365: Tim Cain Says Fallout Needs to Go International

0:02 [SPEAKER_00]: robots radio, games, lore, stories, community, just press play. [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Fallout lorecast. [SPEAKER_00]: The podcasts that explores the boundaries of our knowledge about the world of Fallout. [SPEAKER_00]: on July twenty fifth of twenty twenty five Timothy Kane on his YouTube channel released a video simply titled fallout lore exploration [SPEAKER_00]: I thought this video was very interesting.

0:41 [SPEAKER_00]: It's only about ten minutes long, and if you aren't already following Tim Kane's YouTube channel, then you're missing out on a lot of cool behind the scenes kind of fallout stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: So why is that? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, for those of you who don't know, Timothy Kane, and this is according to the current Wikipedia page.

0:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Is an American video game developer and YouTuber best known as the creator producer lead programmer and one of the main designers of the nineteen ninety seven game fallout. [SPEAKER_00]: In two thousand and nine he was chosen by IGN as one of the top one hundred game creators of all time.

1:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Tim comes up from, you know, every now and again on this podcast and we talk about some of the things that Tim has said, some of the reveals over the last few years since he's been doing his YouTube channel and different interviews and things like that. [SPEAKER_00]: And this video that he put out recently explores the lore of Fallout from his perspective as the original creator and designer of the first game.

1:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And basically answers the question [SPEAKER_00]: What would you do, Tim Kane? [SPEAKER_00]: Where would you take the lore of the series in future titles? [SPEAKER_00]: And he goes into some interesting details here. [SPEAKER_00]: There are things that he brings up that fly very firmly in the face of the way that the game has been developed so far, not in a confrontational or argumentative sort of way, not like a hay Bethesda sucks, and I would have done this instead.

2:06 [SPEAKER_00]: But more of a [SPEAKER_00]: Hey, I think I might take this game in a direction that has never been considered before. [SPEAKER_00]: So I thought this would be a really fun kind of different type of episode to do this week, taking this video, breaking it down, and thinking about what would happen if we get the version of fallout that Tim Kane suggests would be a fun idea for a future game.

2:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Also, I'll be including clips from this video in the episode. [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, we'll just kind of go through the whole episode. [SPEAKER_00]: But absolutely, if you are not already following Timothy Keane on YouTube and I'll include a link in the in the description. [SPEAKER_00]: Go follow his channel.

2:46 [SPEAKER_00]: He has even more recent videos that I could do in the entire episode on. [SPEAKER_00]: But go check out his stuff and give him a follow-up, subscribe, all of that stuff support. [SPEAKER_00]: Tim Kane because he really is the founder of the series and seems like such a nice guy and such a well-meaning person, especially to be going behind the scenes like this and sharing insights that what we all know, the internet is going to argue about and I'm sure he gets a mix of reactions from an audience as do all of us who post things online.

3:16 [SPEAKER_00]: So just take a minute, go over, subscribe to his channel, spread some of the positivity and let's get into it. [SPEAKER_00]: So first of all, before we get into all the details and we start playing his video, taking apart some of his points and that kind of stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: I just want to say how cool it is that somebody like Tim would take the time to do these videos in order to give us insight into the mind of the creator behind the series.

3:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Not just his own personal experiences behind the scenes, in development, working on games for several decades now, his experience as a game developer in general, but also his perspective on the fall of lore. [SPEAKER_00]: And the kinds of things that he was imagining almost thirty years ago when the series began.

4:07 [SPEAKER_00]: and seeing it through that lens and then comparing it to what we have now and where the series has gone some of the things that do match up and some of the things that in his head would be really cool things to do that never happened or haven't happened yet so thanks first and foremost to Tim for taking the time to do these videos they really are amazing but here let's get into it we're just gonna play this from the beginning and I'll pause and comment as we go [SPEAKER_01]: Hi everyone, it's me, Tim.

4:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Today I want to talk about Fallout lore exploration. [SPEAKER_01]: This comes from a really good question from Jose Luis Lopez' seventy-five eleven, who asked, what part of the Fallout universe needs to be expanded upon, or what story or stories deserve to be continued. [SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps take a bit from each game and weave the evolution of the formula.

4:56 [SPEAKER_00]: So we'll pause it there for a minute. [SPEAKER_00]: I think there's something worth highlighting here just in the way that the question is asked. [SPEAKER_00]: What part of the Fallout universe needs to be expanded upon? [SPEAKER_00]: Or what story or stories deserve to be continued? [SPEAKER_00]: So what part of the universe to expand on and what stories need to be continued?

5:13 [SPEAKER_00]: So you can see here from the perspective of the person asking the question, I have [SPEAKER_00]: In my mind, I'm imagining that they are thinking about the characters, the environments, the things that get fleshed out a little bit, but kind of leave you wanting more. [SPEAKER_00]: And the way that Tim takes this question and the direction he takes it surprised me, honestly, from my perspective, I didn't expect the kind of answer that he gave, but I find it to be very, very insightful.

5:43 [SPEAKER_00]: This is an interesting question. [SPEAKER_01]: I debated whether to answer it, because whenever I talk about fallout, some people will crazy. [SPEAKER_00]: about fallout, some people go crazy. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that seems welcome to the internet. [SPEAKER_00]: But no, no, I mentioned previously at the beginning of the episode that he takes the time to do this.

