Each skill in the table is equipped with a fun animation, which makes it look very lively and attractive. The list of general skills has 70 pieces, and if you also count their levels, then the number increases to 275, so you definitely won’t be bored when planning your character. Here you will have the ability to breathe underwater, and an increase in influence on female characters during dialogues, and the talent of a treasure hunter, when literally from every enemy you kill, caps from . Of course, you will have to carefully plan the development of the main character so that not a single unit of skills is wasted. Beforehand, I advise you to read various manuals that will help you navigate the world of the game and competently manage the resources you have. For example, a skill that increases the carrying capacity of a character seems very useful to me. During the game, I turn into Plushkin and throw everything into my pockets, which is why they quickly overflow, and my hero begins to move at a snail's pace. Without this skill, you have to throw something away or spend time walking to your base in order to drop the extra load.
Another way to improve your character is to search the world of Fallout 4 for various pamphlets and comics. Found a comic about "Barbarian Grognak" (a reference to "Conan the Barbarian" by writer Robert Howard) - keep +5% melee weapon damage. Found a manual for security officers, and you will be harder to spot in the stealth mode necessary for successful thefts. Found a fantastic comic "Amazing Stories" - get +5 extra action points. You will find a great many such books in the game world, but it will take you a lot of time to collect them all. Different editions of the same comic add up bonuses, eventually making you a professional in one area or another. The collectible figures of Vault Boys that you will come across in various locations have not disappeared from the game. They also guarantee you constant bonuses to various parameters. Fallout 4 traditionally focuses on the player's euphoria from constantly pumping and improving their character. This process is very fast-paced, and it is almost impossible to break away from it. Also, I think you will be pleased with the fact that the maximum level of the main character in the game is no longer limited by the upper bar.
Of course, there is no Fallout game without a Pip-Boy wrist computer. Especially for the fourth game, the developers have released a mobile application that you can download to your smartphone and use it as an additional screen. The lucky ones who managed to get themselves a limited edition of the game complete with a plastic replica of Pip-Boy will be able to insert a smartphone into it and feel like an integral part of the nuclear wasteland. However, the circulation of the publication was so limited that it sold out on pre-orders in just a few hours. Now you can only buy on eBay for fabulous money. By the way, during the game you will stumble upon various cassettes with records that you can listen to using the Pip-Boy. In addition to cassette tapes, you can also find fun video games, such as Red Menace, a parody of Nintendo's Donkey Kong, or PipFall, reminiscent of the classic platformer Pitfall. But the most interesting game, in my opinion, is the full text RPG Grognak the Barbarian and the Ruby Ruins.
V.A.T.S. aiming system in the game remained almost unchanged, but I noticed behind me that I was not at all attracted to use it. Now this is nothing more than an echo, reminding us of the first games in the series. Much more fun to shoot enemies in real time, famously jumping out from around the corner. In this regard, Fallout 4 has become somewhat reminiscent of the Borderlands first-person shooter series. Yes, fans of traditional mechanics will fight opponents exclusively in this mode. Yes, some skills and weapons are tailored specifically for using them in V.A.T.S. But for some reason, I'm sure that 90% of the players would prefer battles on the run to thoughtful and leisurely aiming at the opponent's right eye.
The game has a very strong emphasis on crafting and building. Yes, now Fallout is also a little Sims. You will be able to build unique settlements for the survivors, supply them with water, electricity, food and protect them in every possible way from periodically attacking raiders with the help of protective fences and traps. For construction, you will need resources, and here you will have to sweat a lot, looking for suitable building materials and dragging them to the construction site. The building mode is activated only near a settlement friendly to you. In this mode, you can not only build various objects, but also dismantle garbage and debris lying on the ground, turning it into valuable resources. To protect the inhabitants from danger, you will have to place homing turrets around the settlement, then build an electric generator and run wires from it to the turrets. You can solve the problem differently, simply by building a strong enough fence and remember to leave a lockable door in it. Each settlement has several key parameters of well-being, including satiety, happiness of the population, security and others. If your colony is thriving, it will attract more and more new inhabitants, just like in the Fallout Shelter mobile game. Among the new settlers there may be valuable merchants from whom you can purchase various goods on favorable terms.
In terms of crafting in Fallout 4, you will have plenty of room to expand. In addition to modifications to 50 basic types of weapons, you can create armor, various explosives, medicines, and food for yourself. If you have necessary ingredients you can fry raddeer meat, cook squirrel soup, or even make an omelette with deathclaw eggs. Each meal replenishes a certain amount of the protagonist's vitality points, so it's a good idea to carry a few of the highest calorie meals around with you just in case. Weapon modification is also very important, because almost any weapon can be pumped so much that you will be almost invincible on the battlefield. However, this requires you to have certain skills, as well as details that you will have to look for during your travels. Picking up various junk, you see in your inventory what ingredients you can get from it if you dismantle it. Upon arrival at one of your bases, with just one button, you can dump all the collected trash into storage, from where all its components will be automatically available during the modification and construction process.
