Why I Prefer the West Coast in Fallout
So I had this on my mind, and I wanted to get it written down somewhere.
I’m a big Fallout fan, and despite starting with Fallout 3, I’ve always preferred Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas over anything on the East Coast. While I do really like Fallout 4 now that I’ve played it, I was not clamoring for the Boston setting like people had been for years.
I prefer the West Coast, and it’s not just because I find those games generally more fun, but a lot of it has to do with the story. Bethesda has a tendency to treat Fallout as though they’re writing off a checklist. Doing a Fallout game? Well you have to have Super Mutants, radroaches, the Brotherhood of Steel, Deathclaws, raiders, power armor, a pip boy, a bunch of vaults, and so on. It feels a lot like they make sure they have all that before they call it a day.
That’s not really how it works on the West Coast for the most part. Things change on the West Coast, like, a lot. You could write an entire history textbook in-universe on the West Coast. For the East Coast, it’d be more like a history pamphlet.
See, in the first game you had the Southern California region, a bunch of loosely connected towns with no organized government. That’s the part of Fallout that gets Bethesda hard. But then things changed for the Southern California region. The small town of Shady Sands, through your actions, were able to blossom in to the New California Republic, and over time absorbed the entirety of Southern California in to their fold.
By the time Fallout 2 takes place, things have changed in the Wasteland for everyone. Everyone has organized in to major factions; New Reno, the NCR, and Vault City forming the power houses of the wasteland. The small towns simply biding their time until they’re inevitably sucked up by one of them. They’re forced to deal with new creatures like geckos, and wanamingos.
But it hasn’t just changed for the remaining independent people of the wasteland, now finding themselves not asking if they will be governed but by whom they’ll be governed, it’s changed for the individual groups populating it. The Ghouls? What’s left of them have formed a new small town after most of them had been massacred by the Master’s Army years ago.
The Super Mutants? The ones left have integrated themselves in to society; they formed a new town of their own, Broken Hills, consisting of Mutants, Humans, and Ghouls. They are not hostile, in fact they’re pretty damn friendly and just trying to get by. They have a tense relationship with the denizens of the wasteland, and they still sincerely believe in their ideology, but they’re getting by in spite of that.
The Khans? The lone survivor of the group became a crazy, badass raider and reformed the Khans, scamming the residents of a shanty town in to hiding the Khans presence in Vault 15.
But then you have the Enclave hit the scene, BAM, brand spanking new to the series and an instantly iconic part of the franchise. Intimidating and mysterious badasses, they are the remnants of the US government and they’re nothing to fuck with.
By Fallout New Vegas, everything has changed once again; the region was won by the New California Republic, who now own the entirety of the California Region and then some. They run prisons, they have an organized military with ranks, they have states, they have farms, they have government, they have safety and peace, scientists, they have gun manufacturers. Things have changed once again for the small groups.
What remained of the Enclave is now elderly. They have integrated in to society like the Mutants did; they are old and tired, they believe in the Enclave but they just want to live a normal life. The Enclave is gone, and they serve as the last traces.
After Broken Hills ran out of uranium, the town fell apart. The Mutants have changed again. Marcus and the Mutants found themselves on Black Mountain, forming a camp society. Slowly, Nightkin and less intelligent second generation Super Mutants made their way to the community and caused quarrels. Marcus and the more intelligent mutants were forced to leave, and founded Jacobstown.
The Nightkin, a previously minor group, are brought to the forefront as their struggle with their need for stealth boys forces them to wait on some sort of cure in the resort. The Nightkin who couldn’t wait left, and some can be found in caves, roaming ruins looking for stealth boys, or indeed at Black Mountain where the ‘State of Utobitha’ has been founded.
The Followers of the Apocalypse find themselves trying to influence and help at any corner they can, changed in to a much larger organization than was found in the first Fallout.
The Brotherhood of Steel, defeated in war, have retreated to an underground bunker where they live out a slow, isolated existence, slowly dying and forgotten and all too content to let it happen.
But hold up, time for new shit.
Mister House, awoken from his slumber, took the tribals of the region and ‘reformed’ them in to civilized casino owners, creating New Vegas, a powerful independent force governed by House, the casino owners, and patrolled by police robots.
Eastwards, things were far from still. Entirely off camera the history of Caesar’s Legion unfolded; they formed in to a massive nation of tribals, basing themselves entirely and in-depth upon the Roman Empire to great success, they are a government that has created a barbaric, sexist, racist nation, but all the same a nation which is safe and firmly governed.
In New Vegas you decide the fate of the region, again faced with small independent towns just wondering who will be absorbing them. You’re the deciding factor in a literal war between, not factions, but whole nations.
This is a rough map to give you an idea of how far this shit has come. The NCR is in blue, the Legion is in Red. These are maaaaaassive, massive straight up civilized countries doing war with each other. Things have change for the entire Wasteland completely over the years, and this is the abridged version from memory.
Bethesda doesn’t seem to like that kind of shit, at all. Bethesda wants one thing out of Fallout; a completed checklist of a barren wasteland with no government to speak of. They just want a big sandbox of raiders and super mutants that never changes, ever. Oh, sure, the Brotherhood of Steel became tyrannical, but information about that is so scarce and not shown at all that that feels more like a (barely) informed characteristic than anything you’re shown.
They wrote in that the Boston Wasteland ~tried~ to make a Commonwealth Provisional Government and that it was sabotaged for literally no obvious reason and then everyone just gave up, but that’s not something that had to happen, or made sense to happen, no, that’s Bethesda’s hand of god coming down to smack down any attempt at this whole ‘government and civilization’ nonsense so they can keep the wasteland a lawless hellhole in permanent stasis where nobody’s trying to make things better, like they want it to be.
They did a good enough job of doing new factions this time around, sure, but the Institute is unlikely to be the canon ending and the Railroad are situational as hell and the Minutemen are just fucking boring and trash.
If Bethesda does another East Coast Fallout, and they probably will, I’m sure most of the groups from the previous Fallout game will either be pretty much unchanged or unmentioned. They used the Enclave in their checklist in Fallout 3, chewed them up, and spat them out never to be heard from again rather than putting delicate care in to explaining what happens once they’re out of the focus like Obsidian did.
To sum it up, barely anything changes, ever, there is no end point, there is no progress, ever.
If you’re, I dunno, this guy?
Chances are you have been raking that dirt your whole life. Your whole family probably did that in the 200 years since the Great War. In the time since Fallout 3, your son probably took over when you died and became a dude-who-stands-next-to-a-brahmin-and-rakes-dirt-er that would make you proud. And at no point did anything ever change for you or your family. 100 years ago your grandpa was standing next to a brahmin raking dirt and living life the exact same way you are now, and 100 years from now your descendants will be doing the same.
Nothing. Changes. Ever. You will never have to worry about things like government, politics, economics, or any of that shit, you probably didn’t even notice the events of Fallout 3 happening. If the BoS even bothered your town, they probably don’t do anything other than post a couple paladins and suck up caps. Doesn’t change anything for you. You just get to keep rakin’ dirt and not giving a care. In the next Bethesda game, it’ll be much the same story. The same enemies hiding in ruins, the same disorganized wasteland, a big megaton-esque town, and no government to speak of. No change to speak of in 200 years since the Great War.
And that’s why I love the west coast more. If that guy had been born in New California, his life would be totally, totally different to his ancestor’s 100 years ago. They would worry about different things, they’d be living in different worlds. And if Obsidian did another sequel, I’m sure whoever takes after him would be living a completely different world too. So here’s hoping they do, cause they don’t treat Fallout like a checklist.
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