Poll: Do you like your apocalypse fixable, or doomed forever?

[josemlopes]

I believe it was George Carlin who mentioned how the Earth will basically correct itself, no matter how much the human race screws it up. Short of some planet-destroying cataclysm, it will correct itself and we'll have a beautiful blue and green marble in space, in time.
Also, in case of a zombie/parasite (The Last of Us) apocalypse, well, I'm sad to say that they'd be dealt with in short order. There are enough pests and vermin to strip a zombie to the bone, and any extreme temperatures will cause a zombie to either become to cold and stiff to move, or so hot that their decomposition would accelerate. Also, we humans are really, REALLY good at defending ourselves.

Long story short: An apocalypse might not be "fixable" in the sense that humans can just science - science: verb, to apply appropriate sciences to a situation towards some end or another - everything better. It's more like any apocalypse would be self-fixing... or something like that.

Edit: It occurs to me, mere moments after posting, that I didn't really answer the topic question. So, yes, I'd prefer my apocalypse to be fixable, either through science, or simply bunkering up and waiting for a good while.

Agree, the "I found the cure, hit a button and the world is saved" feels a lot like bullshit in an apocalyptic setting but for it to remain the same for the rest of eternety is boring too so I guess the best really is being in the shitter in the hopes that things eventually get better.

 

[Gennadios]

There needs to be hope in any kind of fiction because fiction is there to convey a lesson. For example, how many issues of The Walking Dead can the audience sit through before just accepting that that universe is fucked and losing interest?

Hope = interest in my opinion.

 

[Da Orky Man]

The apocalypse story can be made poignant as points of light gradually dimming into total darkness as the radiation/zombies/whatever slowly gain ground, or in a situation where desperation and hopelessness prevail, but there's just enough hope to encourage you to go on, or in other ways. I care about poignancy. I don't so much care whether it can be fixed or not, so much as whether it's a well-told story provoking thought and/or emotion.

That's basically what Warhammer 40k goes for. The galaxy-wide apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but you've been able to see it coming for the last ten thousands years or so, with the Imperium slowly crumbling under it's own weight as systems lose contact, get invaded/destroyed or are simply forgotten about.

 

[Lieju]

It depends on the story.
I can see why you wouldn't want something too civilized in something like Fallout, though, to keep the setting apocalyptic.

What I like seeing is that the humans adapt and create new groups and social structures, even if it's hopeless or not 'civilization'. Because that's what happens.

For example, I read a book 'Jälkeen vedenpaisumuksen ' (I have no idea of the English name.) that told about the world after a nuclear war. Humans were doomed, no children were born, everything was toxic, etc.
But humans still survived and struggled, and formed clans and fell in love, hunted and traded.

And that made the book work. It might have been about humans going extinct, but it was about how people acted in a situation like that.

The likely real-world apocalypse is the ecological one, which may claim all of humanity despite it's tendency to not wish to die off.

Even still, it's pretty unlikely all of humanity dies off. Unless the planet itself is destroyed while we're still on it.

Quite frankly, a game or setting where there is no hope and the world is just utterly and hopelessly irredeemable and broken sounds boring. It's kind of why I'm not too into "cosmic horror" Call of Cthulhu style roleplaying games where everything is hopeless in the face of bone-shattering power and mad-God terror. It's just all too... blah. I don't know, for me the fun is in the story and the story is in the human experience of being able to beat the odds, in hope.

Call of Cthulhu really isn't about the apocalypse, it's about the threat of one. There really isn't much interesting stuff that happens after, or even during the apocalypse, when the Great Old Ones have come back, but humanity can delay it, at least.

Of course, Call of Cthulhu still isn't a setting that's optimistic. You can't really defeat them, but you can survive, for a while anyway.

 

[Strazdas]

the thread lied - there is no poll!
I like my apocalypse permanent. if its apocalypse, it should be apocalypse. if we can get a quick fix its not an apocalyse now is it. Goal and hope is good to keep the character going, but it shouldnt be a hope of "im going to save the world by pressing this lever at the end" type of deal.

 

[Griffolion]

-snip-

Call me a blissfully ignorant optimist, but I prefer fixable. Like in a zombie apocalypse. I'd like to think that the opportunity is there to re-build society and live a half-way "normal" life again.

 

[Caiphus]

Playing in a completely doomed world isn't very interesting to me. It's one of the reasons I didn't really like Fallout 3; everything seemed like it had gone to shit without any chance of getting better. The first major town is a dilapidated shanty town with an active nuke in the middle of it. I saw that, and was like "This is ridiculous, what am I supposed to do?". Everything seemed so outlandishly depressing because it was all broken.

