Bethesda's Lore Recons
- Thread starter arcticflocky
- Start date
First time out of the vault
Dr Fallout
Centurion
He didn't like the experimentation.
Yes, and he stoped them. But up to that point, the scientists had no problem with using prisoners, which kinda makes more sense than using vaults and masses of civilians. Like I said, I can accept SOME vaults beeing build and used for just that. But all of them? A huge waste of potential and resources in my opinion that could have been much easier achieved with prisoners, at least for experiments that worked like the one in Mariposa with creating super soldiers. Some more or less harmless social experiments could have been done by VaultTech I guess. But stuff like this cloning with Gary? Or the SuperMutant vault in F3? Silly in my opinion. Like I said, mariposa was already there. Why not a second underground prison?
Dr Fallout
Centurion
The only vaults that make sense with having over the top experiments are the ones in the Big MT, because the scientists are crazy.
The last check goes up to 9.
Tarca
First time out of the vault
,so they use something already built.
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I do think Askorti that the East Coast BOS has become a bit too big for their britches even if they are more sensible than their West Coast counterparts regarding recruitment.
They feel simply to big for what is essentially an army now without a nation to back them up.
All that stuff they have requires constant maintenance, replacement parts, fuel and so on, stuff that requires industry so as manufacturing plants and refineries.
Only so much can be salvaged to get these items, and these do feel the passage of time if they are not kept in some kind of vacuum locker.
I just really feel that if anything should be reset that it is the East Coast BOS rather than the West Coast and the NCR.
They feel simply to big for what is essentially an army now without a nation to back them up.
All that stuff they have requires constant maintenance, replacement parts, fuel and so on, stuff that requires industry so as manufacturing plants and refineries.
Only so much can be salvaged to get these items, and these do feel the passage of time if they are not kept in some kind of vacuum locker.
I just really feel that if anything should be reset that it is the East Coast BOS rather than the West Coast and the NCR.
Dr Fallout
Centurion
The Brotherhood are the NCR of the East. Two big powers that seem to be more like countries then anything else.
I do agree, that the BoS might've gotten a bit too strong, but I don't think it would be a stretch to see the Capital Wasteland as basically their country the same way Midwestern BoS took over the Midwest. When you think about it, it seems to be another thing Bethesda copied from the FoT BroS. And I don't mind it, a detached military fascist state is an interesting concept to explore in the context of a post-apocaliptic world. Not by Bethesda of course, because they're not capable enough, but an interesting idea nevertheless.
Hmm, I could live with that but I fear it will go as far as the East Chapter BOS eventually coming to dominate the whole of the East Coast under Bethesda's writing team, them having bases/bunkers all over it.
To me that would be the end of the Fallout setting, well Fallout 3 already is, and Fallout 4 continued, but then having the 'benevolent technocratic East Brotherhood' take over and expand all across the United States, perhaps absorbing the Mid West chapter.
Yeah I am not really into Fallout Brotherhood Adventures.
Perhaps the Fallout setting is simply getting tired.
To me that would be the end of the Fallout setting, well Fallout 3 already is, and Fallout 4 continued, but then having the 'benevolent technocratic East Brotherhood' take over and expand all across the United States, perhaps absorbing the Mid West chapter.
Yeah I am not really into Fallout Brotherhood Adventures.
Perhaps the Fallout setting is simply getting tired.
SaucyLad
Stuck in a Fridge
While I think the East Coast BoS are at their peak power in Fallout 4, their strength is likely going to go in decline massively from that point.
Reasons being:
Brotherhood of Steel get wrecked in both the Railroad and Institute ending paths. And even the Minutemen have the opportunity to destroy the Prydwen if the BoS is hostile towards you.
The only endings that they survive in are of course the BoS ending and the neutral Minutemen ending. So that's 2/4 with a possible 3/4 endings that they get wrecked in.
On top of that, honestly they just don't seem to be what the Commonwealth would need. They don't understand the people there, the situation, or even the enemy (Institute) that they wanna eradicate so much. They're a really bad NCR faction from New Vegas, basically.
The only endings that they survive in are of course the BoS ending and the neutral Minutemen ending. So that's 2/4 with a possible 3/4 endings that they get wrecked in.
On top of that, honestly they just don't seem to be what the Commonwealth would need. They don't understand the people there, the situation, or even the enemy (Institute) that they wanna eradicate so much. They're a really bad NCR faction from New Vegas, basically.
Yes. This.
RangerBoo
Resident Schizo Poster
Or Bethesda just doesn't really give a damn about the Fallout IP and have a "anything goes" policy with it.
MercenarySnake
Kept you waiting huh?
I begin to wonder if the Fallout IP is going to turn out like the Assassin's Creed franchise. Releasing Fallout game after Fallout game until we end up with Fallout 14: more bugs, more killing, less dialogue, and less meaningful world without C&C.
