8d27e9 No.16827301
As a kid, I used to love the fallout universe and timeline, but I could never reconcile the fact that the world was frozen in time culturally for a good 120 years. I always thought just prolonging World War II and then having the nuclear apocalypse take place in the late 50’s or early 60’s would produce more or less the same result in terms of advanced nuclear fission based technologies and badass power armors, and make a hell of a lot more sense. Imagine if total warfare never truly ended until the nuclear apocalypse, for example, and essentially WW2 was the Great War that’s oft spoken of by the characters. You wouldn’t even have to change a lot of the dates, since it’s perfectly logical for the vaults to open up 200 to 300 years later anyway still. I prefer a tweaked timeline like this so much that I often play with this head canon in my head. Has anyone else ever put any thought into this, or shares my quibbles with the timeline?
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868184 No.16827314
>>16827301
delete fallout 3 and 4 from timeline fixed there you go
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743bf0 No.16827315
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d40638 No.16827320
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868184 No.16827322
>>16827315
most people dont even consider fallout 76 canon anyways it was never on the timeline in first place just like eso is not on elder scrolls timeline
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142313 No.16827403
You can't make sense out of it because nuclear wastelands cannot exist unless somehow we dropped thousands of tsar bombs on USA
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8d27e9 No.16827416
>>16827315
>>16827320
>>16827314
I definitely agree, fuck Bethesda. But I love interplay’s originals as well as New Vegas. I just think that an extra 120 years of Cold War is unnecessary, since all of the technological advancements and events that shaped the fallout universe into what it is could logically take place within a scenario of a prolonged World War II, and you wouldn’t have the strange sociological contradiction of 120 years of cultural stagnation, all because of the delayed invention of the transistor or whatever excuse Fallout apologists use. Just look at the timeline on the wiki, there are huge gaps between significant events. You could theoretically rewrite them to take place within a 10 to 20 year span. I think I’ll write my own timeline and post it somewhere, maybe here.
>>16827403
I think that’s pretty much what happened in the universe, though. Think about how many Tsar Bombas and even more power nuclear warheads could have been developed in either the vanilla fallout timeline, or a state of total war for 10 to 20 years in a revised timeline. You have to remember that the cold war was, in retrospect and to put this very loosely, a time of relative peace. Imagine if the Soviets in China do it all the time to developing weapons of human genocide.Imagine if the Soviets, USA and China devoted all their time to developing weapons of human genocide.
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8d27e9 No.16827419
>>16827416
Sorry for that dictation software hiccup at the end
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8d27e9 No.16827422
>there is no standstill culturally, but a renaissance of old culture that was always a result of the people's desire to pretend everything is fine and dandy the first time around, and they are doing so again because the world is literally on the brink of collapse. your idea stems from ignorance, so your solution is pointless and unneeded.
Even if that were true, that wouldn’t account for the fact that there are no remnants and there is no evidence of any sort of deviation from 1950s atomic age culture in the ruins. That is one of the dumbest explanations I’ve ever heard, and the fallout universe/timeline is well and truly fucked if its fans are that retarded. All I want is a game with the open endedness of fallout with a properly written universe in the vein of Stalker, metro or wasteland
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40b811 No.16827447
>>16827301
Alternative history is too close to historical revisionism for me to enjoy and frankly it is unnecessary to begin with but seemed to assist Fallout in having modern weapons hundreds of years into the future. Post apocalypse wastelands really don't offer much and really it is an underestimate of humanity to rebuild when the reality would be much better. Seems marxist/weak when you think about it.
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d05c77 No.16827452
>>16827314
more like everything after 1.
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d40638 No.16827457
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>>16827416
The worst thing about Bethesda Fallout is the fact that they didn't add anything to the worldbuilding, it's just self referential garbage.
Why the fuck are the Brootherhood and the Super Mutants in the East Coast?
why are there Scorpions on the East Coast?
Why the fuck is everything rubble and shit when it's been centuries since the bombs fell?
Why the fuck is everyone a 50s stereotype?
Fuck Bethout at least New Vegas gave us a reason for all the quirky bullshit going on.
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a29466 No.16827518
>>16827422
But this isn't a plothole, it's just you being incredulous at that part of the premise. A hundred years of cultural stagnation is implausible but not impossible, whereas the games features many things which are certainly impossible. Add to that other even more implausible elements within the premise: nuclear winter (myth), a nuclear wasteland wherein almost nothing will grow even after hundreds of years, almost 300 years of near cultural stagnation post-apocalypse, industrial states STILL squatting in 4 century old buildings while constructing almost nothing new, etc.
