Bethesda's Lore Recons

[Someguy37]

All the brahmin in Arefu are now dead (and no one there seems to care), there is three whole brahmin at Canterburry, I travelled to the regulators and didn't see a single brahmin

That kind of invalidates the whole plot of your daddy making a water purifier doesn't it, if Megaton and Rivet city can make a purifier out of scrap why can't anyone else in the wasteland

Let's ignore the fact that makes no logical sense for a second, and that suddenly people can grow stuff again in FO4, but Mutfruit grows in the wasteland doesn't it? Is there any reason they can't grow that. Ignoring that, why can't Rivet City's hydroponic gardens be recreated and set up around the wasteland?

Now for sake of argument, let's say that the small number of brahmin and the few hunters could feed entire towns, what is everybody else in town doing? Why aren't they hunting or ranching? How can people even spare the resources to distill alcohol, pay hookers, or buy junk from Moira when they're essentially still hunter-gatherers

-Actually, if you play the game, something few seem to do around here, you would know Arefu gets more brahmin once the quest ends. As for the Regulators
http://i.imgur.com/hqvuFyX.jpg
Odd, I count 4.

-Are you mentally retarded? Honest question. I should really hope that the difference between "making enough fresh water to feed yourselves, and trade a little" and "making literally millions of gallons of fresh water daily, enough to not only feed yourself, and possibly trade a little, but also to farm" should be fairly obvious unless your are intentionally being obtuse.

-I know I say this a lot, but it really does bear repeating. If you had actually played the game, and talked to Li, she outright tells you that the radiation in the ground and water is systemic, and nearly impossible to remove in large quantities, which is why the purifier failed without the GECK. Li can only run a hydroponics farm because Rivet city had a pre-war science lab built into it. That sort of thing cant be recreated. Also, Boston doesn't have the same radiation problems, outside the glowing sea.

Also they ARE doing those things, hence why you see the randomly encountered hunters and scavengers in the game, and people tell you they got money by doing those things.

 

[LiveOnTheEdge]

I think the most obvious answer here as to why the capital wasteland doesn't seem to produce anything is just because Bethesda didn't expand upon that and show it too much in the game.
(And sure, you can make the case that because you don't see it in the game that it's not there and I guess that has as much chance of being right as anything else.)
They probably got flak for it too which is probably why you you see more farms and stuff in Skyrim. (And Fallout 4 too, if I was reading other people's posts right?)
Some of that stuff is (probably) implied since it's a game and the devs seemed to have focused their attention elsewhere.

And they have to be doing something and producing something even if it's not shown in-game since you have people and communities at least sort of surviving after so long instead of having all died out.

 

[Walpknut]

Holy Shit, 4 Brahmin. That's like, a whole ranch! They could totally justify trading services for caps despite there being nothing backing those!

If a community can't farm crops then how do they keep their brahmin alive to become Brahmin ranchers? They don't seem to have any milk products anywhere, without proper refrigeration and storage facilities milk is just no feasible as a food source. There is no cheese items in the game except for the 200 year old Mac and Cheese, which again, surviving off a limited supply of 200 year old food and no farming is not feasible at all, specially when all the meat from the animals and the 200 year old food always gives radiation, these people would be just riddled with cancer before their balls dropped..... The "Economy" of DC wasteland makes no sense, onlyh working settlement is Rivet city.

Also most of Boston's Water reservoirs are awalys infested with rads, like even the Diamond City water has radiation so Bethesda is still clingign to that.

 

[Someguy37]

Fallout 1 total Brahmin = 19
Fallout 3 total Brahmin = 26+

If Fallout 3 fails to show enough Brahmin, Fallout 1 was even worse about it, yet it somehow gets a free pass? Your bias is showing.

-If a community can't farm crops then how do they keep their brahmin alive to become Brahmin ranchers?
-They don't seem to have any milk products anywhere
-without proper refrigeration and storage facilities milk is just no feasible as a food source.
-these people would be just riddled with cancer before their balls dropped
-Also most of Boston's Water reservoirs are awalys infested with rads, like even the Diamond City water has radiation so Bethesda is still clingign to that.

