Fallout: Quite why I love it so
| March 17, 2011 | Posted by L. Wollny under technology |
For me, setting is one of the most important aspects of an RPG. Mass Effect would suffer badly without the fleshed out setting of the whole Galactic Council. The Fable series had a very reactive setting, making up for the repetitiveness of some of the finer details. Dragon Age wouldn’t feel so good if Thedas wasn’t so very much there, with you (never mind that it was the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series, which in itself drew on the ridiculously fleshed out Forgotten Realms setting).
It goes beyond video games, too. Lord of the Rings, for instance, is amazingly successful by sole virtue of being so very damned well fleshed out that the author wrote at least 3 sodding languages, seemingly for nothing more than personal amusement. He wrote the first book in the set out of boredom. Something about knowing that there is a whole load of story behind this setting that you’ve just dropped into for some casual violence makes the experience more enjoyable.
So when I tell you that a game has won my award for favourite setting, I want you to understand exactly how much that means.
Fallout. Oh, Fallout. From the first moment I awoke in your underground vaults to the time I exploded seven mutants with an improvised mine made from a lunchbox and spare tin against the nihilistic backdrop of your irradiated ghost cities, you have been captor of my heart.
I love the whole series. I love them. The setting is breathtaking. The combined influences of 1950s America, the ‘World of Tomorrow’ and A Canticle for Leibowitz together produce a fantastic mix of crushing pessimism, idealistic good nature and bitter irony. For instance, the two main songs used in the trailers and intros for Fallout 3 are Bing Crosby’s Dear Hearts and Gentle People (a contrast with Raiders, who’ll gut you for a bottle of water, or if they’ve had a bad day, or if they’ve had a good day, or if they’re bored) and The Inkspots’ I Don’t Want To Set the World on Fire (and if you need me to explain the irony in that one, you’ve obviously never played Fallout).
Fluffles will never be the same again.
Another example is the first town you encounter in the same game, Megaton. Megaton is built out of old aeroplanes and buses and the like, centred around an old atomic bomb. The residents there are cheery and friendly, despite the sheer horror of… well, of everything around them (no really, everything – mole-rats are, at first, a legitimate threat).
Your choice of music is jolly 50s tracks or patriotic American army marching tunes (both presented in radio form, complete with DJs, both with distinct personalities).
The other thing is exactly how reactive the setting is, and always has been. In many games, my suspension of disbelief is often shattered by a character failing to comment on a quest I’ve completed, or the lack of slight change in attitudes towards my character after some important world-shaking event. I’ve yet to find any example of this in Fallout 3 or New Vegas, even though I’ve looked (and believe me, I’ve looked).
Also, just look at it. Look at the world your character is walking through. Stand at the top of the Washington Monument in DC, and look around. The sight is both beautiful and terrifying. To see a real geographical area blown to hell, and then see the people stubbornly fighting on against the determined efforts of fate to stomp them out? Well, that’s beauty.
You see, this is what’s really at the core of my love of Fallout. It takes the crapsackiest setting, blows it up with nukes, fills it with more clawed rodents than you can shake a stick atand still makes you feel a warmth in your heart every time you walk past some poor bastard with his two-headed cow herd, watching him making life out of it.
Call me pretentious, but to me that isn’t casual entertainment. That’s art.
Good article. I’m one of these pretentious people who sees video games as an art form anyway, so I think you’re safe. This is all true though, and I did love the Fallout 3 opening movie. Hell, i loved Fallout 3!
Yet Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age are both BioWare games, right? So Dragon Age, being the descendant of Baldur’s Gate, is undoubtedly going to be riding on its back.
Yup- Dragon Age, as far as I am aware, was made because the rights to Baldur’s Gate III couldn’t be aquired (something which, as a result of DA, has happened.)
Fallout 3 is an artform to stand aside Bioshock and Persona 4 as far as I am concerned. I don’t think people who consider games such as these an artform could be called pretentious. The game has evoked so many feelings within me that to not call it an artform would be quite ridiculous as far as I am concerned.
I really enjoyed how you explored the cheeriness that many fallout residents possess despite their surroundings. It’s something you just seem to accept. Apart from Moira Brown, who manages to come off as cheery to the extent of where I feel she suffered from Mania.
Ah, I think I’ll touch on Moira in the next piece I do, which will be on Firefly. She’s a character archetype, and whilst not masterfully executed, the archetype is sound. Many people deal with horror by being relentlessly cheerful- she could well be suffering from Mania, given the setting.
Also, I do agree that she should occasionally be shaken by an event, maybe displaying fear or sadness- it would make her cheeriness deeper.
See, I ended up arguing against myself there.