Fallout (2024 TV series) - First Look

[VampiricLongbow]

https://i.ibb.co/ZY6dTw3/Steel.png

Vanity Fair just dropped a really nice collection of pictures from the new Fallout 23 show (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/11/fallout-first-look), which was developed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. The main character will be Lucy (played by Ella Purnell) who hails from Vault 33, which is located in Los Angeles. Based on the revealed pictures, we can expect a pretty heavy presence from the Steel Brotherhood and their ship the Caswennan (sister of Fallout 4's Prydwen). One of the point-of-view Steel Brotherhood characters will be Maximus (played by Aaron Moten). The show will also prominently feature a bounty hunter named The Ghoul, played by Walton Goggins. Todd Howard was deeply involved with the show's development and says that the show IS canon for the Fallout Universe.

The sets and designs seem pretty spot on to me. I am excited to see if they can actually pull this off.



https://i.ibb.co/FhRznHZ/Vault.png

[t209]

https://i.ibb.co/ZY6dTw3/Steel.png

Vanity Fair just dropped a really nice collection of pictures from the new Fallout 23 show (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/11/fallout-first-look), which was developed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. The main character will be Lucy (played by Ella Purnell) who hails from Vault 33, which is located in Los Angeles. Based on the revealed pictures, we can expect a pretty heavy presence from the Steel Brotherhood and their ship the Caswennan (sister of Fallout 4's Prydwen). One of the point-of-view Steel Brotherhood characters will be Maximus (played by Aaron Moten). The show will also prominently feature a bounty hunter named The Ghoul, played by Walton Goggins. Todd Howard was deeply involved with the show's development and says that the show IS canon for the Fallout Universe.

The sets and designs seem pretty spot on to me. I am excited to see if they can actually pull this off.



https://i.ibb.co/FhRznHZ/Vault.png


On the other hand, it can turn into Halo series.
BUT at least we got prequel to main fallout series or Great War.
Edit: also I kinda feel that the series after Black Isle studios tend to run with nostalgia and retro appeal for a series that is critical about such (even the game—every Fallout games—showed that pre-Apocalypse being a dystopia and entire message is folly of clinging to past).

[MCerberus]

Going to be cautious about this because the entire series has sort of lost the plot a bit. These adaptations have been getting better but I don't know if they can get the the mix right in the sauce.

See the setting is the sad comedic farce of the ending montage of Dr. Strangelove mixed with what is a surprisingly genuine endorsement of the human spirit despite everything. Mass media tends to... flatten things a bit.

[VampiricLongbow]

On the other hand, it can turn into Halo series.

Scratch off "Halo" and call it anything else and I think it would be a cult classic Sci-Fi show. It was fun and interesting... Just not really Halo.


BUT at least we got prequel to main fallout series or Great War.
Edit: also I kinda feel that the series after Black Isle studios tend to run with nostalgia and retro appeal for a series that is critical about such (even the game—every Fallout games—showed that pre-Apocalypse being a dystopia and entire message is folly of clinging to past).

I am very interested to see what kind of themes the show runs with.

Setting it inside the NCR is interesting because the NCR is so large, so expansionistic and so organized, which is kind of the antithesis of Fallout's normal dystopia. So I am intrigued by how they will approach the government and the other major powers in the area, especially the Brotherhood of Steel, which is impressively strong but not strong enough to really take down ort cow the NCR.


Going to be cautious about this because the entire series has sort of lost the plot a bit. These adaptations have been getting better but I don't know if they can get the the mix right in the sauce.

See the setting is the sad comedic farce of the ending montage of Dr. Strangelove mixed with what is a surprisingly genuine endorsement of the human spirit despite everything. Mass media tends to... flatten things a bit.

Yeah the sauce is important. It needs a strong balance between humor, seriousness, apocalyptic and silly. Even the games struggle to capture that feeling correctly all of them time.

[Lord Raziere]

.....yeah with Todd "Do Nothing Unsafe Or Interesting" Howard in control? We're not going to get anything meaningful out of it. like, here's the thing: Todd has always wanted to just write an action movie or fantasy movie in Fallout and Elder Scrolls- its just that he's always been constrained by the medium of an open world rpg where he has to concerned by bothersome things like player choice and filling the world with actually interesting stuff to do.

