Just A Fallout Sideblog

Arden, 26 || Getting back into fallout and wanted a sideblog for posts. Home of my LW/Courier Quinn Archer. I drag fallout 3 & 4 out of a place of love.

[falloutconceptart]

I cannot overstate this enough.

There is no single person more responsible for the aesthetics and design of modern Fallout than Adam Adamowicz.

Fallout and many of its designs were of course established prior to Adam's involvement with the series, but his work on Fallout 3 brought an astounding depth and detail to a world he had full vision for.

His concept work was the foundation that the game designers intensely relied on and its astounding how closely his concepts were translated into the game.

I just went through all 800+ concepts he did for Fallout 3 and it is fucking *insane* how he seemingly designed almost everything for that game, at least at the conceptual level.

From mutants-

To robots-

To the buildings-

To guns-

To the details and vibe of the decayed metro-

Adam's artistic vision and creativity was behind the style and design of the entire game.

Adam was a generational talent and he left the world too soon.

Bless him and RIP.

[hallownest-archive-deactivated2]

What I love most about Fallout 2 and New Vegas is that they aren’t really post-apocalyptic; they’re post-post apocalyptic. It’s almost two centuries after the world ended, and people are doing what people do: rebuilding. Not always perfectly, not always well, but always trying.

Look at Arroyo after 2242:

The village we see at the beginning of 2 becomes a shining, vibrant city. Every single building in that picture was built after the War. The NCR is just as much of a success story: by the time New Vegas happens, the NCR has over 700,000 citizens for whom “survival is an assumption rather than an aspiration.” [x, x] Both places are a testament to humanity’s resilience, even in the face of a man-made apocalypse.

The most blatant theme running through all the Fallout games is that war is an unchanging force, inextricably tied to human nature. But 2 and New Vegas argue that something else is just as constant: the human instinct to build and create. War isn’t going anywhere– and neither is humanity’s ability to create a new world out of the ashes.

[nuclearconsole]

[capcollector]

so serious when i say fo3 has the best moment of stepping into the wasteland for the first time. realizing you’re all alone on that cliff, a broken city skyline ahead of you….

[nukacoola-quantum]

Fo3 definitely feels the loneliest upon leaving the vault. You just had a horrifically violent experience when you’ve never had anything like that in your entire life before. Your friends are gone, your family is gone. And you see nothing but wasted desert and wind. It feels a lot lonelier than Fo4 even though you’re in a similar situation. Maybe because in 4 you are immediately looking out over buildings that are so familiar. Fo3’s entrance into the wasteland offers no sign of comfort at all.

[artbyblastweave]

There's a question which the west coast Fallout games are quietly litigating, which is that age-old gotcha about what you do with the remaining orcs once you've deposed Sauron. In the original Fallout, the Super Mutants are basically universally aligned against the quote-unquote "good guys," for whatever value of that term is applicable to the wasteland at large, but subsequent games make it clear that this was an ideological thing, and a product of the political moment of the mutants creation rather than an ontological quality that they have. The game is very aware that this is something that was done to them, and the tragedy of that; the first mutant you're likely to run into is dying scared and alone.

Fallout 2 presents super mutants who've broken in every direction ideologically in the aftermath of the Unity's collapse; the peacemakers under Marcus at Broken Hills, Gond as a member of the abolitionist NCR rangers, reactionary remnants of the original mutant army, genocidal self-hating fascists like Frank Horrigan. Fallout: New Vegas iterates on this beautifully. The mutants dovetail perfectly with the theme of how every faction in the wasteland is trying and oftentimes failing to reckon with the weight of history. Their utopian movement imploded outside of living memory, closer to the apocalypse than to the present day. The survivors- who can only dwindle in number due to their sterility- have been left to reckon with that in whatever way they can. And they have their backs to about a hundred and twenty years of that reckoning not going particularly well, of being the bugbear and boogeymen for bullies and ideologues whose grandparents weren't even alive to suffer from the Unity's actions. The lack of a collective future for mutantkind casts a pall over even the best ending for Jacobstown; humans are collectively resilient within this setting, but through violence, and accidents, dementia and senility, the day will inevitably come when there are no mutants left. And worse still will be the day before that, when there's only one mutant left. Finding some form of satisfaction or contentment within that dwindling window, with the world against you, is a task that falls to the individual mutant. (Take Mean Sonovabitch, for example. He seems to be doing alright for himself.)

Then we slide on over to the east coast games, where the mutants are.... morons. Cannibals. Marauders. And when you meet one who isn't, the game throws itself a ticker-tape parade for containing such an audacious twist. To go back to the orc thing, it's like if The Hobbit had contained a lengthy, empathetic subplot about the rich internality and fleshed-out-if-deeply-flawed ideology of the orcs, and then there was a pivot to treating them like a monolithic block of ontologically evil marauders in LOTR. While staring you straight in the eye the whole time, unblinking. Daring you to say something

[lodestarrush]

thinking abt the phrase "as above, so below" but in relation to the wasteland and the Institute