6:04 [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure if you scrub through the comments and look at the, I don't know, the most terrible of the comments, you're going to have things from across everybody online. [SPEAKER_00]: And people who are just vicious and mean and terrible, you know, and that's just part of it. [SPEAKER_00]: But you can tell, oftentimes when watching other people's content, [SPEAKER_00]: that they have to deal with this and that actually does weigh on them.

6:25 [SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that somebody like Tim Kane would have taken a moment of pause to just be like, well, do I really want to address this? [SPEAKER_00]: Because do I want to deal with the comments from the crazy people out there who are going to say terrible things? [SPEAKER_00]: to me about, well, that would ruin fallout or whatever.

6:43 [SPEAKER_00]: It's just ridiculous. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm just going to leave this here. [SPEAKER_00]: I won't dig into it anymore. [SPEAKER_00]: But just be aware that what he is doing is putting himself out there and there is some risk to that. [SPEAKER_00]: But he does share some really cool stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: So let's keep going.

6:58 [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of me in fallout. [SPEAKER_01]: I've said this a lot. [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of me in fallout. [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of me in arcaneum. [SPEAKER_01]: I've often told people if you want the most timcany game, those are the two most timcany games. [SPEAKER_01]: For lots of reasons involving big teams and publishers and changes in the industry, all kinds of things.

7:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Also, I've mentioned that I have a design for a Fallout sequel. [SPEAKER_01]: This is not that design. [SPEAKER_00]: So, okay, so real quick. [SPEAKER_00]: But I would just, real quick point. [SPEAKER_00]: I always pronounced arcanum arcanum, but it's arcanum, so I'm going to make a mental note that might need to update that.

7:35 [SPEAKER_00]: But also, what he's about to reveal now is not his original plan for a Fallout sequel. [SPEAKER_00]: And he'll go into it in a second, but this is something you need to keep in mind. [SPEAKER_00]: This is not designed from the standpoint of somebody who is planning the next game in a series because there are considerations for the way that you would want to plan the next game in the series, a specific sequel around a specific theme, specific characters, a certain story at the forefront, different antagonists, different dilemmas going on in the world, different types of creatures or animals that play into that story.

8:11 [SPEAKER_00]: All of that is encapsulated and has to be designed in a way where all of those pieces work together. [SPEAKER_00]: This is not that. [SPEAKER_00]: This is more a hodgepodge of different ideas that would be really cool to see in the future that eventually could make up a sequel, could be part of some sort of greater, more complex plan of intricate, interconnected pieces.

8:31 [SPEAKER_00]: But this isn't that. [SPEAKER_00]: Also, he doesn't tell anyone what that is, and that is super interesting here. [SPEAKER_00]: He explains it in the right here. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't tell anybody that design because if I see elements of it show up in another person's fault game or another company's fault game, I know it will be coincident because nobody knows what's in my sequel.

8:52 [SPEAKER_00]: So meaning that like he is not threatened by the idea that the game designs that he has would show up in something else because he hasn't told anyone. [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody knows what those things are. [SPEAKER_00]: There's no threat of people stealing those ideas if the ideas are similar or even exactly the same.

9:08 [SPEAKER_00]: It's because they were invented by somebody else's brain who had a lot of the same thoughts that he did because they maybe see the world through very similar lens that he does, which is kind of a cool thought. [SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of a smart thing not to reveal this to anyone because of that.

9:26 [SPEAKER_01]: I have seen a couple elements show up and it's been completely coincidental. [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, so just completely coincidental. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm sure we could debate the benefits and drawbacks of that. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure some of you are going, we'll just reveal the design so that Bethesda Devs can use some of that in the next fall.

9:43 [SPEAKER_00]: But sometimes that doesn't go to plan, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes somebody who was the creator of something, whether it's a movie or a video game series or a writer, and then you pass off even your ideas for, this is where I would want to take the series and you hand it off to somebody else, [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe they agree with your ideas, but they implement them in a way that isn't what you really would have done.

10:05 [SPEAKER_00]: So it doesn't match anyway. [SPEAKER_00]: And it may even be implemented in a way where the person doesn't fully understand the concept the way that you did with your initial ideas, but you can only explain things so thoroughly before someone just takes it and runs with it in their own way.

10:21 [SPEAKER_00]: So in that sense, it's probably smart that he doesn't share his specific plan for a sequel. [SPEAKER_01]: Instead, this is lore that I would explore if I was doing a Fallout sequel. [SPEAKER_01]: It's elements of the Fallout setting and elements of Fallout lore that really interest me. [SPEAKER_01]: It's very similar to a video I did called Arcana lore exploration, which I'll link below.

10:45 [SPEAKER_01]: So if you want to compare like the lore exploration of Arcana to Fallout, these would be the two videos you watch. [SPEAKER_01]: And just to be clear, because everyone always says this, this is not me asking to work on fallout again. [SPEAKER_01]: I have a video of, of that, um, question.

11:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And it's, I'll link it below. [SPEAKER_01]: It's what I work on fallout again. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing this because it was a good question and it did make me think. [SPEAKER_01]: I mainly went, huh, I bet you I'll do this, I do this. [SPEAKER_01]: And then I thought I'd make a video about it.

11:16 [SPEAKER_01]: So that's it. [SPEAKER_01]: If anybody's working on a sequel, maybe you could do some of these things. [SPEAKER_01]: Let's find out. [SPEAKER_00]: So there you go. [SPEAKER_00]: So you get the difference here. [SPEAKER_00]: The difference is if he was to put out a map for a complete sequel, a full concept of like how everything is interconnected and how it all works, there's complexity there that would be very hard to communicate.

