Been tickled by a deathclaw? I don’t want to alarm you but that pink stuff is BLOOD!!!1! 
The 'claws from Brotherhood of Steel had fur, too. Then again, there’s so much in that game that’s at odds with canon (like M-16s when the nuke war is supposed to have happened in the 50s…).
The Great War happened in 2077, but “the Fifties” continued for 57 years straight. M-16s were old by then. As far as weapons go, Fallout 1 through 3 but not including New Vegas are weird because 10mm is considered a weak, basic round, and not the FBI wrist breaker it is in real life.
The manual for the first Fallout doesn’t mention Deathclaws at all (it does have a picture of one, but it doesn’t look particularly hairy), and as early as Fallout 2, they were identified in-game as being mutated Jackson’s Iguanas. Do you have a cite for them being mutated racoons from anything later than the early pre-production sketches?
I seem to recall reading that the wonks at Bethesda actually did some research into what would be left of the Washington urban area 200 years after an apocalypse, and found that the answer was “nothing”.
So they fudged the numbers and created the bombed-out, barren wasteland you see in the games because the realistic setting wouldn’t jibe with the thematic setting of the Fallout games.
The date wasn’t too mutable, since they were stuck with making a sequel to Fallout 2, which occurs 170 years after the war and had the advantage that a tile-based 2D game still requires the player to fill in a lot of details with their imagination. One would have to assume that, outside of the urban areas the character explores in Fallout 2, much of the game world is virgin forest or prairie. Yet in a 2000s-era game, where small, highly detailed areas are preferred to vast regions of randomly generated generic content, wandering through acres and acres of trees wouldn’t exactly scream “A Post-Nuclear Role Playing Game”.
That seems to be a relatively common thing in video games, though- IRL the 10mm calibre isn’t that common*, but it seems to show up quite a bit in computer games as a “standard” handgun cartridge.
*Yes, I know the .40 S&W round is fairly commonplace, but it’s a different round to the now largely forgotten 10mm Automatic which looked like it might be The Next Great Cartridge in the late '90s/Early 2000s
Here’s what I recall: During the development of Fallout: Tactics, concept art was released showing the Deathclaws as having patches of fur. There was an uproar from the fanbase, and it developed that the info the studio Forte in Australia was given had the creatures as mammalian, which was apparently based on an earlier vision that Black Isle had of them.
That was by far the most gripping Vault story in New Vegas (I found them to be less interesting than the FO3 ones)
I meant that metaphorically. I’ve actually heard that the design team for F2 itself forgot the Deathclaws were raccoons between games, though there’s no way to confirm it now.
Actually, there’s a popular F3 mod for PC which changes the world to just that.
I honestly wish sometime that I was a PC gamer since looking into a lot of those mods, they seem really cool. Well–the ones that don’t just remove female clothing or add porn to the game.
The working motorcycle mod looks amazingly fun.
I do like the wank that we’re seeing a devastation level tied to the retro-future idea as an explanation as to why things aren’t as leveled as they would be. It also isn’t that far off to just say “this version of the world was more advanced and therefore had advanced building materials that hold up longer than ours in our world.”
I think a lot of the NPC personality problems can be waved away as being a whole outside population is some level of shell-shock and ignorance. People don’t beautify their shacks because they don’t really know that that’s an option. they don’t know that it’s NOt supposed to look like that.
Humans have been decorating their dwelling since humans have had dwellings. It’s not really something that has to be taught.
And I think we do see plenty of rudimentary decorations… but people are complaining that things still look shitty.
Oh, I don’t know, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (and its sequels) pulls it off quite nicely.
On the one hand, the Zone is verdant rather than a barren desert, with quite a bit of variety to it from radioactive rolling hills to radioactive swamps to radioactive ghost towns to radioactive forests to giant radioactive landfills. On the other hand, no matter where you are, it’s a) crazy dangerous and b) feels extremely weird, like you shouldn’t be there at all. Nature taking back its rights, that sort of thing. The Zone is pretty run down, and was Cold War Ukraine to begin with so there’s a great sense of alienation and coldness to it, but it’s not “whelp, back to the Stone Age with you” either. There’s a soul to this place. It’s really beautiful, in a Jesus what a dump kind of way.
At least when the badly broken AI isn’t fucking with your immersion or you’re running away from a pack of wild dogs 