Babe 2: Pig in the City is really the glue that holds this whole video together. Thank you George Miller!

Sorry for some of the pops in the audio, I got a little passionate towards the end :p

It's tiring to have adult (not porn, just for older audiences) games being so family friendly and sterilized. It fails to satisfy the itch I have for darker experiences.

New Vegas was actually dark. The vaults, the lore if you look deeper into it, and other instinces

One of the missing features is "Desperation".

Nobody seems to actually struggle. Fallout 4 is less a Post Apocalypse, and more a Post-Post Apocalypse.

You could replace the intro to any Quest from Fallout 4 to the meme: "Oh, No. --  Anyway..."

There are active markets, bars are no actual refuges, jails are basically unused.

The world has been sanitized.

Sure, there are Raiders, Supermutants and Ferals, but they only actively attack YOUR settlements, or are stationary.

Nothing's actually organic.

The set pieces you find in Spawn Spots, never STICK. They are TEMPORARY. You can help settlers, pay or defeat raider tolls, anything; but they don't stick around. No trace of their Effect on the world at large.

That's why there's no "Ladies of the Night". Because it's degrading, and would imply people can't get out of the hell they live in. Specially in a world that, devastated and all, you still have effective healthcare by the same purple syringe. Or plant your own crops, or boil your own water. Or make your own chems.

There's no TRUE STRUGGLE in this world.
Everything's a facade.

I can explain why Fallout 4 has no Hookers !
Fallout 4 wants to ignore so much the themes and stories of civilization reconstructing itself and society coming back, that they rather put as minimal aspects of real societies in the game as possible
Is a theme park ride of a world, not a real place like it New Vegas
I don't even think the question of prostitutes arrived in the writer's heads to be censored, they never even thought about that, to maintain the illusion that the world was nuked 2 weeks ago

5:54 the death of Adam Adamowicz, he was the artist for the aesthetic of fallout 3 (which for the most part carried over to NV) when they made fo4 the art style took a drastically different approach and a lot of that can be attributed to lack of Adam

The whole honest thing is actually a big problem now days. All of us are just used to having 7 layers of irony and sarcasm to protect ourselfs, and the one who is sincere about smt? Gets punished by being called "cringe", "gay", "not that deep bro".  No emotional moment comes without a joke so thing dont get to emotionaly hard, to the point that idk if people actually know themselfs under the layers of irony.

Edging us with Metro footage the whole way. The superior post apoc game 💪

7 minutes in, I like all the questions you're asking & exploring so far. Showing again you have a solid criteria for horror in fictional settings & aren't just reading wiki's verbatim. Great channel, mate.

Almost a bit surprised you did not mention the story of The Survivalist/Randall when you were talking about Fallout. Regardless, a fantastic video as always.

Fallout 4 is not so much an actual post-apocalypse, it’s an “amusement park” post-apocalypse, which admittedly I did enjoy. But I hope the amusement park comparison makes the sanding down of dark themes make more sense cause as you said, it’s to make it more palatable for a casual audience.

Edit: Finished the video, bro said exactly that, a Theme Park version

The thing I'll never understand is why are 18+ games, movies, etc... censored at all?
Seriously, we have some adults censoring adult content because they think other adults wouldn't be able to handle what was created by adult artists? Absolutely ridiculous.

Games have either lost their ability to be dark due to the audience of today, to the current events which many people would see as 'sensitive' or game developers have generally lost their touch in making dark games which generally sucks when you compare Bethesda Fallout games compared to the older Interplay Fallout entries, New Vegas and even Fallout 3 which still relatively dark and then Fallout 4 removed a majority of dark themes and suggestions when it's a rated M game.

Fallout 4 was my gateway into this wonderful series, I liked it. After finishing it I moved on to New Vegas and was blown away by how it handled things that I didn't get to experience in 4. So much so that I felt a sense of "why wasn't some of this in 4?". Looking back at it Fallout 4 did feel too sanitized to me - it wasn't willing to explore things and ideas unlike New Vegas. Like the latter felt gritty - you can see that in Prim, Camp Forlorn Hope, Westside, and Bitter Springs.

30:57 Thank you for reviving the memory of mom trying to explain to the 6 year old me that not everyone dies of old age, and the world can be a horrible place.

2 words: Dead Money. The sierra Madre is one of the creepiest locations I’ve been in a Fallout Game

"That scene" from Children of Men is easily the most emotionally resonant and moving moment of cinema I've ever seen in my life, and I hate that you didn't get to place it in your video. But it is the perfect example of your theme of (meaningfully) dark stories highlighting the light all the more brightly.

I'm kind of sad Metro didn't earn more than passing showcase, but it's nice to at least see it recognized.

I honestly think it does a perfect job at depicting just how crushing a post-apocalyptic life would honestly be. Forced to live in underground tunnels like rats because the very air outside is toxic, more and more people lost to the Metro every day, people lying to- cheating- even killing each other for the most basic of resources. It's not explicitly stated, but it definitely seems to imply that no matter how stable things manage to be, the Metro will slowly crumble, the populace shrinking like a dying flame until one day it will be permanently extinguished.

It also shows humanity at its most bare and ugly state. Not just simple liars, cheaters, and murderers like I said before, but everything reprehensible about humanity is on full display throughout the series. A primal fear of what we don't understand and a "kill first, ask questions later" attitude, ideological fanaticism and back-stabbing betrayal, greed and sadism, poachers and con-men... everything.

And all of it lived through the eyes of Artyom, a man who has to contend with this horrid nature and ask himself if people are any better than the mutants that slaughter them, and you as the player act as the voice in his head that makes him decide if that's correct.

You realize that when game companies become too big, they eventually have to answer to their shareholders, who are only interested in the profit margins of their investment and demand that they prioritize marketability of the product above all else. That's why everything is getting watered down and mediocrity overwhelms in all media.

Part of the issue is how frequently people conflate "dark" and "bleak/hopeless". In a lot of "dark" post-apocalypses people seem completely incapable of learning or teaching, and the only people who're willing to cooperate with each other are somehow the psychopathic sadists.

It's entirely possible to have a post-apocalypse where everyone is in a desperate struggle to survive and humanity is hanging on by our fingernails... and every day or week or month or year, the desperation becomes lesser, and our grip on the edge grows stronger. People who've retained the instinct of mutual not-fucking-everyone-around-you-over band together, protect each other, exchange knowledge and capabilities. People start farming again, start making tools and houses and medicines. The cannibalistic rape-gangs start collapsing into infighting as all of the soft targets dry up, and/or they're wiped out by groups of non-intrinsically-evil survivors.

In fact, this is MORE likely than "humanity continues scrabbling along until it eventually goes extinct", because this is exactly what HAS happened throughout every localized disaster and global extinction event that humanity has been around for: the survivors band together and start working towards fixing things.