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Rome had laser weapons.
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Jul 30, 2022 03:20
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The legion have a doctrinal opposition to technology as a symptom of the old world's decadence to be overcome, so they generally have relatively little of it...except for the tech that Caesar and his elites hoard for their own hypocritical use.
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Jul 30, 2022 03:27
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Right, so bomb collars definitely wouldn't be off the table.
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Jul 30, 2022 03:30
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Discendo Vox posted:The legion have a doctrinal opposition to technology as a symptom of the old world's decadence to be overcome, so they generally have relatively little of it...except for the tech that Caesar and his elites hoard for their own hypocritical use. It's why low level legion army members have spears and knives and high level ones have laser weapons: they think they can justify that you wont fall to decadence if you've 'proven' yourself strong enough to be worthy of technology. It's not that technology is bad, it's that weak people being able to use the technology is bad. Strong people with technology though? Strong people deserve good things!
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Jul 30, 2022 04:36
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Byzantine posted:Rome had laser weapons. Greek fire was actually MFC cluster bombs, ancient peoples simply forgot how to make duct tape
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Jul 30, 2022 04:44
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Byzantine posted:Rome had laser weapons. The Talos Principle taught me this. Thank you based ELOHIM
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Jul 30, 2022 06:15
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KittyEmpress posted:It's not that technology is bad, it's that weak people being able to use the technology is bad. Strong people with technology though? Strong people deserve good things! Ad Victorium, fellow wasteland fascists. The Brotherhood would probably love the Legion ideology if they didn't think they deserved the fancy guns more than the cosplayers.
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Jul 30, 2022 07:01
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I thought the Legion doesn't use advanced weapons because they don't have access to it, so what they do have is reserved for elites who can best use them. they dislike robots because of the fascist cult of action but they're happy to buy energy weapons from the Van Graffsrope kid posted:I do not believe Joshua Graham uses the term "tribals". He refers to tribes and refers to himself as a part of a tribe because Mormons believe they are part of the Israelite Tribe of Joseph. he uses tribes equivalently to refer to the White Legs, Dead Horses, Sorrows and New Canaanites, listing these as the four tribes currently present in Zion. the specific definition he gives of the New Canaanites as a tribe is a "linked family of families" it's not whether he says "tribe" or "tribal" or if he's referring back to his religion's history when he does so - it's the broader idea dating back to Fallout 2 that following the apocalypse some groups of people will regress technologically and culturally (while others don't) and that this regression coincidentally looks like twentieth-century depictions and stereotypes of aboriginal peoples. extending the definition of tribe to include groups like the New Canaanites, casino families, NCR, BoS is kinda worse because why do the Anglo-presenting guys get to keep the clothes and electricity and common language and history? plus I'm generally not a fan of the idea that across 200 years people will not just lose access to technology but also not make any alternative innovations in their stead
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Jul 30, 2022 13:19
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Lt. Danger posted:I thought the Legion doesn't use advanced weapons because they don't have access to it, so what they do have is reserved for elites who can best use them. they dislike robots because of the fascist cult of action but they're happy to buy energy weapons from the Van Graffs The Brotherhood of Steel and NCR aren't "tribes". The casino families had to be specifically uplifted by House to hastily create the image of Vegas as a powerhouse of civilization in advance of the NCR's entry into the region and the White Gloves keep trying to revert back to cannibalism. The Dead Horses and Sorrows are visibly Caucasian and have established American and European backgrounds and the Dead Horse language includes German. Edit: Also the NCR and Brotherhood are full of more POC than the most blatant "tribals" in the game???? chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 15:13
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Also the idea that certain groups would lose knowledge of some technologies (easy enough if the society is founded from a random sampling of people in a specific place isolated for a century or so. No engineers or doctors in that initial group? They can maintain some of what they produce locally and probably keep machines going cause people with that knowledge would be local but tons of knowledge that wasn't used locally would be lost or at best vaguely remembered) and develop into significantly different societies that are then looked down upon and exploited by societies that saw themselves as more civilised just cause they retained/developed more technological knowledge seems reasonable? The issue was some of the coding around that especially in the Black Isle games. If some of the tribals were coded as like, pre-Roman British Celts instead of pulling mostly from non-white groups it would probably come off better. But I felt like that wasn't really a problem in NV. Basically please give us some Midsommar tribals. A Sometimes Food fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 19:35
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I guess the issue is that a lot of the time the distinction between 'tribal' and not can often fall into a sort of whig history, where everyone is progressing towards a similar level and style of tech to that of pre-war civilisations, with that being the inevitable and necessary style of progression.
