The following is excerpted from a larger fan project I have been working on:
The question asked is:
Can you Squint and fit Wasteland into Fallout? The
obvious answer is yes, these two works of fiction can be reworked and retconned and headcanoned until the Brahmin come home and everything fits together. Isn’t that true for anything? Just use your imagination and you’ll find that the answer is quite clear. People imagine much more far-fetched things than this, all the time.
However, I’m interested in the approach: as presented in their current forms, there are almost no fundamental differences between Wasteland and Fallout’s universes, just presentation in the way. In my opinion, the best way to make them fit together is to adapt the events depicted in Wasteland into Fallout’s setting, rather than vice-versa. Please note that I am not advocating that the events depicted in Wasteland as-is can be directly ported into the Fallout setting; there are so many reasons why that cannot be the case, too numerous to list here. Instead, I am going to describe a reimagining of the events of Wasteland and Wasteland 2 that fits into the Fallout setting, addressing timeline discrepancies and consolidating similar elements. The goal is to adapt, convert, and reformat Wasteland to Fallout.
Elements that Require Headcanon
These are the major examples that explicitly require some reconciliation. Your mileage may vary for how you feel about the best way to reconcile these elements.
Factions: Other than the Desert Rangers, prominent factions in Wasteland include the Guardians of the Old Order and the Children of the Citadel. Being xenophobic tech-hoarders, the Guardians of the Old Order are the faction that directly inspired the Brotherhood of Steel; in my opinion, the Guardians can be reworked into an Arizonan chapter of the Brotherhood without issue, and
the difference in naming is moot. The Children of the Citadel are the antagonists of Wasteland 2, made up of survivors from the Guardians of the Old Order when they were attacked and driven out by the Desert Rangers. The Children are a bit more interesting to square: their name is actually the name given to Fallout’s Children of the Cathedral in early design documents, such as in this
timeline document. Given that they occupy a base on the south beach of Los Angeles and are a transhumanist cult, and that many Fallout alumni went to work on Wasteland 2, this connection is probably intentional. The easiest reconciliation is that the Children of the Citadel eventually become the Children of the Cathedral, trading their cybernetic god Matthias for a new biological god in the Master.
Timeline: The Wasteland timeline posits that World War III occurs in 1998, and that the two games take place in 2087 and 2102, respectively. Since Fallout’s Great War took place in 2077, does refactoring the timeline mess anything up for Wasteland? Not really. There are many anachronisms present in Wasteland and its sequel implying that the Apocalypse took place much closer to the game’s events, and there are very few plot elements that actually require a hundred-year gap between the Apocalypse and the games. The only implication is that most characters ported over to the Fallout setting will be old enough to remember the years before the Great War.
Rail Nomads: I will focus on this faction specifically because they touch on both of the above points. The Rail Nomads are a tribe based around riding pre-war railways on repaired trains. Some people might take issue with the idea that a tribal culture could exist in the Fallout setting in 2087, only a decade after the Great War. It’s worth noting, however, that Wasteland 2 depicts most of the Rail Nomads as being of Native American descent; the use of the word tribal might therefore imply an ethnic affiliation, rather than an assumed tech level. As an aside, it is a misconception that Fallout’s tribals are inherently pre-industrial or have gone through a process of societal degeneration. The Rail Nomads are simply a group of Native Americans who took up a culture of riding the rails like the hobos of the 1930s, and continued that practice into the post-war era.
Los Angeles: Wasteland 2’s third act predominantly takes place in Los Angeles, previously depicted in the first Fallout. There is a tendency for fans to look at prequel works–which Wasteland 2 would become, in this scenario–and wonder why elements introduced in a prequel are not referenced in the original story. Is it a problem that Wasteland 2 depicts Los Angeles as a wetlands populated by farming communities and religious militias? I don’t think so. Sixty years pass between the events of Wasteland 2 and Fallout, enough time for communities to rise and fall, for the city to lose its vegetation to droughts and nuclear winter, and for new groups to take prominence. “Why didn’t the Vault Dweller visit the Mannerites at the Angel Oracle or the agave farmers at Rodia?” Because they weren’t relevant to his or her quest in defeating the Master. Fallout’s background lore also explains that many of the prominent groups in Los Angeles in 2162 arrived around 20-30 years prior from other regions, long after the events of Wasteland 2.
