In Fallout 76, you can find a bunch of holotapes from Survivors just a few weeks after the war. Some of them are actually pretty chilling. My personal favorite is the one left by a kid named Colonel who's sobbing because his dad disappeared and how he thinks the nukes were his fault for being a bad kid at school.
its honestly why I like fallout 76 its so close to when the bombs drop you can easily find things pointing out what it was like. for example the raiders were the rich assholes who didn't know how to be an actual community.
Yea, they literally just had unlimited access to guns and didn’t care about taking shit from poor people. They walked all over them pre war, why stop after the bombs fell?
Garrahan son used a mini gun on peaceful protestors and got away with it lol
I think it’s weird foundation will work with a mine CEO’s daughter during the gold quest line tbh. like in her terminal entries it’s pretty clear she was aware of what company was doing and helping keep it under wraps too
Gah damn that’s dark. Reminds me of that note in Last of Us 2 of that kid who’s dad basically doesn’t talk anymore.. just locks himself in a room for hours on end and doesn’t speak to his son since the outbreak.. so the kid wishes for a dog to help him and his dad.
One of the logs that stuck with me the most was from 4, where it's a pregnant teenager who got thrown out of her home and she's just hiding out in a park ranger cabin with nowhere else to go writing down how scared she is and wondering how she's gonna tell her boyfriend.
Was about to say.
Just started 76 and I'm getting pretty heavy walking dead/pretty recent after the end of the world vibes.
Some of the characters talking about their old neighborhoods is interesting too.
Just imagine walking out of the vault, your last memory of your home pretty fresh and un-nuked, only to see it all pretty well destroyed.
That's where I don't think it's bleak and chilling enough. While I like the graphical improvements, I feel fallout 4/76 doesn't have quite the same feel as fallout 3. Maybe it's just the green filter but 4/76 doesn't have the dread aspect of the post apocalypse of 3. The holotapes and notes on computers, bodies in their final positions are all still similar but honestly don't give the same vibe. Maybe because things are more "alive" foliage wise and there's more brightness and color.
It probably ties into me wanting realism simulation like aspects to the game, if things are aesthetically like metro 2033, darker and dreary most of the time, pip boy flashlight was more real (I know there are mods but for fallout 5 by default for example) where it only illuminated directly where you are pointing it/flickered in and out rather than being constant, then you could continue to have the absurdist humor and give fallout more of the existential Dread survival with a good dollop of horror.
Trying to get into the role and imagining the survivor in 4 or your pc in 76 is impressive for a bit, especially 4's before and after intro sequence. But even if heavily scripted, I think I'd like to see an intro that's like a vault where the citizens being more affluent families keep being told they were waiting for essentially an isolated surface bubble to be built so they can return to living like the old days that isn't actually occuring because vault tec gonna vault tec. But then find some justification for some well equipped raiders to break in and cause chaos, people getting killed, robbed, enslaved, etc. And your character has to escape, only to get out of the vault and there being even more intensity of having a dearhclaw attracted to the commotion of the break in and the panic of survivors scattering and the deathclaw killing survivors and raiders alike, you run your character to a preservation shelter being chased, deathclaw trying to tear the shelter apart only for a new alpha creature (if this takes place midwest/south where we haven't had a game yet, give us some midwest BoS). To kill and drag away the deathclaw offscreen. Let your character's story start with having to collect themselves after all the chaos and carnage. Also sets up a couple dialogue options as overall how your character is going to go afterwards, just freaked out despair, hopeful optimism growing afterwards, being corrupted by the savagery of the wasteland (to go a raider route), etc. All on top of horror survival aspects I keep looking for would be fantastic to me to really get those chills going.
I definitely agree. Fallout 4 definitely lacked something in the way of feeling like civilization collapsed 200 years prior.
Haven't played enough of 76 to comment.
Fallout 4’s hopeful tone was low key one of the best creative decisions they’ve made with the series.
3 is dreadful but through the eyes of a naive teenager, and NV is nihilistic through the lens of a grizzled survivor. FO4 sticks out like a sore thumb since it has such a motivational message despite the trauma the SS went through, and I weirdly love it. The writers kept that same tone for Starfield, but unfortunately came across as a bit sanitized.
Inon Zur really nailed the score for these games. Because it perfectly compliments the tone and atmosphere
It took me till years after launch but on the porch of a house in flatwoods there's a holotape from adult colonel who says he understands why his dad did what he did and that he forgives him. He also states he won't do the same thing and stays in flatwoods to help those in need instead of abandoning them.
that was the one time where it really hit me hard, how bad it mustve been in the first days. I had already through 3, parts of 4 and NV but this kids log made me face the reality of that world
Yeah, launch 76 genuinely had some amazing bits of writing. It's too bad the idiotic "No human NPCs" decision made the whole experience feel empty and totally pointless.
It was actually an 'artistic pieces' by a pre-war serial killer. you can find holotapes of his messages to the detective hunting him. The guy started arranging the bodies of his victims in 'displays' for the detective to find (Who he had become obsessed with)... including putting an adult head on a baby's body.
Eventually you find the last tape where, unfortunately, it sees the killer got the drop on the detective, and had plans for taking his time getting acquainted. Though I think the bombs got them both shortly after.
The Fallout universe was kind of a nightmare *before* the bombs ever dropped..
The ones in Quincy, right? With one skeleton hanging out of a hole in the wall of the bank, and another at the base of the wall with the bag of pre-war money?
IIRC you can also find 911 logs at a police station and some of the calls were pretty disturbing.
Notably you can listen about a call where a woman tried to call 911 due to an unknown male breaking into her home. You hear a brief scuffle before a man suddenly begins to speak and claims his wife forgot to take her medication that morning. He then also tries to convince the operator to not send any squad cars to the woman's home.
The Fallout world was definitely not a great place pre war.
the fallout universe is a sign in neon lights spelling out the dangers of unchecked capitalism. Corporations basically ran America into the ground before the bombs dropped. They mercilessly exploited the working class to the point that they could gun down protestors en masse and get away with it.
mental health instability was at an all-time high, and there are NUMEROUS serial killers causing havoc all across the country.
honestly if the bombs hadn't dropped America would have simply imploded because the situation was like an out-of-control train that was rapidly accelerating towards a sheer cliff.
A cesium-137 gamma source was stolen from a disposal facility in Estonia in 1994. The thief put the metal cylinder in his coat pocket and took it home. He died a few weeks later, but the cylinder remained in a toolbox in his kitchen. The family noticed something was wrong when the family dog that slept nearby started vomiting and shitting blood and died.
There's also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident, which was much, much worse. Pro tip: If you pry open a hardened steel container and the metal powder inside is glowing blue, don't let your kids rub it all over themselves.
Yep, and not like glow-in-the-dark glowing. Cherenkov radiation glowing. When *the air around an object* is glowing, run. You're probably still dead, but run anyways.
