Fallout 4: Lore, creativity and constraints

Fallout 4 is a game set in the Fallout Universe which is an alternate history universe that diverges from our universe as the Nuclear Age transformed the way civilizations approached the problems of manufacturing.  This universe didn't see the same sort of Space Age that ours did, and it did not feature the move from vacuum tube technology to transistorized technology.  A good reference for this sort of universe can be found in the science fiction of the 1930's to the early 1960's, especially those that utilized nuclear power for their basis of the next generation of tools, vehicles and equipment.  If you read the works of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Anderson, Pohl and Piper, to just pick a few, from that time period, then you will get a very good idea of how this sort of alternate history is founded.  This is a world where television just never caught on and where radio remained king of the airwaves.  Hollywood didn't budge much from its formulation of that era, either, and the influences were those going from radio to cinema.  It is an alt-history that is very similar to our universe and yet distinctly different in many, many ways, and each game in the series uses that as its basis and then offers a view of what it left behind when it all went to hell in nuclear flames as the Great War with China finally went nuclear on October 23, 2077.

In creating a universe for players, a game designer (without regard to genre) must take into consideration how that universe actually functions.  Even when running a paper and pencil campaign, players will learn about the world they are in by interacting with other people, the environment and coming across hidden or lost information.  A game world has a history as its foundations, and that history can and does gain reinterpretations over time as more is developed for that world in the way of interesting missions, scenarios or new places to go.  All of that historical information, be it before the player arrived or after they have started to explore, forms the basis for this thing known as Lore.

The function of Lore is to give a foundation for game play, and when a series of game sessions (or games) within a given universe are created, Lore must be a foundation for that new material.  This does not mean that Lore is infallible.  In fact it may be contradictory based on who is giving it out, what they are aligned with and how they view those who did the activities being recounted.  Lore also encompasses technology, weapons, armor and all the artifacts that are mentioned by stories.  Lore is also a point of agreement for those who form a civilized unit known as a Nation State, though all Nations start at the family level and that is where Lore is first learned.  The Fallout Universe has Lore behind all of this and more, and it creates a diverse background that has been or will be explained to a player either via in-game materials or playing in prior instances of this universe.

When new instances of material for game play arrives in a universe, it is likely to feature many things that are not in agreement with prior Lore, and Fallout 4 is no different in this than any other game in a series of games that has a Lore based function behind it.  These discontinuities form into broad categories and they deserve an examination.

RETCON
A Retcon is Retroactive Continuity change in a series set in the same universe be it fictional or gaming.  This is a break or discontinuity with prior established Lore that offers a change to prior continuity of Lore in the new instance.

There is an Alteration  Retcon that is a change that attempts to explain itself based on prior material or offers a ready opportunity to understand it where prior games may have established one thing but had no way to gain information from the new game area so that a new continuity is established.  A simple one for this is the presence of cats in FO4.  All prior games established that cats had perished during the Great War, period.  The Commonwealth, by not having much contact with the outside world, didn't have a say in this belief as they were not tied in with anything much beyond their geographic region and the few contacts that were established most likely didn't worry about the absence of cats as something to talk about.  Cats are present in FO4 and the belief they had perished was true up to this point and a reason that this notion wasn't shot down was that it was true for all the prior areas in the franchise.  Geographic isolation and limited contact meant that the survival of cats in the Commonwealth wasn't really known to anyone outside of it.  The continuity of the Lore in prior games has changed retroactively with FO4 as there is a reason for this knowledge not to be known outside of this play area.  The Lore has been Altered in this case and a reason that isn't stated but relatively obvious covers it.

When there is an addition to Lore that has been established, that is to say something new that is consistent with prior Lore but not seen in prior game instances happens, this is an Addition Retcon.  In FO4 the category of Pipe Weapons are introduced as the cheap and makeshift firearms made from available components that are not seen in prior games, and are thus an addition to firearms classification.  These expedient weapons actually should have been seen in prior games, but never were, and there is no way to explain why they weren't.  Many reasons could be thought up to cover this, but nothing readily apparent comes to mind, so it just must be taken at face value that these weapons exist in the Commonwealth and are thus part of the Lore.

