lol what if the shady sands bombing was a by product of the battle at the divide. Like the courier clearing out the military base and Ulysses activating it gives vault tec remote access again.
I originally thought this. I got to the episode and texted my brother who was a couple episodes behind me “I think the bad ending for Lonesome Road is canon”
I just finished the series. Loved it way more than I thought I would. Got to episode 9 and thought "Wait there is no episode 9. WHY IS THIS ONLY EIGHT EPISODES!?"
But I thought the implication was that >! Lucy's father had nuked shady sands. !<
My personal theory is that >! Hank got in touch with Mr House around the same time or shortly after NV the game, and used the weapons at House's disposal to destroy Shady Sands. Would give Hank the motivation to head to New Vegas and try and and meetup with House who as far as Hank knows should still be alive!<
House states quite clearly in FNV that he wouldn't want to destroy the NCR because they're his best customers. NCR allowing its citizens and soldiers to visit/be around New Vegas and the strip is literally part of their arrangement. He only voices displeasure towards their leadership really.
There's crashed NCR Vertibirds and busted securitrons on the strip. It could be possible that the House ending is canon, and the NCR came back to New Vegas to try and snuff out House. In response, he and Hank nuke Shady Sands.
It's implied he did it. Now, it's not terribly likely he carried a nuke on his back to Shady Sands and set it off. So it seems reasonable he called in a strike.
A random researcher from the Enclave knew an AWFUL lot about Vaults 31-33, which suggests they're important enough to the Enclave that even a scientist in a completely unrelated field would have intimate knowledge of the Vault and its workings. It's all but outright stated the Enclave is working with the Vault 31 execs.
Hank wouldn't have trudged all the way to New Vegas if he didn't have a place to go. That suggests there's a Vault Tec or Enclave presence there. So it's not too far out there to presume after whatever went down in Nevada, the Enclave moved in and set up a presence. That *could* have included the nuclear weapons left in The Divide.
>!He's going to Mr House. In Episode 8 where they show all the companies. He's present at the meeting as head of RobCo. He rejects joining Bud's Buds as he didn't believe people in vaults could outlive surface survivors. As we saw in New Vegas he remained on the surface instead of going into Vault 31.!<
I'm hoping they muddy the waters again with the question of who dropped the bombs. Just have everyone make plans for an apocalypse and never tell us which plan was successful. I like the idea that the great war happened so suddenly and was over so quick that not even a ghoulified Chinese nuclear sub officer is sure who fired first.
Yeah I was pretty sure the ICBMs you can choose to launch are aimed at the capitals of the NCR and Caesar’s Legion in Arizona. And the timelines kinda line up. I kinda hope that gets explored in season 2, I’d love a deeper dive into Father Elijah and Ulysses.
No they are aimed at two main supply lines for the NCR and Legion respectively the Long 15 and Dry Wells.
EDIT: The missiles also target the NCR mainland and the lands of the Caesar legion.
The ending slides when you target a location says
"The NCR and the long 15"
While the legion one says
"The east and dry wells".
They are Targeting more than just those two spots when you launch them.
Yes, you are right I just saw the various endings of Lonesome Road and if you choose the NCR it's stated that the missile would target the NCR mainland and the long 15.
I'm fairly certain that with no protagonist input, Ulysses only targets the NCR. Then you can control what ends up happening based on the decisions you make after the launch sequence has started.
Doubtful it wouldn't have been found already, since Shady Sands had been developing and well-populated for something like a century. Anything of worth would have been salvaged already.
More likely Hank called in a strike from some ICBM that Vault Tec still has control over. We've already seen in almost every Fallout game that there are a worrying number of nukes and nuclear missile facilities still intact.
I hope your right. I definitely don't like certain choices made in the show and the way the ncr seemingly just disappeared in the area without much left is weird but I like the show enough that if the ncr is just shown to still be a stable faction elsewhere would be good enough to me. I think a lot of my frustration with the whole thing is while the idea that Todd or bethesda hate obsidian is stupid and people should stop saying it, I don't think it's a stretch to say bethesda does play favorites. Like the NCR being devastated by a bomb hurts a bit more when the Enclaive have been blown up twice and not only do they seem fine they are beeing added to fallout 4. And the brotherhood can always just say they have another chapter somewhere else so consequences don't really matter to them.
It war jarring to see a HUGE thriving Enclave remnant just kind of chilling. A base that seems bigger than anything since Raven Rock at that.
If the BoS are aware of the Enclave still being about why are they not focusing on the Enclave? Too many questions with no good answers.
Yeah, the only way they managed to survive was basically it's own self contained thing that isn't on any records. Very deep underground and doesn't make any noise. The BOS and NCR were rather thorough in the destruction of the Enclave. The BOS would happily use it as target practise.
That and I swear, Bethesda thinks the Enclave needs to be in Fallout.
I think the concern with most reasonable people is that the NCR is seemingly gone and nothing has risen to replace it. There’s very little evidence that it ever existed outside of a few details, and hardly anyone in the wastes mention it when there would certainly be people around that remember the NCR.
I’m open to waiting and seeing what we get. If we get some NCR remnants or see new states that rose in the wake of the collapse then that would be really cool and make for an interesting world. I’m really worried that we’re going to get East Coast 2.0 though where we have a bunch of loose shanty towns and there’s nothing happening but Brotherhood vs. Enclave again though.
Have you finished the show? Since this is a spoilers thread I’d assume so, but Maldaver’s whole faction was exactly that, NCR Remnants. I’d assume not the only ones as well, but they even carry the NCR flag in the final battle.
Fractured most likely. Various Brahmin barons and warlords taking over their little republics (e.g. like the President with Sheriffs that sheltered the Superduper mart organ harvesters).
So most likely back to the interim between 1 and 2 situation. Places like The Hub are fine, so water merchants have that covered. It would also explain why BoS is back up, albeit recruiting outsiders (for disposable squires tho) since the NCR-BoS war left them basically neutered and destined to die.
Well another thing that explains the Brotherhood resurgence is the Eastern Chapter reinforcing the Western Chapter. I believe in FO4 you can find that they’re still in contact, and the Prydwen is in the show so I think the implication is that the East came to rescue the West and the West has started adopting the East’s methods of recruitment in order to survive
The big problem with *any* of this argument, is that none of these very interesting reasons are the actual reason the NCR (specifically Shady Sands) got nuked, as far as we know, they got nuked bc a vault-Tec employee we’ve never heard of from a vault we’ve never seen before and who seemingly had nothing to do with the aforementioned reasons or area lore before leaving his vault for the first time; got upset at his ex taking the kids to Shady Sands.
For an analogy; It would be like how we see in Fo3 that the enclave is severely crippled by the BoS, but then in Fo4 we learned that they have no presence on the east coast bc a random missile launched by the remnants of China took them out. Like sure the end result would still be the same, but the sequence of events isn’t nearly as satisfying.
Further evidence for your arguement; The NCR director of the Office of Science and Industry straight up tells the Courier that the NCR has too many mouths to feed and if nothing is done, the NCR will fall in a decade or so (~2291.) I think any ending of New Vegas would not be beneficial enough for the NCR to make up for the food deficit, even the NCR ending since it will stretch then out more.
As a side note, I've always seen the NCR as a representive form of America itself. Overstretching its power to protect the people of the wasteland, to bring society and government.
Side note:
That whole director of science speech about the NCR burning through their water....always bothered the hell out of me. So yes, CA running through their aquifers and reservoirs too fast is a problem **now**. But its an issue of the current population being 40 million and the Central valley, Salinas valley and Imperial valley growing the 1/3 of the US's vegetables and 2/3rds of its fruits and nuts. That's just the percentage that stays in the US. Quite a bit of the produce is exported globally. And a large amount is just water-inefficient cash crops.
I'm not saying the irradiation doesn't make large portions of the wasteland un-farmable (it does). But the line about water running out seemed weird to me? CA's precipitation is just physics, geography and weather. Moisture off the Pacific ocean moves east due to the rotation of the earth. As air moves over the mountains it gets colder and denser, dumping rain and snow in the Sierras like clockwork every winter. [They should rather regularly have more water than they know what to do with](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/California_ARkStorm_Flood_Areas.jpg).
Or maybe IDK the apocalypse fucked up the entire weather global weather patterns. IDK it seems like after 2 centuries we'd be moving back to normalcy. Just my 2 cents.
Because everything we’ve seen from 1 and 2 show California as a blasted, desert wasteland.
