Yeah, some of those skyscraqers you climb in (sadly few) are pretty awesome, especially with the metal fatigue sound they constantly make.

Cries of dead giants, if you don't mind me going poetic

It seems to me that such a broad based nuclear exchange would be enough to kill not just complex but microbial life forms as well. Part of the reason why we're not seeing the level of deterioration we might expect is that many of the small creatures that might ordinarilly break down things like, say, wood or paper are no longer around to do so. Consider the wreck of the Titanic; one of the chief reasons its doing so poorly after 100+ years is that the hull is being consumed by living organisms - remove those organisms and the wreck might be in better shape than it is at present. I don't know how realistic such an eventuality would be, but would at least give some credence to how things have survived, seemingly undisturbed, for two centuries plus.

It's true that based on logic and history that some kind of stable civilization should have come up in the last 200 years. You'd think at some point old buildings would have been torn down to make way for new ones, for example.

On the other hand though progress in modern countries has so far been a blessedly one-way street. We've only ever seen improvement. In a modern world we're enjoying the advances made by the experience of a hundred million geniuses over a course of 15,000 years. We don't know what it's like to have atomic-age technology available for a time and then suddenly ripped away from us.

Think about it, without our smart phones how much do any of us know right now? I mean about things like construction, architecture, farming, plumbing, engineering... everything that makes our society run. Now imagine not only having it all taken away but most of the people who DO know anything about it wiped out by a nuclear war. Then imagine that the few who survived the war had super-mutants and deathclaws to contend with. How many of them would live long enough to pass down anything useful to a new generation?

When you look at it that way the 200 year stagnation and people still living in rubble doesn't seem so far fetched.

I know, right? Problem is if the game were realistic it wouldn't be any fun to play. Who wants to explore a map full of rubble with no resources? Gameplay trumps realism...every time!

Wait, what?

For starters, the 200 year leap was made in the original lore of Fallout, not by Bethesda.

Secondly, the gap between 3 and 4 is less than a decade.

I guess that's why games like ARMA or IL-2 are so much fun.

I fail to see how games based on reality have any bearing on a game based around a fictional universe with established elements that defy reality. What kind of supernatural and/or sci-fi elements do those game portray "realistically"?

Maybe you didn't read the text I quoted?

Oh, lol. That better. I thought there was supposed to be a big gap between 3 & 4.

Happy now

You might find this odd, but... I more often wonder at the lack of standing buildings and surviving resources. Here's why.

the main character is put into a cryogenic state for 200 years, goes home and finds her robot tending the lawn. He speaks of dusting, polishing the car, attempting to clean the floors and the feeling of futility he experiences by having no one to serve. Is this the only robot to survive that attempted to maintain buildings?

Why wouldn't robots continue trying to fix and replace things within the limits of their resources? Can Mr Handy repair and maintain other robots like himself? Will they abandon their programming to sit and watch the structures fall apart? There are obviously still humans wandering about who robots could serve, yes? So why is the world falling apart? Is it just greed of scavengers stealing resources, or is some other cause responsible?

Given fusion power, I find it easier to imagine a nearly uninhabited nation of pristine structures overflowing with unused resources maintained by automation than a world of ruins....

I did but it doesn't tell me how you meant that to come across and i had to guess. My guess was that you find those games which are ultra realistic to be very fun. Now if you were being sarcastic then that completely changes what you meant but my rule is to take a person at their word by default and it's that persons job to tell me when they are being facetious because i can't determine that on my own through simple text.

I doubt Codsworth has construction abilities programmed into him. He was a nanny bot and cleaning the floors falls into that. He wasn't trying to repair the house as we can see from the state of it

Maybe I'm missing something, but can anyone tell me what was gained by setting Fallout 3 (and subsequently FO4) 200+ years after the bombs fell? It seems to me that the world aesthetic and plot of both FO3 & FO4 make a whole lot more sense if the games take place 20 - 50 years after the war.

What did Bethesda gain by placing their games so far into the future? I can't see what it might be.

They weren't constrained by the plots or characters of Fallout 1 & 2 since their games are set on the east coast. Any ideas?