And that withstanding, your proposed solution has the exact same issue you're complaining of, it just shifts the hundred years of cultural stagnation forward into the post-war period.
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cfc552 No.16827556
>>16827518
>A hundred years of cultural stagnation is implausible but not impossible
That's the thing, it's too implausible. Suspension of disbelief doesn't work based on how realistic a concept is, but how much it contradicts a person's internal logic.
Your average guy can take a step back and accept the concept of, say, Super Mutants and Ghouls. It's easy enough to tell yourself that it works in because you don't have all the knowledge of what would be involved in creating it, the science seems possible on the surface, that kind of crap.
As you get closer and closer to real world elements that people are more familiar with, you start making it harder for a person to accept because they're more attached. Telling someone that in your game's world guns don't exist but modern manufacturing and gunpowder does breaks his ability to take it seriously. It's technically possible for no one to have invented the gun, but so unbelievably unlikely that you can't take anything else seriously. This is also the reason why you can't just shove minorities into a medieval European setting and expect people to nod their heads.
Lots of the elements you mentioned have decent justification, though.
>nuclear winter (myth)
It is a myth, but believed so much that it wouldn't give someone pause.
>a nuclear wasteland wherein almost nothing will grow even after hundreds of years
It is Southern California, after all.
>almost 300 years of near cultural stagnation post-apocalypse
This is the problem I'm talking about.
>industrial states STILL squatting in 4 century old buildings while constructing almost nothing new, etc.
They might not have the capacity to build much better homes. Worth noting is that there were some villages which managed to create adobe-style houses.
>it just shifts the hundred years of cultural stagnation forward into the post-war period.
Stagnation's more believable when communication is sent back to pre-electricity times.
I'm a bit hypocritical however as the only reason I wanted fallout culture to advance was for raiders to invent metal, realism be damned
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b0b9c0 No.16827557
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8d27e9 No.16827579
>>16827457
>Why the fuck is everyone a 50s stereotype?
I can except a logical explanation for everything except this. This is what I always sought to rewrite in my head, that perhaps World War II never properly ended and world society remained in a state of total warfare, and thus advanced research related to atomic power and weaponry really advanced the general state of technology very quickly, which is a well documented principle of warfare, as opposed to 120 years of inexplicable cultural stagnation.
>>16827518
I never said anything was a plothole, although there are many plotholes in Fallout. I acknowledge it’s an integral part of the premise that I just hate, but I kind of agree with you I’m your other points if not fully, I think most everything else you mentioned could be properly explained and somewhat salvaged. Perhaps the nuclear weapons used to bring about the devastation are even more advanced than anything we could possibly conceive, or maybe another factor or extinction event contributed, like the aliens which are for better or for worse canon, etc. I just don’t think the 1950s tropes hundreds of years into the future is necessary, even remotely plausible, or interesting, while everything else you mentioned either is or is “cool enough” to be brushed off with a simple “it’s science fiction bro.” Maybe that’s completely subjective, because most people seem perfectly willing to accept the atomic age culture never developing or advancing for more than a century. Apart from what you mentioned about factions still squatting in destroyed buildings, yeah, that’s just retarded and probably more thanks to limited engine technology, everything else is salvageable IMO. I don’t think the universe is all that great or makes perfect sense scientifically and sociologically, I just think that some little timeline tweaks would at the very least make it more believable and immersive.
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8d27e9 No.16827580
>>16827579
accept*
this is what I get for using a cuckpad
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8d27e9 No.16827603
>>16827457
The segment in which this guy explains the reasoning behind the setting of fallout is by far the best and pretty much only possible explanation I’ve seen for it, that it was an aesthetic decision on the part of the developers to create a retrofuturistic vision of atomic age era visions of the future, but I can’t say I like it or agree with it or think it holds up to any scrutiny. I guess it’s truly a science-fiction moment in that case.
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8d27e9 No.16827608
I guess the real question is what’s the closest I can get to a game with the gameplay, open endedness, and moddability of 3D fallout without the lame atomic age retrofuturist setting? STALKER?
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a84ac4 No.16827624
The pre-war timeline doesn't matter. It's just the means to an end so they can have 1950's sci-fi aesthetics in their apocalyptic cold war pastiche. Bethesda setting their games 200 years after the apocalypse and everything still being a barren ruin is another matter.
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2723e9 No.16827629
>>16827301
>but I could never reconcile the fact that the world was frozen in time culturally for a good 120 years.