Another class of retcon is when something is removed from the Lore via the present game.  This can happen when events are described as happening in a different sequence or placed before established sequences without any rationale behind it.  Or if events happened in a prior story or understanding of Lore and are then said to have not happened then that is a Subtraction Retcon.  In FO4 there is a Brotherhood entry in their database that establishes that the potato has gone extinct after the Great War, and yet the potato can be found as an ingredient in Fallout New Vegas.  The potato actually did survive, exists and the Brotherhood had to go through that region to reach the east coast, and thus had every opportunity to know that the plant existed, thrived and was available as something that could be found or purchased.  Part of the reason this is done is so that the above ground Tato plant, that yields fruit as a foodstuff can be seen as some sort of mutated hybrid, possibly with a pre-war tomato plant, yet the Tato is not the potato which is a root crop, not a fruit crop.

Another form of retcon is that of a Compression Retcon where prior activities are compressed into a very short sequence which may exclude some information or even add in new material that did not happen in the established sequencing of events.  This can happen when getting an overview history from an individual or organization, and may be done to justify the way they act in the present by removing or adding in minor material to the past.  In FO4 the Player Character undergoes this with at least one individual, and it is the PC that is not allowed to actually give a full accounting of themselves even in brief so as to try and establish doubt in the mind of the player.  These sorts of retcons are rare, but they do happen.

Now with all of that said, the actual creativity necessary to create a new instance in a series requires understanding the background and history of that setting in the established context for that series.  If you read any series of stories or watch television or film series, the retcon will happen, even by those people who strive to give as much continuity as possible.  Games are not immune to this and often breaks with Lore happen when better technology to run a game appear that allows for new or novel game play to happen.  Games in a series can be judged by how well they handle these changes and their ability to explain either via setting or actual in-game material, the changes that are seen.  Some changes may be trivial and others may invalidate entire prior games in the series based on what the change is and how well it is handled.  Thus Lore can be seen as a constraining factor, particularly when better technology can make an older way of doing things obsolete.

Creativity is unbounded, however, and while a new way can be implemented it can also be explained as to how things have changed since the prior instance of the game which supported an older interpretation.  This is an opportunity for creativity and creators should not see this as a problem but a challenge to create the reasoning and rationale behind the change, which can be done via a Compression Retcon that retells of events since that prior instance and the current state.  This will indicate that there is a back story to the change that may or may not receive a full treatment, but at least it is there as a placeholder.

And that brings on FO4, as it is rife with retcons large and small across the entire game, and fans will notice these as they happen and be left scratching their heads as to how and why these changes were made.  As cited above there are cats, pipe weapons and potatos as examples, but these are not alone in the game, and there are much larger ones that are just dropped in with no backstory, no environmental explanation and no real rationale behind them, and these can be seen as a problem of creative focus and storytelling on the part of Bethesda Game Studios.

A first example, and most glaring, is power armor and the newly introduced power armor frame to which the power armor pieces are attached.  This frame is powered by the newly found Fusion Core that is not seen in any prior instance of the series.  Furthermore the Fusion Core is now used to power Gatling Lasers, which had been established as being powered by expendable Microfusion Cells (MF Cells) in Fallout, Fallout 2 and Electron Charge Packs (EC Packs).in Fallout 3 and FONV,   These energy cells (generically) are utilized like expendable ammunition in any other weapon and are depleted and the spent cell ejected from the weapon.  Thus within the series there has been a Lore retcon to the Gatling Laser from its prior instance with Interplay and its new life in Bethesda and Obsidian adhered to that with FONV.  While the Fusion Core is run down and finally ejected, the entire way the Gatling Laser works has been changed.  Is there a good reason or rationale given for this?  No.  Is the absence of whole categories of energy cells in FO4 given?  No.  Energy Cells, the specific type, and not the general category, are not present in FO4 at all.  The Gauss Rifle used to be a single shot weapon utilizing MF Cells that were in a cluster and replaced between shots, not a weapon with a magazine of specialized 2mm ammo as seen in FO4.

