Depending on the steel, it is likely to rust. Although it is 2077, so they might not use plain carbon steel for construction.

If the can of spam is still intact, then the spam should be good to eat. It may not taste very good, but it didn't taste good on the day it was made. Military rations from 1942 would have been K-rations. Heck, we were still chomping on them during Nam. MRE's are something more modern and are not as good as K-rations in my opinion, and I've eaten a lot of both. Besides, you always got cigs in the Ks - Camels, Luckys, and I think Chesterfields. The best part of K-rations were the cans of pound cake and the tiny can opener we kept on our dog tag chain. MRE's would probably be good after 200 years, but I don’t think much of the Ks would, except for maybe the cigs.

I wish cigs still came in MREs would make field life so much easier. But K-rations/MREs or fallout equivalent would be nice to have as loot.

Hiroshima was completely abandoned in 1945. We're talking about cities that still possessed inhabitants since the bombs dropped in 2077, a wondrous age of unbridled technology.

I'm just glad that the Boston accent will survive for another 262 years.

Look at how long the Dark Ages was. About 1000 years between the end of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. 200 years is not enough time for civilization to recover from nuclear devastation.

Here is a link to "Scott's Hut" in Antartica - It has been abandoned for about 100 years and is still well preserved. (Due to the cold though).

Looks in some ways similar to an abandoned hut in fallout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott

Neither I nor my PC is a fan of the mutated flora (save Radstags or Brahmin) which roam the Commonweath. So scavenging for prewar junk food is a top priority. So I always look for reasons to justify how good all the prewar food my PC encounters really is.

Anyhow, it actually seems food preservation technology was so advanced by 2077, that it made food expiration dates infinite. This seems supported by what your PC explicitly says right after you create them in the bathroom. If you exit the bathroom, then make the left to head into the dining/living room area, there is a closet door to your immediate left. If you open this door, you'll see some food supplies i.e. Instamash, mac n cheese etc. If you activate any of these, the PC will name the food items on the shelf.

Then they'll make the comment "...expiration date--never"

IMO this could imply technology by that point may have reached the point where preservatives/canned food had an indefinite shelf life (unlike our real, alternate universe today where stuff goes bad after 4-5 years or so). So it's perfectly reasonable to assume prewar canned and preserved foods were still edible after 2 centuries of gathering dust on shelves in the Commonwealth. But perishables like milk on the other hand, would likely spoil within a week if not directly impacted by the fallout. The whole irradiated Nuka Cola on the other hand, is pure fallout lore--regardless of how much fantasy v. sci-fi explanation which validate why it's still consumable 200 years later.

But that isn't 200 years after the original events now is it? Fallout 2 counts as the original lore, you know before Beth got their hands on it. That brings it up to 2241, which means 3 takes place just 36 years after 2. So you see it was 2 that made the largest leap of 80 years and 3 did not make a leap of 200. Nice try though.

Flora is plants, fauna is animals.

The Star Spangled Banner written by Francis Scott Key, September 3, 1814 during the battle of Fort McHenry in Maryland, not New york.

Unlike the entirety of human History, the Great War would be the first (and only) time that EVERY society was "bombed back into the Stone Age". TOTAL societal breakdown as the entire world reverts to "Every man for himself!" The closest anolog would be the Fall of the Holy Roman Empire, which triggered the Dark Ages -- a period that lasted FIVE CENTURIES.

"It was all a dream" - most hated plot device ever.

BUT... I could almost see it working for Fallout, because it's just the sort of thing that Vault-Tec would do. Tranquility Lane on an unimaginable scale.

It would explain all those strange "loading screens" I keep seeing - that's a sure sign of a simulation. For some reason I always forget about them after they disappear, and accept the reality I've been put into.

What the are you on about? What is this "original event" you're referring to as it doesn't seem to be the Great War you're talking about. The whole point was that fo3 took place 200 years after the war like the op stated, I don't know what the time gaps between the games have to do with anything. Still I have no idea where you get this "200 years was in the originals" thing

Yes, and nuclear fallout doesn't result in giant insects, just dead ones.

There's no way Deathclaws are genetically viable.

Ghouls make NO SENSE.

Remember: Fallout is "SCIENCE!!!", not scientific. Same goes for society I suppose.

It makes no sense to apply logic to Fallout but it is fun to a certain degree. Perhaps like this: there are no big bomb craters because the atomic bombs detonated in the air (like in Hiroshima, there was no crater). The buildings were strong enough to survive (ok, unlikely). Terminals etc. work because of the mighty self sustaining power cores. And so on.

What makes me wonder are breaches in the internal Fallout logic. Why do live settlers in ruin-like buildings still? Why are there so many relatively well preserved car wrecks when anybody needs material? And my greatest enigma which makes me so sad, why are there no special summer shorts for males? Nobody was able to cut off a pair of jeans? I think it's the radioactivity that makes all of them dump.

Robots are too inept to build raw materials into finished products... yet they were turned loose with lethal force as law enforcement? It's a bit funny that Fallout is in a 1950s theme, yet the science is far more advanced than our own in many areas. I look around in RL and see robots are taking orders at Mickey D's, building cars in Detroit, and even moving into the world's oldest profession. Military robots are obviously going to very soon move into autonomous control, computers are driving cars, how much more is actually needed to create a robotic platform that is self sustaining without human intervention? ...especially if we had a working version of fusion, eh?

It's not that hard. When someone says "Gameplay trumps realism...every time!" (emphasis was yours) and I respond with two well known and popular games focused on realism, I am, of course, merely pointing out that there are games that do put realism in spotlight and people do enjoy those games, so clearly realism doesn't trump gameplay every time.

Way to miss the point, both of you.