But it wasn't frozen in time culturally for 120 years. That's Bethesda's fuckup. 2077 in the classic games were retro-futurism. It's not the world of the 50's, but the future as imagined by people in the 50's. Earlier than that, really - it had elements of retrofuturism from the 20's to 60's all mashed together. Then blown up, Then had it's bones picked clean for a hundred years. In Bethesda's Fallout, pretty much every NPC you run across has a hard-on for the "old world" - because that's the world that the player of the game currently inhabits. In classic Fallout - it was more like early medieval Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. New civilizations popping up from the ashes of the old - cannibalizing the resources of abandoned ruins of Roman towns and forts and temples in order to build their own petty kingdoms.
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daeb41 No.16828145
>>16827452
no,more like everything after fallout 2
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a3ac4a No.16828159
Invidious embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>>16827301
The best way to deal with this is to imagine that the Fallout universe was actually created in the late 50s/early 60s and not in the 90s. What do I mean by this? Take some of the "predictions" from that era, like the Jetsones or the House of the Future attraction from Disneyland, maybe even Star Trek. Technologically it would just be what the people in the 50s had but better:
Black and white TVs?, Well now they were in color and huge(this is accurate, but predictable).
Shitty cars? Well now they can fly.
Black house maids? Well now they are robots, but still look like African maids.
Computers? Well they are faster, but still use tape and print paper, like the ones from the 50s. There is no internet, and everybody is still using radio to communicate.
Housewives? The husband earns enough money just by pushing a few buttons on the computer every day, so the wife spends most of her time in the kitchen.
Diversity? Well we have white europeans an extraterestrials, blacks don't exist.
Houses? Well they are huge, automated and made out of PLASTIC, everything is plastic now, because plastic is the material of the future(quite funny looking bad). See vid related.
>The next one is important
Entertainment? Well we don't know what will be in the future, but surely neon lights, disco and Elvis Presley will always exist, and teenagers will always use the same lingo we do right now.
They were, more or less, the society that existed in that era, but with better technology. While it's hard to imagine what the future will be(besides obvious stuff, like what we have but better), it's even harder to imagine what the culture will be in the future. Probably in an attempt to make things relate-able, when they made the Jetsons they kept the culture of today, even if they had a magic ball and could see what the future held, having the teenage daughter twerk in her room while posting pics on Instagram, or Astro posting on imageboards about the incel uprising, would have been too alien, and "unrealistic" to the people of the 60s.
Anyway, if the Jetsons, or the House of the Future, were the optimistic visions of the future, Fallout is the pesimistic one, were technology did improve, but they nuked eachother into orbit, and now have to fight radioactive scorpions and super mutants. It's just like some dumb comic from the 60s, only that it was made in the 90s as a game, and now in 2020 we can not believe how the culture could have stagnated for a hundred years, yet we never question the Jetsons, because we accept the fact that it was a product of it's time, and they could not have know how bad things really were.
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a3ac4a No.16828161
Invidious embed. Click thumbnail to play.
Might as well post something from The Jetsons as well.
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a3ac4a No.16828162
Invidious embed. Click thumbnail to play.
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b001bb No.16828284
>>16827301
that's a pretty cool idea and i'm stealing it.
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a5374e No.16828312
The original games didnt have a cultural stop. It was bethesda's misunderstanding of retro futurism that led to them fucking everything about the setting up. Luckily you can just ignore everything about the Bethesda games when it comes to them being actual canon.
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8d27e9 No.16828410
>>16828312
>The original games didnt have a cultural stop.
Why does everyone keep saying this when it is clearly wrong? Fallout 1’s intro very obviously shows that well within the 70th decade of the new millennium futuristic Chrysler Corvegas and atomic age products were still being sold and marketed to the general public, old black and white televisions were still the norm, and 40’s vocal jazz was still being played on the radio. I understand Interplay’s original intent and how Bethesda in all their retardation bungled it completely, denying that that Interplay’s original retrofuturistic concept, that is, a vision of the future as atomic age society would’ve envisioned it, didn’t entail inherent cultural stagnation, however plausible in real life or not, is simply wrong. Interplay made it so that atomic age culture lasted 130 years longer than it should have. Whether their purpose was satirical retrofuturism or not, although I understand it is and I appreciate what they were trying to do, it’s not something I can properly immerse myself in. A rewritten timeline, for me, would just make more sense for both versions of the universe.
>>16828284
Not if I do it first :)
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8d27e9 No.16828411
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27dcc6 No.16829013
>>16827314
>fallout 3
The funny thing about Fallout 3 is that it'd almost make sense if it happened entirely a few months after the bombs fell. Most of the game even feels like that's the situation it's in.