11:39 [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm putting words in his mouth. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm just interpreting the way that I perceive why he would do these things this way. [SPEAKER_00]: And I could be wrong. [SPEAKER_00]: I could be totally wrong. [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, comment, let me know kindly how maybe this could be interpreted in a different way.

11:53 [SPEAKER_00]: But what he's doing here are just bits and pieces. [SPEAKER_00]: So imagine, like, when we have conversations with the patrons, and I'm like, hey, what would be a cool, mutated villain or creature to put in a future follow game? [SPEAKER_00]: And everybody comes up with these ideas. [SPEAKER_00]: And they're just one-off ideas.

12:09 [SPEAKER_00]: They don't have to be grounded in the reality of designing a game, of incorporating that with a narrative, or connecting it to a greater story among other things. [SPEAKER_00]: They're just one-off ideas. [SPEAKER_00]: which is actually easier to implement because if let's say he comes up with a one-off idea for a new type of mutated creature you could work that into a future game in fact that might inspire some story bits that you could add to it but it doesn't have to be the entire thing kind of warped through somebody else's perspective it can be that one singular idea which stays solid and then finds its place in a new narrative finds its place in a new [SPEAKER_00]: story or theme or or tone or any of those things.

12:52 [SPEAKER_00]: So that's why that makes sense in my brain. [SPEAKER_00]: But here, let's see what the first thing he has to say is. [SPEAKER_01]: I broken it down into and I made some notes. [SPEAKER_01]: I made this three basic things that I would explore in a Fallout sequel. [SPEAKER_01]: some new factions, some new locations, and more morality stuff.

13:12 [SPEAKER_00]: So factions, locations, morality stuff, factions, locations, morality. [SPEAKER_00]: These are the components that I think we can assume from the importance of them being things that he speculates about as being [SPEAKER_00]: foundational for the way he views fall out and not just fall out, but the where the future of fall out will go.

13:38 [SPEAKER_00]: It is about the factions, which makes sense. [SPEAKER_00]: Ever since fall out one, it's been about these different factions in the way they interact with each other. [SPEAKER_00]: That's some of the most interesting interplay in the series are the different factions, whether they be the Brotherhood and the Onclave or the NCR and House and the Legion or [SPEAKER_00]: The Institute in the Railroad, or Taggarties, Brotherhood, and the Responders in Fallout, there's all sorts of different examples of this, but that totally makes sense.

14:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Factions are foundational. [SPEAKER_00]: Locations, at this point, are foundational. [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, Fallout one and Fallout two, roughly take place in kind of the same region. [SPEAKER_00]: The map expands a bit and Fallout two. [SPEAKER_00]: But since then, it's been different locations even when we went back to the West Coast.

14:24 [SPEAKER_00]: It was New Vegas and the other games we've always gotten new locations and those locations were interesting in their own way. [SPEAKER_00]: It's one of the reasons why locations come up as topics so much in our patron chats is because location is foundational to what fallout is about. [SPEAKER_00]: And then the final thing he said was morality.

14:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Again, a foundational piece. [SPEAKER_00]: Why does morality come up so often when I talk with the patrons or even just analyze a character? [SPEAKER_00]: It's because it is foundational. [SPEAKER_00]: We might look at the fallout world and think, oh, it is a world full of a wasteland and dangerous monsters and weird technology and aliens.

15:05 [SPEAKER_00]: That's all the icing on top of the cake. [SPEAKER_00]: The cake itself, this is a weird analogy, I guess. [SPEAKER_00]: But the cake itself is made up of factions, morality, locations, and probably some other details that haven't been brought up yet. [SPEAKER_00]: But here, let's see where he's going with this.

15:21 [SPEAKER_01]: And that would fall out to bow. [SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of it. [SPEAKER_01]: intent. [SPEAKER_01]: See what I did there? [SPEAKER_01]: You can interpret it anyway you want, but it is the intent. [SPEAKER_00]: So, okay, so it is what fallouts about. [SPEAKER_00]: It is the intent, but you can interpret that however you want, which we could speculate on.

15:39 [SPEAKER_00]: Does that mean it's the intent of the game design? [SPEAKER_00]: It's the intent of the thing that he wants the player to think about while playing it? [SPEAKER_00]: It's the intent of what is most interesting about this world and the thing he wants to leave with you and keep you thinking about.

15:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's part of the reason why Fallout is so popular and so powerful, and able to transcend just from video games to a TV series, and wherever else the series ends up going. [SPEAKER_01]: Let's start with factions, and we're getting into it. [SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about, I would like to explore other factions in the Fallout universe.

16:14 [SPEAKER_01]: Beyond Vault Tech and Rob Co. [SPEAKER_01]: There were a bunch. [SPEAKER_00]: Opposing of there, notice he mentions Rob Co as a faction. [SPEAKER_00]: Interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: We have Rob Co. [SPEAKER_00]: Rodco. [SPEAKER_00]: We have Rob Co as a company. [SPEAKER_00]: And the company has built a lot of interesting things.

16:33 [SPEAKER_00]: And there are some Rob Co locations. [SPEAKER_00]: But I rarely think of Rob Co as a faction. [SPEAKER_00]: But in a pre-war sense, every corporation was kind of its own faction in a way. [SPEAKER_01]: just stuff still survives. [SPEAKER_01]: The whole the the beginning of fallout you know there was that crisis car and their infusion powered or whatever and there's a whole bunch of cool stuff you can go into.

