Not sad as in "it svcks", I mean sad as in "if I think about too long I may cry".

The two little graves with the teddy bears in the bomb shelter behind Big John's Salvage, with the skeletons of Big John and his wife in a last embrace on the bed.

Those poor women who died in Fallon's and Gwinett's, starving to death as they waited for help that never came.

The Vault-Tec rep, betrayed by the disgraceful company he worked for, spending 200 years wandering alone and disfigured.

Every school in the Commonwealth decorated for a Halloween party that never happened.

That's just off the top of my head. If you pay attention as you poke through the ruins you'll find evidence of so many gut-wrenching stories that happened on and shortly after that day in October when the bombs fell. It makes me have to go back to taking head shots on Raiders just to get my mind off it.

Things like this are a big part of what I love about this game. I've played Fallout 4 for over 400 hours, and somehow I just noticed Mary Abernathy's grave behind the house there last night. That was a bit of a tearjerker. I don't know how I've never noticed this. It's just surrounded by some weeds and doesn't stick out unless you walk past it just right.

Yup there is a bunch of stuff that if thought about for long enough it would make those feeling that society says men arent suppose to have resurface and then if someone walks in and notices and comments on your eyes looking a little glassy you say the fan is drying out your contacts or eyes.

I feel Bethesda really upped the minor things that you need to notice in level design. I've seen skeletons cuddling next to each other, I've found an abandoned mini-shelter that only had a baseball hat and a Halloween bucket of candy, it's just really sad what you find in the ruins.

Of course they also do 180s with this and do funny/scary stuff. Like the skeleton of a peeping tom in the woman's restroom of a store with a female peeping tom in the men's restroom of the same buildings, those damn clacking monkeys, I even found a drug purchase in one of the subway stations between two skeletons

I feel the same way. I feel like to some extent the ability to actually help people in the "present day" Commonwealth can be something of an antidote to this feeling but not just doing quests for some selfish which really performs no actual service.


It would also be nice to be able to clear away the trash on the floors and repair houses and shacks and actually push back entropy a little in the game. Sanctuary Hills is never going to look like it did pre-war but it would be nice if it looked as if people cared about where they lived enough to clean up and make some repairs. Anything you build looks like a shack -- surely there are some power sanders and saws around somewhere that would let you actually produce something modest that looks like it's made by someone who takes pride in their work.


What if the settlers actually gradually improved their settlements to clean up, paint, rebuild slowly over time? What if they cleared away those party banners and skeletons etc. so you saw an actual society re-emerging, even if there were still a lot of villains to control?

Oh yes, there most certainly is some twisted stuff on top of the sad stuff! I once found skeletons in a bathtub with mannequins standing around the tub holding various objects, while a skeleton was lying in bed with a mannequin, in the adjacent room...

Some of it is just atmospheric and background storytelling. The shopowner's skeleton in a bathtub with a toaster and a fork tells of the despair that some felt. There are so many with obvious suicide implements (guns, knives, pills, etc) near them when you find the skeletons that it tells a story in and of itself.

The primary strategic nuclear device that was fired at the Commonwealth 'missed' the city and landed in what is now the Glowing Sea (and may have instead been targeting the Sentinel Site, but was too late as that site fired its missiles successfully). That means that while many did die from the initial explosion, heat blast, and then shockwave the vast majority of Boston lived through it.

It's the radiation and the collapse of society that killed them. Go to a coast line in south Boston and along downtown and all the residential areas. There are wheelchairs of the sick who were brought to the shore to watch the sea as they died. The hospitals are full of them... people waiting for help that never came. Churches full of corpses as they prayed for salvation.

Then there's the madscrabble areas. Train cars that were once triage stations, now overrun with ghouls, but with a table full of teddy bears and a sign that promises that all are welcome and safe there. They're everywhere, all over the map.

Boston died a slow, miserable death. Sick and dealt a mortal blow, it shuddered and wept as it died.

Oh... and the only side quest that I've ever seen in a game that made me cry (every time I've done it on three characters) is the non-quest 'quest' of finding the Holotape of Cheryl and Marlene Glass. If you go to the Slog and talk to Arlen Glass, you have the option of giving it to him.

At that point is some of the most soul crushing and tragic dialog I've seen in Fallout. In a good way. It really hits you hard in the gut what sort of loss people have experienced. That he just sits there afterwards, listening to it over and over again, weeping, is all it takes to tell you everything. He stays like that until you leave and return.

Well done, Bethesda.

I thought the sad, desolate atmosphere of Fallout 3 was perfect. I'm glad Bethesda stayed true to that atmosphere for Fallout 4. All the sad little reminders that the wolrd was broken, innocents died by the multitude, and war always has a terrible price.


The zany humor gives the game some needed flavor, but the real story is in the sadness of picking through the ruins of a broken world.


Love this series.

IMO, the humor is needed to balance out the saddest moments.

Some of the very best shows were ones which could be both funny and sad.

The humor endears you, and makes the sadness all the more bittersweet.

There's no question that the atmosphere in both Bethesda's Fallout games is excellent, even if I much prefer New Vegas' game play. I'm very puzzled by the complaints about the graphics I've seen on some boards. They put a lot of work into the environments and it shows.

Though I agree with carbon_dragon, that it would be nice to see settlements get tidied up. I mean, granted, people in the Commonwealth might not have our standards for hygiene, but surely nobody would leave a decomposing corpse next to a bed they intended to sleep in.

With my second character, I'm trying to do as little fast travel as possible. I'm seeing this game for the first time, despite 300+ hours with my first character. One surprise with this: the basemant in Sanctuary. Never saw it in my first game and it was my main base for those 300+ hours.