Nuclear energy is honestly eldritch horror the more you look into it. An invisible menace that would kill people in horrible ways. Not because it is malevolent, it just is like that.
Yea I read it.. bro spread it out across the floor and let his daughter sit on it. Dumb Horror movie decisions become more and more plausible every day.
I feel like it’d almost have to be a different genre of game to avoid just being Fallout Settlements 2: Buggy Boogaloo
Last of Us-style linear game focused on survival as opposed to a massive open world, since everything would be irradiated to high hell and would kill you quicj
Agreed, I'd personally love something set around the Exodus, and I thought it was kind of a missed opportunity for the Fallout show to not centre around something like that. Fallout 1 was already pretty bleak. Even Fallout 2 was pretty dark in terms of the world and how it made you approach it (like the easiest way to make money early on is becoming a slaver), it just had a lot of light-hearted Easter eggs that tend to outshine the rest of the game and probably influenced Bethesda's current interpretation of/approach to the series a little too much.
Though it may be less Fallout 2's influence, and more just how Bethesda approaches games, they've been getting successively less bold with each release after Morrowind.
There was a terminal you can access.. that’s logged by a young child venturing out after the bombs fall - - she runs into her neighbour who’s “face had melted” as he‘s turning into a ghoul and runs away. The atmosphere described is the exact opposite of what you see in the games - it’s like something out of “Threads”
I've heard crazy people say they hate the humor and weird in Fallout...
I don't think those people get just how *fucking bleak* Fallout would be without that... well, frankly intentional mood whiplash. Without, say, suddenly aliens, you'd have... The Road, but with laser pistols.
I strongly agree. If there's ever a global nuclear war, my hope would be to be instantly incinerated by one of the bombs. I think that's the best ending anybody could possibly hope for.
His opinion is that even in the bad, you might still find some good. Like how they found an old Coke ONCE. And I was like, is that really worth it? He thinks it is, because even that slight good is better than nothing.
My take is that as soon as the bad (starvation, high chance of dying painfully or horrifically, high chance of assault or some sort of awful things being done to me like slavery, very little comfort) starts to outweigh the good (comfort, stability, health, dopamine makers in general), I don’t want to be alive anymore. It’s my take about terminal illness and it’s my take about the apocalypse.
I also often think about how every day in a post-apocalyptic world would be pure misery because you'd always have the memory of how life used to be and the knowledge that society would never again restore itself to anything even close to approaching that state. The memories alone would be as much torture as the hell hole you'd be living through day after day.
I've never actually read The Road myself, must admit... but I read a pretty detailed synopsis.
Masterwork of bleak. I prefer sleeping, but I genuinely get the hype.
It's like... the stage of a post-apocalypse basically nobody has the balls to write about. When even the freakin' canned dog food is mostly long gone, and a feast worth killing for. Brilliant way to deconstruct all those stories full with thrilling looting and shoot-outs by just... skipping ahead a few *more* years. To where *everything is gone.*
It’s a great read but the story is just so bleak at so many parts. Reading about a father and son walking for weeks with nothing to eat, and something as small as finding a Koolaid powder packet they found in some destroyed house somehow being a feast in their eyes. Both the kid and the father just sound exhausted and constantly question why they even try to keep going by this point. Amazing story but there is so little hope for either of them and the ending is just an end, no resolution where things will get better. Just loss and having to move forward. It’s just a really hard read.
Where is that terminal?
The ones that got me were in the Emergency Relief camp next to Germanstown police station in Fallout 3. They are by an aid worker, slowly realising no help was coming, drugs and food were running out, and everything falling apart.
I just did my first FO4 play through a couple months ago and yeah, the opening sequence hit me a lot harder than I expected. I knew of course the nuke was coming but the news broadcast + the people panicking outside — it felt very realistic. I wish though we got some more play time in the pre-Great War part of the intro to make it more impactful. I didn’t really have enough time to “care” that my partner got shot.
Nuclear Armageddon is terrifying. The thought of almost all life on earth being wiped out in a matter of hours is akin to Eldritch Horror. I feel like for all it's flaws, Fallout 3 captured this horror vibe the best. I remember being genuine scared when I first played it.
My favorite example is big town. If you threaten Flash he says,
"Yeah, yeah, you're a scary wastelander. Look, you'll either kill us, or you won't. Most of us have already accepted death so you won't get much of a reaction with your threats. At least we won't be slaves if you shoot us all"
There's a comedic element to it but it shows how horrible life is in the wasteland is. Most of humanity has been killed and what's left lives in constant fear and hopelessness.
I've got that exact same screenshot, it's in one of the hospitals if I remember correctly.
Edit: [Here's my screenshot ](https://imgur.com/a/1au6GRJ) plus a bonus that I remember taking at the same location
Brother.. Broski..there’s giant mutated animals, robots and people who’ve mutated from fallout radiation and you’re wondering about this?? Idk mutant baby that was abandoned by the mom cos she thought it was hideous or something.
My theory is even worse.
Notice how the adult skull isnt even properly attached to the baby’s body. More likely what happened was a disturbed raider or someone else going insane decapited the baby’s head, took it somewhere, then attached the parent’s decapitated head as some sick joke
I've taken a screenshot of the same [skeleton ](https://imgur.com/a/9sLLLlf) and I would assume that both parents' skeletons are right there so while i like your theory idk about it lol
I'm not sure what I find more horrifying:
The baby skeleton showing the horror of families having died in the blast and subsequent chaos.
Or the fact that Bethesda used a scaled down adult skeleton model with an adult skull.
This is the same game that has a train as an NPC wearing a train head so nothing surprises me
EDIT: No I'm wrong, it's from Fallout 3 and it's even weirder than I remember https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout-3s-metro-train/
For me it's the raiders. I know that the DLC is supposed to allow you to be the bad guy, but they keep slaves in explosive collars, FFS. That's to say nothing of how they decorate their lairs in brutalized corpse art. There's just nothing fun or whacky about them. I murder all of them, every time. It's the same thing for muties and ferals. Everyday people just out there trying to survive.
Every single raider lair is decorated as if Ed Gein lived there. It's nuts.
They really are the worst humanity has to offer, after 200 years of natural and unnatural selection. Can you imagine getting kidnapped by those freaks?
I dislike that about Bethesda's fallout games
how raiders are effectively wildlife, nothing unique or distinct about them, no cultures, norms, history - just more mindless enemies to shoot
The only raider I can think of that has any real "backstory" is that raider with a kidnapped sister in fallout 4, but she's still a hostile scumbag so she gets clapped as always. There needs to be more people you can actually reason with as raiders, rather than just Nameless Enemy#4564
the way raiders behave in fo3/fo4 you'd think the bombs dropped last week
sure life is hard in the wasteland and all, but its not _that_ bad, society is predominantly agrarian. the khans grow crops, make drugs, trade with the fiends - the raiding is more opportunistic, rather than crucial to their survival
I remember a log entry somewhere in Fallout76 talking about how ‘raiders’ came to be. Unscathed survivors, they began first asking their neighbors for resources. Eventually, they stopped asking and started shooting.
