With a followed Amazon Series right around the corner and people asking my thoughts on it in my stream chat I figure I’d give my impression of what we know so far based on interviews articles and the footage they’ve released the short short version as you can tell from
The title of this video is simply that I do not think this show is going to be any good I think it’s going to continue bethesda’s trend of [ __ ] on established lore and over focusing on the wacky and weird aspects with any actual serious storytelling being shallow and contradictory
Now it is true that the people writing the show are not the people who made the games but their primary source of information for the Fallout franchise is Bethesda who again have made massive Rons and have heavily damaged the lore of this world since their acquisition of
The IP the showrunners have a handicap from the start their primary source is rotten it’s like trying to fix a complex machine with rough notes and forgotten detail scribbled on a napkin I do have to acknowledge that that the show May turn out to be good Against All Odds but
I do feel the chances of that are so slim it’s not even worth considering if I’m wrong then I’m wrong and I’ll admit as such however currently I have every reason to believe that this show is going to be a complete dumpster fire and as a quick reminder the last time I was
This skeptical about a piece of media it was Starfield which I got a lot of flack for on Twitter before its release for the record [ __ ] you I was right [ __ ] you I was right [ __ ] you I was right with that out of the way let’s
Get into this most of this video will be off the cuff as I’m mostly just following notes to keep myself on track first up is an article from 2021 about 2 and 1 half years ago I think this is the first article that gives any kind of
Detail about the show but I’m not entirely sure I didn’t do a deep and extensive search but this is one that I did read on stream back in the day the main reason I’m looking at this article is from the fact that some of the first
Information we had about the show is one comment from the show runners in particular it is just a Gonzo crazy funny adventure and a mind [ __ ] like none you’ve ever seen before this already gives me a really bad impression because part of the problem with Bethesda Fallout is that
They lean hard into the jokey wacky and weird aspect of the Fallout franchise which is not what Fallout is about the original Fallout was a really dark and Grim game the humor aspect was a very small part of the game the main problem with this is that Fallout 2 took it to
New levels with frequent references to Monty Python and stuff like Doctor Who and Star Trek which were just really unnecessary and distracting from the game it’s arguably the worst part of Fallout too is all the pop culture references and silly jokes they have because it undermines the tone of the
Setting which again is supposed to be very dark Fallout 2 is personally my favorite Fallout game in the entire franchise and I believe the humor aspect is absolutely the worst part of Fallout too the fact that the show seems to be leaning heavily into that direction is
Just a massive red flag for me right from the start it’s also worth mentioning that these showrunners worked on Westworld and while I haven’t seen this show myself I’ve heard a lot of people say that the first season was good but it fell off hard after that apparently
In November of 2023 we get the first look at the Fallout show from Vanity Fair I’m not going to go over this entire article I’m just picking some key points that stand out to me the first is a comment from Jonathan Nolan himself the games are about the culture of
Division and halves and have knots that unfortunately have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades Nolan tells Vanity Fair it is kind of shocking that is getting this so wrong and it feels like modern politics are being shoved in to
Summarize the stories of each of the mainline Fallout games very quickly simply they’re not about the Haves and Have Nots Fallout one is largely about two things the water purifier chip in your Vault has been broken and you need to go and find a new one so the Vault
Can continue to live the other half of the main story in Fallout one focuses on the master Super Mutant Army who he plans on converting All Pure humans into super mutants and you need to stop him there’s nothing in there about the hav and Have Nots similarly in Fallout 2 you
Have to find the geek a piece of equipment that will allow people to essentially start rebuilding society and you’re looking for this in order to save your village throughout the story you find out about the Enclave the remnants of the US government who seek to exterminate all mutated life on the
Planet and they plan to do so by putting a poison into the air that will only affect the mutants which at this point consists of regular people living on the surface so you and your entire town again it’s not about the halves and Have Nots it’s a genocidal plot to kill all
The unclean essentially in Fallout 3 the main story is about a water purifier and getting it up and running to give fresh water to the Wasteland again the enclaves involved but there’s nothing in there about the halves and Have Nots in that sense for the main story the game does
Kind of touch on that a little bit but it’s very mixed Fallout New Vegas once again isn’t focused on the halves and Have Nots it’s a war for control of this piece of land essentially with three technically four different factions vying for control Fallout 4 again has four
Factions but once again it’s not about the Haves and Have Not it’s about a group of evil super scientists who are replacing people with robots and the story is really poorly written so it’s kind of hard to summarize but in short it’s not about Hales and Have Not