In the game, as before, partners are available to you. You can take the robot butler Codsworth with you on your journey, or you can tame a shepherd dog named Dogmeat (in the original Dogmeat, so it would be more correct to call her Sobachatina). As you progress through the game, more and more new characters will become available to you. For example, a girl journalist or a robot detective. Each of your partners is endowed with a unique skill that can help you progress through the game. For example, a dog can attack opponents and immobilize them, giving you the opportunity to aim better, while other companions can heal your wounds or hack complex computer terminals. Your brothers in arms cannot be killed on the battlefield. Enemies can only seriously injure them, after which they fall to the ground and wait until their health is restored. You can speed up this process by giving them one of your stimulants, or you can just wait for them to get back on their feet. If you want to change a partner, then the previous one goes to one of the friendly settlements of your choice, where he will patiently wait until you remember him. By the way, you can have affairs with some of your partners, for which you need to support with them friendly relations and share their values and views during the dialogues.
And you can also race through the wasteland in real Power Armor. The main thing is that you have an extra “nuclear block” at hand, from which this very armor is powered. When you are in armor, your enemies will definitely not be in trouble. However, keep an eye on the charge remaining in the nuclear block, as once it is completed, the armor will become completely useless, and you will find yourself in the middle of a battle, locked in a cramped tin can. Try not to drop the armor in enemy territory, as it can be stolen. If you need to leave the suit, be sure to remove the nuclear block from it to de-energize it. When severely damaged, Power Armor can be repaired and even modified at special installations located in friendly settlements. There are quite a few sets of power armor scattered throughout the Commonwealth, but you won’t be able to use it all the time. Nuclear blocks cost decent money, but they last for a relatively short time. However, you can wear armor when you go on especially dangerous missions.
Visually, the game leaves conflicting feelings. This is the same Creation Engine that was used to develop The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Let me tell you a secret: in fact, this is a slightly improved Gamebryo engine, on which The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was also created. Therefore, you should not expect a technologically advanced picture from Fallout 4. Yes, the textures are sharper, yes, the developers tightened up the animation of the characters, yes, some lighting work was done, but the game looks like something from 2008. Sometimes you come across moments that you unwittingly compare to the recent game The Witcher 3, and you cringe at the realization of what a huge technological gap lies between two games released in the same year. To illustrate my words, I note that there are no reflections in the mirrors in the game. None at all. Even at the very beginning of the game, when main character stands in front of this same mirror in the bathroom - you see only the cloudy texture of the glass surface. And some 3D game models sting your eyes with their polygonal corners. And this is in 2015! It's time for developers to stop using old technologies to make the world of Fallout even more attractive and comfortable for players. Of course, here the issue rests on money and time. However, I want to believe that technological progress will sooner or later get to this cult series.
The number of bugs in the game is simply off scale. Characters can disappear and reappear in a completely different place. The volume of the voice acting constantly jumps back and forth, which makes it difficult to understand speech by ear. And Russian subtitles are not available, for example, while listening to recordings from the cassettes you found for Pip-Boy. In general, Russian subtitles behave disgustingly. Sometimes during the dialogue they hang tightly on one phrase. The characters continue to talk, but you see only a single phrase, the relevance of which ended about five minutes ago. Another problem is too long Russian-language names of weapons and armor, which stupidly do not fit in the space allotted for them. Due to the presence of many modifiers, the name of a fancy pistol may look like this: "Balanced Reflex Heavy 10mm Silenced Pistol". But in the inventory you see only "Balanced collimator ...", and to find out more about the gun, you have to open an additional menu, which wastes your precious time.
Among the variety of developer omissions, there are quite useful bugs. The protagonist can sit on chairs and lie down on beds in order to skip a certain amount of game time if necessary. There are situations when you need to get into a house locked from the inside, but you just can’t do this. We use a useful bug. We are looking for an open window through which any chair inside the room is visible from the street, we poke the “Use” button and, lo and behold, our main character is already sitting inside a locked house on this very chair. Another useful bug is related to your partner Psina. At the very beginning of the game, when you leave shelter number 111, next to the exit you will find a locked box with a powerful cryogenic gun. It is impossible to open the box with your current level, but you can return here with the dog and order it to look for valuable items nearby. The dog will immediately come up to the locked box and pull out a cannon from it with his teeth right through the closed door, after which he will bring the weapon to you. Look for cannon ammo in her inventory. What a smart animal. Well done, Psy!
The system for choosing answers in Fallout 4 dialogues is also far from perfect. The player is shown only short versions of his answers and sometimes it is not entirely clear how the whole phrase will sound, which can lead to completely undesirable consequences. And the answer options themselves are frankly few. It seems to me that it was necessary to leave the dialogue system from the first parts of the series, when there could be many phrases on the screen at the same time, and the player could read them in their entirety, understanding in advance what this or that behavior model would lead to. Sometimes options like "Threat" or "Persuasion" will appear in dialogues, which vary in difficulty depending on how high your Charisma score is. If the variant of the phrase is marked in red, success is unlikely, and if it is yellow, then it’s worth the risk. Thus, you can make it much easier for yourself to complete some quests.
The soundtrack of the game, as before, consists of two parts. This is the natural background music that you hear while traveling through the wasteland, as well as the sounds of various radio stations, which you can switch using the Pip-Boy. Personally, I prefer to listen to music in the style of rock and roll, jazz, rockabilly and R&B. Yes, and the tracks are chosen as harmoniously as possible. Elton Britt's "Uranium Rush" or Skeeter Davis' "The End of the World" sound especially appropriate and fervently against the backdrop of a landscape scorched by a nuclear war of the world. And when you want something more thoughtful, you can turn on the radio station that plays classical music. Here you have Beethoven, and Bach, and my favorite Claude Debussy - in general, everything so that you can relax a little. But if you want to get the most out of the game's atmosphere, you need to turn off the radio and carefully listen to the ominous sounds of post-nuclear space, looking at the beautiful sunset against the backdrop of the ruins. But it’s still not worth admiring the wasteland for too long, as a radioactive sandstorm can begin, which will quickly drain the remnants of vitality from you.
