IMO, the crazed ghouls are ferals. I see no dispute about that. To be clear here the issue is why they have gotten so fast. There has always been ferals.

So they can either give a good explanation or just forget they were ever fast, make em all slow, some of them crawlers, some of them still with an ability to wield weapons, some of them with their limbs rotted off.... Not sure if I expect to see either but we still don't know if those "ferals" seen in the trailer really were ferals. They look neither like the original ferals or 3/NV ferals.

1/2. Not really, because the only "change" was a real world one, in lore, due to retcons, they were always that way.

3. Yes, they were. hat's how retcons work in every series. Fallout is not somehow exception from the function of retcons.

As for the whole "burn victim" thing. That's most likely just a stylistic choice to help the player better tell the kinds of ghouls apart, so they dont accidentally shoot at a non-feral ghoul and screw something up.

It's like the difference between skeletons in Oblivion and Skyrim. They use to be tanks now they fall apart easy. It's like the opposite of ferals.

I like ghouls myself, especially those of the feral variety. Happy to see them making a reappearance. It is strange that there are suddenly so many of them compared to the original games, but I chalk that up to simply updating the series. Nearly any series, if it goes on long enough, undergoes both subtle and overt changes over time. Look at any long-running tv series (like Supernatural) and you can easily see where the series started messing with It's own lore and just adding things completely contradicting to earlier established material. It happens.

I say embrace it! Nitpicking only gives me a headache, I try to avoid it unless the changes are utterly drastic you can't ignore 'em.

To be fair, the original game also treated basically every ghoul as having come from Bakersfield, which never made a whole lot of sense, and even the devs were conflicted about the creation of ghouls, with same saying FEV + radiation, while others said it was just radiation. Ghoul lore has been screwed since the beginning.

Though, the increased presence of ferals is likely the result of more and more "sane" ghouls minds eventually starting to degrade. IIRC, one doctor in Fallout 3 said it would happen to all ghouls eventually.

I like them. But then again I am playing on the pc. I can change all the ghouls into raiders, then use the ghoul assets in another fashion. Maby a biological weapon release?

This.

And not just applied to ghouls, either.

I don't have a strong opinion on feral ghouls one way or the other. They're just meh to me.

I like them, their fun to shoot.

He ever said that. He said don't be bigoted to none feral ghouls but kill feral ghouls if you want.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hevyrgTJrQ

I don't have a problem with feral ghouls in F4; I used to have fun hunting them in F3 and F:NV.

Are we sure that what we see in the trailer are actually Feral Ghouls? They could be the failed results of the Institutes' android/cyborg/clone experiments, for example.