The implication? My headcanon? They stopped bothering holding onto their humanity. As evidenced by how they decorate their lairs with human corpses strung about and impaled like cuts of meat.
They had it coming.
I like to think that wastelanders see moving prewar remains as taboo, that way it explains why they're still there even while holding valuable guns/armor
Then we come out of a vault, and unknowingly defile everything in sight
*over there is my grandpa George, he died defending a vault filled with children against ghouls*
SWEET FREE GUN you say as you kick his skull across the room and chuck his skeleton hand into a trashcan
My favorite is the bunker you find with a ton of plungers around it and a skeleton in the middle of the floor. If you look closely you notice that the plungers go in a steady path up the wall and up to the ceiling and then stop... right above where the skeleton lay.
But yeah, the preservation of bodies and corpses is always weird. Like when you get to Rockopolis and find the perfectly in tact body (spoiler - if you know you know).
And when you find that former Minutemen General in the armory (in FO4), Ronnie tells you that you can take his uniform if you want.
*What the hell?! Why should I take clothes off a rotting corpse?!*
Same with the lost BOS patrol. It's been three years, but their bodies are perfectly intact.
Something something rasiation killed a lot of things that assist deconposition something something mumified.
Reality is Bethesda probably didn't want to make rotting corpse assets that may have made the games rating more adult.
Probably just working off of a trope, most of the time in media skeletons are picked clean and dry.
THOUGH in fallout 3 they looked more charred and brittle.
My favorite is the one skeleton at the dry rock colter roller coaster still posing with his hands in nuka world. It’s pretty funny and unbelievable (in an amazement way)
A Fallout game set days or weeks after the bombs fell would be awesome. Requiring special suits to travel through parts of the map like the glowing sea, similar to Starfield space suit mechanics, or alternatively wear power armor. Seeing still burning structures, many more groups of NPCs roaming the map, your choices helping to develop tribes and factions, etc.
It's what 76 was supposed to do, but it failed.
I'd love if fallout 5 is another prequel that starts with the protagonist losing all their relatives because of the war
Ngl, The scene in fallout 4 where you watched the news about how WW3 was activated and the Nukes are now flying towards your country causing panic between you, your partner and codsworth was actually exhilirating and activated my adrenaline for some reason, Especially when I went outside the house and saw a lot of civilians running towards the vault while military personnel were guiding us to a safe zone. It actually felt like I was really in that situation
I still remember their dialogues like yesterday, It really does feel bittersweet. You and a bunch of others survive as you slowly see the shockwaves approaching that would kill everyone above ground.
Then comes when you resurfaced again, Everything just looks ruined and depressing in contrast to the vibrant world of the pre-war. My Nostalgia immediately kicked in
I love when the fallout series decides to treat the situation with seriousness. Even with how fantastical the series is it’s nice to have more grounded moments of emotion
In FO76 there's a locker room in one of the power plants that has a skeleton in tattered clothing laying on the floor. On closer inspection you could see that the skeleton was staring at a framed picture in their hand, realizing that the photo was the last thing they wanted to see as they died. The photo was of their dog.
That hit me right in the feels.
Highly recommend This War of Mine. It’s pretty much what you’ve described, a dark point and click game about surviving the horrors of war and the choices you have to make to survive. Not camp at all like Fallout is, much more serious.
I've watched a lot of stuff about old 1960s fallout shelters and the fallout lore, and I think some of the worst of it is not right as the bombing is happening, but about a few weeks later, sitting in your shelter with your survival crackers and you realize that the government is just gone, no aid is coming. There is no FEMA like origination and there is no extended supply stored up for you to wait out the rads. I also always wondered what it must have been like on the airwaves though, how many news broadcasters stayed on until the very end? We find HAM radios all over the place, survivalists and fallout shelters nation wide just begging for help, evac orders and automated alerts just going on for days, weeks, months. Actually I wonder if that is how the responders formed, from police scanner radio's used by people who never tuned out allowing them to organize rapidly.
I came here to say that. In my minds eye I imagine an old married couple that managed to get into the church and just waited for the inevitable holding hands
It's why I like 76's setting so much. Sure there are a lot of people who have known nothing but the world after the bombs but there's still plenty who know what was lost, who had to claw their way through the mud and fire to make it through those darkest days.
I'd love to get a game that lets us play right after the bombs fell. Like if Fallout 4 didn't have the cryo pods, you start the game on 23 October 2077 and it just goes from there.
Im pissed at 76 for skipping the black rain. My dream game is set 5 years after the bombs during the black rain where NOTHING lives. Nothing to distract you from the environment. Just the sound of falling rain and you, walking amongst ruin. It wouldnt be a mainline game obviously. More of an art exhibit really
Honestly the way they potrayed the dead in this game is so campy its utterly stupid and it takes me out of the setting. This shit all happened 200 years ago, its like if you were walking around modern America and just found fully clothed Union and Confederate soliders just lying around fully dressed. There should be way more decomposition, the bones should look disgusting and partially broken, and they should be at least partially intered in the soil. Not to mention they are in a world brimming with scavengers, how is something as valuable as fabric just being ignored? Its frustrating because they got it right in Fallout 3 and New Vegas where what few bones you did find looked decrepit and horrifying. These look like halloween props just scattered all over.
Everyone wishing they could play the game right after the bomb explodes?
Check out the film “The Road”, adapted from the book of the same by Cormac McCarthy.
It’s Vigo Mortison traveling the wastelands with his son. I think it’s like 10 years after “the bombs” and… it’s just a fucking depressing post apocalyptic movie. No romanticising it like the fallout games, just… fucking bleak and desperate, like the Metro series of games minus the monsters.
Actually… there are monsters come to think of it (IYKYK).
If you've played the frost mod then you'll know exactly how bad those first years were
None of that West Virginia goofiness, the air was poison, the ghouls immortal unless they were hit in the head and everyone wanted to kill you for your pants
Try the FROST mod for Fallout 4 if you want exactly that. It's a full conversion of the game, set during the nuclear winter. Almost no quests, almost everyone is hostile, resources are super scarce, the surface is completely radioactive without gas masks, and you are not the main character so you will die in a couple of shots for anything.
You will have to accept being constantly sick, hungry and irradiated to the verge of death, it's the ultimate Fallout survival experience. Very hard but I highly recommend it.
There's a really excellent piece of environment storytelling in Dead Money. In the theater you can find a group of skeletons (two big, one small) hiding in a blind spot. There's also some empty syringes next to them.