I really liked the save system in the game. When you create your character, you give it a unique name, under this name all your records are saved. Inside the game, for each player, a separate folder with saves is created, as it were. If you have more than one person playing Fallout 4 in your family, this is an indispensable opportunity! Recordings are divided into three types: automatic, which occur at the key moments of the game, fast, which are made by pressing just a couple of buttons, as well as full-fledged recordings. I'll tell you right away: don't be shy about saving often, as danger in Fallout 4 can lurk around any corner. And if you are playing on a high difficulty, the save function should generally work for you at the level of reflexes. By the way, the higher the difficulty, the higher the chance of meeting legendary opponents in the wasteland, for killing which you will receive a huge amount of experience and especially valuable items.
Pros:
- An interesting storyline that gets better with time.
- The improved appearance editor will allow you to create your own double.
- The city of Boston and its environs are presented in the game just fine.
- Post-nuclear world, densely packed with events and adventures.
- Indescribable delight from countless finds and discoveries.
- Updated S.P.E.C.I.A.L. became clearer and more convenient.
- The history of the Fallout 4 world is interesting to collect bit by bit from different sources.
- Pip-Boy games are a great opportunity to revisit the classics.
- The new building system will appeal to fans of construction games.
- Exploring the Boston area can keep you busy for hundreds of hours.
- A wonderful soundtrack that includes dozens of different tracks.
- A huge number of weapons, armor and all sorts of their modifications.
- Being able to drive through the wasteland in power armor is something!
- Convenient game save system.
Minuses:
- The developers did not bring anything fundamentally new to the series.
- It is time for the morally and physically outdated Creation Engine to retire.
- V.A.T.S mode became a rudimentary component of the Fallout series.
- Many different bugs and flaws that interfere with the game.
- Lack of Russian subtitles when listening to cassette recordings.
- Not a very good dialogue system.
If you do not pay attention to the frank technical backwardness of Fallout 4 from other modern video games, as well as an impressive number of bugs, then we have an excellent shooter in the setting of a post-apocalyptic North America. I didn't misunderstand, the game is really becoming more and more like a shooter with role-playing elements, and not like the classic RPG that it once was. Fallout 4 envelops you with its atmosphere and makes you spend days and nights exploring abandoned factories, digging through garbage, cracking safes and computer terminals, and learning more and more about the amazing world of the post-nuclear wasteland. I would like to believe that the developers will stop playing on our nostalgia and fix most of their shortcomings with the help of patches, but for now it is impossible to call the game ideal even with a very big stretch. I bet the game, forgive me fans of the series, 8.5 points out of 10.
“The most popular post-nuclear apocalypse game is back, bringing Dogmeat, the Brotherhood of Steel and the Super Mutants with it; changing the scene, the dialogue system and the main character, who finally got his own voice"
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There is an opinion that Todd Howard does not learn from his mistakes, and therefore the series TES and Fallout suffer from approximately similar ailments: morally and physically obsolete animation and graphics, funny, and sometimes completely terrible bugs; Bethesda resembles an old artisan lagging behind his more "advanced" colleagues in the shop, but strictly adhering to a verified template that brings the desired result.
If the war never changes, then about the Fallout of the Howard generation, it’s just not possible to say something like that. The long-awaited fourth part has changed the franchise so dramatically that the first minutes of the game leave too ambiguous impressions, thereby making it difficult to answer the burning question: "what is the new Fallout?"
On the one hand, compared to its predecessors, Fallout 4 looks and plays quite freshly, and somewhere even unusually: the unprecedented emphasis on the shooter component has done its job, and now the game looks more like a shooter with role-playing elements like Borderlands, where the whole point existence is reduced to the notorious "clear the location and return for a reward"; on the other hand, whatever one may say, you understand that this adventure was a success, albeit partially.
Why in part? Having taken a step away from its predecessor and even more from the canon, Bethesda doomed itself to mass dissatisfaction on behalf of the community in advance: dissatisfied cries about simplified dialogues and a plasticine picture flooded the World Wide Web, and post-release reviews on the incentive are full of obscene statements about whom. The reason is clear: the post-nuclear apocalypse has completely ceased to be such, and the desire of the game "to be closer to the people" remained incomprehensible to fans.
The prologue outdoes its predecessor: we are given an adult character who is left to change his physiognomy as he pleases - no newborns and puberty; the process itself takes place at the mirror, and the most curious thing is also there: having changed the gender of the character to the opposite, the man in the foreground gives way to a woman. It would seem that the usual procedure for the role-playing genre, but even here Bethesd "e found something to surprise - as one well-known gamer noted, the idea is brilliant. While the player is poring over appearance his avatar, the wife actively comments on what is happening in the spirit of "mmm, what a handsome man."