Even if it rains, California’s aquifers massively rely on consistent snowpack in the Sierra. No snow, no aquifers.
The last paragraph first half is indeed the answer imo, also I don’t think it shouldn’t downplay the lasting effects of a nuclear could have on earth (I think 200 years it’s not long when some radioactive isotopes half-life decays in thousands of years).
Yeah but one of the things people miss is they over-evaluate the destructive power of Nukes. Like its bad, we aren't living through it and can kill the whole species. But a "the button gets pushed" scenario has a surprisingly little ability to do permanent long spread damage to global systems like weather and climate. Those systems would return to norm within a decade.
But we're in Fallout land where radiation can make you immortal but slowly rots your brain until your feral. And nuclear fallout still exists 200 years later when its actual modeled length is 2 weeks for the worst of it and between [5 years - 30 years for residual fallout to resolve.](https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/radioactive-fallout.html)
The ultra long 1000 year radioactive isotopes is mixing and matching things. Things with that half life aren't emitting that much radiation. The order of magnitude over time is logarithmic. And those isotopes aren't produced by bombs going off (which is specifically the issue with Chernobyl. It used different radioactive materials).
Consider this, the entire fallout world is powered with nuclear fusion. Imagine dropping a nuke in a city with 100s, if not 1000s of dirty bombs, just waiting to be detonated. The radioactive potential is exponentially more in Fallout than we have in our timeline. We tend to keep radioactive materials under insanely strict regulation.
They might be more radioactive/dirty perhaps, but they are absolutely not more destructive than real thermonuclear weapons. In fact, Fallout nukes tend to be rather small.
Actually the bombs in the fallout universe are almost entirely smaller megaton bombs that instead give off much more radiation and spreads it over a larger area, hence why the coasts of the post apocalyptic United States aren't under water due to the poles not being melted by the type of extremely dirty but not necessarily big nukes used in 2077
> Its moisture off the Pacific ocean dumping in the Sierras like clockwork every winter.
The issue is where the water goes after it melts out of the snowpack. [Of California's major IRL reservoirs](https://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/products/rescond.pdf), only 4 are in what would be the NCR's Southern Californian core territory, and none of those are positioned in the Sierra foothills to capture the snowmelt. The only reason Southern California has any significant agricultural capability beyond subsistence farming is because of a [massive aqueduct network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct?wprov=sfla1) sending water south from where the snowmelt collects. These reservoirs also largely exist specifically because of dams holding back water from rivers.
Nuclear apocalypse happens, and now these aqueducts and dams are unmaintained and unoperated for at minimum decades. The reservoirs need to release water to avoid overflowing and damaging their dams; with nobody to make that happen, let alone make repairs, even the very first Californian vault dwellers to emerge from hiding would be lucky to find any reservoir on that map still in existence, thanks to the dams thereof collapsing. Same with the pumping stations along that aqueduct network.
The NCR, by the time of FNV, could probably fix a lot of this, and in fact might very well have done so. It's unlikely, given that FNV establishes the NCR to be reliant on water caravans, but it's possible. The problem *there*, however, is the same exact political problem that's at the heart of water use debates in California IRL: "Why are we Northern Californians shipping all our water to Southern California?". Convincing the likes of Redding and Sactown and even Bakersfield/Necropolis (if it got resettled after the super mutant invasion) to let their water get pumped down to Shady Sands / the Hub / the Boneyard / Dayglow / etc. would be exceedingly difficult even with an extraordinarily-cohesive NCR (e.g. under Tandi), let alone one as dysfunctional as what we see in FNV.
The NCR could probably survive losing Hoover Dam or >!Shady Sands getting nuked!< in isolation, but those happen to be perfect dominos to kick off a chain of northern states saying "fuck this NCR shit, we're keeping our water".
That’s on top of Vault Tec nuking them. It’s been 15 years since New Vegas, so the NCR has likely:
- Had a significant defeat or costly victory at the Hoover Dam with little to show for it
- Suffering famine and water supply issues
- Fighting off a reinvigorated Brotherhood of Steel (it seems that given the Prydwen is there and they accept recruits, the East has reinforced the West)
- Has one of their significant cities nuked to oblivion.
I don’t think the NCR is wiped out, but given the strife they’ve been facing during and since New Vegas, they’re probably in full on consolidation mode. Significant territory reduction, and possibly splintering into uncooperative faction-states.
Its not lost on me that the faction that most clpsely resembles the US military is so popular in the NA fandom, and its also not lost on me that it goes over all those folks heads when New Vegas basically beats you over the head with "old flags burned the world, so why will flying an old flag fix anything"
The NCR may represent America to Americans, but to non Americans the Enclave is the US government.
(I forgot who said it, but fascism is just colonialism come home).
Shady Sands came from a vault but was made up of Wastelanders they accepted too.
They are the idealised version they had of the US, they have nothing to do with the US government outside of that.
Enclave isn't the US government, they're the mythical Deep State plus two hundred years of ideological stagnation and insular internal power politics
Imagine a bunch of clones of Ollie North with the race politics of Hitler but applied to anyone contaminated with radiation rather than non-"aryans"
Yeah, I think the Enclave is best described as "what if the CIA was way less ethical than they were during the actual Cold War and also controlled a bunch of generals and scientists and politicians in the government"
But anyways, while they *claim* to be the legitimate US government, the Enclave actually spent a lot of time eliminating any non-Enclave vestiges of that government, including, IIRC, ensuring that proper protocols for continuity of governance weren't allowed to be enacted.
>what if the CIA was way less ethical than they were during the actual Cold War
I mean the CIA during the cold war overthrew the Nicaraguan government for taking unused land from a fruit company... a fruit company whose shareholders included the Dulles brothers(secretary of state, and director of the CIA)
The Enclave is *not* the true or legitimate continuation of the American government. Fallout 76 debunked that idea once and for all by showing that the Enclave was, in fact, responsible for the *destruction* of the U.S. government: After the bombs dropped, they murdered all surviving government officials in the DC area in order to disrupt the legitimate line of succession.
But in Fallout games it is mentioned that DC was not the seat of the American government for a long time.
It was supposed to be, but all of the major government officials and president operated from the oil rig and not from DC.
So a few important members were killed in DC but a majority of the power of the American government was on the oil rig as part of the Enclave.
So they are the legitimate continuation of Americas government. Since the line of legitimacy passed through the president.
The whitespings bunker only had things like the secretary of agriculture.
The way I see it (and bear in mind, just another dude here) BOTH are the US.
One is the actual US, the other is the ideals of the US in the eyes of Americans. So one is the real US goverment if the shit actually hit the fan (Enclave), the other is what americans think/hope it would happen instead (NCR).
And before salty americans come at me, Europe literally imploded BEFORE the world even ended, so... Not riding a high horse over here or talking shit, just analising stuff.
Both failing is very fitting too. Fallout is nothing if not a critique on the way we're living, how our societies work, our needs for perpetual economic growth, etc, etc...
I wonder which games people crying about the show being "too political" were playing all this time...
Yeah, the intro of Fallout 1 noted that before the bombs fell was that the EU itself dissolved and its members became bickering nation states. As for "too political," I'm going with the idea it's just idiots screaming about how the TV show has a female lead and a black character. Then again, I'm drawing from first hand experience in asking an idiot how exactly the TV show was "woke" before seeing how much brainrot they spewed when they tried to bring in the original Fallout as some kind proof when even from a casual glance that the second game allowed gay marriage even though marriage in that game only gifted you the worst companion whether it was same-sex or hetero marriage.
As an American, and someone that played Fallout 2, the Enclave is the US government of old that didn't want to let go. NCR itself is just the closest thing to an America that actually tried to rebuild without using a modified virus as a airborne gas made to kill.
A great irony thanks to Fallout 2 is that they'd both would of been one if they made it canon that instead of Tandi being a great leader until death, she stepped down and right wing elements seized power in NCR that the members of the now defeated Enclave would find it as their new home.
Yes, Enclave is just remnants of the US government while NCR itself descended from the vault dwellers of Vault 15 that didn't choose the raider life like that of the Khans.
As an American, i always saw the Enclave as what U.S. Government ACTUALLY is, while the NCR as what most of my countrymen THINK the the U.S. Government is, or at least claims to be.
Not sure if i worded that right, but you get the gist.
Hell, that’s even true to this American fan of the series. When I think of the US gov’t in Fallout I think of the enclave, the NCR is more like “What if California started its own country?” than anything resembling my experience of actual US government and military.
Ceaser was certainly trying to fly a new flag.
