Oblivion's literature & background information is pathetically scarce compared to Morrowind. It took me ages in Morrowind to find all 36 (!) books of Vivec's sermons and all Mystery of Talara ones. It's perhaps Bethesda continuing an unfortunate trend - but of course this is their first Fallout game so perhaps they'll deliver with FO4 (if it's made at all).

What i dont like on Fallout 3 is that the people of the capital wasteland seem to be awkwardly well informed about the past. Just as if they all went through highschools which dont exist anymore.

This wasn't so with the people on the west coast in F1 and F2 for obvious reasons as they (Except some ghouls of course) were born over 150 years later into different world.
How many of them ever mentioned the USA or the war ? Nearly nobody. Why should they ? Its gone. They care about whats existing now.

They dont know what countries or nations are. USA is nothing but three letters to them which may read here and there IF they can read at all.

Remember the tribes from F2 ?

But people in Fallout 3 know it all and talk as if all of them walked out of a Vault yesterday, went to school and had lots of history lessons or the war happened yesterday.

- They know about the war as they constantly talk like "Before the war this was ..." and "Whats left of......." as if they would know what was before the war, what "the war" actually was and what was once there and is gone now.
People would not talk like that after 200 years in a different world.


- Three Dog tells me about a beached aircraft carrier. ...Yeah sure. What does he know what an aircraft or a carrier is ?
Im sure he saw and heard plenty about them in his life. Knows what they are, knows the name and what they were good for. The only thing still missing is he telling me the name and a little story about its service in the u.s navy.

It would be nothing but a huge mysterious piece of floating steel in the water which somebody must have built and put there for some unknown purpose a long time ago. The best thing most people could do is give a nice guess what this might had been in ancient times.


Only people from Vaults can still have that much knowledge as they have access to it and have a working school system.

But it doesnt seem that any of the generations living in the Capital Wasteland has been born in a Vault. Maybe their ancestors came from them. But without a school system and the conditions they live in its rather unlikely that there was much time or emphasis for telling children about "200 years ago" history. Hell , i bet they even have 100% literacy rate

Go ask someone what Stonehenge in England was good for and when it was built and by whom.

You will meet a lot of researchers which have nice theories which sometimes contradict each other and they all will say: "I cant really tell you with certainty"
And these people have access to measures of research and history knowledge which people in post-apocalyptica cant even imagine. Nonetheless even that cant help them to determine a definite answer for your questions as the knowledge about Stonehenge was not passed on and is lost forever.


If the Fallout Bible should ever get continued , the one who's going to write the new chapters will go through a lot of blood sweat and tears while trying to invent convincing explanations for all this not very well imagined stuff in Fallout 3. LOL

Ah, I was just bugging the guy for being so uptight

Anyways...to me, I personally see Black Isle continunity as being seperate from Bethesda continunity.



It does make you wonder. Of all the Vaults in F3, only two didn't end horribly. And neither were releasing people into the wasteland.

Where are all these people coming from? Nearly all the other Vaults were massive failures, where everyone pretty much died. If they came from elsewhere, why did they decide to stop and settle in a Super Mutant/raider infested territory?

And good point about their level of education. To add to that, it seems like there are scientists running around all over.

Yeah.

Well, you see, thats what i consider to be a game atmosphere killing piece of story writing.

We dont need Three Dog to be a character who knows what an aircraft carrier is to tell us THAT Rivet City is a beached aircraft carrier in advance.
Why not let players go there to find out by themselves ? That would had been way cooler.

You know, the "WOW That looks like a beached aircraft carrier !" "How cool is that !" effect.
"They have no idea what they are actually living on but i do. Cool i wonder what its story is!"

But nope. They had to spoil it with that dialogue and with that concept art released months before the release of F3.

Imagine a ape from "Planet of the Apes" telling Charlton Heston about the remains of the Statue of Liberty in the forbidden zone before he went there. LOL That would had been a great ending for the movie right ? People would had said "yeah.....thats nice". instead of "OH WOW! IT WAS EARTH ALL THE TIME AND THERE MUST HAD BEEN ATOMIC WAR OR SOMETHING!"

Or its 1980, you stand in line in front of a cinema and want to watch "The Empire strikes back" and Todd Howard comes out and says "Wow thats so cool. You have to see that movie because Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father!" :clap:

The same with Megaton. They were beating us to death with Megaton and its bomb making it the most boring quest and place in the entire game. All players were like "been there ,done that" regarding Megaton months before the game was in their hands.

Thats like a hollywood movie trailer that shows all the great scenes of a film in 3 three minutes. You've already been spoiled the most exciting scenes of the movie before you even got close to the cinema.

And thats what people complain about when they say that Fallout 3 does not hit the right Fallout atmosphere. You actually think that someone like Bethesda who has experience with RPG games and their importance of story-telling would not make such beginner mistakes.

