Yea but remember, schools teach kids every year history. Think of a place where the books are usually all burned, not schools, people isolated... the knowdlege pretty much desappear.

you are right about that ... but still i would think the vaults might have been teaching history to kids, and the majority of vaults did open before vault 101, also there seems according to fall out 3 lots of pc with information about the pre-war events (atleast in fall out 3 there are couple of pc's wich feat. information about dissolving of the un, the resource wars and the invading of canada/alaska) .... i talked about FO3 not the other games never played them

To reply about paint, isn't most pigments made from plants but where are the plants?

Some colours are made from plants, yes. Woad and madder coming to mind. A lot of pigments are mineral or metal based though, like titanium or lead for white, bones for black (burning the bones and mixing the remains with whatever is used makes a lovely dark shade), clay, ground rocks. Animals can also be used, like the mollusks once used to make purple dye. I think they were boiled or milked or something.

Paints could pretty easily be made. There's plenty of minerals in the dirt and rocks around, you just wouldn't have a huge palette of colours. Mostly reds, yellows, browns, maybe some greys and such. Depending on how deep down they dig, blues could also become available.

I got the impression that people only more recently started moving into the Capitol Wasteland, since it was so badly destroyed during the war.

I mean the Brotherhood only showed up what, a few decades ago? I believe they mentioned that before the Brotherhood showed up, people were barely surviving because of all the Ghouls, and Mutants, and that one the Brotherhood showed up to equalize things, that people began to flourish.

As for food still being around, I just assume that by 2077 "SCIENCE!" had developed to the point where packaging material would be made from some space-age materials, and that preservative chemicals had probably developed to the point where food is still good, especially since it's in space-aged air tight packing materials on top of probably having all sorts of exotic preservatives in them.

Not to mention that one of the major factors of food spoilage is bacteria, and the bombs probably sterilized bacteria in a rather extensive range.

As for the war still being fresh in peoples minds... I live in the South and in some places where the Civil War brought just utter destruction, there are STILL people talking about their great-grandparents fighting in the war or getting killed, and it's been OVER 100 YEARS! And they are still talking in a way that suggest it happened recently.

The 2 Hour War was a far more devastating action, the destruction it brought, the complete paradigm shift it caused, not to mention so many pockets of culture being preserved for so many years (sometimes centuries in the case of Vault 101) the culture being preserved in the vaults, combined with things being so bad that people idealize the Pre-War golden age, creates an environment where people still act like the War just happened.

Things are so bad that they just can't stop thinking about Pre-War life, even 200 years after.

Why oh why are thry going on about the war so much?

Simple answer. Though there are loads of us that love the series and have been here since the begining and know every little detail regarding the whole fallout universe, there as as many if more that dont know any thing about it. Hence why there is the vast amount of info kicking about covering the past and so on all over the game.

This is the 1st of 3 games if what ive been reading is correct, an becasue of this they want to get every one upto speed on every thing thats happened.
To make this a worth while investment they need to show the world, and though id like to see a fallout1, and 2 remake in the new system i dobt it would happen.

Hopefully there will be less mention in the next installment and the addson that are coming for this one will widen the picture.

RE: Nuclear Winter

Nuclear Winter was a theory thats been largely debunked by the scientific community. From the reflowering of the regions of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and Chernobyl they reckon that Nuclear Winter is something of an overreaction.

Scientists believe we will experience something like a "Nuclear Autumn" the same kind of cooling, and other damaging effects but not on an Extinction Level Event scale like Nuclear Winter is supposed to be.

RE: Capital Wasteland Habitation

I think the obsession with the War and the Pre-War is that the DC are as someone else said has only recently begun to be colonised, im sure this was confirmed somewhere.
This people are finding all sorts of pre-war gear that has long since been plundered out west so its lead to something of a fad over the War and Pre-War stuff.

You mean the Super-Duper Mart that has raiders storing food in it? Yeah I don't see why humans would have food in a place they are living .

At least I thought she knew Raiders were there. Or is it you who tells her? Aw damn I can't remember.

Why is the word New Darkage Apearing, some of the scientists and engineers must have surrvived the haulocaust and there is so much new technology kicking around that you would assume that they could atleast get a car or two working, If you can make a plasma weapon work than a car shouldnt be that much of a stretch.