-Cows can eat grass you know?
-Moria actually mentions Brahmin milk, which has been stated to exist, but totally absent, in every Fallout game.
-Well they do have working refrigerators.
-That implies Fallout radiation causes cancer, it doesn't.
-and, again, if you actually played the game you would have seen the giant water purifier and the the kid who runs it and sells purified water in the city. Just like Megaton, Tenpenny Tower, and Rivet city had water purifiers.

 

[Hardboiled Android]

Aren't the bulk of those Fo3 Brahmin living at abandoned farmsteads rather than actual settlements?

 

[Walpknut]

Fallout 1 is not a 3D simulation game so the scaled down world is much more justified.
You see, when you make the jump from 2D Isometric turn base to 3D real time changes the way it's acceptable to represent your world. Which is why Fallout 1 and 2 also made extensive use of descriptive dialogue instead of making unique models for everyone. It's kind of an universal principle.

2D Isometric Turn Based: Abstraction.
3D Real time: Simulation.

On a 2D game a single image can represent a whole building, in 3D you have to model it and populate it with details otherwise it looks fake.

Also, Fallout 1 has more farms than Fo3 and no stupid shit like "Nobody has any clean water yet they somehow survive!" despite working on an abstraction plane.

Your lack of understanding of basic concepts is showing. Funnily enough you used the Abstraction argument on another thread to justify the Nukes only destroying the block of a city ona 3D game, now you are trying to ignore it....

 

[Someguy37]

Aren't the bulk of those Fo3 Brahmin living at abandoned farmsteads rather than actual settlements?

No.

4 - Regulator HQ
4 - owned by the 4 named caravan merchants
3 - Arefu
3 - Canturbrry Commons
2 - Republic of Dave
2- Raider camp at the Charnel House
1 - Megaton
1 - Paradise Falls
1 - Temple of the Union
1 - Gidershade
~ - number of randomly generated scavengers with Brahmin, and the water caravans in Broken Steel, which are the scavengers re purposing their brahmin to carry water.

there are like..... 3 at one unmarked abandoned farmstead on one edge of the map, but the vast majority of them are in currently inhabited settlements.

snip

Everything you just said was such a retarded double standard that flies in the face of the fact that every large scale 3d world, from MMOs to GTA, rely, and have always relied. on heavy abstraction in their gameworld. Its hilarious could you actually write that out and think it was accurate.

 

[LiveOnTheEdge]

Fallout 1 is not a 3D simulation game so the scaled down world is much more justified.
You see, when you make the jump from 2D Isometric turn base to 3D real time changes the way it's acceptable to represent your world. Which is why Fallout 1 and 2 also made extensive use of descriptive dialogue instead of making unique models for everyone. It's kind of an universal principle.

2D Isometric Turn Based: Abstraction.
3D Real time: Simulation.

On a 2D game a single image can represent a whole building, in 3D you have to model it and populate it with details otherwise it looks fake.

Also, Fallout 1 has more farms than Fo3 and no stupid shit like "Nobody has any clean water yet they somehow survive!" despite working on an abstraction plane.

Your lack of understanding of basic concepts is showing. Funnily enough you used the Abstraction argument on another thread to justify the Nukes only destroying the block of a city ona 3D game, now you are trying to ignore it....

Though I would have assumed that 2D games would have been better at showing less abstraction (from a certain perspective) than 3D games because of some those very same points. In that I would think, depending on the engine and graphic style, you would be able to populate the worldspace with more things, more people, larger buildings and more buildings, larger farms, and stuff like that without taking as much of a performance hit (at least in this day and age) when compared to a 3D game in which you basically have to have very and minutely detailed models for pretty much everything (depending on what sort of cost cutting measures are taken, and again, the graphics style.)
And then there's also the development costs and time that can factor into abstraction.

(I also could be very wrong about all of this as I am nowhere near a developer. But that's just what seam right to me.)

Obviously Fallout 1&2 are old so that explains some things there in why they might be a little more abstract. They might have been hitting the performance peak of the computers at the time, or maybe not, I don't know. I'm sure somebody here could say one way or the other.

