True, but really the people of the Capital Wasteland didn't really do any rebuilding.....their one big project was to move all the planes from a airport to a hole in the ground with a nuclear bomb in it......genius was not available in any great supply in the Captial Wasteland, unlike Boston.

I'm pretty sure if you talk to Zimmerman in the fallout 3 replicated man quest he tells you the Commonwealth is just as bad if not worse than the capital wasteland save the institute. Being such a small state I couldn't see Massachusetts being devastated but not boston

We saw it get nuked. There was atleast one blast.

Targeting in the Fallout Universe seems to be a bit more primitive than in ours. They (at least the Chinese, anyway) seem to favor taking a shotgun approach and pepper their targets with a lot of small nukes. This would pretty much royally screw everything up, but total destruction would be hit or miss.

It's 437 miles... quite a bit

Thanks for all the feedback. Interesting to read and consider.

So then assuming Boston was hit as hard as DC I wonder why DC never really recovered and remained in ruins while Boston looks to be in decent and working conditions. I guess the Institute probably plays a large role in that as where DC did not have a dedicated and well-established faction post-bombs. Just gangs, raiders, and Super Mutants galore.

We don't really know what shape Boston is in. What's in the trailer is a pretty small amount. And most looks to be inside a settlement at fenway

The Institute may have pulled a Mr. House and at least partially protected Boston. You can never figure out the Chinese because, as everyone knows, they are inscrutable, so they may not have even targeted Boston and it may have just gotten unlucky with a few nukes that got lost. We won't know until launch and maybe not even then.

In the trailer we can see Fenway in the background during the shot of the Massachusetts State House, as well as the areas on either side, and both look FAR more intact then anything in D.C., or most of Vegas even.

The other brief glimpses we get around the Paul Revere statue, the Custom House tower, and Fenway itself all show the city to be in fairly good condition.

And that stuff is in the core of the city, the place likely to get hit the hardest.

There were places in DC like Georgetown and tocoma that were in pretty good shape. But it stands to reason more bombs would have been dropped on DC.

The death claw part of the trailer is the simplest evidence that it was bombed.

Which makes me wonder which part of Boston is where the deathclaw was shown.

Yeah he said something to the effect of the Commonwealth is mostly blasted nothing, just like the Capitol Wasteland.

Most major cities within the U.S. would be blasted hellholes... If not for SCIENCE!

It is 200 plus years after the bombs, not five years.

This is one of the big reasons that Fallout 3 did not fit in with any of the other fallout games. In all of the games besides fallout 3 there were areas that were heavily radiated that were extremely lethal but held really good loot, while people lived and rebuilt communities in areas that were not bombed. You could buy into the idea that "The Glow" was a place full of great stuff but would melt your face off while "The Hub" was a town put together by survivors trying to scratch their way back to civilization. It all made sense and followed the in game rules of their world.

Then you have Fallout 3 where all (most) food is scavenged from old supermarkets, water sources are all lethally radiated, people live in bomb craters or on wrecked ships floating on irradiated rivers of death, and they have done this for the last 200 plus years. It just fails to hold suspension of disbelief as compared to the rest of the series.

It would have been better for Fallout 3 to be placed in a timeline that happened prior to fallout 1. Since that die has already been cast the best I can hope for is that Fallout 4 addresses these concerns and make their world have livable areas (protected via SCIENCE or whatever) and then some heavily radiated high loot areas. I especially hope that they follow FNV's lead and make the interactions between the factions a major point of the story. I want to be able to work with the Institute and hunt down Replicants like Deckerd, I want to be able to make a bad call and retire people.

In Fallout 3 it was established that the Commonwealth is a land supposedly even more war stricken and destroyed than the Capital Wasteland. I'm assuming that the reason it was this way had to do with Boston being a primary target due to the scientific capacity of the city in the Fallout Universe. I hope that this time they have an excuse other than "the bombs were intercepted" because it's starting to feel like a cheap card that lets them build intact locations without a proper explanation in the lore.

Neither of these are true.

Scavenged food makes up the minority of food eaten in Fallout 3, and every major settlement, Megaton, Rivet City, Tenpenny Tower, has a water purification device. Others have water purification devices as well, Eden mentions smaller home made ones held by wastelanders over the radio.

Most of the food comes from

-Brahmin, of which there are more domesticated Brahmin being raised in pens in Fo3 then there are in NV.

-Animals such as mirelurks, yao guai, mole rats, and wild dogs, who are hunted by the randomly encountered hunter groups for meat.

-Other animals such as iguanas, squirrels, and radroaches, whose food items can be found on numerous NPCs in the game.

-Two kinds of mutfruit, which can also be found basically everywhere.

-Punga from Point Lookout, which reaches the C.W. in large numbers from a variety of people including Tobar the Ferryman.

-Rivet City, who grows fresh food and exchanges it for scrap metal to fix their city.