Everyday American carelessness, appearing in the first minutes, involuntarily delights: a robotic butler named Codsworth treats the owner to morning coffee; according to the "zomboyaschik" they talk about another political mumbo-yumba and the threat of nuclear war; a child's crying is heard from the next room, and on the threshold of our cozy nest, the annoying Jehovah's Witness consultant Vault-Tec is waiting, who is talking about the rescue operation of the population in case of a nuclear apocalypse.
Just a couple of minutes later, the inhabitants of the town in a panic rush to the shelter; helicopters are all around, military men in familiar armor, “lower the elevator!”, The climax of this turmoil is a sudden flash of light and a nuclear mushroom that arose in the distance. Once in the shelter, your family is confronted with a fact: they will not give you any life-existence in the shelter, you will have a cryo-sleep, which no one warned about; 200 years of freezing, the murder of a spouse, the kidnapping of a child, another ten years of sleep, and you are on the threshold of a new life. The first emotions - damn it, it's just fucking!
Returning to his native land, the hero will have to do his usual routine. Explore the surroundings, get decent weapons, ammo and caps, find out at least something about the missing son and follow the trail. Another thing, is it necessary to follow the story quest? As soon as the Commonwealth (or Wasteland) looms on the player's horizon, it is difficult to resist the inexplicable desire to go out to that abandoned garage and look for some useful trash; having taken on the first story task, you have several dozen hours behind you and a lot of open side quests - and yet everything is just beginning.
Traveling around the outskirts of Boston, you will almost certainly stumble upon a shootout in the Liberty Museum, where the raiders "press" the next victims, as it turns out later, these victims - the Minutemen - are the last representatives of their cause. Then there will be a fierce battle, almost immediately they will be allowed to “drive” in power armor with a minigun at the ready, later there will be more crowds of raiders and a death claw that crawled out of a smelly sewer.
In fact, the player is immediately given deadly toys, which in the same Fallout 3 best case several tens of hours later. This is both good and bad at the same time.
Power armor has changed the principle of operation: like Tony Stark, the player inserts a nuclear block into the armor, after which they automatically open and absorb their owner; inside we are waiting for the same interface of Iron Man, and the knowledge that you are really in something massive, cool and powerful. Oh yes, and the voice is also changing - a trifle, but nice.
Having the opportunity to test solid weapons after an hour of playing, you feel like a king, because, in fact, absolutely any living creature in the Wasteland, with the exception of outlandish, legendary monsters, does not pose any danger when you are fully dressed in a kind of exoskeleton, which automatically injects stimulants, and protects from lethal radiation.
Staggering around the neighborhood of Vault 111, you might be slightly surprised that an eloquent two-digit number is on the counter of played hours - 10-20 hours is far from the limit. During this time you have collected various kinds of rubbish; helped the Minutemen settle in and gain a foothold in the Sanctuary Hills; more or less explored the surrounding territories, discovering a couple of dozen interesting places, full of no less interesting things; met the locals and rendered them a service - at first glance, not the most exciting pastime, but it draws you in so that you involuntarily lose the sense of time, and it is impossible to tear yourself away. Anyway.
Against the backdrop of endless adventures in the spirit of "we are offended by raiders, please pile on them with an additive" - the plot motivation of the protagonist floats before your eyes, and you hardly remember that once you had a family from which there was only one son and thirst to sweep; throwing side tinsel, rushing in a hurry to the main goal, the town, arranged in one of Boston's most famous attractions - the Fenway Park baseball stadium; along the way, you come across a dozen more similar structures, you admire, explore, and again you forget about the main thing - and this is always the case.
Sometimes it seems that Fallout doesn't need a legend; an explanation of how the main character ended up in such a place: there are a sufficient number of different characters in the game world, and each with its own story, filled with humor or grief; The wasteland lives on its own, not requiring the participation of the player at all, and the player, in turn, is left to his beloved. Freedom is fully felt at the moment when four large groups come into action, each of which pursues its own goals, follows its own credo.
Speaking of factions, it is worth noting that the motives of each of them are not as unambiguous as it seems at first glance: over time, you realize that the Brotherhood of Steel is far from being good guys; Underground agents don't know what they're doing; The Institute is not evil at all; Well, the Minutemen just want to live and prosper. In general, we are free to decide not only our own fate, but also the fate of a single faction, and the Commonwealth - the burden of possible responsibility for the decisions made also lies on our shoulders, which does not ease the soul.
From the mission to save the Wasteland, you can always be distracted by something more urgent, there are plenty of things to do: scour the map in search of interesting places and things; start building your own settlement or small estate; arrange a raid with the Brotherhood on super mutants or raiders; help people from other settlements; hunt legendary animals and so on - everyone will find entertainment to their liking.
In order not to be in a constant advantage, you should think about creating your own base, where in your free time you can relax, heal, modify armor and weapons, store various kinds of trash. On the territory of Boston there is the N-th number of workshops with workbenches, thanks to which access to the construction menu is opened. The process of creating a dilapidated shack is extremely simple: there are ready-made modular block-rooms, or manually, using walls, floors and roofs; furniture and decorations for aesthetes, security turrets and generators with various switches that power all the electronics.
Fortunately, routine and clumsy construction (and it was implemented, let's be honest, through one place) is not forced, so those who are not related to the architectural craft can be calm. The only annoying moment that occurs everywhere is the lack of resources. Most spending time in the Wasteland, all you do is run from one dump to another, in search of the coveted concrete, copper and glue - the first important resource for construction, the rest for crafting.