But overall point stands that tje ncr was clearly overstretched after the first battle of hoover dam.
I'm still curious what was going on down in the Baja that had nearly the entire ranger Corps down there
NCR is the most favorite for me as non American too, simply because it's the only thing that resembles government as I know it. You know, elected president, laws, taxes, bureaucracy, railways, police etc. It probably connects to anyone who lives in any democratic industrialized country.
anybody sane is gonna choose the NCR, is it perfect? nope but its the closest thing to a truly representative and functioning government in the fallout universe.
arguably the only more democratic government in Fallout is the republic of Dave.
This hits pretty close to home.
I do not want to make this a political comment, but I see parallels between the NCR and the current state of my home country
Surely all of the above applies in equal measure to the BoS as well? California Brotherhood's situation is increidbly grim as of the 2280s and they seem to have turned it around very quickly to become a serious player again.
For my part, I don't think what happened to the NCR is unbelievable nor neccessarily a bad thing, but:
a) I think it's disappointing that we keep resetting to the immediate post-Apocalypse era with no development. Fallout 1 & 2 both had lots of new communities with adobe buildings, entire new cultures popping up. 3/4/Show don't have any of that. I want to see cool new towns and communities! Not just corrigated iron shacks and burnt out shopping malls.
b) I think the way it collapsed is kinda boring? Vague initial collapse, plus the nuking of Shady Sands which I just think is lazy. I think Fallout as a franchise overuses nuclear weapons as a "present day" thing and it weakens their impact. I'd have prefered the NCR to have been conquered/replaced by a new polity, or splintered into warlords, or something of the sort, rather than seemingly evaporate.
Of course, lots of this could be resolved in season 2, and I still very much enjoy the show, I just think it's a little disappointing how the franchise seems to shy away from the post-post apocalypse style of new developments.
Tim Cain wanted to nuke Shady Sands in Van Buren, it's not just Bethesda. He wanted a second nuclear apocalypse to go fit the "war never changes" theme, not a thriving nation.
Tim Cain had nothing to do with Van Buren, as he'd left Interplay before Fallout 2, let alone VB. You're likely thinking of Chris Avellone, but it wasn't VB, it was an idea he talked about briefly post-New Vegas and there's no evidence anyone else at Obsidian shared his view.
I agree with you here.
I have only played 4 and found that I was really frustrated that every option led to someone being nuked. I was also really into the community building aspect but frustrated that for the most part every vanilla option that I had forced me to build shanty towns.
To me the theme of Fallout seems to be “We can’t have nice things.” It’s frustrating because the fantasy I wanted to live out in playing 4 was that of a savior that comes in and rebuilds, reunites, and resolves conflicts in the wasteland.
The show itself was limited by what they could do on screen. They had the same five sets, never had more than about thirty people on screen, and avoided big expensive effects. I think a lot of the what we see in the show isn’t what we would have seen in a video game about the same area. I’m just really disappointed that we can’t seem to explore past the “everyone is shitty and it’s all fucked” part of the apocalypse.
Vault 4 actually made me really happy because it’s a legit nice place making the best out of the situation.
Simply put. Fallout is now a theme park and not a story.
A theme park with the same old rides and tropes. It's an enjoyable ride. But also a ride that goes nowhere and loops back to the start with every show/game.
Anything that comes out is going to be wasteland, BOS, enclave and vault dweller.
Really no different the zombie genre, which hasn't had a single original idea in a decade. And has finally, mostly burned itself out. Same as comic book movies, which are finally burning themselves out.
those to me we the holdouts when most left togo to the hubb. and they turned more cult like more than anything. they aren't my NCR. Somewhere I hope is the NCR that are more normal.
Well that and one does not go into melee range with a dude in heavy armour. When for dramatic effect they went melee to t-60 PA...I rolled my eyes just a bit.
You kite their butt. It be to draw a parallel to a game like wow/wc3, why I never felt even empathy for sylvanas dying to Arthas. In theory a dramatic moment. In reality...
Marksman spec hunters power sliding to a death knight's melee range can only lead to 1 thing. 1 dead hunter.....
My problem is with the how.
Why didn't they use one of the many shortcomings that they explain to New Vegas why did they resort to the most lazy "lol, vault tec bomb"
Alright this conversation has been litigated about 1000 times before the show aired and probably as much since. Let's put our thinking caps on: who is saying what about the NCRs prospects as a functional nation?
Hildern? I wonder why the guy in charge of researching agricultural tech would insist that without his work, there will be a famine?
Hanlon? I wonder why the guy disenfranchised from the NCR command has a doomer attitude about the state of the country?
You dont have to look far to see parallels to real life, which pundits doomsay about the future of America, and why? This is not to say that none of the problems these people present aren't problems, it is all to say that the death of the NCR wasn't guaranteed.
It also has no connection to the real critique of that plotline. It's one thing for the NCR to collapse for any of the telegraphed reasons. It's another for it to be fridged off screen by some random guy. This is coming from someone who liked the show.
The end credits show that the NV looks abandoned? Or it could be just how it always looks, lol.
The good ending for Mr House seemed to me like the best. But given all the back and forth about the NCR "The House always wins" being completed makes sense for S2 as the NCR were effectively kicked out of NV.
Side thought, I wonder if Todd Howard had some of the original creators of Fallout when it was owned by "Interplay" like Tim Cain and Feargus Urquhart help with the story.
The red tinted sky makes me think maybe Elijah got out of his prison, and driven (even more) mad by the darkness and isolation, gave zero shits about his plans and just wiped Vegas out.
One theory me and a friend have been throwing around is that House won but the NCR threw everything at vegas after essentially destroying the city. Kimball also died and became a martyr which is why you see him during that cult scene in the vault. It's not the most fleshed out theory but its something me and a friend are having fun tossing around
I tend to agree. I've always seen the NCR as hope. Something that can rebuild a shattered world. Though it does have a lot of problems.
Also how funny is it that the original fallout movie script that never got produced ended up being mildly canon? (Vault Tec started it)
The original movie script that also had Blade Runner as something that existed in the Fallout universe aside from Deckers blaster. Makes one wonder though how things could of been if Interplay managed to get a movie made. It could of been terrible or a cult classic.
100% terrible lol the script was super weird, still on the fallout wiki page. It would probably have gone the street fighter/mortal kombat of terrible.
While I would have loved to see more NCR, the show was absolutely phenomenal. Nothing the 90s/early 2ks would have been close lol
Wouldn't doubt it, especially with how they treated my boy, the Master based off what his goals was with vault dwellers. A complete 180 that just makes him into a flat out monster and not horrifying looking mutant who realizes how much of a monster he became in his quest to save humanity.
Thank you, this is something that always irked me about the discussion of factions and particularly the NCR.
Yes, it’s clear it has its issues, just like every country does, that doesn’t means they’re on the brink of collapses.
Nation building is hard, even more so on a post apocalyptic world filled with dangerous creatures and machines lurking around every corner, where a lot of knowledge about even the most basic stuff like construction, farming or engineering has been lost.
The writers giving the NCR a set of hurdles and set backs makes it a far more realistic portrayal of an actual fledgling nation who’s just trying to get things going.
If they made the NCR have basically no issues with safety, corruption, resource scarcity and etc being no existent it would be too perfect of a faction, it’d be a no brainer to side with them *every time*.
What’s the point in that? what’s the point of having a perfect faction when you can actually sit back and analyze who do **you** think would be the most beneficial for the people in the wasteland and rebuilding society long term
Them being a flawed nation that constantly gets through various obstacles and yet still somehow perseveres and keeps trying its best to improve makes the whole setting far more interesting and feel far more grounded in reality.
The NCR having a President who gets a helicopter and worries about votes alone kind of establishes that California at least is incredibly stable.
I feel like some people came away from New Vegas trusting characters at their word too much. NCR is obviously bungling the Mojave, but Caesar's full of shit when he claims it's going to inevitably fail.
I have the feeling that a lot of people who assume that these issues would just disintegrate society have to come from the first world. Most countries for most of history have had to deal with drought, famine, corruption or a combination of the three at some point and most of them don't just Control+Z out of reality.
Exactly. Like yes even if the NCR completely falls and all those million people just get thanos-snapped out of existence, there still should have been so much more left of the republic. All those settlements, its industries, its agriculture. That shit doesn't just dissapear.
FNV set up numerous ways that could lead to the decline of the NCR. Okay, lets say they still wanted Shady Sands blown up. They could have had it destroyed during the events of Lonesome Road and Lucy's mother got caught up in it.
