I picked up the GOTY version of F3 for Xbox. First time I’ve played it, and I’m not far.
One thing is bugging me and I haven’t been able to answer it: Are the ruins and items all around really 200 years old? Or is it some sort of mind screw? Please spoiler box any major or specific information.
If there’s no canon answer I might like to hear Marvel No-Prize style answers.
Sure. Why wouldn’t they be? Concrete and metal last a pretty long time.
That said, FO3 does do a poor job of setting the time period. Aside from the DC ruins, in general it feels more like 50 years rather than 200; people seem like they’re only just starting to come back out into the open and pull civilization together. In contrast, over in the West, by this time the NCR’s basically gotten California fixed up and back to a reasonably modern state of affairs.
No, there’s no good answer. Yes, the developers publicly admitted they just didn’tm think about it. So it just plain is.
In Fallout3 they mention several times how radiated the water around D.C. was. The problem didn’t seem as bad on the west coast in Fallout 1&2, so you can fanwank that as a reason for the slower development. Also, one could assume that the east coast was more heavily bombed during the war.
It’s intentionally vague. The entire world is set in a near future that looks as if it was imagined by people in the 50s.
Still, one does have to wonder about the two century shelf life of Nuka-Cola and all the rest of the crap you find lying around.
Assume that the food you find is loaded with potent preservatives. Food safety regulations are for commies.
yeah but why is there even so much 200-year old Salisbury steak left in the mostly-raided grocery shops. I’d assume it’d all be long time
Rule of cool…it’d be no fun if everything was in shambles. I do anxiously await Fallout 4, in which i hope there will be more towns and more background “stuff”! Fallout New Vegas fixed some of this stuff, btw.
Well, yeah, it fixed all of it. Aside from a few sealed structures maintained by robots, most old buildings had either been inhabited or collapsed, and actual pre-war salvage was nonexistent. Actually getting really old things is a small plot point here and there.
200-year old building are old? You must be an American. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to cleaning this dust from the Parthenon off of my boots.
I frequently snark that apparently they’ve re-discovered the secrets of gatling lasers, but not paint and drywall. It’s highly improbable that people wouldn’t have found a way to make their own homes less shitty.
As for the stuff you find in random loot, I do think it’s a kind of gag that there are packaged foods that are still edible. But that there’s so much salvageable stuff still lying around after all this time seems unlikely. It leads me to imagine an untold number of survivors stashing things and getting killed before they can retrieve their stuff. Nothing stayed looted, it just kept getting moved around.
A lot of things about Fallout 3 don’t really make sense. I’d say the game more closely resembles 10-20 years after armageddon, not 200 and not even 50. Where are all the farms and such? There’s virtually no sustainable food source at all, or even hinted at. How Little Lamplight manages to perpetuate itself God only knows, and kicking people out when they turn 16 is fairly ludicrous and would never happen. In general, the world feels completely wrong - communities are too small and isolated with no sense of how things would develop organically, and there’s no greater consistency of how things fit together.
It may sound like I’m expecting too much from a video game, but all I would have wanted is a video game level of immersion and suspension of disbelief, stuff that everything from Dragon Age to The Witcher to Grand Theft Auto do perfectly fine. In Fallout 3, I was constantly reminded of how much everything felt off, which rarely happens when I play such games.
I’m not talking about the 50s aesthetic. I’m talking about this:
Megaton isn’t a town, it’s a rickety pile of scrap metal thrown together to make a hovel. Most of the Capitol Wasteland is like that: people living in crappy metal sheds or busted-down ruins, as if they just crawled out of a cave and slapped together whatever they could find, rather than having 200-some years to rebuild. Sure, you could handwave that the Wasteland is still intensely dangerous due to the number of raiders and violent Super Mutants roaming around and communities haven’t had a chance to rebuild, but even Rivet City, which is as secure as it’s possible to get in the Wasteland, just looks like something folks are taking temporary refuge in, rather than it being a relatively stable population center.
Contrast with New Vegas, where while it is still ruinous in some areas, it’s clear that the settlers are making lives for themselves and are living in homes rather than shelters. Sure, it helped that the Mojave didn’t get nuked, or nuked as badly, but it gives a better sense that civilization is returning; instead of a wasteland, it’s merely more of a frontier.
That’s why I don’t touch the stuff. Probably planted by Commies and loaded with pinko chemicals. I only eat iguana-on-a-stick and “special” meat. Then I know it’s fresh.
Eh - honestly, there are plenty of real-world places that haven’t been nuked that have never really been ruled effectively by a large-scale government. Show me the folks who’ve genuinely established a solid rule over Afghanistan, or any chunk of it larger than a village. For that matter - while large swathes of Africa were goverened by big, powerful states prior to European colonization, plenty more didn’t have governments beyond the village level.
It seems reasonable to me that heavier bombing and lingering radioactivity would keep population levels on the East Coast pretty low. And small populations struggling just to feed themselves aren’t going to be able to build a large industrial base, so they’ll be hard-pressed to get up to non-post-apocalyptic levels of civilization. As to their homes looking crappy - heck, most of these poor bastards probably don’t even thing their homes are crap. They’re homes, built with the material at hand, and all they’ve ever known.
Actually, that’s one thing that made me wonder and broke my precious immersion: how *do *they feed themselves ? Unlike FO1 & 2, you can walk up and down the Capital Wasteland and not see one field, not one veggie garden. Not even a mushroom growing operation in some dank vault or tunnel. Are they all living on 200 yr old tin cans and Rad Roach ?
But even with them mining gypsum at Quarry Junction, they still live in houses with crumbling interior walls. And for minimal effort to be made to clean up even the fancy-pants Ultraluxe casino? That seems improbable, given that near as I can tell, they upheld better standards in the old west.
Man, games are no fun with you guys.
they eat the fungus
Oh, no, I love the game, even with its ridiculousness. GARY!