While walking for everything you need, and even together with a companion (by default with the famous Dogmeat), you feel like a real homeless person who, in the event of a useful find like a bottle or fork, will crush anyone who gets in his way for it - an atmosphere of post-apocalyptic devastation and a lack of familiar items life is fully imbued. In addition, the found trash can always be shaken off by your partner, thus lightening your hump and getting even more useless shit.
By the way, companions can not only carry "bags", but also beat the crap out of ill-wishers, as well as get in the way, preventing you from entering or exiting where you need to: the AI is so stupid that it sometimes unbalances; The dog gets in the way every now and then, doesn’t find anything useful, barks when the enemy approaches, which betrays your location, not to mention its sudden appearances out of nowhere, when you literally startle in surprise.
Story walkthrough ClaraOswald 217512 November 2015 17:19
Wake up and sing! After some changes in your appearance, explore your house, chat with Codsworth, your wife or your husband and son Sean, learn a little about life here until the doorbell rings.
Great news! A Vault-Tec representative is here to offer you and your family a brighter future in a crumbling world.
Fill out the registration form. There you need to indicate your name (you can choose a name from the list of voiced names for Fallout 4) and your best abilities, that is, to allocate S.P.E.C.I.A.L points. between seven attributes. You can create a character with a certain type of character (there are some suggestions for you).
Don't worry if you make a mistake. You will be able to fix your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. right before the exit from Vault 111.
When chaos erupts, follow the government officials' instructions to find Vault 111 that the Vault-Tec spokesperson spoke of. After talking with the officer, proceed to the center of the platform and watch the end of the world. Ignore the fear that gnaws at you, it is quite natural.
When you get to the shelter, follow the instructions of the Vault-Tec staff. And please enter the decontamination capsule.
-1) (_uWnd.alert("You have already rated this article!","Error",(w:270,h:60,t:8000));$("#rating_os").css("cursor", "help").attr("title","You have already rated this content");$("#rating_os").attr("id","rating_dis");) else (_uWnd.alert("Thank you for rating !","You did your job",(w:270,h:60,t:8000));var rating = parseInt($("#rating_p").html());rating = rating + 1;$ ("#rating_p").html(rating);$("#rating_os").css("cursor","help").attr("title","You have already rated this post");$("# rating_os").attr("id","rating_dis");)));"> I like 7War never changes,” Nate tells his reflection, brow furrowing in a funny way. Hanna sees in this only pathos smelling of dust and mothballs, an absurd and no longer needed challenge to the world, which can only be thrown by a retired military man. The one who is used to killing, but never adapted to peaceful life in a small cozy house with lace curtains on sparkling clean windows. And is it possible to forget about the horrors of war when it stands at the border of peaceful life, grinning menacingly? And every sunny morning threatens to blaze with lightning in the hands of an ancient, terrible god. Hannah rubs her husband away from the mirror, leaving a weightless kiss on his unshaven cheek, smoothing out the cobweb of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes with thin, unaccustomed to weapons fingers. For her, "war" is just a terrible word that catches the eye from the headlines of newspapers and from the speech of a television announcer. She wants to believe that everything will work out. Even when the heavy Vault door closes behind them, she still believes in the fairy tale like a stupid little girl.
War never changes. Hanna realizes this as her eyes are relentlessly stinged by the bright light of the New World. When strange people who call themselves the Minutemen break into the funeral home of her small town, where she hides in the ruins of her turned out to be such an unreliable house, sorting through children's toys miraculously preserved, faded to dirty shades. A strange woman, in whose eyes, it seems, time itself is frozen, gives her an illusory hope. Previously, Hanna did not believe in prophets and horoscopes, but now the words of an old drug addict are the only thing she has. And she asks a stern black man, whose face was burned by the radioactive winds of the Wasteland, to teach her how to shoot. A few months later, she leaves the Sankshuari Hills, hoping to find the only link that will lead her to her son. And from the pocket of the backpack sticks out a rattle that has lost its once sky-blue color, rhythmically beating the time of the steps of the last from Vault 111 with tiny steel balls.
“War never changes,” she recalls the last carefree morning of her life, shooting back at the savages in rags. This new world seems like a bad dream, an illusion, a wheezing, choking cacophony of screams. Sometimes it seems to Hannah that she is still sleeping in a cryopod, like a broiler chicken in a supermarket. That everything that happens is nothing more than visions of a slowly dying brain. But the pain of fresh wounds makes it clear that hope is dead. The world has changed, and, alas, not for the better. And a law degree is hardly useful here for something more than making a fire.
War never changes. The understanding of these words comes to Hannah when she, like a shepherd dog nailed to her, crawls on the trail of the kidnapper of her child. She has already learned to survive here, drop by drop losing what is left of her caring wife and keeper of the hearth. Her hearth has long been covered with rusty dust, and her husband, whose strong shoulder, as it seemed to her, will always be there, has been resting in a crooked coffin for several years. On her body are ugly scars left from inept darning, and her teeth are yellowed from tobacco smoke. The blue jumpsuit, which stands out as a bright spot on the lands of the Wasteland, has long found its rest at the bottom of the trash can. She salutes with her glass to a man whose bright yellow lamp-eyes look reproachfully at her. But Hannah doesn't really care anymore.
