So from what I understand, about 200 years have past since the bombs dropped. In that case...

So from what I understand, about 200 years have past since the bombs dropped. In that case, why is everything still look like shit? Aside from North Vegas, everything is run down and dirty. People just left shit on the floor. How difficult is it to clean up? If you look at, say, many parts of America 200 years ago things looked pretty damn bad, but then people just fixed them up. Many places weren't even settled. Few people lived in, say, California, which now has sprawling metropolises. I understand that War fucked things up, but war has always done that because war never changes. Humans get over it and move on. And it's not as if they were starting from square one. The knowledge of the past was not all lost. The Followers of the Apocalypse have done a shitty job with that in mind.

It's not a big deal. Just nitpicking on the lore. I skipped most of the dialogue anyway so I might be completely wrong about something.

> Why is everything still look like shit
Because that's what the game needs to feel the way it's supposed to feel faggot.
Realismfags go the fuck outside and stop playing fucking video games.
Oh and kill yourselves.

>I skipped most of the dialogue anyway so I might be completely wrong about something
really activates those almonds

I can't help it. I have ADHD and stopped taking my meds.

I'm not expecting realism. I still expect some verisimilitude, however.

I'd guess it's sort of a bias in the personality traits of who survived the bombs.
So the bombs fall, a few people are safe in vaults, but most of the people who manage to survive are the kind of people that were making their own survival plans. The kind of person who participates in survivalist activities (I'd say) aren't the kind to rebuild society after. That behavior would presumably be taught to their decendents, so you end up with a population composed largely of insular, "only the strong survive" types.

There's tons of ghost towns in every state. Why haven't YOU gone into them, ransacked anything that's not nailed down, and cleaned them up? Oh wait that's right because you literally have no reason to fuck around in ruins and neither do NPC's.

Would you want to live in the fucking desert where there's no sign of anything looking like a government or somewhere where you can actually grow food without fucking cazadores shitting your day up?

That's why most places are just raider/gang territory, no-one wants to settle outside of the actual vegas city bit. And gangs constantly warring eachother makes the place look like shit, the NCR and Legion presence in the region is very recent.

I disagree. The kind of person who have the foresight to hide out in the vaults are precisely the kind of people who would be able to rebuild society. I don't think there's good reason to believe the destruction would have selected against intelligence or ingenuity.

He's not talking about ghost towns user he's talking about actual towns with humans living in them looking like shit with not a single new building just run down architecture with holes and rust everywhere from apparently 200 years ago.

idk goodsprings looks nice, novac as well. the clutter lying about in some places does kind of bother me, I admit that

Play Fallout 1 and 2 for actual rebuilt civilisation

I'm not very well versed in Fallout's war or real life science behind nuclear weapons, but isn't radiation super fucking hard for nature to get rid of? Especially from the soil and the water cycle?

I recently watched a documentary about a Soviet nuclear test site in Kazakhstan and though there is grass everywhere, you will just straight up die if you stay in some areas for too long, and even newborns from within a couple hundred kilometers are being born with cerebral palsy and the like en mass.

I guess it just kind of fucks up a person's understanding of a habitat if they live in a post-nuclear war fallout, as in - it's not really worth it to build up a permanent residence because everything is still in a continuous state of decay. Dunno if 200 years is or isn't enough for things to get back to normal.

Yeah it's my main gripe with the new Fallout games too. I can't accept that towns where people live, especially areas under NCR control, still have so much debris laying around and people living like hermit crabs and not lifting a finger to tidy things up. Especially considering there's so much high tech shit laying around and people have the knowledge to maintain it.
The world of modern Fallout looks like a skeleton of our civilization instead of a civilization that rose from the ashes.

But I can kind of understand it. Modern Fallout has a specific post-apocalyptic visual identity which is its primary mass appeal. It think there are fewer people who are interested in the human context.

Mutants and lawlessness reign over vasts swaths of the earth. Though the NCR doesn't really have an excuse.

did you not play the game? the mojave was infested with tribals and the strip was only booted up about 7 years ago. only now have powers started to seep into the area

if the world was all tidied up, it would just look like slightly worn out but otherwise completely generic.

to change the conversation slightly, is Fallout 4 worth playing through just for exploration? not expecting a good story or rpg.

>but isn't radiation super fucking hard for nature to get rid of? Especially from the soil and the water cycle?
thats what I thought but hiroshima and nagasaki have been completely rebuilt
although they were only baby bombs compared to what we have now

>Fallout 4 worth playing through just for exploration? not expecting a good story or rpg.
there isn't much shit to find, everywhere is just full of raiders
the settlement building aspect is kind of fun

Radiation, new mutant animals and ghouls. Deathclaws. Theres a lot of new savage beings.

All these generations in a vault eventually come out. How many of them are welders, miners, farmers, electricians, know how to get oil and natural gasses, Captain a ship, drive cars, operate factories. Theres tons of skills lost, and even if they werent, the means to supply facilities to produce electricity and gasses are gone, even more hazardous is that theres varying degrees of radiation to deal with. So, thats a lot of shit to deal with and try to come back from.

