Fallout 4

Unfortunately some of that is also the limitation of Gamebryo - being able to render only about 12 people even in "bustling" metropoli. And also down to the Bethesda team not really wanting to script upwards of 50 NP Cs with interesting day / night routines.

If we got cities that were a bit larger than a holiday camp, that'd probably help. I genuinely think that Cyberpunk (in the future0 and Witcher have done a lot to set expectations for settings now. Amalur / Fable / WOW / Elder Scrolls populations or world structure doesn't feel "enough".

It's the Sim Settlements thing is good and something that, arguably, Bethesda should be doing by default, to make the world feel more "alive".

But in terms of story as well - yeah there seems to be so much active sabotage going on, coupled with a CRAZY amount of hostile fauna; add in the sheer diversity of Deathclaws alone in the area - it makes sense that settlements don't seem to last long.

In Zombie fiction rebuilding being difficult makes sense - shambling hordes present an absolute existential threat. In Fallout that's harder to justify, unless you buy into the idea that 50% of the population go all "Lord Humungous" on the wasteland.

I mean. I agree its weird there isnt more rebuilding, or that half of old boston hasnt crumbled to dust and skeletons from the great war still exist, but at least 4 you can kinda justofy the lack of governance in it it seeing as the Institute has spent the last 200 years actively antagonizing anyone who isnt part of the institute.

More Criminals Than Targets is partly a gameplay limitation of the engine, but there are other options. New Vegas did the interesting thing where a lot of the old raider tribes had evolved into actual cultures, albeit small and violent ones. The NCR didn't fight against faceless raiders at Bitter Springs, they fought a war against an enemy nation. That war has caused numerous problems for the NCR even though they won, but it's a more realistic explanation than "I dunno, there's an infinite supply of raiders and monsters keeping everyone down."

tbh if anything the annoying part is the memory dive showing us at least that san francisco was rebuilt enough that the golden gate bridge looked perfectly normal again and running water and power were a thing again.

yet instead we're stuck in bumfuck

There's at least one Fallout 76 style survivor settlement near the center of the map that's been taken over by Super Mutants. It's the one you find by discovering the Lost Family radio signal.

They were wiped out by one of the first gangs of raiders.

New Vegas also show that that raider tribes like the Great Khans are a dying breed as that lifestyle is simply unsustainable in the long run (especially when everyone else is rebuilding and has better weapons and resources) and the only way for the Khans to survive is by becoming an actual civilization.

The radiation sticking around comes down to the cars slowly leaking it everywhere. It's not actually hard to believe in that case. The monsters aren't entirely unbelievable, either. CRISPRS is a real life argument for FEV that takes snippets of gene code from its host as camouflage and can deposit it in other creatures it infects. Scientists have used it to combine a goat's udders with a spider's spinnerets to produce spider silk in goat milk. I don't know what you'd have to do with it to make a Deathclaw, but if that stuff hits an elephant and gives it omnivorous tendencies, for instance, I could totally see murderphants being a problem.

It's extremely unlikely for us to have entire settlements of ghouls in real life, but considering the existence of the Henrietta Lacks gene line, it's not 100% impossible for somebody somewhere to get "lucky" enough to regenerate and live longer as a tumor instead of dying straight out. Still not likely by any stretch of the imagination, but probably not impossible. They'd also probably be sterile and any effort to make new ones would be an active scientific one that people really should shake their heads and say "what the fuck" at.

There's also fusion generators everywhere. Overall too mush radio waste

With Fallout I would agree that in general it makes two mistakes: Overestimating the amount of time it'd take for civilization to bounce back, and overestimating how long old-world artifacts lasts.

Essentially, the setting wouldn't be a scavenger world for both reasons: The pre-war buildings and artifacts would mostly have decayed by now, and there'd be enough infrastructure to no longer need to rely upon it any more.

If they want to keep the scrapscape, they should have post-war America, along with the rest of the world, recover and fall again. After all, war never changed. Then they could also take more liberties with the tech and aesthetic designs.

Bethesda did the research when making Fallout 3, to determine how much would have survived. The answer was "basically nothing," they decided that was boring, and went with Ragnarök Proofing instead. Part of the fun of any post-apocalyptic work is seeing various monuments and sites After the End. I wish they hadn't leaned on it quite so hard, and all the stuff I was saying about rebuilding, but I can't argue with the most basic idea.

That's basically what Avellone did with nuking the NCR, but I doubt that's going to be canon going forward. Besides, like I said, they want pre-war stuff still around.

I think that's more what he was proposing, rather than "nuke the NCR because I hate it and all it stands for." Regardless, you can't actually nuke the whole NCR (or Legion). The most Lonesome Road allows you to do is nuke a fair stretch of the road between the NCR proper and the Mojave, the Long 15 (an NCR outpost with troops stationed, just to be clear — they turn into high-level ghouls like the Marked Men, it's basically a Bonus Boss area). The intent is that you can RP nuking that area as a deliberate tactic to limit the NCR's influence over Vegas, rather than simply kicking puppies for the fun of it — but it's the kind of thing that's easy for future games to gloss over and write around anyway, by design. However you feel about the NCR and the state of Fallout going forward, Chris Avellone's never really done evil choices that are purely just for the negative karma.

