Yeah, that bothers me too (not enough to stop me playing, though). All these factories that have at most one previous explorer (for you to find dead and loot) - hell, there are even people who’s whole job is apparently scavenging (at least in FNV, my memory of FO3 is slightly fuzzier), but there are still five bottlecaps in every broken locker.
Actually, I think a lot of it is just that Bethesda is pretty bad at editing - they do a really good job of writing cool pieces (cultures, characters, and all), but a terrible job of cutting out the dull stuff - they go for quantity over quality, and end up just filling containers with random vendortrash, and slapping the same mailbox with random mail outside all the still-preserved wood-frame home, and why there are so many pointless collection or FedEx quests. Obsidian is a little better, which is why New Vegas feels a little more alive, but the format of the game still calls for dozens of locations, and there are only so many you can make interesting, so a lot of it ends up being dungeon crawl. Pre-war factory with preserved robots to kill ends up being a pretty easy way to crank that out.
The big war wasn’t 200 years ago, it was 1000. In the intervening time aliens landed and found copies of Leave it to Beaver, Mad Max, and Dr Strangelove laying around. Using secret underground manufacturing plants-- the vaults, they rebuilt in a way that made the landscape look the way it does, because they thought it was funny. Then they went away.
One thing I still have not figured out. Every animal you encouter is pretty easy to figure out what they mutated from, except Deathclaws. What the hell did Deathclaws evolve from?
I actually experienced some empathy for a bunch of pixels in Fallout:NV.
Vault 3 is found by the player to be occupied by some horrific psycotic gang of killers (I forget their name).
If you take the time to read the computer diary entries by the original occupants, you see that they had survived the war, and everything was going fine. They held elections (to elect their vault director). The candidate who won campaigned on the idea that enough time had passed on the outside, that surely mankind had restored civilzation. They decided to unlock the vault and initiate contact with the outside world. I don’t know if it was all in my head, but I got the impression that they were optomistic and joyfull about reestablishing contact with the rest of mankind.
Only their first (and only) contact was with this gang that likes to kill folks as painfully as possible, and wear their skins.
That’s your introduction to the Enclave in FO 2 as well, more or less. The intro of the game features a bunch of Power Armoured guys (which, if you’ve played FO1, you’d assume were the good guys) approaching the entrance of a Vault. The people inside pick them up on sensors and go crazy with joy that someone else is alive out there.
They open the door in a hurry, and you see a family (inc. kids) happily wave at them and about to run towards them… before getting gunned down in a hail of minigun fire. War. War never changes.
Way back in the Fallout world’s 1950s a device was secretly created to preserve what the Americans of the time felt was an “ideal culture”, perhaps with salvaged alien technology. This device manipulated reality in some subtle fashion (<handwaves frantically about spacetime and quantum mechanics>) to produce a worldwide “stasis effect”, limiting or eliminating change. This resulted in 1950s culture going on and on and on, and warped the direction of technological progress as well. The Great War however was so destructive as to overwhelm the stasis effect. But…once the war was over the stasis effect was still there and acted to preserve the new world as it was. So wasteland remains wasteland, things don’t decay as they should, and people still live in dirt and rubble like their ancestors did right after the bombs fell.
One of the things I’ve often wondered about is the state of the rest of the world in the Fallout universe. I mean, you run into characters with British, Irish, Mexican, Chinese, and even New Zealand accents, but beyond a couple of lines referencing that things aren’t great in what’s left of the UK (which is why Alistair Tenpenny left and Desmond Lockheart mentions something to that effect as well), we’re not told a great deal about how things are elsewhere- which is odd, when you consider there’s functioning shortwave radios everywhere, the NCR (and possibly the Brotherhood of Steel) apparently have the ability to construct Vertibirds, and let’s face it, people were crossing the Atlantic and Pacific in (wooden) sailing ships in the 1500s, so (barring ill-tempered mutated [del]sea bass[/del] sea monsters) there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason for this to be out of the question in the 2200s.
Long range communication does seem awful; perhaps some other long term effect of the War causing interference? As for the lack of more physical contact; it could simply be that Americans are blamed for the devastation of Earth, and are killed on sight if they show up overseas.
Or maybe as you say, it’s something like giant fish.
Meh, it’s a retcon. You can’t have a universal desert, and even magic Fallout radiation doesn’t explain everything.
BTW, originally, the Deathclaws were supposed to be mutated from Racoons. However, later people(not starting with Bethsoft) got confused by people who didn’t read the manual and changed it to lizards. The confusion got started because the Deathclaw model wasn’t detailed enough to show fur well, and the in-game 2d model was developed from a clay figure - which obviously didn’t have fur.
Presumably Chinese Remnants? Are 200+ years old, being ghouls. They have the accents they had before the war.
One reason the woman in New Vegas with the NZ accent has it because her voice actor (Zoe Bell, maybe best known for Death Proof) is a Kiwi. People can fanwank all they want to explain it, but she was born a tribal in the Mojave. I don’t know why they went with it. They other characters she voices do not have NZ accents.
From the first game onward, deathclaws laid eggs and had forward pointing horns. I’ve seen the early development sketch of a deathclaw as a furry and raccoon like, but the change to lizards can’t be laid on the feet of confused fans. It had to have been done mid-development of the first game.
I do wish deathclaws had retained the chameleon eyes. Something about the most deadliest creature in the wasteland having those goofy, bulging, independently wandering eyes would tickle me pink.
