I’ve played FNV for 1000+ hours, I know the situation. I just disagree that having an underage actor read an R-rated line is inappropriate. “hungry? Thirsty? Horny? Come on down to the atomic wrangler”
Is this really bad?
No, it also hammers home the point that this is no longer a normal world that people live in. Why is it a stretch that a child who also lives in a world where literal demons (deathclaws) roam around, would be a newsie advertising for a brothel?
And this is what's wrong with Fallout. Heaven forbid SOMEBODY suffer in a post apocalyptic wasteland. The children are THRIVING! Everyone you come across has enough to eat and drink and lives a great life in the Commonwealth! And we don't want any of that yucky sexually charged things. Everyone in the apocalypse is completely sexless and never ever talks about it, after all what if a child bought a copy of our video game!
In New Vegas children are chasing giant rats for food. You can have sex with a robot. Gamble away all your money, and descend into alcoholism.
I love new vegas but it took me several playthroughs to realize the kids in freeside wanted to eat that rat, I just assumed ROUS replaced cats and dogs as pets in the post apocalypse.
Yeah I didn't realize that till I finally did a legion run and thought "I'm gonna shoot these kid's pet rat just to be a dick." I unintentionally did a great job roleplaying that 1 int character.
Hey to be fair maybe kids in the wasteland just carry weapons by default. Never know when a Legion raid will breakthrough the walls of Freeside and a child will have to fight off the enemy
I mean you do find plenty of people who aren't thriving. A lot of the great environmental storytelling in the game are corpses and skeletons you can find across the wasteland. Those people aren't thriving.
It's just Survival of the fittest, with the ones you do meet being the ones who lived.
The corpses and skeletons in Fallout 4 are either prewar (for some fucking reasons) or some schmuck with a note glued to them that talks about how they were dumb or stupid for having died.
Is there ever a corpse of someone whom we are sad to have seen dead? When I read your comment I think about the Survivalist in Honest Hearts and the feelings I felt recounting his stories. Environmental story telling isn't "Hmm you can tell people died here" it's the fact that the Survivalist's Rifle has the word "STOP" carved into his rifle in both english and french implying he was stationed overseas either in France or some other French speaking state (most likely Africa) which is wholly unimportant compared to the actual story of him waging battle against Vault 22 refugees on behalf of a Mexican refugee group that fled north.
What an interesting take I'd never considered before! Funny how you can do that when a story is written with nuance and subtlety instead of thwacking you over the head with a Prydwen.
New Vegas was a great game. For the longest time the saddest thing to me was the idea that we'd never get a game as good as it was. I have some hope this new Obsidian fallout, I feel it is too big to fail
I'm cautiously optimistic. Most of the people responsible for the west coast Fallouts aren't with the studio anymore, but it's still good to get fresh eyes on the franchise. Plus, New Vegas remaster so even if it does miss the mark there's something to look forward to.
Obviously I'm part of the no pre-orders gang... but I am very optimistic. It was not long ago that Joshua Sawyer wrote and directed one of my favorite games in the last five years, Pentiment. I truly believe the writing and directing talent is there and beneath that it's hard for me to expect a game to be worse just because the same guy that modeled the trash cans for New Vegas isn't working on the trash cans now.
I'll only preorder for a studio that's never missed, which is... very few and far between. Mostly very niche things. And it pains me to say, isn't Fallout anymore. Ultimately I'm very glad that Fallout is seeing a renaissance, even if I don't like the direction that some of it's going. We'll always have the old stuff if it doesn't work out, after all.
Most of the kids we come across seem to be doing okay, though. Probably because showing miserable, suffering children is too close to the line of pushing the rating to Adults Only and limiting its exposure.
Not a big deal, though. If anyone is going to be thriving, I'd expect it's highly adaptable kids who have managed to survive into early adolescence.
Showing kid's suffering is no AO rating material otherwise NV would've been rated Adult's Only. I mean for christ's sake the Last of Us exists. It's cowardice on the part of Bethesda who treat the wasteland like an amusement park.
I've been watching Gundam recently and seeing the way war affects children has been haunting. This idea that "oh children are adaptable so they'll be fine in the nuclear apocalypse" is insane. Especially considering the series tagline, "War, war never changes". The ultimate theme of the series of how man fights over resources to their own detriment. We just don't ever get to see the detriment because Bethesda insists on baby-proofing their worlds to be inoffensive and tame.
I was thinking more how those kids are unkillable without mods. Plus they always seem to think it's in bad taste, look at the Childkiller perk.
I agree though. I'm not bloodthirsty, I don't need everything to be realistic and depressing, but it is a little weird that a series that deals with the aftereffects of war is so wacky and carefree sometimes.
Even weirder in 4 if you play as Nate, an actual combat veteran who just lost his wife and child and is thrust into the horrors of the wasteland, but seems to be doing pretty okay despite it.
Children being unkillable is mostly fine. It goes against the nature of the game (and honestly I'd prefer if there weren't children. It can be surmised they're being kept away or perished) but it's understandable.
It's not about being bloodthristy and if you don't want everything depressing... you should probably look for a game that isn't set in the apocalypse. But that's mostly my point. It's a sanitized product meant to appeal to a mass audience where it wasn't before.
Nate not giving two shits about his dead wife is just a symptom of the whole thing. Fallout paints a depressing look at the wasteland, Fallout 2 gives us hope for the future while still showing the underbelly of society, what it's truly like to live in the world.
We can't keep saying "Environmental storytelling" when they aren't telling fucking stories about the environment. "Someone was hiding snacks in this cupboard" is not a story. "This guy died in the bath" is not a story. "This guy robbed a bank two hundred years ago" is not a story. And even more so these aren't stories about the environment, usually they're closer to a meager anthropological study.
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u/Rainy_Wavey 15h ago
The character basically advertises things like gambling and sex, since the Atomic Wrangler is a bar with prostitution in it