Bomb didn't make the crater. The crater was actually made by the crash of the plane carrying the bomb.

I'm gonna have to stop you there. Domesticated Brahmin being raised in pens more so than in NV? That's seriously pushing it and I might even say lying. I could only recall one location that had brahmin (up to 3 I believe), whereas NV had a bountiful amount of them across the wastes, even with Bighorners.

-hunting animals alone cannot support large communities that have a daily-demand. You must build at least farms to support such numbers. I don't recall anyone in FO3 even TRYING to farm.

Everything else is nice, but that's still not enough to handle the growing demand of human communities, which makes it all pretty hard to believe. Meanwhile NV has (had) multiple successful farms growing out, along with a large amount of livestock to boot, holding the suspension of disbelief stronger than Fo3 ever could.

P.S I don't think Mutfruits are considered a great source of eating, and I don't recall them being common. Pungas are good, but Tobar? I doubt he would have enough to sell to the wasteland population, Nor does he want to work at acquiring their seeds and planting them in DC soil.

The blast is one thing, but then you have the massive heat and not to mention the incredible shock wave. I wouldn′t feel safe at that distance.

There are

-4 outside the Regulator HQ.

-3 in Canterbury Commons.

-3 in Arefu.

-2 in The Republic of Dave.

-2 in the Charnel House raider camp.

-1 in Paradise Falls

-1 in Megaton

OFC this doesn't count all the ones being used by the 4 big merchants, the base game's randomly encountered generic wasteland merchants, the ones added in Broken Steel's water caravans, or the 2 or 3 herds of wild brahmin that exist in the C.W., since those aren't being raised as a food source.

New Vegas has Brahmin being raised in pens for food in

-3 in Novac

-1 outside Raul's shack.

All the others are being used as caravan animals by the Crimson Caravan Company, and not for food.

-The communities in the C.W. aren't large. They have a combined population about the total of The Boneyard in the Fo1/2era.

-http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Hilltop_Farm_ruins

These people tried it, then got killed by raiders, and their "farms" only amounted to radioactive plants and mucky water. That's kind of a big point of Fo3, its impossible to farm because the water is radioactive, and the ground is equally so.

-Unfortunately NV has a massive plot hole in that all the farms, except the ones in Goodsprings, and I think Nellis has one, all come from the NCR, or use NCR made/repaired things like the Vegas water system. Same with the brahmin, 99% of them are from the NCR's Crismson Caravan Company. Which leads to the question....... what did they eat for the 200+ years before the NCR came into the Mojave region and gave the all these farms and Brahmin since the Mojave lacks the resources needed to handle such a population itself?

-Mutfruit can be found in the merchant lists of every food seller in the C.W., including

--Jenny Stahl of the Brass Lantern in Megaton.

--Gary Staley of Gary's Galley in Rivet City.

--Margaret Primrose of Cafe Beau Monde in Tenpenny Tower.

--Doc Hoff's merchant caravan.

It's one of the singular most commonly sold food items in the game.

-OFC he doesn't plant them in D.C., that would be pointless as they wouldn't grow, just like everything else that isn't grass or mutfruit in the C.W. And punga is so popular it can be found in The Pitt, so long as both DLC are installed at the same time. What do you thing the smugglers are smuggling? Punga is the only thing anyone owns in Point Lookout.

There's more than that, you forgot Matthews Animal Husbandry Farm, which has multiple Brahmins and calf, though malnourished. They were raised in pens and most likely for consumption.

There's also the Grub N' Gulp which is independent of the Crimson Caravan (though not sure if independent from NCR), and they have 3 Brahmin.

I thought the Crimson Caravan was holding the rest of those brahmins for food to trade to people, but that makes more sense. Guess you're right, I apologize, Fo3 does have more brahmin.

Not counted because its abandoned, and has been for some time. I could count the 3 brahmin in the hilltop farm ruins in Fo3 by that logic as well.

Always believed those were for transport, but they may have been for food, so ill count that.

Has no one else noticed that the bright scenes in the trailer seem to be pre-apocalypse? Take the house for example where it switched back and forth between before the bomb and after. I think it is entirely possible that the bright scenes that we saw are part of the opening video for the game or perhaps the "tutorial." It's like in Fallout 3 where you start out growing up in the Vault and then get into the real game play once you leave. It would be interesting to have the intro occur during the nuclear attacks and provide some sort of pre-war preface for some of the aspects of the game.

Also, on a separate note, I was always under the impression that the Institute was sort of a post-war entity. You know, like a think tank or research company that survived the blasts and developed into what it is in the Fallout universe. Everyone else seems to think they were, even before the war, some sort of major, influential powerhouse... any sort of reference for this? Am I just way off?

House went to school at The Institute at one point before the war, so we know its a pre-war organization.

Good call. Maybe it's like MIT and transitioned into a group/society/faction after the war?

It IS MiiT, Fallout just has a different name for it.