Fallout Let's DISCUSS the Vault Experiments again!

[Davaris]

but we will find hard to believe that smart, capable officials have the same motivation as mustache twirling villains.

Not only that, as people pointed out in the old thread, the idea of social experiments does not go to an interesting place. Instead of having to integrate the vault into the world around it, the lazy designer can make up anything they like and you end up with theme park vaults.

 

[Infinitron]

did this really warrant a thread split

jesus christ

Yes, because I didn't want my thread that was actually about a new and interesting discovery to be infected with a dead horse Codexian brain meme. Blame Gozma.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Whether they fit with the game or not the main issue with the experiments is that they don't make any sense even by themselves, do they?

I mean, what and who in the hell they serve? The vaults are supposed to be populated in case ITZ comes, right? So who is supposed to benefit from the results of these experiments?

 

[DeepOcean]

Social experiments are silly, especially as NV continued the trend from Fallout 3 of making all vaults complete failures what is even more silly. The idea of turning the vaults on thematic mysterious dungeons is fun, I wont deny (the story of Vault 11, for example, is just pure gold.) but I don't like it not because its silly but because it is a lost opportunity. The reason most vaults are social experiments that go wrong is to cut work for the designers so they don't need to make a whole city for each vault and to make all the vaults cool on a different way.

I don't like the social experiments idea because its alternative of all those vaults becomming cities with different cultures is way more attractive to me even if that could be a bit outside the budget they had for Fallout 1 and 2. Imagine an Alexander, the Great scenario on Fallout where all the vaults made city states after the nuclear war and are struggling to survive with the lack of resources and hostile locals but some stronger vault city lead by a charismatic leader tries to conquer the other vault cities. It would be more insteresting origin for NCR than Shady Sands suddenly forming an empire for no reason.

 

[Davaris]

Whether they fit with the game or not the main issue with the experiments is that they don't make any sense even by themselves, do they?

I mean, what and who in the hell they serve? The vaults are supposed to be populated in case ITZ comes, right? So who is supposed to benefit from the results of these experiments?

You don't want to know.

Spoiler

The U.S. government's real plan to survive a nuclear war was simply to find another planet to live on after blowing up Earth. A spacecraft designed to ferry the human race to another planet was either under construction or ready to go before the War. The plan was for the government to flee to the oil rig, and then leave in a spaceship for another planet.[9]

Any voyage to space or recolonization of Earth would have been very difficult and fraught with unforeseeable complications. Thus, many of the Vaults were designed to have some sort of critical flaw in order to test how an average American would be able to deal with various circumstances.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Enclave

 

[FeelTheRads]

Well, OK, the "government" can remake humanity all by itself on another planet, that I find totally believable, but how will they find the results of the experiments when they're on that other planet?

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Lore-wise, the vaults make perfect sense. The 1950s/60s were full of insane government experiments and I think the alternate-history timeline builds on that. Hell, Dr. Strangelove kinda parodies the vault idea, and it works because it's totally believable that a circa 1950s government would, under duress, come up with such a bizarre plan. If anything, the notion of a vault system is more sane than some of the actual, real-life shit world governments have thought up.

Not to mention that X-Files were airing back then and people making the game were fans of it.

 

[Davaris]

how will they find the results of the experiments when they're on that other planet?

 

[Zdzisiu]

Well, OK, the "government" can remake humanity all by itself on another planet, that I find totally believable, but how will they find the results of the experiments when they're on that other planet?

With a giant telescope you dumbass! :D

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Well, OK, the "government" can remake humanity all by itself on another planet, that I find totally believable, but how will they find the results of the experiments when they're on that other planet?

They'd move to another planet after the experiments are complete.

It could have been a backup plan in case the Earth will no longer be habitable in a long term.

You don't want to know.

Spoiler

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Enclave

I wonder if that part of the story existed when the experiment idea was invented. Or if it's a later addition by MCA and Sawyer.

 

[FeelTheRads]

I for one think it has something to do with adra.

 

[Melcar]

The shit is retarded. One of the things that made me hate FO2 and FO extended fiction. In the original FO I always had the impression that the Vaults failed because in the end there was no real plan. It was just something to sell to the panicked mobs.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

The shit is retarded. One of the things that made me hate FO2 and FO extended fiction. In the original FO I always had the impression that the Vaults failed because in the end there was no real plan. It was just something to sell to the panicked mobs.

True. It's even more visible in the original V15 document where the Vault 15 also suffered a Waterchip malfunction.
The whole vault location holodisk just reeked of false advertising.

 

[Night Goat]

Do people really cant tell the difference between something that makes sense within universe and something that doesnt?
Yes, suspension of disbelief works like that, we can believe mages can throw fireballs in a given story, but we will find hard to believe that smart, capable officials have the same motivation as mustache twirling villains. I know you are trying to be funny, but when i read shit like this i find it painful.

The existence of smart, capable officials would kill my suspension of disbelief.

 

[Tigranes]

It's a good conceit to generate interesting content, so I don't think it's a bad idea to begin with. You want to keep expanding on the Fallout universe, well you want there to be more to Vaults than just what you learn in FO1. You want some vaults to be very different, etc.

As DeepOcean said the real mistake was not to think through what would happen to the 'no joke' Vaults. It's a much more compelling story if instead of seemingly every Vault out there being sabotaged, you have a few sabotaged, then you also have the 'good' Vaults which were built to the best intentions and then you learn how they nevertheless failed.

 

[Drakron]

Social experiments are silly, especially as NV continued the trend from Fallout 3 of making all vaults complete failures what is even more silly.

New Vegas had 7 Vaults, we can ignore one since it was just the Securitron Vault.