These may seem like relatively simple forms of retcons, and they are.  The purpose is to streamline game play by removing some prior bits of technology, re-purposing others and then adding in a final type that is utilized in specific instances.  There is only an environmental consideration in the setting of FO4's history that could explain this, and that is the advent of Mass Fusion and the lovely fusion generators that appear to still be producing power over two centuries after the Great War.  The setting also gives ruins of Municipal Plutonium Wells where, presumably, older nuclear material was dumped once fusion generators replaced the older nuclear generators.  Yet this environmental explanation, if true, would undermine the very problems of the Institute in the ways of power generation.  These generators represent a distributed fusion system that appears to pre-date the Beryllium Agitator used to get the large reactor going in the Institute.  We know what nuclear reactors look like from previous games, and these lovely yellow devices with a fusion core in them are not attached to nuclear generators, but stand alone systems.  This is, in theory, a known and trusted technology that has proven the test of time and the Institute would have used that same technology to create new power sources as they expanded so that each sub-section of the Institute would have its own reliable power supply.

When changing the Lore of a region and putting it into the past it is necessary to then take into account how it will be seen and understood as time goes on.  To remove certain types of energy cells and streamline game play, and by adding in the fusion core and putting in a number of places to get fusion cores that are active generators, the concept is then not propagated throughout the region.  Even if these new power systems had a decade to be put in place, or even two, they would not totally supplant the older systems which were also reliable for the long term.  One item, the Nuclear Battery, seen in FO3 and FONV is totally absent from the Commonwealth, yet these were not only able to power up drained energy cells (generically), but also served as a form of jury rigged lighting when attached to long life light bulbs or lamps.  Those were seen in many places in the wasteland, and the large number of such batteries points to a widespread utility function of them for smaller devices.  These were subtracted from the Lore in the Commonwealth, and no number of Municipal Plutonium Wells to dump these batteries would explain their absence as they clearly had a function that reached to much smaller and independent technology as they were portable.  Thus no matter how long the Wells were taking in old batteries, the necessary functions of equipment and pure utility in long-lasting power for low power draining equipment would remain.  They served a different purpose from Fusion Cores and removing them doesn't make any sense and, due to the high price of Fusion Cores, makes the Nuclear Battery a cheaper and better known alternative than trying to adapt older systems to them.  And as a battery it has easy to access terminals that allow for it to be utilized in a number of roles that the Fusion Core just can't fill.  The change to the Fusion Core with no real good back-up for why it wasn't used by those able to build technical equipment post-war, and the absence of the older Nuclear Battery means that these are breaks with the Lore of the Fallout series within Bethesda's own tenure as owner of the series.

Equipment Lore has ramifications for plot, storyline, and suspension of disbelief, thus even a cursory glance at what is seen above ground and functioning reveals major flaws in the plot design of FO4, holes which are not explained in any way.  A much simpler break with Lore is that of Power Armor, a new favorite as it moves away from being an enhanced wearable armor and turns it into something closer to a personal vehicle.  This might be something closer to the combat suits of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, or what some of the personnel wear in David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series, or even be considered as a form of transition to a Mech Suit or Mecha form of warfare.  To get that spiffy animation and entry/exit from the suit, plus feeling like you are wearing something with a lot of heft behind it, Bethesda decided to scrap preexisting Lore built up throughout the Fallout franchise, even during its own tenure which kept with the prior Lore until FO4.  That Lore requires specialized training and fitting for Power Armor to put it on.  It is possible to repair such suits without such training, but to actively wear it and use it does require training.  That was always training of the 'fade to black, it happens off screen' sort, and was meant to keep what was special about Power Armor a secret from the player.  Getting accepted by a faction (normally the Brotherhood or, in FONV, the Enclave Remnants) was a reward for helping them and represented the point in which the PC was now able to handle some of the best equipment in the entire game.

In FO4 any illiterate farm hand, junky, Raider, or other untrained individual can just put in a readily available Fusion Core into a Power Armor Frame and walk off with it and the armor on it.  Raiders do that one better by crafting their own armor (which isn't so great but what do you expect of Raiders?) to put on the Frames thus creating new suits of low quality Power Armor.  And there are more than enough Frames, some with armor already on them, sitting unattended around the wasteland so that anyone who has any wit at all can quickly pick up Frame and start walking around like a pro!  Is there a reason for this change?  I mean beyond the spiffy animation and feeling like a tank while using the stuff?  No.  That's it, you are able to feel awesome!  So is anyone else, including that illiterate settler that just jumped into your suit of Power Armor because you forgot to take the Fusion Core out of it.  Heaven help you if they have a Fusion Core in their inventory.  FO4 the game where everyone gets to feel awesome because...reasons?  What are the reasons for this change in technology?