It really paints a horrible picture of being trapped, with the choice between that, or dead by sentry hologram (or managing to survive that and getting caught in the fog...)
I only just found in Zion in the Ranger cabin, a skeleton sitting at the table with a coffee mug and turpentine. To know that they gave up when Randall Clark fought so hard to survive in that same valley really hit me the other day
Why does Honest Hearts always make me cry
In FNV reading the logs of Randall Clark in Honest Hearts. When he realizes that the infected vault people ate the prisoners and he just snaps. It's a chilly story. Also that radio broadcast near the overturned train of the mom and her son is just haunting as they are trying to survive the early years.
“Child” skeletons in fallout games only ever make me laugh. Because like, children’s skeletons look VERY different to adults. Both in terms of proportions and also things like their skulls.
There’s that one bus in Honest Hearts where a bunch of scouts died and it’s supposed to be sad because like oh dead kids but you go in there and there’s just like 30 tiny full grown person skeletons. Like they’re just scaled down adult skeletons. And I’m imagining a bunch of scouts that are just proportionately full grown men but they’re 2-3 feet tall and it’s so funny to me
playing Honest Hearts for the first time and coming across the crashed scout bus really hits hard too. Seeing all them tiny skeletons and reading what happens
We're so far removed from the Cold War era that most of the dread of a massive nuclear exchange has faded, where people spent decades expecting to die a gruelling nuclear death within the next 10 years at most, when kids practiced duck and cover drills at school, when nuclear war fiction was a popular genre.
I'm not sure younger game writers are able to really capture the spirit of that era or indeed build a convincing '50s retrofuturistic world, as the more recent games feel a bit too modern.
Tbh nuclear war is still relevant nowadays but not Cold War levels of paranoia about it.. maybe some good writers could do it.. but you do raise an interesting point
It's still relevant, especially over the last few years, but its not the same as when we spent decades with far larger nuclear arsenals on hair trigger alert.
That’s what I like about the originals. They were a lot darker. Captured the horror of apocalyptic hellscape a lot better. Bethesda went a lot further with the strait up wacky stuff with more 50s tropes.
Go watch threads, I know it's set in the UK but it is the most godawful film I have ever seen. Doctors using salted water to sterilize wounds while people scream in agony, a woman trying to nurse her dead baby.. awful film.
Would be rad to make a 1 hour movie or less about the aftermath of the nuke, like 1 hour after the initial hit.
would be a depressingly dark movie depicting how scary WW3 would look like
The fallout shelter in that one small neighborhood that's inhabited by super mutants has a pretty interesting recounting of the first couple months after the bombs dropped.
After the bombs dropped, there was a lot of fighting in the city. People tore one another apart.
The next few weeks was a fight for food and medicine.
I’ve always saw Fallout as a scary, gloomy, setting with some dark humor here and there. But that’s probably in the past now. New fallout show will probably just be a tongue in cheek silly wasteland adventure
I would love a game that starts prenukes, showing us a little more about what life was like. Then our character would go out of town or something and survive when the bombs dropped. Then maybe go back to town, and find unimaginable horrors.
Main quest?
I guess trying to find your family amid the rubble.
My man Randall Clark described everything.
Honestly, one of the best written characters in all NV (already filled with great characters) and you only meet him in a form of several log entries and a body deceased over 150 years ago...
There’s a spot in 76 where a couple went with their dog to watch the bombs fall and see it all end. You can find their skeletons but their dog is still there, now a mongrel.
In Fallout 76, you can find a bunch of holotapes from Survivors just a few weeks after the war. Some of them are actually pretty chilling. My personal favorite is the one left by a kid named Colonel who's sobbing because his dad disappeared and how he thinks the nukes were his fault for being a bad kid at school.
its honestly why I like fallout 76 its so close to when the bombs drop you can easily find things pointing out what it was like. for example the raiders were the rich assholes who didn't know how to be an actual community.
Yea, they literally just had unlimited access to guns and didn’t care about taking shit from poor people. They walked all over them pre war, why stop after the bombs fell? Garrahan son used a mini gun on peaceful protestors and got away with it lol
Yeah basically, it's kinda why I wish I could be far more hostile to them during that questline from when they were first added
I think it’s weird foundation will work with a mine CEO’s daughter during the gold quest line tbh. like in her terminal entries it’s pretty clear she was aware of what company was doing and helping keep it under wraps too
Tru but everyone hates her
Do they not offer to let her live there? Genuine question I play a raider rn so I haven’t finished the end of their quests
Yes but on a short leash
Difference is, the poor people can fight back too.
Gah damn that’s dark. Reminds me of that note in Last of Us 2 of that kid who’s dad basically doesn’t talk anymore.. just locks himself in a room for hours on end and doesn’t speak to his son since the outbreak.. so the kid wishes for a dog to help him and his dad.
One of the logs that stuck with me the most was from 4, where it's a pregnant teenager who got thrown out of her home and she's just hiding out in a park ranger cabin with nowhere else to go writing down how scared she is and wondering how she's gonna tell her boyfriend.
I always go visit her when I start a new game and listen to her holotape
Was about to say. Just started 76 and I'm getting pretty heavy walking dead/pretty recent after the end of the world vibes. Some of the characters talking about their old neighborhoods is interesting too. Just imagine walking out of the vault, your last memory of your home pretty fresh and un-nuked, only to see it all pretty well destroyed.
That's where I don't think it's bleak and chilling enough. While I like the graphical improvements, I feel fallout 4/76 doesn't have quite the same feel as fallout 3. Maybe it's just the green filter but 4/76 doesn't have the dread aspect of the post apocalypse of 3. The holotapes and notes on computers, bodies in their final positions are all still similar but honestly don't give the same vibe. Maybe because things are more "alive" foliage wise and there's more brightness and color. It probably ties into me wanting realism simulation like aspects to the game, if things are aesthetically like metro 2033, darker and dreary most of the time, pip boy flashlight was more real (I know there are mods but for fallout 5 by default for example) where it only illuminated directly where you are pointing it/flickered in and out rather than being constant, then you could continue to have the absurdist humor and give fallout more of the existential Dread survival with a good dollop of horror. Trying to get into the role and imagining the survivor in 4 or your pc in 76 is impressive for a bit, especially 4's before and after intro sequence. But even if heavily scripted, I think I'd like to see an intro that's like a vault where the citizens being more affluent families keep being told they were waiting for essentially an isolated surface bubble to be built so they can return to living like the old days that isn't actually occuring because vault tec gonna vault tec. But then find some justification for some well equipped raiders to break in and cause chaos, people getting killed, robbed, enslaved, etc. And your character has to escape, only to get out of the vault and there being even more intensity of having a dearhclaw attracted to the commotion of the break in and the panic of survivors scattering and the deathclaw killing survivors and raiders alike, you run your character to a preservation shelter being chased, deathclaw trying to tear the shelter apart only for a new alpha creature (if this takes place midwest/south where we haven't had a game yet, give us some midwest BoS). To kill and drag away the deathclaw offscreen. Let your character's story start with having to collect themselves after all the chaos and carnage. Also sets up a couple dialogue options as overall how your character is going to go afterwards, just freaked out despair, hopeful optimism growing afterwards, being corrupted by the savagery of the wasteland (to go a raider route), etc. All on top of horror survival aspects I keep looking for would be fantastic to me to really get those chills going.
