>>96968800Did you know that before Bethesda acquired the Fallout IP they had plans for a generic post-apocalypse game already? They were planning on calling it "Apocalypse Road". Yes, really.
The idea of Fallout as a post apocalypse playground where the status quo never changes lives so rent free in their heads that they will distort the setting around the fantasy of a permanent rubblestrewn crater. Fallout 3 taking place 200 years after the bombs? Rubble everywhere, no plantlife to be seen. Major communities consist of scant groups of people living in tin shacks. On the west coast, you walk out of Vault 13 and are greeted by a thriving tribal community with agriculture and adobe houses.
Fallout 4 takes this contrivance even further by having it so that the in-universe explanation for there being no large settlements is that the mad scientist faction sent a replicant to a provisional government meeting where all the wastelanders were ready to start up a proper government and work together only for the replicant to start shooting people, causing distrust and preventing civilization from beginning in earnest.
Therefore you have the settlement system so that you can personally live this 'rebuilding from zero' fantasy that Bethesda wants you to have in Fallout, where you personally are responsible for putting together tin shacks and plywood houses amidst the rubble, instead of emerging from a vault like on the west coast fallouts and interacting with the new forms of society and the struggles they face in day-to-day life.
Fallout 76 was set just after the bombs so they could avoid criticism of this and naturally allow for the setting to be bombed out shit... except in order to preserve the 'Fallout gameplay' there needed to be people who had been living in the outside world after the bombs fell but before you exit the vault. This conflicted with the baffling idea they had for there to be no human npcs to further the 'apocalyptic feeling'. They wanted players to act like in an MMO and naturally fill in all the natural roles of NPCs instead, so that coming across someone felt rare and special.
They made it so an in-universe plague killed all the humans that were out and about before you exited the vault, leaving behind only cryptic messages and their remains as a playground for you to loot through. Someone with a brain at Bethesda pointed out that gunplay is a major part of fallout and with no human NPCs, no one would be around to shoot at you. So they made it that this plague made special ghoul-like creatures, still feral but intact enough that they could fire guns.
Awesome, so now we need a vector for this plague: what if we just took the dragons from Skyrim, slap a bat skin on them and made them the carriers of the virus? That would be a pretty big threat, so how do we get rid of them in-universe? Oh dude, what if we dropped NUKES on them? That's right, the fearsome power and thematic weight of nuclear weapons in Fallout have been reduced to a gameplay element to create temporary raid zones for the fallout MMO. Which is perfect for Todd because FALLOUT™ means NUKES.
Iconography is what Fallout is "about". A series of contrivances meant to dangle NUKES. POWER ARMOR. BROTHERHOOD OF STEEL. SUPER MUTANTS. in front of you like shiny keys for a baby.
Todd said that without things like this, it isnt "Fallout". So important are these iconographic elements that they will appear everywhere in bethesda's fallouts with zero concern to their original context.
There have been no less that 3 distinct origins for east coast mutants in their games so far, simply for the establishing of them as mindless enemies to shoot at, instead of the lucid and competent creatures they were on the west coast. They couldnt even be bothered to write it so that the mutants of 3 dispersed to Boston after being pushed out by the BOS in 3. They had it so that the mad scientist faction previously mentioned created their own strain of super mutants and then dumped them into the wasteland LITERALLY JUST BECAUSE.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/FEV_lab_terminal_entriesDuring Quakecon (an event Zenimax aka THE PARENT COMPANY OF BETHESDA hosts) the interviewer candidly asked Todd about Fallout 76, if it was "the right game for fallout fans?" and todd literally couldnt do anything but chuckle and say "I dont really know but uh....". What the fuck does that even mean? You guys literally run this event.