A good start at cobbling together a reason is to see that the prior instances of the same armor had some sort of undersuit as part the entire deal.  It doesn't look like the hard frame system of FO4 and this then posits something like a soft frame with servos that need positioning for each user, and that required training.  By using a distributed, small set of energy cells (generically), the old Power Armor could have a long life in the field, take wear and tear and allow the user to mitigate the weight of the suit through the servos that off-set it by enhancing the wearer's strength stat.  In theory, if the new frame system was made for the old armor pieces, then all an individual has to do, when the frame arrives, is take off the individual pieces of armor and place them on the frame, shove a fusion core into the frame and make the transition from the prior instance to the new instance.  All military in use and precision, with requirements built into contracts that would take years if not decades to fulfill.  The Commonwealth would be the source of this new type of frame and would see the first military replacement of the prior soft frame system with this hard frame one.  This happened so close to the bombs dropping that it never got beyond the Commonwealth and even the Enclave didn't have access to it.  Perhaps it was a test deployment for the entire military, including National Guard units, just to make sure everyone knew how it worked.  Maybe it even had a training manual, though none are seen in FO4, but they are likely given how the military operates.  The Brotherhood may have run across records of this in the Citadel and the first team in, that Danse mentions, found the specs for making this stuff and they then got a production line in The Pitt going for it.

Yes a likely theory can be created to explain this, and it has its own constraints to keep it so that it is geographically isolated.  Now to actually run a vehicle, which is what Power Armor becomes, takes no training, because...reasons!  In the post-war vehicles are a bit on the scarce side, and no one has bothered to get bicycles up and running, which should be relatively easy compared to Power Armor.  Thus the absolute knowledge of how to run a vehicle by those born after the war is zero outside of a few factions like the BoS, Enclave or NCR.  Even with a self-adjusting frame, and all that good stuff, there is no need for any training at all to utilize Power Armor.  Imagine if this stuff was deployed in the field in China and the Chinese decided to get a few sets by staging a raid on a depot where they were being unpacked.  Grab a Fusion Core put it in a frame with armor pieces on it, and then use a Stealthboy sitting on a nearby shelf to get out or even use some form of native Chinese stealth technology that you brought with you.  Is this actually how the US military would want such suits to work?  I mean, really, just get in and go?  What will the Drill Sergeant have to yell at you for at that point?  And just how the hell do you deal with an enemy who has stolen the suit, speaks English well enough to fool you, and infiltrates a unit in a suit of Power Armor?  As production of this stuff was a contract negotiated with a war on, safeguards would be in place to prevent this, and each trooper would be expected to be able to maintain their suit, as well.  How to efficiently use it so that you don't run down the Fusion Core would also be taught so as to lessen the logistics requirements of these suits.  And from Proctor Ingram we also get the idea that all these frames just don't fit all that well: One Size Fits All, Fits None Well.  Want to adjust it?  Bring it to her and she'll do it and, probably, train you to do it for yourself so you don't have to pester her with it.  That would solve the Lore problem: training from the Brotherhood, the good old fashioned method.  All those other pretty suits you couldn't use until you got training.

Ah, training rears its ugly head yet again.  One of the major parts of that training would include actually getting past the safety interlocks of the frame to get into it in the first place.  This is the case of 'You Are Assigned This Frame, Soldier, And Expected To Maintain It And It Is Coded To You' sort of deal.  Just like in prior wars you got issued equipment to keep track of, the Power Armor Frame would be no different.  Why?  Logistics, so the military could know just what happened to each Frame, what its expected use of Fusion Cores was versus how it was actually used, and so that individuals wouldn't go joy riding or accidentally 'lose' one.  Hop in and go would only be for authorized personnel, which does not include that ignorant post-war settler or Raider.  Thus to operate Power Armor an individual would need training, authorization and then be held accountable for the equipment, all of which would have an impact on the post-war world of FO4.  What we get is the implausible hop in and go system that streamlines game play and gets you a chance to feel Awesome! when you haven't done a damned thing to deserve that feeling.  And then push that feeling down when you realize that any fool with a Fusion Core can do this.  But you still got that spiffy animation!