16:58 [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of companies to explore what their products were [SPEAKER_00]: Well, a lot of companies to explore. [SPEAKER_00]: That's what we've been doing on this podcast is going through all of the pre-war companies to figure out how much is detailed about each of them and what do we know about them and how did they work in the world and how did they relate to other companies?

17:16 [SPEAKER_00]: All of that. [SPEAKER_00]: We've been going through recently and he's pointing this out as one of the key components of what makes Fallout fall out. [SPEAKER_00]: Very interesting. [SPEAKER_01]: There's slogans where it would give you a much more interesting look into what? [SPEAKER_01]: Society was like right before the bombs fell, which I don't think for people eating, you know, squirrel bits.

17:39 [SPEAKER_01]: I think that all came after. [SPEAKER_00]: That's an interesting point as well. [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that happens during the pre-war time is that the world is in crisis for decades. [SPEAKER_00]: Things just keep getting worse and worse and worse. [SPEAKER_00]: Resources are going away.

17:55 [SPEAKER_00]: There isn't enough food, but in his mind, [SPEAKER_00]: At least I would assume in the U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: I think that he's talking in the scope of the U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: He's not talking about other countries that may have been dealing with warfare and even more catastrophic kinds of things.

18:08 [SPEAKER_00]: But in places like the U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: and China, which were still relatively on top. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they're definitely on top, but relatively OK in the fact that they were probably suffering a little bit less than a lot of the other countries in the world. [SPEAKER_00]: But even in those countries, there was a limitation of certain supplies, resources, food, and those kinds of things.

18:25 [SPEAKER_00]: But they weren't eating squirrel bits yet. [SPEAKER_00]: That's his perspective is that they were hanging in there until the bombs dropped. [SPEAKER_00]: And then all of a sudden, the invention of squirrel bits has food becomes a necessity. [SPEAKER_01]: I would also like to [SPEAKER_01]: besides company factions, I would like to look into if mutations caused any other factions like were their super mutants or were their human mutations other than the super mutants standard that we saw in many many games.

18:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so he's lumping all the different super mutants into kind of the same thing. [SPEAKER_00]: Relatively speaking, yes, there are different groups of super mutants depending on which game and which location the FEV is involved and that's that puzzle, right? [SPEAKER_00]: So the question then becomes what other mutations are there for people?

19:15 [SPEAKER_00]: You might be thinking ghouls, right? [SPEAKER_00]: I've talked about ghouls recently, ghouls. [SPEAKER_00]: Not naffy v-thing. [SPEAKER_00]: They happened to before the bombs dropped. [SPEAKER_00]: And in the lore, our described as primarily a result of radiation. [SPEAKER_00]: Radiation and certain people, their own genetic code, would lend them to be more likely to be gullified.

19:35 [SPEAKER_00]: And then, of course, there's the going insane and all of that. [SPEAKER_00]: But he's talking about something other than super mutants that people can evolve into. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, you might also be thinking, sentars and things like that. [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, that's kind of along those lines.

19:48 [SPEAKER_00]: But what else could they be? [SPEAKER_00]: What other kinds of mutations could be out there? [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe FV mutated. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe people mutated. [SPEAKER_01]: And then FV affected those people differently. [SPEAKER_01]: That would be fun to explore. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe those factions are more secretive.

20:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe they fight super mutants. [SPEAKER_01]: And we've just humans have never come across that war because maybe super mutants are winning. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know. [SPEAKER_01]: Which then brings me into there could be whole kinds, whole swaths of isolated communities. [SPEAKER_01]: People, goals that are very isolationist, that you have to work hard to discover.

20:27 [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, once you discover them, the reaction is going to be probably not happy that they've been found out. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe goals isolate themselves just to avoid [SPEAKER_01]: Being persecuted and I'm not talking about they hold up someone where and say you know We're goals in here don't come here.

20:44 [SPEAKER_01]: They literally hide you don't know they're there There's like an entire population living deep deep deep under the sewers kind of like Futurama there's this the whole city under the city [SPEAKER_00]: All right, so a few things don't pack here. [SPEAKER_00]: First of all, I like the future Alma reference, and I feel like that was a series that would have been, I pointed it start late nineties, early two thousand, probably late nineties.

21:08 [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like this was one of those parallel series, and I can see a little bit of Futurama in thought in the kind of weird future wackiness kind of thing. [SPEAKER_00]: So that makes sense as a reference. [SPEAKER_00]: Also, he mentioned here the idea that the FV might [SPEAKER_00]: mutate, or humans might mutate, and it might affect them differently.

21:26 [SPEAKER_00]: That's interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: FVV is the forced evolutionary virus. [SPEAKER_00]: Viruses can mutate. [SPEAKER_00]: A virus out in the world that has been passed around by so many different people for so long, without a doubt, would mutate. [SPEAKER_00]: So what does that mean? [SPEAKER_00]: What does that mean?

21:41 [SPEAKER_00]: What does that do to creatures? [SPEAKER_00]: And how does that affect them? [SPEAKER_00]: Especially humans. [SPEAKER_00]: I like this idea. [SPEAKER_00]: I also like this idea that the Super Mutants have been fighting a hidden war against some other mutant faction that is losing but still hanging on.

21:57 [SPEAKER_00]: What if they were, and under, like he said, an underground faction, a faction that is hidden, stealthy. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we have super mutants with stealth boys, but what if there were other kinds of groups or factions of people who have mutated in certain ways? [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe there's a reason why they're hard to find.

