Davis Aurini - Amazon's Fallout, the Simulacrum of a Lets Play: An Aurini Rant.
Aired: 2025-12-17
Duration: 24:09


=== Complain About Super Mutants (05:02) ===

[00:00:01]  Tomorrow is the release date for Fallout Season 2, Episode 1.
[00:00:10]  May God have mercy on our souls, and Merry fucking Christmas.
[00:00:23]  Fallout Season 1 is literally worse than Fallout 76, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4 all put together.
[00:00:36]  Because at least those post-apocalyptic funhouse games could be ignored since they're happening on the East Coast.
[00:00:51]  Before I get into the meat of this video, I just gotta complain about something.
[00:00:58]  Could we please stop bringing back super mutants?
[00:01:03]  let alone the Brotherhood of Steel, in the three good Fallout games.
[00:01:13]  Honorable mention for Fallout Tactics.
[00:01:18]  In the three good Fallout games, the first one, the Super Mutants, were a core story element.
[00:01:28]  In the second one, they were relevant.
[00:01:33]  They were part of the story, but mostly they were just the leftovers from the conflict in the first game.
[00:01:43]  And by Fallout New Vegas, you could actually complete the entire story without encountering a single super mutant.
[00:01:52]  Like, they weren't relevant to the story.
[00:01:54]  They were, there's an old folks home full of super mutants.
[00:02:00]  They were past history, man.
[00:02:02]  They weren't relevant anymore.
[00:02:09]  Fallout is not the Brotherhood of Steel and Super Mutants.
[00:02:17]  Oh, God, don't get me started.
[00:02:20]  The freaking ghouls.
[00:02:27]  Stop treating ghouls like an oppressed class.
[00:02:32]  The ghouls were walking-talking reminders of the horrors of nuclear war.
[00:02:40]  They were people cursed to look like permanent burn victims.
[00:02:49]  And they were, 99% of them were produced from, what was it, Vault 7?
[00:02:57]  In Necropolis.
[00:03:02]  You don't need ghouls in every single fallout.
[00:03:11]  Stop doing super mutants.
[00:03:13]  Do something else.
[00:03:14]  You can do something else.
[00:03:16]  There were lots of evil experiments going on back pre-war.
[00:03:20]  It doesn't need to be Super Mutants versus Brotherhood of Steel every single time.
[00:03:26]  Make something new.
[00:03:29]  Never should have been Super Mutants on the East Coast.
[00:03:32]  It should have been something else.
[00:03:35]  They definitely, even if it was the FEV virus making super mutants, it should have been something else.
[00:03:42]  Call them the Super Soldier Program or something.
[00:03:51]  This is not a video about Bethesda being terrible in general.
[00:04:01]  This is a video about Bethesda being terrible in particular.
[00:04:07]  This is about simulation simulacrum and writers that have never been in a fist fight once in their entire lives.
[00:04:23]  Simulation simulacrum.
[00:04:26]  Baudrillard.
[00:04:29]  Baudrillard was talking about the media obsessed society.
[00:04:36]  The oversaturated society, the entertaining ourselves to death society, where media becomes more real than reality.

=== Why It's Terrible (13:44) ===

[00:04:49]  more real than real.
[00:04:59]  And that is exactly what we are seeing with the Fallout TV series.
[00:05:10]  Now if you like this, like honest to God, what the hell is wrong with you?
[00:05:13]  Were you drunk?
[00:05:14]  Were you playing Sudoku while it was playing in the background or something?
[00:05:20]  Can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.
[00:05:23]  Confused Matthew was right about that.
[00:05:25]  The set design, the costume design, the, like, that part is amazing.
[00:05:33]  It's fantastic.
[00:05:34]  The special effects, they're great.
[00:05:38]  I really wish I could like this series.
[00:05:42]  I wish it was, like, okay.
[00:05:46]  But no, it's absolutely terrible.
[00:05:50]  And one of the reasons it's terrible is because the series is based upon game mechanics.
