can someone please explain to me what the fuck is going wrong with the show? it’s like all build up but no payout…
Jonathan nolan has a history of being great at starting a story, and making it too big to finish. Just like season 2 of fallout, his shows open too many threads to finish. Season 2 has 10-12 story threads, meaning none of them get enough time to actually close the story because there’s not enough time in a season to really tell the story, and it just winds up dead. He can’t finish story threads.
He can’t finish story threads.
that is def what we’re seeing here… what I guess I’m asking is how does such a thing get out of preproduction - one would think there’s be someone standing in the corner going “gee guys we sure do have a lot of dangling threads here and it’s ep8 maybe we should uh start connecting uh”
the production values are certainly top notch. just get someone who understand the arc of stories to write it for fuck sake
Agreed, and it’s only getting bigger. Like dude, even game of thrones didn’t have this many open threads.
yup. a couple eps left in the season and they keep introducing more stuff.
That’s the annoying thing, there’s going to be at least 6 cliffhangers.
I love the detail and the feel of the show but I fear that were already getting into Nolans known problems. Season 2 has so many open threads that none of the stories are getting their proper time. When maximus is a main character, yet he’s had how much screen time? It’s down to like 15 minutes every other episode. He desperately needs to tie some threads together and finish them off or it’s going to get so big that it’ll take 10 years to finish the stories because each one is getting about 20 minutes per season.
How many stories are currently going on? Lucy, the ghoul, maximus and Thadeus, norm and vault 31, the legion, Hank, 32/33, Robert House, and now enclave, and super mutants. That’s 10 right there and that’s only assuming that the NCR and BoS are either dead or meaningless now, which is highly unlikely. So there’s likely 12 open threads, and arguably more if you include chet and Steph being seperate from vault 32. And sure some overlap for a while but eventually they separate again. This is the same problem Westworld had, it just got too convoluted and fizzled out. I hope that doesn’t happen with fallout but every episode this season makes me think it’s more and more likely. They need to kill off a bunch of characters within the next 2 episodes to bring the story back to being manageable. And yes, they have to be killed off, they can’t just team up and combine threads. It would be hokey and not very fallout to just tie the threads together like some kind of avengers team up to bring it back down to 3-4 stories.
I also have a problem with that. Sure in the games you’ll have a bunch of open quests, but how many are you going to do at once? 2 or 3 in the same area maybe? And Hank has felt like a longer quest line than almost any main quest in any of the games.
Lots of articles glazing Todd Howard recently.
Almost like he’s paying some PR firm to fix his reputation which let’s not forget, included calling people who paid for horse armour ‘fucking morons’ and then trying to monetise mods while taking a huge cut.
Is he wrong though?
One could say a lot of disparaging but “not wrong” things about people who buy video games. For us to point and laugh at the horse armor people is self defense at best. The guy just shouldn’t have gone there.
That was exactly my thought after reading that response.
Like yeah obviously that’s not something you actually say… But he’s not wrong. Anyone buying horse armor was a fucking moron. Many micro transaction purchasers are morons. The dolphins and whales definitely are.
That doesn’t mean the tactics companies use to promote that bullshit get a pass though either. His comment can both be correct, and decisions in the wrong at the same time.
And they did it again for the remake. The remake included all of the game’s useful DLC, which included a major expansion, two extra quests, a few features that were added to Skyrim, and a few player homes. However, you had to pay extra for the horse armour (and I think this deluxe edition also had a weapon/armour pack or something like that).
I actually think it’s fine to buy horse armour even if you don’t use it, because you got your money’s worth from the game and wanted to reward the developer. The horse armour itself was stupid. (I had the GOTY Deluxe on PC. It included all nine DLC, including horse armour.) It was just a flashy cosmetic thing you could add. IMO none of it looked good, but maybe someone liked it?
Not true. The only DLC you could buy extra to the Remaster was the new armor/weapon sets, one is a special set of Daedric armor, and the other is a special “holy” armor kinda like Knights of The Nine.
I didn’t buy it, but I know that that’s what the deal is.
So you’re saying Horse Armour is included with the base version of the remaster? That’s weird. I played it on GamePass and I don’t recall being offered horse armour.
That’s the one I have and I have horse armor.