Can the Lore of Power Armor be salvaged?  Yes, and it would need a thorough going-over to do so.  Would have been nice to get a couple of screens of this on a Brotherhood terminal or have some one tell you a bit about how the stuff works.  A couple of screens of text doesn't require lots of game development cash, and it is way cheaper than voice acting it.  The male protagonist, by story, already had training in Power Armor and an authorization for it.  The female protagonist is a bit of a loss, unless you make her day career helping to make the things...remember becoming a lawyer was done by night school, so she did have an unknown day job.

These times I am using the environment to help explain things is creative, though as a derivative of presented material, and attempts to fit the new Lore into the old system of Lore.  These are instances that could be readily done by the game design team and introduced in a more explicit fashion to make for smoother retcons.  Lore is not a constraint on creativity, in fact when Lore is changed an opportunity to explain the discontinuity or change is then available to explain just how far and deep the Lore change actually is

Retcons can respect prior Lore, adapt to it and still offer the changes in an understood framework of knowledge and history.  Putting in artifacts, removing others and changing yet others each creates a lack of continuity and that lack is not an obstacle but a challenge to a game designer who seeks to expand the constraints and limits of prior material.  There is no need to drop them in without telling what is behind them if the environment can tell the complete story, which means more than just inference or guesswork.  Small pieces of primary material be they holotapes, books, magazines or other sources of information in a game setting can do that, as well.  A small or even tiny bit of explicit material can go a long way to understanding a setting and how it is both similar to and different from other, prior settings in the same game universe.

Now if an alternate to the main history universe is being told, which is an alt-alt-history, then so be it, and a new continuity can be established that has few if any links to the prior ones.  That usually gets some introductory material or a few bits and pieces that get to a major plot, depending on if the goal is just to explain or try to abort (or revert) an alternate history.  That last usually doesn't work out so well and leaves a question of just why the game was made in the first place.  The former, where there is a clean and explicit break allows for just some pieces of the old continuity to pass onwards and the rest gets chucked, thus allowing the prior continuity to be preserved without retcons.

Prior history, prior Lore and continuity are not just a constraint for creativity but an opportunity for truly creative individuals to explain just why these changes are present in the new instance of a story in any form of media, games included.  There will always be discrepancies in long running story series which can be traced back through the earliest written works of mankind.  Yet these works, be they religious, historical or fictional in content, do not fail as works when they give a reason and rationale for the discontinuity with prior works.  Thematically they can still adhere to the basis of those prior works, respect them and yet offer changes to them be they putting in that generations of mankind were longer the closer to the state of original grace they were in time to the shifting of weapons used in Victorian England when a well known team seems to continually shift their favorite side-arms.  Some require explicit and purposeful work in explaining changes, while others need merely show the shift in time to reflect the changes within a single time period. There are instances in Fallout 4 where the retcons seem to be just tacked on to try and assert that the potato didn't survive the Great War and to explain why the Tato plant bears fruit...a useless change, by and large, and unnecessarily tries to invalidate prior known facts, instead of saying that the Tato plant appears to be some sort of mutant hybrid formed by genes jumping between plant species in the Commonwealth.  It is unlikely to be a major plot point in any future game in the series, true, but why change something that only needs simple abridging or demonstration that in the localized region a new, mutant plant supplanted prior varieties?

For all that Fallout 4 offers an abundant world to explore, it seems to miss the mark when it comes to fitting in this region of the franchise into the entire past history of the series.  Perhaps the design team wanted to showcase all the great stuff they created early on to the players, and lost sight of the necessary respect that must be paid to prior design teams to keep a coherent world in play.  There will always be retcons in series, it can never be helped as even the best single author will screw up details between stories: it is a given.  Recognizing that these are changes, working them smoothly into the overall world, and then utilizing that newly created material to expand upon the world, that is an ultimate goal of a retcon: to change continuity and establish a new continuity and show why it makes sense.  More of that sort of thing would have meant changing timing of events, leaving the feeling of being truly powerful for later in the game and, perhaps, not changing minor things that worked just fine and were streamlined for design purposes alone.  That last is pure laziness on the part of the design team...perhaps they thought the pre-war world was very streamlined and efficient.  Yet the Fallout franchise demonstrates just the opposite, even within Fallout 4.