So, we have now seen Boston. We have seen the DC Wasteland. We have seen Point Lookout and Pittsburgh. We have also seen how the West Coast started to rebuild properly prior to Fallout 2; NCR/Shady Sands having proper buildings and even some advanced tech (laser fields), Broken Hills looks actually rather pleasant, and even in the original Fallout we can see sandcrete buildings. Sure there were the occasional settlement that was corrugated steel shacks and barely standing remains of pre-war towns, bit it felt like these were starting to become less the rule. Even then, they had at least bothered to take the skeletons out of their bathtubs, or their beds. Vegas may have been largely spared the bombs due to House, but it still feels like it has been somewhat maintained. Others have chosen to go Tribal, and live well off the land, making clothes and living in proper tents and such.

So... what went wrong on the East Coast (and yes, I know the answer to that is Bethesda design choices, but I'm trying to hash out a reasonable possibility in canon)?

In DC it was easy to justify how everyone lived due to the state of the area; raiders being the majority of the population, preying on eachother, and those few who wanted to live normally. Add super mutants, and other wasteland threats, with a sprinkling of 'DC being what it is, only recently got resettled in any major way'. So I could justify it to myself in FO3. They are where the wasters of the original Fallout were; and to their credit, the 'normal' settler did clear out the bodies if not the junk piles. Rivet City is cluttered, but overall seems relatively livable.

Now, Maxson says that on the way, they saw cities overrun by mutants and abominations,where humanity has no footholds. But... that doesn't really explain the Commonwealth. Sure, synths, super mutants, and a particularly large population of ghouls, yadda yadda.

It's been 200 years, and the Commonwealth wasn't half as dangerous as it became until the last, what, half a century? Diamond City is tidy enough; but not only does it not even fill the stadium, and they haven't got the numbers to build vertically, even if we put aside gaming downscaling - there is a limit to the size of a settlement you could fit into a baseball stadium and then sustain, considering the need to leave a large part for farming. And this is the biggest settlement in the Commonwealth when you arrive. Goodneighbor is maybe a city block; it's Hells Kitchen, Boston. Quincy is much like it, presumably. The Fort was a militia base. Other settlements are small by design. Farming settlements and communities that self sustain.

Boston seems barely settled, really, even compared to the CW. And Boston still has functioning factories.

But, this isn't what I find hard to get my head around, really. It's the 'cultural mindset'. When a settlement is established, people seem to settle for living basically like pre-war homeless, as though it's not the case of a bit of hard work to do better. They live in shacks, usually surrounded by piles of trash and rusted skeletons of vehicles (that are even potentially explosive), and sometimes don't even bother to clean out the bones of the long dead. I haven't found a single shack that would actually keep the weather out; with holes in the roofs, no windows, and sometimes no doors, they are basically fancy bus shelters. In an area with severe rad storms that can roll in any moment. It's like as a culture the people on the East coast are the walking dead. They are resigned to... everything and anything terrible.

The thing is, this is likely to continue, because out of lore for a moment, it's how Bethesda feel the East should look for that post-apoc feel. And I feel it's getting harder and harder to understand in the lore.

How do you guys and gals wrangle this when trying to roleplay? I think it's especially relevant to Fallout 4, as our character has seen the world before. America itself has only been around a little longer in real life than the time since the bombs dropped in Fallout, and look at the progress.

Well, the Institute is certainly partially to blame.

As far back and one hundred years before the game takes place they were sending Gen 1 Synths to the surface to scavenge materials to enable further construction of the Institute, and anyone in the way was likely to end up a pile of glowing dust, or a skeleton eventually. I mean imagine a Mr. Gutsy patrolling every ten miles on every road, just how much would that slow advancement? There would likely be those that didn't have a good communication network available that would possibly even speculate Aliens or any numbers of things as they became more human looking, slowly ramping up the paranoia in the Commonwealth as the decades pasted.

Then by the year 2229, almost fifty years before the game takes place, with the Gen 3s comes a mistrust of your fellow man as the possibility that they are actually now a Synth becomes a reality. For a reference on how bad this could be you have all the Invasion of the body Snatchers movies to watch.

One could argue that even if the Institute stopped sending Synths out to replace people that mistrust and murder of fellow humans due to paranoia would likely be higher for decades afterward.

In the game we have University Point as an example of a settlement wholly wiped out by the Institute in 2285, just two years before the game takes place.

In Addition to the Institute we have the Quincy Massacre, which just took place in 2287, by the Gunners, which lead to the death of all but twenty survivors.

I'll leave others to add more, but in the last one hundred years, and even in the last year, this area has seen serious devastation, so those skeletons may not be from two hundred years ago, it could be just a few months or years.

That could lead to depression, and that could lead to not really caring all the much about the crap laying outside your door.

The fall of the MintueMan and the Institute being bastards played a role. Synths and Super Mutants wouldn't be in Boston if the Institute didn't create them that hurt progress for sure. Now boston is filled with Mutants and no body trust each other because someone might be a synth. But to the Institue credit they did try to help at one point.

There was no Vault Dweller until 2277 in the East Coast. The Vault Dweller in the West Coast appeared in 2161 which jumpstarted civilization. After all, it was the actions of the Vault Dweller that created the NCR which brought civilization to the West Coast.

If you strip the settlers nvde and bag their heads the whole slaving away in the dirt thing makes sense.

Personally, I believe Beth tried too hard to tie FO3 to the older games. What they should have done is create a new storyline which set FO3 around 50 after and go from there. Boston 60 years after would make more sense.

People seem to forget that the only reason true civilization rose on the west coast is because the Vault Dweller and Chosen one, the super mystical and magical player characters, of Fallout 1/2 paved the way for it by eliminating the threats of the Master and The Enclave before they ever got TOO serious.

The East Coast has had no such benefit until the Lone Wanderer in Fallout 3, and the Sole Survivor in Fallout 4.

Whats more is that this isn't even just the east coast either.

-The Midwest was nothing more then a collection of small towns, spread out by hundreds of miles, living in a barren wasteland just barely existing until the MWBoS, and the Initiate, came along in Tactics.

-According to New Vegas, the four corners area of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah was nothing more then nomadic tribal groups and Mad Max style warlords until Caesar formed the Legion just a mere 30 years ago, abd much of it is still that way even now.

-The American north, states like Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, are described in New Vegas's ending slides as being "wilderness" and "ruins". We only hear about a small coal mining town up in Montana were life was pretty hard, implying they haven't risen past the east coast level of civilization.

The rise of civilization in California is a fluke, not the norm, and every game in the series has shown this.

200 years while it seems like a long time, for the recovery of civilization it's not long. Back when settlers first came to the new world they had skills and knew how to do things they came from civilized world. It's safe to assume most people died in the initial attack many later from radiation. So the skills and know how just to build a house went with them too.


Never mind the life expectancy of a person dropped drastically not much time to ponder technology but just to survive. People who did reproduce would probably have some severe genetic mutations putting the human race further behind if able to recover at all. The bombs were not dropped on one location it was nation wide, not many places to escape the radiation.


Even those rad storms would be a killer. 200 years is not enough time for a human to become immune to radiation. Yeah I know they have rad away and all, but where does that come from. Would probably have run out many years ago.

Look how long it took Western civilization to crawl back after the fall of Rome. Yes I realize the "dark ages" weren't as dark as often depicted but it still took a very long time to get back to Roman levels.