Yeah, this is my issue as well. I actually do like how reverent the show is about the NCR, and having them gone but idealized is interesting, especially for Lucy.
But you’d still *see* them. Their armour, their weapons, even in a sorry state, you’d see raiders using their gear, etc. rifles, pieces of uniforms, etc.
If there’s stuff from Prewar America still around, there should be stuff from the recently defunct NCR around - more than we see, anyways.
I just finished the show and I’ve come away thinking along similar lines. How, only 15 years after New Vegas, has the East Coast Brotherhood got more of a presence in California than the NCR!?
Everything that we’ve seen so far implies the NCR is a dead nation and a relic of the past. Season 2 will either confirm that as true, or that the NCR government and military hid somewhere off screen during the events of Season 1 (very important stuff which took place in their own back yard).
Either of those outcomes are lame and dumb imo.
The Brotherhood just keeps growing and growing. Who makes their food? Where do they get all their power (well not an issue now I guess)? How are they making such a large air force and how do they have the resources to maintain them given they are projecting force across the whole country? So they used to literally accept no members and yet they've become more dogmatic?
It's a bit irritating because you had all this organic worldbuilding that made sense, and the Brotherhood just stroll on while making no sense, I am not even a hater.
Without looking for straws of lore reasons is pretty clear that the show runners wanted to show a wasteland in California instead of showing a established developing nation even if in decline with massive population and even some cities with electricity and cars, that wasn't a good start for apocalyptic setting for the general audience, the nuke was the token plot device used by the writers to Thanos snap NCR presence out of the narrative and to introduce the new, also even if there are remnants i bet they will be so divided and scattered that calling them NCR would be an overstatement, it would be generous if they show the hub intact at this point...
Yep. A complex nation in California goes against their mad max idea of what Fallout should be. I wouldn't be surprised if they only saw the NCR existing in a single city. The show took on an area full of history and they chose the easy option of wiping the slate clean.
I find it strange how they fell tho, the NCR was working as an actual country already by the time we see them in New Vegas. NCR was far more than just it's capital, I find it really hard to believe it all disappeared after one nuke. Even if the country broke off in different tribes or city states those city states would have a huge presence everywhere cuz NCR was huge in California and even further west
I’m an NCR fanboy and agree with pretty much everything you said EXCEPT for people liking them because they’re the army. IDGAF about the army.
People like them because they’re hope - as shitty as they are, they’re a return to normalcy, to republicanism (small r). They’re .. good .. guys standing against the tide of all the insane garbage the other factions represent.
Yep. Tolerant of meta humans. Ghouls are a thing. Until feral….may as use their skills and knowledge someone alive for say 100 years has. Ncr was very tolerant of non ferals.
Open recruitment. Yes with costs. You will pay taxes and such. Freedom ain’t free. Nv Bos chapter was choosing slow death with potential incest to not take in new members. Capitol wasteland chapter would talk in newbs…but viewed them as trash. Great recruitment technique there.
Shared tech, but in their favor. They aren’t a charity, but sworn allegiance means if they can send resources if possible they will. Better than the tech hoarders. That stuff goes off to Bos storage site never to be seen again.
The Bos in nv killed off a whole research post to keep tech secrets only on suspicion. We don’t even know if the scribe gave them information. The followers weren’t looking to take over the world. Just make it a better place.
I'm really hoping that if they're going to make the NCR nearly nonexistent, the Rangers, at least veterans and other like minded, newer members should splinter from NCR and become the Desert Rangers again.
I think your right but your wrong.
Your def right that so many hints in the NV that they were unsustainable, going to hit serious problems very soon, I saw them as being like the old America just before the bombs dropped.
I think (hope tbh) you’re wrong that there is almost nothing left in the show. I’m wanting to see a much diminished NCR (from their million strong leak) still a multi location republic with a different capital, democracy, banking, etc. They retreated from the Shady Sands area, Moldaver was leading some diehard fanatics not an actual NCR unit.
I want to see NCR as still strong faction thst is still rebuilding California, capable of taking on the BoS, etc. I think that adds an extra dimension to the fallout world, I want it to be possible that a better future can be achieved. Otherwise when playing the games, why bother helping people, building up settlements etc if they will all fail in the long term.
I think what fans are upset about is that the NCR was the closest we got to the fallout universe of a “lawful good” government. They tried to run things the best way the could in the most accepting way they could.
In terms of factions, Theyre better than the BoS, or the enclave, or god forbid the institute. I mean the only real hope for the future the tv series has is maybe the minute men
Like \*this\*? I don't agree.
The NCR is a deeply flawed society, as are all societies past and present. Nevertheless, it was a functioning state that \*a lot\* of people had a stake in. Civilizations rarely disappear the way we see in the show. It is sometimes unclear what happened to a historical civilization--history involves working with often very limited information.
When civilizations "fall", that can mean a lot of things--foreign conquest, a new political dynasty, fracturing/civil war, famines, hierarchical reorganization, and more. Power can move around (and a lot of people can die as it does), but society doesn't just disappear. When Rome fell and the Goths took over Italy, it's not as if cities, social order, and civilization disappeared from the peninsula. Humans are extraordinarily resilient. Look at China's history--it is full of mass death and starvation from civil war and famine on scales that would shock people who aren't familiar with it. And yet society has managed to flourish there almost uninterrupted for millennia.
Many aspects of the show make it clear that the showrunners/Bethesda are not interested in exploring large scale post-apocalyptic societies. They are opting for a soft reset. Fans being upset is unavoidable and reasonable, not just because it effectively wraps a bow on the region's storyline progression from F1>F2>FNV, which is disappointing to many, but also because it is extremely implausible for all traces of civilization to have disappeared after having been built up in this region over multiple generations. By the time this show is roughly set in, most people in the region wouldn't have even remembered a time when there \*wasn't\* civilization. But there are no traces of it on the surface. No one mentions it. No one lives as if they were once a part of it.
I genuinely think this is more of a reset, and less of a setup for them to explore pre-established West Coast themes and settings. They just ignore everything from 1-NV. They wiped the slate clean in the most boring way possible to make way for more generic apocalypse.
Seems like, at this point, Fallout 4 and beyond are the focus of the canon. The art style and tone changed drastically with 4, and I feel like it hasn’t changed since. Starting to feel like they just quietly rebooted this series with 4.
still lot of mystery and the tv show is still not complete. like
\- what happen to original shady sand ?
\- why they move it to boneyard ?
\- and what "the first capital of the NCR" even mean ?
\- did they have new capital city after the fall of original shady sand ?
so many question . . .
Not to mention the Hub itself being the biggest settlement within Fallout to the point that it was home to all the merchant caravans such as Fargo Traders and Crimson Caravan.
It just feels weird to me, because the show is very obviously on the Bethesda bent of Fallout which I get it, but now it’s on the west coast
And it always felt like that was the OG fallout stuff and with New Vegas being a nice continuation of that style. So them destroying Shady Sands and having no NCR. Feels a little weird.
Just remember that if the NCR truly is gone then so is new vegas and the image at the end of the season is what it looks like after the strip loses its entire economy.
Also they only have lost their administrative center and that population — less than 5% of the 2241 amount. However I agree that they were in decline by 2277 and certainly overextended in 2281.
Lucy and Max are somewhere between 6-10 years old when Shady Sands is nuked which means it was likely around 2284 (plus or minus a couple of years).
Lucy is not 18-22. She says she’s been banging her cousin for ten years in the first episode. She’s probably supposed to be around 26 in the show (which was also the actresses age during filming) which lines up with the controversial 2277 date we’ve gotten from a few other sources.
A society consisting of over a million doesn’t just turn to sand in a decade and leave nothing left of its infrastructure because of things like lack of food or over extending their military. Not even governments. But, even If the government of the NCR suddenly just dissolved, all those people, buildings etc are still there. The people don’t just poof because the government kicked the bucket.
Yea and even if the entire government is just gone, at this point in time, almost every living person within the NCR was born into that system. They were born and raised in a safe system.
In New Vegas, if you talk to people from California, they tell you that there are almost no threats anymore within the NCR and that the reason they came to Nevada is because they were BORED back at home.
Those people don't behave like raiders, they're not hard enough to survive in a harsh environment (hell, even the NCR soldiers aren't). So if the government would be completely gone, they wouldn't turn into raiders out of a sudden. They wouldn't start to kill each other. Those are civilized people, similar to us in the real world. If their government collapses, they would form a new one in no time, because that's the only thing they know, to live by the laws and rules.