I think the lore explanation was the nukes scrambled the brains of everyone above ground. Modern day humans in Fallout took a big hit to their IQs

yeah it depends. that test site I mentioned had dozens of bombs fall within a relatively small area, so it's a pretty extreme example. I don't know just how many bombs fell in Fallout.

then again, if it was a global nuclear war, that shit gets in the entire ecosystem, which is probably even worse.

thanks, I'll pass

What about the gun modding?

because its fiction

as you would expect there's one or two best loadouts per gun, but there's only about 5 gun types

Gun, Melee, and Suit modding is pretty cool. Armor pieces drop with random modifiers too. The game isnt terrible, there is some dumb stuff like options on what to say to NPCs but they all almost end up the same result. Theres a lot of hours of exploration if thats your thing. Clear out areas and build new Settlements for survivors.

I'm finishing up New Vegas and trying to find something to replace it.

You guys have anything you'd recommend if Fallout 4 is not a worthy successor?

One could argue that people simply have other priorities rather than cleaning up. Between fighting off dangerous wildlife, raiders, scavenging for resources and trying to find food, people just stopped giving a shit about "picking up the trash".
A lot of people, even in today's world, already seem to have no concept of keeping public places clean, imagine how bad it would be in an apocalypse-situation.
Also, there is nobody alive in these games who saw the old world. While knowledge wasn't entirely lost, most of the practical applications of it was and what hasn't been lost could only be spread from person to person by word of mouth, starting from the survivors who knew their shit.
And we know that a lot of the experts, the people who have the knowledges, all have their own shit and grand-designs, like the guys making the massive solar stations, dams, weapons and stuff like that.
Nobody wants to waste time picking up the trash.

there is no worthy successor

If you are really enjoying Vegas, you'll be disappointed in certain areas like the dialogue shit, your Suit requires Fusion Cores so if you run out you gotta ditch your suit which sucks. There is a lot of cool mods you can make to it like jet pack and some cool heavy guns and painting it.

Overall I think you'll enjoy it, but you wont love the game dont get your hopes that high going into it.

Did you not play the game? You are right, the people who had the foresight to hide out in the vaults would be the ones to rebuild society, but the Vault-Dwellers aren't the survivors.
To begin with, most Vaults were death traps in the form of absurd experiments. Only a few were meant to be survivable.
And any vault dweller from these vaults who got out, would be like children in the "new world". No common sense, no perspective. They would either get enslaved by raiders or killed by wild-life.
The survivors that you see in game are 99% people who never lived in vaults.

>And any vault dweller from these vaults who got out, would be like children in the "new world".
I love this aspect of the lore. Especially when you meet an actual former Vault-dweller, such as Sarah in Vault 21, who is utterly naive, has zero clue about how the world operates, and is unlike anyone else you meet in pretty much the entire game.

I think its about human standards today.
See in the old days humans would grow and develop by being ruthless. Wed all be unified by a religion and an emperor and wouldn't think twice about taking their shit and enslaving them to build our shit for us.

Humans today don't have that mentality. If bombs dropped wed all be running around trying to organize a democracy that benefitted everyone and it wouldn't really develop beyond a small village.
I hate to say it but in those early stages really only Caesar had the right idea. In the modern days hi's ideas suck but in a time where resources are limited and were basically back to iron age we need strong leaders and an imperialist government that governs and conquers through strength. Also we need slaves.

I know some people think it'll be easy to rebuild but seriously take a lot any building in your city. Do you know how much effort goes into mining and shaping all that metal? Those bricks and those wooden planks. Today maybe one in 50 people know how to make those. That water in your tap requires teams of people putting in chemicals to get it just right.
And thats the other part. Water. Its now a previous resource. In ancient times cultures would settle near natural water sources and they'd be able to worry about things and use it for farming. Now about 1% of the population is farmers So there's goes effective irrigation techniques not to mention i m not sure of the effect of radiation on crops but I'm sure its not good.

Anyway basically if nukes did fuck up the planet it wouldn't be big cities that bounced back first. Those games are more or less an accurate portrayal of what most folks would be like 200 years after just looking t survive and without any clear goals for the future. For development in society you need autistics and big ego chads that wanna rule the world. In a world of just Normie's not much really gets done. They make good managers but not really Innovators.

Given that people were separated for 200 years, you'd expect the vault dwellers would each have their own distinct dialects, no?

Because Bethesda forced them to put the game after 3, which for some retarded reason took place 200 years after the war. This meant that they had two options:

1) Make a game that looks nice, with regular villages, and not looking post-apocalyptic at all (which would completely contradict 3)

or

2) Do the best of the situation and put it in a desert and handwave the rest, which is naturally what they were forced to do

You do realize not all Vaults opened that late

What I don't get is the purpose behind the vault experiments, most people will be dead by the end of the war and the government or vault tec wouldn't really have use for the research

How long did it take for the earliest people to get out?

