I haven’t played the second one yet, but the first one absolutely was! I’m one of those “patient gamers” — especially after seeing how they did the first one. I’m going to wait for the full/final edition and wait for a sale on it. I still haven’t played the DLC for the first one because the path to ownership if you already own the base game is essentially “just buy the whole thing again.” So nah, I’ll wait.
The first one, though. With all the dirty corporations, yeah, it’s pretty obvious what they were going for. Almost annoyingly so, but it was obviously satire. Cyberpunk did the same thing, but it was less satire, more serious. Companies actually going to war with one another.
I don’t know about “cooked,” but I remember back with Fallout 4, it was so obvious the factions were based on the 2016 US presidential election candidates. The Brotherhood of Steel was Trump, might and conquest. The Minutemen was Sanders, cooperation and building/farming. Socialism through and through. Railroad was Clinton, or the liberal view of her, placing the iconic slave freers in a future tense, saving robots from their makers, wiping their memories and giving them new ones, and ushering them away from the Institute. I’m not sure who, if anyone, the Institute was meant to represent. They’re pretty much evil, the others exist in shades of grey, so they could be valid choices and largely, people went for the one that aligned with their politics. A few people disagreed the factions were based on or correlated to politicians, but most people would espouse beliefs and ideals that would align with a certain politician (any of them, I mean, not just one) and they would almost always favour that politician’s associated faction. (Then there’s the achievement hunters who do all of it one time for the meaningless awards. Or the privacy-focused gamers who get all achievements to poison the well, though I think if you get all the achievements, your data isn’t included for obvious reasons.)
Not me just thinking people picked factions because they seemed cool to play in a video game or they liked the faction companion even if it did not align with their real-world politics ;-; or wanting to explore what the story had to offer from every side (I guess that could be completionist or achievement-hunter?)
Never heard of people tracking faction data, so I never even conceived of the idea that you might do multiple playthroughs, one for each faction just to hide who you really wanted to join. Now I’m curious to find the data.
Fallout 4 released at the end of 2015 and was obviously in development for a long time prior… I think you’re reading into it too much if you think the factions are supposed to represent the 2016 election…
It’s not as excessive as Outer Worlds 1, but TOW was clearly meant as satire. Fallout is satire, too, but it’s satirising 1950s Americana. There’s always been some political subtext in Bethesda Fallouts.
It’s not often talked about, but the Institute and Railroad actually first appeared in Fallout 3. The robots were later rebranded as Synths but they were Androids originally — this was before the rise in smartphones, though. Fallout 3 came out in 2008, around the time Android phones started existing, but they were not popular yet. As time went on and Android (and iPhone) became super popular, the game was patched to rebrand Androids as Synths. At least, the last time I played Fallout 3, they were called Synths. I remember speculating that the Institute would be modeled after Apple. Of course this was inspired by Steve Jobs saying Android was a stolen product and they were willing to wage “thermonuclear war” to “right this wrong.” Since Fallout games are about nuclear fallout… well… the story just wrote itself. (That was just my fan theory, years before Fallout 4 was a thing.) But phones and speculation aside, Bethesda had the Underground Railroad helping robots escape from slavers. They also had slavers you could work for. And the main quest involved purifying the water in the Potomac (river that runs through Washington DC, where Fallout 3 takes place), via a machine built in the Jefferson Memorial (Thomas Jefferson notoriously owned slaves.) So yeah, politics in Fallout run deep. Oh yeah, the Enclave, a faction that did not return for Fallout 4 except via mods, was basically the old US government, but heavily fascist. In 2008 this was extreme science fiction. Now? It kinda tracks. The Enclave’s goal was the same as yours, purify the river, except they wanted you to put a virus in that would kill people who were impure. Targeted at ghouls (intelligent zombies) and Super Mutants (think Incredible Hulk, but permanent); it also seemed to target pure humans who were different (Black, LGBTQ+, other criteria — not sure if the actual criteria in the game were named, but that seemed to me to be what they were driving at).
New Vegas a little less subtly, but New Vegas was made by Obsidian… who made Outer Worlds. Not Bethesda. In New Vegas, none of the factions were great. Caesar’s Legion was obviously super racist and sexist, but the Brotherhood of Steel have always been evil outside of Fallout 3 (Elder Lyons’ group was the good offshoot of the fascist organisation) and the New California Republic were well intentioned but spread too thin. I went NCR every time, except for the achievements. Mainly because I liked the Ranger gear.