Reasons Why Wasteland and Fallout Cannot be Reconciled
Here are a few of the counter-arguments I have encountered as to why reconciling the two settings is a bad idea or otherwise undoable. I will try to present them fairly, and then counter them with my own points. One of the reasons many feel that the two series cannot be reconciled is down to a matter of approach: on face value, integrating Wasteland and Fallout as-is is improbable. However, the approach I am taking is adapting Wasteland to the Fallout universe and acknowledging the areas that would require alteration.
Tone: Wasteland and Fallout are said to have different tones by many fans; the usual claim is that Wasteland is less grounded and more pulpy than Fallout, while Fallout’s world is more built up. I submit that the Fallout series has never had a consistent tone, has just as much pulp in it as Wasteland, and that Wasteland’s lack of in-depth lore is a boon for its integration with Fallout, not a hindrance.
Tech level: Synthetic humanoids are a major plot element in both Wasteland games, while in Fallout they are a relatively new innovation by the Institute by the mid-23rd century. In general, Wasteland implies that AI was successfully miniaturized outside of supercomputers, which is not the case in Fallout. Actually, the lore presented in the games doesn’t present many contradictions with Fallout’s lore: the Cochise AI built synthetic bodies with the goal of downloading itself into them, and most of those synths actually contain human brains.
Circumstances of the Great War: Wasteland’s World War III occurs between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1998, while Fallout’s World War III occurs between the United States and China in 2077. Remember that while on face value these are irreconcilable, the approach I take is to adapt, convert, and reformat Wasteland to the Fallout setting. This is an inconsequential difference. More importantly: Wasteland 2 offers a conclusive explanation for the cause of the Apocalypse. The Cochise AI intentionally misinterpreted a meteor shower as a missile salvo to spark nuclear war between the world powers, with the goal of destroying all of Humanity. Many Fallout fans mistakenly believe that the matter of who and what caused the Great War is settled, but this is not the case. There is no confirmation that Aliens did it, or that Vault-Tec launched the first nukes. While Wasteland 2 offers the most conclusive explanation, there is also the possibility that Cochise is lying. Interestingly, Skynet from Fallout 2 claims that there is a high probability that a rogue AI goaded the world powers into nuclear war.
Aesthetic: Wasteland is rooted in 1980s iconography, whereas Fallout takes a 1950s retrofuture aesthetic. Actually, there are plenty of places where Fallout uses 1980s aesthetics: the Followers of the Apocalypse with their punk ideology and mohawks, the Mad Max-style leather jackets and raider bands. Fallout’s aesthetics are much richer than many believe. Furthermore, both settings are inspired by 1960s and 1970s post-apocalyptic novels like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, A Canticle for Leibowitz, A Boy and His Dog, and The Stand.
Hoover Dam: The existence of Hoover Dam is the single biggest divergence between Wasteland and Fallout: in Wasteland, the dam was destroyed by nuclear blast and water from Lake Mead surged out through the Colorado, destroying many towns in its wake. In Fallout, Hoover Dam is the prominent setting of the climax for Fallout: New Vegas. The only solution here is to go with a hard retcon and remove references to Hoover Dam’s destruction.
A Corporate Argument
While I’ve been trying to argue mostly in favor of headcanon for fans who are interested in incorporating elements from both settings into each other, there is another argument that isn’t often brought up: what if the corporate powers that be were to merge the IPs of Fallout and Wasteland? At present, Fallout’s owners Bethesda Softworks and Wasteland’s owners InXile Entertainment are owned by the same company, Microsoft. It is not unheard of for companies that own similar intellectual properties to merge them together to reduce competition and cannibalization of their own products. This is most often seen in comic books: DC Comics, for example, has acquired pantheons of different superheroes from buying out other comic book companies over the decades. About once a decade they soft-reboot their mainstream continuity to include elements of whatever they purchased. It is entirely possible that Microsoft will turn Wasteland into a sub-brand of Fallout to reduce the number of post-apocalyptic RPGs they own and to possibly use as a bargaining chip with parts of the Fallout fanbase.