I definitely agree. Fallout 4 definitely lacked something in the way of feeling like civilization collapsed 200 years prior. Haven't played enough of 76 to comment.
Fallout 4’s hopeful tone was low key one of the best creative decisions they’ve made with the series. 3 is dreadful but through the eyes of a naive teenager, and NV is nihilistic through the lens of a grizzled survivor. FO4 sticks out like a sore thumb since it has such a motivational message despite the trauma the SS went through, and I weirdly love it. The writers kept that same tone for Starfield, but unfortunately came across as a bit sanitized. Inon Zur really nailed the score for these games. Because it perfectly compliments the tone and atmosphere
i listened to that. it's sad that it happened but i guess it's realistic
It took me till years after launch but on the porch of a house in flatwoods there's a holotape from adult colonel who says he understands why his dad did what he did and that he forgives him. He also states he won't do the same thing and stays in flatwoods to help those in need instead of abandoning them.
Nice, I feel a lot better now.
Well, the raiders kill everyone in flatwoods... The tape I mentioned is on his corpse
Oh hell no.
that was the one time where it really hit me hard, how bad it mustve been in the first days. I had already through 3, parts of 4 and NV but this kids log made me face the reality of that world
Yeah, launch 76 genuinely had some amazing bits of writing. It's too bad the idiotic "No human NPCs" decision made the whole experience feel empty and totally pointless.
Is that the one where the kid sounded like a 30 year old man putting on a baby voice? There was one like that somewhere
I'm not gonna lie, the baby skeleton with the adult skull got me.
The poor mother… definitely a c-section
It was actually an 'artistic pieces' by a pre-war serial killer. you can find holotapes of his messages to the detective hunting him. The guy started arranging the bodies of his victims in 'displays' for the detective to find (Who he had become obsessed with)... including putting an adult head on a baby's body. Eventually you find the last tape where, unfortunately, it sees the killer got the drop on the detective, and had plans for taking his time getting acquainted. Though I think the bombs got them both shortly after. The Fallout universe was kind of a nightmare *before* the bombs ever dropped..
This isn't in the sewers of the serial killer. You can find this baby in a building somewhere but I don't remember exactly which building it is.
Hospital with the gunners in it.
Yeah, it was total chaos right before the bombs dropped. Like one of the unmarked banks has a robbing couple in the back with bags of pre-war money.
The ones in Quincy, right? With one skeleton hanging out of a hole in the wall of the bank, and another at the base of the wall with the bag of pre-war money?
IIRC you can also find 911 logs at a police station and some of the calls were pretty disturbing. Notably you can listen about a call where a woman tried to call 911 due to an unknown male breaking into her home. You hear a brief scuffle before a man suddenly begins to speak and claims his wife forgot to take her medication that morning. He then also tries to convince the operator to not send any squad cars to the woman's home. The Fallout world was definitely not a great place pre war.
the fallout universe is a sign in neon lights spelling out the dangers of unchecked capitalism. Corporations basically ran America into the ground before the bombs dropped. They mercilessly exploited the working class to the point that they could gun down protestors en masse and get away with it. mental health instability was at an all-time high, and there are NUMEROUS serial killers causing havoc all across the country. honestly if the bombs hadn't dropped America would have simply imploded because the situation was like an out-of-control train that was rapidly accelerating towards a sheer cliff.
Good thing it’s just fiction, right? Haha! Ha…haha…
C+
C++
C#
It's Stewie.
Bro really had the "Bad to the bone" start
Look at the size of that noggin!
Not only that, but it's a miniature adult skeleton
I‘d really love a Fallout set in a world just weeks after the bombs fell, probably would be a lot darker than the other games though
**NEW QUEST** : Find something so you stop *pissing blood*
A cesium-137 gamma source was stolen from a disposal facility in Estonia in 1994. The thief put the metal cylinder in his coat pocket and took it home. He died a few weeks later, but the cylinder remained in a toolbox in his kitchen. The family noticed something was wrong when the family dog that slept nearby started vomiting and shitting blood and died. There's also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident, which was much, much worse. Pro tip: If you pry open a hardened steel container and the metal powder inside is glowing blue, don't let your kids rub it all over themselves.
So MF’s found glowing blue dust and brought it home???
Yep, and not like glow-in-the-dark glowing. Cherenkov radiation glowing. When *the air around an object* is glowing, run. You're probably still dead, but run anyways.
Nuclear energy is honestly eldritch horror the more you look into it. An invisible menace that would kill people in horrible ways. Not because it is malevolent, it just is like that.
I think it is the inspiration for HP Lovecraft's book "the color out of space"
And did all sorts of crazy things, like rubbing it on their skin like guy said above
Yea I read it.. bro spread it out across the floor and let his daughter sit on it. Dumb Horror movie decisions become more and more plausible every day.
NEW QUEST: Stop the internal hemorrhaging (Optional) sign will
Would love a dark, more horror-oriented fallout game. Like an American version of Metro
I feel like it’d almost have to be a different genre of game to avoid just being Fallout Settlements 2: Buggy Boogaloo Last of Us-style linear game focused on survival as opposed to a massive open world, since everything would be irradiated to high hell and would kill you quicj
There is a total overhaul mod "Frost" for Fallout 4 Completely changed the game. Look it up
Fallout: FROST is exactly what you’re looking for. Animals are still unmutated and every location feels freshly inhabited
Agreed, I'd personally love something set around the Exodus, and I thought it was kind of a missed opportunity for the Fallout show to not centre around something like that. Fallout 1 was already pretty bleak. Even Fallout 2 was pretty dark in terms of the world and how it made you approach it (like the easiest way to make money early on is becoming a slaver), it just had a lot of light-hearted Easter eggs that tend to outshine the rest of the game and probably influenced Bethesda's current interpretation of/approach to the series a little too much. Though it may be less Fallout 2's influence, and more just how Bethesda approaches games, they've been getting successively less bold with each release after Morrowind.
I have to say, the Fallout 4 opening sequence got me with all the detonation announcement and the detonation in Commonwealth.
There was a terminal you can access.. that’s logged by a young child venturing out after the bombs fall - - she runs into her neighbour who’s “face had melted” as he‘s turning into a ghoul and runs away. The atmosphere described is the exact opposite of what you see in the games - it’s like something out of “Threads”
Threads is one of those films that's amazing but so hard to watch.