Best example is Lamplight, where the kids got stuck there after their teacher dragged them inside to protect them from the nuclear blast.
We can accept that there have been several generations of kids that go to Big Town, reproduce and send their offspring back to Little Lamplight to keep the process going.
Or we can assume the same kids we meet are the ones that the teacher in the audio recording mentions.
The state of Megaton works as well too, they haven't expanded much because it's only been a few months since the bombs fell, all the other settlements are rubble and trash because people are busier trying to scavenge for supplies than cleaning shit up, even all the food and items you find makes sense since it's all relatively recently abandoned.
>fallout 4
It makes sense in a different timeline: it came after New Vegas. That game was Bethesda thinking they were good enough to one-up Obsidian in terms of storytelling and showing everyone why that's really not true.
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d97142 No.16829027
>>16829013
Hey yeah, that WOULD make sense.
That would also definitely explain why everything looks so shitty and covered in rubble if not much time has passed yet.
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d68e4e No.16829033
>>16829027
They probably weren't even trying all that hard to keep a consistent timeline. I'd believe it if any idea that sounded kinda good got thrown in with some minimal oversight to get it to fit into the timeline in at least some bullshit way–like the generations of kids in Lamplight. The guy who wrote the encounter probably conceived of and designed it in terms of having happened a few months ago without really considering the overall time involved. Then whoever was responsible for editing all that shit just fucked with details until it fit in the timeline so it wasn't a glaring plot hole.
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d40638 No.16829034
>>16829013
>Bethesda thinking they were good enough to one-up Obsidian in terms of storytelling
They would be if they had good writers or any kind of world building that isn't completely ripped off and bastardized from Interplay/Black Isle.
But that wasn't the case and the "world building" they had was godawful with shit tier designs inspired on modern scifi.
At least Fallout 3 had passable gameplay, Fallout 4 is a fucking mess and not an RPG at all.
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d68e4e No.16829045
>>16829034
I haven't been paying attention to Bethesda PR for 10 years. Whatever happened to Pete Hines? I thought he was Bethesda's main PR hack. Maybe I'm just remembering the wrong guy.
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d40638 No.16829067
>>16829045
Hines is the head of Bethesda Softworks
Todd is the head of Bethesda Game Studios
The first, which is a publisher owns, the second, which is a developer.
It's been confusing people for years
THQ Nordic is also in a similar situation where the parent company that owns Deep Silver and THQ is also caled THQ, but they're different entities.
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d40638 No.16829070
>>16829067
To be more precise, Hines is one of 3 heads (vice presidents) of Bethesda Softworks, Hines is the head of PR/Marketing.
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979c8f No.16829092
>>16827624
>Bethesda setting their games 200 years after the apocalypse and everything still being a barren ruin is another matter.
The sad part is that Fallout and Fallout 2 were set primarily in the desert specifically for that "bombed-out wasteland" aesthetic, complete with areas along the coast and in the mountains being green and forested, while Bethesda took a lush, fertile river delta and made it into a desert.
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689157 No.16829188
This is easily the best game produced since the original Deus Ex. A truly magical experience. It''s hard to even know where to begin.
Right off the bat, I felt a deep and visceral connection to my wife and child. Fallout 4 really made me feel, which I have never seen before in a roleplaying game. The story really hits some emotional notes early on, and has a great sense of adventure and ominousness. It loses the latter two qualities about 2/3s of the way through the campaign, but this is in the wake of a very original and emotionally charged plot twist. The whole "synth" concept felt a little half baked, but it does make for a more morally nuanced story than anything we've seen before in Fallout.
The combat is amazing. It is FPS quality. I remember my amazement when I first saw an enemy lean out from behind a wall to take shots, or blind fire from behind cover.
The world feels alive. This is something I felt Oblivion had that was missing in Fallout 3 and Skyrim, but its back in Fallout 4. Returning to a location you've already been to can present new quests, and an even more pleasant surprise is that even refusing quests can have complicated. I remember once I decided not to help an NPC out with his problems, only to find he got himself killed trying to handle the situation by his lonesome.
There is a sense of organicness in Fallout 4 that just seems to be missing in RPGs. There are slickly done scripted events (such as when I entered a dark room and suddenly all its lights turned on and I found four heavily armed people pointing guns at me), the conversational animations and believable and intricate and add a great sense of intimacy and believability. I will never forget the pain I saw in a synth's eyes who described himself as "discarded Institute trash". Nothing feel formulaic. Its the little touches that make the game great. The way documents like newsletters are presented in their original form rather than green text, or the player character whispers "yes" when he/she successfully picks a lock, or the way everything from stimpak injections to drinking water is animated.
