Centuries Later and All of America Still in Ruins?

[West Dragon]

After my thousandth+time going inside a place of business (specifically, a bar) I've reached the point of wondering why after centuries nothing in Fallout has improved and why nothing has been rebuilt. Why it is somehow the responsibility of a player-controlled character to pick up the slack of 5 generations? Why is it that everyone seems content to just live inside drafty subway tunnels, partially-demolished houses, and stone and metal and glass ruins?

Everything is still in ruins and no one has bothered rebuilding?

I've read the excuses players have made in defense of why things are the way they are, but the excuses do not add up...at all.


Excuse 1: People are too busy fighting each other and defending themselves to begin rebuilding.

My Argument: Necessity is the mother of invention and war is the mother of necessity. If anything, the constant battles waged will have forced people to adapt and create or recreate advances in science and technology so as to provide themselves with an advantage against their many enemies and the threats against their very existence. Small nations will have been built by now with modernized military factions to serve as defense. Entire areas would have been cleared so as to build new homes and structures for housing, education, medicine, marketing, and more.

Look at the US, for instance, little more than two centuries ago, an entire nation was born from almost nothing and as a result of the chaos of an all out war with another country. The revolutionary war is a prime historic example of how humans realistically deal with the aftermath of war and how it encourages and facilitates change and progress. Fast-forward a little to the American Civil war that very nearly destroyed the US as a nation and resulted in the deaths of millions of people. Despite the seemingly irreversible damage done to the country, the nation recovered.

We can also look further back in history to the bubonic plague, a disease that reduced the human population for the first time in all of recorded history. Despite a threat that humans, at the time, could not combat, it was through natural causes that humanity developed necessary immunities to the disease. What was once seen as an extinction threat centuries ago is now nothing more than a bad case of the flu to us. Once again, humans overcame and advanced.


Excuse 2: Lost knowledge and technology prevent people from rebuilding.

My Argument: This excuse is complete♥♥♥♥♥♥ Most of the survivors of the war are descendants of vault dwellers. The others are vault dwellers. And there are some cases of humans from before the war who survived somehow, a minority among them having made themselves virtually immortal. Education is not lost, information is not lost. Vaults have modern curriculums that teach people how to operate and maintain pre-war technology. On top of which you've entire structures that survived the bombings that contain all manner of records to serve as information and a form of education.

Additionally, there have been advances in science, technology, and medicine throughout the fallout series. Some good such as the invention of teleportation and some not so good such as the creation of Jet (in before people argue it's good, it was discovered through slave labor and caused the deaths of hundreds of slaves and has been proven to cause lifelong addiction and heart failure. Jet is nothing more than huffing fumes off Brahmin manure, usually through a crude plastic inhaler as depicted in Fallout 4).


Excuse 3: People are still recovering from the great war.

My Argument: How does that make any sense? Recovering from what, exactly? Are you still recovering from the world wars of your ancestors?

While it can be argued that the allies won out in the end and it made it easier for their nations to recover, we can look at Japan. A nation that has, at the very least, survived centuries of infighting, Western invasion, two atomic bombs, and a massive tsunami. But theirs is a country that remains as one of the global super powers and continues producing and exporting advances in technology. You can't convince me that the people in the fallout universe are too busy recovering to be bothered with improving their living conditions.


In closing, if Fallout is going to continue feeding me the line "War never changes" then maybe, just maybe its developers and writers should take a moment to examine how war impacts humanity. Because war might not change, but war, war changes us.

[Winters]

The game isn't built to make sense at all. :L It's just how it is, sadly.

[kdodds]

Refutation 1: It's a post-modern fantasy RPG game.
Refutation 2: It's a post-modern fantasy RPG game.
Refutation 3: It's a post-modern fantasy RPG game.

How much fun would it be, how much need would there be, for a game set in a re-civilized America? It wouldn't be Fallout. It wouldn't be a game at all.

[ronr42]

Excuse 4. It's just a game, have fun with it.

Or if you would like: 210 years of No education made the population stupid.

[Killzone]

210 years of CNN.

[Enkidu98]

Also - The Great War was the final, desperate reaction of collective humanity to a world which no longer had the resources to sustain the society it had created.

You also ignore multiple events in human history where society collapsed and it took centuries or longer before things got around to catching up to where thir ancestors had advanced.

Human medical skill/sknowledge, for example, did not reach the level it had been in the classical world/Imperial Roman age until the American Civil War. Sure, the Romans didn;t have germ theory but they were performing retina re-attachment. 1400 years passed before we caught back up.

