Rann:  Anyway, there’s a lot to be said about Fallout 3, enough that I’m almost itching to get the computer version so that I’ll be assured of being able to get the expansions and use mods and such. But one of the biggest things that I keep thinking about during the game is this.

Bethesda has done an excellent job of making this a fully-realized world. The vast majority of the time, when you run across Raiders or whatnot, they’re close to where they obviously live. There’s a few haphazard shanties nearby, or a blown-out house, or a section of tunnels that they obviously live in and sleep in. These are their homes, where they sit and flip through scorched books or drink their booze or whatever. And a lot of the time, when I see one of these areas, I wonder…

... what do you sit and think about when the world has ended?

I brought this up with a friend of mine and he almost reacted like it was a criticism, like I was saying people wouldn’t sit around and smoke and drink and think after the world ended. (Well, ended in this fashion.) It’s not that, of course they would. He then went on to say that they’d probably think of all the same stuff people thought about before there was the internet and television and all.

I dunno. It seems like it would be different.

Even 200 years after the bombs fell and civilization crumbled, most people in the world of Fallout seem to have a pretty good idea that they’re living in the remains of the old society. There’s no real sense that they think “Well, this is just the world”, it’s more like they’re very conscious of living after the apocalypse. How realistic that is, I dunno, but it definitely lends a different tone to things… most of the people you talk to seem to carry this palpable sense of loss, as if they’d actually known and lived in the world of the pre-war, even though they were born many generations after. There’s very little sense that they’re starting to forget, to think that nothing like computers or robots or genetic engineering existed, except very rarely with some young children, who presumably just haven’t learned about the pre-war world yet.

So I think that the thoughts would still in many ways be a survivor’s thoughts. The thoughts of someone who lost something, even if they were born into this world.

What does a Raider think about when they sit in an old subway tunnel and smoke? “I wanted to be sheriff when I grew up”? “Wonder if I’ll ever have the caps to settle down someplace”? The game paints them as practically being Reavers like in Firefly, but Reavers don’t sit around reading Grognak the Barbarian. They’re obviously still people, no matter how depraved. They must still have hopes and dreams and memories.

What do the caravan sellers think about as they wander from settlement to settlement? Do they think about the dog they had as a kid? Do they think about asking out their bodyguard? Do they think about how bad a 200 year old business suit smells?

You think of all these questions, you wonder and ponder. Or I do, anyway. Hell, what’s a Super Mutant think about, when he doesn’t have any little people to run around yelling at or any captives to pull apart? What goes through that big mutated head when they’re sitting around the fire with their buddies staring into the flame?

These are the questions spawned by creating a game world where most of the enemies you fight don’t just exist in a vacuum, as if they’d popped out of nowhere like random encounters. You get to rifle through their stuff after you’ve reduced their skull to paste, so you wind up wondering… what was the last thing that passed through their head, other than your spiked knuckles?