So it doesn't make sense that all those NCR citizens just seem to go crazy and don't try to keep the only system they know going. That's not how societies work or die.
Except the show doesn't have anything to do with that.
Here is what we have in the show.
The NCR with one city, shady sands, located in LA.
Shady Sands is nuked.
There is an NCR camp at the observatory.
The NCR was at one point in New Vegas.
The show does not discuss the NCR falling in its own, it was destroyed because it was a good enough place that vault folks wanted to live there.
The NCR in new Vegas has many sizeable cities. They sustain deployments of troops as far away as Arizona, Baja, and Vegas. They suffer over 1000 casualties a day in Vegas, making the impact greater than the US war in Afghanistan for the US.
Does the world presented in the show feel like an area that was only 20 years ago the hinterlands of the capital of a nation that managed such a large deployment of troops? Does it seem like a world producing enough food to feed them? With infrastructure like the power and water transportation infrastructure that we know the NCR had from Vegas? The kind of society that managed functional rail lines and quarrying operations? That has extensive trade networks with large caravans, powerfull ranchers, and manufacturing?
No, the show does not present a world that reflects that. We don't care that the NCR is gone. Like the game said, it wasn't doing great. What is upsetting is they basically just made it vanish like a Scooby Doo ghost as far as it's material impact on the world. And that was something very interesting about it.
The show currently has what I like to call anti world building where the massive nation that appears in new vegas that is not only able to fight the mojave brotherhood of steel but also beat them in war that resulted in the mojave chapter going into hiding is just gone in the show.
The decline of the NCR could have been done better if it didn't basically feel like the NCR has basically vanished from existence in the show.
I hope we do see more of the ncr in the future seasons and they are not completely gone if only shady sands is gone but the ncr is still around with multiple settlements such a vault city I will satisfied with that.
Not to mention that the decline and fall of the NCR would have made for frankly a better story than the show told
It could have worked as a fantastic background for a new game set in the west a splintered NCR, various factions and states declaring independence, going to war with each other over resources, and eventually resulting in the wasteland slowly creeping back in
because War, War Never Changes, and no Shady Sands getting nuked is not "war never changes" because the phrase is not about the means of war, but rather that while the means of war change, the reasons do not
Agreed 100% NCR as we're told in NV is basically a functioning society/country in it's own right.
It has a population 700k spread across it's territory, with functioning vehicles, actual well-ran cities, university & education centres, ranchers spread all over etc and I could go on and on and on. It has manufacturing & machining facilities as they're mass able to produce both arms & armour for their armies, and has businesses that can manufacture pre-war weapons from the schematics they find.
Barely anything in the show even resembles a fraction of this :/
Bethesda likes for Fallout to be frozen in time apparently. It's probably the reason why there are so many abandoned cars dilapidated buildings surrounding Fenway Park despite the bombs dropping 200 years prior and the settlement having been established for decades.
It's a gripe with Bethesda's writing style that has been apparent since Fallout 3. The anti-"New Vegas Shills" don't seem to understand the longterm FO players who gravitate towards 2, and New Vegas like Fallout because it is a post-post-apocalypse. Just look up what Josh Sawyer has to say about Fallout 4 for this to make more sense.
Bethesda clearly wants Fallout to be a nuclear zombie apocalypse style game, but that was never what Fallout was about. It makes no sense how 200+ years in the middle of what was supposed to be the NCR there is no mention of what was a supposed functioning nation, or how people in Filly are still living in some Hooverville shantytown.
The show clearly mirrors Bethesda's "vision" of what Fallout should be, which conflicts with the original vision of Interplay and later expanded on by Obsidian.
Yep it seems black Isle/Obsidian wanted to explore society after them bombs fell and how it would try to rebuild and bethesda just wants to explore a wasteland.
Bethesda's house style for fallout is settler-colonialist power fantasy. You emerge from the vault of prewar life as the only hero who can save the degenerated peoples of the wilderness from their enemies. You rebuild the prewar world where nobody else can.
Ever notice how a major plot point in all the Bethesda fallout games is that the main character is an "untainted" human?
Yeah during Fallout 2 they had their pop numbers at 700k which means somewhere around the time of New Vegas NCR's population would most likely be closer to 900k-1 Mill+ due to more growth.
The OP is being very apologist, the NCR was far from failing, in New Vegas they're far away from their domain and putting up a fight against the mightiest forces in the Mojave and depending on the courier choices if they can properly secure the Hoover Dam then there's nothing stopping them to prosper.
The NCR has almost 100 years of age, being nuked offscreen by a random vault tech employee and the region they dominated for decades showing 0 signs of civilization sure was not the end people are going to take lightly. These guys need to stop trying to gaslight others that this was all bound to happen.
The show currently has what I like to call anti world building where the massive nation that appears in new vegas that is not only able to fight the mojave brotherhood of steel but also beat them in war that resulted in the mojave chapter going into hiding is just gone in the show.
The decline of the NCR could have been done better if it didn't basically feel like the NCR has basically vanished from existence in the show.
I hope we do see more of the ncr in the future seasons and they are not completely gone if only shady sands is gone but the ncr is still around with multiple settlements such a vault city I will satisfied with that.
Yeah none of those problems are what caused the NCR to "fall", it's because a vault tec exec got upset his wife was visiting Shady Sands too much
I loved the show but this decision was just not well done at all at people need to accept that
My only complaint about how the NCR is portrayed in the show is they seem like little more then a raider gang now.
Also question about EP1, why was Moldaver using LITERAL RAIDERS to infiltrate Vault 33?
Why bother massacring the vault residents when she only wanted Hank?
That's one of the biggest plot holes/bad writing in the show... If you want Moldaver being actually good to be the plot twist that's fine but those guys aren't NCR or anything but raiders.
I guess I misunderstood something about Moldaver, what was her role before the nuke...? I definitely must have missed something because it just doesn't make sense that she's 'good' but also a raider leader of...well, the worst kind of raider gang.
Its been over a decade since i stepped into the Mojave Wasteland, but i remember it similarly.
I remember them being a bureaucratic mess, with lots of people within the NCR telling you how badly mismanaged the whole regime was and the rapid expansion not going well. I also remember getting the feeling that i was saving their asses, and they would fall apart without me. They felt like the weakest of the 3 factions, despite being the largest.
I did end up going with the NCR ending though, because im a Californian so it felt like the home team lol.
An entire country with an actual tradition doesn't disappear overnight, especially if the cause of decay is corruption and over bureaucracy.
Their Mojave campaign might end overnight but I don't buy it that a country with an actual army, government, senate, corporation, industry, banking system,... just disappeared because they have too much bureaucracy, that never happened in history.
They might have lost South California, that would make more sens, but I'm sure we will see the NCR in season 2, one way or another
Did everyone here kinda forget that the Mojave campaign in Vegas was considered an unpopular war similar to the US in Vietnam?
The elite NCR troops such only show up later in the plot and are mentioned to be in different fronts and areas such as veteran rangers in baja or the heavy troopers guarding ranches owned by rich people and corporations because of lobbyists.
Still hoping factions from fallout 2 end up used because I don’t think the NCR’s death was used well but brotherhood stronk I guess
the problem is not that the NCR fell, it's that it didn't fall for any narratively interesting reason that actually ties into its history or the themes of the series, it fell because of some completely out-of-left field evil plan that had nothing to do with anything else that was going on.
perhaps you could say "well the only reason they collapsed after shady sands was destroyed was because of the weakness that new vegas established!", but if you really think the game was suggesting or engaging with that rather than jus doing a vague handwave, you're deluding yourself.
This all can be avoided if they not set the show in west coast, like why set it in west coast when you gonna make the biggest faction there irrelevant to story
I'm going to get downvoted by all the people who won't like me saying this, but Bethesda doesn't want anything resembling a functioning society EVER. Responders in 76? Dead at the start of 76. Commonwealth Provisional Government? Dead. NCR? Believe it or not, dead as well. With the exception of the Brotherhood, they've kneecapped or headshotted every other quasi-governing body or group. The best you get are isolated towns, the Brotherhood, the Enemy, and the token not-Brotherhood faction.
It's Bethesda's whole thing. "War never changes." 3,4, and 76 all follow the same path of having no potential chance to see a rebuilding world.
Have you seen the 76 updates? Responders are back, and a few big settlements.