War doesn't change,” she says, smiling broadly through her cracked, bleeding lips as she fires a clip at her “son's” head. She no longer believes in anything or anyone, whispering these words like a mantra, as if she were crazy.
This world is heading towards the Devil, and Hannah will gladly help him stay on track. She picks up a rifle from the floor and nods to a sinth whose movements are the habits of an experienced mercenary. The one who lost everything and took everything from her. The only one in whom she does not see lies, the only one who was honest with her, even in his hatred.
War does not change. And will never change, because now she is always with her.
War has always been a companion of civilization. Historians now speak of 14,000 conflicts since we learned to tell our own history. Countless centuries of carnage, blood, violence and darkness. The skeletons of the first people are found with stone arrowheads in their shoulder blades. The first documented murder took place 12 thousand years ago. In the back. To free up territory for hunting or squeeze beads out of a bear, take a woman or take revenge. Or maybe it was a maniac from the Paleolithic. Who knows? In Britain, campsites were found where everything was strewn with gnawed human bones - it is not clear whether captives or elderly relatives were eaten there during a shortage of food. But there is no doubt that such traditions met. In Italy, they dug up a skull, with traces of human teeth - its age is 120 thousand years. Killed and devoured. The folklore of the Great Lakes tribes mentions the Wendigo, the Thing from the North. In the most severe winters, she appeared from a dense fog, and her eternal hunger could only be satisfied with human meat. There is an opinion of anthropologists that the Indians allowed their weakened relatives to stew, and then in the spring, shamefacedly averted their eyes, that, they say, the spirit did it all, we have nothing to do with it. The bloody millstones did not stop for a minute. Military campaigns for prey and religious conflicts, the first attempts to take possession of lands beyond the seas and the severed hands of slaves who did not fulfill the daily norm for rubber. Violence, violence, violence - in all manifestations.
Last World War accompanied by unprecedented disasters, destruction and casualties. The fronts swept across the continents twice, killing millions of people, crippling many times more, putting the survivors on the brink of poverty. Even my grandfather, a colonel, a wealthy man by the standards of a scoop, traveled around the country with a wooden suitcase, a chest and two chairs. The stories from the villages simply terrify me - sucking sweets for the holiday and boots for three. Sixties. People with iron teeth against the backdrop of a pier glass, as if carved by goblins, and strange paintings on the walls. Any photo from Canada or Australia of those times, whether ours or Polish - everything will be clear without words. It was then, after realizing the price, that all these UN, OSCE, human rights committees arose. They were conceived not only as an effective lever of political influence, but also with the aim of preventing, protecting, preventing. Then, against the backdrop of the meat grinder of camps and demolished megacities, this seemed vital. As it turned out, another mechanism came into circulation that protects the interests of the great states of our planet and the bureaucracy for cutting the budget. Not a single modern war has been stopped only with the help of the UN or peace initiatives. Israel is now in its sixth conflict with the Arabs, Saddam captured Kuwait and attacked Jews with Scud missiles, Milosevic and the leader of Libya were filmed with the help of an air operation, terrorists are being hunted by special services, and not a single explosion has yet been prevented by the peace ambassador. Maybe these guys stopped the massacres of tutus and hutsies? Not? Or the genocide of Christians by the Islamic state? Also no. Blood in the former Yugoslavia, in the very center of Europe? Somalia, "a mile to Mogadishu"? Humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo? Some strange track record that most of us would not have been hired with.
So, you slowly realize that there are not so many differences between eating relatives 120 thousand years ago and waging hybrid wars in 2014. Only the form, the goal and the ways to achieve it have changed, the motives have remained the same. Destroy an opponent, suppress him with your will, make a competitor disappear, free a niche for yourself and your children. This also works on the scale of states, not only among ancient people. Yes, the rules have changed a little, yes, you can't just cut out half of the continent. But war remains a terrible and effective means of resolving issues, while it is difficult to stop it. But we have changed a lot. The same Ukraine has not seen anything like this since the 60s of the last century. We are all descendants of a generation of people who drank tea at the research institute until five o'clock, sold Turkish consumer goods in the bazaars, waved flags for peace at the rallies on the first of May. The very people who cannot create working trade unions struggle to fight for their rights, and even the severed heads of journalists are not a reason for them to change the government. We will not take 10 percent of the activists who dragged both Maidans in all regions and are now giving their lives in batches at the front - the majority of Ukrainians are extremely peaceful, tolerant and calm people. They are hard to get involved in the conflict, trying to find reasons for themselves not to participate in it and are frankly afraid to admit that sometimes there is simply no way out. You have to run, kill, or be killed. And the years of a relatively well-fed life and the feeling that there is something to lose inspire real fear - in the world of globalization, you can always take a transport, take your family out and watch the conflict from a well-fed beauty far away. Well, you all remember those voices well. We were betrayed, nothing will change anyway, let their children go to the army first, and then we. We don't want to die for a factory in Lipetsk, and what kind of war is this, anyway? How is it - the ambassador is in Moscow, gas goes to Europe, in the evening we play football with Zenit, in the morning the Yakuts shoot from the Grad. It is necessary to announce everything officially, everyone to go to the trenches, and now we'd better go to Poland to lay tiles.