So saying that these games are about halves and have knots is just really really [ __ ] weird and out of touch this article also mentions that we’re getting the origin story for Vault boy which [ __ ] why not everything has to have a [ __ ] origin story just leave it
Alone one of the most important details though is the fact that Todd Howard considers the show Canon to the games this is important because any criticism or analysis of this show is going to have to take the games and their events into account when criticizing this show
So this is more potential for retconning established Lord this is more potential for contradicting previous games or ruining certain aspects of the lore which Bethesda is not afraid to do in fact I find it particularly amusing that they specifically point out that Bethesda was careful to make sure the
Scripts could coexist with previous story lines from the gaming titles which is kind of insane to me considering Bethesda doesn’t even make sure their own scripts are consistent with themselves let alone with their other Fallout games let alone with the rest of the series just as a reminder in
Fallout 4 the game seems to flip-flop on whether ghouls need food and water or not you have kid in a fridge who has been stuck inside a fridge for 21 years without food and water you have the settlement building system of which ghouls have a food and water requirement
Then you have Eddie winter who is locked in a small bunker in a [ __ ] train station again for 210 years without enough food and water to last him that long finally you have Kent Connelly who specifically mentioned as needing food and water on a terminal lock and this is
Just in one game the latest Mainline Fallout game by Bethesda this isn’t counting the fact that in Fallout 3 there’s ghouls who will fight over water this doesn’t count the fact that Fallout one established that ghouls need water to survive it’s a very big plot point to
Fallout one you get a bad ending for taking their water chip and not getting them an alternate source of water so to say that Bethesda is being very careful that the show fits in with the games yeah I’m not buying it sorry the next segment I want to cover
Has to do with the Brotherhood of Steel it’s a little bit of the Marine Core it’s a little bit of the knight’s Templar it’s this kind of weird Fusion Nolan says in the absence of a federal government you just had all this military hardware lying around who would get it and how
Would they maintain control of it the answer is the Brotherhood which no one describes as being fueled by a mutated version of patriotism religion loyalty and fraternity there is so much [ __ ] wrong with this what do you mean patriotism the Brotherhood has never been a patriotic group if you’re just
Talking about loyalty to their own faction that’s not patriotism yes the Brotherhood is cult-like they’re a group of technophiles it’s treated much like a religion but patriotic I genuinely don’t know how you get that read from them ever their control comes from the battalions of super soldiers nice and
Shining power armor who stalked the landscape enforcing the brotherhood’s notion of order so I wouldn’t really consider a power armored Soldier to be a super soldier I I view them as two different things when I think of a super soldier I’m thinking more like Captain America someone who’s Genetically Enhanced or
Even like the Winter Soldier someone with cybernetic upgrades but I wouldn’t consider a man in a mech suit a power armor to be a super soldier saying that the Brotherhood and forces of their notion of order is really really weird because they’re not a political group seeking power and control over people
Their whole thing is keeping advanced technology away from the dirty Outsiders they don’t care about their Petty struggles or conflicts another point and this is a very small one I admit but in this interview Nolan says whoever the good guys and bad guys were they destroyed the whole world so
Now we’re in a more gray area which is really weird because there were no good guys or bad guys in the nuclear Apocalypse in this series both sides were absolutely awful and while we don’t see what happens on the Chinese side of this conflict on the American side of
This conflict we see the government doing a lot of absolutely horrible things testing on people many of the vaults are experiments which lead to people’s deaths they’re largely social experiments that almost always end in disaster and death and tragedy so describing the war as they’re being good
And bad guys is just really weird it it very much feels like someone who is not aware of what the series is at all all the last thing I want to talk about with this article is how they talk about the ghoul who doesn’t even get an actual
Name he’s just called the ghoul the article seems to treat him as though he’s somehow a unique case as if ghouls aren’t common in this world which they’re very common it just seems really weird to me that he’s getting this strange special treatment when again it’s just a common thing for ghouls to
Be in this world shortly after that we got a teaser trailer and there’s not much to comment on aside from an overall jokey comedy tone that I don’t really like going from brutal fighting to a really weird and out ofpl comedy bit I See I grabbed a moldy one also why the [ __ ] is the Vault overseer side clops this to me reeks of the kind of thing you’d see in an ‘ 80s or 90s adaptation of a video game into a movie where the people making the adaptation just don’t understand the sour material
And they just do some weird [ __ ] [ __ ] with it I don’t see why this guy should be a cyclops and also it just looks [ __ ] terrible what the hell in early March we get the full trailer for the most part production quality looks pretty good and I don’t