Well you can probably take solace in that since Bethesda seems to have a dev cycle of a few years, and since they seem to be alternating between TES and Fallout, that it at least won't be a yearly thing. It might be closer to the 7-10 year mark, unless they grow their team and start working both franchises at the same or if they start routinely contracting some Fallout games to other devs…
I wonder about that too in that I figure at some point it's got to "naturally evolve" past the wasteland setting as societies start rebuilding more and more, and they start building up a bigger population, and as the planet possibly heals from the effects of the bombs. (But then you might have to wonder, at what point would that get too far divorced from fallout, or would it just depend on how it's done? Could the world of Fallout actually rebuild and grow to some great extent past the effects of the war and it still be Fallout and a Fallout game?) Or unless something else happens to knock the world down a peg. Because otherwise it seems like it would get very stagnant especially piling on sequels. And depending on how large the time skips are between new sequels. And you'd have people questioning why they haven't been able to rebuild more after 200+ years. Even now there's people asking that kind of question. (Though that could just be limited to Bethesda's setting.)
Or it could be that there's yet still a lot of story to tell. Who knows.
Obsidian took it further then Bethesda ever did TBH.
We learn in New Vegas that for nearly 200 years since the war, the Vegas areas, as well as the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado were nothing but primitive tribal groups who couldn't read, had no permanent settlements, roads, calendars, mines, or anything resembling civilization, outside the towns of New Canaan and Tuson.
D.C. at least had places like Megaton, and Underworld, and Boston had places like Diamond City, 50+ years ago, and its known the east coast has had established trade routes since so soon after the bombs fell that there were some people didn't know what ghouls were.
The Four Corners area makes the east coast look positively advanced by comparison.
That's not even bringing up the pacific northwest, which is stated in New Vegas to be nothing but wilderness and ruins, so broken that the Great Khans, who were on their very last legs in New Vegas, were able to forge a mighty empire out of it in basically no time.
For as undeveloped the east coast is, basically everything in the western U.S. outside California is many times less so.
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Stone Cold Robert House
Mojave Rattlesnake
I think that's the wrong perspective, though. Tribal societies aren't necessarily disorganized or underdeveloped. They aren't technologically advanced and their society isn't as structured as ours, but their lifestyles and culture are stable and viable. There are still tribal societies today and many are less organized than the Fallout tribes yet anthropologists don't consider them less developed, just built differently. So the existence of tribes for centuries after centuries is still believable because those groups simply didn't form a larger community either due to not having the necessary structure to do it, or because they made a stable enough system to not need to go back to our way of life. The Fallout 3 kind of civilization is a different problem - we have several groups who have all the means to create a larger society, the need to do so due to instability, consistent attempts by several groups to advance, yet they didn't do so due to unexplained reasons. It's an entirely different framework you're working with. The East Coast groups are built in a way that is less conductive to forming different tribes and more conductive to an unified society (very similar to how the NCR, Legion etc. formed) and somehow they're still scraping for survival? That's the part that bugs most people.
Except it is explained, its literally the major plot point of Fallout 3. The lack of large amounts of clean water, which is fundamental to civilization, has prevented people from being able to expand beyond the size they are in-game.
In Fallout 4 its explained that attempts by the settlements of The Commonwealth to form an organized nation have been sabotaged by The Institute, who don't want any power to arise that could possibly challenge them.
Stone Cold Robert House
Mojave Rattlesnake
Ah, but then we have another point entirely, which is that the water plot in Fallout 3 is completely strange, unecessarily convoluted and inconsistent with the portrayal of radiation in the rest of the series. PossibleCabbage explained it throughly in the post I linked:
"Okay, so basically radiation is "something unstable emits a particle" (there are three kinds of ionizing radiation depending on which particle is released) and the way this damages your body is that it's a high energy particle on a microscopic scale, and that's going to do damage at a cellular level. There's only two ways for water to be radioactive: the water itself is radioactive (i.e. the hydrogen in your H2O is Tritium) or it contains heavier unstable particles (Carbon-14, say) so that ingesting or being around the water subjects you to radiation from that source, not from the water itself.
It's entirely implausible that the water in the Potomac basin is mostly tritium, since tritium has a half-life of like 12 years, and it's only produced in the upper atmosphere in small amounts from cosmic ray bombardment or from working reactors (you make it by bombarding Lithium-6 with neutrons in a working fission reactor.) So there's not going to be anything that conceivably produces a significant amount of tritium and dumps it in the river.