The brain is always painting a picture of what we want to see. Some curse politicians who have surrendered nuclear weapons and argue that if Ukraine had them, no events would have happened in Crimea and the East. Others run from reality, saying that if the rules change, they will defend their country, but for now they are not obliged to do anything. Still others see the "correct" conflict solely in the exchange of notes, the withdrawal of the embassy and the construction of a system of bunkers along the borders of 3,000 kilometers. Well, let's see, they say that war never changes. What path have we all traveled to this day in March 2015? We recall the beginning of the article - tens of thousands of years of murder, promiscuity, cannibalism and tribal violence. What's next? A small excursion to the beautiful past, where everyone was knights, fought with open visors and always by strict rules. With conclusions for today. Captives stopped being killed not so long ago - when the floods of the Nile and agriculture made it possible to support the captured people economically. Prior to that, chaos reigned - mass slaughter of the vanquished, keeping them like slaughtered cattle, until the first famine, treating women like property.
The rules, like today, have been changed by the economy. Mediterranean triad - grain, wine, olive oil. Stationary farms, efficient centers of production and trade. Food began to suffice, workers were needed. Now the prisoners have become a valuable commodity, the war has changed for the first time. It was no longer necessary to burn crops, chase every fugitive and cut children - everything went to work. The vanquished dug canals, planted trees, harvested crops, burned pots, and developed the victorious economy. In return, in addition to the obvious advantages of labor for a bowl of soup, they received slave unrest, crazy military regimes like the Spartan one, with its hunt for helots, and a certain efficiency ceiling that forced artisans could not overcome. Persian epic. The struggle of policies for trade flows. Tiny Macedonia, at the peak of its power, organizes trips to India. China, where at the end of the same era, the Red-browed uprising broke out - literally throwing the country to the bottom, when the victors could not just establish a normal life, and everything collapsed again. The battles of ancient kings to get banal booty, the dynastic struggle of the Diadochi for the legacy of Alexander the Great, the wild riots of people who were considered things, the selfish desires to "own the world" that fit on a piece of a modern map.
The second time everything turned upside down when Rome turned military campaigns from the personal hemorrhoids of leaders and leaders into the concerns of the state. paved stone roads through the whole empire, hundreds of thousands of slaves and civilians on the construction of ramparts, forts along the line of contact with the barbarians, the march of the iron legions, having their own badges, awards and annals. Nightmare cold mask of the system. Instead of warm lamp raids for money and human goods, full-scale sieges began, campaigns for decades, assaults on cities with half a million inhabitants, clashes at sea, and the enslavement of entire peoples. The war showed its true face, but it always changed, each time faster and faster. Invasions of barbarians who killed everyone whose height did not exceed the height of the wheel of their wagon. Great migrations of peoples sweeping away civilizations. The destruction of the majestic cities of antiquity with the sprinkling of ashes with salt. Increasingly, conflicts went beyond the economy and personal ambitions of the kings, religion and politics intervened, and external wild tribes increased pressure on the states of the fertile Crescent, and later Europe.
Religion. Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Campaigns "predicted" by the gods and vestals. Persecution of Christians, and then a retaliatory blow from them, but such that many still hiccup to this day. The emergence of the institution of the papacy and the "second power". Excommunications of kings from the church, increasing the influence of orders that owned real estate from Britain to the Middle East. The Albigensian wars, more like a branch of the massacre at a meat-packing plant, the first bulls that the pagans have no soul, and heretics have a warm place in hell. The birth of Islam. Crusades. What has changed in the confrontation is that in all battles a third party has become invisibly present - the Devil and God. Now it was no longer possible to act straightforwardly, the paradigm of faith required a certain behavior, although cruelty only intensified. Bonfires, torture, three legal days of sacking the city, beatings of non-believers, their loss of rights, special taxes, total impalement on a stake at the whim of the ruler. The “V” gesture, meaning victory, comes from there. Then they tried to keep the prisoners for ransom, slavery could no longer provide an economic race on an equal footing with free villans. But when it turned out that archers, poachers and rabble from their 80-pound longbows could pierce through the expensive armor of noble knights who had been practicing martial arts since childhood, they began to chop off the fingers of the captives. Index and middle finger right hand so that the string cannot be pulled. Such are they - the trolls of the Middle Ages, with their gestures.
What am I talking about? That war is changeable and never constant. Recruitment kits from the Seven Years' War, the blockade of Napoleon and the terrifying partisan guerrilla, when they cut the water carriers serving the headquarters, because all normal Spaniards should be in the mountains, and not kiss the ass of the invaders. The day before yesterday you were killed and eaten, yesterday you were captured as a slave, today you are maimed and sold to galleys, tomorrow you are taken to serve in the army of the winner, who knows what will happen next? The new time has put murder on stream. Both world conflicts gave the world hecatombs of corpses, the ability to turn a quarter into ruins with two clicks of a toggle switch, and the understanding that the principles of warfare have changed. Now millions of people were already involved in them - from children in factories and women fighting off landings, to scientists selecting codes for cipher machines and writers creating posters about saving bread. Trenches from ocean to ocean, swede and pea sausage, gases and battles lasting for years. The main change in modern history– attitude towards the civilian population and its limits. With all the Geneva conventions, why should a soldier destroy an 18-year-old teenager with a rifle, but spare a woman who collected a hundred bombs on a conveyor belt in a shift? Air strikes that demolish cities, nuclear mushrooms over Japan and refugee camps, who were put to the machine under duress, served as an answer to these questions. Terrifying cruelty to the “peaceful”, Zina Portnova with her poison, Nazi hunting teams, smoking stoves in the camps. The whole planet has become the battlefield, the trend in recent times is only getting worse.
