Don't get me wrong, I love Fallout 4. I just find the 200 years have passed thing so inconsistent with the evidence that the world offers.

Let's look at history for just a moment to get an idea of just how long 200 years is... That would be around the year 1815...

The French have one of the strongest militaries in the world. THE FRENCH!! Napoleon is leading a conquest expedition eastward into the Netherlands.

Slavery has not yet been abolished in the United States because the Civil War has not yet been fought.

In fact, the United States is just now finishing a second war with Britain. Britain has invaded the United States and has burned the US capitol. And the United State's invasion of British held Canada is thwarted by Native Americans... (yes this happened).

The Star Spangled Banner is written in 1814, inspired by the Battle of Plattsburg as the United States repels the British attempt to invade New York.

Napoleon is defeated in Waterloo and the United States and Britain make peace so that Britain can focus once again on the French as they begin to withdrawn their resources from Napoleon's campaign and once again become a threat to British soil.

That was the United States 200 years ago...

That's how long 200 years is in terms of human history.

If we decorate for halloween and then the world ends... there aren't going to be little pumpkin buckets and pumpkin decorations lying around 200 years later.

Very few of the original buildings are still going to be there 200 years later... there might be some pieces of old building patchworked together or refurbished with replaced lumber.

But after 200 years... if it wasn't made from stone and mortar or concrete, it isn't going to be there any more... and unless it got upkeep, it isn't going to have a roof anymore.

And considering that each generation is seperated by 20-30 years... we are talking 7 or 8 generations of people passing through in 200 years...

How many resources left over from 200 years ago do you image are going to be left 7 or 8 generations of scavengers later? None

There aren't going to be above ground buildings that have gone unexplored and unsquatted for any amount of time.

200 years later, you aren't going to be scavending whole desk fans... at that point you'd be happy to find a few uncorroded bits of scrap metal that several scavenges ago used to be a desk fan...

And imagine trying to eat or drink something the pre-dates the civil war... you might as well just try to eat dirt because a 200 year old soft drink or box of cereal is going to be dirt.

Again, don't get me wrong, I love Fallout... but this is just a part of the universe that I find... un-immersive...

Um...what? the world ended in 2077 in the games story, and went 200+ years into the future.

The items of 2077 cannot be equated to items created during the civil war.

We have foods today that can theoretically last decades, if not centuries so long as they are left unopened.

We have metals and metallic compositions that are all immune to rusting.

You don't know what the [censored] was going on pre-war. I mean... they had freaking nuclear powered cars! who the hell knows what kind of preservative measures existed at that time. I'm willing to bet they were probably a hell of a lot better than they are today and definitely than they were during the years of my man Abraham.

The spacing in your thread is interesting and makes your post easy to read.

He's not saying the game places the war in the 1800s... he's saying the whole commonwealth should be picked clean over the course of 200 years. Not sure I agree, but I at least get the point being made.

It is called "suspension of disbelief" for a reason.

This 'debate' has been brought up before with no one really agreeing on things. You can say that, since Fallout does not occur in our same history, great strides were made in buidling material from the 1950's until 2077 (which should be true anyway, in 62 years from now). You can create any reason you want since things are not happening in the same world as we live in today. Cars are fusion powered and robot butlers change our babies diapers. You saying it's "un-immersive" just shows you're not trying hard enough. They shouldn't have to hand hold you through explaining everything in the game. I'm fine with them leaving things open to whatever I want to think

While the thought has crossed my mind many times, I've always attributed the lack of political and societal structure to the reason why things haven't been cleaned up and society hasn't built itself back up again.

I know it's a little naive.. but... uh.. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Eg_rbHMgXiQ/hqdefault.jpg

I agree...based on the destruction level of the buildings 20-50 years seems more likely.

Codsworth kept all the desk fans alive by cleaning them

Actually nothing from any Fallout game has ever actually happened.
They have all been a virtual reality simulation sent into a cryogenically preserved body.
All of them have been experienced by the same vault-dweller while waiting for the world to be inhabitable.
If you want to blame anybody for it being unrealistic...blame them damned Vault-Tec programmers!

