Fallout: The Amazon Series

From the producers of 2016's Westworld, in partnership with Bethesda Softworks and Amazon Studios, comes a live-action series based on the Fallout franchise. Bethesda.net article confirming the news.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Jul 2nd 2020 at 1:56:21 AM

Everything Bethesda touches turns to poison.

So, anyone taking bets on how bad a trainwreck this ends up being?

Given it has Amazon money and Westworld’s executives, it will at least look nice.

I think we should at least give it a chance for now, we don't know how much Bethesda will be involved with the development.

I hope it's just straight up Fallout 3.

I'm personally hoping that it's an adaptation of Fallout 1.

What about Fallout 2?

Fallout 1 would make a great first season, if only to explain the origins of supermutants. Parts of Fallout 2 could be used in a subsequent season to explain the origins of the Enclave and the truth behind the Vault program.

Were the Vaults really only explained in the second game? "The Vaults were never meant to save anyone" is such a core part of the series that I assumed it had been there from the very beginning.

I believe that in the first game Vault Tek was meant to be incompetent rather than malicious and the vaults failing were just unintended accidents. I think it was Fallout 2 that retconed in the secret experiment aspect while Fallout 3 exaggerated the nature of the experiments.

Yes, the Vaults being an experiment was actually the big reveal at the end of the second game. The first game was a rather standard story of survival in a post-apocalyptic world, and the preservation purpose of the Vaults was mostly kept at face value.

Come to think of it, it'd be hard to do quality control on the Vaults anyways. If they don't work, what are you going to do? Sue them? Nobody's letting the lawyers.

Though what really always confused me was the business model of The Preservation Chambers. They cost money to let a person in. Who's going to collect this money?

Presumably they were built assuming they'd be used to survive small-scale attacks, even if they were advertised for large-scale attacks. After all, even if one of those dinky little shelters could survive being in the immediate radius of a nuke, you couldn't survive in there for the amount of time nuclear fallout is expected to last—nevermind magic Fallout-type radiation.

I think canonically the Preservation Chambers were just a scam. They were built to give people a false sense of security.

Only the first and last episodes should focus on the plot of whatever Fallout game they adapt. Every episode in between should just be shenanigans and sidequests.

Personally, I say, of all things, DO NOT adapt one of the games. They work specifically in the medium of video games. Trying to adapt them for tv might not work very well because, frankly, those stories weren't written for the tv medium. And following the adapted lines doesn't let the show evolve into it's own thing over time. Tell your own story in the fall out universe that has it's own characters and emotions that you can do justice.

I adore Fallout: New Vegas. It's wonderful. But it'd make an awful tv series as is.

The plots of Fallout 1 and 2 are both fairly linear (the first one especially), they both just have the option for side quests in between and many of the more important/famous ones could still easily be adapted into the story without breaking the flow.

In Fallout 1 in particular you actually didn't get that many story choices till near the end and even then it was mostly a choice on whether to fight The Master or The Lieutenant first and on the exact way that you kill The Master. Either way the end result is the same.

Right, but that's not entirely my point. Even the most linear of games don't make good films. Because games have COMPLETELY different pacing than film and television do and tell their stories in dramatically different fashions. A game can go several hours without much dialogue or character development and then dump a bunch of down-time conversations and cut scenes on us and it doesn't quite feel so slap-dash. A game also can have, via gameplay-story integration, the actual mechanics of the game carry some of the burden of the story telling. A character constantly having to scavenge for food and water can tell a narrative and build the world and be just as important to the story even if characters don't directly talk about those issues; show vs. tell. Or, hey, even if you might not like Elizabeth from Bioshock: Infinite from the get go, her ability to help in combat and find items develops a relationship between player and audience that can't be built the same way on film.

Or, just how things are portrayed in film. As a player, I can have a lengthy tense sequence of sneaking into some base to get a MacGuffin and that can keep tension and release going on it's own for an hour or longer depending on the game (Fallout, Skyrim, Dishonored, Assassin's Creed) and then drop a bunch of narrative and story bits after the sequence. Replicating that on film gets wonky because, besides player engagement and their own ups and downs which creates a narrative on it's own for them, nothing narrative actually progresses during those moments. A common critique of some movies I've seen (A Cure for Wellness comes to mind) are that character sneak around places, but since there are no consequences and they never risk getting caught resulting in it feeling like a video game stealth moment instead, like they'd just skipped over the level of avoiding orderlies.

Companion narratives are well talked about when discussing RP Gs. We love them. We adore these characters. But their stories seldom ever intersect with the main story going on outside of MAYBE why they join the player and that doesn't work in a tighter film medium. So, either we cut them, have them there but flatten them like a pancake because we don't have the run time to tell that story, or we artificially try to tie them into the main story not only with either success or falling right on our faces, but possibly adapting ourselves into a corner and the character just isn't who they started as anymore.

I could write essays on how video games present narratives compared to other mediums. Actually, I have and one on Fallout: New Vegas was my final topic before I got my degree. Point is, even when video game narratives are fairly simple or easy to tell, I'd rather they just avoid trying to faithfully adapt something to a fault or in a way that doesn't work for the medium change and just create new characters, settings, and conflicts that work better for the medium of a several season television series. These are problems that even the best of comic book and literature adaptations have consistently. It might be better to fit the spirit of the series, not the letter.

Many A True Nerd gave some analysis about the sort of things that can be in the show

So does anyone agree or has it changed what they are anticipating?

Honestly, if this series wants to be loyal to the game, then the protagonist must ignore the main objective, and do a lot of unrelated things.

Protagonist: I know I should be looking for my twin brother, but a guy offered me 50 caps if I killed a slaver. And just as I was on my way to kill the slaver, another guy showed up and offered me an assault rifle in exchange for killing a bunch of wolves.

Edited by DarthNoxIsCool on Oct 25th 2022 at 11:37:38 AM

Honestly, if recent efforts have taught us anything, there's no real silver bullet when it comes to videogame-to-movie/show adaptations beyond just... hiring people who actually like the games and grew up with them, who both grasp the spirit and are competent artists and filmmakers in their own right.

Fallout is basically a neo-Western, and IMO one best served as a series more than a feature film, so they've at least got that right. The lead could be anyone with any motivation, and that's if they even focus on a game-style central protagonist in the first place.

The plot can really be anything. The Fallout lore is pretty flexible. I think the only thing they need to do is have the Vault be a control vault, as the weird experiment ones would be a lot to explain as a twist.

People are already pointing out the irony about a game who has an anti-capitalist message being done with Amazon money.

Same with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

I wonder if a story line like Into the Badlands would work for a Fallout TV series. Something focusing on the power struggles between different factions in a post-apocalyptic world.

The other thing I could see being successful is a series leading up to the nuking, but that would be pretty much nothing like the games and would have a Foregone Conclusion that might drive viewers away. I dunno.

Edited by PhiSat on Oct 26th 2022 at 11:42:50 AM