Bethesda's Lore Recons

[Stanislao Moulinsky]

The whole point of the vault experiments was to test these things out on people so The Enclave would know if they worked.

For non-sociological experiments you don't need to use the Vaults though. Just use POWs in secret facilities, like Mariposa.

However, those short term tests would not give them the data they needed to be sure it would last for hundreds of years, aka the hundreds of years needed to reach another world, until they did it in the vault experiment and got the data of them surviving for such a long term.

The Vault 111 experiment was supposed to last only for 6 months.

To be fair though, Fallout's vault lore has been broken since day 1.

Fallout 1
>Lets built all these vaults to save humanity!
>Proceeds to put Vault 13 and 15 so far from any major population center that no one would realistically have the ability to reach them before the bombs fell.
>Vault 8 is built even FURTHER away from any major population center then Vaults 13 and 15 were, making one wonder how anyone managed to reach it in time in the first place.

Maybe the governemnt built small towns around the Vaults just for the vault dwellers. Can you imagine the chaos if the 1000 Vault Dwellers had to reach the Vaults amidst the frightened doomed citizens? Not to mention that by being in the middle of nowhere there would be less risk of nukes targeting the area.

>Despite spending billions of dollars to build all these vaults, The Enclave didn't spend any money making sure the communication lines stayed intact, thus meaning they lost contact with all the vaults, rendering the whole thing pointless.

Didn't Vault 8 receive the all-clear signal from the Enclave or I'm remebering it wrong?

 

[Severite]

You are remembering it wrong, vault 13 got the all clear from the enclave, and when they opened up, kidnapped the whole group for experimentation

 

[Stanislao Moulinsky]

According to Lynette, surface sensors monitored by staff was the source of the all-clear.[SUP][4][/SUP] Due to the lack of confirmation from dialogue with Vault 8's central computer that Lynette defers the Chosen One to, [SUP][5][/SUP] it is entirely possible that the all-clear signal came from the Enclave[SUP][6][/SUP]

[SUP]

Their tie to the Vault computers also gave the Enclave the ability to override any Vault locking mechanism and send an "all-clear" signal to sealed Vaults, coaxing the inhabitants to come outside.

Mh...

Where it was said that the Enclave lost their connections to the vaults, by the way?

[/SUP]

 

[SaucyLad]

[SUP]
Mh...

Where it was said that the Enclave lost their connections to the vaults, by the way?

[/SUP]

I believe people only thought that because usually there was only silence whenever a Vault asked for assistance or tried to communicate with them.

I really like it that way, though. It paints a picture of Vault-Tec/Enclave as secretly monitoring the Vaults for all these years and not giving a damn or saying anything.. Just there, collecting data while knowing everything that is going on within them. While the people in the Vaults assume they're dead.

 

[Someguy37]

One thing I found today is that the Boston Burgle already had knowledge of the Enclave's existence, and claimed that the President had already been on the Poseidon oil rig for half a year by the times the bombs fell. Is that corroborated by information from previous games?.

The Fallout Bible's timeline said the President and other Enclave members retreated to the oil rig in March of 2077, and various things from the Fallout bible, and Fallout 3/NV suggested at least some people knew of The Enclave before the war.

For non-sociological experiments you don't need to use the Vaults though. Just use POWs in secret facilities, like Mariposa.

The Vault 111 experiment was supposed to last only for 6 months.

Maybe the governemnt built small towns around the Vaults just for the vault dwellers. Can you imagine the chaos if the 1000 Vault Dwellers had to reach the Vaults amidst the frightened doomed citizens? Not to mention that by being in the middle of nowhere there would be less risk of nukes targeting the area.

Didn't Vault 8 receive the all-clear signal from the Enclave or I'm remebering it wrong?

Vaults are far better for controlled experiments.

And other vault programs were only "supposed" to last for certain periods of time, yet they were diliberatly rigged to last longer, or be different, then even what Vault-Tec was told.

Maybe, but that's never mentioned or shown in any of the games.

It got an all clear signal, but its unknown from whom they got it from.

 

[Crni Vuk]

It's still stupid. I wish that not ALL vaults would be always experiments but actually only a few, while the biggest number of Vaults would have actually really the purpose to save the people. Would give a lot more diversity.

 

[SaucyLad]

It's still stupid. I wish that not ALL vaults would be always experiments but actually only a few, while the biggest number of Vaults would have actually really the purpose to save the people. Would give a lot more diversity.

