Headscratchers / Fallout 76

Is the Resident Crazy or Just Bored?

• I'm not sure what turning on a bunch of old tourist attractions and playing musical instruments on rooftops does to rebuild America.
  • Probably a bit of both. I mean, he/she spent, at minimum, 25 years of his/her life in a Vault with a bunch of know-it-alls who claim they know how to save America. Consider also that on Reclamation Day, no one bothered to wake him/her up to leave which tells me that the Resident probably wasn’t so popular in the Vault.

Why are Super Mutants wandering around West Virginia?

• Even if the Master was creating them 59 years before Fallout 1, that still doesn't explain how they got on the complete opposite side of the country.
  • These are likely Vault 87 mutants, Washington D.C. is right next to West Virginia and the D.C. mutants came into existence much sooner than the Mariposa mutants.
  • Heading to the West Tek building outside Huntersville reveals that the US Gov. was experimenting with FEV even before the war, and managed to succeed to a degree. The mutants found in West Virginia are the escaped test subjects of West Tek.

Why is the Enclave and BOS in West Virgnia?

• The B.E.T.A revealed that you can receive Brotherhood and Enclave uniforms, with a Developer selling the former in his shop, but... these groups were both formed on the west coast and only made their way east far after the events of Fallout 76. How did they make their way to the East Coast, much less a remote state like West Virginia?
  • In Fallout 3's Operation Anchorage, General Chase's Overcoat is shown to be almost identical to his centuries later Enclave counterpart Colonel Autumn's, only winterized instead of tan. Given this it's plausible that the uniforms seen are simply US government uniforms rather than Enclave ones, and that the Enclave simply barely changed from their Pre-War roots. It is also possible that the Enclave were already going by that name in 2102 and had dispatched some small amount of people to West Virginia for much the same reason as the players going out, to get access to the active nuclear silos, or that the Enclave had some forces active in the region at the time, possibly operating from Greenbrier. The Brotherhood, though...unless we receive a better explanation, that seems to be a legitimate retcon.
    • Somewhat a little of a retcon and more of an addendum for the Brotherhood. According to the game's lore, the Appalachian Brotherhood was formed from an army unit in Appalachia after they made contact with Roger Maxson through a radio.
    • The Enclave turns out to have had a base under the Whitespring Resort (the equivalent of the real-life Greenbrier resort). The Enclave lost contact with the Poseidon Oil Rig almost immediately and became a Renegade Splinter Faction that elected its own President. They were then wiped out in an Enemy Civil War.

How dumb is The Overseer?

• Did she not clue into the fact that her orders from Vault-Tec don't mean a lot when the company has been defunct for decades?
  • To be fair, she probably thought they too were in some bunk somewhere monitoring everyone. It's also kind of hard to rebuild America when you've got Scorchbeasts flying overhead, nevermind the mutants prowling Appalachia. She kind of has to take care of that first.
  • Vault-Tec's selection process for the position of Overseer was, well, flawed. Adherence to rules and regulations that don't make logical sense was in fact what the Vault-Tec leadership required in order to be considered for an Overseer position. Take a tour of the Vault-Tec Institute and ask yourself at what point you would have left to find something not as insane. In order to graduate the training, you must submit and perform an experiment on real, living people. Casualties of these experiments are not only expected, but built into the projected populations of the Vaults (as expected losses). The most successful of these projects became real Vaults, such as 108 (GARY!!!) and 92. There was a planned experiment for Vault 76, but the Overseer simply didn't implement it. Frankly, she comes off as one of the more reasonable Overseers in the entire series. Compare her versus the hobo that was going to take over Vault 114.

Is the 76 Experiment Doomed By Canon?

• We've been to Boston and to the Capital Wasteland, neither of which seems to have heard of anything good from West Virginia.
  • Or they just didn't bother expanding into that area for whatever reason (or expanding too much at all), and they just weren't discovered/mentioned at any point in the other games (Fallout 3 and 4 are kinda self-contained, and the Brotherhood might've gone around West Virginia on their way to Pittsburgh and D.C.).
    • It is very unlikely that they could go unnoticed. West Virginia is right next to D.C. Not to mention, a huge forested area right next to a wasteland would attract the attention of a lot of people. If there is still an advanced civilization there, the news would spread like wildfire. All of this is beside the point, however, because even if they still exist as an isolationistic faction, they still fail in their mission to restore America.
  • West Virginia is extremely mountainous, and 300+ miles from D.C., the mountains could easily shield the area and have it go unnoticed.
    • People have traveled from D.C to Boston in the game, even normal people like MacCready and Sierra Petrovita, so 300 miles aren't that much of a distance. In addition, people can and have traveled to areas even more mountainous than West Virginia, as evidenced by Caesar's Legion having conquered mountainous states like Arizona, New Mexico, most of Utah and parts of Colorado.
    • It's also just possible that there is an NCR-esque country and they didn't go to the Capital Wasteland because it is an irradiated Super-Mutant and Raider-filled hellhole that an entire unusually-heroic Chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel was incapable of pacifying.
    • Calling whatever nation Vault 76 builds an NCR-esque country would be a misnomer, because it has neither the scale nor the capability of the NCR. The NCR can expand to and pacify nearly the entire West Coast in fewer than 80 years. Vault 76 had 200 years to do rebuild and they couldn't even reach or at least try to clean D.C, the capital of the country they want to restore. Even if the hypothetical NCR-scale government doesn't go to D.C, people would still know of its existence. People from the areas surrounding D.C has contacted as far as Boston, which is over 400 miles away. A mere 300 miles are not going to be enough to stop people from discovering a massive government if it exists. It's already established in the lore that people can move through areas more mountainous than WV, so the terrain can't possibly isolate the region. Even if people don't notice any government there, they would still notice how the region is not affected by the war as much as the surrounding areas. WV would still be an ideal location for settlers everywhere and widely talked about due to its relatively preserved rural areas and wealth of pre-war technology. The fact that WV is not even mentioned in anywhere else points to the most likely possibility that it is a desolate place of no interest in later games. It probably turns into a typical wasteland after Vault 76's attempt to stop the Scorch creatures with nukes.
  • We do know that the Scorched don't end the human race so it seems likely they were at least prevented from spreading—at least until a sequel where they show up like Deathclaws.
  • Given how freely nukes fly in Virginia despite the war being over, I don't think there was ever a chance of it ending well.

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