The world of 2077 had items and wood and food and what not to support billions upon billions of people.

After the nukes fell, we're looking at a world that might have not even had more than 1 billion people.

[censored], in America, the population today is over 300,000,000. By the time of 2077, we could safely assume a population of perhaps 400,000,000 or even 500,000,000. By the time the bombs devastated America, We could EASILY determine that over 95% of the population was eradicated.

So we have some few million people living in a world that had enough items and buildings and what-not to support at least way more than 300,000,000 people. So yes, it makes sense that people would still be looting untouched things dating back to the pre-war era.

And this 8 generations thing is still absolute [censored] nonsense. A generation consists of only a few million people who can only effectively loot and utilize so many things. Not to mention the amount of lawlessness and technological decay means that the death rate in this new world is astronomical, meaning that there are even less looters to loot and utilize things...

I can go on and on, but no, it's definitely not illogical to assume that untouched things exist for the picking 200 years after a near-extinction event.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool, style over substance, they're just trying to be nifty...... pick any or all.

...this also seems like a good place for the MST3K Mantra:

he does get a little carried away with some stuff. But certin items would be gone/unusable. Like cartons of cigarettes laying everywhere. 200 years of no manufacturing plants would leave more valuable items long gone. Like cigarettes. But even with the building materials we have today, most homes and business buildings would be just fine. Glass may be broken, but they would still be structurally sound. (im a builder, therefore have a very good idea how building materials are designed) For got sakes, I just bought a farm house on a couple acres that was build in 1904. Ya, i have re modeled it to be more modernized, but it was totally livable when we bought it.

"not interested in discussing how realistic things are in an alternate universe post-apoc game w/ talking mutants and ghouls" -Pete Hines

I normally can suspend disbelief for the sake of a good game, but once I learned that gasoline has a shelf life measured in a single digit number of years it was a serious blow. I wish I didnt know.

It's all suspension of disbelief.

Some historical monuments and such need frequent repairs and maintenance and would never be able to survive a nuclear war and 200+ years of neglect and still be in the shape they are in the game.

What does gasoline have to do with this? Gas in the Fallout universe was extremely limited before the Great War and was the leading cause of the Resource Wars. Older Fallouts showed signs of it being like $8000/gal or something absurd like that. That's why cars went to fusion. And the generators we can say were diesel if you want. Which they can make run on vegetable oil

What I find strange is all the sky scraqers that remain standing. I mean you would think Boston would be hit by at least one nuke, most likely more than one. Then add in 200 years of environmental damage from all those constant RAD storms. They must have really come up with some really good building material for anything to be left at all. Go out in the country and look at all the single story buildings totally destroyed and yet most of these would not have been in the direct blast area.

Also let’s look at the biology side of things. Yea I can see intense radiation causing all kinds of strange mutations but in just 200 years they would not have had time to mutate into common family’s, such as mole rats.

So is any of this real? Ummm no but it is only a game setting, don't get too carried away with reality, just play and have fun.

Please don't look for logical integrity in BGS's Fallouts, it's a waste of time. They take a very "gamy" approach to these things.

Fallout 4's setting feels a lot more "picked over" then Fallout 3 did.

For that matter, consider that all locations in Fallout 4 have had 200 years worth of residents of some form or another in them. So there's a give and a take to a lot of places. Which is how I explain the presence of so much ammunition in office buildings.

Same.

Well, thankfully he's just the PR guy


Here's something else. The material used in nuclear weapons and reactors is not stable, and decays quite quickly. In other words, realistically nothing in any Fallout could cause a nuclear explosion. Still radioactive, yes, but not able to blow up.
And of course a reactor (like the ones in cars) can never blow up like a nuclear bomb in the first place.

Seriously, though..... the city & landscape as it is, is more interesting than if everything was 95% collapsed & rotted into the ground. So it's fine with me.

I have to agree with the OP.

As much as I love Bethesda, this is not the first time in recent games that they have made a impractical large jump in time. Skyrim jump from Oblivion left me thinking similar thoughts.