 

[Monco]

They might have been hitting the performance peak of the computers at the time, or maybe not, I don't know. I'm sure somebody here could say one way or the other.

I wouldn't think so, I was only 3 years old at the time so obviously I couldn't say from personal experience, but Half-Life, Banjo Kazoie, and Ocarina of Time came out the same year, so I wouldn't think that a isometric sprite-based game would be any more demanding than Half-Life, though I'm sure it allowed for larger environments and more focus on writing and refining core gameplay.

 

[LiveOnTheEdge]

They might have been hitting the performance peak of the computers at the time, or maybe not, I don't know. I'm sure somebody here could say one way or the other.

I wouldn't think so, I was only 3 years old at the time so obviously I couldn't say from personal experience, but Half-Life, Banjo Kazoie, and Ocarina of Time came out the same year, so I wouldn't think that a isometric sprite-based game would be any more demanding than Half-Life, though I'm sure it allowed for larger environments and more focus on writing and refining core gameplay.

I was just thinking that sometimes there's some weird optimization issues or stuff like that even with 2D games and they somehow end up being somewhat high performance. But I wasn't actually sure if that was the case with Fallout back when it came out or not. So I was just leaving that open as a possibility while assuming you could get away with adding more in a 2D game vs a 3D game.

 

[Walpknut]

snip

Everything you just said was such a retarded double standard that flies in the face of the fact that every large scale 3d world, from MMOs to GTA, rely, and have always relied. on heavy abstraction in their gameworld. Its hilarious could you actually write that out and think it was accurate.

You just have a very limited understanding of things, you only seem to be able to understand in the most extreme and broad categories possible. I never said 3D world doesn't make use of abstraction, is just that abstraction in those works differently. GTA compresses space but it can't go as far on it's abstraction as a 2D game can. Just compare the top down GTA games with the later ones. Abstraction is much trickier with 3D because obviously the way it's representing the space to the player is more direct, you are not looking at the room from a corner and never changing angles, you are able to move the camera around the room constantly and look at every piece of furniture and decor, if an entire wall is missing then you notice, if the bed is too small on relation to your character it looks weird, same if you go out into the park and there is only 2 people walking around, or have a climatic battle and there is only 5 people there. A dude twitching his hands in the air in front of him in a turn based game is acceptable, a 3D model rigidly jumping in place takes you out immediately. You don't expect the game to go on forever but a message in front of a clearly open space telling you "you can't go this way" is dumb while in a 2D game you can just make the camera cut off the rest and put a fence in there.

The less detail you have the more you can get away with, interactive 3D emphasizes detail so you can get away with less and less.

Also there is the fact that Bethesda is supposedly all about "exploration" and details, yet apparently having more than 1 Brahmin on the very first settlement players visit wasn't worth it. Same with putting in some crops or people actually doing something besides sitting at the bar despite flaunting about them being able to program schedules to NPCs.

 

[Someguy37]

Also there is the fact that Bethesda is supposedly all about "exploration" and details, yet apparently having more than 1 Brahmin on the very first settlement players visit wasn't worth it. Same with putting in some crops or people actually doing something besides sitting at the bar despite flaunting about them being able to program schedules to NPCs.

Megaton has one brahmin because people dont raise large numbers of cattle inside a small city area, as they lack the space to do so, and instead raise them in smaller towns out in the wilderness where they have more space, like Arefu or the Regulator HQ... just like real life.

But given your complete ignorance of everything ranging from basic scientific procedure, to many of the core tenants of the series you claim to love, it doesn't surprise me that such a commonly known fact has eluded you for so long.

 

[Walpknut]

Now you are claiming that Arefu is raising the Brahmin for Megaton? What does Megaton even do? They have no clean water, they don't grow crops and they live around a nuke. I get Arefu barely surviving but Megaton just makes no sense, and you tried jsutifying them as raising brahmin before, so again with your flip flopping.

This would only work if there was actually a working economy and if Megaton had anything to give to Arefu in exchange. They live really far away, Arefu doesn't even get protection from them and Megaton does absolutely nothing for anybody yet they have survived 200 years while following a cap currency system. And Again, if you can't grow anything on the ground then how are you keeping either your people or your animals alive? Animals don't survive off air and sunrays. They need food, and if they are being raised for milk and meat they need to be fed lots.