[00:06:00]  I wrote an article many moons ago.
[00:06:08]  I'll link it below.
[00:06:10]  Asking the question, how realistic is Dungeons and Dragons?
[00:06:14]  The rule system of Dungeon and Dragons.
[00:06:16]  How realistic is it?
[00:06:19]  And it turns out very.
[00:06:22]  Even though it has displacer beasts and magic spells.
[00:06:27]  Turns out that Dungeons & Dragons is not a bad human simulator.
[00:06:43]  But one of the problems, anytime you come up with a rule set for a human simulator, that's what RPGs are.
[00:06:52]  Any an RPG is a character-focused strategy game.
[00:07:04]  Now, on the one end, you have completely abstract strategy games like chess.
[00:07:11]  You know, bishops don't actually move at 45-degree angles.
[00:07:14]  They mostly try and cover up for what happened to little boys.
[00:07:22]  Chess names all the pieces, king, queen, pawn, rook, but they're all abstract concepts.
[00:07:31]  Then you get things like JRPGs.
[00:07:34]  And the Wasteland series, it leans very heavily JRPG, where, you know, you have the different combat skills.
[00:07:44]  You have the unarmed combat skill.
[00:07:46]  You have the big guns combat skill.
[00:07:51]  So the labels are based upon real life, but the skills themselves are abstract.
[00:07:57]  It's like one to ten points in them, and you have these different perks that go along with each one.
[00:08:02]  So it's actually just a chess-like strategy game where we have real-world labels applied to the different skills, and then individual characters connected to having these skills.
[00:08:19]  But the combat itself is very abstract.
[00:08:25]  And then you have the Western RPG, which is Dungeon   ⁇  Dragons, which is the Fallout series, where it's trying to imitate real life.
[00:08:40]  Dungeon   ⁇  Dragons does it on a probability curve, a bell curve.
[00:08:47]  You know, you roll 3 die 6, you get 3 to 18 is your score.
[00:08:53]  Produces a perfect bell curve.
[00:08:57]  And then those scores are correlated to real-life statistics, which also form a bell curve, of how much you can bench press.
[00:09:13]  Fallout, based upon the GURP system, same thing.
[00:09:16]  It's a reality simulator.
[00:09:25]  But the problem with reality simulators is that when you're a game designer in a reality simulator, you often start mistaking the trees for the forest.
[00:09:42]  And I'll give you an example from a Ravenloft campaign that I ran.
[00:09:51]  So in this Ravenloft campaign, the secret, actually based upon the sorrows of Young Werther, I'm That Much of a Nerd.
[00:10:08]  Where the plot of this horror Dungeons and Dragons game was that a woman had been murdered by her unrequited lover.
[00:10:23]  And she'd been murdered with a gunshot, which does piercing damage in the D  ⁇ D system.
[00:10:32]  And so her marble statue Revenant could only be harmed by piercing damage.
[00:10:41]  And my players did eventually figure this out.
[00:10:45]  It was pretty good.
[00:10:46]  It was a creepy, creepy story with her severed head spinning at a different rate from the dancing marble statue.
[00:10:52]  It was a lot of fun.
[00:10:54]  But after that, I reflected that, you know, they were using rapiers, which also do piercing damage.
[00:11:02]  And now that doesn't actually make sense.
[00:11:04]  Like, that makes sense in the game rules universe.
[00:11:08]  But the game rules universe, that's an approximation.
[00:11:13]  D  ⁇ D is supposed to be a story about real people encountering fairies and dragons and drow and engaged in real combat.
[00:11:28]  And sometimes, as a game designer, you get too focused on the rules.
[00:11:34]  Well, technically, it's piercing damage.
[00:11:37]  Actually, and that ruins things.
[00:11:43]  The rules are there to create the illusion that it's a real world.
[00:11:50]  The real world, the physics are too complex for us to decide with 20-sided dice.
[00:11:58]  So it's a simplified rule set that's very, very close to reality.
[00:12:03]  So is Fallout.