Priorities, heheh. First you arm yourself reliably THEN you go some where to show off your flashy new weapon. :gun:

um do u understand "apocalypse" ?in two hours everything humanity built in +2000 years was destroyed. Of course evryone knows about it, yes im sure they told stories bout it and ppl heard about it. We still talk bout revolutionary war. and they dont remember what went on, it was recorded as history. You can still see the war because EVERYTHING was destroyed ,there was nothing left to rebuild, no one left to rebuild it, to sum it up it was an apocalypse

It wouldn't take people so long to start over. Can we please look at towns like Vault City, New Reno, NCR, The Hub, Broken Hills the list goes on about people who started over and started building and retaking land from the wasteland way before FO3 even started.

Lets not forget even if it took us so long to get to the point we are at now, with the tech laying around you have to consider that a head start for wastelanders.
(In Fallout 1 if you examine cardboard boxes your character makes a remake about how you are amazed they have survived this long)

(By the way Food was left in crates and the Nuka Cola Machines all over and it was still easy to open them and just take them out. Hard for me to believe no one else would of looted it)

These people have more then Fallout 1 wastelanders had including radio signals, strong brotherhood support ect. and they are still worse off.

Let us take Fallout 1's timeline into consideration and lets think about Junktown(quite easily the first town you enter in the game after Shady Sands) They reminded me alot of Megaton but they were still doing better 100 years before Megaton existed apparently.

I totally agree, this has been bugging me too. At least they could try to clean up something, for example around where they live? the citys? , it looks like they just put up a tent and didn't bother to do anything about the environment. Hey even people who are out for a trip in the woods clean up the area before they put up their tent. I understand that these people are weak from radiation and they don't have much resources to rebuild but they could at least try to make it look livable around their citys. They can't be that weak and laizy. Another thing, as an example. In the little town for children you have to get through in order to get to vault 86 (can't remember the name of the place) there are still skeletons laying randomly around the place especially in the toilets. Do these children enjoy the company of skeletons? or are they just too lazy to move them?

Yeah, exactly what I was thinking. He is right.. but it really would be a different game. I guess all they really had to do was say this was a few decades after the war rather than 2 centuries.

I think we have two different issues, and we need to disentangle them:

1) People talking about the war.
The issue here is that 200 years after the war, people are in the 8th or so generation, and so they would very likely have long forgotten about the war, and post-apocolyptia would have become the new "ordinary". Your parents grew up in the wastes with irradiated water and two-headed cows, your parents' parents, your parents' parents' parents... Especially when you add in the lack of formal schooling on history, and more, the lack of learning materials for those specific individuals desirous of learning history, and the pre-war world would become something of legend. On the other hand, given the tremendous difference between pre-war and post-war, and the catastrophic and enormous chasm between them, it's possible that the memory would endure by virtue of the shear magnitude of its significance.

2) The physical state after the war
The point here is NOT that people are talking about the war; the issue here is that 200 years later, there is still food in the Super Duper Mart, there are still bullets from before the war, etc. How could it be that so much pre-war material has endured? In Fallout, it was plausible, and in Fallout 2, manufacturing had begun again, and people were again producing guns and bullets and such. Just look at NCR: they had standardized police uniforms and street names! Now, NCR was not the norm, but it shows how much recovery had taken place in certain areas. Fallout 2 also had intercity politics and the like, so whereas Fallout gives us the feeling of the great-unknown and the world reeling from catastrophe, Fallout 2 shows us the beginnings of normalization of life. In Fallout 3, NCR was going to have an armed force capable of going toe-to-toe with the BoS (albeit due to greater numbers, but that still means they had capability to arm their soldiers with plenty of 5.56 mm assault rifles and combat armor).

Given all this, it is extremely perplexing how stunted things are in Fallout 3; given that Fallout 3 is after Fallout 2, we'd expect even greater development, perhaps even with re-urbanization of DC and renewal of sewage systems and the like. Instead, we find things in the same state they were in Fallout 1! The explanation would seem to be that whereas in Fallout 1, the Master emerged a few decades after the war, and spent several more decades experimenting with Super Mutants, and thus civilization was not affected by the Super Mutants for some time. And even once they began, it was very slow and gradual, such as taking Necropolis and scouting out stealthily for non-irradiated humans; the Super Mutants did not have any real existence to the towns. Thanks to the Vault Dweller, the Super Mutant threat was nipped in the bud before it really materialized; had the Vault Dweller come a few years later, the Fallout world would have been devastated by the Super Mutants, and Fallout 2 would never have happened. In fact, the Hub was affected by deathclaws far more than by Super Mutants. On the other hand, in Fallout 3, the Super Mutants plagued any attempts at civilization from the very beginning, and only extremely slowly (and especially with the BoS) was mankind able to overcome this opposition, which, unlike Fallout 1 in CA, plagued MD-DC-VA from the very beginning of post-war history. So in some sense, the BoS coming to the East Coast is when MD-DC-VA finally got to the same stage that CA was in Fallout 1, and we can suppose that (hypothetically), in Fallout 4, in another seventy years after Fallout 3, MD-DC-VA will be in the same state that CA was in Fallout 2.