Also apparently releasing failed experiments into the wirlderness and not even bothering with and autopsy is proper scientific prodcedure. So it doesn't really surprise me that your arguments are always this flimsy, ignorant and inconsistent.

 

[Stanislao Moulinsky]

-Arefu, The Regulators, Canterburry Commons, and The Republic of Dave, have multiple Brahmin which provide them with milk, and meat.

Arefu strangely is never mentioned by anyone. Merchants bever stop by the Regulators. Canterburry Commons has brahmins...but no merchant sells brahmin meat (they sell meds, junk, clothes and weapons). The Republic of Dave has a couple of brahmins but nine persons to feed.

-The larger towns such as Megaton, Tenpenny Tower, and Rivet City, produce small amounts of clean water they can trade.

Megaton IIRC produces clean water only for its inhabitants. Tenpenny Towers...produces water?

The idea that they don't produce things is demonstrably false, and easily disprovable by anyone who has played the game.

The things they do produce aren't enough to sustain a population, even taking into account abstractions. You are taking the whole "they don't produce anything" too literally.

But even on top of that, due to the hostile nature of the wasteland, big cities like Megaton can simply trade safety for items. People will be willing to trade some ammo, guns, or food, to be able to stay inside Megaton's walls for X numbers of days.

Which means that the people trading for it has to "produce" twice as much to sustain themselves and to trade for something immaterial (ie, protection) in return, thus eschewing even more the nonsensical economy.

Li can only run a hydroponics farm because Rivet city had a pre-war science lab built into it. That sort of thing cant be recreated.

Hydroculture needs sciency stuff now? People can seemingly get their hands on anything yet they can't get mineral solutions to grow a few plants for themselves in a bucket?

Also they ARE doing those things, hence why you see the randomly encountered hunters and scavengers in the game, and people tell you they got money by doing those things.

What do the wild animals eat?

-Cows can eat grass you know?

http://i.imgur.com/hqvuFyX.jpg

Look at all that grass!

 

[Eternal]

Fallout 1 total Brahmin = 19
Fallout 3 total Brahmin = 26+

If Fallout 3 fails to show enough Brahmin, Fallout 1 was even worse about it, yet it somehow gets a free pass? Your bias is showing.

-If a community can't farm crops then how do they keep their brahmin alive to become Brahmin ranchers?
-They don't seem to have any milk products anywhere
-without proper refrigeration and storage facilities milk is just no feasible as a food source.
-these people would be just riddled with cancer before their balls dropped
-Also most of Boston's Water reservoirs are awalys infested with rads, like even the Diamond City water has radiation so Bethesda is still clingign to that.

-Cows can eat grass you know?
-Moria actually mentions Brahmin milk, which has been stated to exist, but totally absent, in every Fallout game.
-Well they do have working refrigerators.
-That implies Fallout radiation causes cancer, it doesn't.
-and, again, if you actually played the game you would have seen the giant water purifier and the the kid who runs it and sells purified water in the city. Just like Megaton, Tenpenny Tower, and Rivet city had water purifiers.

FO1 has the ability to actually use the excuse they aren't showing things because they aren't interesting. They'd actually describe something as a couple miles away and it'd be a single loading screen in one of the towns. FO3/4/NV is unfortunately a fully realized 3D game where you can view everything. Scale is messed with and has been stated as such so you can kind of excuse raw numbers of things to an extent but there is a limit. In addition many locations with farming or animals are completely abandoned, this is both in NV and FO3. NV was much better with farm land and energy and water actually being managed, explained, and shown than FO3 though.

Any 2D game with loading screens it's much easier to excuse not seeing locations like farmland/ect because they are places your character has no interest in visiting in the first place. The only loading sections in FO3/NV/FO4 you can turn around and see the exact thing you just passed through, such as a doorway or grating or broken down rail car, ect. You can't use the excuse of having passed through the area and brush it off as game logic nearly as easily.