But the stories he comes up with? they don't mean anything or lead anywhere. Skyrim, you go kill the big the dragon, are the last dragonborn, so on and so forth....but.....what did it all mean? Elder Scrolls 6 will come out and.....we'll probably just get Starfield: Elder Scrolls edition. all the effects that the Last Dragonborn had or could do, ignored, gone. Fallout 4, you go to the Nuka Theme Park filled with bandits, what do you do does any of this have any effect on anything? None. Despite the post-apocalypse dressing its an actual theme park just with guns. the whole story with your kidnapped son? an urgent action movie motivation but poor motivation for a nondescript protagonist your supposed to be able to shape as you want. but follow the story through to any end what does it really get you? your choice of which faction is padding you on the back for being their best soldier.

like sure the story's flow is probably going to be helped now that Todd doesn't have a whole videogame medium to distract him from what he really has wanted to do all this time: make mediocre films/tv shows about nerd stuff. but its still going to be not that great, because what he thinks a good story to tell just isn't that thought through or just not that interesting.

[warty goblin]

Scratch off "Halo" and call it anything else and I think it would be a cult classic Sci-Fi show. It was fun and interesting... Just not really Halo.


I rather like the Halo show precisely because it isn't a slavishly fan-centric recreation of the games, but had both the sense and the guts to make the child abducting space fascists actually bad and lean the hell into that. I don't actually mind when adaptations change things, I mind when they break things that worked fine for no good reason. In this case I think they mostly did the opposite.

Can't say I'm really excited about a Fallout show. The universe has never really appealed to me, so sticking to it isn't really a great virtue. It works OK for a game, because an rpg needs to generate lots of weirdos to interact with, and easily identifiable bad dudes to murder and loot, but neither of these are nearly as important for a TV show as plot and characters, and the world itself is an unfortunate combination of cliche and silly in all the most tedious ways. Or at least the Bethesda version is, I can't speak to the OG Fallout as that comes with the OG Fallout interface, and oh hell no I ain't dealing with that.

[t209]

I rather like the Halo show precisely because it isn't a slavishly fan-centric recreation of the games, but had both the sense and the guts to make the child abducting space fascists actually bad and lean the hell into that. I don't actually mind when adaptations change things, I mind when they break things that worked fine for no good reason. In this case I think they mostly did the opposite.

Can't say I'm really excited about a Fallout show. The universe has never really appealed to me, so sticking to it isn't really a great virtue. It works OK for a game, because an rpg needs to generate lots of weirdos to interact with, and easily identifiable bad dudes to murder and loot, but neither of these are nearly as important for a TV show as plot and characters, and the world itself is an unfortunate combination of cliche and silly in all the most tedious ways. Or at least the Bethesda version is, I can't speak to the OG Fallout as that comes with the OG Fallout interface, and oh hell no I ain't dealing with that.
Well, part of me want to compare Halo show and upcoming Fallout as "Ultimate". Like same premise but immense departure from original source in terms of plotline and elements.

[Trixie_One]

Bit that's bothering me is that they called Walton Goggles' character the Ghoul. It's like calling a character in an adaptation of 40K the Eldar, or of Marvel the Mutant, or of DnD the Halfling.

Ghouls are common enough in setting, be they feral or otherwise, that calling your one Ghoul character the Ghoul strikes me as not trusting that they can sell the setting to a new audience if that makes sense?

[Pax1138]

I had similar thoughts about The Mandalorian back before that show came out, and it turned out all right (at least for a while).

I don't know how much Jonathan Nolan knows about Fallout (thought reports from before said he was a fan), but I doubt he has wiki-level knowledge about all games, so the show is going to be filtered both through what he knows, and what he thinks he can easily explain to a wider audience.

So yeah, The Ghoul. I bet feral ghouls won't be too far into the show though, so my question is whether they'll look like Walking Dead extras, which will be weird next to Goggin's character, or what.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

Bit that's bothering me is that they called Walton Goggles' character the Ghoul. It's like calling a character in an adaptation of 40K the Eldar, or of Marvel the Mutant, or of DnD the Halfling.

Ghouls are common enough in setting, be they feral or otherwise, that calling your one Ghoul character the Ghoul strikes me as not trusting that they can sell the setting to a new audience if that makes sense?

That worries me a bit, too. Though, the synopsis of the character says he's several hundred years old and a legend, so maybe that's just what he is. He's not just some Ghoul. He's "The Ghoul." Well-known enough that he doesn't need a name or he's existed long enough to discard it, like a ubiquitous government agent in a spy movie could be known as just "The Man."

If he's the only ghoul in the show, then we've got some issues. Otherwise, it looks promising and I like the idea of exploring the setting from the perspective of three characters. One new to the world, one who's never known it another way, and one that seems old enough to remember before the bombs dropped.

[Darth Credence]

On the other hand, it can turn into Halo series.
BUT at least we got prequel to main fallout series or Great War.
Edit: also I kinda feel that the series after Black Isle studios tend to run with nostalgia and retro appeal for a series that is critical about such (even the game—every Fallout games—showed that pre-Apocalypse being a dystopia and entire message is folly of clinging to past).

