Confused about the lore in Fallout 4+the ending.

Klarix

Klarix

First time out of the vault
Anyone else feel there's just not enough information about the timeline, specifically about the Capital Wasteland and how we got from point the Lyons Brotherhood at the end of Broken Steel to Boone----er, I mean Elder Maxson 10 years later.

Below is what I've gathered from the timeline, as it pertains to the Capital Wasteland:
-2279:

Elder Maxson, 12, killed two raiders and saved the squad escorting him.

-2280:

A Brotherhood of Steel recon team was sent to the commonwealth to gather technology, great success.

Elder Maxson, 13, killed a large death claw, and gained the facial scar he has today

-2281:

MacCready, 16, leaves Little Lamplight
Courier Six's adventures across the Mojave/West Coast.

-2281-2287:

MacCready "took an odd job here and there, but things were pretty hot with the Brotherhood of Steel running the show."

MacCready marries Lucy and has a son named Duncan.

Lucy dies to some feral ghouls, and MacCreedy runs with Duncan in his arms away.

Duncan becomes sick with blue spots on MacCready's homestead/farm, and MacCready leaves vowing to find an antidote.

-2282:

Maxson, 15, kills the Supermutant Leader Sheppard, (presumably ending the Supermutant threat in the Capital Wasteland once and for all, although that's speculation on my part)

-2283:

Maxson, 16, reunited the Brotherhood and the Outcasts.

-Maxson named Elder of the Brotherhood
-Maxson is named elder of the Brotherhood by the West Coast chapters, who shouldn't be alive at this point. (I'm going to attribute this one as a lie/propaganda of the writer in this terminal entry)

-2284:

A second Brotherhood Recon Squad, Artimis, was sent to the Commonwealth and disappeared

-2285:

The Prydwen Completed

2286-2287:
MacCready arrives in the Commonwealth.

...And that's it. Beyond Danse's memories of the wasteland which I'm omitting because spoilers.

In general, the fate of the Capital Wasteland, not to mentioned any word of a veteran 30~ year old Lone Wanderer, is nonexistent. Do the Brotherhood have a police state going on? Were they pushed out by an angry populace? What about growing settlements like Megaton, a potentially destroyed Rivet City, or the ever-growing Democracy of Daisy? Not a mention of them?

Ugh. One thing I love about time skips is seeing how things have changed, for better or worse. Watching the NCR grow from the small town of Shady Sands into a young nation state, and eventually a mighty Republic was kind of awesome for me, and then learning about the sheer amount of stuff that has changed in the 80 and 40 year interims.


Lastly, what do you think is the canon ending?

After replaying through the storyline a second time recently, I'm tempted to say a Railroad ending + a rebuilt Minutemen soon after, with both the Castle and it's artillery recovered. Under those conditions, by 2297 much of the Commonwealth could have finally rebuilt-----hell, renewed attempts at forming the CPG would be underway by the 2307.

The Brotherhood get's it's teeth kicked in, for once, and any surviving force down in the Capital Wasteland might learn from where Maxson's chapter failed(aka lording over the Commonwealth in your airship, threatening farmers, and calling for assassinations of completely compliant and friendly scientists like Virgil)

I dunno, did anyone else notice there wasn't a lot of exposition about the 10 year gap between the two games? What do you think is the best/canon ending for Fallout 4?
 
It's Bethesda we're talking about. They don't like to make a choice as to what is canon and what isn't. So not hearing a lot about the Capital Wasteland doesn't shock me one little bit. So what ending do I think will be canon for Fallout 4? All and none. We'll never hear from the Commonwealth again.

Really, it's Bethesda.

Them and lore don't mix well.
 
I think Beth made all Fallout 4 endings result relatively the same so they can continue a sequel or DLC without having to work too hard... Classic Beth, no need to write a good story when you can just write 100 hours of sequel baiting
 
Yeah. FO4 is noticeably scant on hints to as what happened in the 10 years between FO3 and FO4. I sided with the Brotherhood and judging by their banter, the Capital Wasteland is STILL a lawless shit hole as Spacemnky mentioned. As Boo mentioned as well, Beth also retcon's stuff like wild fire. So, nothing much has changed in the Capital Wasteland from what I can gather.
 
RangerBoo said:
Seems like Beth just keeps trying to retcon the lore of their franchises with each new installment.
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I don't think that is their goal, but it is happening. I think they have lost whatever it was that drove them before. They have a blurred vision now of what they want and it seems related to money. There should have been a mission statement when building 4. If it were me, replay-ability would have been in the statement and how much money will we make would be towards the end of the statement.

In regards to the lore not adding up. I think Klarix, that if you over-analyze poop you will come to the conclusion that it is poop. Poop can take many forms and consistencies, but it is still poop at the end of the day.
 
I don't mind the ambiguous approach that Bethesda takes to addressing what was "canon" in the previous games of a series. I think it's a good way to respect the various choices that players can make in an open-ended RPG. That's why I'm so surprised that they would go out of their way to tell us that everything we did in F3 was for nothing. It just seems like a pointless jab at the players. It's one thing to take the series into darker territory, but it's another altogether to drown everything out with excessive nihilism. TV Tropes has an article about this kind of thing:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarknessInducedAudienceApathy

I had a similar issue with how the game handled the factions. NV succeeded at giving them realistic flaws, but F4 made them all very callous and unlikable. I didn't feel like I was choosing which one would be best as much as I was choosing which one would be the least terrible.
 