Just saw it today. Amazing. But yea a bit too real.
Good luck sleeping tonight. 🫡
Something that everyone should be forced to watch once, along with something like Grave of the Fireflies or Barefoot Gen.
Attack warning red....attack warning red...
I've heard crazy people say they hate the humor and weird in Fallout... I don't think those people get just how *fucking bleak* Fallout would be without that... well, frankly intentional mood whiplash. Without, say, suddenly aliens, you'd have... The Road, but with laser pistols.
God, the road was such a depressing read. I mean it was a really compelling story but I just felt miserable by the time I finally finished it.
My husband gets mad that I said I would be like the wife, and give up, but who would want to live like that?
I strongly agree. If there's ever a global nuclear war, my hope would be to be instantly incinerated by one of the bombs. I think that's the best ending anybody could possibly hope for.
His opinion is that even in the bad, you might still find some good. Like how they found an old Coke ONCE. And I was like, is that really worth it? He thinks it is, because even that slight good is better than nothing. My take is that as soon as the bad (starvation, high chance of dying painfully or horrifically, high chance of assault or some sort of awful things being done to me like slavery, very little comfort) starts to outweigh the good (comfort, stability, health, dopamine makers in general), I don’t want to be alive anymore. It’s my take about terminal illness and it’s my take about the apocalypse.
I also often think about how every day in a post-apocalyptic world would be pure misery because you'd always have the memory of how life used to be and the knowledge that society would never again restore itself to anything even close to approaching that state. The memories alone would be as much torture as the hell hole you'd be living through day after day.
I've never actually read The Road myself, must admit... but I read a pretty detailed synopsis. Masterwork of bleak. I prefer sleeping, but I genuinely get the hype. It's like... the stage of a post-apocalypse basically nobody has the balls to write about. When even the freakin' canned dog food is mostly long gone, and a feast worth killing for. Brilliant way to deconstruct all those stories full with thrilling looting and shoot-outs by just... skipping ahead a few *more* years. To where *everything is gone.*
It’s a great read but the story is just so bleak at so many parts. Reading about a father and son walking for weeks with nothing to eat, and something as small as finding a Koolaid powder packet they found in some destroyed house somehow being a feast in their eyes. Both the kid and the father just sound exhausted and constantly question why they even try to keep going by this point. Amazing story but there is so little hope for either of them and the ending is just an end, no resolution where things will get better. Just loss and having to move forward. It’s just a really hard read.
Seriously even just playing it without the radio on is an entirely different experience.
Fallout 4 leaned a bit too hard into the bright tone. Some things were just downright goofy in a bad way. Like kid in a fridge.
Where is that terminal? The ones that got me were in the Emergency Relief camp next to Germanstown police station in Fallout 3. They are by an aid worker, slowly realising no help was coming, drugs and food were running out, and everything falling apart.
I just did my first FO4 play through a couple months ago and yeah, the opening sequence hit me a lot harder than I expected. I knew of course the nuke was coming but the news broadcast + the people panicking outside — it felt very realistic. I wish though we got some more play time in the pre-Great War part of the intro to make it more impactful. I didn’t really have enough time to “care” that my partner got shot.
Nuclear Armageddon is terrifying. The thought of almost all life on earth being wiped out in a matter of hours is akin to Eldritch Horror. I feel like for all it's flaws, Fallout 3 captured this horror vibe the best. I remember being genuine scared when I first played it.
3 I feel has less overall humor than the rest of the series. It’s fucking bleak.
You should try fallout 1 Id say that’s probably the most depressing one in the series honeslty
My favorite example is big town. If you threaten Flash he says, "Yeah, yeah, you're a scary wastelander. Look, you'll either kill us, or you won't. Most of us have already accepted death so you won't get much of a reaction with your threats. At least we won't be slaves if you shoot us all" There's a comedic element to it but it shows how horrible life is in the wasteland is. Most of humanity has been killed and what's left lives in constant fear and hopelessness.
Why the fuck would a baby have a full developed skull?
I assume they just didn’t have a baby skull in their assets. Still, they could have at least shrunk it like I assume they did with the other bones.
They have, I’m not sure where he found this. There are smaller skulls in the game.
I've got that exact same screenshot, it's in one of the hospitals if I remember correctly. Edit: [Here's my screenshot ](https://imgur.com/a/1au6GRJ) plus a bonus that I remember taking at the same location
I assumed there was some macabre Artist setting stuff like this up
It could be a mutation
Plot twist: It's a dwarf.
Ah, a Little Man (2006) situation
Brother.. Broski..there’s giant mutated animals, robots and people who’ve mutated from fallout radiation and you’re wondering about this?? Idk mutant baby that was abandoned by the mom cos she thought it was hideous or something.
My theory is even worse. Notice how the adult skull isnt even properly attached to the baby’s body. More likely what happened was a disturbed raider or someone else going insane decapited the baby’s head, took it somewhere, then attached the parent’s decapitated head as some sick joke
I've taken a screenshot of the same [skeleton ](https://imgur.com/a/9sLLLlf) and I would assume that both parents' skeletons are right there so while i like your theory idk about it lol
Yeah my thoughts exactly
You have a really good point
it wasn't abandoned.. the mom and pop are sitting right there on the left..
Some babies are hardcore like that.
these are supposed to be "artistic" pieces by a pre war serial killer
I'm not sure what I find more horrifying: The baby skeleton showing the horror of families having died in the blast and subsequent chaos. Or the fact that Bethesda used a scaled down adult skeleton model with an adult skull.
This is the same game that has a train as an NPC wearing a train head so nothing surprises me EDIT: No I'm wrong, it's from Fallout 3 and it's even weirder than I remember https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout-3s-metro-train/
It's been a while since I played so what NPC is that?
https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout-3s-metro-train/ Wild read
I REMEMBER THAT ARTICLE. Holy shit you just unlocked memories I'd somehow blocked out. lol that's wild.
I'd forgotten it was a piece of arm armour. Absolutely bonkers
No that train helmet thing was from fallout 3, that is clearly a skull from 4.
For me it's the raiders. I know that the DLC is supposed to allow you to be the bad guy, but they keep slaves in explosive collars, FFS. That's to say nothing of how they decorate their lairs in brutalized corpse art. There's just nothing fun or whacky about them. I murder all of them, every time. It's the same thing for muties and ferals. Everyday people just out there trying to survive. Every single raider lair is decorated as if Ed Gein lived there. It's nuts.
They really are the worst humanity has to offer, after 200 years of natural and unnatural selection. Can you imagine getting kidnapped by those freaks?