Wasn't part of why they chose a large timeskip due to wanting to be definitively after FO1 and 2? Just so there was absolutely no possibility of overlap? Thought I'd read that somewhere....

They were constrained by the originals because if all that stuff in the lore is to have actually taken place in this universe then subsequent sequels have to take place after those events.

Yep. In a real nuclear war, there would be nothing left of the centers of our big cities except craters several miles wide, lined with fused glass. No skyscraqers, no bridges, no capitol building or Washington Monument. You'd have to travel quite a ways out into the suburbs to find anything worth looting afterwards. Presuming there was no real fallout in those suburbs at that point (right...) making those leftover snack cakes glow for another 500 years. But that wouldn't make for a very fun gameworld, so we get F4 instead.

PS: I tasted a 7 year old can of veggies last year, something that had been lost in a corner of a cupboard somewhere. It was borderline edible, but the taste was pretty unpalatable. 200 years? Heh. Ain't no preservatives that good, especially when most of these cans in the game are exposed to the elements anyway.

Sure, Codsworth was apparently just a robotic butler, but by the time a society gets around to robotic butlers, there should be lots of construction worker robots already working away. What were THEY doing for 200 years? Striking for higher wages or killing time at Sully's Pub?

Here's my two cents.

Power armor.

... In a 50s environment.

Yea...

Its the same reason as in Fallout 1. Going to Los Angeles and finding not a giant hole in the ground, or a impassable pile of rubble, but The Boneyard, a unique location that uses interesting designs despite the fact that if this were real life those tall and ruined skyscraqers would have fallen down after almost a century of disrepair or even being flattened by the many bombs that would have hit the area due to the real life doctrine of having 4 or 5 warheads aimed at every major target using various means to make sure that one or more get through.

Being 100% realistic does not make for a good anything. Design trumps realism, every single time.

There are construction Protectitrons but they need programming(they don't just spontaneously build things) and raw materials.

Are people in general that disillusioned as to what is was like here on earth before mass industry and mass distribution? People of humble means just a few hundred years ago would spend an entire lifetime building a single home. Just goes to show how soft society really is and when the apocalypse comes more survivors will meet their end on the wrong side of priority.

ARMA is hardly all that realistic.

If people played an actual army simulation game, then they'd probably be bored to death.

How much spare equipment is at any given building? I doubt they have the programming to go down to the hardware store and stock up on nails and plywood, or the smarts to know how to break something that's useless into spare parts, or fix the infrastructure to repair the roads and power to bring the iron factory online so it can produce the metals needed for vehicles so that they can carry the mined iron ore to the factory. So they have to make due with what they have on hand.

And unless the site was producing refined construction materials (or already under construction), there's not many things around that can be used to fix a broken window or collapsed roof. At least nothing they would recognize as "usable as building materials".

Keep in mind, the biggest jump in time was from Fallout to Fallout 2, being a whole 80 years. Fallout 2 to Fallout 3 was only half that, so I wouldn't blame this on Bethesda for those who are doing it for whatever reason.

As for why everything isn't a big pile of rubble or mush after not being tended to for over 200 years, well, its just part of the reason why so many other things aren't realistic in Fallout. Realism isn't fun. Exploring post-apocalyptic America and shooting at giant green mutants and mutated chameleons of death, is fun.

The whole point is society stopped dead the day the bombs fell. Yes people, robots, power armor suits and vertibirds survived but only a fraction of what existed. The survivors are too spread out to represent civilization anymore. That's why in Fallout 3 you took part in writing the first book in 200 years. You have to cope with the paradox with society able to still maintain some advanced tech but no longer being socially advanced enough to create literature, or culture for that matter.

That's why we call it the dark ages (we don't anymore though lol).

And yet many people play such games. Counter argument?

Actually, I see no reason why Fallout 3 could not have been set in the Capitol Wasteland concurrently or shortly after the events of FO1 or FO2. They could have done all sorts of things that didn't directly involve the plot points of of those earlier games.

Maybe Besthesda felt they had to use supermutants, the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel and thought the needed the big time jump to explain how those three things spread to the east coast?