Video Game General 2: Definitive/Remastered Edition
Dustcan 
Dogs
Fallout is very pointedly a critique of 1950s America/American Cold War era culture.
You can’t exactly transfer that style elsewhere in the world, or at least not without reflecting that nation’s 50s culture.
Penguin Dragneel 
Spooky in Spirit
@pixel
Yeah, you’re gonna want to get good at guarding in FP2. It’ll save your ass countless times, especially during the boss fights.
Yeah, you’re gonna want to get good at guarding in FP2. It’ll save your ass countless times, especially during the boss fights.
Not big on Neera’s guard mechanic though. It puts your special meter on a cooldown for some reason.
Cosmas-the-Explorer 
Explorer in Training
@Dustcan
To be honest concepts are universal.
To be honest concepts are universal.
I mean 1980s even if it was much closer to our time, had some of its own similarities to the 1950s with its nuclear threat and family friendly sitcoms.
Sometimes these can repeat even in different places and times.
Icicle Niceicle 1517 
Ocs,Boops,Tickles&Memes
@Cosmas-the-Explorer
I mean its true that time periods are universal regardless of countries, but with Fallout specifically, a lot of its themes/style is specifically based around 1950s American politics and society, along with the general theme of Americana (especially the games set in the West, like New Vegas and 76)
I mean its true that time periods are universal regardless of countries, but with Fallout specifically, a lot of its themes/style is specifically based around 1950s American politics and society, along with the general theme of Americana (especially the games set in the West, like New Vegas and 76)
Also afaik the franchise never makes it a point to say what happend to the other countries (Except Canada and China) in the world other then they also got nuked to hell (Though if i remember right one of the characters in 3 mentions moving to America from England so things seem to be somewhat stabilised for immigration)
Cosmas-the-Explorer
Explorer in Training
@Icicle Niceicle 1517
Good point. I guess America is very different in that it didn’t just think it was the greatest country on earth. In terms of power and sheer importance for the rest of the world, it was.
Good point. I guess America is very different in that it didn’t just think it was the greatest country on earth. In terms of power and sheer importance for the rest of the world, it was.
European country in the 50s were struggling to rebuild themselves from the war.
It was just a completely different set of expectations that no other country could possibly have.
Dustcan
Dogs
Origin of Halo’s Flood in the Bungie era: Space is big and they just showed up one day.
Origin of Halo’s Flood in the 343 era: Ancient Space Humanity used an alien shampoo on their dogs. This shampoo was made from the mummified corpses of Cthulhu, and now everyone’s zombies.
Neat.
AaronMk 
Sky funeral
Fallout is very pointedly a critique of 1950s America/American Cold War era culture.You can’t exactly transfer that style elsewhere in the world, or at least not without reflecting that nation’s 50s culture.
That’s honestly a very surface level analysis of what the Fallout series is doing with itself. Namely it’s taking the same small spoon from the well as Bethesda did in working on Fallout 3 and handing it off as a glass of water. While the Fallout series do utilize 1950s aesthetics it was a broader nostalgic critique of Americana writ large from the 50s into the 70s. Especially if you believe in the theory that nostalgic culture in America operates on 20 year cycles, then for a game developed in the 90s and released in the 2000s the period was very much in in so far as mid-century American modernism is an aesthetic genre as a whole.
But you can pan it deeper by saying the 1950s and the mid-century was the last time America ever had an image of the future. And you have the analytical thesis of Lost Futures, where as we move ahead we abandon the Sci-Fi futurism and the world-as-could-be into the new world-as-is. And that the world-as-was was itself a dead end. There isn’t anything worth searching for in that past if it would have, and in Fallout’s case destroyed the world. And in that final statement there is a crumb of aesthetic philosophy of Chris Avellone where doing these things would just destroy the world again.
But brushing off the American scum layer you can find the basis on which non-American Fallout games can be launched and ran because we were not the only country to have a body of Sci-Fi literature and culture that could be used as a window into how Europe or Asia thought the future would be that would be the built lived-in world for their Fallout setting, the promise more harshly denied for them.
And like, Europe still had a very living cultural scene in the mid-century at the same time as America was booming. China was super dynamic. There is rich soil to expand the franchise. But: that is contingent on Todd Howard and his creative team being good. Which God bless them they seem to acknowledge they are not.