Now, didn't play the first two fallout games. This is just how it worked out in my head.

So, minor rant over. I don't like the idea of a totally doomed apocalypse. Because then the only narrative you can reeeeally have is act-selfishly-for-your-own-survival. And that doesn't interest me at all. Might interest other people, which is fine. I mean, DayZ was pretty big, and it was all about selfishness gameplay-wise. As was The Last of Us.

 

[Arakasi]

The problem with the NCR is not that it is ruining the idea of an apocalyptic survival game, though it would be if one were to set a Fallout game entirely within the NCR, the problem with the NCR is that they are bringing back the very same values, beliefs, and tactics that lead to to the apocalypse in the first place.

The first two Fallout games had people trying to bring civilization back to the wasteland too, with varying degrees of success. It is unsurprising that someone managed to do a good job of it. So saying what the game is supposed to be, is rather redundant when the first two games were similar, what Fallout really is, as opposed to a post-apocalyptic survival game, is a post-post apocalyptic survival game, where we watch people (on-mass as opposed to individually) attempt to rebuild and thrive rather than simply survive in the face of both ideological and environmental adversity.

I think if Fallout were to simply be a post-apocalyptic survival game it would have been set at least 100 years earlier.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

its not a case of being unfixable. its just a preference of a nation state vs smaller independent city states.

each has its pros and cons story wise. personally i think there are more options with independent city states over a single monolithic nation like the NCR. while its rebuilding is good for civilisation as such stability makes for a boring adventure zone

Yes, but the NCR is tiny compared to the rest of the world or even pre-war America.

I can see what you are talking about and I wouldn't mind seeing Vault City breaking away and the Rangers becoming a separate organisation (Chief Hanlon your exit strategy was retarded, but your story was inspiring) but to simply go "LOL Nuke NCR" the way Chris Avellone appears to advocate is my biggest worry about the Fallout IP. Even Bethesda's liberal use of canon is mitigated by the fact that they went to the east coast rather than destroy the NCR in order to get that post-apocalypse feel. I would keep NCR and open up new areas like post Vegas Legion territory, or where the Khans went if you went that route.

 

[Wookie 1]

One of the main reasons I preferred NV to 3 was because of the NCR, hell I would play a Fallout game where you were the NCR slowly helping them to bring back the light. 3 was far more horrifyingly dark with the feeling that a lot of stuff needed to be made better before it was faintly ok. So yeah I prefer fixable (and would like to see the Fallout games slowly progress in the direction of the world getting better and better but still being slightly troubled).

Also I want to see the next game in the Mid-West or preferably the Deep South (you could do so much down in Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia, etc).

 

[Hoplon]

As far as I am aware apocalypse basically means great change.

so on this i disagree with Chris Avellone since, to quote Winston Churchill "democracy is the worst form of government, it's just better than all the others"

 

[Flames66]

I learned, however, that one of the important people behind the series, Chris Avellone, despises the NCR. He's of the opinion that including a real civilization to the games has taken away from the idea that it's the post-apocalypse, and everything is pretty much terrible all the time. Apparently he's hoping to destroy it in the future if he gets the chance, but I can't help but feel that's not a good way to think of the situation.

My personal preference for how the Fallout series could progress is to get rid of the NCR. My reasons are that I play the Fallout games to get away from the "Rule of law" and "society". I usually end up siding with small factions who want independence because I believe that complete freedom from government is a preferable existence.

 

[Megalodon]

The apocalypse story can be made poignant as points of light gradually dimming into total darkness as the radiation/zombies/whatever slowly gain ground, or in a situation where desperation and hopelessness prevail, but there's just enough hope to encourage you to go on, or in other ways. I care about poignancy. I don't so much care whether it can be fixed or not, so much as whether it's a well-told story provoking thought and/or emotion.

That's basically what Warhammer 40k goes for. The galaxy-wide apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but you've been able to see it coming for the last ten thousands years or so, with the Imperium slowly crumbling under it's own weight as systems lose contact, get invaded/destroyed or are simply forgotten about.

Depends on your interpretation. In many ways the Imperium's apocalypse happened with the Horus Heresy 10,000 years before the "present". Plus, depending on the fluff (the Time of Ending stuff from recent rulebooks is bullshit imo) that the Imperium for the most part isn't crumbling, it's static on a macro scale, systems being settled/lost/conquered/liberated/rediscovered pretty much all the time. The scale works in its favour here, you can have complete hopelessness and defeat in one place, but the Imperium triumphant in another. The setting's big enough to have pretty much any story you like.