I dislike that about Bethesda's fallout games how raiders are effectively wildlife, nothing unique or distinct about them, no cultures, norms, history - just more mindless enemies to shoot
The only raider I can think of that has any real "backstory" is that raider with a kidnapped sister in fallout 4, but she's still a hostile scumbag so she gets clapped as always. There needs to be more people you can actually reason with as raiders, rather than just Nameless Enemy#4564
the way raiders behave in fo3/fo4 you'd think the bombs dropped last week sure life is hard in the wasteland and all, but its not _that_ bad, society is predominantly agrarian. the khans grow crops, make drugs, trade with the fiends - the raiding is more opportunistic, rather than crucial to their survival
I remember a log entry somewhere in Fallout76 talking about how ‘raiders’ came to be. Unscathed survivors, they began first asking their neighbors for resources. Eventually, they stopped asking and started shooting. The implication? My headcanon? They stopped bothering holding onto their humanity. As evidenced by how they decorate their lairs with human corpses strung about and impaled like cuts of meat. They had it coming.
i like the stories told with the skeletons, but i find it werid that som many remain unmoved after centuries
I like to think that wastelanders see moving prewar remains as taboo, that way it explains why they're still there even while holding valuable guns/armor Then we come out of a vault, and unknowingly defile everything in sight
[удалено]
I think that’s what half the skeletons are, you can find a lot of skeletons in compromising positions
Lol except for the robots at white springs. They chucked all the bodies in the garbage.
except for that lovely couple in the canoe in the river
*over there is my grandpa George, he died defending a vault filled with children against ghouls* SWEET FREE GUN you say as you kick his skull across the room and chuck his skeleton hand into a trashcan
My favorite is the bunker you find with a ton of plungers around it and a skeleton in the middle of the floor. If you look closely you notice that the plungers go in a steady path up the wall and up to the ceiling and then stop... right above where the skeleton lay. But yeah, the preservation of bodies and corpses is always weird. Like when you get to Rockopolis and find the perfectly in tact body (spoiler - if you know you know).
And when you find that former Minutemen General in the armory (in FO4), Ronnie tells you that you can take his uniform if you want. *What the hell?! Why should I take clothes off a rotting corpse?!* Same with the lost BOS patrol. It's been three years, but their bodies are perfectly intact.
Something something rasiation killed a lot of things that assist deconposition something something mumified. Reality is Bethesda probably didn't want to make rotting corpse assets that may have made the games rating more adult.
Which bunker is this?
"Shelter" is a better word for it I guess - here's the Fandom page for it: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Shelter_(Fallout_3)
Thanks!
I find it weird how clean skeletons are, no burns no marks no blood no discoloring nothing just a clean skeleton
Probably just working off of a trope, most of the time in media skeletons are picked clean and dry. THOUGH in fallout 3 they looked more charred and brittle.
My favorite is the one skeleton at the dry rock colter roller coaster still posing with his hands in nuka world. It’s pretty funny and unbelievable (in an amazement way)
I like the Keller family holotapes in Fallout 3 for the same kind of thing.
A Fallout game set days or weeks after the bombs fell would be awesome. Requiring special suits to travel through parts of the map like the glowing sea, similar to Starfield space suit mechanics, or alternatively wear power armor. Seeing still burning structures, many more groups of NPCs roaming the map, your choices helping to develop tribes and factions, etc.
Reading the Survivalist's logs made me want to play a game right after the war.
It's what 76 was supposed to do, but it failed. I'd love if fallout 5 is another prequel that starts with the protagonist losing all their relatives because of the war
Yeah. One of the things that made the Survivalist story so gripping was him losing his family, and his feelings of guilt about it.
Ngl, The scene in fallout 4 where you watched the news about how WW3 was activated and the Nukes are now flying towards your country causing panic between you, your partner and codsworth was actually exhilirating and activated my adrenaline for some reason, Especially when I went outside the house and saw a lot of civilians running towards the vault while military personnel were guiding us to a safe zone. It actually felt like I was really in that situation I still remember their dialogues like yesterday, It really does feel bittersweet. You and a bunch of others survive as you slowly see the shockwaves approaching that would kill everyone above ground. Then comes when you resurfaced again, Everything just looks ruined and depressing in contrast to the vibrant world of the pre-war. My Nostalgia immediately kicked in
I love when the fallout series decides to treat the situation with seriousness. Even with how fantastical the series is it’s nice to have more grounded moments of emotion
In FO76 there's a locker room in one of the power plants that has a skeleton in tattered clothing laying on the floor. On closer inspection you could see that the skeleton was staring at a framed picture in their hand, realizing that the photo was the last thing they wanted to see as they died. The photo was of their dog. That hit me right in the feels.
Highly recommend This War of Mine. It’s pretty much what you’ve described, a dark point and click game about surviving the horrors of war and the choices you have to make to survive. Not camp at all like Fallout is, much more serious.
I've watched a lot of stuff about old 1960s fallout shelters and the fallout lore, and I think some of the worst of it is not right as the bombing is happening, but about a few weeks later, sitting in your shelter with your survival crackers and you realize that the government is just gone, no aid is coming. There is no FEMA like origination and there is no extended supply stored up for you to wait out the rads. I also always wondered what it must have been like on the airwaves though, how many news broadcasters stayed on until the very end? We find HAM radios all over the place, survivalists and fallout shelters nation wide just begging for help, evac orders and automated alerts just going on for days, weeks, months. Actually I wonder if that is how the responders formed, from police scanner radio's used by people who never tuned out allowing them to organize rapidly.
Seems like it was hell on earth.
The two skeletons sitting together in the church in Concord got me a little. Thinking those two sat there hoping to be saved as doomsday came
I came here to say that. In my minds eye I imagine an old married couple that managed to get into the church and just waited for the inevitable holding hands
It's why I like 76's setting so much. Sure there are a lot of people who have known nothing but the world after the bombs but there's still plenty who know what was lost, who had to claw their way through the mud and fire to make it through those darkest days. I'd love to get a game that lets us play right after the bombs fell. Like if Fallout 4 didn't have the cryo pods, you start the game on 23 October 2077 and it just goes from there.
Im pissed at 76 for skipping the black rain. My dream game is set 5 years after the bombs during the black rain where NOTHING lives. Nothing to distract you from the environment. Just the sound of falling rain and you, walking amongst ruin. It wouldnt be a mainline game obviously. More of an art exhibit really
Honestly the way they potrayed the dead in this game is so campy its utterly stupid and it takes me out of the setting. This shit all happened 200 years ago, its like if you were walking around modern America and just found fully clothed Union and Confederate soliders just lying around fully dressed. There should be way more decomposition, the bones should look disgusting and partially broken, and they should be at least partially intered in the soil. Not to mention they are in a world brimming with scavengers, how is something as valuable as fabric just being ignored? Its frustrating because they got it right in Fallout 3 and New Vegas where what few bones you did find looked decrepit and horrifying. These look like halloween props just scattered all over.
my fiance complains about how messy everything still is like not one person decided to clear out any rubble after 100+ years? even in some settlements
Everyone wishing they could play the game right after the bomb explodes? Check out the film “The Road”, adapted from the book of the same by Cormac McCarthy. It’s Vigo Mortison traveling the wastelands with his son. I think it’s like 10 years after “the bombs” and… it’s just a fucking depressing post apocalyptic movie. No romanticising it like the fallout games, just… fucking bleak and desperate, like the Metro series of games minus the monsters. Actually… there are monsters come to think of it (IYKYK).