No, and neither was Mark Zuckerberg when he called his (Facebook) users “dumb fucks” for giving him all their personal information.
Being right doesn’t make one not an arsehole though. Nor does being right give you the right to be an arsehole. In fact, I personally think it’s better to be a good, upstanding person than it is to simply be correct.
I hate wrong mfs who claim being good makes it okay to be confidently wrong.
Being wilfully ignorant is evil, can’t even consider them good acrually
I was very apprehensive about this show before it came out. I had heard preproduction rumors for at least a couple of years before.
The show is fantastic. Really. Whomever is making it really cares that they get it right.
It’s somehow stuffed chock full of fan service details yet manages not to be annoying about it. I was losing my mind over the accurate tato plants in the background of that scene where Lucy meets the guy cramming sand into his water filter.
twisted metal is like that too but as a far less serious show. theyve even brought in a group that was cut from the first game. im getting spoiled over here with 2 great video game shows
Anyone who’s still sleeping on the show by now is doing themselves a disservice.
Really though, I could tell from that first real trailer that it was gonna be some good shit.
It’s amazing how many small details they absolutely nailed
Yea, like BoS destroying a perfectly fine automobile with working reactor using a minigun, instead of confiscating it. Or making sure factions behave the way they do in the lore. Very much attentive to the details indeed.
Yeah, they’d never destroy useful working technology. It’s not like they blew up the entire fucking institute or anything.
To be fair, a car they could claim and study with much ease vs the base of a faction that’s creating synthetic people en masse to infiltrate all the wasteland groups is quite a different scenario.
Right but they could just kick the raiders out of the corvega factory and start producing these cars if they wanted to. It’s 200 year old tech, the brotherhood has seen a car before. The stuff at the institute is unprecedented and new. If nothing else it would have made a damn good base of operations in the Commonwealth.
Guess they’re both a little half-baked.
I took the shooting up the car as a demonstration of that chapter’s deterioration and splintering preceding the “plot”.
That’s a good interpretation! It would definitely be interesting to see a BoS that came to fear technology more than preserve it.
I wish they had set that up a little more, though. Ideologies developing is a big part of Fallout, and to me it feels like they’re presenting factions that are drastically different to what we’ve been shown before, without showing the before and at least part of the history that got them here.
I completely agree more set up would have been beneficial. I think the show runners were stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to fit everything into the number of episodes ordered. It seems they generally chose to omit things like this that only prior fans would need, where most of the audience would just accept it as how things are. I’d be interested to see what was originally in the season’s story that had to be cut.
I’m not sure they ever planned to tackle it. The showrunners seem proud to have not played the games.
There’s also quite a few things that are really weird without a lot of explanation, so if they knew they were limited in time why did they change so much that requires explanation?
To me it seemed like the showrunners were far better aquatinted with the games than most writers are with their source material. A lot of things get changed in writers rooms for practical reasons, like moving Shady Sands next to the Boneyard so the protagonists don’t have to travel over a hundred miles over mountains to visit it, or changing Novac to fit with the filming location and action sequence. For the most part, these retcons don’t absolutely break the stories of the past, while providing enough benefit to the current story to be worth it.
This isn’t to say that everything works, but what doesn’t work for me has less to do with lore and more to do elements just not working. My biggest problems with this season stem from the writing not being as tight as the first. I’m also worried that Nolan and Joy will make the mistakes they made in Westworld where they didn’t have a narratively compelling long term plan.
At the same time, none of what they’ve done with the factions surprise or disappoint me. The Brotherhood are jackasses who only had benevolent leadership in 3, the Legion were doomed without Caesar, and House was an eccentric weirdo who thought he was more important and capable than he really was.
Most controversially, the direction of the NCR makes way more sense than some fans want to admit. The NCR has reflected American liberal democracy in every game in which it prominently features. In Fallout 2, it’s a promising force with cracks in its ideals, mirroring the perception Americans had in the late 90s. In New Vegas it’s stuck in an imperial quagmire while wealth inequality weakens the country from the inside, mirroring the war in Afghanistan and the neoliberal post recession “recovery.” Finally in 2024, on the eve of America’s collapse at the hands of oligarchs, liberals who refused to change, and fascists who took advantage, the NCR has collapsed at the hands of Vault-Tec, the NCR’s established problems, and the Legion and Brotherhood (who fuck it all up because they’re fascists).
