sir if your not going to calm down willingly then we are going to have to make you...he who remains......get the jacket.....

My guess is that the PC's home was somewhat out of the way being the secluded looking suburbia it was before the fallout event. i.e. it was far enough from the Glowing Sea region which was ground zero of the bombsite (and resulting nuclear plume) we saw in the E3 trailer. Which could mean the PC's home was probably spared being ramsacked by raiders and speculators alike. Because either of these factions wouldn't think twice to use a fatboy, grenade launchers, energy weapons etc. to take out Codsworth so they could scrap him for parts.

So other than the home's doors/windows being blown out by that mushroom cloud shown in the trailer, the rest of the house's structure was pretty much intact. Codsworth may have been able to take refuge in one of the back rooms like the nursery or bathroom they showed us. Which -- since he was immune to the radiation levels--was how his physical condition was relatively undamaged. But as to the energy source issue, I'd be willing to bet the robot had a built in energy circuit breaker somewhere that would conveniently let him hibernate until "needed" in situations by a human NPC. And perhaps a movement sensor to detect motion nearby/outside the house would trigger the robot out of it's hibernation state.

Welp, enough of the theorizing. I'm done overthinking the violations of energy conservation in a hypothetical situation in what is clearly a futuristic fantasy world.

It will be interesting to see how Beth opts to spin doctor this little bit of conflicting detail....or not.

You can't catch what isn't real. O_o

You know what they could've done? They could've had a robot maintenance pod in the house which gets sealed up when the robot goes inside and cannot be opened by anyone but those that have the code and those which knows how to override the code. Robot wanders around for a year or so after the nukes hit, realizes that it isn't going to find its master, goes into the pod and seals itself in. When you find the pod you get a descriptive pop-up that says that it looks like the hull has seen some damage and that the keypad is gone. This implies that people 'have tried' to get into it but failed because of the strength of the pod. It would also help explain why other pods out there has not been breached in 2 centuries, because they are built damn fine to protect the robot from intrudes. You go find a new keypad from some other pod and when you install it you can enter the code and open it up, at which point the robot will come out to greet you. Though since power has been cut I guess you need to create or find a power source (like a battery) so that the pod will reactivate again.

I'm not asking for some kind of extreme scientific crap to explain everything into the most excruciating detail possible.

All I'm asking for is that the writing makes sense. What I just wrote? It makes sense. It's logical. It's sensible. AND they can still have the robot butler.

I'm an amateur and I outperformed Bethesda when it came to writing a sensible reason for how the robot could still be around and how you'd get access to it.

And that is sad.

That an amateur can outperform people that were hired as writers.

Bethesda does not get to be excused from bad writing. It is that simple. "It's just a game" is an excuse. "But it's not a realistic setting" is an excuse. "You're taking it too seriously" is an excuse. So what if it is just a game, so what if it is not a hyper realistic setting, so what if I am nitpicking. It doesn't make the writing good.

The topic of discussion here is how Codsworth survived for 200 years. The answer to that is bad writing so that he could conveniently survive for whatever reason Bethesda has for him to survive. I have yet to be given any reason to think otherwise.

[edit]

I'm basing all of this on what I've seen in the E3 video though, if new information is released that helps explain things then I will obviously have to tear my own argument asunder and build up a new one from scratch. What I'm basing my argument on is that the first time the player character encounters him again is at the old neighbourhood where Coddie just kinda... Hangs around... Even offers you to cook you something, as if what happened in the past 2 centuries doesn't matter all too much.

I don't know why, but I still can't stop chuckling at "Cogsworth".

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that there's a basemant in the house (possible hidden or sealed) with a maintenance pod like the ones we see in FO3, where Codsworth has been holed up for all these years. If he shut down right after the events (like a pre-programmed daytime shutdown when the family leaves the house) and then he reactivated when our PC approached the house again.

In answer to several inquiries, which I couldn't seem to get the multiquote to work for, DC is built on a swamp. It's part of the Rock Creek Basin which never dries up and all rivers flow all the time, even during the worst droughts. However, last I heard (and it was many years ago) you can't drink the water from the Potomac River (gotta be treated). In F3, it was radioactive as well, which didn't help it I'm sure.

http://www.explorenaturalcommunities.org/parks-places/rock-creek-park/natural-history/physical-setting/watersheds

Kind of what I'm thinking, he went to sleep and for some reason didn't wake up. I don't remember but did the PC have his pip boy in the E3 footage? That could've been what awoke 'Stupid". Who knows they can spin it anyway really. As long as I can dump him ASAP that's all I care about. And dog is a delicacy in certain countries. Shows you how I feel about this lol

Yeah I'm with you on that. I'm not dragging some mutt around the wasteland except if I need food. In FO3 I took Dogmeat with me and he died in like the 3rd encounter with some Super Mutants and I was like "Huh..." and moved on.