The eternal anti-terrorist operation in Africa and the East. Endless civil wars on the periphery of civilization. Change of power with the help of a handful of mercenaries and point deliveries of weapons. The network of sanctions, programs for the exchange of raw materials for food, embargoes - new ways to break the enemy, work like clockwork. Cities have ceased to offer protection against smart bunker bombs, the shadows of silent killer drones skim over the mountains, and thousands of eyes are watching from space. What has changed globally? Never mind. Nuclear weapon? Funny. Israel is waging several wars at the same time, although it has missiles, sea and air-based charges, approximately up to 200 warheads. That is, theoretically, it can burn out a belt of a thousand miles around itself. But in real life, the state is not able to move the falling Kasamas from the borders and stop shelling residential areas. Russia has waged two hardest campaigns in Chechnya, one of which has been lost. India and Pakistan continue to fight regularly, the latest conflict, Kargil, claimed 5,000 human lives and cost billions of dollars. Both countries have dozens of nuclear weapons, but even the threat of the Apocalypse does not stop them. Would there have been nuclear weapons during the Crimean events? And what if they would hit Simferopol during the seizure of the parliament of autonomy? Would they burn Donbass by stopping Strelkov? Look at things more realistically, you would have to fight in the same way as now. The British nuclear arsenal did not stop the IRA and their sponsors from operating in Ireland, nor did it help the NATO member to defend his own in the Falklands.
There is no such country trading with enemies? Come on? There is. And there was. While the folders of those over thirty were shot down in Afghanistan from Stingers, they were torn recoilless rifles and slaughtered practicing Green Berets, their children buying jeans and cola from the US while shaking hands with Samantha Smith. You will not believe it - in the evening they fought with the Yankees, with the hands of the rebellious miners of the province of Peshawar, and in the morning they sold oil, acquiring machine tools and machines. Then, however, the shop closed, because sanctions were imposed. But they traded before the collapse, through third countries. The Jews went further - regularly supplying the Palestinian Authority with electricity, lovingly restoring buildings after numerous cleansings and targeted attacks, operating on the children of terrorists. They keep on the balance sheet those who fireworks, having learned about the next explosion at the disco, and dig tunnels under the checkpoints. Why? Because they understand that several million people cannot be slaughtered and that no army can solve the origins of hostility. What else is there? There are no countries where they conduct an incomprehensible ATO against their own people and there are no militants with tanks and Grads. Come on. Ceylon. LTTE - had a fleet, aviation, tanks. supported from outside. There were dozens of rounds of negotiations, explosions in the capital, even the assassination of the country's president. The war went on from 1983 to 2009. 200 thousand people were left homeless, up to 100 thousand died. From this, the Tamils did not cease to be militants, and the operation did not cease to be considered anti-terrorist.
Everything has been and will be. Our problem is that we are looking for an external foothold - the UN, nuclear weapons, those responsible for everything going wrong at the front, reasons not to go to the East or leave the country. And the recipe is really simple. Only the army stands between us and any aggression from outside. And it is a reflection of our society. All the people who scream about revolution for a year, but never learned how to fill out tax returns. Analysts from vocational schools who want to attack Donetsk in winter. Draft avoidance specialists after the fifth mobilization campaign. Critics of the General Staff, unable to draw up a map of fire per company. Economists sweeping away tons of pasta in a matter of hours. Adepts of changes from below, who manage to write tens of thousands of signs on social networks on a working day. Honestly, when every time I hear another enchanting nonsense about how wars should be waged, I want to do terrible things with writers. No one owes nothing to nobody. There are performance criteria. And if today we effectively trade with the aggressor and do not recall the ambassador, so as not to lose the remnants of influence on the situation, not to drop the economy, we will do it. If tomorrow you need to drive 600 thousand soldiers into the trenches, feed lice and lose teeth from stew with porridge - do not hesitate, this will happen. All that eternally dissatisfied people can achieve is another riot and chaos, after which a dollar will cost fifty hryvnia, and their lives will be almost nothing.
Because conflict is always plastic and flows from form to form. And the war ... It does not change. This is true. From generation to generation. Outsiders say we pray to the wrong gods, put up the wrong monuments, prevent them from speaking the language of their fathers, or own their land. But everyone knows why they are here - to remove rivals or to force us to do as they want. Everything else is a nice wrapper. Enemies come for us like the Wendigo from the legends of the Indians, creatures from the North. And their fierce hunger can only be satisfied with human flesh. And whether it will be "Grad" as in Mariupol, the basement of the former SBU, bullets from a car or a bomb at a rally - it does not matter. It has long been time to choose what to do next - fight, surrender or flee. The time for doubt ended in the summer. And if you don't want to wake up in the middle of a burning city or in a refugee camp with a knapsack of things and a pack of humanitarian rice, stop creating your fantasy worlds on social networks. Stories on TV, the expectation of martial law and wishes for the president's son to go to the front will not help. Do something. I don't want to give any advice. There they are. Here we are. Accept the right decision and stay alive.