I have to agree, they have too many changes to the basic "fundementals". No tribals, radiation and NPc education like the bombs hit a decade ago instead of 200 years. No progress on cities. Towns with a popoulation 2? How The white house is a crater but all the building right beside it have very little damage. Stuff like that.

Yeah, I liked talking to Abraham Washington at Rivet City about American History, for example. (All the little distortions and whatnot - and this is probably the most well-informed scholar in the whole DC area.)

The whole "everyone knows Rivet City is an old aircraft carrier" thing I can sort of understand. It does have a history as a scientific outpost, and according to Pinkerton was started by the remnants of the Naval Research or whatever (more likely the descendants of the remnants of the Naval Research Center, I suppose.) All it would really take for word to spread would be one of the settlers going up to a scientist during a lunch break or something, and asking "hey, this is a neat ship - what exactly is it anyway?"

But I do get your point.

Well, they did with Oblivion. And then it got better with Shivering Isles, which I kind of hoped was the start of something better. But deeeeerp... :meh:
Anyway, I hope the next time the story writers check the lore much, much, much more often and thoroughly and don't bend it too much. They can create rich and more consistent worlds, as they did with TES. Next step, better dialogue writer monkeys! :ahhh:

Of course FO3 is canon. It's just contradictory and not very well thought out canon. It's official, though some wouldn't agree.


Ahh, good old ignorance for the lulz.

The problem is that Fallout "lore" pales in comparison with the TES lore, when it comes to depth, volume of material & experience. TES lore is basically Middle-Earth of gaming. Keep in mind that FO3 is Bethesda's first venture into the Fallout universe, it's basically a testing ground for later material - which explains why FO3's contents are a melting pot of old Fallout ideas. I hope FO4 will be completely fresh and deal with for instance the Commonwealth - I want no more Enclave, BoS, deathclaws and what not.

HA! That's right. The Commonwealth. One of the few factions they make of their own, and we don't even get to see them. Just three NPCs. Bleh.

Sure, Talon and the Regulators are new, but they don't do anything. Just there for you to shoot.

Speaking of the regulators, why hide them if you're good, and only allowing you to see them if you have the Lawbringer perk? Why don't they hunt down other bad guys aside from you? I mean, if you never take that perk, and are good or neutral, you will not see a single regulator.

TES games consistent? Wha? Monsters, armor, weapons, everything looks different every time they release a new game. The TES series is anything but consistent.

Why hide the regulators?

You need to remember: these guys supply what little "law" there is in the wasteland. It's probably all they can do to prevent a large, neon sign popping up saying REGULATORS HERE! AIM YOUR FAT-MEN HERE! The fewer people who know about them, the easier it is for them to work.

But we don't ever see evidence of their work unless we're being bad. If you're a good guy, and not a Law Bringer, you might as well think that they don't exist. And that's boring. Even if it was just the odd raider corpse, or Talon company corpse in the wasteland, with their finger missing...although something more would be better. I felt like F3 was there just to say "yeah, we're connected to the Fallout world, see? We got BoS, we got the Enclave, Deathclaws, Super Mutants...maybe in the next game you'll see some new people..."

The lore is generally consistent. The history doesn't change with each game.

It's normal that the elements you mention look different due to evolution in graphics technology.

The appearances of those elements weren't just little different, they were very different. And the lore is very inconsistent, Cyrodiil was supposed to be tropical but in Oblivion it was generic high fantasy woodland and plains. I don't think Bethesda fully grasps the concept of continuity.

They probably realized a cotinuity mistake in Oblivion; the Empire is highly greek/roman in appearance, and people from Cyrodiil often have latin names. Bethesda probaly made the environment to match the "feel" of the Cyrodiillic people.

Honestly, wouldn't it seem out of place to see a leigonnaire in full roman-esque attire in the middle of a tropical rainforest? Bethesda probably made the change that the least amount of people would notice; change the people in Cyrodiil to match the tropics, or to change Cyrodiil itself to match the people. However, if there are any Vets of The Elder Scrolls: Arena out there, can you tell us how Cyrodiil looked in that game?

Yes, people always come up with Cyrodiil when they're thrashing Oblivion. The lore doesn't mention Cyrodiil is tropical, it mentions "most of Cyrodiil is endless jungle" and imo "jungle" is open to interpretation - could refer to the large forest lands & swamplands, for instance, that make up at least half of Cyrodiil.

What about the stuff that was cut, would be cut, or could be added before the game was released...? I didn't follow development that closely but how close was Interplay's Fallout 3 to being completed?

Fallout 3 is not canon. Honestly, this trend of remaking classics(ie: James Bond etc.) is nothing more than dismal marketing ploy, attempting to dumb down a good product, and make it more "accessible" to the non-fan base of the Fallout Series.

Jungle means an area of dense vegetation in a hot climate.