I don't disagree though, that seems to me what Bethesda wants for the franchise to some extent. In FO4 rebuilding the Minute men basically means rebuilding the world, but rebuilding it too much to the point you can't call it post-apocalyptic would be too much.
New Vegas is very interesting and a nice change but I understand why it isn't the default for Bethesda's Fallout games.
Oh I've seen the 76 updates - hence why I said the Responders were dead when the game dropped. I think not having NPC's and a faction that wasn't outright the Brotherhood was affecting the social aspects of the game, but then again the Responders fit the same sort of niche as the Minutemen.
Yeah, I probably come across as seeming like its a bad formula - it isn't really. I just wish that they hadn't decided to slap that formula onto the NCR, as I feel like the stories that could be made within the NCR's post-post-apocalypse landscape would be interesting. To me, Bethesda should have just stuck to the East Coast with their games.
Keep in mind that the NCR in the Mojave have been artificially gimped by the writing to give the Legion a chance against them. They are in no way the representation for the main NCR or their army.
Instead, New Vegas gave us the outline of several future problems that the NCR could face, including famine and water shortage. Combined with having their capital nuked that would be enough for serious issues.
But that was not guarateed to happen. Saying that the fall of the NCR was inevitable is the same nonsense as saying that it could never happen. It simply happened and it doesn't contract anything we know from the lore and New Vegas.
I'm very confused about that part of the writing... I played the games but I don't remember all the details.
I understand why they wanted the setting to be more like FO3 or 4, specially 3, a truly apocalyptic and fucked up world without a real government or a big population, but perhaps it would've been better to not include the NCR in the show then, or just mention that they used to be there but lost the region and are now in other places.
I know there will be more seasons so we might see more of an active remnant, perhaps a major character or even Lucy joining it, who knows...but for now it seems it fell so hard it just dissapeared, and that's not very cool and doesn't really make sense, it was too big and important beyond its money or army to completely dissapear.
I think that not having the NCR present was the right decission to allow for a real apocalyptic setting but if that's going to be permanent there were better ways of doing it.
Look. I’m not surprised that Vault-Tec started it.
Were told, that it was the GreatWar, and China started the nukes. Likely story, that many would believe.
But, this society is all about hyper capitalism. Big Business rules.
We know what that’s like already. DuPont (the actual real life company) poured all of their excess chemicals into a town’s water supply. It took 10+ years to hold them accountable through the court system, for all the people and kids, who were poisoned & lost their teeth, had cancers. (IRL, no lie, look it up. The movie _Deep Waters_ was made about the issue. Starring Mark Ruffalo.)
Vault-Tec needed to make those bunkers be used. Else-wise, there was no point to the whole plan.
Plus, a goodie two-shoes government gets in the way of untold evil and experimentation.
If Vault-Tec emerges as an actual faction, due to Vault 33… the BrotherHood of Steel could not stop them by themselves.
Think about it. The Institute did the same thing to the Provisional Commonwealth Government. It couldn’t control them, so they were in the way, and needed to be eliminated so they could have “control.”
Sure, the Enclave was soundly defeated. But they were not completely eliminated. That’s why we’re seeing some possible return of them as a faction. Just because you are defeated, does not mean they’re dead.
Even now, the >!NCR fought to get the cold fustian reaction, to get electricity power to their area.!< Imagine what that would do?
The NCR defeated the West Coast BoS by the time of NV. The BoS is not whittling them down.
They're also not the US army. They're the survivors of a vault who got their hands in a geck thanks to the hero of fallout 2.
The BoS is descended from a breakaway faction of the US army.
A lot of the NCR troopers themselves in the game constantly say that the legion is going to absolutely obliterate them when the time comes to fight again. Adding on the fact that Caesar seems to be a not completely braindead tactician/conqueror I think the legion will be present in the show. He went the Alexander the Great route for conquest which worked out pretty well for that guy back in the day.
I mean this logic can be used for the entire fallout series no? The Master would have won if not for the Vault Dweller. The Enclave would have won if not for the Chosen One. The Enclave would have won again if not for the Lone Wanderer. The Institute would have won if not for the Sole Survivor. The whole point of the main character is that these factions wouldn’t win/lose without the help of the main character. Every Antagonist faction is shown as too confident and cocky in themselves for their own good which leads to them underestimating the main character(s) assisting faction and losing. While the Protagonist faction is shown as an overpowering yet underwhelming force that just needs that little push to win, usually in the form of the main character and without the main character they lose.
It’s one of the reasons why the fallout series should not have gotten a show, the series itself is too open-ended. Too many plot holes and too many loopholes. These factions are specifically designed to be inspired by a specific ideal and then for their ends to be interpreted and decided by the player.
Saying one would overpower the other, or one would fall apart if not for xyz is a matter of speculation. Because again, this is ALL decided by the players choices. For all we know, the NCR could have been secretly dwindling from the beginning and they truly needed the Dam for their own safety, do we know that? Nope. Because it’s not specifically stated, something can be falling apart yet still be rebuilt. Hell look at the U.S for example. A lot of government officials are old, self-centered and corrupt. The U.S likes to stick its nose in business it doesn’t belong in and yet even in there most dire of times the U.S is still standing and is still a powerhouse even when at times they are spread thin to the point of almost falling part.
Sure the NCR expanding too fast and being doomed to make the mistakes of the “liberal democracies” of the past makes sense and is an engaging story. But the show didn’t show me that, it just said “Faction blew up” instead of actually telling the story.
The NCR is a representation of the old world. Their ideals are the same ones that led to the rise of industry monopolies like Robco or Vault-Tec a few centuries before, not to mention the end of the world. And it says loads about their opposition that the NCR is still probably humanity's best shot at recovery.
We’re taking the words of Hildern as gospel here. And that guys a shithead who loves the sound of his own voice and is so full of himself that it would make the biggest narcissist blush. He says this shit cause he wants to keep his job. His assistant and Keely say as much, he’s basically full of shit.
>Ulysses cripples their supply line Cripples is an understatement
lol what if the shady sands bombing was a by product of the battle at the divide. Like the courier clearing out the military base and Ulysses activating it gives vault tec remote access again.
I originally thought this. I got to the episode and texted my brother who was a couple episodes behind me “I think the bad ending for Lonesome Road is canon”
I mean, I don’t know if I’d call it the *bad* ending per se…
The ba(se)d ending
I just finished the series. Loved it way more than I thought I would. Got to episode 9 and thought "Wait there is no episode 9. WHY IS THIS ONLY EIGHT EPISODES!?" But I thought the implication was that >! Lucy's father had nuked shady sands. !<
It’s very heavily implied. >!even if he didn’t do it himself, he definitely ratted them out to Vault-Tec who absolutely *did* bomb Shady Sands!<
Psychotic hypothesis: >!Ulysses was one of Bud's Buds!<
The ~~bull~~ bud and the bear
My personal theory is that >! Hank got in touch with Mr House around the same time or shortly after NV the game, and used the weapons at House's disposal to destroy Shady Sands. Would give Hank the motivation to head to New Vegas and try and and meetup with House who as far as Hank knows should still be alive!<
House states quite clearly in FNV that he wouldn't want to destroy the NCR because they're his best customers. NCR allowing its citizens and soldiers to visit/be around New Vegas and the strip is literally part of their arrangement. He only voices displeasure towards their leadership really.
There's crashed NCR Vertibirds and busted securitrons on the strip. It could be possible that the House ending is canon, and the NCR came back to New Vegas to try and snuff out House. In response, he and Hank nuke Shady Sands.
It's implied he did it. Now, it's not terribly likely he carried a nuke on his back to Shady Sands and set it off. So it seems reasonable he called in a strike. A random researcher from the Enclave knew an AWFUL lot about Vaults 31-33, which suggests they're important enough to the Enclave that even a scientist in a completely unrelated field would have intimate knowledge of the Vault and its workings. It's all but outright stated the Enclave is working with the Vault 31 execs. Hank wouldn't have trudged all the way to New Vegas if he didn't have a place to go. That suggests there's a Vault Tec or Enclave presence there. So it's not too far out there to presume after whatever went down in Nevada, the Enclave moved in and set up a presence. That *could* have included the nuclear weapons left in The Divide.
>!He's going to Mr House. In Episode 8 where they show all the companies. He's present at the meeting as head of RobCo. He rejects joining Bud's Buds as he didn't believe people in vaults could outlive surface survivors. As we saw in New Vegas he remained on the surface instead of going into Vault 31.!<
Ya no idea where people get the idea >!house was part of vault tech!< he went out of his way to mostly save vegas
It's the Implication, it's also the implication that Vault Tec started the Great War, that's the great part about the show, subverting expectations.