The characters are a mixed bag. Nick Valentine is a character as well written as anything in Mass Effect 2. Other characters become painfully one dimensional. Paladin Danse is nothing but a soldier. Piper seems loveable at first but soon appears to be nothing more than a reporter.
While its far from perfect, Fallout 4 is one of the best games ever made
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491a76 No.16829393
>>16827518
>>16827422
>A hundred years of cultural stagnation is implausible but not impossible
It's not really implausible, the Roman Empire, after conquering everything worth conquering stagnated for centuries, and it didn't develop culturally in any significant way. It was a period of slow decline, attempts at welfare state to stimulate population growth (there's evidence of children's gravestones depicting amount of welfare they received from the state), religious turmoil (christian sects massacring each other and the pagans), bureaucracy growing ad infinitum and increasingly unsuccesful campaigns. But yes, I can concede that 120 years in a more modern setting might be a little too much, but still it's not impossible to see it. If you want to grasp at straws, then what's more implausible is that the mutually-assured-destruction scenario actually happened and people decided to launch the nukes.
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01f7ba No.16829429
Say the 60's-80's happened but all with a 50's and nuclear twist. Not that hard kids, not like Bethesda or even Interplay would have included a crucial piece of world building like that because why would they?
As for other retcons they can always just do what RE did and have multiple not Umbrellas take over. It would make more sense than like
>>16827457
says, having every game be the Brotherhood vs the not Enclave vs Retard Mutants vs Scorpions.
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d40638 No.16829432
>>16829393
You're talking about Rome after it hit it's peak.
We're talking about the end of civilization here, people would create something new and create a culture out of the new world they have.
One could excuse Fallout 3 for not showing most of tht due to it's technical limitations and Bethshit wanting to show a fairly generic post apoc to new players of the IP, so you get groups of 3 NPCs representing sparse villages.
Then New Vegas showed what they could do even with the limitations.
There was no excuse for Fallout 4 other than dumbing down for shit eating casuals.
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d5a3e8 No.16832036
>>16829393
I'm not convinced late antiquity is as stagnant as is commonly portrayed. There's the issue of not howing how much of the writings of that time have survived, but also just that History is a foreign country. How can we necessarily judge that there were no "significant" cultural shifts twenty centuries removed from the fact (not to mention linguistically and culturally alienated from Rome). It's like a gwailo trying to parse the differences of Mongolian and Chinese culture, or the differing intra-chinese ethnic nations, it's all just chings and chongs to me.
Late antiquity to the early medieval period is either stagnant backwardness or continuous development and cultural vibrance depending on what metric you use and who you ask. You even mentioned the early cult of Christ displacing and eventually totally philosophically discrediting European paganism, which began in that era; that's a pretty radical change, how can that be called "stagnant"?
>>16827556
>Stagnation is more believable sent back to pre-electrical communications
But if anything the opposite should be true, a plurality of isolated tribes without a means of easy communication are more likely to diverge than if they had continuous communication with eachother. This can be seen today, places like the US, Eastern, and Western Europe have never been more similar culturally than they are today, thanks to the advent of mass media, which leads toward greater homogenization. The news uses the same talking points, nationalists share nearly the same memes, leftoid Indians even try to shame hindoos for the holocaust ffs.
If anything cultural stagnation is more plausible now than ever; other than superficial fads (which this thread is mostly about, but still, speaking in a broader sense), Western culture has been stagnant and decaying since at least the 1960's. The modern progressive insanity is just the progressive principle which gained uncontested dominance in the 60s (or earlier) metastasizing and becoming acute.
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2723e9 No.16832263
>>16829432
If Bethesda had wanted, they could have realized their mistake and made a decent excuse for why D.C. was still so primitive despite being relatively untouched. They completely by accident threw in Chinese remnants as a "lol, remember that old Japanese WWII soldier they pulled out of the Jungle who didn't realize the war was over" reference. But considering that D.C. is the capital of their great enemy, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think that some ego-stroking plan created by some propagandist in their war department would come up with the idea of using low yield bombs and leaving the city mostly intact so that they could march their troops up it's ruined streets to proclaim their dominance. The perseverance of radioactive material and fowled water long after neither of which should have been a problem anymore could have been played off as a "salt the earth" tactic to make the city indefinately uninhabitable. Even if any civilization did start to take root, their remnants would be around to sabotage it's efforts and ensure the city remained dead until a larger contingency of their troops could arrive.
Still would have been dumb, but at least it'd be salvageable and add to the lore a bit. But nope, it's just a throw-away gag.
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