Using Rome again, when Rome fell (collapsed inwards more aptly) and its supporting infrastructure and unifying culture was removed the whole of Europe descended into barbarism collectively. It took hundreds of years (About 500 - Half a millenia) before things started to turn back around for humanity and they didn't have to deal with Super Mutans, Ghouls, Rad Scorpions and Radstorms.

Our world if filled with the ruins of cultures who were once mighty but fell and never recovered their former glory. Empires fall and don't recover.

Also - This is a video game and the story is that we didn;t recover. That's the point. It'd be a really boring game if you rose up out of your vault and everything was fixed and everyone was happy and peaceful. The end.

[rikashiku]

Argument 1: This is the exact reason why the NCR was built in the first place. IN the first two games they have built new settlements and very large settlements. One of the largest being a fully functioning Vault within their territory. We see them again in New Vegas in ruins again, but counter-argument to that is that they haven't been there for long and are still getting resources to rebuild. Same with Fallout 4 in the commonwealth. There is no governing faction to rebuild everything for them. That's where the player comes in to build the commonwealth back up.

As for why other people still live in ruins. Well, it's easier than building a new home while at the same time being attacked. The ruins are already there with some patchwork needed to be done and that's what the settlers do. Patch them up. Only the NCR have actually tried to restore the cities.

A2: Most of the Wastelanders are insane, uneducated, and lucky to be alive in the first place. You actually see it first hand with some characters who didn't grow up in a faction.

So unfortunately, intelligence isn't hereditary.

A3:

Originally posted by Old Kid John:

Are you still recovering from the world wars of your ancestors?

Yes, and those wars were nearly 200 years ago. My ancestors actually lost a lot and it's only until recently we started getting land, money, and people back. The population actually dropped to about 60,000 from 200,000 over 100 years ago. Only today has it risen to nearly 1 million.

If you played the game and gave attention to the lore, you would know that yes the people are still affected by the war. Hence the Brotherhood of Steel, the NCR, Caesars Legion, the Minutemen, etc.

A4: Duh.

[Gordon Freeman]

Originally posted by Old Kid John:

After my thousandth+time going inside a place of business (specifically, a bar) I've reached the point of wondering why after centuries nothing in Fallout has improved and why nothing has been rebuilt. Why it is somehow the responsibility of a player-controlled character to pick up the slack of 5 generations? Why is it that everyone seems content to just live inside drafty subway tunnels, partially-demolished houses, and stone and metal and glass ruins?

Everything is still in ruins and no one has bothered rebuilding?

I've read the excuses players have made in defense of why things are the way they are, but the excuses do not add up...at all.


Excuse 1: People are too busy fighting each other and defending themselves to begin rebuilding.

My Argument: Necessity is the mother of invention and war is the mother of necessity. If anything, the constant battles waged will have forced people to adapt and create or recreate advances in science and technology so as to provide themselves with an advantage against their many enemies and the threats against their very existence. Small nations will have been built by now with modernized military factions to serve as defense. Entire areas would have been cleared so as to build new homes and structures for housing, education, medicine, marketing, and more.

Look at the US, for instance, little more than two centuries ago, an entire nation was born from almost nothing and as a result of the chaos of an all out war with another country. The revolutionary war is a prime historic example of how humans realistically deal with the aftermath of war and how it encourages and facilitates change and progress. Fast-forward a little to the American Civil war that very nearly destroyed the US as a nation and resulted in the deaths of millions of people. Despite the seemingly irreversible damage done to the country, the nation recovered.

We can also look further back in history to the bubonic plague, a disease that reduced the human population for the first time in all of recorded history. Despite a threat that humans, at the time, could not combat, it was through natural causes that humanity developed necessary immunities to the disease. What was once seen as an extinction threat centuries ago is now nothing more than a bad case of the flu to us. Once again, humans overcame and advanced.


Excuse 2: Lost knowledge and technology prevent people from rebuilding.

My Argument: This excuse is complete♥♥♥♥♥♥ Most of the survivors of the war are descendants of vault dwellers. The others are vault dwellers. And there are some cases of humans from before the war who survived somehow, a minority among them having made themselves virtually immortal. Education is not lost, information is not lost. Vaults have modern curriculums that teach people how to operate and maintain pre-war technology. On top of which you've entire structures that survived the bombings that contain all manner of records to serve as information and a form of education.

Additionally, there have been advances in science, technology, and medicine throughout the fallout series. Some good such as the invention of teleportation and some not so good such as the creation of Jet (in before people argue it's good, it was discovered through slave labor and caused the deaths of hundreds of slaves and has been proven to cause lifelong addiction and heart failure. Jet is nothing more than huffing fumes off Brahmin manure, usually through a crude plastic inhaler as depicted in Fallout 4).