I would have to agree. All Vaults being used for some experiment is not only unnecessary but also silly.

It implies that Vault-Tec/The Government before the war planned for ALL SURVIVORS to be guinea pigs. Why would they - out of no where - suddenly be evil to their own citizens? The very citizens they tried to save?

Even if it's my own personal "fanon" I rather them going about it with a "Greater Good" approach; sacrificing a few vaults here and there for experiments so they can further their research to rebuild the United States. Them sacrificing all as guinea pigs from the get-go is just plain evil and seemingly out of character.

 

[Someguy37]

It's still stupid. I wish that not ALL vaults would be always experiments but actually only a few, while the biggest number of Vaults would have actually really the purpose to save the people. Would give a lot more diversity.

Well, out of the 122 vaults made, 17 of them were control Vaults, designed to work as people believed they did.

Vaults 3(in The Mojave area), 8(in upper Nevada), and 76(somewhere near D.C.) are known control vaults.

 

[MercenarySnake]

It's still stupid. I wish that not ALL vaults would be always experiments but actually only a few, while the biggest number of Vaults would have actually really the purpose to save the people. Would give a lot more diversity.

I agree, a few would be fine by me but the purpose of the Vaults should be to save people instead of making the purpose of these Vaults for social experiments.

 

[Hardboiled Android]

Was Vault 3 ever explicitly called Control?

 

[Someguy37]

Not in-game, but it was named as such in the official New Vegas guide.

There's also no terminals, notes, or any sort of background information, in the game itself that indicates it had some "secret experiment" going on either, so there's nothing to contradict that statement from the guide.

 

[Crni Vuk]

It's still stupid. I wish that not ALL vaults would be always experiments but actually only a few, while the biggest number of Vaults would have actually really the purpose to save the people. Would give a lot more diversity.

Well, out of the 122 vaults made, 17 of them were control Vaults, designed to work as people believed they did.

Vaults 3(in The Mojave area), 8(in upper Nevada), and 76(somewhere near D.C.) are known control vaults.

Point is, from those 122 vaults made, 17 of them should be experiments. Not the other way around. I just feel those experiments should be a rather rare thing and more of a what-the-fuck-moment for the player.

 

[Someguy37]

Point is, from those 122 vaults made, 17 of them should be experiments. Not the other way around. I just feel those experiments should be a rather rare thing and more of a what-the-fuck-moment for the player.

I would have to disagree.

Vault City was cool, but having 100+ Vault cities would be boring. Too much tech everywhere, too many well armed/well off people, too many basins of civilization, would make explaining why there are enough problems that a game Player character is needed to fix them all rather difficult, since there would be far too much organized resistance to threats like ferals, raiders, mutated wildlife, and super mutants.

The greatest problem with that much civilization is coming up with a viable threat to make the game narrative compelling. New Vegas was already pushing it by having a random guy, who read some history textbooks, being able to conquer 87 tribal groups, as well as several semi-civilized cities such as Tuson, across 4 states, forming an empire as large as the 120+ year old NCR, in the span of 25-30 years, while also being able to train them, and amass a weapons stockpile large enough to face the NCR on equal footing, even when the NCR has access to power armor, vertibirds, and other manufacturing capabilities.

I honestly couldn't imagine what would be a viable threat to that many vaults full of people with pre-war tech, without having to go even more extreme then Fo3/NV/4 did.

 

[Romanophile]

Tim Cain(!) was the one who conceived the vault experiment idea, a feature which he had wished was conserved in Fallout 2. So far, I haven’t seen anybody directly criticize him for that idea.

Perhaps the U.S. government thought that stressing out the vault occupants with challenges would make them more prepared for the wasteland. I certainly wouldn’t call the actual American government to be much better, seeing as how they’ve frequently been involved in bombing, torturing, deforming people, dehumanization (of their own recruits), raping, invading… at some points, they even considered nuking the moon, sprayed germs on their own cities (1, 2), and considered terrorizing their own citizens to stage a conflict. I really doubt that our own government cares all that much about its citizens (especially when there’s mad $$$ to be made).

A less probable explanation is that they doubted that a nuclear conflict would occur soon, though I lack evidence to support that.

 

[fakeangel]

Even if all of them were made to save people, that still wouldn't be enough to actually guarantee the survival of humanity.