[00:12:08]  And yet, one of the things that I read that made, it helped make the first season of Fallout make a lot more sense.
[00:12:22]  It's that these characters, you've got the ghoul, and you've got Lucy, and you've got, I don't know, the Brotherhood of Steel guy.
[00:12:38]  They're not designed around real characters experiencing reality.
[00:12:46]  They're designed around RPG characters.
[00:12:54]  Karma was one of the original game mechanics introduced in the first Fallout game.
[00:13:01]  As to whether you were playing a good character or a bad character.
[00:13:05]  Which is, it's universal now in video games, okay?
[00:13:09]  It was a new concept when the first Fallout came out.
[00:13:17]  The more good things you did, the more that people would respond to you positively.
[00:13:24]  And bad things vice versa.
[00:13:27]  By the time of Fallout New Vegas, you got not just your karma system, but also your reputation system in individual communities.
[00:13:37]  Fallout spearheaded these concepts, which when you're playing D&D, the DM knows what you've been doing and how you've been acting, and he doesn't need a karma system to keep track of it.
[00:13:51]  But a video game does.
[00:13:56]  And this has resulted in a problem.
[00:13:59]  Particularly in games like Fallout 3.
[00:14:04]  In Fallout 3, I just acted like a decent, honest person for the first 35 minutes of gameplay.
[00:14:15]  And so a group of bounty hunters came after me to murder the do-gooder when I just complimented people.
[00:14:25]  Fallout 3 tried to do this like moral ambivalence, where if you were a good person, the evil bounty hunters came after you.
[00:14:32]  If you're an evil person, the good bounty hunters came after you.
[00:14:37]  Which is absurd.
[00:14:40]  Everybody likes an honest person.
[00:14:43]  The evil people, if they see an honest person, they might try and scam him, but they're not going to murder him for being honest.
[00:14:49]  Not until he's done something to betray them.
[00:14:54]  And in the Fallout TV series, the three primary characters are deliberately following karmic routes.
[00:15:06]  Lucy is deliberately being karmically positive the whole time.
[00:15:13]  The ghoul is deliberately being karmically negative the whole time.
[00:15:20]  And Brotherhood of Steel retard is trying to stay neutral.
[00:15:27]  Again, Fallout 3, there are some companions that would only be your companion if you had neutral karma.
[00:15:35]  Which is ridiculous.
[00:15:40]  Karma is a metric to track, To indirectly track what your attitude to people is.
[00:15:49]  Like, if you're genuinely, generally helpful, you can't quite track that through dialogue options.
[00:15:57]  Right?
[00:15:57]  Like, the new person, like, how you speak, how you carry yourself.
[00:16:01]  That's what the karma system is.
[00:16:04]  It's not, like, a literal part of reality.
[00:16:07]  It's a game mechanic.
[00:16:14]  And it's not just limited to that either.
[00:16:23]  Early on, Lucy shoots the ghoul with a tranquilizer dart, and he pulls it out, unaffected, commenting, do you have any idea how many drugs I'm on?
[00:16:38]  Because the ghoul has the day tripper perk.
[00:16:46]  The day tripper perk is meant to imitate, emulate somebody with a very high alcohol tolerance, Somebody that has experience with different drugs and can keep their wits about them, even when they're stoned or high?
[00:17:12]  It's emulating the real world.
[00:17:16]  When you take the day tripper perk in Fallout New Vegas, you are saying, oh, my character's done a lot of drugs and he knows how to handle himself.
[00:17:29]  He knows when to stop drinking so he doesn't get a drunk driving ticket.
[00:17:35]  He's not a noob.
[00:17:42]  The Fallout TV series treats these game mechanics as if the game mechanics are reality.
[00:17:57]  This is why you get so many absurdities in the series.
[00:18:00]  You get the one guy.
[00:18:06]  He gets his foot crushed and then walks 10 miles on a compound fracture of his foot bones.
[00:18:18]  Then injects a stim pack or something and gets immediately healed from it.