Excuse 3: People are still recovering from the great war.

My Argument: How does that make any sense? Recovering from what, exactly? Are you still recovering from the world wars of your ancestors?

While it can be argued that the allies won out in the end and it made it easier for their nations to recover, we can look at Japan. A nation that has, at the very least, survived centuries of infighting, Western invasion, two atomic bombs, and a massive tsunami. But theirs is a country that remains as one of the global super powers and continues producing and exporting advances in technology. You can't convince me that the people in the fallout universe are too busy recovering to be bothered with improving their living conditions.


In closing, if Fallout is going to continue feeding me the line "War never changes" then maybe, just maybe its developers and writers should take a moment to examine how war impacts humanity. Because war might not change, but war, war changes us.

At least it's not raining .

[raubrey]

Originally posted by Gordon Freeman:

Long quote

At least it's not raining . [/quote]

Ok, that was funny.

[Solomon Hawk]

@Old Kid John,

The short version of a long story:
Humanity nuked itself back into the stone age.
Not just us, everybody who had nuclear capability was involved.

Consider this:
The world population two years ago was about 7.5 billion.
Fallout's world of 2077 the days the bombs fell would be around 15 billion (conservative, non statistical guess) if the population hasn't gone into a "critical mass" bottleneck die-off by then.
What is left of the survivors have been really barely holding onto a thin, fraying thread of life.... just short of blinking out of existence into extinction and they are in no position to rebuild anything resembling what was the ***"old days"***. (excluding The Institute who are isolated and really care nothing for the surface now).

The ***old days***:
a time long before the first nuclear bombs were dropped ending WWII and the advent of the Fallout Universe Nuclear Age.
The world population was much smaller (a couple billion at most) and better suited to sustain itself agriculturally. Back before major industrialization.

Humanity is ignorant for all the wrong reasons.

[Chispon]

The ones that were not selected for a vault entrance are dead or became ghouls. I guess people waited for the extreme levels of radiation to settle down before leaving the underground vaults.
Society probably started to be rebuilt 40-50 years before you wake up from the vault, and people is still fighting for ideologies and resources(BoS, Institute, Raiders, Railroad, etc).

[Smightor]

Discussions like this have led me to believe that the series does not need to keep advancing in time for its story. I would like to see the next game take place say 70 years or so after the war, just set in a differant location than the early games. We are now 200+ years along and it will get harder and harder to believe that the world is still a mess 300 or 400 years later(in future games).

[Uglzorp]

Aside from the fact that Fallout is a post-apocalyptic series and therefore requires a healthy dose of apocalyptic destruction, it doesn't seem unfeasible that its world remains destroyed. As the series has shown, there's no single government to guide people towards a single goal. Instead, there are numerous factions that are constantly in conflict with one another, making it difficult to make any progress towards rebuilding. Various regions of the Middle-East and Africa are pretty good examples of how this reflects reality. You can't build anything when your work is constantly being torn down.

[Bluebottle]

my biggest beef is the fact that ppl are fine with living in utter filth with skeletons in their kitchens and fungus above their beds. i would rather commit suicide honestly

[presto668]

Originally posted by rikashiku:

Argument 1: This is the exact reason why the NCR was built in the first place. IN the first two games they have built new settlements and very large settlements. One of the largest being a fully functioning Vault within their territory. We see them again in New Vegas in ruins again, but counter-argument to that is that they haven't been there for long and are still getting resources to rebuild

The point of the NCR in New Vegas is that they have expanded too quickly too soon and are weak and stretched too thin as a result. And they've started getting corruption creeping in.

They need to pull back and consolidate and deal with issues at home before trying to expand again.

[Vex Hilarius]

Originally posted by kdodds:

Refutation 1: It's a post-modern fantasy RPG game.
Refutation 2: It's a post-modern fantasy RPG game.
Refutation 3: It's a post-modern fantasy RPG game.

How much fun would it be, how much need would there be, for a game set in a re-civilized America? It wouldn't be Fallout. It wouldn't be a game at all.

Actually besides f3 and f4 the series is about civilization coming back. That's Fallout. Not having society come back for 200+ years is not what Fallout is.

Think about if it's the year 2018 but society is still like 1818. Doesn't seem right does it.

Sure there was a nuclear apocalypse but you mean to tell me not once in 200 years a bunch of people decided to get together and form some sort of country?