Mind that aspect of the show so far based on what we’ve seen that said there’s a few things I do want to talk about here that stand out to me in this trailer the first one and this is a really really big one we see this shot
Of two characters at the edge of a crater and there’s a sign there that says Shady Sands public library and this stands out to me in particular because Shady Sands is the capital of the NCR this is a location from Fallout 1 and two and to say it’s a major lore
Location is a bit of an understatement this is quite possibly one of the most important locations in the world in the lore at this point and what I’m seeing here gives me the impression that it’s just been [ __ ] destroyed now I suppose it’s possible that this sign could just be an Easter
Egg but I very much have my doubts there is no real world Shady Sands it’s a fictional Town made up for the original Fallout and if it really has been destroyed if that’s what the series is confirming then I feel like there needs to be a really really really good
[ __ ] reason for this place to be gone I just feel this has a lot of really bad implications and this is just another massive red flag to me there’s also a shot of a crater towards the end of the trailer and I believe it’s supposed to be the same one which again
If this is Shady Sands what the [ __ ] there better be good justification for this another thing that stands out to me is how power armor helmets now open like an Iron Man face mask and I just really don’t like this the power armor helmet has been shown to
Be solid in the past and this is just totally unnecessary I don’t believe you would ever need this on power armor where it’s it’s meant to protect you but you could still talk to people you can still have conversations in full power armor and people do in the series all the time
Paladin dance you ready to move out ready outstanding follow me and try not to lag behind listen up if we do this clean and quiet know heroics and buy the book understood if feels like they did this just so they don’t have to have the character taking off the helmet
Constantly to show his face it also actually kind of reminds me of the Halo show which is also [ __ ] terrible but they have Master Chief take off his helmet all the time and there’s even large parts of the show where he’s not even in his armor another thing that’s
Standing out to me with all this pre-release info is the general lack of the NCR as a whole remember that this show is taking place on the west coast which is solidly in NCR territory the new California republic for anyone who hasn’t played the games this is a fullon
Nation rebuilding From the Ashes of the old world they emulate the old world government and the fact that they’re barely getting a mention the fact that you have to look in the background of one of the shots in these trailers to even see one of their
Flags is a really bad sign to me the the NCR should be present everywhere in this part of the world and they’re barely referenced from what I’ve seen again it’s just another really really big red flag the final thing I want to talk about and we’ve seen a couple pieces
Relating to this already but this trailer felt like the biggest showing of it and it’s the whole junk Town aesthetic that’s going on which I believe is out of place for how far into the timeline we are remember this show takes place 220 years after the apocalypse and people
Are still cobbling together bits of scrap to build their towns from I’m sorry I’m not buying that it seems as though Bethesda wants this Perpetual apocalypse Mad Max aesthetic which just doesn’t make sense with how far we are past the apocalypse in this franchise at this point even in Fallout 1 which was
About 80 years after the apocalypse people people were rebuilding they’re making new things they’re making New Towns they creating new weapons same goes in Fallout 2 where again we see the NCR has grown into its own nation and it’s expanding it’s gaining territory but then in Fallout
Three everyone is still living in Ruins or cobbled together scrap heaps like Megaton which just again doesn’t make sense it feels like the world is stagnating when it shouldn’t I really really hate hate bethesda’s aversion to the world progressing in any way and just the stagnation of it all the
Nonsense of it I [ __ ] hate and it really is a big question in Fallout 3 and 4 especially of why is no one making anything new for the most part see most of the wastelanders are just apparently content to live in these trap shacks and not really do anything to better their
Lives whereas when we do actually get people making new things they things that don’t make sense for the world stuff like the syns which the syns in and of themselves in Fallout 4 are such a massive contradiction in almost every way it would probably extend this video out to
A [ __ ] hour to talk about them all I Do cover it in depth in my Fallout 4 analysis the other big thing made postwar that doesn’t make sense is the pridwin the brotherhood’s Airship and we see a shot of an identical one in this trailer for the Brotherhood and
This thing is just complete nonsense it is a magic flying fortress and I hate it in particular it’s really weird to me that stuff like this was not possible before the war when you had countries that could gather resource but after the war it’s just suddenly possible now to
Build multiple airships that double as a massive Flying Fortress in a tank this thing is armored in Fallout 4 they say it weighs about 40,000 tons and it’s apparently held up by [ __ ] hydrogen moving on just a few days ago we also got a statement from Jonathan Nolan
Saying they didn’t set out to please fans I don’t think you can really set out to please fans of anything the director oind or please anyone other than yourself I think you have to come into this trying to make the show that you want to make and trusting that with