=== Game Mechanics Reality (05:50) ===

[00:18:24]  Yeah, in video games, you can be crippled and you can still move your character around.
[00:18:31]  They're called game mechanics.
[00:18:37]  And the people writing this series are so divorced from reality that they actually don't know what it's like to get punched in a fistfight, to get your bell rung, to pass out drunk.
[00:18:51]  They don't know any of this stuff.
[00:18:56]  And so they write game mechanics as if it was reality.
[00:19:02]  And then call us the crazy people for finding it uncompelling.
[00:19:13]  Simulation, simulacrum.
[00:19:21]  This has been a growing problem in Hollywood, by the way.
[00:19:25]  The Fallout TV series is like the high watermark of mistaking artificial reality for reality.
[00:19:41]  But we've been on this path for a while.
[00:19:43]  Look at the Marvel movies.
[00:19:47]  The reason I cannot take the Marvel movies seriously.
[00:19:52]  Even though I recognize they've got some themes in them, yes, yes, and then hell, if you enjoy them, then you go enjoy the shit out of them, okay?
[00:20:00]  Not trying to tell you what you can and can't enjoy aside from the Fallout series.
[00:20:05]  You should not enjoy that.
[00:20:07]  It's terrible.
[00:20:12]  But you know, just call me a stickler.
[00:20:20]  But there's certain characters that have invulnerability.
[00:20:26]  Right?
[00:20:26]  Like the Hulk, he's got some sort of gamma radiation, alpha male, invulnerability, muscle shit going on.
[00:20:36]  So if you throw the Hulk into a brick wall, and there's an imprint of the Hulk's body on the brick wall, it's like, okay, I get it.
[00:20:45]  He's the Hulk.
[00:20:49]  But then you do the exact same thing with Spider-Man.
[00:20:53]  And hey, maybe I didn't get the memo, but he's got spidey senses, he's got spidey reflexes.
[00:21:01]  He doesn't have Spidey smash a brick wall.
[00:21:08]  Or take Iron Man.
[00:21:12]  Now I will buy that his whatever it's made out of suit.
[00:21:18]  It's obviously not iron because iron can't do this, but whatever it's made out of, I'll buy that it can deflect bullets.
[00:21:29]  But I've read too much on motorcycle helmet technology to believe that Iron Man can fly face first into an intercontinental ballistic missile.
[00:21:44]  Boom!
[00:21:47]  And not have his brain splattered within his own skull.
[00:21:51]  I don't see any fucking crumple zones in that Iron Man suit.
[00:21:57]  Bullets, okay.
[00:22:01]  Getting punched by King Zod?
[00:22:05]  No, I don't buy that.
[00:22:14]  These modern Hollywood writers are so divorced from reality that they mistake game mechanics for the real world.
[00:22:28]  Not just physically.
[00:22:30]  Okay?
[00:22:31]  Maybe I'm being kind of a prick when it comes to Iron Man catching an intercontinental ballistic missile.
[00:22:36]  Maybe I'm being the jerk and I should just enjoy the overall narrative of the Iron Man movies.
[00:22:44]  Maybe you got a point when it comes to that.
[00:22:50]  Iron Man is actually about Tony Stark real.
[00:22:54]  Okay, fair enough.
[00:22:55]  Fair enough.
[00:22:56]  I'm a prick.
[00:23:01]  But the Fallout series doesn't just apply, doesn't just abuse game mechanics.
[00:23:10]  Well, the ghoul is high level.
[00:23:12]  That's why he could get shot in the back and not die.
[00:23:16]  It doesn't merely abuse game mechanics in the combat scenes.
[00:23:27]  It also abuses them morally.
[00:23:30]  Where instead of having real characters that grow and change and learn and have desires and goals and challenges they overcome, It has players metagaming.
[00:23:47]  Metagaming to be a high karma or a low karma or a neutral karma character.
[00:23:55]  Because these idiot writers know absolutely nothing about the human soul.
[00:24:02]  All they know is how to min-max a character in a video game.
[00:24:08]  Merry fucking Christmas.