Hey guys, me again with another youtube video-turned reddit post. You guys really enjoyed my last one, about non-horror games that frighten you, so I decided to give this whole "sparking interesting discussion and debate via /r/games" thing another go.
So, I’ve been thinking a lot about Fallout lately
I saw a post on reddit today about a mod for Fallout 4 that adds seasons and vegetation to the game. It got me thinking about the Fallout universe, how after 200 years everything is still a wasteland and how society still hasn’t made any meaningful progress. Sure, we see small isolated pockets of super-advanced technology, but I’m talking about society as a whole, as well as the environment that surrounds it. Why is everything still a sunbaked desert, why are people still living in ruins, why hasn’t all that much changed in the 200 years since the apocalypse?
I then realized that this is a relatively new problem in the Fallout series. The first two games only take place a generation or so after the apocalypse, and they take place on the hotter, more desert-y west coast, so the design choices are more easily justified. Even Fallout 3’s presentation can be justified when you realize Washington DC is infested with mutants and the area took the brunt of the nuclear bombardment.
It’s a bit hard for society to recover when it’s drowning in toxic waste.
But with the fourth installment in the series, it’s starting to get a little silly. In over 200 years, no one took the time to start rebuilding civilization (technically they tried once a few decades ago but still) until the player shows up and almost single-handedly creates his own state, complete with electricity, farms, and trade routes. This is when I started to realize something:
Ever since Bethesda’s revival of the Fallout series, they’ve refused to move things forward. It always feels like the apocalypse just happened a week ago, and no one seems to be making progress until the player comes along.
This realization got me wondering about revivals in general: video game and movie franchises that come back after a long hiatus, or are passed on to another developer or director. There seem to be just as many examples of revivals being successful as those that aren’t, and I wanted to figure out why.
Let's analyze franchise revivals through the lens of Fallout and other series (note, I may briefly mention some movies, but hopefully this post is game-y enough that it's still accepted). Are revivals worth it? What makes them succeed? Is there a surefire way to make a perfect revival?
Well, let’s take a look.
The following is a huge wall of text, feel free to skip to the TL;DR
As much as I love Fallout 3 (and NV is one of my favorite games of all time), I don't think Bethesda really "gets" the Fallout world at its core, despite bringing the world to life in a way we'd never seen before.
Contrary to popular believe, Fallout was never supposed to be post-apocalyptic. It's post-post-apocalyptic, a slight difference, but a significant one nonetheless. The post apocalypse typically takes place within the first generation or two after the apocalypse itself. It’s an age of complete anarchy, where the government has officially fallen apart, there are no safe havens, and the future of humanity is uncertain. Post-post-apocalypse is about humanity rebuilding, it’s about new societies forming on the ashes of the old, it’s about change and awkward-progress in an unkind world. This is Fallout at its core.
Fallout, at its heart, was about a retro-futuristic, atom-punk society rebuilding itself after an apocalypse. For example, The New California Republic, a collection of tribes that slowly become a united nation, is a fully modern, functioning society at this point. Vegetation and forests have returned in many areas (particularly the Midwest), tribal structures from the post-apocalyptic age are slowly returning to modern society (again, the NCR or even Caeser's Legion), and fragments of the old world are violently dying off and struggling to stay relevant (the Enclave and Brotherhood of Steel).
After Fallout 2, the world was supposed to keep advancing, not stay in ruins.
A lot of people complain that Bethesda didn't keep the game-world similar enough to the first two games. I'd argue that Bethesda didn't change enough. Look at the difference in the U.S. between Fallout 1 and 2. Look at New Vegas, where fully modernized nations are fighting over electricity, where the world is still wild and untamed in the wilderness, but modern civilization has returned in full force. Each Fallout game was supposed to be another step forward, another grand leap into the future of mankind, a look at how we'd change, and how we'd stay the same.
Bethesda, in their attempt to keep the games thematically faithful (while becoming less faithful in terms of gameplay and rpg-aspects) have stagnated the Fallout universe.
This is why the world is still desert.
This is why the Brotherhood of Steel is still relevant in a world where the Institute exists.
