At one point (pre-San Andreas?), Rockstar trademarked several names, like GTA: Tokyo and GTA: Bogota, leading to wild speculation.
I have the same beef. After each game, the next must be set some arbitrary number of decades in the future, making it increasingly implausible that people have rediscovered Gatling laser technology, but haven’t rediscovered paint and drywall yet. Of course, Mass Effect 3 has the opposite problem. We’re supposed to believe that the human race exploded all over the galaxy in the 30 years they’ve been part of the galactic community. Lately we’re talking about 30 years before humans even start trying to get a pair of boots on Mars. That’s way too short a time scale in which humanity is supposed to have gotten their asses that much in gear.
Smart money is on Boston.This site is registered to ZeniMax and buried in the code is a reference to The Institute.
I hope there is more than that, because that setting has been way over done. Personally I would love to see at least some form of rapid transit, and several areas. The only thing I didn’t like about FO3 was the claustrophobic feeling of knowing you were all in a 10X10 mile area.
Yeah, Boston is definitely the most likely candidate. It had a fair amount of setup in FO3. Plus, it’s close enough to DC that Bethesda can choose to reuse a few plot threads or characters to maintain a feel of continuity. Kinda like how FO2 was set close enough to FO to reuse Shady Sands and Vault 15. The high concentration of academic institutions in Boston also provides a very ready justification for including a bunch of wacky sci-fi locales.
I really wonder how a Fallout game set in China would play out. If they did a careful job of it, it would be great to have a setting that flips things around and shows a world filled with anti-US propaganda. It would definitely teeter on that line between offensive and satirical, though.
Fallout 2 is amazing, but I think Fallout: New Vegas(which I consider Fallout 4 in my mind) is really the best one.
I loved Fallout 3 as well, though, but I thought the main storyline was only OK.
Yes, there is room for more stories. It’s really more of a setting than anything else, and creative minds can find more stories and more interesting characters in any well made setting.
Interesting. I thought Fallout 3 had the best storyline (but the worst gameplay - I can only take so much skulking around subways full of ghouls). Assuming the first game doesn’t get points for originality.
Three Dog is pretty much confirmed.
And the military/weapons manufacturing sites around Springfield for DLC.
In someways 3 had the most coherent, well thought out plot. But on the other side it was a bit more boilerplate, “You are the hero, go through the checkpoints to save the day”, rather than the Fallout/Elder scrolls morality “Do what thou whilst, you 'll get to the plot eventually. Or not”
My biggest let down from Fallout 3 was that they didn’t try to do anything new or different with the eastern United States. Out west, it could be expected that everything would be blasted and desolate but the east coast could/should have had vegetation regrowing, different wildlife, something to make it look different from “Western desert, but with the Capitol building”. Keep the retro-future stuff, keep the apocalyptic vibe (water is radioactive, etc) but make it different somehow.
Not that the game should be Stalker, but that game managed to make a believable mesh between “abandoned radioactive town” and plenty of trees, grasses and the like. Fallout 3 felt like they didn’t even try aside from placing Washington DC landmarks in the stock Fallout 1/2 setting.
It was the first effort at making the FPS version of Fallout and there were already enough people griping about that (yea gods remember the whining!!!) . They wanted to keep as much of the ‘feel’ of the original series as they could to keep people comfortable with the new platform.
Everyone’s got excuses 
I’m more worried about it (such as I’m worried) because they set up the eastern US as looking the same as the west. When will they change anything up? Fallout: Florida? Fallout: Honduras?
What about the fact that the weapons available were completely different from those in the original Fallouts (a bit of a continuity problem, in my opinion). And the fact that there were new creatures – Yao Guai, Mirelurks (and Mirelurk Kings), Radroaches, Bloatflies and Super Mutant Behemoths? And why would the capitol region of the country being nuked get to be a relative garden spot? Obsidian did well to implement such a thing for the Mojave area, with a good story reason why it could have been so.
Furthermore, they took the opportunity to implement many ways the Capitol Wasteland was different from the west – the personal protection booths, travel through the subways, radio stations that not only played music and unlocked secrets but also commented on the player’s actions throughout out the game, took advantage of the vertical dimension in encounter designs and to create stunning desolate vistas, brought in a new enemy group (The Institute) and put new emphasis on the Chinese role in the war.
What they did new and different was, in fact, lots of stuff.
Most of that stuff is just general game enhancements. Nothing about subways or radroaches makes you say “Wow, this must be the eastern US!” versus the previous settings.
The short answer is: You could have taken Fallout 3, changed the DC landmarks to Salt Lake City landmarks and no one would have blinked and said “This looks like northern Virgina, not Utah!” Different guns and radio stations aside, they did nothing with the bland grey & brown geography which is what I was talking about.
As for “why” it should look different, look at photos of Hiroshima or Chernobyl or the Bikini Atoll today and that’s a mere 30-50 years after the fact. How long ago was the war by the time Fallout 3 occurs? 150 years? 200?
I don’t really have a problem with the idea that different parts of the country would recover at different speeds. Particularly considering that DC would have been one of the hardest hit cities during the war. (Really, it should be a glass crater, but then you wouldn’t have the fun of all the ruined monuments.) DC is basically the frontier, now, as civilization pushes eastward. It took about two hundred years from the founding of the Plymouth colony, to the establishment of the city of San Francisco. Makes sense to me that it would take about as long for civilization to make it’s way back across the continent after the Eastern seaboard was virtually depopulated.
I agree about the inhabited towns still being too messy, though. Nobody has a broom in Rivet City?
For the “too radioactive” crowd, here’s a photo of Chernobyl’s Reactor #4 which was the epicenter of the Chernobyl disaster. Here’s another. And a wider shot of the reactor area. Again, that wasn’t a bomb hit but it was a hell of a lot of radiation and it was less than 30 years ago.
The game is what it is and it’s not a bad game but the design decision to make Virginia look like brown pseudo-desert was just them playing it safe and staying with the Fallout 1/2 design instead of trying something new, not anything based in “reality”.
I’m not sure that was the design of Fallout 1 and 2. Vault city at the very least was clearly represented as clean, shiny, and artificial, not grey and decrepit. Obviously the graphics didn’t contain the detail to know for sure, but I never got that feeling of universal palette from 1 or 2. I always felt it ran the range from desert wilderness, to shiny sci-fi, to decaying industrial ruins. To empty but clean labs with blinkenlights.
I don’t know if a registered trademark is the best evidence for the next direction, although it’s not lack of proof, either. Back in 2004 and before (San Andreas era), Take Two registered GTA: Tokyo, GTA: Sin City, and GTA: Bogota. I don’t know if it was a red herring, or plans for sometime in the future, but people went into speculation mode back then, too.
That said, Boston is a good possibility, as it would allow us to visit the Commonwealth, which can be assumed is Massachusetts, as I don’t think they meant Pennsylvania! That place was alluded to a few times, but mostly vaguely and rarely (unless it happens a bunch in Broken Steel, never got through that).
Personally, I’d really like to see a Fallout game set elsewhere in the world - in London, for example.
Still, the Commonwealth could be an interesting setting. I’d love for them to bring James Urbaniak back to voice a Mad Scientist a la Rusty Venture for it, too.
That the world was full of DC landmarks is not exactly a trivial matter for the feel of the area. In the DLC that took place in North Carolina, were you angry that they made no reference to vinegar-based barbecue sauce or refer to R&B as ‘Beach Music’? What would have been enough for you?