I notice that Bethesda tries to hard in certain areas. They go all-out fairy tale if they want to make a happy story, with one good and one evil faction fighting each other. This makes for a disjointed and boring scenario of good and evil fighting it out... again. When they try to go the New Vegas route they make each faction have flaws... and that's it, they're not anything but flaws.
 
Tom Bishop said:
I don't mind the ambiguous approach that Bethesda takes to addressing what was "canon" in the previous games of a series. I think it's a good way to respect the various choices that players can make in an open-ended RPG. That's why I'm so surprised that they would go out of their way to tell us that everything we did in F3 was for nothing. It just seems like a pointless jab at the players. It's one thing to take the series into darker territory, but it's another altogether to drown everything out with excessive nihilism. TV Tropes has an article about this kind of thing:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarknessInducedAudienceApathy

I had a similar issue with how the game handled the factions. NV succeeded at giving them realistic flaws, but F4 made them all very callous and unlikable. I didn't feel like I was choosing which one would be best as much as I was choosing which one would be the least terrible.
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DirtyOldShoe said:
In regards to the lore not adding up. I think Klarix, that if you over-analyze poop you will come to the conclusion that it is poop. Poop can take many forms and consistencies, but it is still poop at the end of the day.
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I'm not as experienced in the Elder Scrolls mythos as others are(I was introduced to the series with Skyrim and it was alright. Started getting boring early on but I powered through it to the end----to be honest the Civil War it's greater implications in other regions outside of Skyrim should have been the main focus, I wouldn't have minded if that was the main focus of the story.)----but to my vague understanding each game is separated by a considerable gap in centuries, or it's so far removed geographically from the preceding game that there would be no way it could possibly affect/interconnect with it.

I guess the problem with this, that became more apparent as time went on, is that when Bethesda acquired the rights to Fallout, they applied that same vague non-specific lore gap between Fallout 3 and the preceding two games------and it resulted in a lot of backlash about the timeline, characterization with the Brotherhood, and so on. And the series, both before and after (New Vegas) 3 had a history of being ultra-specific about the events between each game, and the fate of the protagonists from each preceding game.

Given the way New Vegas was very blunt and to-the-point in it's epilogues and connection to Fallout 2, I thought Fallout 4 would try to replicate the same thing in the Commonwealth. But...they didn't. And as poop as that 10 year time gap is------well, you're right DirtyOldShoe. I just wish there were some answers, for better or worse? "Is the Lone Wanderer canonically dead? Did the Lone Wanderer even exist in Fallout 4's timeline? Did the canonical war in the Capital Wasteland between the Brotherhood and Enclave happen, just without the Lone Wanderer but with James? Is this Fallout 4 to Fallout 3 like Ultimate Marvel to 616 regular Marvel? Will there be a Days of Future Past-esque Fallout sequel that recons all of the worst aspects of Fallout 3 out of existence while simultanesouly giving much needed context to Fallout 4's 10 year backstory? Can my questions get anymore distracted?"

I don't know. Maybe I have an irrational hope to expect the best out of series I'm a fan of, and maybe that does lead me to be more disappointed more frequently. But what's the alternative, be happy with everything? That seems so dull.
 
If they didnt bother to write a decent story for the actual game then why the christ would they expend energy filling in the gaps between 3 and 4?




Fun fact, I didnt realize that MacCready was the MacCready from little lamplight because by the time I found him I didnt really care anymore. I hired him and then sent him to a settlement 10 minutes later
 
I'm sure you've all guessed this, but there is no little differences in the endings or a secret ending depending on the choices. I just looked into the PC files, and there are literally only four files - two each for the male and female character, one of which is the Institute ending and the other of which is all other endings. These are their names:

Endgame_FEMALE_A.bk2
Endgame_FEMALE_B.bk2
Endgame_MALE_A.bk2
Endgame_MALE_B.bk2

That is all there is for the ending. Seriously. Four pre-rendered clips. The fact that there were only two endings didn't really hit me until I saw the files themselves. If you wish to know where, it's in the Data directory of the game, in the Video folder.
 
And there wasn't even much difference between the endings.
Didn't they say something about eight endings or something?
 
ZigzagPX4 said:
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Good find! This doesn't surprise me one bit. To me the endings scream of laziness. You know its not that hard to make a ending and have the game continue post game. For Gods stakes Beth was able to do it in Fallout 3 why not in 4? Its not too hard to make a New Vegas style ending and have you continue the game after it. Fallout 4 is the epitome of laziness.
 
While I can't seem to get the maths done properly, If we consider that there are potentially 19 variant end details which have up to 10 variants of themselves, Fallout 2 has potentially hundreds (thousands?) of variation of ending...

The Den alone has 4 endings... and that's literally the first place you wander into.
New Reno has 10 unique and individual (non-repeating) endings ... that's more endings for one location than the whole of Fallout 4 entire 'game-world'

To say that Fallout 4 was shallow and lacked endings is to liken a teaspoon to the Pacific ocean.
 
Why would you ask for consistency in lore when you have people like Hines:
image.jpeg

See they don't have time for dialogue but that's the impression you should be getting when you play the game considering the writing is putrid.
If you want Fallout lore Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas are there. Fallout 3 and 4 are about how many inconsistencies you can add to the lore, how much sense you can avoid making, and how high of a body count you can get. When I first started playing Fallout 4 I kind of expected a body count counter to pop up to inform me I "killed this many people".
 
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