December 17th cannot come quickly enough. The second season of Bethesda’s Fallout on Amazon Prime is only a couple of months away.
If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, you can watch it below;
Now, the Institute. This is a faction in the Fallout 4 video game. A far advanced faction than we’ve ever seen previously. They live deep in an underground bunker, but it’s 10x more advanced than the vaults we’re so accustomed to seeing.
They have toilet roll, animals, food, water, clean beds – it’s incredible. In my first-ever run, I chose to side with the Institute. Before the pitchforks come out. I opted for them purely because of the way of life down there. If this were truly my character, I’d opt for cleanliness, safety, and access to clean food and water. It’s simple, really, although they’re not exactly ethical or good.
The show is roughly 9/10 years after the events of Fallout 4. This does mean that it’s likely the showrunners will need to decide on an ending. All things do likely point towards the Institute winning. This makes sense because the Brotherhood could still lose in Boston, as they have placements set up all over the country.
It would add a lot of questions around the Sole Survivor (the playable character in Fallout 4). They could go down the route of him/her disappearing there shortly after the events of Fallout 4, but it could work with them surviving and would lead to synths for the third season.
This would add a layer of storytelling arcs within the show itself, as it doesn’t have to fully deal with the Institute directly, but it could do so indirectly, tying the games together.
It could be done with the obvious synths themselves. Humans like robots, whether sentient or not. They could even go as far as having Shaun flashbacks or tapes of him. After all, the Institute was largely a myth in the wasteland in Fallout 4. For me personally, I’d just love to see a direct tie-in to the game itself more than anything. None of the games have really connected before, so this would be a first. It’s set very close together, so anything could happen. Even just Easter Eggs or references would be fine by me.
It adds a layer of knowing as well. For gamers who’ve played Fallout 4, it adds this familiarity with it. It did with me at the end of the show’s first season when we got a glimpse of New Vegas. For us who’ve played the games, we knew right away exactly where that is and what happened there.
One of the solid things the show did well was not just bring the gaming community together but also allow non-gamers to become invested in the universe. My wife has never played the games before. She’s only known of small parts from when she’s seen me play the games or I’ve been telling her. She absolutely loved the show.
I even very recently reinstalled Fallout 4 to show her the Institute and sections of the game so it feels even more familiar to her. One of the amazing things about the Fallout universe is how rich and vast it is. Bethesda has done a great job in building this entire lore from a single video game back in 1997.
I’m looking forward to the second show, but I do hope we get Fallout 5 at some point before I die, that’d be great.