It doesn't have to mean tropical but it does exclude a temperate european climate as depicted in Oblivion.


And the difference in climate from the previous in-game book depiction of Cyrodiil and what we see in Oblivion is only part of the problem.

The previous lore depicted Cyrodiil as an 'exotic' place nothing like a standard medieval lotr (movie) inspired cliche.

Well, it could have made sense to have colovia depicted that way... but only to contrast with Nibenay

And of course the imperial city is a crushing disappointment

TES Lore is five doors down and to the right. This is the Fallout Universe over here. I think some of you are lost. Back on topic please.

My guess is that was a setup for Fallout 4. I'm actually going to be suprised if you don't end up visiting them in the next game.

Just on a side note - I actually agree with Bethesda recycling a lot of stuff from the originals. It might be a lot of "more of the same" for us... "veterans." But they also needed to introduce the setting to a whole ton of new players. I kind of see Fallout 3 as a bit of primer, to some extent. I'd imagine the next installment is where they're going to let loose with their own ideas. (Say what you want about Bethesda, but I have a feeling they have a whole lot of stuff planned and kind of held themselves back this time out.)

(And - let's face it - if/when Bethesda starts introducing their own factions there's going to be a lot of people who aren't going to like them. I think it's going to be interesting to see how many of the people who thought there wasn't enough new stuff in FO3 are going to be among those who cry foul at the new factions. )

Well they could have introduced those old elements in a less stupid way then!

It's been...what, well over 100 years since Fallout 1? Left over muties from the Masters Army could have made the trek to DC. They could have had an existance much like the Krogan have in Mass Effect, tough warriors with no future. Imagine the story telling they could have pulled off there.

Of course, that would alter Lyons actions. We could have had an opposing techno savants that were also slavers. High tech slavers! That would have been pretty damn awesome. You could still have Lyons go native. Maybe write that he was once a slave out west before getting freed and ending up in the Brotherhood? And because of that experience, feels the need to strike out more then the Brotherhood intended him to against these techno slavers. Then Paradise Falls could have been WAAAAAAY crazy. Imagine the slaver deflied power armors they could have scavenged, how they would have modified them to fit their slaving ways.

And the kicker? Maybe their leader was a Super Mutant who believes there could be a supply of FEV in the Capital Wasteland, and that's what the Mutants are looking for, so they can have a future. And he's undergone some of the enhancements that Frank Horrigan did. Suddenly, the Mutants have a goal that leads to their survival as a species (and maybe, if they find one of the many scientists that seem to infest the Capital Wasteland, help them find a cure for FEV sterility so that the Master's plan can be enacted).

As for the Enclave, they could have been doing the same thing the Brotherhood is. Seeking Pre war tech to strengthen themselves. And during their salvage ops, they learn about Project Purity, a project designed to remove all the nasty stuff from the water (But not radiation, that's silly, and another topic ), so that people can have access to clean water that they don't have to filter themselves with homemade filtration devices.

That, I think, would have been super awesome. That way, you still get the elements introduced from the first games, but in more logical ways that don't have players of the first games going "Why the hell is this faction even here?

The story of the East Coast Brotherhood is actually really good.

You know, having a Brotherhood expedition travel to the east in search for pre-war tech and then having them abandon their original task because of Elder Lyons inability to leave the helpless people of the capital wasteland on their own. Then the logical split resulting in the creation of the Outcasts.

Thats cool and i think even Black Isle could not have written a better story.


But the Supermutants ? They dont have any story at all. They just walked out of their Vault and started a procreation rampage. Why ? What drives them ?
They have no "Master" afterall.

FEV now suddenly in the hands of Vault-Tec ? DC Supermutants have no connection to the East Coast ones and were created seperately and by accident ? Now thats shallow and uninspired.
The end of Fallout 1 gave the perfect explanation for Supermutant presence in the east (...The defeated remains of the Master's Army travelled eastwards...)

Why didn't they made use of that ? Thats a hundred times better than to involve Vault-Tec into the FEV project and make the F3 supermutants faceless baddies without real agenda.

Yeah, I kind of wondered why they didn't just go with that. Considering that Supermutants, where they come from, and what they're up to has kind of been a central and well-documented aspect of the earlier games - it strikes me as odd that they're just kind of plopped into DC with little explanation. To some extent I might be able to give them the benefit of the doubt that they wanted it to remain a "mystery" to be uncovered in a later game - but I have my doubts about that. And especially - like you said - when there's a perfectly workable explanation they could have used already. The Supermutants in DC could have been just be the remnants of the Master's army that kept driving East until they had nowhere else to go.

I have a feeling that someone on the team really wanted to show off those failed experiments that you run into in Vault 87. And everything sort of worked backwards from there. "I want to show what it looks like when the mutation goes wrong. So I need some place where they're making their own Supermutants. Let's put that in a Vault, and say they also had FEV. So that we can show off those models we've been working on."