It would be cool to see all of the factions having evolved in some way.

I agree with you. I hope someone (maybe even Sarah Lyons herself) could wrap his/her fingers around Arthur Maxson, and control him like a puppet for their benefit...

There are a couple of reasons to explain the apparent power discrepancy.

The Legion would be on their Western Front while Boston is on their Eastern Front. If they were allocating a lot of troops to expand Eastward from Chicago, obviously that could leave their Western Front more vulnerable, especially if they weren't predicting anything as sophisticated and organized as Caesar's Legion showing up and giving them the what for.

Then again, the Legion could have just found Brotherhood scouting parties and taken the bits of armor from them, without actually going to full scale war.

The Legate is afraid of leaving the Eastern borders unprotected. He doesn't say why but it can be assumed that the Midwestern Brotherhood is part of the reason. If this is the Midwestern Brotherhood, this would make them quite a large faction land wise, as the Rockies to Boston is quite a distance.

Leaving out all the evidence pointer to 200 years actually being 200 years.

It just seems to me it is easier and provides more opportunities to place F3 directly after F4.

They are close enough together to share the events and NPCs without having the Sole Survivor step on the story line for the Lone Wanderer or vise versa.

Given a month or so to travel the distance, you are likely to hear more rumors of the events in the CW directly after the war between the CWBoS and the Enclave than four years later.

Certainly the NPCs in F3 that might appear in F4 could be there if F4 happened 200 years after the war or 204 years after the war.

But Desmond and Dr Li are likely going to need help more when they first get there compared to after they have been there four years.

People are more familiar with the current Capital Wasteland of F3 and Broken Steel than some thing based years later.

They are even including a free copy of Fallout 3 for the Xbox users so they can experience F3 (and F3 mods?).

Finally with the Tale of Two Wasteland's team's example of loading F3 assets in to FONV, you could actually have mods that allowed the Sole Survivor to travel to the DC wasteland, the Pitt, Point Lookout, and the like.

I could see some amazing mods making the changes the Lone Wanderer caused and expanding the story from there.

I think the NCR and the prize of New Vegas would have Caesar's full attention compared with minor skirmishes with a tough nut to crack like the Brotherhood.

Unless of course a few more years had passed.

I really hope you are wrong. The whole dudes in power armor acting like knights was fine for one story, but if it carries over into Fallout 4 I will be very disappointed.

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