Meanlucario 
Time to get spooky
After entering act 2 via the pass, I decided to reload and enter through the elevator and it feels like the right decision.
Dustcan
Dogs
I get what you’re saying but it ultimately comes down to how do you depict, say, a China or Germany or Egypt that’s been stuck in the 50s for a few hundred years?
Like forget that most to all the series mainstays not showing up: deathclaws, super mutants, etc wouldn’t make sense outside the US outside some very contrived plot points. Fallout has a very hard baked aesthetics as based on what America in the 50s thought the future would look like. How do you replicate that in another country? What would China in the 50s think the future would look like? For that matter a lot of the series’ satire is coded in critiquing Cold War Americana. In a hypothetical Fallout China, what would a satire of Cold War era China be like?
igotnopicks
Monado User
In Fallout, the Soviet Union is still around so yeah. It’s not just big bad China and United States of America with the Soviet Union still around. They probably have spys in the US government to know what the hell is going on.
AaronMk
Sky funeral
I get what you’re saying but it ultimately comes down to how do you depict, say, a China or Germany or Egypt that’s been stuck in the 50s for a few hundred years?Like forget that most to all the series mainstays not showing up: deathclaws, super mutants, etc wouldn’t make sense outside the US outside some very contrived plot points. Fallout has a very hard baked aesthetics as based on what America in the 50s thought the future would look like. How do you replicate that in another country? What would China in the 50s think the future would look like? For that matter a lot of the series’ satire is coded in critiquing Cold War Americana. In a hypothetical Fallout China, what would a satire of Cold War era China be like?
China and or the Soviet Union poses particular challenges because they are states that historically to even “the fifties” had a robust market sphere that would have slowed or prevented the infiltration of American products to unify the world in a particular American Aesthetic. In Europe you could pull this off with their own particular period characteristics. But this is something I could go into in depth if I wasn’t on my phone (finishing up lunch at work).
But viewing this question from the perspective it must preserve a particular surface level aesthetic is a very Comics Books Nerd’s attitude towards whether or not it could. Were such an attitude be true: all drawn comic books and comic book properties would be drawn as they were back when those franchises first released. Which isn’t flexible, intuitive, or interesting at all; on both accounts.
Instead I think you have to deconstruct Fallout and reconstruct it to bring in a new setting in the same universe with lore fine tuning along the way. And that means:
- Identifying the trends of cultural nostalgia of that place at a time. Fifties nostalgia is big in the US because it always has been. And in a near-Avellone sense the usage of those cultural nostalgias as something revived or preserved since their time over the century required for it signifies a dead end of that society. It is destroyed, and presumably holds it back
And - What images of the future the setting’s subject had that would emerge as a ghost of what would be. As in the case of Mark Fischer’s Lost Futures.
They will of course all look different than what we would know of Fallout in America. But the written unifier would be an in-universe critique of the usual America-centric perspectives of games like Fallout where the player-character in a Fallout France gets to fuck around in a neo-DrGaulle France but also bitching about how Americans fucked everything up.
Kind of like what was happening in Marseille in DeGaulle France if not already a thing of DeGaulle France at large
harasha456
yokaimancer
had a surprisingly good hollow knight run today. got through grim without a lot of hassle I only died once because I kinda forgot that you only had to do the flame hunt twice instead of three times so he caught me with my pants down.
Meanlucario
Time to get spooky
I feel bad for sending a drider and his group to a gruesome death after giving said drider an inferiority complex.
Wiimeiser
(Foil Hat)
@Angrybrony
Who, and what game?
Who, and what game?
@phoenixacezero
Ah yes, the big difficulty spike. Really, the only places I remember having difficulty with were a few puzzles (mainly around the Sensorium part of the game) and the boss of Bob’s Bottles. And also somehow not getting the camera until postgame
Ah yes, the big difficulty spike. Really, the only places I remember having difficulty with were a few puzzles (mainly around the Sensorium part of the game) and the boss of Bob’s Bottles. And also somehow not getting the camera until postgame
Cosmas-the-Explorer
Explorer in Training
@Angrybrony
Has she thought of like cutring her bangs so she can see better?
Has she thought of like cutring her bangs so she can see better?
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