No, offense. But lets not bring reality into the Fallout universe. Because, first and formost. The half-life from the radioactive fallout from a nuclear war is going to last around 10k years. That's right. Around 10 thousand years. So, 200 years from the dropping of the first bomb I'd say anywhere from 50% to 90% of the planet will be instant death zones. Where the radiation would be so strong it would kill you in minutes. Now lets add into the fact that the Nuclear Winter would be lasting around a decade or so at least. So any crops or areas that didn't get hit are probably still going to mostly die off.

Here's a rather interesting and frightening article about what would happen if 2 countries with the smallest nuclear arsenals took each other out. How it would affect the rest of the planet.

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/computer-models-show-what-exactly-would-happen-earth-after-nuclear-war

Keep in mind this article is written showing about 1/10th maybe of the remaining nukes in the world being used.

Fallout itself is a game written around fantasy. Enjoy it for what it is.

Thanks for the info. When it comes to food I enjoy eating it but I am very science dumb about how it works and what it is our bodies take from it. I do know that a lot of it gets "rejected"

Its more complex. You have a huge spectrum of radioactive isotopes. Some last even much longer then 10.000 years. But, the most active ones are the ones that decay first. Just to name the most importen ones - iodine 131, cesium 137 and Strontium 90. Those are the ones that made most trouble after Chernobyl accident. However, iodine 131 is already decayed, the other two will be in 200 years. ( 10 half times = almost gone, at least that's what I have read ). The remaining isotopes are much less active

Fallout 1: The game takes place in 2161, 84 years after the Great War
Fallout Tactics: The game takes place in 2197, 120 years after the Great War
Fallout BoS: The game takes place in 2208, 131 years after the Great War
Fallout 2: The game takes place in 2241, 164 years after the Great War
> Enter Bethesda

Fallout 3: The game takes place in 2277, 200 years after the Great War
Fallout NV: The game takes place in 2281, 204 years after the Great War
Fallout 4: The game takes place in 2287, 210 years after the Great War

"the 200 year leap was made in the original lore of Fallout, not by Bethesda"
"original lore of Fallout"
"original lore"

Original - existing from the beginning; first or earliest.
∴ original lore's timeskip = 84
84≠200

Either, you are really bad with math, don't understand words like original or phrases like "not by

your aware that there are pages of discussion here no? you responded to me first comment but apperently didn't read any further than that. I'll leave you with my final comment.

I have had a similar feeling that some things shouldn't be there after all that time, but it wasn't the state of the buildings that made me feel that, neither the amount of bullets and stuff you can find around.

Because I've seen buildings old enough still standing myself, and so its not so hard to think many are still there. At Santorini, Greece there is a whole town preserved from 3.000 BC, with many of the ancient buildings not only still having their walls but also their roofs. https://www.google.gr/search?q=akrotiri+thera&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiP_5Dq4sPJAhXimHIKHQhoBoYQ_AUIBygB&biw=1920&bih=979

And as for ammo and stuff found, I've been thinking that these weren't there untouched from the time before the bombs, but that perhaps some people after the war passed from these points and left them for some reason.

What made me personally to think that there's something wrong is the little pieces were you see how some people died during the war. For example some of the many skeletons you find in a variety of positions, some of them clothed.

It's way harder for cloth to be preserved than it is for a building. Stones and bricks don't rot, neither they get eaten by moths, but clothes do. Except that, the skeletons shouldn't be there after all that time. People from various tribes / nations / races around the world and in thousands of years have shown that they don't like human bones laying around, and they dispose them. They might bury them, burn them, whatever, but they don't let them be there. Because its a natural reaction to be apalled by the bones of your species, even animals have this instict. One of the first thing a bunch of settlers or exploring expendition would do, would be to dispose with some way the bones of dead people before staying at a place, even for a while. So while these little scenes offer an interesting view on what happened to people when the bomb fell, it is kind of breaking the suspension of disbelief, more than standing buildings or other stuff found laying around.

FWIW -

I have a 78-year-old Emerson desk fan that still works perfectly. Mind you it was a luxury item back then and would have cost around $300 in today's dollars. They built them to last.

i do find the fact that there are holloween decorations EVERYWHERE despite the 200 year differance to be quite annoying..

and yes... quite frankly the world is in much better shape considering the time passed compaired to a real world situation..

Chernobyl is even more degraded than Boston in the game and its not been half as long since that place went up.

that said its a game. and there are robots. and people didnt completely die off so there would have been people who tried to keep things standing for a while.

It makes sense if you accept that Fallout is essentially Dungeons & Dragons except set in a pseudo-futuristic world instead of a medieval fantasy world. Substitute Super Mutants for Orcs, Deathclaws and such for Dragons and abandoned buildings for dungeons.

A realistic post-apocalyptic scenario would be so bleak that nobody would want to play it.

Game...not Sim...

Sometimes I tend to think things would be cleaned up within decades of a nuclear conflict if anyone happened to survive. The thing about mental health is that it's based, by definition on function. Mentally healthy people do not, willingly, live in the mud - they pave their walkways much as we might light a candle instead of complaining about the darkness. Were this not the case, we'd still be living in caves. The same thing drives people to clean up and make the best of things when the dust of a dead war has finally settled.

