Specifically, I think it was a Fallout 4 Junk Jet.
Although I never got a great look at it, so it could have been a Rock-it Launcher from Fallout 3.
That’s right, the games had two different projectile weapons that flung trash at high speeds at your target.
It was probably invented independently by two separate people who gave them different names. There’s not much long-distance communication in this setting - unless you’re the Brotherhood the only way you’re getting from Point A to Point B is by walking, and though there are plenty of working radio transmitters in the wasteland, I don’t think anyone’s operating high-energy border blasters a la Wolfman Jack and spinning the wasteland’s greatest hits from the Boneyard to the Commonwealth.
I was looking forward to this series as something that might be fun to watch. That first episode was long, boring and failed to provide useful information if you don’t know the game. None of the characters are compelling either.
I’m going to throw in a poll here, I suspect this show is mostly going to be interesting to fans of the game and not to those like me without a familiarity.
I haven’t played the game and thought the first episode was meh. BUT I have seen the second episode, which I really liked for the humor and how the characters eventually meet. Hang in there.
Good to know, I was probably going to give the show one more episode, this is reassuring.
I read it as a dumb superstition that people in the wasteland have come to believe.
Yeah, that was my take-away, too. You don’t need to “test” to see if a ghoul is feral. You don’t need to “test” if a ghoul is feral - you’ll be able to tell by the way its trying to chew your throat out. The point of the scene was to give you a head’s up that these guys are a bunch of chucklefucks.
I do wonder how raiders would have accessed Vault 33, but I’m only up to episode 2.
The one question I do have is why did the infrastructure around the external door seem so huge, given the relatively small population size? Like there is this huge bottomless Death Star-like chasm of dozens and dozens of levels.
I voted “Did not play the game, liked the show” but I did, in fact, play the Fallout Shelter mobile game so I guess that’s not entirely accurate.
It’s a door. What does the size of the door have to do with the number of levels?
In the games, there is a “standard” vault door, put in scare quotes because the design varies from game to game. There are also a few non-standard doors here and there just for funsies. Vault 111 for example has a descending door (platform?) that takes you down to where the main door is.
Vault 111 is also a very small vault, for reasons that I won’t get into since it’s a spoiler for the Fallout 4 game. But despite its small size, Vault 111 has a full-sized vault-door, just like most other vaults.
The vault door is supposed to inspire confidence that it will protect you and the members of your vault in everything except possibly a direct hit from a very large nuke.
Interior vault doors are also ridiculously overbuilt. It’s all about projecting the image of strength and safety during a nuclear apocalypse.
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Nothing really. What I meant is that it seemed like they ascended hundreds or even thousands of feet from the bowels of Vault 32. And not like an old mine shaft cutting through hundreds of feet of bedrock. Like it looked like a giant facility meant to support way more than the few dozen people we saw.
I have to say, the show did capture the feel and tone of the Fallout series IMHO (at least as I remember from playing Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas on Xbox 360. Even the slow-mo “bullet time” effect of the V.A.T.S system, without looking like they shoe-horned the effect in.
Canonically most vaults house a population of around 1,000. Vault 33’s might be smaller - most of the vaults were intended by Vault-Tec to be social experiments to test how human beings would fare on colony ships, since the wealthy elite’s plan had been to escape to another planet when bombs started falling. There were, for example, vaults with hundreds of men and only a few women or vice versa, or vaults where the water supply was drugged, or vaults with a population of hardened criminals, or a vault with one person and a bunch of hand puppets.
On the contrary, I disagree with your assessment. Yes, the first episode was long but I found the setting intriguing, I didn’t feel I lacked any important information for the story/plot, and while none of the characters were wildly compelling I wasn’t put off by them, either. Well, OK, some of these people you aren’t supposed to like, but I think you know what I mean.
But hey, if it’s not your cup of tea it’s not your cup of tea.
Oh - and I’ve never played the game, either.
I’ve never played the game, but I just watched this episode and quite liked it. Of course, anything with Walton Goggins is already a step up for me, but I like the other actors as well, and I like the overall tone. I will keep watching.
I have played several post-apocalyptic tabletop RPGs and grasp the genre. I have not played any of the Fallout games. I wanted to like this show. I think I watched the majority of episode 1, but I had to turn it off. If later episodes lighten up, I might come back to it and see if I change my mind.
So far, it’s just too bleak for me. I stopped watching The Walking Dead for the same reason. If a show keeps it simple and has the characters dealing with some fantasy threat like radiation monsters, aliens, or zombies that I can keep at an emotional arms-length, I can watch that. When shows dwell on portraying humans as the real monsters killing each other, remorselessly brutalizing each other, or sexually assaulting each other, I can’t watch it. I already know humans can be terrible. I see real human misery through my jobs (about 35 years in mental health, then juvenile corrections), and my empathy is intact. I get no entertainment value from too-real or in-your-face scenes of cruelty, despair, gore, or death.
Update: sharp-eyed freeze-framers have debunked this. At 36:29 in Episode 1:
Close-up:
It’s the actual Prydwen, not a second airship based on the design. I have to wonder where that mass of “media reporting” I fell for actually came from.
If that actually is the Prydwen, it implies that the Brotherhood ending of FO4 is canon for this show, since IIRC it gets destroyed in all the other endings.
No, there is a Minuteman ending that allows the Brotherhood to exist.
Although I regret taking it all the time in my current playthrough, because I get a lot of snark from BoS NPCs, stuff like “Next time you run an op, how about you call your Brothers?”
But those are the only two endings that could be canon with the continued existence of Maxson’s folly.