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Jul 30, 2022 20:16
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Why don't tribals simply level up medicine to 70 and make stimpacks instead of healing powder?
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Jul 30, 2022 20:26
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oh jay posted:Why don't tribals simply level up medicine to 70 and make stimpacks instead of healing powder? Well it only takes 20 Survival to tell Siri how to make healing powder and unless you're gunning down every raider and gecko in sight you might take a long time to level up if you're a peaceful settler.
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Jul 30, 2022 21:04
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Caesar explains why he doesn't let the Legion have technology:quote:You don't get it, do you? The weapons I wield are forged from blood, flesh, sinew, bone - mortal stuff. Fragile, even. And yet my Legion obeys me, even unto death. Why? Because they live to serve the greater good, and they know of no alternatives. House's machines, his technologies - what do they propose? The possibility of victory without sacrifice. No blood spilled, just... rivets. That's not an idea to be put in circulation. If mankind's going to survive this moment in history, it needs warriors, not gadgets. It's a pretty specious explanation. I think the truth is that he knows using technology requires a complex society with education, and that's not his vision for building a wasteland empire.
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Jul 30, 2022 21:28
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I don't hate the idea of isolated groups regressing itself, it just usually comes off disappointing. Rather than groups developing differently they all just generally fall back to 'beat people with clubs' in addition to the - unintentional or not - really unfortunate Aboriginal peoples coding. Could do a lot more interesting stuff with the idea of isolation shaping societies instead. Take the Dead Horses, they have a German influence right? Well maybe those Germans were, I dunno, a bunch of professional river barge engineers on a company outing when the bombs fell. They brought knowledge of their thing to the group and now the Dead Horses have an extensive motorised riverine trade fleet or whatever. Or another group made up of army deserters and farmers transition into militarised agricultural communes that can grow crops in the desert and maintain or invent cool new guns, but they don't know how computers work. I still love Honest Hearts, blindspots and all, but things could always be better.
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Jul 30, 2022 21:32
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chitoryu12 posted:The Brotherhood of Steel and NCR aren't "tribes". The casino families had to be specifically uplifted by House to hastily create the image of Vegas as a powerhouse of civilization in advance of the NCR's entry into the region and the White Gloves keep trying to revert back to cannibalism. The Dead Horses and Sorrows are visibly Caucasian and have established American and European backgrounds and the Dead Horse language includes German. when talking about whether the New Canaanites constitute a tribe, Graham lists the Boneyard, Phoenix and New Vegas alongside New Canaan as the homes of tribes (which, he goes on to say, are just places that can be outlived by their tribes, just as the New Canaanites outlived the destruction of their home). For Graham, the NCR, Legion and Vegas families are tribes like the New Canaanites who just happen to "wear more clothes and understand more about technology" than tribes like the Dead Horses or Sorrows the specific tally of race-by-tribe is irrelevant. Sulik is white but I don't think anyone wants to defend his portrayal in Fallout 2. in essence this is what makes me uneasy about Graham's equivocation between tribes - that it is okay to play into tropes about noble savages and native guides if the character in question is technically white I think it's worth thinking about how we portray technologically-disparate societies and what signs we use to denote such societies. it's true that the Sorrows and Dead Horses have no doctors, no engineers, that's fair - but then they forgot how to make clothes? how to build huts? they experience 200 years of linguistic drift but everybody else still speaks standard English? they stop using names like "John" and "Mary" and start using "Follows-Chalk" and "Waking Cloud"? they lose all concept of the Abrahamic God to the point where Mormon missionaries have to re-explain it to them? they worship a white man as a god and have actual taboos against pre-War ruins? do these follow naturally from, uh, being refugees from the Navajo nation or escaped schoolchildren? if not, where are these referents coming from? compare Mad Max, where everyone has regressed technologically, everyone dresses in fetish gear and everybody speaks some weird made-up gibberish dialect called "Australian English"
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Jul 31, 2022 00:08
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sulik is white?!