My wife and I loved the Halo series and look forward to another season. Neither of us ever played the original campaigns - I've played some of the multiplayer, but I know nothing about the lore.

While the new show is not what I'd have done for a Fallout show (I'd make an anthology series about different vaults and the experiments done in them, which would seem like a great horror anthology series to me), I am looking forward to this. And 90% of that is Walter Goggins. It may end up being too much like the man in black from Westworld, with him a good guy in the past and becoming something worse in the present of the show, but I enjoy Goggins' performances enough that I think it will be worth watching anyway. (And come on Vanity Fair, it's Walter Goggins from Justified, not Hateful Eight. He was so much more important to that show.)

[Trixie_One]

I had similar thoughts about The Mandalorian back before that show came out, and it turned out all right (at least for a while).

This is a fair point. I will note though that Star Wars is both a way bigger setting than Fallout, and one where Mandalorians are relatively rare to the point that most denizens are unlikely to run into any more than one so it's a more reasonable title. Ghouls though are way more common in a smaller setting so it comes across as more offputting to me.


That worries me a bit, too. Though, the synopsis of the character says he's several hundred years old and a legend, so maybe that's just what he is. He's not just some Ghoul. He's "The Ghoul."

It's been awhile since I've played a Fallout but aren't all ghouls said to be a couple hundred years old? Them all being around from when the bombs fell which was what cause their undying condition.

[Errorname]

Looks visually impressive, but I am not a fan of Westworld and the Bethesda Fallouts are super reliant on the gameplay and exploration because the stories aren't great. Not super optimistic for it.


It's been awhile since I've played a Fallout but aren't all ghouls said to be a couple hundred years old? Them all being around from when the bombs fell which was what cause their undying condition.

Nope. It's just a potential effect of radiation poisoning in this universe. New Vegas has a bunch of feral ghoul NCR troopers as a result of a dirty bomb deployed by the Legion at Camp Searchlight

[Trixie_One]

Nope. It's just a potential effect of radiation poisoning in this universe. New Vegas has a bunch of feral ghoul NCR troopers as a result of a dirty bomb deployed by the Legion at Camp Searchlight

Man New Vegas was such a good game with how much they stuffed into it. I've got hundreds of hours in multiple playthroughs, and I'm pretty sure that I never came across that bit which is neat.

[Darth Credence]

Looks visually impressive, but I am not a fan of Westworld and the Bethesda Fallouts are super reliant on the gameplay and exploration because the stories aren't great. Not super optimistic for it.



Nope. It's just a potential effect of radiation poisoning in this universe. New Vegas has a bunch of feral ghoul NCR troopers as a result of a dirty bomb deployed by the Legion at Camp Searchlight

I think at least part of the reason that the stories aren't as great is the limitations of the media. An open-world game cannot have the same type of tight story that a TV show can have. There are tons of great little stories in all of Bethesda's games, IMO - the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion, Gary's Vault 108 from Fallout 3, the Vanguard story in Starfield, for example. The main plots just don't hold together tightly because you aren't just doing that story. If the main story is finding your kidnapped son, but you can ignore that and do tons of other things instead, it's hard to make anyone care about it, and easy to make fun of. If that was the story of the TV show, then I would expect that the main character would be completely focused on that, and would not instead head over to a pre-war amusement park to take over the raiders who operate out of there.

And in addition to the ones you mentioned, Hancock had only recently become a ghoul in FO:4, through some type of drug, IIRC.

[awa]

personally I think the story of fallout 3/4 are weak even for an open world rpg. Because the story of new vegas was better not perfect but much better (so were fallout 1 and 2 but I dont know if those can be considered sandboxes).

I can think of tons of things that could have been done to make the main story of fallout 4 better that would have left it a sand box (it's the one I played most recently and I spent a lot of time considering its many flaws).

edit
I would love for this to be good but the track record of these tv adaptations of properties I like has been really shockingly bad recently.

[Errorname]

I think at least part of the reason that the stories aren't as great is the limitations of the media. An open-world game cannot have the same type of tight story that a TV show can have. There are tons of great little stories in all of Bethesda's games, IMO - the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion, Gary's Vault 108 from Fallout 3, the Vanguard story in Starfield, for example. The main plots just don't hold together tightly because you aren't just doing that story. If the main story is finding your kidnapped son, but you can ignore that and do tons of other things instead, it's hard to make anyone care about it, and easy to make fun of. If that was the story of the TV show, then I would expect that the main character would be completely focused on that, and would not instead head over to a pre-war amusement park to take over the raiders who operate out of there.