 

[Crni Vuk]

Point is, from those 122 vaults made, 17 of them should be experiments. Not the other way around. I just feel those experiments should be a rather rare thing and more of a what-the-fuck-moment for the player.

I would have to disagree.

Vault City was cool, but having 100+ Vault cities would be boring. Too much tech everywhere, too many well armed/well off people, too many basins of civilization, would make explaining why there are enough problems that a game Player character is needed to fix them all rather difficult, since there would be far too much organized resistance to threats like ferals, raiders, mutated wildlife, and super mutants.

At the same time it is boring to have always the same 100+ communities (well in Bethesdas wasteland a community are already 2 people in a schack in the middle of nowhere ... ) struggling to survive even after 200+ years.

There is no reason to not have some bigger civilisations showing up after 200+ years. Doesn't mean this has to be the case everywhere.

The greatest problem with that much civilization is coming up with a viable threat to make the game narrative compelling. New Vegas was already pushing it by having a random guy, who read some history textbooks, being able to conquer 87 tribal groups, as well as several semi-civilized cities such as Tuson, across 4 states, forming an empire as large as the 120+ year old NCR, in the span of 25-30 years, while also being able to train them, and amass a weapons stockpile large enough to face the NCR on equal footing, even when the NCR has access to power armor, vertibirds, and other manufacturing capabilities.

Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte achieved even more in their time. And there have been at least a few very well known self educated characters in history.

So given the time frame of New Vegas, a couple of years at least, it's not completely unthinkable. And I am saying that as someone who doesn't really like the character of Caesar and the Legion, because I believe he was not really very charismatic. The concept however, works well enough in my opinion. The game explains us that he didn't just fall out of the sky, it took him time and dedication to conquer the tribes and the region, the NCR and the Legion had already fought at least once and they have been for years fighting each other. There is a certain history behind the character. He started his journey at the age of 21, and he was at least 55 years old at the time when the courier started his journey. This means that there has been at least 1 generation, maybe even two, to serve under Ceaser.

The Legion makes for me a lot more sense than the Enclave and the BoS crossing the continent to DC ... for what is more of a lulz reason in my opinion.

I honestly couldn't imagine what would be a viable threat to that many vaults full of people with pre-war tech, without having to go even more extreme then Fo3/NV/4 did.

Who's saying it has to be always about saving the world from some unspoken evil? I think New Vegas did a great job with the narrative, giving the player a chance to actually explore the narrative, and really role playing inside the story, without the idea to create a binary scenario where you have no other choice really but to fight this big evil thing.

New Vegas was about a power struggle between different groups and leaving it up to the player to be the tiping point, which I think was very refreshing. While I don't really like the Legion thematically, you could argue that it is a conquering army, they are not like the Enclave or the Master even. And thus if you feel affiliated with their cause, you could releate to their motivations.

 

[Ilosar]

Even if all of them were made to save people, that still wouldn't be enough to actually guarantee the survival of humanity.

120 000 people living is more than enough to ensure survival, on top of those lucky enough to not be killed by the bombs (especially if big cities like Boston somehow only get hit by 1 glancing nuke while there are 77 aimed at Las Vegas). And since the country would mostly be safe from lethal radiation after, what, a few years at most, it's not like the people who emerge would be clueless Vault Dwellers. There would be people with the necessary survival skills, as well as the technical and scientific know-how, to rebuild civilization. Certainly not to the level of pre-apocalypse America anytime soon, but farther than the isolated communities building stuff out of junk 200 years after the fact, like we see in the games.

But I suspect it makes for a more compelling setting. You can't exactly have NCR-level factions loaded with pre-war tech and knowledge cropping up left and right without limiting the influence of one player character at some point. And because then the setting would be even more post-post apocalypse than New Vegas was, and the devs at Obsidian have said that they already feel the setting is too ''civilized'' for their tastes.

 

[Someguy37]

There is no reason to not have some bigger civilizations showing up after 200+ years.

Sure there is. People are selfish, self centered, paranoid, and overall don't care for others, on top of that, people are very stupid.

We already saw this with New Vegas. Bombs drop, House destroys the overwhelming majority of the ones aimed at Vegas, people are left with an intact city, a massive lake of clean water, and an unspoiled landscape perfect for farming, and what do they do with it? Degenerate into a number of nomadic tribes and cannibals that achieve nothing of note for 200ish years until House comes along with and forces everyone to rebuild the city, and the NCR comes along bringing trade and farming.