Eighty years at a minimum, I guess

everyone would have their own dialect in 200 years depending on how isolated their were
and people who weren't nomads definitely would clean up their surroundings and not make everything out of scraps

>In the modern days hi's ideas suck but in a time where resources are limited and were basically back to iron age we need strong leaders and an imperialist government that governs and conquers through strength. Also we need slaves.
If what you need is order and workforce, you can achieve this through a police state as well, it doesn't literally have to be a dictatorship. You can "enslave" the population through taxation, but also provide some basic freedoms. I think it's a decent middle ground for the state of the world that you're describing.

Then again, a rarity like North Vegas, or even Zion to an extent, where communities can be self-governed and self-sufficient can be viable.

This. NV was hamstrung by the retarded decisions by Bethesda in 3.

2 is set ~80 years after the war and parts of it looks real nice. They have some large ordered cities with a regular police presence and so on.

They were isolated, not cut-off. IF they still had the pre-war material to study on, and it was the same material through the vaults, there is no reason for different dialects to pop up. Of course, the occasional slangs and stuff like that would happen.

Only reason New Vegas looks like it does is because Obsidian was lazy. By the time of Fallout 2 people started to rebuild actual cities with nice modern buildings, but for some reason everyone in Vegas is content living in ruins

Oh sure they can be self sufficient. But I'm just saying without religion to unite people, a working military and a ruthless leader with a home located by a large body of water civilization can't progress beyond a certain point.
He's asking why all the buildings still look like shit I'm telling him why it all looks like shanty villages still because until they go through the natural order of progression again , without outside influence they will always be stuck at that point.

>But I'm just saying without religion to unite people, a working military and a ruthless leader with a home located by a large body of water
that's assuming people started with the mindset and technical knowledge that they had thousands of years ago which they dont

Here's a pic of a part of NCR in F2. As you can see it is not dirty or run-down (other parts of the game can be so it is not a graphical limitation).

Here's a part of Vault city, which is basically a modern city (sans cars).

one thing I disagree with completely is that you'd need a religion to unify people. there is a pretty strong fucking common ground in a global apocalyptic event.

Don't try to justify bad decisions. It is 200 years. WW2 ended ~70 years ago, and there's hardly a trace of it now. Entire cities were wiped from the earth, and they are back without a scratch, and have been for a long time. The Vietnam war ended ~40 years ago. Same thing there, Vietnam was bombed to shit, and have you seen how it looks lately? It looks like any other place in SE asia, poor, but pleasant. There's hardly a trace of the war (in how buildings and the environment looks).

Fallout 2 is set 164 years after the war

surely there is a difference between nuclear fallout and conventional bombs over dresden

Yes, my mistake, but it's ~80 years since people started coming out of vaults regularly at least. So civilization has has about 100 or so years to rebuild.

Meant for
Yes, but not in how dirty the streets are. That would only hinder what areas you could settle since you'd die if you settled in irradiated areas. You'd see birth defects and such, but I don't see why you can't have street sweepers and somewhat competent house building after 200 years.

this is a giant asspull because if something can be attributed to technical shortcomings of the game, it's this, but - the population of the Mojave, or actually every settlement that we saw across all the games, is extremely small. Even the towns that are relatively well-off don't have a population over ~100 people.
There simply aren't many people left and so there really isn't anyone for whom to build the infrastructure. Survivors/newborns are just living out their lives in the shack or on the farm where they were born.

In NV, yes. Obsidian aren't COMPLETELY retarded (like Bethesda) so they tried to at least have SOME reason for this. It's still a bit hand-wavy though, but it's better than nothing (as in F3 & 4).

Fallout 1 was pretty close after the war, so they have a reason to be dirty. In 2 they had time to rebuild and parts were starting to look nice. Then in 3 Bethesda shat all over the series and everything looks worse than in 1.

>NVfags keep going on about internal consistency
>point out something inconsistent
>UGH REALISMFAG FUCK OFF GO OUTSIDE UGH KILL YOURSELF UGH
Hahahahah!

>The kind of person who participates in survivalist activities (I'd say) aren't the kind to rebuild society after.
Lol NV fans don't even understand their own game

Hi just wanted to let you know that you are retarded. Thanks bye

>people can't clean up their houses or take ripped painting off their walls in 200 years

So that thing with the fridge ghoul in fallout 4 doesn't matter right? It's only fiction

>NPCs spend all their time doing fuck all
>can't take 5 minutes to clean up their houses
LOL NVFAGS

>I skipped most of the dialogue anyw

Smaller towns are more likely to be clean, people don't keep large public places clean because there's no social benefit to it, in a small town people remember who that cunt who throws shit on the ground is.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that their technology was built on nuclear devices powering everything, and nobody really wants to go back to that after nukes destroyed everything.

>I skipped all the dialogue
That aside I've always hated that aspect of Bethesda Fallout.