22:16 [SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to notice them. [SPEAKER_01]: Also, I've never seen a big dive into what I would consider to be prepper factions, people who now today, [SPEAKER_01]: you know, by homes out in middle of nowhere and give them huge underground bunkers full of dried foods and [SPEAKER_01]: They're planning to them and their families and maybe some other families live there for a long time.

22:42 [SPEAKER_01]: What would it be like finding those people forty fifty hundred years later? [SPEAKER_01]: That would be interesting. [SPEAKER_01]: It would also give you an interesting look at what their grandkids or great grandkids thought of the world and the pre-war world outside of vote dwellers and goals.

22:59 [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a reason to use these and that's the reason I would use them. [SPEAKER_00]: So I like this idea as well because we know about Vault Tech. [SPEAKER_00]: We know about the Polaski shelters which didn't really do much. [SPEAKER_00]: But what about the people who took it upon themselves to make their own vaults or at least to prep for the way things would have gone?

23:19 [SPEAKER_00]: there was a news article that came out recently about the head of meta marks up Zuckerberg and how he is purchased like some island or something or a big part of an island in Hawaii where he is basically creating a vaults kind of an evacuation shelter if ever he should need it [SPEAKER_00]: which is kind of disturbing, but I would imagine that you would have billionaires that didn't take part in vault tech, creating their own solutions.

23:48 [SPEAKER_00]: But you would also have a lot of regular people, maybe somebody would land out in Montana or somewhere that's creating their own way to survive the war, especially in a place that isn't likely to be directly hit by nukes. [SPEAKER_00]: What would those people look like? [SPEAKER_00]: We get a little bit of that in Fallout Eighty Six, but [SPEAKER_00]: That could definitely be expanded upon.

24:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Which gives me into my other big thing I want to do is I would like to explore a lot of other locations and I should probably be more specific and say I don't mean other US locations, I mean other countries. [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so, absolutely have to address this one. [SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the reasons why I included this as an episode of the show, because Tim King himself has said he would love to see locations outside the US.

24:33 [SPEAKER_00]: And I have been a firm proponent of the idea that Fallout itself is designed to be an American game. [SPEAKER_00]: always set in the United States. [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe we get these little glimpses here and there of things outside of that. [SPEAKER_00]: But primarily, the theme of the game has been very America's, American centric, right?

24:55 [SPEAKER_00]: The questions about democracy, questions about capitalism, these kinds of things. [SPEAKER_00]: So Tim Kane here is saying, it's time. [SPEAKER_00]: It's time to go outside the US. [SPEAKER_00]: What else is going on? [SPEAKER_01]: There's been very little discussion of what happened outside the U.S.

25:14 [SPEAKER_01]: But there's been evidence of things that have happened outside the U.S. [SPEAKER_01]: I would like to explore what happened there. [SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of that's exploring their gengoism, which I will say right now, I'm not really prepared to do. [SPEAKER_01]: I would love to know if Fallout was advanced American fifties, you know, gengoism, what would that be for the Soviet Union?

25:36 [SPEAKER_01]: What would that be for China? [SPEAKER_01]: What would that be for Canada, even though we annexed them? [SPEAKER_01]: What would that be for Mexico? [SPEAKER_01]: What would that be for Brazil? [SPEAKER_01]: What would that be for Australia? [SPEAKER_01]: What would that be for tons of countries in Europe and Africa?

25:51 [SPEAKER_01]: What would India be like? [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, and I don't know if I can make that, but I would certainly love to see that explored. [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so he mentioned a number of different locations and what they would be like. [SPEAKER_00]: Notice he very, very firmly still ties them into the Jingoism of the fifties and sixties.

26:09 [SPEAKER_00]: So here's a quick definition of Jingoism. [SPEAKER_00]: Jingoism is nationalism in the form of aggression and proactive foreign policy, such as a country's advocacy for the use of threats or actual force as opposed to peaceful relations in efforts to safeguard what it perceives as its national interests.

26:26 [SPEAKER_00]: So from his perspective, he's explaining that the jingoism of the fifties and sixties that we see in the US would be mirrored in other cultures because of the dire nature of the way the world is going. [SPEAKER_00]: So not just the US, but all of these other locations and he goes through a whole list of them.

26:43 [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a lot that when he says that this doesn't get discussed, he means that it doesn't get [SPEAKER_00]: I adequately enough attention in the prospect of future games. [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's not that we are discussing these things, and we don't come up with these ideas of, oh, it would be really cool to see what's happening in China.

27:02 [SPEAKER_00]: That discussion does happen. [SPEAKER_00]: He's not saying that we don't discuss things in that way. [SPEAKER_00]: I think he's using discuss as a more formal kind of, this is the way the game would be developed sort of way. [SPEAKER_00]: He also mentioned places like Canada, even though they were annexed by the US, what if the next follow game is located in Canada?

27:22 [SPEAKER_00]: And the majority of the characters you come across are not happy about the US annexation, and we see what it actually means for them. [SPEAKER_00]: What is the United States government doing in Alberta? [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, but that would be interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: He also says that he would not be the one to design this, which makes sense.

27:40 [SPEAKER_00]: He's an American. [SPEAKER_00]: He understands what it was like to be. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he's not that old. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not like he was around, I don't know the last few fifties, but I'm sure his parents were. [SPEAKER_00]: And being part of this culture, you have a sense of what our history is and the way that people previously would have reacted to different kinds of things here.

28:00 [SPEAKER_00]: But somebody would have to be brought in who understands what it means to be Canadian or Brazilian or Australian or any of these other ones that he mentioned to get their perspective on the world, and that opens up so much possibility. [SPEAKER_00]: I've often said that I don't see a mainline follow game going outside of the US in the future, and that's primarily because of the way that Bethesda has built out the series since taking over fall of three.