So given the time frame of New Vegas, a couple of years at least, it's not completely unthinkable...

I still don't find The Legion to be really that believable. The only reason they got as far as they did is because everyone other then them are idiots to the point of being nearly cartoon characters.
-The NCR have a small fleet of vertibirds, The Legion has no anti-air capabilities, yet no one in The NCR has thought of flying over the fort and dropping mini-nukes on it in a carpet bombing raid that would easily kill the entire Legion leadership in one fell swoop.
-The Khans are only siding with The Legion because they are somehow totally oblivious to basic facts of the Legion that everyone else knows, such as them not allowing women into their ranks, that they don't allow drugs and crucify people who use them, and that they break apart tribes and sell people off as slaves and the like.
-The Van Graffs and Omertas are conspiring with The Legion due to their hatred of the NCR and House respectively, and think they are actually going to get anything out of it, despite all evidence to the contrary, such as the above.

The entire NCR/Legion war didn't sit right with me, it was only possible because of unrealistic incompetence on the NCR, unrealistic ignorance on the part of all the groups the Legion were secretly allied with, and unrealistic manipulation on par with comic book character such as Dr. Doom, and Lex Luthor, on the part of The Legion.

And The Legion only needed to exist as it did because the NCR was far too powerful of a force, due to being so large/with so much civilization that nothing else could pose a threat to it. The Legion, and everything they did, just felt like one massive ass-pull attempt to give the NCR an equal.

New Vegas was about a power struggle between different groups and leaving it up to the player to be the tiping point, which I think was very refreshing.

That the plot of every Fallout game, and every main series Fallout game, sans Fallout 2, gave you a way to side with the other faction.

Who's saying it has to be always about saving the world from some unspoken evil?

No one.

I was saying that if you have a large civilization, you need an equally large civilization to combat it, in order to make the narrative feel like its a viable conflict, and when you make a civilization too large, you make explaining where this "other" group came from difficult without massive leaps of logic like The Legion got in NV.

Keeping civilization small means you dont have to make such large threats to make the conflict a fair one.

 

[Bubba Zanetti]

-The NCR have a small fleet of vertibirds, The Legion has no anti-air capabilities, yet no one in The NCR has thought of flying over the fort and dropping mini-nukes on it in a carpet bombing raid that would easily kill the entire Legion leadership in one fell swoop.

A few Centurions armed with anti-materiel rifles could handle that.

-The Khans are only siding with The Legion because they are somehow totally oblivious to basic facts of the Legion that everyone else knows, such as them not allowing women into their ranks, that they don't allow drugs and crucify people who use them, and that they break apart tribes and sell people off as slaves and the like.

Why not? They're essentially a nomadic warrior tribe with little to no interaction with the areas outside of Red Rock Canyon apart from their drug distribution networks, which have in effect, made them pariahs in the wasteland.

-The Van Graffs and Omertas are conspiring with The Legion due to their hatred of the NCR and House respectively, and think they are actually going to get anything out of it, despite all evidence to the contrary, such as the above.

Ever complete Birds of a Feather for the Van Graffs?

As for the Omertas, same deal as the Khans... another isolated group with an axe to grind with society, this one confined behind the walls of New Vegas as opposed to Red Rock Canyon.

 

[Crni Vuk]

There is no reason to not have some bigger civilizations showing up after 200+ years.

Sure there is. People are selfish, self centered, paranoid, and overall don't care for others, on top of that, people are very stupid.

And yet ... you have the NCR ... Vault City, the Shi and who knows how many more. But ... only in Bethesdas Fallout games no community has more than no clue 20+ NPCs runing around. Everyone is still happily digging around in the dirt ... for no reason.

It. Simply. Makes. No. Fucking. Sence.

Don't be so thick skulled. If the last 15 000 years of human history have shown us at least one thing, than it is that people will always try to rebuild something and form larger communities, repopulating areas - if possible. Doesn't matter if for egoistic reasons or greed or what ever. People are social beeings. Forming large communities and our sophisticated skills in communication have been some of the most important reasons for our success as species so far.

Again. There is absolutely no reason, why people would not do that in the world of Fallout. Doesn't have to be a city of 1 million people. But no clue, something like a real town would be already a start. Something that is bigger and more believable than Diamond City, Rivet City or Megaton, that actually has a real infrastructure, trading routes and all that. New Vegas has done a decent job on that so far.