So what lore has Bethesda done gone fucked up?

Mr Fish

Mr Fish

Slippy sloppy, The
I'm curious as to how much lore Bethesda's gone and messed up. We know some of it as it is obvious. Like FEV being in a vault. But how much lore has been retconned or is inconsistent or just doesn't flat out makes sense because of previously established lore?

To get a few things out of the way, vaults were never meant to be super whacky experiments. Enclave in Fallout 3 are far too numerous considering the vast majority got nuked. FEV was sent to Mariposa explicitly because it was a facility created to house and test the substance so it being in a Vault or in the fucking Institute's hands just flat out doesn't make any sense. Ghouls are meant to be walking rotting corpses so 28 Days Later-rip offs and burn victims go against that.

That oughta be the big ones. What other stuff is there that Bethesda messed up? It can be small or big, I don't care, I just wanna know how bad their influence on the series has been and how much it stacks up.
 
Power armor is everywhere in Fallout 4. For every type of power armor in the game, there are dozens of places you can acquire full or partial sets, including supposedly "rarer" armors like the X-01/APA. Plus random spawns. Compare that to Fallout 1, where you can only get it with the Brotherhood of Steel, or Fallout 2 and New Vegas, both of which only have power armor with the Brotherhood/Enclave or deep inside extremely dangerous territory. Come Fallout 4, you can find pieces of power armor in abandoned houses, under bridges, on odd caves... even raiders have their own custom "makeshift" power armor, because apparently the most advanced tech of the Old World is easily manipulated and repurposed without losing functionality.

And talk about the power creep! Before, we thought the T-51b was the latest, most powerful equipment of Pre-War society, being only completed about a year before the bombs fell. Except, now the last produced model before the war was actually the T-60, which really just looks like a beefier T-45d. This isn't something that directly contradicts previous information, or something that breaks the lore, but is a rather uninspired addition with the sole purpose of having a new, "original" power armor model to market the game.

Power armor went from being a part of the world to being little more than an element recognizable to the Fallout property, from which you derive aspects of gameplay without considering if what you're adding is actually substantial.
 
I would say 'Ghouls are now everywhere'.
From what I understood from Fallout 1 and 2, Ghoulism is very rare and both games had only a small numbers of Ghouls that lost their mind and became animalistic.
Some were simply hostile without having lost their mind.

In Fallout 4 I have encountered several buildings and locations now that are infested with feral Ghouls and I have not met a single one yet that can talk.

The nuclear powered cars. Yes, eventually cars before the war were redesigned to run on energy cells but I don't think these will explode even if suffering extreme force such as a collision. Well unless their manufacturer on purpose designed them as potential explosives which I probably violates several laws and dozens of safety regulations.
Alternatively, I don't think cars were fitted with small nuclear reactors either as a real attempt at doing so showed that cars would become very heavy with the reactor and all the lead shielding, probably wearing out any car suspension in a very short time.
 
Radscorpions were also altered, for better or for worse, with Fallout 3. I mean, in Fallout 1 you face a giant one at Vault 15 IIRC and you can kill it with low-tier weapons whereas in Fallout 3 and beyond they've turned into these tanks.

Molerats also lost their fur and shrunk in size.

Robobrains no longer use firearms and have built in lasers. (Why?)

Mr Handy/Gutsy looks like a skeleton compared to the original massive octopus-like robot.

Pip-boy IIRC was mentioned as something you couldn't take off of your arm in Fallout 3, like once you put it on then it stayed the fuck on until you dead. Then in Fallout 4 they changed it back again...

Also, what happened to all of the architecture that had those weird giant faces on them? Hell, what happened to the architecture in general? In Fallout the pre-war architecture had a very industrial gothic feel to it but in Fallout 3 they went bananaz on the whole 50's obsession.
 