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Jul 31, 2022 00:24
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All this talk about tribes and tribals is way more sophisticated than my standard explanation of Fallout tribals: "You know, in Mad Max III, that group of idiot schoolchildren who survived a plane crash? Them. Imagine their village and descendants." Lt. Danger posted:
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Jul 31, 2022 00:39
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You're looking at the difference between a film which has 90 minutes to 2 hours to convey a post apocalyptic society visually versus a 100 hour game that needs to examine what makes a post apocalyptic society tick beyond giving them a funny outfit. Somewhere Emil Pagliarulo stirs from his restless slumber...
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Jul 31, 2022 01:01
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not relevant - see also Horizon: Zero Dawn e: or the Mad Max game, for that matter
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Jul 31, 2022 01:09
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I mean a lot of fallout has really phoned in the 'tribal' aesthetic.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:11
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Arc Hammer posted:You're looking at the difference between a film which has 90 minutes to 2 hours to convey a post apocalyptic society visually versus a 100 hour game that needs to examine what makes a post apocalyptic society tick beyond giving them a funny outfit. You're not wrong! Part of my point was that my analysis is very superficial and comparatively lacking, with an implication that this may have been sufficient given the level of detail and explanation given in the first game or two.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:18
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Lt. Danger posted:plus I'm generally not a fan of the idea that across 200 years people will not just lose access to technology but also not make any alternative innovations in their stead I don't think it's that unrealistic? 200 years is a long time—if you go back 200 years from this very moment, for example, you'd find yourself at the dawn of the Industrial revolution, where the US was still 8 years removed from producing the first domestic steam locomotive. A lot can change in 200 years, but much can also be lost, as knowledge is often predicated on previous discoveries. Simply knowing how to make a steam engine is, after all, almost worthless if you don't have access to fuel, iron, or the ability to make a boiler strong enough that it won't explode under pressure. So for a scattered, isolated group of survivors in a rural area away from major metropolitan areas (Like, say, Southern Utah), it's entirely plausible that their descendants would talk, dress, have far different cultural norms than their ancestors, and have far less access to industrial goods or technology. It's worth noting that, per the lore of the first two games, technological advantages have been made—those advances were just made by the Enclave, the only group in the wasteland to retain access to an advanced (If small) industrial and technological base. This is contrasted against groups like the NCR, who have retained pre-war knowledge from the Vaults but have had to build their industry from scratch, or the Brotherhood of Steel who have made it their entire mission to control and preserve pre-war technology but not to develop it. On a related note, on of my favorite tribal groups from the lore are the Ciphers, a tribe based out of Mesa Verde who were supposed to appear in the original Fallout 3/Van Buren. They're a group that was founded by scientists from Los Alamos who did their best to try and pass down their knowledge to their descendants, up to and including writing electrical schematics on the walls of their settlement. But they ultimately failed, since over the generations much of their original knowledge was lost or ignored in favor of the practical realities of living in the wasteland—so while their descendants have a strong cultural understanding of things like mathematics and how to repair electronics, their theoretical knowledge of why things like computers or laser technology is non-existent, preventing them from replicating or significantly improving upon those technologies.
