“No, I haven’t sat down to play the games,” said Walton Goggins, who plays pre-war movie star Cooper Howard and his post-war counterpart The Ghoul. “And I won’t. I won’t. I won’t play the games. I’m not interested.”
The reason is actually pretty simple: Goggins doesn’t want to think of the world or the characters of Fallout as elements of a game.
“All of a sudden, I’m looking at this world from a very different perspective, and as something on a screen in which I am an avatar in. I don’t believe that I’m an avatar. I believe The Ghoul exists in the world. I believe that Cooper Howard exists in the world.” he said.
“The best way that I can serve this world and serve the fans of this game, I think, is to go to work every single day and believe the circumstances that I’m presented with,” Goggins said.
The lore in Fallout is grossly inconsistent because of a lack of Henry Cavills working at Bethesda.
There’s still a chance to retcon stupid shit. I really, really would prefer that outcome to "eh the lore in this RPG series doesn’t matter that much.
They have had staff that knew the lore the fact is they decided to change things because it made the game more fun. For example mutants and supermutants should not be in almost any part of the wasteland as the means to create them is not universally available according to lore, yet they are in every single game because they are fun enemies to fight.
Fallout chose fun gameplay over consistency.
You can have both fun gameplay and consistency. In terms of gameplay, Super Mutants are just big, tough humanoids, nothing unique. I do like what the addition of the suicider in 4 does for gameplay, but they’re bullet sponges in most of the games. Bethesda proved they can come up with a regional variant on that enemy type in Point Lookout with the Swampfolk.
As for the Super Mutants themselves, they have at least half-assed an excuse every time they appear in the games, with 76’s Super Mutants kinda fitting pretty well. The more they do it, the less valuable FEV is, but the Super Mutants are really the least of my problems with the lore. However, their constant reuse indicates a desire to establish series icons that they can use to market the game instead of good mechanics (look guys BoS again!). Above all, it really indicates a lack of creativity to me. They absolutely did not have to make a choice between their game being fun and their game having well-thought-out lore.
You generally need a single person with the vision to maintain consistency throughout the whole series, and as far as I know that was not the case with Falout the games.
Absolutely. They switched out creators almost every game. But I would still say that even with the differences between 1, 2, and NV the series still splits pretty cohesively into the West Coast series that tries to build upon the history of its world and the East Coast series that tries to create a freshly-fucked apocalypse with every outing.