**Edit: Note that in Fallout 1, the BoS played almost no role at all in defeating the Super Mutants; one individual was able to infiltrate two facilities and destroy the key targets within and shut down the entire Super Mutant army before it had a chance to form. However, in Fallout 3, the BoS made a full-scale military assault on the Super Mutants and was merely able to contain them and prevent their further expansion. So in Fallout 3, we see that the Super Mutants had a far far greater foothold in MD-DC-VA than they had in CA in Fallout 1, and this probably explains why the MD-DC-VA area is so far behind where CA is.

Aren't there also Chinese soldier holdouts in the DC area? I know I've heard their propaganda on the radio. The fact that there are still people fighting the War, and near constant Enclave radio bombardment of the past, also tend to encourage the propagation of the memories of the War and the time before it. Not to mention the DC area itself. I'm sure some stories and descriptions were passed down the bloodlines for the past 200 years.

Like, as someone earlier mentioned, the Declaration of Independence. The general gist of it has been carried on, but it's been distorted as time went on. Much like a more serious game of Telephone.

Honestly, when you're struggling to survive and manage to gain just a little time to relax and sleep at night, what else do you really have to tell your kids about except the past?

my personal opinion is that yes it may b a little farfetched for 200 years after a nuke war but when u think about it the setting of items is possible from ppl storing there stuff. although the buildings coulda been a little more scorched and blasted. i agree that ppl shoulda forgotten mostly by now though. also let me know wat u tink but i personally think it woulda been awesome to have random moments where as urt walking by a building thats barely standing it just collapses. this would help show the fact that its 200 years later with no repairs done.

I think the fact that these things were preserved so well 200 years after the war helps to explain why that period of history is so "fresh" in people's minds. When you think about it people in the Wastes are living in their own little time capsule just as much as people in the Vaults. There isn't much for humanity to aspire towards in post-apocalyptic America but they are surrounded by the dilapidated remnants of all their past human achievements and glory: mass transit terminals, towering skyscraqers, robots, wholesome suburban neighborhoods. That gives them something to hope for a return to in the future.

I don't think they "remember" America before the war so much as they idolize/worship what little they've gathered about it from ruins in the Wastes and Enclave Radio broadcasts. Sierra Petrovita for example is obsessed with the nostalgic image of Nuka-Cola and has even turned her house into a Nuka-Cola museum. Nathan from Megaton eats up Enclave Radio broadcasts and discusses things like baseball and apple pie for verbatim when it is obvious that he doesn't understand them outside the context of President Eden's speeches. There are constant reminders of the time before the war and it makes sense that people in the Wastes would be more sensitive to them, being isolated, desperate, and in many cases impressionable.

Everything still has 200 year old wallpapers. I mean, honestly, is it that hard to figure out how to make paint?
----

Evidentley so. If you were fighting for you'r life, forcing down irradiated water day by day, and vommiting to stay alive decor wouldn't be you'r highest priority. Or maybe it would. Enlighten me.

After WW2 Warsaw saw >90% of its buildings completly flatterned... Imagine if there had been no world aid or goverment re-building schemes, I bet the people of Warsaw to this day would still live asthough the war was yesterday if so...

Also another example is New Orleans after Katrina, I think the people there still live asthough the Hurricane was yesterday and they are supposedly recieving aid.

I think part of the reason why it makes no sense to us that people would focus on things that happened 200 years ago is that we're looking at it from a different perspective. When we look back at life 200 years ago, it's simply to marvel at how much we've advanced and achieved. To the people of the Wasteland, 200 years ago was the pinnacle of human civilization. To them, 200 years ago was paradise, when the grass was green, water was clean and pure, and mutated creatures didn't exist. To a Wastelander, to look back 200 years ago is to think about how much has been lost since the War. And that's before you consider that the ghoul population exists to give first-hand knowledge of pre-War life.