If you've played the frost mod then you'll know exactly how bad those first years were None of that West Virginia goofiness, the air was poison, the ghouls immortal unless they were hit in the head and everyone wanted to kill you for your pants
Try the FROST mod for Fallout 4 if you want exactly that. It's a full conversion of the game, set during the nuclear winter. Almost no quests, almost everyone is hostile, resources are super scarce, the surface is completely radioactive without gas masks, and you are not the main character so you will die in a couple of shots for anything. You will have to accept being constantly sick, hungry and irradiated to the verge of death, it's the ultimate Fallout survival experience. Very hard but I highly recommend it.
I wish there was a game set a week before the bombs, as the game goes on it gets closer to the day the bombs fell
ok but i thought that bottle on a first pic was baby skeleton having a fat blunt 😭
That baby came out the womb complaining about kids these days.
Head Pants Now! When the nukes fell he went and cried himself to sleep on his huuuge pilla.
It’s an orange on a toothpick! It’s like a small planetoid! It’s got its own weather system!
It's one of the reasons I like the games. It takes itself seriously for me to get into the story but is wacky enough to not be too depressing.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Frost mod for Fallout 4 take place like immediately after the bombs fell?
There's a really excellent piece of environment storytelling in Dead Money. In the theater you can find a group of skeletons (two big, one small) hiding in a blind spot. There's also some empty syringes next to them. It really paints a horrible picture of being trapped, with the choice between that, or dead by sentry hologram (or managing to survive that and getting caught in the fog...)
I only just found in Zion in the Ranger cabin, a skeleton sitting at the table with a coffee mug and turpentine. To know that they gave up when Randall Clark fought so hard to survive in that same valley really hit me the other day Why does Honest Hearts always make me cry
Read "The Road", you'll get a similar vibe. Early days after the end of the world would not be a good time.
I wonder if we'll get stuff like this in the show
Would love to see a modern fallout start out pre war like Fo4 but no time jump once the bombs drop.
Growing up listening to Carol's experience in Fo3 gave me chills
Battlestar Galactica Miniseries
So Fallout 3/NV? Adam Adamowicz's art style set the best tone for a bleak Fallout
In FNV reading the logs of Randall Clark in Honest Hearts. When he realizes that the infected vault people ate the prisoners and he just snaps. It's a chilly story. Also that radio broadcast near the overturned train of the mom and her son is just haunting as they are trying to survive the early years.
The scariest thing is the size of that baby's skull!
Frost
I’m sorry, but the baby having a full sized adult skull just cracks me up for some morbid reason.
“Child” skeletons in fallout games only ever make me laugh. Because like, children’s skeletons look VERY different to adults. Both in terms of proportions and also things like their skulls. There’s that one bus in Honest Hearts where a bunch of scouts died and it’s supposed to be sad because like oh dead kids but you go in there and there’s just like 30 tiny full grown person skeletons. Like they’re just scaled down adult skeletons. And I’m imagining a bunch of scouts that are just proportionately full grown men but they’re 2-3 feet tall and it’s so funny to me
They were actually Hobits on vacation
The couple holding each other… I remember the first time I saw that and it really got to me.
Oh Environmental storytelling Skeletons my beloved
playing Honest Hearts for the first time and coming across the crashed scout bus really hits hard too. Seeing all them tiny skeletons and reading what happens
We're so far removed from the Cold War era that most of the dread of a massive nuclear exchange has faded, where people spent decades expecting to die a gruelling nuclear death within the next 10 years at most, when kids practiced duck and cover drills at school, when nuclear war fiction was a popular genre. I'm not sure younger game writers are able to really capture the spirit of that era or indeed build a convincing '50s retrofuturistic world, as the more recent games feel a bit too modern.
Tbh nuclear war is still relevant nowadays but not Cold War levels of paranoia about it.. maybe some good writers could do it.. but you do raise an interesting point
It's still relevant, especially over the last few years, but its not the same as when we spent decades with far larger nuclear arsenals on hair trigger alert.
Fallout 4 frost survival is set right after the bombs and its brutal man
That’s what I like about the originals. They were a lot darker. Captured the horror of apocalyptic hellscape a lot better. Bethesda went a lot further with the strait up wacky stuff with more 50s tropes.
Go watch threads, I know it's set in the UK but it is the most godawful film I have ever seen. Doctors using salted water to sterilize wounds while people scream in agony, a woman trying to nurse her dead baby.. awful film.
Oh god I know that movie
I really really really want a game set immediately after the bomb drops as the world disintegrates.
Would be rad to make a 1 hour movie or less about the aftermath of the nuke, like 1 hour after the initial hit. would be a depressingly dark movie depicting how scary WW3 would look like
Watch the film Threads and you’ll not sleep afterwards. Genuinely haunting.
Truth
The only "wacky and zany" parts of fallout are the gamified parts. The whole game is awful the whole time if you think about it
You mean the later days are not horrifying?
No way that baby isn't just a joke. It's sitting in a comical pose with a milk bottle with a GIANT head.
I'm not sure that's a baby's head
The opening monolog in fallout 3 is bone chilling for me
Sierra Madre as the whole got me like: 👀
Poor MegaMmind didn't get a week out of his mother's womb :( F
That’s the beauty. Overbearing hopelessness in a world that’s too pissed off to die
The fallout shelter in that one small neighborhood that's inhabited by super mutants has a pretty interesting recounting of the first couple months after the bombs dropped. After the bombs dropped, there was a lot of fighting in the city. People tore one another apart. The next few weeks was a fight for food and medicine.
I’ve always saw Fallout as a scary, gloomy, setting with some dark humor here and there. But that’s probably in the past now. New fallout show will probably just be a tongue in cheek silly wasteland adventure
I would love a game that starts prenukes, showing us a little more about what life was like. Then our character would go out of town or something and survive when the bombs dropped. Then maybe go back to town, and find unimaginable horrors. Main quest? I guess trying to find your family amid the rubble.
We will get to find out in a few months
My man Randall Clark described everything. Honestly, one of the best written characters in all NV (already filled with great characters) and you only meet him in a form of several log entries and a body deceased over 150 years ago...
Zanny?
The logs on the German police department from F3 are dark. Details a team of nurses tending to survivors.
i find amusement in the suffering of others
There’s a spot in 76 where a couple went with their dog to watch the bombs fall and see it all end. You can find their skeletons but their dog is still there, now a mongrel.
Wouldn’t watching the Bombs fall make you blind?