Of those Vault 21 didnt failed and wasnt meant as a control Vault either.

The idea of turning the vaults on thematic mysterious dungeons is fun, I wont deny (the story of Vault 11, for example, is just pure gold.) but I don't like it not because its silly but because it is a lost opportunity. The reason most vaults are social experiments that go wrong is to cut work for the designers so they don't need to make a whole city for each vault and to make all the vaults cool on a different way.

Its a game, its not literature so you can masturbate all over it or bitch about it whatever fucking message they are preaching about.

They always been thematic, reason why FO1 and FO2 didnt use then is because they had better titlesets for dungeons, a military base is more cool that yet another Vault, Fallout 3 had a extremely limited set selection and thus Vaults were overused as dungeons, New Vegas inherent it and simply had to do with what they had.

I don't like the social experiments idea because its alternative of all those vaults becomming cities with different cultures is way more attractive to me even if that could be a bit outside the budget they had for Fallout 1 and 2. Imagine an Alexander, the Great scenario on Fallout where all the vaults made city states after the nuclear war and are struggling to survive with the lack of resources and hostile locals but some stronger vault city lead by a charismatic leader tries to conquer the other vault cities. It would be more insteresting origin for NCR than Shady Sands suddenly forming an empire for no reason.

They wouldnt.

If social experiments are bad what you are saying is simply lubricious, it would not happen and this is once again the fucking idiotic argument about "lack of resources" and other bullshit of people that cannot understand that nuclear would not regress mankind not to the stone ago, not to the ice age but to a evolutionary state that predates mammals.

I gone over this, humans are social creatures and in 200 years we would not have just one NCR ... we would have several. The old order would be gone but we would simply replace old nations by new ones.

 

[Davaris]

It's a good conceit to generate interesting content, so I don't think it's a bad idea to begin with. You want to keep expanding on the Fallout universe, well you want there to be more to Vaults than just what you learn in FO1. You want some vaults to be very different, etc.

As DeepOcean said the real mistake was not to think through what would happen to the 'no joke' Vaults. It's a much more compelling story if instead of seemingly every Vault out there being sabotaged, you have a few sabotaged, then you also have the 'good' Vaults which were built to the best intentions and then you learn how they nevertheless failed.

I guess it comes down to whether or not you liked the Fallout sequels. It doesn't matter to me if they make more Fallouts if I don't like them.

I gone over this, humans are social creatures and in 200 years we would not have just one NCR ... we would have several. The old order would be gone but we would simply replace old nations by new ones.

Yeah, all you would need to do is let time pass. The vaults would open one way or another and the outside world would change the people inside. And people in isolation form their own customs, just as they've done all through history.

 

[Melcar]

Jews. Just saying.

 

[Gozma]

Can you rename this thread to something I would have named it like everyone that likes theme vaults deserves to die

FO2: everything is ruined

 

[GarfunkeL]

Problem is that Bethesda took it too far because they are lazy hacks. The idea that some vaults double as social/psychological experiments does fit in with the general themes present in the original and F2 - but the Bethesda made it AWESUM and turned every Vault an unique experiment and some with ridiculous hypothesis to test out, though I guess MCA didn't help with some of the stuff he included in the Bible:

Populated by twenty men, ten women, and one panther.

Populated by one man and a crate full of puppets.

Of the one thousand people who entered, there was only one woman.

Of the one thousand people who entered, there was only one man.

The food extruders were designed to produce only a thin, watery gruel.

No light bulbs of more than 40 watts were provided.

No one in this vault was over the age of 15 when they entered. Parents were intentionally redirected to other vaults.

Psychoactive drugs were released into the air filtration system 10 days after the door was sealed.

The vault houses a cloning lab and all (surviving) residents are clones of one man called Gary.

Populated largely by renowned musicians, this vault was a test bed for a white noise-based system for implanting combat-oriented posthypnotic suggestions.

Evaluation of performance of an omnipotent, dictatorial overseer in a closed community. This vault was intended to never open.

and before someone cries that I included the Penny Arcade stuff, that was an official comic created for F3 PR with Bethesda, so the PA guys weren't just pulling that stuff out of their asses.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Yes, because I didn't want my thread that was actually about a new and interesting discovery to be infected with a dead horse Codexian brain meme

good job, now nobody will post again in that other thread

 

[Slow James]

The Vault with the post-hypnotic white noise is one I could see actually being useful. How much money and research was spent trying to make spies who could blend in, or even be unaware that their own cover was a cover?

If you had the means of a long-term study which could show the effectiveness of creating an army of obedient soldiers that could be activated with the flip of a switch, that would be worth investigating.


After all... if the Vaults weren't intended to actually save humanity (that was the Enclave's job), then they would view everyone in the Vaults as disposable. If you have the means to monitor people who are completely at your disposal for how you designed their environment, why NOT try and create some bizarre scenarios?

True, some are just so stupid as to defy explanation, but the idea itself - that the Vaults were a scam to pocket money and the people who enrolled could be treated to various tests just to see what would happen because it didn't matter if they lived or died - isn't that inane on the face of it.

 

[Melcar]

In before the war was fake. May as well. What better excuse so they could get everyone inside vaults for there experiments.

 

[Jaesun]

The war was a fake. The Reapers indoctrinated us all to think it was real.

 

[Sykar]

No, it is that bad, it's completely retarded, comic book style Evil Scientists doing Mad Science for the lulz. All issues of ethics and practicality aside, there is no fucking way anyone would even consider spending that much time and resources on a psychology experiment. The whole thing is completely immersion breaking and the main reason why I consider Fallout 1 to be the only real game in the series.

Since such experiments have never happened in real life, amirite?