However, sometimes it can take a long time for the dust to settle. The Fallout world is complicated by large, powerful and organised bands of malefactors such as raiders and supermutants. History has shown that powerful minorities can force large groups of people to literally "live in the mud" and this is certainly true of the feudal lords recorded by history. The kind of people who demand a fee to travel on roads they never built are precisely the kind of people who hold development back and keep the disempowered living under appalling conditions.

So, I think that either outcome makes sense depending on what happened during the preceding two centuries.

On the subject of food that lasts 200 years - there seems to be a certain tongue in cheek reference to the once increasingly bold claims of added preservatives and I think that reference leads us to the point past which the food is no longer edible by bacteria much less potentially nutritious. If anything, the best chow in the Wasteland is what you cook up yourself and, once again, food that's so nutritionally deficient that, by 2077, it can last two centuries without significant spoiling really says something about the quality of processed food and the direction food "science" took in the 20th Century.

Also, I think that "suspension of disbelief" is a is an erroneous interpretation of how immersion works cooked up by someone who's evidently never genuinely immersed himself in a computer game. It is a fact that you don't have to suspend disbelief in order to separate in-game reality from real-life reality while accepting both for what they are. Otherwise mystery quests would be unplayable and a significant proportion of us would be expecting to greet a deathclaw whenever someone knocked on the door while we were playing Fallout. That doesn't happen and I don't think anyone, here, has a problem when the compulsion to unravel an in-game mystery becomes apparent. Instead, immersion revolves around the lack of of objectionable detail within the game-world. We need to see things we all agree on - like the laws of motion, gravity, fundamental ballistics, and some sense of basic purposivism as applied to NPC behaviour.

However, depending on the genre, there are some things unrelated to reality which are also considered necessary to immersion. In the Medieval variation of the fantasy genre we have magic and improbable monsters whose presence is more related to what the darkest recesses of our minds cook up during a night terror than to what anyone finds believable. I think the same can be said for the post-apocalyptic variation of the fantasy genre. The clearly fictional elements don't break immersion and this is definitely not because of any realism but because they fit with a primal need to explore a worst case variation on the question of "what if". Regardless of the improbability of giant scorpions or spiders or, for that matter, fire-breathing dragons, I think it is quite natural to be fascinated by the question of "what if we were to encounter such beasties under various conditions?" We see what happens to prey ensnared by the spider and, having encountered the painful pinch of crab claws, we can imagine what a scorpion does to something it catches in its grasp. And we find ourselves identifying with the prey in search of an answer to the perennial question of "How would I survive?" This familiar theme of survival has nothing to do with belief, disbelief or suspension thereof. What makes it compelling is not that we believe in the existence of the various bugbears portrayed in these hypothetical explorations but that we recognise the potential to learn something about how we can or would go about overcoming adversity from a clear disadvantage.

In essence, I think any rigorous study would find that realism is vital to role play in everything except the various bugbears that roam these hypothetical worlds because, without that realism, our victories over such clearly fictional elements as fire-breathing dragons and acid-belching mirelurk queens would lose significance to the overwhelming din of the never-arriving miracle. And role-play isn't about disempowering ourselves by invoking the miraculous. It's about empowering ourselves via enough realism that we can at least feel confident about the quality and nature of decisions we make in the face of adversity.

With respect to the question of how the passage of two centuries would impact a post-apocalyptic world: If anything, I think that would depend heavily on who got organised and armed first. What we see laid out in the opening of Fallout4 in terms of raider and supermutant dominance fits nicely with the apparent lack of progress. The bugbears might be clear fictions but the history is still repeating like, err, history.

Well.. ya kinda just stole my whole response..

Would also include this lil bit: Fallout has always, since day one, been upfront about their ALTERNATE universe. You know, where things like OUR universe aren't always the same.

Although, this is also discarding the fact that you're arguing about the believability of a FAKE world in a GAME created in our REAL world.

All i can say is that I can suspend some disbelief but a fully functional computer sitting exposed to wind and rain.......is a challenge not to scoff at.

War, never changes, right?

So why should 200 years make a difference?

Actually, they never said "universe". They said "timeline" and "world". The Physics remains the same, except that the scientists discovered fusion sooner, along with a myriad of high-energy applications. The timeline diverged at the end of WW2 where in the FO world the Major Powers went all gung ho developing civilian applications for atomic power. And where McCarthyism was practically a religion as well as a national pastime in the USA.

honestly, who cares? When you turn the game off, the world/timeline no longer exists, so the argument is pointless. /sarcasm.

It is 200 years the way it is because that is the way it was designed. Plain and simple.

"Universe" in this context refers to the setting not the location of our galaxy.

-.O damn you CaptainPatch, lol fair enough, alternate timeline (which I translate to alternate universe, my bad )

And to the person that was listing the different radioactive isotopes, kudos, you saved me the work, however I would also remind you that the triggers used are sometimes the actual problem (cobalt triggers are hideously bad stuff and the main reason china's stockpile is feared, even Russia made an attempt to go cleaner :yes ironic relative term when applied to WMD's: anyway, depending on the nuclear fuel used, the trigger used, can all effect how 'dirty' a nuclear device is.