On topic, the nature of the apocalypse depends on the kind of story you want to tell. The kind of permanent crapshoot apocalypse the Avellone apparently prefers can work, but probably only in stand alone stories, where you can be dealing with a short enough timescale for that setting to feel realsitic, but that gets harder to pull off as you spawn sequels. Hell, one of my biggest criticisms about Fallout 3 was that it felt like 20 years after the bombs fell, instead of 200.

 

[Flames66]

its not a case of being unfixable. its just a preference of a nation state vs smaller independent city states.

each has its pros and cons story wise. personally i think there are more options with independent city states over a single monolithic nation like the NCR. while its rebuilding is good for civilisation as such stability makes for a boring adventure zone

Yes, but the NCR is tiny compared to the rest of the world or even pre-war America.

I can see what you are talking about and I wouldn't mind seeing Vault City breaking away and the Rangers becoming a separate organisation (Chief Hanlon your exit strategy was retarded, but your story was inspiring) but to simply go "LOL Nuke NCR" the way Chris Avellone appears to advocate is my biggest worry about the Fallout IP. Even Bethesda's liberal use of canon is mitigated by the fact that they went to the east coast rather than destroy the NCR in order to get that post-apocalypse feel. I would keep NCR and open up new areas like post Vegas Legion territory, or where the Khans went if you went that route.

I think the NCR would face many problems trying to bring society back. One of which would be people like me trying to stop them. I would take the apocalypse as a chance to have society with an option to opt out.

 

[sid]

I've always had the nasty habit of trying to make everyone's life better in fallout, only to find out that that's not what the games want me to do. I can't really go against what they want the narrative to mean, that said I'd kill for a game focused around rebuilding postnuclear society rather than just surviving it

 

[an annoyed writer]

Honestly I'm not misanthropic enough to want an apocalypse that spells absolute doom. I'd rather my species survive, because as fucked up as we are and as many bad things we've done, we've still got a lot of good going for us. There's a reason Humanity is at the top of the food chain on our planet, and I'd rather not see that light be put out.

 

[CrazyGirl17]

Fixable, obviously. Or at least it's possible to get things back in reasonable shape afterwards. A non-fixable apocalypse is kinda depressing...

 

[The Gnome King]

Call of Cthulhu really isn't about the apocalypse, it's about the threat of one. There really isn't much interesting stuff that happens after, or even during the apocalypse, when the Great Old Ones have come back, but humanity can delay it, at least.

Of course, Call of Cthulhu still isn't a setting that's optimistic. You can't really defeat them, but you can survive, for a while anyway.

Oh, I know, I've ran by fair share of CoC games and played in more than my fair share. It's not post-apocalyptic fiction, it's more "cosmic horror" but the prevailing sense of dread/not mattering/no hope etc. is similar in both CoC and some post-apoc genres.

It's just not my cup of tea. The best you can hope for being to survive a little longer? That's just boring to me. I want to *thrive* ...

 

[briankoontz]

A lot of people hold some hope for an apocalypse *in order* for creation to be possible - given that currently the world is controlled by wealthy institutions who oppress us for their own benefit.

The intuition that a post-apocalyptic world causes depression is wrong. We're depressed in our current world and an apocalypse would give humanity hope, many for the first time in their lives.

This doesn't imply that very many current people *want* an apocalypse. The amount of human destruction involved in any kind of apocalypse greatly outweighs the benefits of increased subsequent creation.

But the worse the current world gets, the greater the desire will be for an apocalypse, a kind of "biblical flood" to wash away the corruption and monstrosity of the current ordered world.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Fixable, but within the level of realism established by the rest of the game. Fallout is the aftermath of a nuclear war, you can't expect that to go away in a month no matter how many babies you save. What I do like seeing at the very end is the hope that things will very slowly improve so long as you continue to work hard at it. A proverbial light at the end of the tunnel no matter how dim, even if it will take centuries to reach. Then you go to credits so the player doesn't have to endure that . A 'doomed forever' setting leaves you without any real goals to strive for, something very important in a game.

Good examples of this for me are Breath of Fire 3, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Final Fantasy 6. Of course JRPGs are a lot more forgiving about this kind of thing in general, but I'm currently playing through one where I'm fairly sure the game is trying to trick me into believing that I have just irrevocably destroyed the entire world with my good intentions.

At least, I hope it's a trick. Do not spoil me.