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Jul 31, 2022 04:33
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Humanity's managed to forget plenty of things, even without apocalypses. People were building communities in the shadows of aqueducts they had no idea the functioning or purpose of. The Egyptians forgot how they built the pyramids. A lot of what we considered common knowledge used to be highly-specialized, and absent a functioning education system or access to sources of that knowledge would likely be again. For post-war survivors, innovating is maybe less of a concern than just trying to survive all the mutated wildlife, radiation sickness, and subsistence-level living.
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Jul 31, 2022 04:46
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Lt. Danger posted:I thought the Legion doesn't use advanced weapons because they don't have access to it, so what they do have is reserved for elites who can best use them. they dislike robots because of the fascist cult of action but they're happy to buy energy weapons from the Van Graffs And I wouldn't have thought this needs to be said, but Joshua Graham's beliefs are not my beliefs and his commentary about "tribe" is not meant to be my defense/hand wave of how tribes are portrayed in Honest Hearts. rope kid fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 06:09
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rope kid posted:I'm not defending the idea going back to Fallout 2. I'm not even defending the ideas in Honest Hearts. I've previously discussed the many ways in which the imagery and naming of the tribes in Honest Hearts were failures on my part. I'm drawing a distinction between "tribals", which is frequently used as a pejorative within the Fallout universe, and Joshua Graham's use of "tribe" and his view of it. No, every character is an explicit mouthpiece for the writer’s own views. Whoever wrote Cook-Cook has a lot to answer for. And don’t get me started on James Garret
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Jul 31, 2022 12:48
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Is the B-29 still underwater irl?
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Jul 31, 2022 13:11
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The Boomers are a tribe.
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Jul 31, 2022 13:16
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bit on the nose having the insular, superior, warmongering, obsessed-with-the-past group be called the "boomers" tbh
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Jul 31, 2022 13:50
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:bit on the nose having the insular, superior, warmongering, obsessed-with-the-past group be called the "boomers" tbh They're the only faction in the game I hate. Other groups might be worse in various ways but they are also interesting and that's all you can want from a story. The Boomers are equal parts unlikable and uninteresting.
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Jul 31, 2022 14:02
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I've always thought that the tribal stuff was something that got thrown into Fallout 2 basically unexamined and not really thought out in a worldbuilding sense because they wanted to have a starting position for the game that wasn't just another Vault. The Chosen One doesn't really act like a 'tribal' in any meaningful way; they are happy to pocket the BOZARs off the first pair of guards they see standing around with them and use them proficiently without any dialogue or explanation, the Chosen One doesn't talk like Hakunin or Sulik and isn't mentioned to wear facepaint or have extensive piercings in any of the game conversations. The tribals are just kind of there, a little bit, because someone in the game development thought it would be neat. Fallout 3 and New Vegas base games don't really have any tribals in the sense of shirtless weirdos wandering around the wasteland throwing spears at geckos and brahmin and talking in broken english -- the Khans might be the closest and with Bitter-Root the writing pushes at the idea of the Khans developing into something like The Chosen One's tribe at Arroyo (which the writing also doesn't do with like Manny Vargas and others). ** The Dead Horses and the Sorrows also have always felt like they were just there because 'hey there were tribals in Fallout 2, let's put some of them over here'. The actual story of Honest Hearts, as in the stuff the Courier does and the choices presented, don't really seem to be about the tribes. I know Bethesda isn't Bioware so we'll never have the real answers but I imagine the initial playthrough statistics for who sides with Joshua Graham and who sides with Daniel were probably about as heavily swung as the Mass Effect Paragon/Renegade choices; Honest Hearts' writing is basically all about Joshua Graham's story and the tribes are just the things that happen to around him while it is happening. ** EDIT: I also almost always destroy the Khans because I am old enough to have played Fallout 1 and 2 at release and gently caress those guys and their fake rear end 'culture'. Bunch of damned raiders who have done nothing but make trouble for me for literal decades. 