That being said, there are stockpiles of weapons that would be considered squeaky clean nukes in comparison to the 10k contaminant ones, most nukes stockpiled by America wouldn't leave the background radiation appreciably higher than it already is. (appreciably being a vague term I know, but having an increase after 200 years of only 3% mSv (milliSievert) would realistically only cause a slight increase in cancer rate, but totally survivable and unnoticed by the wildlife.

It's the 200 years before that part tho... >.>

It seems to me the primary problem as far as persistent radiation is concerned in the world of Fallout would not be the bombs but what they hit. A nuclear reactor vaporised and spread around the countryside would be bad news, and we know that in the pre-war world of Fallout, reactors were ubiquitous. Even cars had them. Thousands or even millions of mini-Chernobyls, everywhere. Would human life even survive such a scenario? Fallout probably offers an overly-optimistic view of what the world would be like if that ever came to pass.

It has been estimated that if you could selectively kill 3% of the world's populaton, our technology would quickly devolve to a 17th century level technology. Essentially, it is 3% of the population that has the knowledge required to keep the wheels turning. Surprisingly, most of that 3% you have to kill, would have "dirty hands". That is to say, most of them would be what are sometimes called master craftsmen. Most people today are specialists, there are very few generalists. For the most part, none of us can do our jobs without the help of others doing their jobs.

To give you an example: Your car suddenly develops a problem. You take it to an auto mechanic, who tells you that your fuel pump needs to be replaced. The mechanic goes into the back room and comes out with a new fuel pump, but what happens if they don't have one and the factory that made them is no longer in operation (for what ever reason)? How many auto mechanics do you know that have the tools on hand and the knowledge required to fabricate a new fuel pump? This is a fairly simplistic example but it does serve to illustrate what happens when a supply chain is disrupted. Just about everything we do in modern society involves supply chains and potential chaos if any of those supply chains are disrupted. Something like a nuclear exchange would have a tendency to disrupt all supply chains.

So you have five people huddled in the basemant of a department store after the bombs drop: An accountant, a sales clerk from the store, a computer programmer, a pharmacist and a beautician. These are not the core that a new and thriving settlement will be built. This is the beginning of a cannibalistic raider band.

They just don't make 'em like that anymore. [Wait, they're not making 'em at all anymore! They haven't been making them at all for >200 years! Wow. That means pretty much EVERYTHING qualifies as an "antique" now!]

Dude love the answer here. This is prime example of player who uses imagination to find his/her own rationality. Way too often we get threads that make some good points but show that we have a large percent of our gaming community far to fixated on logic that they can establish from their own real life experience. You guys remember the old Oregon trail computer game? That was supposed to be a simulator. Look at the huge strides we have made in the gaming industry and keep in mind they will continue doing so as long as fallout4 remains just a game..

I see too many threads that start off "I love everything about the game but.." Then go onto point out such flaws as come to wreck their immersion. I see complaints about the lack of RPG in this version. You know when I grew up role playing was done by real people rolling dice and looking up trivial info in lengthy book piles. There is just not going to be a whole lot of role playing in a single player game no matter how many options they give you.

I agree that food should long have turned to dust but hey this is an alternate history future science fiction based game.. Not a real world simulator. I have seen first hand how long sheet steel lasts with out some preservative coating of tar. However I am just glad to be alive and well enough to see the latest Fallout game and I dream of seeing the next version Bethseda comes up with be it full of dark elves or super mutants.

Finding flaws is the easiest thing to do..

I too was a little baffled that 200 years later there were lootable items everywhere, buildings still standing, the landscape still very brown, and society as a whole hasn't really recovered. It just seems like all technological advancement has completely halted, to the point that no one even tried to learn and improve on anything (I mean, EVERY BOOK EVER besides a few magazines were burned to ash, seriously?) Realistically, it feels like the world of Fallout 4 is roughly 10-20 years following the bombs dropping.

But y'know what? I can look past all those logic holes. I mean, my character wakes up a literal bad ass that's actually kinda-sorta okay with the situation the world is in and is capable of wiping out entire raider gangs, super mutant holdings, and death claws by himself, and yet no one has heard of this guy. I would think word of someone tearing through the common wealth would spread pretty damn fast and he'd either be THE dude you get in bed with, or paint him as public enemy #1.

However, it's a game - of course we have to make the Master Chief look like a green recruit. And bullets are in every nook and cranny so we can actually use our guns. Apparently 5mm and 50. cal ammo was a form of currency because there's just so much of the $#!%. I can hand wave the absurdity of a ruined world with clearly a ton of salveagable resources inhabited by a bunch of freakin' morons whose greatest (and only) invention apparently was the pipe gun if it means having things to explore, loot, and enjoy. Although I guess technically the NCR, BoS and the Institute (especially the Institute) are well on their way to becoming the sort to advance technologically and not just remain uneducated scavengers for forever.

Honestly, the next Fallout better include a freaking war over the last remaining active fusion core factory. Really drive the whole "War... war never changes" message home with that one.