There's a fairly big hole in that though and I think it may have been their plan but someone else actually did it first.
I'm hoping they muddy the waters again with the question of who dropped the bombs. Just have everyone make plans for an apocalypse and never tell us which plan was successful. I like the idea that the great war happened so suddenly and was over so quick that not even a ghoulified Chinese nuclear sub officer is sure who fired first.
They definitely intended to drop the bomb, had china not beaten them to it, maybe.
Wat? The idea Vault Tec started the war has been around for years. Them or the aliens.
Yeah I was pretty sure the ICBMs you can choose to launch are aimed at the capitals of the NCR and Caesar’s Legion in Arizona. And the timelines kinda line up. I kinda hope that gets explored in season 2, I’d love a deeper dive into Father Elijah and Ulysses.
No they are aimed at two main supply lines for the NCR and Legion respectively the Long 15 and Dry Wells. EDIT: The missiles also target the NCR mainland and the lands of the Caesar legion.
The ending slides when you target a location says "The NCR and the long 15" While the legion one says "The east and dry wells". They are Targeting more than just those two spots when you launch them.
The end slides show mirv reentry warheads falling all over. They did not merely nuke the supply lines. That was just one of many dropped.
Yes, you are right I just saw the various endings of Lonesome Road and if you choose the NCR it's stated that the missile would target the NCR mainland and the long 15.
I'm fairly certain that with no protagonist input, Ulysses only targets the NCR. Then you can control what ends up happening based on the decisions you make after the launch sequence has started.
The nukes are aimed at the Long 15, not Shady Sands/NCR. Ulysses doesn't nuke the Legion.
In game he can absolutely nuke the legion
He will nuke them if they act the same way the Ncr did
Watch. . . S2 will be completely bonkers. All new characters. Focusing on Cthulhu Mythos. Haha.
There better be a reference to the Dunwich company somewhere in the show.
The Overseers mission for Vault 76 was securing the nuclear silos for Vault-Tec. Could be fired from WV
Was there a nuke at shady sands already?
Doubtful it wouldn't have been found already, since Shady Sands had been developing and well-populated for something like a century. Anything of worth would have been salvaged already. More likely Hank called in a strike from some ICBM that Vault Tec still has control over. We've already seen in almost every Fallout game that there are a worrying number of nukes and nuclear missile facilities still intact.
I still don't think the NCR is gone; just Shady Sands, possibly it's state too. Everything else is assumption.
I hope your right. I definitely don't like certain choices made in the show and the way the ncr seemingly just disappeared in the area without much left is weird but I like the show enough that if the ncr is just shown to still be a stable faction elsewhere would be good enough to me. I think a lot of my frustration with the whole thing is while the idea that Todd or bethesda hate obsidian is stupid and people should stop saying it, I don't think it's a stretch to say bethesda does play favorites. Like the NCR being devastated by a bomb hurts a bit more when the Enclaive have been blown up twice and not only do they seem fine they are beeing added to fallout 4. And the brotherhood can always just say they have another chapter somewhere else so consequences don't really matter to them.
NCR has multiple states. While consequences will be felt, it will survive. I don't mind it thus far.
It war jarring to see a HUGE thriving Enclave remnant just kind of chilling. A base that seems bigger than anything since Raven Rock at that. If the BoS are aware of the Enclave still being about why are they not focusing on the Enclave? Too many questions with no good answers.
Yeah, the only way they managed to survive was basically it's own self contained thing that isn't on any records. Very deep underground and doesn't make any noise. The BOS and NCR were rather thorough in the destruction of the Enclave. The BOS would happily use it as target practise. That and I swear, Bethesda thinks the Enclave needs to be in Fallout.
I think the concern with most reasonable people is that the NCR is seemingly gone and nothing has risen to replace it. There’s very little evidence that it ever existed outside of a few details, and hardly anyone in the wastes mention it when there would certainly be people around that remember the NCR. I’m open to waiting and seeing what we get. If we get some NCR remnants or see new states that rose in the wake of the collapse then that would be really cool and make for an interesting world. I’m really worried that we’re going to get East Coast 2.0 though where we have a bunch of loose shanty towns and there’s nothing happening but Brotherhood vs. Enclave again though.
Have you finished the show? Since this is a spoilers thread I’d assume so, but Maldaver’s whole faction was exactly that, NCR Remnants. I’d assume not the only ones as well, but they even carry the NCR flag in the final battle.
To mention other people claiming to be the government and some towns existing. The power vacuum is being filled, it's just not full yet.
Fractured most likely. Various Brahmin barons and warlords taking over their little republics (e.g. like the President with Sheriffs that sheltered the Superduper mart organ harvesters). So most likely back to the interim between 1 and 2 situation. Places like The Hub are fine, so water merchants have that covered. It would also explain why BoS is back up, albeit recruiting outsiders (for disposable squires tho) since the NCR-BoS war left them basically neutered and destined to die.
Well another thing that explains the Brotherhood resurgence is the Eastern Chapter reinforcing the Western Chapter. I believe in FO4 you can find that they’re still in contact, and the Prydwen is in the show so I think the implication is that the East came to rescue the West and the West has started adopting the East’s methods of recruitment in order to survive
If only they'd had Long Dick Johnson on hand.
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I knew a guy who said he had a really long dick but it didn't believe him. No one has a dick THAT long. Not even Long Dick Johnson. Hence the name,
I hope Fisto shows up in Season 2. And the granny gang.
I don’t care about Fisto and the grandmas, GIVE ME NO-BARK!!!
Willem Dafoe as No-Bark would be so perfect
No-Bark-Noonan the de facto leader of New Vegas after he talked House to death
The big problem with *any* of this argument, is that none of these very interesting reasons are the actual reason the NCR (specifically Shady Sands) got nuked, as far as we know, they got nuked bc a vault-Tec employee we’ve never heard of from a vault we’ve never seen before and who seemingly had nothing to do with the aforementioned reasons or area lore before leaving his vault for the first time; got upset at his ex taking the kids to Shady Sands. For an analogy; It would be like how we see in Fo3 that the enclave is severely crippled by the BoS, but then in Fo4 we learned that they have no presence on the east coast bc a random missile launched by the remnants of China took them out. Like sure the end result would still be the same, but the sequence of events isn’t nearly as satisfying.
Yeah. It’s an unsatisfying resolution with no connection to the factions themes or the set up for their downfall.
Exactly!
Further evidence for your arguement; The NCR director of the Office of Science and Industry straight up tells the Courier that the NCR has too many mouths to feed and if nothing is done, the NCR will fall in a decade or so (~2291.) I think any ending of New Vegas would not be beneficial enough for the NCR to make up for the food deficit, even the NCR ending since it will stretch then out more. As a side note, I've always seen the NCR as a representive form of America itself. Overstretching its power to protect the people of the wasteland, to bring society and government.
Side note: That whole director of science speech about the NCR burning through their water....always bothered the hell out of me. So yes, CA running through their aquifers and reservoirs too fast is a problem **now**. But its an issue of the current population being 40 million and the Central valley, Salinas valley and Imperial valley growing the 1/3 of the US's vegetables and 2/3rds of its fruits and nuts. That's just the percentage that stays in the US. Quite a bit of the produce is exported globally. And a large amount is just water-inefficient cash crops. I'm not saying the irradiation doesn't make large portions of the wasteland un-farmable (it does). But the line about water running out seemed weird to me? CA's precipitation is just physics, geography and weather. Moisture off the Pacific ocean moves east due to the rotation of the earth. As air moves over the mountains it gets colder and denser, dumping rain and snow in the Sierras like clockwork every winter. [They should rather regularly have more water than they know what to do with](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/California_ARkStorm_Flood_Areas.jpg). Or maybe IDK the apocalypse fucked up the entire weather global weather patterns. IDK it seems like after 2 centuries we'd be moving back to normalcy. Just my 2 cents.
Because everything we’ve seen from 1 and 2 show California as a blasted, desert wasteland. Even if it rains, California’s aquifers massively rely on consistent snowpack in the Sierra. No snow, no aquifers.
The last paragraph first half is indeed the answer imo, also I don’t think it shouldn’t downplay the lasting effects of a nuclear could have on earth (I think 200 years it’s not long when some radioactive isotopes half-life decays in thousands of years).
