Stevee Wonder said:
Balor said:
Is there anything in Fallout lore that can explain this?
Do you need Fallout lore to tell how people can learn to read? WTF?
Holy shit man... just wow.
Maybe it's a fucking pop-up picture book with Molerats that fold up. Then even you might fucking understand it.
Drakron said:
Balor said:
Somebody already mentioned literacy, and it's a very good question... the Moira questline for 'writing a book' is not only haven for the most stupid dialogue in the game, but if you think about it - it's utterly pointless!
Why? I mean serious folk ... its not WRITING WAS CREATED OVER OVER 4000 YEARS!
RIGHT!
I guess LITERACY CAN ONLY BE ARCHIVED BY THE AWESOME POWER OF SCIENCE!!!! not having someone explain what letters means and how to construct phrases, you know ... HOME TEACHING!
Heh, you think you are so smart, huh?
Well, while writing existed for thousands of years,
absolute most people, except for elite (nobles, priests), were illiterate. That changed only about a hundred years ago, when a lot of jobs started to require literacy, and a system of public education was established.
What do we have in a PA world? Schools destroyed (well, all infrastructure destroyed). People have to battle for survival - spending every waking hour hunting and scavenging for food, working in the fields, etc.
The first generation would be literate, and may attempt to teach their offspring basics of literacy, with varying degree of success. And then they die off.
Next generation may not even bother teaching their children - they have much more problems at hand, due to pre-war food reserves running out, and this skill being generally useless in day-to-day life of a 'typical wastelander'.
And remember, kids, as a norm, are LAZY and DON'T LIKE TO READ (and learn in general). Imagine a typical console retard (redding is teh hard!), but 2x dumber due to malnutrition and genetic aberrations. Imagine him in a situation where he has to toil 12 hours a day just to survive and his parents too, btw. No schools, no teachers, very few (if any) books. No reading with a flashlight under a pillow… cause flashlights are a damn precious commodity. Fuck, some people cannot even afford clean water!
Now that continues for about 5 generations before game starts (likely even more, cause life should be much shorter in general... supermutants aside).
Of course, people in vaults must be literate, and perhaps so are people in large settlements, where they can have luxury of free time, and where literacy may actually be useful (but not all, certainly – only ‘high class’ citizens).
But remember, it's Moira's book I'm talking about. People in Vaults will not see it - they are sealed from outside world. Elite in large settlements do not really need it - they are established already.
Target audience of this book, 'typical wastelanders', struggling to survive on a day-to-day basis... are highly likely to be illiterate.
That's what I'm talking about.