I'd be more inclined to agree if I didn't love the stories of the West Coast Fallout games, especially New Vegas. I think you could absolutely do a compelling TV show out of 1, 2 or NV taking elements directly from the games

[Tyndmyr]

It's been awhile since I've played a Fallout but aren't all ghouls said to be a couple hundred years old? Them all being around from when the bombs fell which was what cause their undying condition.

Not all, but a lot. Enough so that being an old ghoul wouldn't be at all unusual. You definitely run into some quite old ghouls in Fallout 3, it's pretty typical.

I do share the skepticism of this naming convention, but I'm a fairly big Fallout fan, so I'm kind of excited to see what they come up with. If there isn't the world being nuked in the pilot, though, I will be very concerned about the vibe of the show.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

Not all, but a lot. Enough so that being an old ghoul wouldn't be at all unusual. You definitely run into some quite old ghouls in Fallout 3, it's pretty typical.

I do share the skepticism of this naming convention, but I'm a fairly big Fallout fan, so I'm kind of excited to see what they come up with. If there isn't the world being nuked in the pilot, though, I will be very concerned about the vibe of the show.

I don't know if they need a flashback of the world being nuked, but I'm hoping the opening credits are a 50s TV show homage showing the pre-war world, complete with scratchy music and everything. Really ham up the 50s Pleasantville vibes, with some sinister hints in the background like a TV news program showing "WAR WITH CHINA" or a military humvee rolling past the windows. Last few seconds, fire off an air raid warning and smash cut to a mushroom cloud with FALLOUT. Maybe have a chipper Vault Boy figure blistering in the foreground to really juxtapose it.

As far as the ghoul thing, being old is only half of it. He's apparently something of an outlier among ghouls, quoted from the article: "The Ghoul is a legend, distinct among his kind for his cleverness and cunning." Seems to hint he's not the only one, he just has the distinction of being The Ghoul where every other is just a ghoul. The article also says we'll see flashbacks of him pre-war, so I assume he's going to be the POV for filling in how the setting became the way it is.

[MCerberus]

I don't know if they need a flashback of the world being nuked, but I'm hoping the opening credits are a 50s TV show homage showing the pre-war world, complete with scratchy music and everything. Really ham up the 50s Pleasantville vibes, with some sinister hints in the background like a TV news program showing "WAR WITH CHINA" or a military humvee rolling past the windows. Last few seconds, fire off an air raid warning and smash cut to a mushroom cloud with FALLOUT. Maybe have a chipper Vault Boy figure blistering in the foreground to really juxtapose it.

As far as the ghoul thing, being old is only half of it. He's apparently something of an outlier among ghouls, quoted from the article: "The Ghoul is a legend, distinct among his kind for his cleverness and cunning." Seems to hint he's not the only one, he just has the distinction of being The Ghoul where every other is just a ghoul. The article also says we'll see flashbacks of him pre-war, so I assume he's going to be the POV for filling in how the setting became the way it is.

A Crimson Skies style newsreel would be perfect. End it on a war bonds ad, drop the nukes, and then bring in the narrator for the usual.

[oudeis]

If the showrunners focus on the story and the world, this could be big. If they try to use the show to impart their 'wisdom' unto us, they'll alienate their biggest fans and we'll have another tale about 'what could have been' to argue about for the next several years.



A Crimson Skies style newsreel would be perfect. End it on a war bonds ad, drop the nukes, and then bring in the narrator for the usual.

Not to derail the thread, but I've been thinking for a few years now that the world of Crimson Skies would make a stellar TV series, if someone was willing to pay enough to do the visuals right (full disclosure: middling reviews and reports of game-breaking bugs put me off buying it, but I was a huge fan of the worldbuilding and the design). Given the money-coffin that Disney+ seems to have become and the epic underperformance of 'Rings', however, I can't see any of the big streaming players taking this kind of risk.

[Lemmy]

I want to be optimistic about this... But the last decade of cinema makes me think this is more likely to be a "The Witcher" or "Rings of Power" than a "One Piece" or "House of the Dragon".

I hope I'm proven wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.

[Errorname]

These are the guys behind Westworld, which is a show that basically devoured itself trying to prevent reddit from guessing the twists in advance. I'm not hopeful

[Tyndmyr]

These are the guys behind Westworld, which is a show that basically devoured itself trying to prevent reddit from guessing the twists in advance. I'm not hopeful

Awww. That was a show that started out really amazing, and then just kind of dwindled off into nothing. Lovely atmosphere and what not at first, though. Here's hoping they get to do that, and someone else helps them out with the plot.

