While I'm still holding out hope for more of the Star Trek-style future, in which whatever problems we have now fade as our philosophy and technology improve and we continue to improve as a species and a civilization, there is something very fertile about the post-apocalyptic setting. And the invention of the Atomic Bomb seventy years ago made the possibility of a really global-scale apocalyptic event terrifyingly plausible. We spent the entire Cold War afraid that NATO and the Warsaw Pact would end it by nuking each other into oblivion (and the cumulative effect of such an event would be terrible for everyone else as well.) That threat isn't gone, but we trust more in the notion that no one wants to see that terrible scenario of mutually assured destruction. Let's hope that such sanity persists.
Fallout portrays a world in which such sanity did not. It's not really our future, because the nuclear war that happened was actually in our future - the 2070s, if I recall correctly. Why had everyone reverted to a 1950s aesthetic, despite all the advanced technology like robots? Well, I think it's an aesthetic choice - the 50s were the height of Cold War paranoia and in the US, an insistence on a homogenized culture that was seen as the direct opposite of Communism (one that didn't really have a place for the poor or minorities.)
So we spent Fallout 3 combing through the ruins of Washington DC, and it was really grim. There were very few settlements - essentially Megaton (which, if you're evil, you can destroy,) Tenpenny Tower (which, if you're "good," you can unleash a bunch of murderous ghouls on,) but there is no real structure of society that has come back.
While Fallout 3 does end with a ray of hope - the water-purification system starts working, giving people safe water to drink finally - it still feels like the world is in a state of despair.
A point I once heard about post-apocalyptic settings is that the reason they're so dreary is that people are too obsessed with what once was. If the world's going to end, you want there to be something new.
To me, I think the appeal of a post-apocalyptic setting is not just depression-porn, but the idea that familiar things are reimagined to become something different. And we do see a bit of that in 3 - the Pentagon becomes the Citadel, for example.
So I do have some hopes for 4 - for one thing, the game just looks more colorful. In Fallout 3, it seemed like everything was a shade of grey, brown, or a sickly radioactive green.
I'm not sure when all the Fallout games are set, but given enough time, it would be nice to see at least plant life start to grow back. And what I have seen of 4, there is just more color there.
The other thing that excites me is that there seems to be a theme of building things - you get to build a house (or multiple houses) and your own weapons. You can call a helicopter down for you to ride, which implies that there's enough of a support network for you to have such a thing.
I'll admit that partially this is because of my love for my hometown, but I don't want to go into Boston and see nothing but rubble. I want to see people who have cleared away that rubble and instead built a crazy temple out of the State House, or turned Faneuil Hall Market into an actual market for bartering. It looks like Fenway Park has become a little town in the trailers - that's more my speed.
Because really, with enough time after the nuclear war, assuming that people did survive at all, you'd think that something resembling an earlier society would begin to grow up. I would love, love, love to see Fallout 4's Boston (area, given that I think MIT is part of it, which is technically in Cambridge) less just a total depressing ruin, and instead a Skyrim-like landscape of different new kingdoms popping up to replace the society that was once there.
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