Has anybody else been irked by the lack of a proper food chain or weather? Why no rain? I mean we have Brahmin, Squirrel and Iguana bits, but we have no crickets or grass. EVERYTHING is dead as dead could be. I hope there will be some greenery in the form of mutated and hideous shrubbery and some sign of our favorite eats.

Anybody else bothered by the lack of those things or have something to add?

well there can't be too much greenery considering nearly every thing is supposed to have been wiped out. That said the few occasions where greenery has appeared felt much more special and awesome as locations to visit

Coming from experience, living relatively near where New Vegas took place...that was actually kinda on the mark for the Mojave.

The minor things are what bother me. I don't understand how the brahmin are alive lol.

Because Mutant Cows, and they are one of those staples of Fallout.

It's a video game, man, not a loose history.

There was rain in the new trailer. There is yellow grass everywhere, so clearly there is some green at some point in the season, but we have yet to see it.

Who knows, maybe we will actually have seasonal weather and vegetation this time around. I know that the game jam video for Skyrim showed someone had worked on seasonal weather ... it could have made it into this game.

Maybe we will actually see a squirrel. Maybe they will be giant mutant squirrels wielding machine guns and cooking wastelander stew.

I'd just be happy if we got some rain and thunderstorms. Maybe different regions would be nice. For example, you'd have the biggest region, the urban region, which would be Boston proper, you'd have a CW rocky desert type region, and maybe a greener (and by "greener" I mean sparsely populated by some small green plants and trees) area further out from the city.

Ever hear of adaption? Animals who changed to survive and scavenge off of garbage and waste? Mainly vermin though...

Never thought about the food chain thing but that's a good point. I hope we see more live vegetation in this game and I think we will, though I haven't seen much in the trailer. And to the argument that there should be no plant life because of the war; it has been 200 years... That's a lot.

I agree that they should give us something in this regard. If only to make sense of the animals and what not.

I realize these are two different franchises with entirely different circumstances, but The Last of Us pulled off an incredible wasteland with nature completely beginning to retake the cities and towns.

I don't tend to hold Fallout to a terribly high level of realism - this isn't a hard science fiction setting anchored in in-depth scientific extrapolation a la Arthur C. Clarke. Rather the setting is defined more by it's visual style and iconography.

I'd wouldn't mind seeing some areas with vegetation - but less because I'm concerned with realism in Fallout, and more because I feel I'd enjoy more variety in the locales I visit in-game. Greenery isn't terribly high on my list of priorities, however.

Verisimilitude is another matter, however. It's a standard gaming concept that there's more going on in the world than what is rendered - as fidelity in these games improves, however, that gap becomes more and more noticeable. I didn't care in Fallout 1, for example, that I could buy a squirrel-on-a-stick yet not see one in-game. With modern computing power, however, I'd expect to see some more wildlife beyond just the creatures that are going to be important in terms of gameplay. (Skyrim, for example, featured a variety of wildlife, and most contemporary games will include minor wildlife beyond just what's going to attack you or be hunt-able.)

I sort of feel the same way about weather, really - in past titles I could assume that there likely was some sort of (post-nuclear and twisted) weather pattern going on in the setting - but it was just never portrayed. There's nothing in canon that says it never rains in the Wasteland, for example, and a dust or radiation storm could be an interesting thing to play through, I think. But again, I won't be terribly bothered if there's no weather in the game. Though if I remember correctly, there was snow and snowstorms in Skyrim (can't remember if I ever saw it rain - I'm thinking I didn't but could be wrong.) So at I guess I think it could be within the realm of the possible with Fallout 4 to see some weather effects - and given the setting that could have some interesting outcomes, potentially.

Well, the shot with the Deathclaw looked like nothing else in the trailer. I don't think that's another weather type as it is just a completely ravaged region. Maybe even recently ravaged.

The weather variations we saw in the trailer were beautiful, though. And there was rain in the Memory Den and Paul Revere shots! If there's one thing Bethesda has always been terrific at, it's skies IMO.

I have to assume you didn't watch the trailer. There were a couple of shots with rain, another with storm clouds (full of rain) and a couple of shots with foliage, when the dog is running up the hill towards the vault in post-war there are leaves on the ground.

I have to agree I do tend to wonder why so many odd years after the bombs dropped everything is still so makeshift and why there is such a lack of flora, nature has a tendency to reclaim the land as opposed to die off completely. New Vegas made sense to have such a barren landscape due to the location of its setting, with Boston though if its set around the same time that makes little sense to me.

I would love to see seasons implemented and at least be able to attribute the trailer having been shot in autumn / winter for why it looks so lifeless, but I'd have to say that's seems somewhat unlikely.

I had not noticed the rain in the trailer. That IS exciting to me as I seem to obsess over those weird little things.

That shot reminded me a lot of Fallout 3. It even has the greenish tint. I'm guessing that could be a highly radiated area. Possibly the site of the bomb impact.

I agree, from watching the video it looks as if we may see different weather changes and radically different environments depending on what part of the map we're at. I did see some scattered leaves on the ground, also some grass, and shrubs with leaves in the video.

Having no real ecosystem in Fallout 3 is one of the biggest complaints I have with the game and was debated constantly over the years on the forum.

People complain/ed that New Vegas is a boring desert. Yes it is a desert. But so is Washington DC. The difference being the world created in New Vegas makes sense and fits with the original Fallouts. While Fallout 3's world makes no sense and was created purely for "fun" if I am not mistaken the developers did admit that.

The trailer to Fallout 4 has one up for me and that is a blue sky... gone is the stupid green sky of Fallout 3 but there is a down and all the plant life looks dried out and dead.

As for weather, rain would be great we have it in Honest Hearts.

True. Even the DC wasteland should have been pretty much reclaimed by nature 200 years after the war. In all reality, nature should have finished the job on a fair few of the still-standing buildings, and DC should have reverted back to the swampland from whence it came.....

I always install a flora mod for Fallout 3. Life is going to return after a nuclear, especially after 200 years.

Both gameworlds are equally nonsensical in various ways.

yes, for example the way Bethesda writes kids you realize they had to restrict you in game code from killing them.

Don't talk about people that way!

Well most of the dc's water was still heavely irradiated so I dont know how they were supposed to start on the path on modern civilization?

Thats just more nonsense on top of the lack of eco system.

Here in California we have forest fires yearly. Entire forests are sometimes wiped out. Yet they always come back and you can tell where the fire was because the area that was burned is always greener than the areas around it.

Not equally... Having thriving wildlife/human population with no form of agriculture (seemingly dependent on 200 year old persihable foods) is about as fatuous and nonsensical as you can get for a gameworld, nothing in FONV equals that.