So the only way the water is plausibly radioactive is "it contains unstable isotopes of things other than H2O". So there's say, Carbon-14 and Radium-226 in your water supply, so drinking it and being around it is a bad idea. But here's the simple solution: Water boils at 100 degrees celsius, Radium boils at around 1100 degrees, whereas carbon boils at around 4800 degrees. So if you heat water to its boiling point you're going to get nothing but pure H2O in the steam, which you can collect and condense to get pure clean water. Since evaporation on the atomic level basically works through individual molecules being excited enough to "go ballistic" and boil, pretty much all of the water vapor in the atmosphere is going to be clean too, so you could just run a standard dehumidifier that you could buy at any department store before the war.
Alternatively, you could always just filter water through dirt too, since the clay in the dirt will bind with all the radioactive particles and what comes out will be purified (this is what the American Civil Defense Organization recommends in the case of nuclear war: get a 5-gallon bucket, punch holes in the bottom, put 2" of pebbles on it, cover with a porous cloth, put 8" of clay on top, cover with a pourous cloth, top with another 2 inches of pebbles. Then pour water through it letting it drain into a clean container, replace the clay every 10 gallons or so.) The fact that radioactive particles will get trapped in the clay makes "purify the land so we can grow stuff to eat" a much more interesting plot than "purify the water."
But the problem here is that Fallout 3 treats radiation like it's magic. In a fantasy game, like the Elder Scrolls, we can only understand how magic works based on the information given in the text, because magic is not a real thing, so when something doesn't make sense we can wave our hands and say "that's just how the magic works, I guess." But radiation is a real thing, and people who play the game (like me) may know a thing or two about how radiation works, so when the game doesn't bother to explain how this works (which it doesn't, except through the mechanics for gaining/losing Rads, which are an okay if gamey abstraction), we can actually drill down on this by saying "wait a minute, I have a degree in physics..."
As for the latter point, the GECK is designed to transmute blasted irradiated landscape into a verdant clean garden. Fallout 3 itself states "The G.E.C.K. will collapse all matter within its given radius and recombine it..." So it's a hyperscience qua magic device that turns one kind of matter into another kind of matter. So if you're running water with unstable isotopes in it through the GECK, why aren't you turning them into something inert? That's what we're told the GECK does- it transmutes matter. So there's no reason there should be a large amount of radiation present waiting to be released in the Jefferson memorial, as the actual radioactive particles will just lose their energy if contained and become harmless helium, electrons, or light, and the emitters theoretically held in suspension in the water could be processed by the GECK.
The long and short of this is that you shouldn't do plots about "radiation" in Fallout games unless you're prepared to show a bunch of leaking hazardous waste casks or some other plausible source for that radiation. It's been 200 years, so all but the 7 long-lived fission byproducts from the bombs should have been rendered almost completely inert (and these are a very small portion of a given fission reaction, like .1%) You can justify the presence of the nasty 7 if you show vats of glowing stuff, but not in the general environment just handwaving "there was a nuclear war 7 generations of ago." If you want to invoke technology or a scientific phenomenon as the cause of something, go ahead and posit something that doesn't actually exist (a fission battery, a way to preserve brains in gel, FEV, etc.) Don't go invoking something that actually exists, make it work some way it can't actually work, and don't bother explaining how it's supposed to work in this context."
Well that is just completely untrue. NPCs in Fallout 1 and 2 mention glowing water, radioactive rain, and the need for Geiger counters, since radiation is still everywhere. The Midwest is described in Fallout 2 as a giant radioactive dust bowl.
Even in New Vegas, which made a massive deal about how House deflected most the nukes, keeping the area clean, many towns, such a Nipton, have their water supply, which comes from the local water tower, contaminated with radiation, it even has a small radioactive pool forming below the nozzle they get water out of. Even in pristine areas such as the Mojave, radioactive water is still a problem to many.
As for the quoted material.
A. All arguments using real world science are fallacious at their core, as Fallout is based on 50's pop-culture and scifi b-movie portrayals of radiation. Hence why radiation causes animals to mutate into giant versions of themselves, and how it makes humans into ghouls.
B. People in the D.C. area do filter water, they just lack the machinery to do it on such a large scale as to make farming viable.
C. You can't filter the water with dirt in Fallout 3, since the dirt is radioactive as well.
D. Radiation IS magic, hence the point made in A. That was always the entire point since the beginning. I do believe Tim Cain even equated radiation in Fallout to be like magic, and used that as justification as for why radiation can cause mutant animals as portrayed in 1950's scifi b-movies, and in the game.
E. The whole point about the GECK is a non issue, as they didn't use the GECK itself in Fallout 3. Both James and Braun state the GECK is dangerous, and doesn't really work like its supposed too. And James directly says he is going to use components of the GECK's technology to fix the purifier, not the GECK itself.
In short, everything you just posted is nothing short of pure historical revisionism about the nature of the world of Fallout, and things stated in Fallout 1, 2, and 3, layered on top of fallacious arguments of real world science in a game setting where realism never applied to the bomb.
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