[OracleofWuffing]

I'll wait and see what it looks like after the modders get their hands on it and fix all the bugs.:smalltongue:

[Lemmy]

These are the guys behind Westworld (...)This alone just killed any shred of hope i could have had for this series...

[MCerberus]

If the showrunners focus on the story and the world, this could be big. If they try to use the show to impart their 'wisdom' unto us, they'll alienate their biggest fans and we'll have another tale about 'what could have been' to argue about for the next several years.




Not to derail the thread, but I've been thinking for a few years now that the world of Crimson Skies would make a stellar TV series, if someone was willing to pay enough to do the visuals right (full disclosure: middling reviews and reports of game-breaking bugs put me off buying it, but I was a huge fan of the worldbuilding and the design). Given the money-coffin that Disney+ seems to have become and the epic underperformance of 'Rings', however, I can't see any of the big streaming players taking this kind of risk.

If you can find the first game, you start out sinking an aircraft carrying sub in order to steal Sir Francis Drake's lost treasure in Hawaii and it never gets less extra.
Also the installer is a radio drama

[Rodin]

My concern is that a Fallout TV show is recursive film-making. Fallout is based off of Mad Max and similar "APunkalypse" settings. As video games it's great fun to explore that setting. But when you circle back around and make a TV show, you're just making a Mad Max knockoff. And that's without getting into other apocalypse scenarios, like the oversaturated zombie apocalypse genre.

I have my doubts that Fallout can stand out in that field without gameplay to back it up.

[Mechalich]

My concern is that a Fallout TV show is recursive film-making. Fallout is based off of Mad Max and similar "APunkalypse" settings. As video games it's great fun to explore that setting. But when you circle back around and make a TV show, you're just making a Mad Max knockoff. And that's without getting into other apocalypse scenarios, like the oversaturated zombie apocalypse genre.

I have my doubts that Fallout can stand out in that field without gameplay to back it up.

I think it's possible, but it's tricky. It is possible to run Fallout as a fairly straight-forward post-apocalyptic setting played seriously. That's what FO76 did at launch and there was a functional story there, if a grim one, while it was the gameplay that suffered by contrast. The hard part will be to keep things manageably constrained. The Fallout setting, especially under Bethesda, is wide but not deep. The setting includes all kinds of things, but interfaces with each one in fairly limited ways, usually in only a handful of locations. So to make it work in a show it's necessary to compress things down and focus the narrative on one specific problem while everything else is mostly background dressing.

The main stories of the various games try to do this, but it often doesn't quite work. Still I think it's possible, using the formula of picking some post-apocalyptic problem from the Fallout lore, applying it everywhere across the geographic focus of the show, and then telling the story of everyone's efforts to confront said problem. The show looks like it'll have three main storylines in this way: vault dweller, BoS, and Ghoul, and that could work well. What I'd worry about is getting the threat right. A lot of the 'bad guys' in Fallout are either just rampaging might-as-well-be-zombies monsters or bizarrely over-the-top BBEG-ruled hordes (I love FO:NV, but Caesar's Legion is just...yeah). Maybe they can reuse the Enclave though, or some variant thereof.

However, given that this is being made by the Westworld people, and that Westworld degenerated in exactly the manner a Fallout series is most vulnerable too, hopes not high. Also, this is an Amazon show, and Amazon's track record on adapting popular genre franchises is abysmal.

[Batcathat]

I might be in the minority, but while I agree Westworld was a bit uneven and flawed, I genuinely liked it all the way through, so this show being by the same people is actually making me a bit hopeful (I also consider Person of Interest one of my all time favorite shows).

Still, video game adaptions have a... mixed record at best, so I'm not exactly hyped for it either.

[awa]

While Fall out certainly has some mad max in there I dont think its fair to say that's all it has. Fallout has a lot of things all its own, the super mutants and ghouls, the death claws and robots, tons of faction that are not simply gangs in leather and hocky pads, and its own retro future aesthetic. You could go serious like most wasteland story or comedy like the baseball fanatic in fallout 4.

I'm at best tentatively optimistic that this could be fun but that's not the fault of the source material.

[Errorname]

My concern is that a Fallout TV show is recursive film-making. Fallout is based off of Mad Max and similar "APunkalypse" settings. As video games it's great fun to explore that setting. But when you circle back around and make a TV show, you're just making a Mad Max knockoff. And that's without getting into other apocalypse scenarios, like the oversaturated zombie apocalypse genre.

I actually think this is overblown. Mad Max was an influence, but aside from broad genre aesthetics they are not actually that similar and they've only diverged with time.