As for why there's so much loot to be had in the ruins, have you noticed a lot of signs of recent human activity in the more isolated parts of the DC Interior? Beyond J. Random Scavenger here or there, the majority of what exists in the DC Interior is hostile to the average human. Between feral ghouls, Mirelurks, Molerats, and Muties, you'd have to be either desperate, suicidal, or ballsy to go very far into the ruins looking for even the most basic of supplies. Same goes for the heavily irradiated places like Greener Pasture, where just a quick stroll through without any Rad-X would cut your life expectancy in half. And this is in the past 20 years, after the BoS showed up and started thinning out the Mutie population and making it safer for people to move around.

And why haven't things totally fallen apart or decayed beyond all recognition? All I say is the same thing the creators have been saying since FO1: It's 1950's physics, folks. Back then, they really believed that if nuclear war happened, the remnants of civilization would last forever. After all, there's still buildings built by the Romans that stand today, so why wouldn't the Capital Building?

Just think of the Civil War or Revolutionary War. Same difference.

Nuclear winter is quite undisputable. But for the sake of arguement, if a nuke were to hit an area out of the range of explosion and direct radiation, it would only be fallout that would be a threat to paper. But that doesn't seem like much a threat at all. And also, there is way to much segregation out in the wastes. Humans are very judgemental against mutants, raiders like what they do, and the world is a literal hell hole over run by Giant mole rats, emaciated hounds, Hulking deathclaws, Centaurs, and the most ridiculous size of Insects you'll ever see. People settle where they may, and find the little protection they can. Fear is enough to make that part of the story credible for me. I would NEVER walk out of the town, or vault I was born in. Well, you know... bar getting thrusted out by Mr.God complex.

I love how the hallways of Rivet City are completely COVERED with sheets of paper and other garbage.

You guys don't pick up after yourselves, or what?

YOU LIVE HERE, YOU DUMB BASTARDS. DO YOU THINK YOU COULD KEEP THE EMPTY BOXES AND TIN CANS OUT OF YOUR HALLWAY!?

No matter how you slice it, after 200 years, you would NOT be harping on the war. Even the oldest people in the wasteland are too young to have ever known anybody who remembers the beforetimes. Except for one or two ghouls, there is nothing but the here and now. Sure, you're surrounded by the results, but they've always been there. There's never been anything different, in anyone's memory, anywhere.

So you CAN'T think about it, because it's an abstract out of your realm of experience. Your definition of "Delicious, clean water", for example, is the LEAST nasty water you've ever had. You LOVE BBq'd squirrel on a stick, because noone you've ever known has even HEARD of the glory of a taco.

It's all relative. So yes, they should definitely have moved on.

But Bethesda painted the whole game in this five foot thick "NUCLEAR WAR IZ BAAAAAD!" shillack, and populated it with helpless, pathetic, semi-retarded goobers with the survival instinct of an armadillo on oxycotin in the Daytona 500. It's just a very amateurish and heavy-handed way of dealing with a post-apocoyliptic setting. It's INCONCEIVABLE to the design team that you could have a group of people who have achieved any level of success in regards to food, clothing, and shelter, like Vault City, Reno, the Hub, etc., unless they're blatent Bad Guys.

Even the super-advanced technology of "SCRUBBING YOUR CLOTHES ON A ROCK UNDER WATER" is a lost art, for Christ's sake. As evidenced by the Capital Wasteland's "Cultural Elite" at Tenpenny.

And I'm supposed to sacrifice myself for these people? Psssh. Biotch, please.

Well, I get the feeling people were more interested in Pre-War civilization the same way we still to this day look at the Roman Empire as a high point - and that's a couple thousand years' past. For hundreds of years after the fall of the Roman Empire, Western civilization was still copying elements of that society - and they weren't even recovering from a nuclear disaster.

The War was 200 years ago, but most of that intervening time people were just working on the day to day worries of survival - you don't bother yourself with rebuilding civilization when you don't even know if you're going survive the night. All the best and brightest were safely locked away in the Vaults. I'm sure there were people who survived the War who knew how to build and maintain all this high-tech stuff, but if you were that capable and resourceful to help in the rebuildling effort - chances are you also manged to get into one of the Vaults. Those on the outside were left to their own devices.

When you don't even have the technology to repair most of what you can scavenge from the ruins, you're going to see the society whose rubble you're picking through as almost Demi-Gods, I think. Forget about wondering why people are still hung up on the War - I think a better question is why don't you see cults worshipping them?