Something I noticed whenever I alternated between Fallout 2 (which I still play frequently) and FNV is that the destruction is very off. I believe that the devs need to draw a line between how wrecked the Fallout sandbox should be. One of the things that made me love FO2 so much was the fact that the environments were varied, with amazing settlements like Vault City and Shady Sands providing the contrast to the wastes. In FNV Obsidian messed up. New Vegas was dirty, had cracked roads, and generally made me think more of New Reno than the amazing place it was made out to be (and it was still far better than everything else in that game). To make matters worse this contradicted the lore completely, because Mr.House was made out to be a careful planner with the means for the re-establishment of Vegas. I believe that in order for the game to adhere to lore and also be more enjoyable you need to have factions with at least one Developed city (a "Capital" of sorts) because the game makes no sense otherwise. Also, since I know I will be crucified if I don't mention this, Fallout 3 was also terrible at this. Rivet City was the best of them all and it contained tents. If this issue is fixed it can breath life into the Fallout game world.

Obsidian, why isn't it more like Fallout 2? WAAAAHHHH

lol jk

lol obsidian made FO2 or at least the core did

I think there are a lot of variables we might not be taking into account here...

New House saved the New Vegas areas from the most of the nukes. He helped rebuild it to the point we see it. He didn't even become active in rebuilding that long before New Vegas started.

Also if you pay attention to the game you will learn that the NCR is spending alot of money in rebuilding cities like LA.

You think the destruction being off is bad? Well, yeah. It is bad. It's why it drives me nuts that Bethesda has said they won't go back in time with the Fallout series.

Fallout 1 was set 50 years after the Great War and the bombs fell. It made sense that things were still wrecked and dirty and there were some areas that hadn't been looted or scavenged from yet. In fact, the population was super small and some Vaults didn't open until several years after the nuclear fire ravaged the Earth.

But now we are going on, what, 222 years after the end of the world, and people haven't cleaned things up? Sure, radiation would still be a problem, but why would a settlement that is a century or more old not pick up or move or use the junk in their front yards? Why is there ANYTHING left to loot or scavenge in populated areas? Am I supposed to believe that there are still boxes of Blamco Mac and Cheese sitting on the supermarket shelf after 200 years? It's getting ridiculous. Are we still going to go into a house right next to a main road in Fallout 4 and discover no one has ever checked the first aid kit inside it for supplies? If Bethesda maintains this timeline, supplies should have already been picked clean.

The truth is, at this point in the timeline, there should not be any shanty towns left, and most settlements should be like Vault City or the NCR town in Fallout 2. But the problem is, when you lose the destruction, you lose the Fallout post-apocalyptic setting. But I have a feeling that even if we get to Fallout 8 and are 500 years after the Great War, we'll still find the inhabitants of the wasteland are the laziest people ever and have passed down a tradition of never touching a broom and always politely leaving more stuff to scavenge for the next guy.

Am I the only one who would love to play a Fallout game set only 20 or 25 years after the bombs? Maybe even possibly play as a survivor who remembers "the world before"? There is major potential in that.

You do realize that those amazing settlements were made from scratch in what was otherwise an empty space? They're clean because they are not ruined pre-War cities. If you look at surviving pre-War cities in Fallout 2 and Fallout, New Vegas is perfectly in line.

Furthermore, House only ruled for about a decade and had to work with the NCR dead set on annexing Vegas. Complaining that he didn't initiate massive public works to renovate Vegas into a tip-top shape is silly. New Vegas is still a step above most settlements in the wasteland.

It depends on what it is. If it's a city reviving/using old assets (Ala New Vegas/San Francisco/ Greyditch et cetera) then I think it'd be very difficult to give it paved roads, clean buildings and such akin to Pre-War standards. It'd be VERY hard to do so because the resources to do so are so far flung only people with the caps, resources or vision could acquire those resources to restore that place and turn it into a distant echo of its Pre-War self.

However, to make every single settlement 'ragtag scavenge' is overly cliche. I mean, Fallout 3 only gave one 'city' Pre-War status and it was Tenpenny Tower, a miscellaneous collection of jerkasses. I liked Canterbury as it came as close as possible to being 'clean', but it was an underdeveloped area due to Bethesda's silly notion 'EVERYTHING MUST BE SAND, DREARY AND DESOLATE!'.

Yeah I was playing New Vegas a few days ago and while walking around in Primm all I could think was "Why can't just 1 of you lazy !&!!()*￡! lift these slot machines up from off the ground!? I keep tripping over those svckers!"

Given that they're initially under siege by less than reasonable escaped convicts, I doubt having a clean casino is their highest priority.