28:26 [SPEAKER_00]: But that doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to see that. [SPEAKER_00]: That's a very different argument. [SPEAKER_00]: I think it would be really cool to see that. [SPEAKER_00]: I just don't feel like it's particularly likely. [SPEAKER_00]: But with people like Tim Kane putting these ideas out there into the world, it could make it more likely.

28:43 [SPEAKER_00]: These types of things start to resonate in the culture and with everybody else and posted online and eventually the devs take note. [SPEAKER_00]: And it could influence what the way things go in the future. [SPEAKER_01]: It's, I would, beyond jingleism, beyond what their fifties style, you know, retrofuturism would be for, by country, I would love to know what their tech is.

29:07 [SPEAKER_01]: We established in Fallout two that the Stelt Boy was Chinese tech. [SPEAKER_01]: What other countries had really unusual tech that weren't here in the US or Roni in the US, because maybe we stole it, or maybe some other spies got in or with it. [SPEAKER_01]: Did other countries explore biological weapons?

29:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Like our FVV, maybe there's an FV like virus in Argentina. [SPEAKER_00]: What if there was an FV like virus? [SPEAKER_00]: I totally messed up my words there. [SPEAKER_00]: We're going to keep that in China. [SPEAKER_00]: What if we got to China with our power armor and our massive military and we not only ran into a bunch of stealth soldiers, but also their version of super mutants.

29:52 [SPEAKER_00]: But what if they did super mutants better? [SPEAKER_00]: What if they actually fought for their military on their land? [SPEAKER_00]: That would be super interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: What would that be like? [SPEAKER_01]: And they were growing some weird people down there. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe that would be fun to explore.

30:08 [SPEAKER_00]: And they were growing some weird people down there. [SPEAKER_00]: He's talking about Argentina and maybe their version of FEV or something like that. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that would be cool. [SPEAKER_01]: And then what about all the non-superpowers? [SPEAKER_01]: We don't have to talk about, you know, bigger countries, you know, what?

30:24 [SPEAKER_01]: What are they doing over in Vietnam? [SPEAKER_01]: What are they doing in Iceland? [SPEAKER_01]: Iceland amazingly, it's so isolated and it has geothermal power. [SPEAKER_01]: What are they doing over there? [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe they like being isolated. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe they don't like people showing up.

30:41 [SPEAKER_01]: That would be fun to explore. [SPEAKER_01]: So lots of locations in different countries I would love to do that in a follow-up sequel. [SPEAKER_00]: I can imagine locations like Iceland being these kind of fortresses, global-sized fortresses, right? [SPEAKER_00]: But you go back to medieval time periods and castles built on islands and at the tops of mountain cliffs so that they were hard to surmount, right?

31:05 [SPEAKER_00]: A place like Iceland is an island, a place like Hawaii, I mentioned already, is an island, or a series of islands. [SPEAKER_00]: But any one of those islands, especially the big ones, if you could fortify them and they could take care of their own needs and still have the ability to supply food and take care of their people, maybe they are isolated from the rest of the world, maybe it's like going back in time.

31:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Because maybe they've been able to keep going with the way things were kind of the way they were before, [SPEAKER_00]: And yet everywhere else is falling apart, that would be super interesting. [SPEAKER_01]: And then finally, in the biggest one that would have to be in any sequel I worked on would be morality exploration.

31:48 [SPEAKER_01]: I love grammarality. [SPEAKER_01]: I've said that a lot. [SPEAKER_01]: I also like tough black and white decisions. [SPEAKER_00]: This is interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: There's a difference between gray morality and tough black and white decisions. [SPEAKER_00]: And he's about to lay this out for us.

32:01 [SPEAKER_00]: So keep note of this because this is definitely something to put in your back pocket and to use in future conversations about fallout and morality and those kinds of things. [SPEAKER_00]: I find a lot of times when I talk about morality, especially when I do video versions of things and they get more kind of general hits by the greater internet and not so much the audience that we all have here of people who tend to, I mean there's a reason if you're sticking around to continue to listen to the podcast.

32:24 [SPEAKER_00]: You'd probably agree with a lot of things I said, or at least you don't disagree in a fervent thinking of a terrible person or an idiot sort of way. [SPEAKER_00]: But things on YouTube, you're going to get a mix of different responses. [SPEAKER_00]: And when it comes to morality stuff, people will often downplay morality conversations as if they are like, I am so smart.

32:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Kind of conversations like, wow, yeah, I was twelve-year old, folks years old when I had that thought. [SPEAKER_00]: That's not the point of morality conversations to be profound in a way that you haven't thought about things before. [SPEAKER_00]: Because, yeah, maybe you were introduced to those kinds of moral clandries that twelve years old, or eighteen years old, or whatever age it was that you were, most of us probably in our teens early twenties came across a lot of this stuff if you're interested in any form of philosophical debate at all about morality.

33:11 [SPEAKER_00]: That's not the point. [SPEAKER_00]: The point is that those questions are timeless. [SPEAKER_00]: The point is that those questions lead us to new and different perspectives depending on the situation and the circumstances that you're in. [SPEAKER_00]: And on top of it, they are deeper than they seem.

33:28 [SPEAKER_00]: Moreality questions can be explored in very, very minute and interesting ways. [SPEAKER_00]: And some people just don't get that. [SPEAKER_00]: They just think that either things are black and white or they are gray. [SPEAKER_00]: But as minimal as maybe things are only black and white is just one step further.

