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When you accidentally create an anti-capitalist game
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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Sorry but I don't do death of the author, Fallout is officially reactionary now
Since Bethesda took over Fallout is just "apolitical" centrist slop that doesn't actually want to make social commentary. It exists as a power fantasy simulator like all Bethesda games with no identity or substance to make the experience worthwhile.
I don't know about the old games, but from Fallout 3 onwards, they always had anti-communism in it.
The first game doesn't dabble much in ideology; its big talking point is that war is bad and everything else in the game is meant to revolve around this. The second game is more geared toward anti-fascism. Neither really touch on communism as an ideology or a system in practice.
Fallout 3 is centrist slop that simultaneously treats communism and anti-communism as being equally bad because it doesn't have anything it actually wants to say.
New Vegas doesn't touch on communism at all but it does offer some stark critiques of liberal democracy and colonialism (and capitalism of course) as well as Caesar's weird Primitivist philosophy resulting from his inability to understand Hegel, which in turn attacks conservatism and similar Right-wing ideologies.
Fallout 4 doesn't have anything to say about anything other than "slavery bad" and that's about it. Like FO3 it's just centrist slop with no political literacy whatsoever.
I don't know about the other two games because nobody really played them.
Same. I tried getting into TES4 but couldn't make it past half the game because I found it too boring and watered down compared to Morrowind.
In FO4 I made it past the beginning area before I got bored and quit.
I already know that TES6 & FO5 will be yet another Loot Hoarder Sim with a "You are the chosen one" Story and MMO-Tier Quests.
They've been making bad Morrowind clones for 2 decades now with no end in sight, and that's how they'll probably die lol.
Lol, FO4 kind of replaced Skyrim in that regard since it's literally just the Skyrim build of Gamebryo with a facelift and some improvements.
They wanted Starfield to be the next big sandbox game engine, but nobody wants Oblivion in Space.
The only big-Name Game I have any amount of faith in is HL3, although I don't expect much.
I'm assuming you're referring to Epistle 3 by Laidlaw? In what way is HL:A based on that? I thought HL:A takes place before HL2 (minus the ending scene).
Personally I've come to terms with the fact that we'll probably never get a proper continuation of EP2 years ago. Like I said, I don't expect much from Valve at this point.
If the game comes out and it doesn't have bad writing and features interesting and innovative gameplay I'll be pleasantly surprised.
If the game comes out and it not only has interesting gameplay but also continues to follow the Story that EP2 set up I'll be very pleasantly surprised.
If the game comes out and it's overall OK but they retcon a bunch of stuff and make it so Aperture and the Borealis are no longer relevant, or worse, abandon the storyline for something completely different, then it's time to forget and play some more indie games! :)
Right now I'm mostly interested in what their current Half-Life Project even looks like.
That's what I'm expecting, why else would they suddenly decide to change the EP2 ending after 13 years.
I agree, I'd rather them conclude the Story HL2 has set up ASAP and see something completely new.
Game of Thrones season 1 released 7 months before Skyrim
Fallout Tactics is generally "we will save you from the destruction (by conquering you)" tactics game except it's actually way better as a game than usually admitted, it just got smashed in reviews because it was not actual Fallout 3 when everyone was hyped for one. Also Broterhood in it is least hitlerite of all its versions since it's actually inclusive (you can have ghouls, supermutants, robots, deathclaws) and everyone is getting high in random moment, though the armed paladin taking psycho while on watch was pretty alarming.
I kinda prefer the Brotherhood to be fascist-coded since that is the logical conclusion of their philosophy and they've always canonically been assholes.
The Followers of the Apocalypse in New Vegas and 2 are essentially communist and presented in a good light.
The Followers of the Apocalypse are a volunteer aid group. There's nothing really communist about them; they're altruists and pacifists motivated primarily by moralism. They don't appear interested in the economic structure of societies, the use of labor, or who owns the modes of production. They're "socialist" in a purely idealist sense.
True, but there isn’t much of a society left. Productive forces don’t really exist beyond artisanal and sustenance production, and neither does organized or capitalist modes of production. There isn’t anything to really organize, let alone lead.
They live in commune societies where the collective own the means of production, reject money, they attempt to elevate tribal groups through education, they’re anti-fascist and only maintain a tenuous relationship with the liberal NCR, and attempt to recruit through their outreach.
Society tetters between tribal and early feudal at best, and even then barely. What is a socialist to do in a “society” like that? Volunteer outreach is all that’s left, not like there’s much to do a “revolution” against.
This would be true if they didn't literally come from the NCR - which does in fact have an organized, capitalist mode of production.
The reality is they're simply not Marxists. FotA are closer to Christian missionaries that do charity work.
Which makes them closer to utopian socialism rather than full-blown communism.
Again this argument would make more sense if the NCR, the Strip, and Caesar's Legion didn't exist. Complex civilizations are coming back and they're reviving exploitative modes of production such as the imperialism of the NCR, the Strip's more basic capitalist model, and the Legion's slave economy.
I mean they are kinda supposed to be - this is how their leader Nicole speaks/quotes about her in Fallout 1
See the absence of any socialist big words? They are much more christian moralistic in nature.
Exactly. They're a morality movement rather than a political or economic faction. This is a big reason as to why they keep taking Ls from the NCR and BoS.
Fallout 1 and 2 had only vaguely anti-communism stuff (stuff from the old world), the start of fallout 1 with a cutscene of US troops killing journalists/guerrilla fighters in Canada (In Fallout Tactics theres a joke about leftist guerrilla infighting in Canada over naming their organization). Bizarrely the Soviets and Americans were close enough in the Fallout universe that some russians still lived in America before the war.
The implication was always that the Sino-Soviet split caused the USA to choose the USSR over China. The Soviet Union in black isle's fallout was more like "successful" revisionist post-glasnost state that diminish in its power - which Bethesda kinda forgot and given how fallout 4 was written when the whole crimea thing was popping off, the USSR became a useful enemy to use again.
I thought the entire point of the communism bad stuff was to make it as over the top and insane as possible as a criticism of the anti communist narrative but that may have just been my interpretation
Especially things like liberty prime just being so obviously insane
The McCarthyism aspect was not really that present pre-Fallout 3, China was never really discussed at all - beyond that they nuked america, neither was its ideology. Fallout as a franchise got flanderized hard with the whole 50s Americana, in fact the first two games major 50s influence was mainly in art deco architecture a la Chrysler building.