Initially, fine. But why are the streets of Primm crowded with trash and wrecked cars? Why has the owner of the Mojave Express not cleaned up the broken glass and boards in his bedroom? Given his age and position in the town, he's been living there for years and has an entire room or closet in his house full of dirt and trash, when there are empty dumpster right outside.

I buy the fact everything would still be destroyed and dirty 50 years after the war. Hell, the survivors are probably too traumatized and depressed to do much picking up. They know the glory of how it was before, so the goal of fixing it seems too far out of reach. But don't tell me mutliple generations of people would live in a building and not clean it up.

I also got annoyed at the people in Goodsprings. There are a lot of citizens, the town is mostly nice, but they never pick up the school house or stomp a few bugs? That school house is prime property, and it seems no one can be bothered to spend ONE DAY cleaning it out. Seriously. Look at the inside of that building. After killing just a handful of mantis bugs (and they already have one citizen who can kill geckos with no problem), you could get that place straightened and cleaned well in just a single day of work. And that's IF you were working alone. Yet the town has let it sit for 200 years?!

Because it's a game built on a roughly 10-12 year old engine, to expect as much detail and physical world change as you're asking for is simply laughable.

I think you're misunderstanding.

I'm not asking for it to change DURING the game. I'm saying the environments in the game should have been designed differently from the start if we are 200 years after the bombs.

This is what you get from the requirement of using a compressed sandbox. You lose the means for a good amount of plausible variety just to get a monotonic landscape with fewer loading screens - TES-style miniture "cities" don't really work here, so you have "campsites" and squatted buildings as settlements. There's no way you could - for example - remake or make a game "like" Fallout 2 with this kind of sandbox model without it feeling and looking absolutely ridiculous.

A dynamic, changing setting is a healthy setting.

Don't cling onto the setting as if it were the only thing keeping Fallout as Fallout, and no, re-nuking everything doesn't qualify as a "changing setting."

That's what I'm getting at.

If Bethesda wants to keep the irradiated and destroyed setting, they need to back up in time. Otherwise, the setting needs to advance with the march of time, and we need to see a lot more recovery.

To be fair he's only had a couple of years to do it and in that time he's had to worry about quite a lot of things so renovating isn't his first priority at the moment.

Right, but none of those other Pre-War cities in the original Fallouts had the means of New Vegas. New Vegas possessed huge tourism revenues, a personal Securitron army, and one intelligent leader to unite all the different casinos into rebuilding Vegas. In the lore Mr.House had gone to extreme measures to protect Vegas, so it's only logical that he would have stored material for it's reconstruction. Furthermore, I know that Vegas wasn't directly hit with a missile. How did that damage even get there in the first place? It seems like the devs now just randomly sprinkle destruction if they believe it doesn't look "Fallout" like.

BTW, I know that Shady Sands and Vault City were made afterwards. Vault City had the help of a GECK, but Shady Sands became developed due to plain hard work and their thriving agriculture. Meanwhile, in FO3 and FNV you have places like Megaton and Sloan that seemed to be erected after the war, and they look even worse than the crumbling buildings of the Pre-War USA.

Exactly. Yet, in the new Fallout's we don't see any new settlements that managed to thrive in the fashion of Shady Sands. Megaton has a good story, but it represents a problem that the current Fallout devs have in their whole destruction mentality. At least some of the cities should have some type of main industry that keeps them afloat. In Megaton it was all about scavenging for supplies instead of being active and finding a way to feed themselves.

OK, from the top:

- What means? By 2281 House was in control for just eight years and he had plenty of other worries on his mind than renovating the entire city into tip top shape. Hell, he did a pretty good job considering the fact that he had to work with tribals coerced to work for him using a military-grade robot force, much later than he initially planned.
- Why on Earth would House waste precious space on storing bricks, mortar, and reinforcement bars? His plan relies on finding a new supply (eg. the quarries around Vegas), not stockpiling cement and gravel in every nook and cranny of the Lucky 38. Do you have any idea just how much asphalt, concrete, and metal reinforcement is necessary just to maintain a city, let alone rebuild it? House prioritized essential items, such as Securitrions, weapons, clothing, and other items that would be in high demand after the Great War.
- It's natural damage due to lack of maintenance and environmental hazards. http://all-that-is-interesting.com/abandoned-detroit-photos. Now, magnify that a few dozen times and add total societal collapse on top. New Vegas is actually in pretty good shape for two centuries of neglect.


http://fallout.gamepedia.com/Shady_Sands#History. Difference being that one had a fully functional Vault at their disposal, the other did not. I do agree, it's pretty strange that people haven't moved beyond junk shacks two centuries after the War.

It is worth noting that the "shacks" in Fallout and Fallout 2 actually look pretty sound from a structural standpoint, the difference being that they use scrap and metal sheets instead of brick and mortar.