Fallout is very invested in the world that was, with a lot of emphasis on exaggerated 50's Americana, and they import a lot of classic sci-fi stuff in like energy weapons and robots and really prominent mutants which help it stand out. Also because of the limitations of the game engines it's built on there's very little emphasis on vehicles and cars which occupy a central position in every Mad Max movie. And that's without factoring in the West Coast ethos where groups like the NCR have managed to assert an almost pre-war standard of living in certain regions, Fallout 2 and New Vegas are about the end of the post-apocalypse period and new civilizations rising to fill the gaps.

Basically you'd have to really mess it up to make it feel like just a Mad Max ripoff.

[Pax1138]

100% agree. Mad Max movies, though I love them dearly, are just enough story to justify a movie-long car chase and oodles of style. Fallout cribbed the style, but doesn't have hardly any working cars! :smallbiggrin:

The 2 original games and New Vegas were mostly about talking to people in ramshackle settlements who were all various levels of insane, while 3+4 were mostly about delving into elaborate ruins and shooting stuff (with a world that made you feel insane).

What the series needs, like any adaptation decried for not being deep enough for sustain a TV show/movie, is a good story to hang all that established setting and design detail onto. Last of Us had the advantage that the existing story was the point of the original game, so it was "easy" to take it and just turn all the characters and monsters into live-action. We'll see if Nolan and co. have anything to say story-wise in the Fallout setting.

[warty goblin]

The upside to a Fallout TV show is that Fallout is more a setting than a story. Game stories - excepting some Sony first party titles which are long movies you press buttons to advance - generally do not work well for non-game media because they're just hazily justified sequences of extremely repetitive combat encounters with very little engaging plot or character conflict and development. By not being even remotely tied to such a compromised structure, there's some ability for the screenwriters to do something good instead of just polishing a mediocrity.

The two potential downsides of this are that it requires them to actually write something good, and they're still shackled to the Fallout lore and setting. I don't think that's really much of a bonus outside of a game, where it works OK at providing a steady stream of goofy NPCs to do fetch quests for and enemies to kill. Like, the most interesting thing about it is the 1950s retro-future pastiche, but the 1950s are 70 years ago, and the pastiche itself is 25 years old. Pointing out that 1950s Americana is goofy and sucks, actually, is kinda an old shtick at this point, landing about as savagely as one of those ironic fridge magnets about how housewives day drink.

[Rodin]

The upside to a Fallout TV show is that Fallout is more a setting than a story. Game stories - excepting some Sony first party titles which are long movies you press buttons to advance - generally do not work well for non-game media because they're just hazily justified sequences of extremely repetitive combat encounters with very little engaging plot or character conflict and development. By not being even remotely tied to such a compromised structure, there's some ability for the screenwriters to do something good instead of just polishing a mediocrity.


For some genres of game that may be true, but I don't agree at all that statement holds for any games that actually care about their stories. Most story focused games instead have the opposite problem - there is way too MUCH plot and character development for a movie or TV series to possibly deal with. Try squeezing the events of Final Fantasy VI or VII into a single season of a TV series - there's no flippng way you'd even do the main story justice, never mind all the side stories. There's several novel's worth of story in Baldur's Gate III. And then there are others that have a movie plot glued together with combat encounters, like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.

There are a ton of games with worthy plots. The hard part is adapting them in a way that makes it worth the effort.


The two potential downsides of this are that it requires them to actually write something good, and they're still shackled to the Fallout lore and setting. I don't think that's really much of a bonus outside of a game, where it works OK at providing a steady stream of goofy NPCs to do fetch quests for and enemies to kill. Like, the most interesting thing about it is the 1950s retro-future pastiche, but the 1950s are 70 years ago, and the pastiche itself is 25 years old. Pointing out that 1950s Americana is goofy and sucks, actually, is kinda an old shtick at this point, landing about as savagely as one of those ironic fridge magnets about how housewives day drink.

Very much agreed here. Outside of the aesthetic, there isn't much to the Fallout universe. There aren't any characters I want to see on the big screen, no stories I want to see told. You can write a good story to fit into the Fallout universe, but that's not how movies get made. The setting is popular, so the movie gets authorized, then someone has to come up with a story. What made The Last of Us so good as a series is that the story was already there.

[warty goblin]

For some genres of game that may be true, but I don't agree at all that statement holds for any games that actually care about their stories. Most story focused games instead have the opposite problem - there is way too MUCH plot and character development for a movie or TV series to possibly deal with. Try squeezing the events of Final Fantasy VI or VII into a single season of a TV series - there's no flippng way you'd even do the main story justice, never mind all the side stories. There's several novel's worth of story in Baldur's Gate III. And then there are others that have a movie plot glued together with combat encounters, like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.

There are a ton of games with worthy plots. The hard part is adapting them in a way that makes it worth the effort.

