It's bugged me for years. Just wondering if I'm in the minority.

Do you mean the revelation that the Vaults were never meant to save anyone and that they were social experiments instead? No, I thought that revelation was pretty cool actually.

Vaults being just what they were generally thought to be, i.e. a safe place for portions of the poplace to wait out the nuclear winter before repopulating the surface, then to me that's just, ho hum, boring. The Vaults are then all the same except for geographical location, and not much beyond that.

But the Vaults instead being social experiments and not meant to save anyone makes me wonder ... When I come across Vault X in my explorations, what am I going to find happening inside this one? Who did these experiments? Why? Where are they now? etc etc There's just more mystery and intrige this way. Also, since they were not meant to save anyone, and still managed to make communities after the war, like Vault City, it's much more impressive to me that they ended up doing so on their own.

Edit: Ok, now I'm confused as to why the OP quoted me in his reply but then didn't say anything themselves ....

Interesting point of View. To me, I find it scarier to think that the Vaults were meant to protect people from nuclear war, but that (in many cases) they just couldn't get the job done. I think it is more in the spirit of the game to find out many people who did all the right thngs to protect themselves were still overwhelmed; that there is a randomness to survival no matter how well prepared someone is.

The social experiment idea just seemed a little corny to me. Maybe I could have gotten into it if there had been a more grand scheme behind it, but the idea that the government would spend billions of dollars and man hours constructing massive Vaults as social experiments just because they kinda wanted to see what would happen feels thin to me.

Well, i like it. It shows you that beneath the happy-go-lucky 50's facade hides the real worlds ugly, cynical face.
Bleak? It's the apocalypse, goddamit!

To be honest, I thought the change in story was a lot better than saying 'the bombs went off, and we just crammed 300 people in this random, out-of-the-way vault on a world map where there only happened to be 2 or 3 of them and that this small, tiny amount of people were supposed to restart civilization.

If I were one of those people, I would probably come to the conclusion that some social experiment like that was going on.

Yeah, it was really a game-ruining revelation. It just seemed to trivialize everything...and it also seemed so incredibly unrealistic. Why would the US government agree to such a warped plan? They would be far stronger if they used the vaults as a base to recover their full strength.

I read an interview somewhere - perhaps one of the Fallout Bibles? - in which one of the dev team admitted it had been a mistake, added in because it 'sounded cool' at the time, without giving it much thought.

I tend to retcon it out of the series.

The vaults did protect people from nuclear war though. A shady organization manipulating the people and resources going into the vaults wouldn't prevent them from working as advertised. They were not extensive enough to really safeguard much, intended more to keep humanity from going extinct than build an impenetrable military base.

The big question is- If there was NO nuclear exchange, would those people have still been sealed away thinking they're being protected?

Corny? Maybe.

Game breaker? No.

For me, it gave a depth to the Fallout world that wasn't there in the first game. Frankly, it showed that the world was horribly messed up BEFORE the bombs dropped.

Vaults promised people a way to return to business as usual when the radiation cleared. What we see is perhaps the cleansing by fire wasn't as bad a deal as it appeared to be. Remnants of the "old way" wanted to purge the world with bio-warfare. Everyone else wanted to rebuild.

Besides, that's what makes a game great....when it leaves you thinking after you finish playing it.

I HATED it! I loved all the Vaults! I love the thing that they were all the same but with different numbers! I love that kind of thing! But when I discovered they were experiments, I was so depressed It it weren't for Vaults, I would like Fallout a bit less than what I like now

Presumably yes, they would have been. Since the Vault-Tech social experiments were already being built and put into place by the time the Great War happened.



Really? According to Vault-Tech's ads, Vault doors were supposed to close and keep out the radiation and other poisons. However, the Vault at Necropolis where the ghouls originated was set up so that it's doors would NOT close and thus the dwellers there were purposely exposed as part of the experiments. The Vaults were advertised to open after a certain amount of time so the surface could be repopulated, however some of the vaults went against this advertising and were set up by Vault-Tech to open at different time intervals.

Although most of the Vaults do seem to have protected their dwellers, most of the Vaults do not seem to work "as advertised".

Folks were only supposed to head to the vaults when the Sirens went off.

I didn't like the whole part of making a few spaceships as a "get out of jail free card", even if it made sense in the context of the Vault Experiment/Project Safehouse were the Vaults were set as sociological experiments to test humanity's resilience and prepare the survivors for deep space.
I would have prefered the vault experiment remained a sadistic experience thought by crazy pre war scientists and nothing about no space ships!

yeah the spaceship thing kind of ruined the mood. I mean ok i kind of understand the experiments because the power got to the governments head so they were playing god. But the space ship idea sounded like a rushed excuses to justify the their madness. I mean common......a spaceship?! to travel to a different planet?! What they found another planet to live in? That means the must have a space traveling technology?

Well, you've got to remember what project safehouse prediced. Mutually assured Destruction was enevitable, much of the planet would be uninhabitable.

The US government/Enclave could build a rudimentry space vessel - They could today, its not particularly hard, just not particularly useful. It wouldnt be fast, running at small factions of the speed of light, so you would be relying on the people inside not ever setting foot on land in their lifetimes... It would be generations down the line that would do that, 200 years or so later.

The vaults were designed to work out what problems might occur on such a journey.

In the end, the earth didnt end up as the enclave feared, and they figured they could rebuild.