It's as realistic as consumer computers and controls allow it to be without being pointlessly tedious. And it's not "army simulation", it's combat simulation. Of course you don't have to take tests to be allowed using something (although that was/is in America's Army!)

Arf there would probably have to be a great deal of (impossible?) miniturization to that fusion. The vacuum vessel alone for ITER will be something like 19.4 meters in outside diameter and 6,5 meters in inside diameter. 11.3 meters in height and weight 5,116 tonnes.

I'd point out that its not really 200 years for most of the population since the non-ghouls would have come from opened vaults so the actual number of wastelanders in a area might be very low if any for a good part of that 200 years since unless they came from a local vault the current non ghoul population of Boston would have had to migrate into the area from elsewhere.

The giant insects, lots of radiation, the laser weapons fits well with the 1950 visions of the future and an atomic war. The 1950 retro-future is basic of Fallout.

Here its rule of cool, old comment is that Fallout 3 DC area would look more like Oblivion than Fallout 3 if seen from the air.

Plants would have grown back, new cities would have been established, some build on the foundations of old other in new places.

Yes you would have ruins but not areas with destroyed houses, just ruins of solid buildings standing out between the trees as they do in Oblivion.

This would not look post apocalyptic, Fallout does so its better to make things look like its 5-10 years since the war.

This.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, it took quite a few centuries for Europe to get back onto its feet. Now imagine if every single society on Earth was blown to hell and back into a nuclear war. This isn't like "Oh, everyone just up and left their cities for a few centuries", this is "the human race was quite literally blown back to the Stone Age".

While I would expect that after 200 years, all the plants would've grown back (ie, all the dead trees and desert-like terrain? Unrealistic for Fallout 3 and Fallout 4) humans wouldn't really be so lucky, I think. Comparing 1815-2015 doesn't work because last I checked, the world didn't get blown up in 1815. We can't even compare Hiroshima or Chernobyl because this was THE ENTIRE WORLD that got destroyed. Kind of hard to rebuild from something like that.

Lots of good comments here.

I agree that fun over rules realism. But I, like several others, kind of wish the game was set 5-20 years after the bombs fell instead of 200.

To those who are saying that technological collapse is possible and are likening it to the fall of Rome...

I'd have to disagree.

The fall of Rome was more a social and political collapse than a technological one. In fact, I can't think of a single technology that was lost as a result of the collapse of the Roman empire. Many technologies saw a decline in use, simply because without a strong government structure, there just wasn't a need for them. And the "dark ages" if you want to call them that (and most historians would not) were more the fault of the controlling powers discouraging the development of new technoligies and hording technology and resources. Religious oppression stemming from greed and desire to control slowed progress during this time, nothing else...

That said, you really have to consider just how large and inclusive the Roman empire was.

When that empire broke apart, sure, there were parts of the former Roman empire that slide right back to the muck where really they belonged. Most were quickly conquered by various regional powers... who cared very little about architecture or math because they were nomadic groups.

But there were still parts of the former Roman empire, most notably the Byzantine Empire, that went on with life largely unchanged after the Roman empire collapsed and they continued to develope mathematics, architecture, metallurgy, astrology, literature, chemistry, medicine, and art.

It was the Catholic Church that really slowed human advancement in this timeframe...

Couple this with monarchy style governments, where kings and queens were "ordaned by God" (backed by the church) and who's judgement was divine; swiftly dispatching the head of anyone who was found to be too progressive...

And then you can see why advancement in certain areas was a little repressed during this time frame. But again... technology wasn't lost (at least not working technologies).

And I don't think it really can be... at least not practical/working technology.

Reverse engineering things is just too easy. If the world were littered with artifacts of lost technology, it really wouldn't take us long to recover their secrets...

All of this is just all the more reason why I don't believe the 200 year thing...

In a world where "he who carries the biggest stick wins." The first guy who becomes self sufficient on a mass production scale is going to sieze control of the world.

You wipe out every standing government and the majority of the population... and it still would only take a group of guys a couple years to do this.

There is just no way that a mass void of power stands for 200 years...

Yep, you're right. I got the wrong War of 1812 battle there.

The Battle of Plattsburg was significant because it denied "Uti possidetis" (basically denied the British the ability to keep a holding on US soil after the end of the war), not because of the national anthem.

So what? You mention buildings would all be gone. But, i would posit that using this rationale, the enclave rig wouldn't have been able to hold enclave in F2. It would have rusted out, long before the chosen one was born.
....and arroyo wouldn't have devolved into a full on tribal society, complete with an actual shaman and a temple that for some reason isn't used for anything other than housing a vault suit.
This also goes for all of you saying, "well, Bethesda......".
No. ALL fallout games require suspension of disbelief.

Alternate universe, in game days are shorter so their years are also shorter OP they might also travel around the sun faster we don't know cause its an alternate universe so we cannot go there to find out.

Also this whole game is just a game its all make-belive stop taking it seriously.

I just want to know how those barrels manage to keep burning...{smiley}

While I can sympathize with the OP I have to admit that none of this bothers me. It's a science fantasy world, always has been, based on many sources including pulp science fiction and post apocalypse flicks. It's not realistic, and when it is it's (to me) sort of disconcerting. I loved the Survivor in Honest Hearts, but his story was (at first) almost too real. Those ICBMs in Lonesome Road looked a bit too modern to me, as well.

It's fun to find in-game answers, though. I assume that in the years between now and the war a lot of junk got moved around, hence those ammo stashes and piles of food. That that food is edible is a joke on the 1950's mania for preservation. The robots are probably programmed to change their own fuel cells, so Cogsy has probably wandered further than he lets on.

Anyway. A Real PA game would look like the glowing sea, except with no monsters and no power armor. It would be the shortest game in history.