There's a difference between having a lot of plot, and having a story that works well for a movie or TV show. BG3 has a plot that works very well for a game, but it would require a huge amount of retooling to function as anything else. Not because it's too long, but because the protagonist (quite deliberately and correctly for the medium) has zero character, so there's no central conflict, no character arc, just a sequence of events and some side characters orbiting around this sucking black hole of non-personality who makes Bella from Twilight look like Hamlet. If you wanted to turn that into a script, you'd get a huge pile of plot that isn't about anybody. People watch TV mostly because it's about interesting characters, and you'd have to invent the central character from almost whole cloth who nevertheless fits seamlessly into an existing plot structure.

[Pax1138]

For the writer of a TV show based on an RPG series, they've just got to be able to do what the player does when they sit down to play the game: create a new character that'll fit into the story being told. That's what they seem to have done, coming at Fallout with a plot of "Vault dweller leaves Vault to help community, winds up meeting new people and (probably) encountering a bigger problem that they then have to confront." That's the basic plot of at least half the games, and the only question is which faction is it that's trying to kill/mutate/take over the wasteland this time.

[Sapphire Guard]

Game stories - excepting some Sony first party titles which are long movies you press buttons to advance - generally do not work well for non-game media because they're just hazily justified sequences of extremely repetitive combat encounters with very little engaging plot or character conflict and development. By not being even remotely tied to such a compromised structure, there's some ability for the screenwriters to do something good instead of just polishing a mediocrity.

I mean, that describes the Last of Us pretty well, and that worked out. On the whole, it's a simple, marketable story that is easily adapted.

On the other side of the coin, Halo has a lot of really good lore, and they just tried to insert the same Wolf and Cub dynamic somewhere it didn't fit. (Apparently Halo Season one iis free on Youtube now, but the link I followed didn't work). Arcane made a good story from complex lore. So did Cyberpunk Edgerunners. There's no reason it can't be done if they just put in the time.

[Rodin]

There's a difference between having a lot of plot, and having a story that works well for a movie or TV show. BG3 has a plot that works very well for a game, but it would require a huge amount of retooling to function as anything else. Not because it's too long, but because the protagonist (quite deliberately and correctly for the medium) has zero character, so there's no central conflict, no character arc, just a sequence of events and some side characters orbiting around this sucking black hole of non-personality who makes Bella from Twilight look like Hamlet. If you wanted to turn that into a script, you'd get a huge pile of plot that isn't about anybody. People watch TV mostly because it's about interesting characters, and you'd have to invent the central character from almost whole cloth who nevertheless fits seamlessly into an existing plot structure.

Baldur's Gate 3 does have a main character, they're called the Dark Urge. They're a player-only character who is tied intricately into the main plot far beyond any of the other origin characters, to the point that not having the Dark Urge around leaves that hole at the center of the plot you're complaining about. BG3 just doesn't force you to play as that character.

But I'm not just talking about BG3, I'm talking about video games in general. There are some that wouldn't make good TV (and Baldur's Gate is one of them, for all sorts of reasons relating to the plot structure) but that isn't the same thing as having a bad plot. There are lots of games with extremely engaging plots with plenty of character conflict and development that are difficult or impossible to adapt. And the Fallout games are very much included in that list - you can take the setting, but doing a plot for them requires a lot of work.

Funnily enough though, my crack film want is one with a zero character protag - Half-Life. I would love to see the original game done as an 80s style "Die Hard on a secret military base" with Gordon Freeman knocking heads while the character work gets done by Barney, Dr. Kleiner, and Dr. Vance. Because you don't really need in-depth character work for that movie, you just need to call Jason Statham up and tell him to put on a hazard suit.

[Errorname]

Trailer dropped. Production values are good, the cast will probably turn in solid performances, it should be pretty watchable even with my bias against Bethesda era Fallout stuff.

My big hangups are that it's apparently meant to be in canon with the games, which feels restrictive and unnecessary, and that I don't trust either Jonathan Nolan or Todd Howard's instincts as narrative guys. I saw that flashback of pre-Ghoul Walton Goggins and got worried that Nolan's going to try some of his trademark weird chronology stuff.

[Ramza00]

which was developed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy.

Just a reminder these are the Westworld people, between Season 2 and 3 of Westworld Amazon said they will pay these 2 people 150 million dollars for 5 years of work making Amazon shows. This is one of the many reasons why we will never get a Westworld Season 5 (not just new execs with HBO / WB / Discovery, these two people wanted out of the HBO contract)

https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/jonathan-nolan-lisa-joy-amazon-overall-deal-1203181858/

Note this 150 million over 5 years is for the work of a mere 2 people, not the entire show. It is salary and benefits.