Edited by Unsung on Feb 4th 2019 at 6:57:29 AM

What did Avellone say on the NCR? I think from a Doylist perspective I can see why it'd be troublesome to Fallout's writers, though it is my favorite faction.

The problem with the NCR is that it's a stable and growing nationstate with modern amenities and is on a fast track to fix the setting and civilizing the US.

And that's pretty much his problem with it. He doesn't want the post apocalypse to end.

Pretty much. Though yes, it's a Doylist reaction rather than a Watsonian one.

There are hard coded limits you could put on them - no oil, thereby limiting their mechanised forces; scavenging things like power armour and not really being able to recreate it without Brotherhood help; apex predators meaning anything short of army movements is risky, thereby limiting logistical and cultural spread.

Add onto that that major forms of transport aren't feasible - airships are rare; trains are difficult to run consistently; and we've already SEEN that the NCR is overstretched and would probably be unable to fully expand into the Mojave in the long term, even with a pro NCR ending AND having New Vegas as a launch pad.

Re-establishing the USA is a pipe dream; you couldn't re create it as there are too many disparate "nations" with no real connection to the past; add to that how there's environmental things like the fog from the Sierra Madre and worse, no single nation seems to actually be able to solidly hold territory to enforce their will.

Now, in our own history pre-industrial nations had empires, but usually only over opponents with inferior tech or militaries; modern firearms change the game, along with limited populations.

So, you don't need to renuke the NCR - it has an upper limit of what it can currently do, especially with the levels of implied corruption.

Well, yes and no. Most of the small tribes don't have the ability to make new guns, just maintain old ones (and steal from their enemies). That limits how dangerous they are to a group like the NCR, who can make new guns, vehicles, and so on. Remember, although it's not shown in the game due to limitations of Gamebryo, NCR does have vehicles and a fully active industrial base. Even the oldest, crappiest truck is a massive advantage over a local tribe that is still getting by on foot.

So yes, I do think the NCR could re-conquer the entire US... eventually. They have the technology for both conquest and bridge building. Their big problem is that they are overextending themselves due to the influence of the brahmin barons. The US went through a similar era of corruption with the oil barons, but the difference is that America wasn't trying to expand its borders at the time. So the situation isn't quite the same.

The NCR is overstretched and corrupt right now — in another 20 or 40 years, who knows? And you're kind of leaving out stuff like Helios One, energy weapons, robots, A.I.s, and man-portable nuclear reactors, etc. Technology that we don't have or necessary fully understand in the real world that could make up that gap.

But that whole argument, I'd say, is the meta reason why Avellone wanted to nuke the NCR. Not because it guaranteed that the NCR could or would rebuild the whole US or because you couldn't write around it in-universe, but because he felt like it was, thematically, a direction he wished Fallout hadn't gone. It anchors the setting in greater realism and seriousness, as opposed to a more heightened, satirical, weirder Wasteland. The Old World Blues elements, basically.

Not that it's not compelling in it's own right. I do think there's a balance to be struck, and to be clear, I don't think you really need to nuke the NCR to do it, either. But I also don't want to see the dark parody edged out of the setting much more than FNV already has. Maybe that's what Fallout 4 was missing for me.

Edited by Unsung on Feb 5th 2019 at 10:59:43 AM

Governments don't tend to get less corrupt with time. It usually takes massive upheaval to dispel corruption. Corruption isn't really a great word for it, because it's kind of usually inherent to the system it's corrupting. "Corruption" implies external influence, or infection, but societal/government corruption very much comes from within.

Well, I wasn't ruling out a massive shakeup in the NCR. I definitely wasn't expecting the government to root out corruption by itself.

I think that's a little unfair. The NCR is a democracy, made up of the people, so if the people force the government to change, then that means the government has become less corrupt over time through its own laws. One of the biggest advantages of democracy is that you can have a major upheaval without killing everyone in charge.

Well, I didn't say that, either. Shakeup doesn't have to mean armed rebellion, but it does mean something that rouses the people in sufficient numbers to vote out those in power — those who can use that same power and existing corruption to keep people content.

That's still major upheaval.

And it's almost always more violent than history tells it. History usually approaches things from a very lofty, "long-term" perspective.

But when you're there on the ground watching your friends and brothers die, it'll still be bittersweet at best for you.

Take Pride, for instance. You might think LGBT decriminalization is a fairly bloodless revolution. This is not so.

When HIV first swept the US, the LGBT communities were hardest hit. Reagan and his Congress refused to put any funding into researching how it spread or how to treat it. Pride came about as basically a desperate bid to remind people the LGBT were still there. Pride started because 90% of a population had died or were dying, and nobody was willing to help. 90% is only a slight exaggeration too. I think the actual numbers were closer to 70-80%.

But Pride was a bloodless response to a bloody event (not directly bloody with people killing people, but a classic example of Murder by Inaction). The government did the wrong thing, the people did the right thing, and the government started moving in the right direction. That's how democracy works. If America was a dictatorship, Pride would have needed to assassinate a lot of people before anything got done.

We're getting off track, but my point is that saying "governments don't become less corrupt on their own" is reductive, and implies you need to get rid of any government that becomes too corrupt. Something needs to be done, but it can be done within the existing democratic framework.

Oh no doubt. But that government by and large needs to retain its conscience. A moral sense. The NCR seems to, but we don't actually know that do we? Or would we know if only we had played 1 and 2?