Or any scavenger with a big hammer/crowbar/blowtorch. Or a bored raider with a grenade. Or.... etc, etc, etc.

Basically, yes - in a "realistic" setting, anything useful & unattended would have long been scavenged up by people & used. Especially with the "200 years" thing. But a game world where the only place you'll find anything is in inhabited camps (because everything useful has been scavenged already) would be boring as hell.

And I'm not so obsessed with "realism" that I'd rather a game be tedious & boring, rather than fun. (Big part of why I have no understanding of the popularity of the original The Sims game. That game was all about the Awful Tedium & Responsibilities of Real Life. Gotta get enough sleep, to get up on time, to shower & cook breakfast, to get to work on time, to get a promotion, to earn enough money, to maybe someday save up for a bigger TV/house/car, that you don't use because you have to spend the rest of your time cleaning the house. How the $@#& was that a popular game? That's all the crap I play games to escape.)

I think The Sims is one of the greatest RPG's out there actually.

how can a game you have no role in be a role playing game?

Cogsworth is OP

Because robot with fusion batteries?

Is it cogsworth or codsworth?

well, actually, it DOES mean that.

an rpg, by definition, is a game in which YOU play A role. not "you control a bunch of characters that play roles in that game". by your definition, lemmings is an rpg

edit: and btw, you can sit back and watch characters in skyrim all day. how boring this gets just depends on how worked out their ai is. (in fact, it'd be perfectly possible to do something sims-like in skyrim, from a modder's perspective. would likely be tedious to control with skyrim's ui, but fully operable, except for the peeing their pants part, skyrim has no animations for this

This is getting offtopic, I'll respond in a PM.

You know how many robots there are in the Fallout series?

There's gotta be at least 7.

As the good doctor stated, where are all the robots in the Mojave? Besides Victor I don't think you come across a single robot on your way to Vegas, until you reach Vegas proper, and I can think of one location in the Mojave Wasteland that has a huge pack of hostile robots, which is around the crashed vertibird iirc.

There's a crazed one up by an irradiated area to the west of Primm in a house who's owner had died, probably from said crazed robot.

There is a home defence robot set up in a house in Nipton by a paranoid dude who didn't win the lottery.

The crashed vertibird had robots around it.

There are robots in REPCONN HQ which if I remember correctly has a bunch of dead bandits near the entrance, implying that people have tried to loot the place but were killed by its security.

There are robots in a RobCo building somewhere in the northern part of New Vegas.

Then uh... Apart from DLC and The Strip's Securitrons I can't remember many more robots in the game.

Any robot you find in the game has a reason for being where it is and why it is still there.

Well, there are four robots (excluding any Mark II variants) and a cyber-dog in Fallout 2; and Frank Horrigan is said to be more machine than mutant.

There are also two kinds of automated gun turrets.

• Eye-bot (not the one in FO3)
• Robobrain
• Sentry Bot
• Mr.Handy and Repair-Bot [looks exactly like Mr.Handy]

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/Gizmojunk001/robots_zpsfkky3eki.jpg

Of the robots, there a few unique variations of Mr.Handy, and multi-stage variants of the cyber-dog and the robo-brain NPCs; (both at different levels, and some with different brains ~which affect their stats).

How does Mr Handy survive 200 years?

Lots of duct tape.... and ball bearings.

It's all about ball bearings these days.

Not just friendly robots, there are many hostile robots that seem to survive 200 years.

I was thinking more about the actual game mechanics. Constant, endless micromanaging of all the tedious annoying stuff we have to do IRL. It's not fun, not remotely. And it certainly doesn't work as an escape from the boring humdrum existence of "real life" - it's just recursive repetition of the same tasks. ("Yo Dawg! I heard you like housework, so I put housework in your game so you can housework to avoid housework!"

Do Your Chores, and Get To Work: The Game. Like I said, I've no idea how this was a mass-market/"casual gamer" breakaway hit. (I only played the first game, basic style. No idea how much they changed it in 2 & 3)