[lodestarrush]

the phrase is used to juxtapose the human/earthly and divine but I really like the idea of the Institute being the "below" in this where they're just as beholden to the the wasteland in the sense that they are still human, just as the wasteland's people, and despite what the Institute says about being the last hope for humanity, there is literally nothing making them any different. they're equally as capable as being like raiders, farmers, scavvers, mercs, anyone in the wasteland. they're no different from the people that make up the Brotherhood, Railroad, and Minutemen because all of them are human. For every Justin Ayo there is an Liam Binet. there's no escaping that reality, no matter what they want to believe

[lodestarrush]

Ok y’know what I also think this applies when using the phrase’s more scientific meaning as well, of how the heavens influence the earth (the moon causing the tides for example) and how the Institute is still beholden to the wasteland too. Even during Mass Fusion, a quest where the idea is that the Institute can power itself and become self-sufficient, the beryllium agitator has to be taken from pre-War technology. The Institute is affected by the wasteland whether they like it or not. As above, so below, indeed

[derekstilinski]

aesthetics: i left my heart in the sierra madre

[sayodoko]

[goodbuttaken]

a co máte v plánu vy?

[rosmaryne]

Fallout: New Vegas Scenery [10/?]

[lelelego]

welcome to novac, stranger

[malwaredykes]

lone wanderer: i cant stop crying. can somebody please buy these 20 pistols and 10 rifles off of me. im so sorry. and can i get a nuka cola

the enclave radio playing in the same room:

[rosmaryne]

sometimes,,, nexus mods is Good

[cosmichalibut]

This is what happens when you decide to show up at his shack without notice.

vvv Reference image below vvv

[wildflower-ditch]

Shoutout to Obsidian Entertainment for making one of the few pieces of fictional media that understands the paramount importance of logistics and manpower in war.

As an example, the NCR manages to beat the Brotherhood at HELIOS One not because their gear is better, but because it’s really easy to outnumber a xenophobic and self isolated cult. On the flip side, they’re having such a bad time in the Mojave because Kimball’s rapid expansionism left troops in the east over extended and under supplied.

You can even convince Lanius to fuck off back to New Mexico by telling him that the Legion will suffer the exact same weakness if they try to conquer the west too quickly (and you’re probably right); it’s great.

[fallout-fallen-knight]

Related to this post about the Kings, when I say that I want Wastelanders to be weirder, I don’t mean in the Howard/Pagliarulo/Esda mode where wastelanders are cartoon freaks for the audience to gawk and laugh at. Hardly any “wastelanders” in either Fallout 4 or the TV show feel like real people who could exist outside of the immediate scene where they are the butt of the joke. Look at this guy, he fucks chickens, isn’t that weird? Look at that guy, he thinks baseball was a blood sport, isn’t that weird? Look at this guy, he loves American history but he’s wrong about it, isn’t that weird? You point and laugh at the dumb freak and move on.

Contrast that with some of the (non-Wild Wasteland) weirdos in New Vegas. Malcolm Holmes is “weird”, but his character tells you that adventuring and scavenging are (albeit dangerous) ways to make a living in the Mojave; meeting him also starts a side quest for you. Oliver Swanick is “weird”, but his presence immediately tells you that something is very, very wrong, heralding one of the most horrifying scenes in the game. Hell, even Benny has a reason to talk like that - he’s being paid to! They all feel like a part of a larger world.

All this to say, I guess, is that I want to know more about the Preston Garvey impersonator. What’s his deal? What’s his goal?

[artbyblastweave]

What I like about New Vegas is that out of all the Fallout games, it feels like it's the most aware of the fact that everyone is doing a bit of some kind from the fifties and is much more attentive and thoughtful than some of the other games to the implications of the fact that everyone is doing some kind of bit from the fifties.

The Kings are a salient example of this. The surface level gag, of course, is that they're a militant gang of Elvis impersonators, having adopted the aesthetic after their leader mistook a training facility for Elvis impersonators as some kind of religious site. Stock Future-imperfect stuff, oh-those-silly-wastelanders, elevating our pop-culture to the level of organizing-societal-principle.

Until, of course, you take into account the (singular) King's actual project- the fact that his gang is the defacto governing body of Freeside, the accompanying fact that he's got his anarchist predilections and thus would like to maintain that governing position without having to constantly kick people around to get them to listen. And here you've come across a guy from before the war who was apparently so incredibly charismatic that people came from all over the country to see him, so charismatic that they built an entire school to train people how to imitate his mannerisms. No shit they're gonna check if there's any gas left in that can! There might be some real practical power on the table if they can walk that walk! Even if the quick-and-dirty pitch for the gang is "Elvis Cult," there isn't really a spiritual component, they aren't morons who're mistaking this guy for a literal god, they just recognize that there might be some unreclaimed social capital here for them to tap into. And there absolutely is, in-universe and out- have you ever encountered a Fallout fan who didn't love The Kings?

Compare this, by the way, with the Three Families, who aren't in a situation where they're scrambling for a symbol they can rally populist support around. These guys are on top of the world. They aren't doing a bit because they're pursuing the social power that bit would provide them- there ultimately is some, but that's not why they started doing it and it isn't strictly something that they needed to do, given their combined force of arms. They're doing their respective bits because the guy with the robot army told them to. They're theme-park employees, working to brute-force back into existence the halcyon youth of a guy who can't even go outside to enjoy it.