Us being fans of the game we would find pieces of that that were essential to us and try to do the best version I’ve got mixed feelings on this on one hand it’s a massive red flag for a showrunner to say they’re not setting out to please
Fans where we’ve seen examples in the past where other showrunners have said similar things and the end product was complete garbage that said he is kind of right here in the sense that the Fallout fan base is one of the most divided fan bases right now aside from Maybe Star
Wars it’s true that you can’t please all fans but especially so in this case where there’s two very distinct vers verions of what Fallout is and the show can’t adhere to both of them you either have the side of Fallout one to in New Vegas where there’s Rich stories and
Characters where the World building is really really good and you have the Bethesda version which is more wacky and jokey and just shits all over everything and when no one says that you can’t really please anyone other than yourself that he’s a fan of the games too and
They’re looking for the parts that are essential and try to do the best version of that you have to remember that he’s a fan of the Bethesda Fallout he likes Fallout 3 which again Recon delore and shits all over it as well it just tells me which way this is going to skew
Fallout 1 and two might as well be in an entirely different dimension at this point because bethesa Fallout has almost completely supplanted what was originally there with their [ __ ] bastardization garbage the final thing to talk about is the most recent Clip Amazon has released the first scene video which is 2 minutes
Long I obviously can’t play the full thing here but we get some cringe dialogue from our main character I get that she’s naive and it kind of makes sense for her to be like this but it’s just not a good first impression and I think they could have handled this a lot
Better another thing I noticed while recording is this science saying that they deal in caps only which again were on the west coast why are they dealing in caps still caps were the currency of Fallout one but by the time of Fallout 2 they had moved on because the NCR was its own
Faction now and people were dealing with actual money again Fallout 3 brought back caps seemingly for Nostalgia reasons and while New Vegas does deal in caps it’s not in NCR territory it’s territory that they’re trying to gain control of so it makes sense people would be using caps but we also see the
Ncr’s currency as well as the legion’s currency in New Vegas as well showing that societies are growing and making their own money again so why the [ __ ] in a story that’s taking place on the west coast deep in NCR territory are they using [ __ ] caps still anyways in this
Little conflict that’s going on here the Brotherhood intervenes night Titus of the Brotherhood of Steel stand down or be cut down why is the voice so [ __ ] this is not what people and power armor sounded like why is it so bad here also why is the Brotherhood getting involved
They don’t give a [ __ ] about the petty squabbles of Rand wastelanders or even Vault dwellers again they’re a faction of technophiles they want to keep advanced technology out of the hands of the dirty simpleton Outsiders that’s all they care about so why are they intervening in this conflict also there’s
This they fly go they fly now they fly now the flying looks like [ __ ] and power armor shouldn’t be able to fly this is a problem I have with Fallout 4 as well where they introduce a jetpack mod for Power Armor when again this is an incredibly heavy suit of
Armor and the amount of thrust you need to take off is kind of insane power armor due to its nature just should not be able to fly and the fact that they just do it casually here is a problem for me it should not be able to fly it
Should be too heavy to fly power armor makes you into a walking tank and the technology to suitably give that walking tank lift just should not be possible in this world that’s basically everything I have to cover right now and I see a mile long wide trail of red flags where
Almost every piece of information has come out about this show leads me to believe that it’s not going to be good that it’s going to continue bastardizing the lore that’s going to be inaccurate to the original games in New Vegas I have had people ask me if I
Think the show is going to intentionally reccon New Vegas or something like that and to answer that no bethesda’s reccon don’t tend to be made out of malice but out of incompetence I don’t think the show is going to go out of its way to reccon New Vegas but it might do so
Incidentally because I’m seeing a lot of the same problems here as I see with Betha Fallout where they just don’t adhere to what was already there they don’t seem to care Maybe I’m Wrong maybe I’ll have to eat crow on this but at this point I don’t think I will
Hopefully it’ll be good maybe I don’t want Fallout to be bad but I have no reason or expectation to believe it will be any good at this point everything I’ve seen points to problem after problem after problem I will be covering this show but I don’t know what form
That’s going to take yet it all depends on how the show actually ends up being by the end but I suppose we’ll see when we get there but yeah that’s everything I’ve got for today if you like this video please subscribe I do have several videos in the works including a
Starfield analysis and finishing off my Fallout 4 analysis this isn’t a Bethesda Focus Channel though I Do cover other things as well and I’m working on those videos on the side while I’m working on my larger projects thank you for Watching
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