I'm sure Bethesda could have kept the TES IV weather in for FO3 so they probably consciously decided to remove it. Perhaps they felt that rain should be a rare occurrence but didn't feel that it was worth adding lots of new rain related comments/animations in to reflect this. Or maybe they just liked it without any rain :shrug:

I think they dropped the idea to include rain already during design phase.

With all those dry earth and desert style landscape they designed (propably just because they used F1 and F2's design elements as reference) they propably thought that rain would not fit into this environment. Could be strange to have it rain while the player looks at a desert like landscape and wonders, why does everyhting looks so dry here even when its raining every two days ?

With that they dont make a statement that there is no rain in the Capital Wasteland , they just circumvent rain by saying its a rare occurence and , by chance, it just does not happen during the duration of the F3 storyline.

We unknowningly chose the dry season to escape from Vault 101 you know.


Im using a mod that puts rain (and snow) from Oblivion into Fallout 3 for realism. Radioactive rain of course as SCIENCE! and the F3 main storyline demands it to be radioactive.

I heard that rain was just supposed to be an easter egg in the original games. Therefore unless they make a DLC called Farmtown Zed, I'll keep pretending most wasteland residents have no idea what rain is.

Probably didn't want to find a fix for rain clipping through overhangs and such.

IIRC rain wans't implemented in F3 because the devs didn't get it to work like they wanted

The last random battles in Tactics against armies of robots take place on snow covered ground in the mountains.