Those FUCKING ALIENS! Those stupid abominations may have caused the Great War in Bethesda lore. No longer was the Great War a product of the collective paranoia and the political and ideological differences of America and China nor is it the product of warring nations fighting over the last of the worlds resources, NOPE it was those FUCKING STUPID ALIENS FROM MOTHERSHIP ZETA!:evil: Oh and they also created the human race too according to The Cabbot House in Fallout 4. :twitch: What drunken, meth addled, half brained dumb ass thought that this was a brilliant idea?
 
Mr Fish said:
Also, what happened to all of the architecture that had those weird giant faces on them? Hell, what happened to the architecture in general? In Fallout the pre-war architecture had a very industrial gothic feel to it but in Fallout 3 they went bananaz on the whole 50's obsession.
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In fallout 4 faces on buildings are back, just not everywhere. I remember seeing some on a National Guard Training Ground office of all places. And Boston seems pretty industrial to me, lots of steel.

And when it comes to molerats, I guess it's actually their version of pig rats, look similar enough to the ones in classics. Why would they change the name I have no idea.
 
What about the new virus where you can reverse supermutants back to humans. That was mentioned in the cabotts house thread i believe.
 
That reminds me. I don't know where but somewhere in Fallout 3 it's said that ghouls turn feral from overexposure to radiation, despite all of the times ghouls have been around enormous quantities of radiation or low quantities for a very long period of time.

Oh and nuclear blasts create insta-ghouls. It takes less time to create a ghoul than it takes to microwave food. (Moira)
 
And no one mentions Bottle cap adoption in DC yet? [IE Hub-Bucks, from the Hub; where the Water Merchants were; that ersatz script currency that they stopped using between Fallout and Fallout 2, and that the Devs' made light of in Fallout 2 with a joke quest, and the special encounter with the soda truck.]
 
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Well, Gizmo, to be fair we don't know how fast the currency spread from The Hub to the east, I mean, it's over 100 years since Fallout 1 by the time of Fallout 3 right? That should be enough time for it to spread further and further out. I don't really like the idea that everyone and their dog adopts the currency without anyone around to back it. Without the water merchants who the hell is around to back it in the first place? Wouldn't someone get laughed in the face for trying to use junk as currency at places? And wouldn't scripts from MWBOS have spread to the east before the caps? Still, we're talking about 100 years worth of time where the old world dollar's value must've dropped all around so a replacement had to be found, especially since those old dollars should be worn out from time.

Still, it doesn't necessarily mess up any already established lore.

If we're to criticize Bethesda's poor writing then we'll pretty much have to go through all of Fallout 3.
 
Mr Fish said:
Well, Gizmo, to be fair we don't know how fast the currency spread from The Hub to the east, I mean, it's over 100 years since Fallout 1 by the time of Fallout 3 right? That should be enough time for it to spread further and further out. I don't really like the idea that everyone and their dog adopts the currency without anyone around to back it. Without the water merchants who the hell is around to back it in the first place? Wouldn't someone get laughed in the face for trying to use junk as currency at places? And wouldn't scripts from MWBOS have spread to the east before the caps? Still, we're talking about 100 years worth of time where the old world dollar's value must've dropped all around so a replacement had to be found, especially since those old dollars should be worn out from time.

Still, it doesn't necessarily mess up any already established lore.

If we're to criticize Bethesda's poor writing then we'll pretty much have to go through all of Fallout 3.
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Oh no...
 
PossibleCabbage said:
- Pre-War Jet
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Apparently jet was sent to Vault 95 before they sealed the vault, so they really want to retcon poor little Myron.

5545Trey said:
Damn, they just retconning their own Fallout lore...
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Liberty Prime was an uncomplete tin can in Fallout 3 but according to a Mr. Handy, it was deployed to Anchorage and drove Chinese out.

There are more examples of them retconning things from Fallout 3 but in my opinion Fallout 4 is truly the masterpiece of Bethesda's writing team. They cant go any lower than this game.

My personal favorite is T-60 being produced and distributed to soldiers, not to mention it looks exactly like a T-45.
 
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