I haven’t played the second one yet, but the first one absolutely was! I’m one of those “patient gamers” — especially after seeing how they did the first one. I’m going to wait for the full/final edition and wait for a sale on it. I still haven’t played the DLC for the first one because the path to ownership if you already own the base game is essentially “just buy the whole thing again.” So nah, I’ll wait.
The first one, though. With all the dirty corporations, yeah, it’s pretty obvious what they were going for. Almost annoyingly so, but it was obviously satire. Cyberpunk did the same thing, but it was less satire, more serious. Companies actually going to war with one another.
I don’t know about “cooked,” but I remember back with Fallout 4, it was so obvious the factions were based on the 2016 US presidential election candidates. The Brotherhood of Steel was Trump, might and conquest. The Minutemen was Sanders, cooperation and building/farming. Socialism through and through. Railroad was Clinton, or the liberal view of her, placing the iconic slave freers in a future tense, saving robots from their makers, wiping their memories and giving them new ones, and ushering them away from the Institute. I’m not sure who, if anyone, the Institute was meant to represent. They’re pretty much evil, the others exist in shades of grey, so they could be valid choices and largely, people went for the one that aligned with their politics. A few people disagreed the factions were based on or correlated to politicians, but most people would espouse beliefs and ideals that would align with a certain politician (any of them, I mean, not just one) and they would almost always favour that politician’s associated faction. (Then there’s the achievement hunters who do all of it one time for the meaningless awards. Or the privacy-focused gamers who get all achievements to poison the well, though I think if you get all the achievements, your data isn’t included for obvious reasons.)
Not me just thinking people picked factions because they seemed cool to play in a video game or they liked the faction companion even if it did not align with their real-world politics ;-; or wanting to explore what the story had to offer from every side (I guess that could be completionist or achievement-hunter?)
Never heard of people tracking faction data, so I never even conceived of the idea that you might do multiple playthroughs, one for each faction just to hide who you really wanted to join. Now I’m curious to find the data.
Fallout 4 released at the end of 2015 and was obviously in development for a long time prior… I think you’re reading into it too much if you think the factions are supposed to represent the 2016 election…
Yeah thats crazy talk, it’s just generic politics.
Didn’t know about Fallout 4 having such obvious political subtext!
Seems almost excessive.
It’s not as excessive as Outer Worlds 1, but TOW was clearly meant as satire. Fallout is satire, too, but it’s satirising 1950s Americana. There’s always been some political subtext in Bethesda Fallouts.
It’s not often talked about, but the Institute and Railroad actually first appeared in Fallout 3. The robots were later rebranded as Synths but they were Androids originally — this was before the rise in smartphones, though. Fallout 3 came out in 2008, around the time Android phones started existing, but they were not popular yet. As time went on and Android (and iPhone) became super popular, the game was patched to rebrand Androids as Synths. At least, the last time I played Fallout 3, they were called Synths. I remember speculating that the Institute would be modeled after Apple. Of course this was inspired by Steve Jobs saying Android was a stolen product and they were willing to wage “thermonuclear war” to “right this wrong.” Since Fallout games are about nuclear fallout… well… the story just wrote itself. (That was just my fan theory, years before Fallout 4 was a thing.) But phones and speculation aside, Bethesda had the Underground Railroad helping robots escape from slavers. They also had slavers you could work for. And the main quest involved purifying the water in the Potomac (river that runs through Washington DC, where Fallout 3 takes place), via a machine built in the Jefferson Memorial (Thomas Jefferson notoriously owned slaves.) So yeah, politics in Fallout run deep. Oh yeah, the Enclave, a faction that did not return for Fallout 4 except via mods, was basically the old US government, but heavily fascist. In 2008 this was extreme science fiction. Now? It kinda tracks. The Enclave’s goal was the same as yours, purify the river, except they wanted you to put a virus in that would kill people who were impure. Targeted at ghouls (intelligent zombies) and Super Mutants (think Incredible Hulk, but permanent); it also seemed to target pure humans who were different (Black, LGBTQ+, other criteria — not sure if the actual criteria in the game were named, but that seemed to me to be what they were driving at).
New Vegas a little less subtly, but New Vegas was made by Obsidian… who made Outer Worlds. Not Bethesda. In New Vegas, none of the factions were great. Caesar’s Legion was obviously super racist and sexist, but the Brotherhood of Steel have always been evil outside of Fallout 3 (Elder Lyons’ group was the good offshoot of the fascist organisation) and the New California Republic were well intentioned but spread too thin. I went NCR every time, except for the achievements. Mainly because I liked the Ranger gear.
Was BoS really evil in the original?