[MCerberus]

Just caught the trailer on a YT ad and all I can think of is "wow they should have Edgerunner'd this". Way to much flat expression and action and cgi monster shots compared to plot and drama that makes me think animation may have been the better vector.

[Errorname]

This wasn't really a dialogue focused trailer, so I'm willing to withhold judgement on the performances. Like these are good actors who will probably turn in good work, and stuff like Walton Goggins as a zombie cowboy is pitch perfect casting

Also I somehow didn't catch that this was meant to be California? Which means the NCR might show up, and I am not sure how I feel about that

[t209]

On the trailer

- Overseer with one eye (same or different vault, but one of his cups is mouldy so maybe the latter...like one Vault that would become Necropolis after the door failed to seal, at least what the residents seem to think).
- Fight breaking out in the breakroom (Vault civil war? shortage-induced uprising? Another Vault to show another Vault experiment like too many guns or aggressively inducing chemicals in air system?), so maybe main reason why protagonist left to resolve issues.

[warty goblin]

Trailer looked decent. I'm not sure I love the super saturated color grading, but it is distinct. Mutant critters looked fun, with cool B movie design. The question is whether the show has the feeling to match, or is 6 episodes of pointless stuff that in retrospect mea s nothing, goes nowhere, and makes very little sense, before the entire actual plot happens in the last hour and a half.

Also I'd thought this was on Apple for some reason. Being on Amazon raises the chance of watching it to something positive.

[Ramza00]

multiple layers of discourse nonsense

So a new Hbomberguy video dropped yesterday, praise the H Bomb 💣 !

And all I can think of is the Barbie Movie doing a crossover with Fallout New Vegas is Genius and Here’s Why

Barbie image “Do you guys ever think about dying?“ || The alternate thumbnail of the Hbomb 2020 video where it is a ferret in a Cowboy Hat Oppenheimer in his Fedora

[Trixie_One]

So a new Hbomberguy video dropped yesterday, praise the H Bomb 💣 !

Wild watch that, and well worth checking out if you have the time. I did it with several breaks over the course of the day.

Thankfully the only one of the youtubers named that I'd watched was iilluminaughtii, and I'd already bailed on her after her 'apology' video earlier this year of which plagiarism was by far the least of her many sins. Though saying that the Fyre Festival one being so regurgitated was something I had no idea about, and was a bit of a bummer as I had thought that had been one of her better vids.

[Errorname]

With a bit of time to sit on the trailer, I'm cautiously optimistic about this? I'm a little worried with how they'll handle the NCR stuff, but so far this looks pretty promising actually.

[taleteller50]

I don't know...
It seems like their taking it all a little to seriously. You've got talent from West World, a writer responsible for Tomb Raider, a composer from Game of Thrones. It just seems like a lot of talent aimed at making this EPIC but forgetting that it should be fun too.

Twisted Metal came out last year and even if it wasn't EPIC it was still fun. They also pulled off post apocalyptic without constantly putting it in a desert. I'm just afraid the studio and Bethesda will be so focused on creating a mega hit that when it only does so-so they'll wash their hands of everything. They'll focus more on the money (as they have in the past) rather then on creating something interesting and entertaining.

I remember Fallout: Nuka Break. Sure, it wasn't perfect but it was a pretty decent series done by fans of the Fallout world. And it was fun. I want something like that.

[DEZDEMONA]

The Fallout series of games made me fall in love with RPGs and I'm looking forward to the series!

[Rynjin]

I rather like the Halo show precisely because it isn't a slavishly fan-centric recreation of the games, but had both the sense and the guts to make the child abducting space fascists actually bad and lean the hell into that.

ONI and Halsey were always portrayed as "bad people doing bad things for good reasons" in the games. Which is infinitely more interesting than "they are teh evulz" for any "bad guy" type character(s).

[Pax1138]

I don't know...
It seems like their taking it all a little to seriously. You've got talent from West World, a writer responsible for Tomb Raider, a composer from Game of Thrones. It just seems like a lot of talent aimed at making this EPIC but forgetting that it should be fun too.

Twisted Metal came out last year and even if it wasn't EPIC it was still fun. They also pulled off post apocalyptic without constantly putting it in a desert. I'm just afraid the studio and Bethesda will be so focused on creating a mega hit that when it only does so-so they'll wash their hands of everything. They'll focus more on the money (as they have in the past) rather then on creating something interesting and entertaining.

I remember Fallout: Nuka Break. Sure, it wasn't perfect but it was a pretty decent series done by fans of the Fallout world. And it was fun. I want something like that.

Well, if you like Nuka World, good news! The original creator is doing a GoFundMe to make a sequel.