This is why no one in the world has done anything to rebuild society in a meaningful way in over 200 years.
This is why people still live in ruins and essential resources are just lying around, not scarce at all, because apparently no one has figured out that grocery stores have food and medicine in them.
This is why people, to this day, legitimately think Fallout 3 was supposed to take place before Fallout 1.
Because if anything, the world has moved backwards since Fallout 2, and it’s starting to get old. If Bethesda really wants to be faithful to the spirit of Fallout, they need to advance the world a bit.
I can’t really blame Bethesda, however. There’s a very tricky balance to be had when you’re continuing a franchise that wasn’t originally yours. Consumers are always very skeptical when this happens, and fear that the new version won’t maintain the spirit of the old. This is a legitimate fear, and I understand why creators and consumers alike are so hesitant to revive a beloved series.
[Note: this is where I reference a few movies as examples, skip ahead if you want to keep your /r/games experience film-free] Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a great example of this. I’m an obsessive Star Wars fan, and I loved the movie, but I wholeheartedly admit the basic plot was re-hashed from A New Hope. However, there was a good reason for this.
When you have a franchise that’s so powerful, that so defines American mythology, that’s so essential to our culture, that defined the lives of so many people, there’s millions of ways to get it wrong, and only a few ways to get it right.
If you change too much, you risk losing your identity. If you don’t change at all, you’ll stagnate into irrelevancy. Why watch that new movie or play that new game if it’s exactly the same as the old ones? It’s so easy to get stuck in that rut, both when you’re continuing someone else’s work, or even when working on a project of your own.
Take Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull for example. There was no correct way to make that film. Indiana Jones is a series that’s defined by the decade in which it was made. We love it because it’s campy, because it’s unrealistic, because it’s silly. If they had tried to update Crystal Skull too much, if they had made it more gritty and serious and grounded, die-hard fans would riot. And, to an extent, they’d have a right to. This ISN’T the series they grew up with. This isn’t what they paid to see.
On the other hand, if they had kept it exactly the same, if they refused to throw in any new ideas, the movie would feel re-hashed, too old school. Critics would be calling Indiana Jones a dead franchise, something that should’ve stayed in the 80’s.
What we got in the end was a movie that tried to strike a balance, but a lot of people would say it was the wrong balance. They kept the movie silly and campy, with the infamous refrigerator scene, while trying to update it with something slightly more grounded than the fantasy overtones that the franchise is known for. Instead of pleasing everyone, they ended up pleasing no one. Viewers ridiculed the nuking the fridge scene, and hard-core fans rioted over the inclusion of aliens. It’s a tricky situation without a lot of right answers.
Crystal Skull could have worked, on paper, but when you’re reviving a franchise you need to do everything perfectly, or don’t do anything at all, which may be one of the reasons JJ Abrams decided to use a recycled plot for Star Wars. It was a safe choice that allowed him to ease us into this new phase of the franchise, while still providing a solid film.
[End movie stuff]
So, why did I decide to talk about this?
Well, I’m one of those people that loves to see a series continue. I love to see the worlds that are slowly created around a continuing franchise. I love the lore, I love the fan base, I love the culture that surrounds our entertainment. I also love seeing a franchise change and expand over generations. I want Star Wars to continue long after I’m dead, I want to eventually see a Fallout 37, but it’s so easy for a series to stagnate, or change so much that it loses what originally made it great.
I decided to make this post because I want us to consider what makes a series great. I want us to consider how franchises change over time. I want us to consider which changes are good and which are bad. Why do some revivals work while others don’t?
It’s a complicated topic, and there isn’t a single right answer. As creators, we need to take it on a case by case basis, we need to truly immerse ourselves in the projects we’re working on if we want them to stay faithful to their original vision, while still giving them enough space to grow beyond it.
TL;DR What makes a good game revival / reboot? How much should a game change when it returns? How much should stay the same? What are some of your favorite / least favorite video game revivals and why? Is there a series you'd like to see revived? Tell us how you'd do it!
Submitted January 14, 2016 at 10:01AM by Psychotrip http://ift.tt/1ZlH9LG Games
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