33:44 [SPEAKER_00]: No, there's lots of gray. [SPEAKER_00]: There's lots of room for gray. [SPEAKER_00]: There's even different ways to see extreme black and white, which he's about to talk about. [SPEAKER_00]: So here, let's get into it. [SPEAKER_01]: People consider this to be gray, but I'm like, no, there's nothing gray about the decision.

33:56 [SPEAKER_01]: There's an obvious right choice. [SPEAKER_01]: There's an obvious good choice, but the evil choice is way more rewarding. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, you can save that person or grab that really cool weapon, but you can't do both. [SPEAKER_00]: Like, do you get the difference there? [SPEAKER_00]: The difference isn't, do you save your grandmother or do you save two strangers?

34:18 [SPEAKER_00]: There's not a clean answer for that. [SPEAKER_00]: Some people will say, obviously, my grandmother, she means more to me, I understand who she is. [SPEAKER_00]: I know that she's a good person, whatever. [SPEAKER_00]: Some people will say, two people is more than one person, so save the two people, because from a quantity standpoint, that's the better thing to do.

34:33 [SPEAKER_00]: That is debated. [SPEAKER_00]: That is a great kind of moral dilemma. [SPEAKER_00]: What he's talking about is, everybody knows the right decision is to do the good thing. [SPEAKER_00]: Everybody knows that the selfish thing gets you something you want, but it's not the right decision. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not the good decision, but yet it is still a dilemma.

34:51 [SPEAKER_00]: That's what he's talking about. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, you can rescue that child or get access to a new technology, but you can't do both. [SPEAKER_01]: Things like that. [SPEAKER_01]: I think those are things that really make people stop because there is an effect in the game for your player.

35:06 [SPEAKER_01]: You will never be able to get that super power weapon again. [SPEAKER_01]: If you don't, [SPEAKER_01]: Let that person die, or maybe you have to kill somebody, maybe you've do something overtly evil and not just evil by lack of action. [SPEAKER_01]: So those are the kind of things I want to explore.

35:22 [SPEAKER_01]: It's very similar to [SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you took philosophy classes, the trolley problems, or maybe you watched good place. [SPEAKER_01]: The trolley problem is interesting because, you know, it says the trolley's gonna run over five people, but if you pull the switch and it'll run over one person.

35:36 [SPEAKER_01]: But what's interesting about that is, there are people who think there's a solution, there isn't. [SPEAKER_01]: But it depends on how you think. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, if some people go, look, if I don't do anything, those five people get killed, but as not on me, I'm not doing anything.

35:49 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, there's other people going, well, five is greater than one, so I'm pulling that switch because that's always better. [SPEAKER_01]: At least the other five people live in only one person dies as opposed to five people dying one person lives. [SPEAKER_01]: There are issues with doing it any of those ways.

36:02 [SPEAKER_01]: I love Charlie Paul and Charlie like problems because if you put it into a game, those gamers are gonna talk online in foreign boards and they're gonna talk about the right solution. [SPEAKER_01]: And there is no right solution. [SPEAKER_01]: There's just a variety of solutions. [SPEAKER_00]: so he's he's making a very good point here and I would agree that there is no ultimate right solution there's there's no what he's actually saying is there's no objectively right solution because we can never get to objective truth or the objective good there's not like [SPEAKER_00]: some greater source who defines the nature of reality and how morality works that we can ascend to ask the question and get a response back.

36:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Some people think that that's praying to God and that sort of thing, but even that has the same beauties. [SPEAKER_00]: Did God speak directly to you? [SPEAKER_00]: Did you interpret a passage from a book? [SPEAKER_00]: Did a teacher teach this to you? [SPEAKER_00]: Everything goes through lenses, right?

36:57 [SPEAKER_00]: his point is getting to objective truth is extremely difficult if not impossible I would say he probably says it's impossible so therefore you're dealing with subject of truth subjective truth means that to each person the scenario appears differently depending on what we value what we want the situation our perspective in that that situation at that time all of those details and that's what makes trolley like problems which I like how he said that interesting and fun to debate about also [SPEAKER_00]: It's what makes those hard black and white problems different because the trolley problem doesn't have a objectively correct answer, at least not one that we can get to.

37:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The other solution has the good. [SPEAKER_00]: Answer, you save the child, you don't get the technology, but people will justify it. [SPEAKER_00]: People will jump through hoops to justify why letting the child die is good because the potential I have of using this technology in a way to save more people offsets the death of that child.

37:59 [SPEAKER_00]: They try to turn it into a gray question. [SPEAKER_00]: A gray gray gray gray morality question. [SPEAKER_00]: But at its heart, it's not in that one situation. [SPEAKER_00]: It's better to sacrifice in order to save a child than it just to get something that you want, because you come up with any sort of justification for why you would need it.

38:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Most of the time you go with the child. [SPEAKER_00]: I guess there are some scenarios where there's hidden variables that could say that the other thing is correct. [SPEAKER_00]: But in the concept of, well, it's just something that you want versus the life of somebody else. [SPEAKER_00]: The life of somebody else.

38:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Across the board is more valuable than just getting the thing you want. [SPEAKER_00]: Not to mention, if you save the life, maybe there's going to be another opportunity to get the thing later. [SPEAKER_00]: It's lots of variables that could be involved in this. [SPEAKER_00]: But either way, those are the kinds of questions that make this world interesting and make every fallout game interesting.