 

[Mr Fish]

-I know I say this a lot, but it really does bear repeating. If you had actually played the game, and talked to Li, she outright tells you that the radiation in the ground and water is systemic, and nearly impossible to remove in large quantities, which is why the purifier failed without the GECK. Li can only run a hydroponics farm because Rivet city had a pre-war science lab built into it. That sort of thing cant be recreated. Also, Boston doesn't have the same radiation problems, outside the glowing sea.

Yes, because homemade hydroponic gardens aren't a thing.

 

[TorontoReign]

-I know I say this a lot, but it really does bear repeating. If you had actually played the game, and talked to Li, she outright tells you that the radiation in the ground and water is systemic, and nearly impossible to remove in large quantities, which is why the purifier failed without the GECK. Li can only run a hydroponics farm because Rivet city had a pre-war science lab built into it. That sort of thing cant be recreated. Also, Boston doesn't have the same radiation problems, outside the glowing sea.

Yes, because homemade hydroponic gardens aren't a thing.

I'm sure some people in Colorado would disagree.

 

[Someguy37]

snip

-Actually, Arefu is mentioned by other people, specifically Lucy West in Megaton, who is the one who gives you the quest to go there in the first place.
-Are you implying the Regulators couldn't do trade by themselves? Not to mention all the merchants who just wander the wastes outside the 4 named caravans.
-The guy who sells meds actually sells various food items as well. With Point Lookout installed, he starts to sell Punga also.
-And the Republic of Dave is also an abstraction, just like everything else in the game. Shady was said to be over a hundred people in Fallout 1, yet had a grand total of 5 Brahmin in the game.
-Yeah, it does. It has a water purifier, and clean water in its various toilets and sinks.
-By what measure? if 5 abstracted brahmin can sustain a population of hundreds in Fallout 1, then why cant 2 do the same for a population of far less in Fallout 3? Those double standards rise again.
-No, you don't need to produce "twice" as much, you need to produce for yourself, and a little bit more to trade.
-When all the soil and water are irradiated to the point were basically nothing but grass grows... yeah, you kinda do need a large/complex water purification system, which can purify semi-large amounts of water daily, in order to sustain crops. That is THE core point of the game.
-Depends on the animal
--Deathclaws, being the alpha predator, would eat anything.
--Yao Guai eat anything, except deathclaws.
--Roaches eat basically anything they can IRL, that wouldn't change in Fallout.
--Brahmin eat grass.
--Mirelurks would eat algae, and some dead animals, like real crabs do.
--Mole rats eat plant roots, like real mole rats do.
--Squirrels are known to eat everything from fungus, to tree bark, to soil, if they have too.

Yeah, the C.W. is just SO devoid of grass right?
http://i.imgur.com/1xcsJQd.jpg

Yes, because homemade hydroponic gardens aren't a thing.

I am constantly amazed by how little you people seem to have played the game. Its a core point of Fallout 3 that the soil and water are too irradiated for basically anything to grow, and that large scale water purification is neigh impossible to the aggressiveness of the radiation in the area.

I never implied hydroponic gardens aren't a thing, what a ridiculous straw man. I implied only that they weren't possible in D.C. because of environmental factors, outside of Rivet City and its pre-war science lab.

 

[TorontoReign]

Here comes the whole You never played the game defense.

 

[Mr Fish]

Yes, because homemade hydroponic gardens aren't a thing.

I am constantly amazed by how little you people seem to have played the game. Its a core point of Fallout 3 that the soil and water are too irradiated for basically anything to grow, and that large scale water purification is neigh impossible to the aggressiveness of the radiation in the area.

I never implied hydroponic gardens aren't a thing, what a ridiculous straw man. I implied only that they weren't possible in D.C. because of environmental factors, outside of Rivet City and its pre-war science lab.

Yes, because soil can't possibly be purified and neither can water through a reasonable simple filtration system. And one could not possibly set up a hydroponic garden with the purified soil and water. Oh wait! Seriously man, do you think radiation is magic or something? It's not that difficult to filter it out of something, especially water and soil.

Never mind the fact that radiation should not be fucking up the soil after 200 years.