I find stories all over the place, such as notes and holotapes I skipped past before. The runaway holotape has to be, bar far, the most depressing thing I've heard in this game. Its impact is so great, I keep it on me to remind me why I help others in need.

The downside is this game forces me to FT simply because of the settlement. I say "force" as though it's required, but it feels it is. I can't see myself exploring and collecting necessary components are working well together, so I need to FT to "unload" my junk. How I miss the courier system from FONV.

This game definitely makes me think about circumstances, which is rather ironic considering I just read the unedited version of Anne Frank's diary and see that, indeed, war never changes, and neither does the impact it has on innocent people.

Remember this when you vote this year.

I've seen skeletons in bathtub's with toasters and I thought, "well that's a strange place to eat breakfast" then the penny dropped and I realized they topped themselves, then I took the toaster.

In the water plant quest you do for grey garden, at the bottom of the water treatment plant in a hall (that was previously flooded) are some skeletons on the ground with various implements, a sledgehammer, various small tools and a blowtorch right next to the door. In the terminals it's said the place is known for flooding issues, so my guess is the safety door sealed shut on the bottom floor while they were in there when the bombs fell. Whether they died because the place flooded before they could get the door open and were trapped until they starved, or it flooded and water was seeping in so they tried to break the door before they drown I don't know.

The cool thing about all these little touches is that you know they were hand placed. It shows the artistry and craftsmanship.

The only game where you get this sort of thing in this quantity...but I want more still, not to say I'm lapping up all the little treasures I find and there's plenty. I feel sorry for the run and gun, blitz by everything crew that claim there's little content.

There's a shack near ... Finch Farm, I think? It's got a Police Protectron patrolling around it, even now.

When you go inside, there's a seated skeleton with a revolver nearby and shattered fragments of a skull. Fairly grim and depressing, but when you explore more, you find a second skeleton in a dress wedged down the side of the bed, with bullet holes IN THE GROUND around the second skeleton, meaning this was a murder-suicide, and that Protectron has been protecting the crime-scene for well over two hundred years ...

Did the man give in to despair and try to end the woman's life to 'spare her' from the horrible wasteland?

Was he just a murderer and she his last victim, and the Protectron was assigned to guard the crime scene when the bombs dropped and prevented the case from ever being investigated?

Did she turn into a Ghoul while they slept, and he attacked the 'monster', only to realize he'd shot the love of his life to death and then took his own life in grief and madness?

So many questions ...

I just did this recently and it killed me. I listened to the holotape when I first found it and got choked up, but Arlen's reaction when I gave it to him just did me in completely.

Go catch Season 1 of Scrubs. To this day I love Brendon Fraiser because of the storyline from that show.

You can hate me for this. But in a lot of ways Scrubs was our generation's MASH.

There are no heroes in the Commonwealth,only people concerned about themselves.Since i started playing all i found was a world asking to sacrifice me and my son.In the end i choose family over the world.

There are so many of these little vignettes in the game that are so emotive, be it funny or sad, or just plain hysterical. They write the game for the average person and leave all these little things about to find. Its why I play Beth games for hundreds or thousands of hours, and games by Bioware for rarely more than 100.

Pathetic, There is no Crying in Fallout !!

I have never seen such a bunch of weak.....

No my eyes are red cause of allergies.

There is sort of a connected thread that goes from maybe its west Everest estates ( I am sure i slaughtered or got name wrong its the place sort of south of the boathouse) Any way the bunker there/ the mayoral bunker and the hospital all linked the same family there may be more to it, (this is what i found so far )Kind of one families tale of what happened during and right after very clever and maybe moving to soft touch's like you people here.

Not me

Heh

The Miller kids' graves got to me, too.

Another touching vingnette i found was an old woman (I assume she was old), sitting in a comfy chair, facing a TV in her hotel apartment. With her were Jangles, Teddy perched in a Halloween Pumpkin and a fully assembled Giddyup. Jangles was wearing a Sea Captain's hat, while Giddyup looked dapper in a bowler. The scene said, to me, these were the last friends she had left in the world...

Or the soldier skelly sleeping on a mattress, cuddling both Jangles and Teddy.

Of course, I've found a few that made me chuckle, too. The shout-out to Madmen, with Teddy wearing a trilby hat and carrying a newspaper, coffeepot right nearby. The woman skelly caught in mid-swing (she was using a cutting board) as she was spanking a male skelly in an outhouse.

I love finding these "little things".

Or the ones that made me gasp, such as the collection of bones in a dryer in the laundromat -- it appeared to be a full skeleton. The story behind that could go in several different ways...

The voicing of the Fallon's tape was excellent. Chilling to listen to.

There's an abandoned cabin just off to the left of Sanctuary Hills with a skeleton on a cot and a holotape. The holotape reveals that this skeleton was of a pregnant girl who was scared and rejected by her parents when she dropped the "I'm pregnant" news. She ran away to this cabin for a place to clear her head and think.


It was on October 2077. For an extra dose of horror, it's highly possible our character may have seen her alive before the War, even if it were only a passing glance.


---


I've also seen skeletons side by side on benches looking out at the water/general landscape, some with their hands still laced together.


I've seen an old retirement home near Salem littered with skeletons and the Mister Handys that continue to operate the place as if the patrons were still alive. You could even pass a speech check with the front desk Handy saying you're either here to visit your grandmother, or you are one of their elderly patients checking back in.

Yeah. I also like tracking down distress signal.

My first try was at the Fallon. I was thinking maybe we could recruit the girl in the end. Turned out she already become a skeleton.

The moment I opened the locker and saw that, I stopped for a while and actually felt sorry. That was really really sad.