Honestly, them going in this direction is more compelling, better commentary on our current politics, and more in line with the best that Fallout has to offer. I think a lot of people were too attached to their favorite factions to see the bigger picture, and the writers not doing the same has made the show better.
Like how they faced Dinky the Dino backwards?
Or am I under the wrong impression that sniper lookouts should look out?
Sorry, that’s a little snarky. Plus it was built Pre-War. It was just built and used differently than seen there. I don’t hold any malice for anyone who enjoys the show. I would like to know what little details you mean, though, because I think that’s one of the areas where the show is least successful.
The scenery, the items, the vibe. All of these feel like they’re straight out of the game. The vaults and boxes of sugar bombs etc are absolutely perfect. Just because they didn’t get everything right doesn’t mean they didn’t get anything right. They stuff they did get right they knocked right out of the park.
Hey, I never said they didn’t get anything right!
I agree with you hardcore on the props and the vaults. The vaults especially are finally realized to a proper scale, and I absolutely adore the manufactured community they have going on!
But I wouldn’t call the way things look a little detail in a TV show. The way things look is like, at least half of the show. That’s why they hire prop designers and cinematographers.
When I say little details, I mean stuff like how they treated previously established locations and lore. In my opinion, the little details are the ones that, when they get wrong and someone points it out, everyone says “that doesn’t matter.” Which has been a large part of the discourse I’ve observed for this show.
For instance, the Great Khans. By the end of New Vegas, they are either genocided by Courier Six, forcibly relocated north by the NCR, genocided and wiped from history by Caesar, integrated into The Legion, willingly relocated to Wyoming and allied with The Followers, or dead in battle at Hoover Dam.
In the show, 15 years later, they’ve taken over Novac. Which is also on the side opposite of Black Mountain from where their claimed territory sat 15 years ago.
Not that borders can’t change, but I would like to see some of the history of that!
Here’s a big detail:
At the same time that Shady Sands fell in the show, the NCR controlled almost all of California, had Pre-War spec gun manufacturing, had a currency, healthcare, the largest military in the world, concrete manufacturing, working railroads, five STATES, over 700,000 citizens, and were expanding into Vegas where they all but destroyed the local BoS.
For all intents and purposes, we should be seeing mass amounts of refugees and new settlements. Plus, Shady Sands isn’t located in LA. There was almost no remnant of NCR society other than mention, a junk town, and a few refugees. The ruins of LA are kinda implied to be the Pre-War ruins, so I was just kinda wondering where the evidence of the modern nation in that area from 15 years ago was.
Could they explain all this away? Probably. But they haven’t so far… and I’m getting worried that they think the regional history isn’t important for a series with major themes of humans repeating history.
I could continue to rant and rave, but I’m not here to oppose you on the things you like about the show. If you enjoy the show, I’m happy for you! It does capture the feel of the Bethesda Fallout games pretty darn well, and I’ve enjoyed Lucy and Cooper’s plotlines thus far.
But as a fan of and nerd for (obviously) the story they told in the West Coast up to that point, it’s hard for me to enjoy the show, as they seem to just be ignoring a lot of the history to present the world in a way that feels more similar to the characterization of the world and factions in the East Coast.
Todd Howard: “We’re not going to just let anyone fuck up the Fallout franchise. Fucking up Fallout is my life’s work.”
Kidding. Sorta.
Don’t think it’s Howard’s “life work”, but it is one of his achievements.
Arguing subtleties of admittedly hyperbolic humor is exactly like inserting red hot spikes into the eyes of an infant.
Well, not **exactly…**
I’m not a Todd Howard dickrider, but if you think what happened to Fallout was because of him alone, then you need to look into Emil Pagliarulo’s contributions to both Fallout and TES.
Surely not him alone. But he is in charge so the contributions of others also accrue to him.
True, true.
But man, has Emil contributed a lot.
now its been owned by MICROSLOP.
This.
A decade ago, Bethesda was owned by ZeniMax Media. M$ bought Zenimax and everything they owned and all of a sudden they started making remasters, TV shows and movies. If this was the 90s, there would also be a line of cheaply made toys.
