, like the wire you're going to need to wire a new motor. Making wire requires some very specialized machinary, so you're going to have to either find a factory that makes wire and get it running or build one which either requires developing the tech from the ground up or finding schematics and replicating that. Then you need to wind the motor cores and so on.

Tires are going to be a big problem since you're pretty much looking at natural rubber since the polymer composition of modern tires is going to be a ways off in terms of manufacturing those. Natural rubber also has the problem of sourcing it in the wasteland. They're not native to the Americas, so you'd need to find a few and then farm them. The alternative to that is, well, finding an alternative. That's a matter of luck and hoping the wasteland provides. The big problem with all that is those natural rubber tires won't have near the durability of modern tires either especially without roads. You're going to need a lot of tires.

Even a successful NCR is going to have a long road ahead to getting close to pre-war levels. They'll be pre-industrial for a very long time.

Also, I'd argue that fusion cells and cores are already cold fusion, since they still work. If they were hot fusion, the containment of the heat of the fusion would be drawing power from the reaction the entire time since that would require a STRONG magnetic field within a Gaussian surface. They also have to constantly be running because they don't take power to get started. You toss a fusion core in a generator and the generator starts up. Same thing with micro fusion cells and energy weapons.

Light-emitting diodes? Microchips?

None, by the way. All those are micro-electronics. There's a reason why Fallout's computers are the size of clothes washers and still work after a nuclear war. Vacuum tubes can handle things that transistors and diodes can't, like EMP. That's kind of why the Institute is complete ass for the setting.

 

[NecroLord]

It's probably one of the most unique Star Wars stories to ever be put to media.

The best Star Wars story ever put to media.
Pretty much a deconstruction of the Star Wars setting and the nature of The Force.
Something more involved and thought provoking than the usual "clone vs droid" shit or the "retarded superweapon of Doom and Gloom that we invented overnight gets suddenly destroyed because of a hatch we forgot to close"...

 

[NecroLord]

Well, because technology is the only reason Caesar's Legion doesn't stretch from river to sea.

Oy vey, that's antisemitic.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Read the rest of the quote. He's clearly implying it's A Good Thing(TM) that more games were made and it became popular.

Initially, it was a good thing, because we got New Vegas.

Not really though, Fallout 3 came before New Vegas. And MCA strangely doesn't mention that, only F3, 4, and merch

At best you could say, it wasn't 100% bad.

 

[Sinder Velvin]

Part 2 is now up:

https://chrisavellone.medium.com/fallout-apocrypha-tv-series-review-part-2-1744b68fe4f2

Spoiler: he didn't like it.

 

[AndyS]

MCA's comments on ghoul transformation reminds me of how the series settled on radiation alone causing ghoulification (which some of the staff of F1/2 were on board with and others opposed), yet ghoulification is seen as a strange post-war thing despite the nuclear exchanges of the Euro-Middle Eastern War because over a decade behind the US's Armageddon. (Best explanation I've seen on is the bugged to be unreadable terminal entry in F3 theorizes ghoulification only happens to people with particular genetics is correct, and those genetics weren't present in previous radiation deaths. The sheer number of ghouls that were explicitly Chinese does support the genetics idea, but the complete lack still seems implausible for something so widespread in the former US.)

The ghouls are one of the things I think really did get a bit out of hand in the setting. At least stuff like talking deathclaws were one and done, but ghouls are so numerous that they're a sizable minority population and it's never surprising to see them around. Feels like they should have been limited to the remnants of the Necropolis, similar to the ghost people in Sierra Madre.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Imagine actually thinking that this would be a bad thing. Typical Reddit-tier argument - oh don't criticize this latest pile of shit and be sure to pre-order the extended DLC cut, else they might stop making these piles of shit altogether.

The only thing that we would have lost if Bethesda didn't brought Fallout IP would be New Vegas. Everything else is so milktoast, bland and without bite to it that's i still genuiely surprise why Bethesda was ever considered as a great developer

 

[Tyranicon]

Dude wrote a book in his lore break down, but it's a good read if you're interested in this stuff. MCA definitely indulges in a little splurging like we do here.

Final Verdict:

If you're a Fallout fanboy and must consoom the slop: 6/10

If you're a normal person: 4/10


Leave it to Avellone to be the only real one about this shit.

 

[luj1]

Anything past SWKotOR II

Yeah, I know it's off topic, but I still don't get the hate for this game. It's probably one of the most unique Star Wars stories to ever be put to media

I dunno who is hating it. It was Obsidian's last good game and among the very last Renaissance era titles.

 

[Hellion]

https://x.com/ChrisAvellone/status/1793666626996625556

I lol'ed. Bravo, sir.

 

[Bulo]

Talking animals is more Wasteland’s domain than Fallout’s, and something Tim Cain did not want in F1 and F2, which some of us respected, other designers… didn’t.