38:55 [SPEAKER_01]: I would love to do that because I want to deep dive into Fallout's main theme. [SPEAKER_01]: Power crops. [SPEAKER_01]: People have always done bad things. [SPEAKER_01]: War never changes. [SPEAKER_01]: That was always Fallout's theme. [SPEAKER_01]: I would love to explore that in detail in a sequel and really make some of the players who are coming to have fun in this wasteland of cool weapons and weird monsters give them something to think about when they're playing that game.

39:23 [SPEAKER_01]: It's what we always intended. [SPEAKER_01]: It's why Fallout was so dark and had some of the quests in hand. [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, I hope that answers your question Jose Luis Lopez, seventy five eleven. [SPEAKER_00]: So there you go, that's it. [SPEAKER_00]: And I like the way he wraps it up.

39:38 [SPEAKER_00]: The themes are the themes. [SPEAKER_00]: Power always corrupts. [SPEAKER_00]: People have always, always been bad. [SPEAKER_00]: People have always done bad things. [SPEAKER_00]: People humans are humans. [SPEAKER_00]: I think you could wrap that up with just people or people and also war never changes.

39:54 [SPEAKER_00]: those are the core themes and how do you explore those themes through factions, through locations, and through a morality system, or at least the debate of what solutions are the best way to go. [SPEAKER_00]: In the fact that sometimes they're gray, sometimes they're hard black and white, but they're never easy.

40:15 [SPEAKER_00]: So Tim, if you're listening to this, I absolutely loved this post, keep it up, keep posting things out onto the internet, and don't worry about the haters, because all of us love you, and we really do appreciate your work and the series that you created. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.

40:28 [SPEAKER_00]: And to everybody listening, if you have different thoughts on this, if you'd like to debate some of these details, please join us on the Discord. [SPEAKER_00]: The Robots Rated Discord, there's a link in the show notes in the description or whatever. [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, you can just search it online and find us on there.

40:42 [SPEAKER_00]: And I'd love to hear your thoughts, come join us, be part of the community. [SPEAKER_00]: Alright, let's take a quick break. [SPEAKER_00]: I've got my patrons to go think. [SPEAKER_00]: So don't go anywhere. [SPEAKER_00]: Alright, thank you for all the support our new patrons for the last two weeks.

40:58 [SPEAKER_00]: It's been a little while since I went to the GCX thing. [SPEAKER_00]: Our Drayless Leviathan Matthew P. Richard E. and Kai J. Welcome to the Patreon. [SPEAKER_00]: So glad that you're here. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for your support and also have to shout out every month or every week, not month, weeks.

41:15 [SPEAKER_00]: What am I doing? [SPEAKER_00]: Germinator, thank you for your continued support and to everybody who supports the show and all sorts of different ways. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for being here. [SPEAKER_00]: Also, I hope you enjoy the interviews from GCS. [SPEAKER_00]: If you have any thoughts or questions about those, I'd love to hear that as well.

41:28 [SPEAKER_00]: If you want more episodes like that or like this, I every so often, I mix it up. [SPEAKER_00]: Let me know. [SPEAKER_00]: I would love to find out what types of episodes resonate the most with all of you. [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, we're going to continue the other series I've been doing with the businesses and then the fallout vaults and all of that.

41:47 [SPEAKER_00]: If you're certain stuff that more of you like than others than I can tweak the formula, I think it's really fun to take apart these types of videos by people like Tim Kane because they are so insightful. [SPEAKER_00]: If we can understand the game and the way the game works in his mind, [SPEAKER_00]: then we'll have more insight into why these decisions were made to begin with.

42:08 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's all part of enjoying this together even more than just through our own perspectives. [SPEAKER_00]: It's always good to have more information. [SPEAKER_00]: Other people's perspectives to keep broadening our sense of things. [SPEAKER_00]: So Tim, keep it up. [SPEAKER_00]: And if you have any recommendations for other videos I should be reacting to, please send me links for that as well.

42:24 [SPEAKER_00]: That would be awesome. [SPEAKER_00]: Also, thanks to everybody who leaves review on Apple Podcasts. [SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate that. [SPEAKER_00]: Five-star reviews will get read out in the future. [SPEAKER_00]: And if you want to help out in other ways, just share with other people. [SPEAKER_00]: If you're listening to this and the follow-up TV show is out and you've got like a uncle Bill who's like super into it, share the show with him.

42:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe he'll like that kind of thing. [SPEAKER_00]: Always helpful. [SPEAKER_00]: So thank you for being here. [SPEAKER_00]: I hope you have a wonderful week. [SPEAKER_00]: And until next time, I don't know, do some traveling. [SPEAKER_00]: Let me know. [SPEAKER_00]: Follow out to the same and other locations.

42:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I guess we're not quite there yet. [SPEAKER_00]: Wow, that's gonna get real dark. [SPEAKER_00]: All right, we'll wrap it up. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you next time. [SPEAKER_00]: Bye, everybody. [SPEAKER_00]: To plug into everything else we're doing, check out robotsradio.net. [SPEAKER_00]: Reach out to me on Twitter at robots underscore radio.

43:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Check out the robots radio rocket club where you can join me and a bunch of our other creators creating your podcast, starting a new podcast or helping your current podcast grow. [SPEAKER_00]: There's more information about that on RobotsReady.net as well. [SPEAKER_00]: And you can always talk with us and the entire community over two thousand people on the RobotsReady Discord.

43:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Come join us. [SPEAKER_00]: We'd love to chat with you. [SPEAKER_00]: See you guys next time.