NorgLyle fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 14:26
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NikkolasKing posted:They're the only faction in the game I hate. I need to use them to keep Vegas independent.
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Jul 31, 2022 14:58
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One of the few things even somewhat comparable to Fallout's situation was Britain after the Romans left in 410 - stoneworking vanished, no more coins were minted, the cities were abandoned and technology in general regressed, even Christianity fell away to the point that the Catholic Church sent missionaries in 597 to re-convert the island.
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Jul 31, 2022 15:46
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Byzantine posted:One of the few things even somewhat comparable to Fallout's situation was Britain after the Romans left in 410 - stoneworking vanished, no more coins were minted, the cities were abandoned and technology in general regressed, even Christianity fell away to the point that the Catholic Church sent missionaries in 597 to re-convert the island. A quagmire from which the Brits have been trying to emerge for the past 1600 years.
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Jul 31, 2022 16:33
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:bit on the nose having the insular, superior, warmongering, obsessed-with-the-past group be called the "boomers" tbh
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Jul 31, 2022 16:33
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rope kid posted:I'm not defending the idea going back to Fallout 2. I'm not even defending the ideas in Honest Hearts. I've previously discussed the many ways in which the imagery and naming of the tribes in Honest Hearts were failures on my part. I'm drawing a distinction between "tribals", which is frequently used as a pejorative within the Fallout universe, and Joshua Graham's use of "tribe" and his view of it. ok - I wasn't talking about anyone's use of "tribal" in terms of a pejorative though. my criticism of Graham's line is that his reminder of common humanity also serves to obscure why some tribes get guns and clothes and English and other tribes don't. how he uses tribal or if he uses it pejoratively doesn't matter, it's not important. what matters is what markers we use to write and read fictional characters as "primitive" or "regressed", particularly when those relate to real-world marginalised people my general opinion is that the whole concept is kinda tainted from Fallout 2. at most you can play it for laughs e.g. the Kings I say this for clarity, not argument - as you say, you're already aware of this Byzantine posted:One of the few things even somewhat comparable to Fallout's situation was Britain after the Romans left in 410 - stoneworking vanished, no more coins were minted, the cities were abandoned and technology in general regressed, even Christianity fell away to the point that the Catholic Church sent missionaries in 597 to re-convert the island. what I would suggest is that the ancient Britons stopped doing stuff that Romans wanted them to do (for the purposes of empire) and started doing stuff that they wanted to do. you don't need cities if you're not trying to administrate and extract wealth from the surrounding area, you don't need coins if you're not participating in commerce, etc. etc. equally, agriculture does change and develop in this period, because that actually mattered to Britons so the Britons didn't construct stone villas - but they could still build homes from wood and clay, because they still needed protection from the elements. however, the Sorrows and Dead Horses sleep in caves and under makeshift shelters. are they entirely incapable of even rudimentary construction? why?
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Jul 31, 2022 17:09
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super sweet best pal posted:Is the B-29 still underwater irl? With the way Lake Mead is going not for long.
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Jul 31, 2022 17:36
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Related to the era of b-29s: at what year abouts does the fallout universe diverge from our own? I was thinking basically immediately after ww2, but that’s just a guess.
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Jul 31, 2022 17:53
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There is no hard absolute point. Nixon and Reagan both get referenced, for instance. Generally yeah expect things to start going different after the war but things are pretty much unknown except for the decade or so before the bombs fell. Edit: Of course those references aren't some deep attempt at world building, just something that nerds in the 90s thought was funny.
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Jul 31, 2022 18:02
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The Space Race is entirely different in Fallout, but World War 2 is the same. We don't get any information on how the Cold War developed, except that the USSR never collapsed. So somewhere between 1945 and 1961, but with no information on Korea, Vietnam, Cuba or Germany to pin it down further.
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Jul 31, 2022 18:46
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