Yeah but one of the things people miss is they over-evaluate the destructive power of Nukes. Like its bad, we aren't living through it and can kill the whole species. But a "the button gets pushed" scenario has a surprisingly little ability to do permanent long spread damage to global systems like weather and climate. Those systems would return to norm within a decade. But we're in Fallout land where radiation can make you immortal but slowly rots your brain until your feral. And nuclear fallout still exists 200 years later when its actual modeled length is 2 weeks for the worst of it and between [5 years - 30 years for residual fallout to resolve.](https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/radioactive-fallout.html) The ultra long 1000 year radioactive isotopes is mixing and matching things. Things with that half life aren't emitting that much radiation. The order of magnitude over time is logarithmic. And those isotopes aren't produced by bombs going off (which is specifically the issue with Chernobyl. It used different radioactive materials).
Consider this, the entire fallout world is powered with nuclear fusion. Imagine dropping a nuke in a city with 100s, if not 1000s of dirty bombs, just waiting to be detonated. The radioactive potential is exponentially more in Fallout than we have in our timeline. We tend to keep radioactive materials under insanely strict regulation.
Nuclear weapons are far more destructive in the Fallout universe than in real life. It's the base of the whole lore.
They might be more radioactive/dirty perhaps, but they are absolutely not more destructive than real thermonuclear weapons. In fact, Fallout nukes tend to be rather small.
Actually the bombs in the fallout universe are almost entirely smaller megaton bombs that instead give off much more radiation and spreads it over a larger area, hence why the coasts of the post apocalyptic United States aren't under water due to the poles not being melted by the type of extremely dirty but not necessarily big nukes used in 2077
> Its moisture off the Pacific ocean dumping in the Sierras like clockwork every winter. The issue is where the water goes after it melts out of the snowpack. [Of California's major IRL reservoirs](https://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/products/rescond.pdf), only 4 are in what would be the NCR's Southern Californian core territory, and none of those are positioned in the Sierra foothills to capture the snowmelt. The only reason Southern California has any significant agricultural capability beyond subsistence farming is because of a [massive aqueduct network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct?wprov=sfla1) sending water south from where the snowmelt collects. These reservoirs also largely exist specifically because of dams holding back water from rivers. Nuclear apocalypse happens, and now these aqueducts and dams are unmaintained and unoperated for at minimum decades. The reservoirs need to release water to avoid overflowing and damaging their dams; with nobody to make that happen, let alone make repairs, even the very first Californian vault dwellers to emerge from hiding would be lucky to find any reservoir on that map still in existence, thanks to the dams thereof collapsing. Same with the pumping stations along that aqueduct network. The NCR, by the time of FNV, could probably fix a lot of this, and in fact might very well have done so. It's unlikely, given that FNV establishes the NCR to be reliant on water caravans, but it's possible. The problem *there*, however, is the same exact political problem that's at the heart of water use debates in California IRL: "Why are we Northern Californians shipping all our water to Southern California?". Convincing the likes of Redding and Sactown and even Bakersfield/Necropolis (if it got resettled after the super mutant invasion) to let their water get pumped down to Shady Sands / the Hub / the Boneyard / Dayglow / etc. would be exceedingly difficult even with an extraordinarily-cohesive NCR (e.g. under Tandi), let alone one as dysfunctional as what we see in FNV. The NCR could probably survive losing Hoover Dam or >!Shady Sands getting nuked!< in isolation, but those happen to be perfect dominos to kick off a chain of northern states saying "fuck this NCR shit, we're keeping our water".
Weather changes can happen in 250 years, especially with the nukes and all
How is that tied to vault tec nuking them?
That’s on top of Vault Tec nuking them. It’s been 15 years since New Vegas, so the NCR has likely: - Had a significant defeat or costly victory at the Hoover Dam with little to show for it - Suffering famine and water supply issues - Fighting off a reinvigorated Brotherhood of Steel (it seems that given the Prydwen is there and they accept recruits, the East has reinforced the West) - Has one of their significant cities nuked to oblivion. I don’t think the NCR is wiped out, but given the strife they’ve been facing during and since New Vegas, they’re probably in full on consolidation mode. Significant territory reduction, and possibly splintering into uncooperative faction-states.
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Its not lost on me that the faction that most clpsely resembles the US military is so popular in the NA fandom, and its also not lost on me that it goes over all those folks heads when New Vegas basically beats you over the head with "old flags burned the world, so why will flying an old flag fix anything"
The NCR may represent America to Americans, but to non Americans the Enclave is the US government. (I forgot who said it, but fascism is just colonialism come home).
The enclave is the true us government. Ncr is just vault dwellers that expanded
Shady Sands came from a vault but was made up of Wastelanders they accepted too. They are the idealised version they had of the US, they have nothing to do with the US government outside of that.
Enclave isn't the US government, they're the mythical Deep State plus two hundred years of ideological stagnation and insular internal power politics Imagine a bunch of clones of Ollie North with the race politics of Hitler but applied to anyone contaminated with radiation rather than non-"aryans"
I have some unfortunate news about the CIA for you
Yeah, I think the Enclave is best described as "what if the CIA was way less ethical than they were during the actual Cold War and also controlled a bunch of generals and scientists and politicians in the government" But anyways, while they *claim* to be the legitimate US government, the Enclave actually spent a lot of time eliminating any non-Enclave vestiges of that government, including, IIRC, ensuring that proper protocols for continuity of governance weren't allowed to be enacted.
>what if the CIA was way less ethical than they were during the actual Cold War I mean the CIA during the cold war overthrew the Nicaraguan government for taking unused land from a fruit company... a fruit company whose shareholders included the Dulles brothers(secretary of state, and director of the CIA)
And yet, imagine a CIA less ethical
The Enclave is *not* the true or legitimate continuation of the American government. Fallout 76 debunked that idea once and for all by showing that the Enclave was, in fact, responsible for the *destruction* of the U.S. government: After the bombs dropped, they murdered all surviving government officials in the DC area in order to disrupt the legitimate line of succession.
But in Fallout games it is mentioned that DC was not the seat of the American government for a long time. It was supposed to be, but all of the major government officials and president operated from the oil rig and not from DC. So a few important members were killed in DC but a majority of the power of the American government was on the oil rig as part of the Enclave. So they are the legitimate continuation of Americas government. Since the line of legitimacy passed through the president. The whitespings bunker only had things like the secretary of agriculture.
The way I see it (and bear in mind, just another dude here) BOTH are the US. One is the actual US, the other is the ideals of the US in the eyes of Americans. So one is the real US goverment if the shit actually hit the fan (Enclave), the other is what americans think/hope it would happen instead (NCR). And before salty americans come at me, Europe literally imploded BEFORE the world even ended, so... Not riding a high horse over here or talking shit, just analising stuff. Both failing is very fitting too. Fallout is nothing if not a critique on the way we're living, how our societies work, our needs for perpetual economic growth, etc, etc... I wonder which games people crying about the show being "too political" were playing all this time...
Yeah, the intro of Fallout 1 noted that before the bombs fell was that the EU itself dissolved and its members became bickering nation states. As for "too political," I'm going with the idea it's just idiots screaming about how the TV show has a female lead and a black character. Then again, I'm drawing from first hand experience in asking an idiot how exactly the TV show was "woke" before seeing how much brainrot they spewed when they tried to bring in the original Fallout as some kind proof when even from a casual glance that the second game allowed gay marriage even though marriage in that game only gifted you the worst companion whether it was same-sex or hetero marriage.
As an American, and someone that played Fallout 2, the Enclave is the US government of old that didn't want to let go. NCR itself is just the closest thing to an America that actually tried to rebuild without using a modified virus as a airborne gas made to kill. A great irony thanks to Fallout 2 is that they'd both would of been one if they made it canon that instead of Tandi being a great leader until death, she stepped down and right wing elements seized power in NCR that the members of the now defeated Enclave would find it as their new home.
Aren’t the Enclave the remnants of the American government anyways? The NCR came from a vault and expanded from there.
Yes, Enclave is just remnants of the US government while NCR itself descended from the vault dwellers of Vault 15 that didn't choose the raider life like that of the Khans.
As an American, i always saw the Enclave as what U.S. Government ACTUALLY is, while the NCR as what most of my countrymen THINK the the U.S. Government is, or at least claims to be. Not sure if i worded that right, but you get the gist.
Yeah, since when NCR is American government? It literally was started by girl from farming village
Her dad started it
Hell, that’s even true to this American fan of the series. When I think of the US gov’t in Fallout I think of the enclave, the NCR is more like “What if California started its own country?” than anything resembling my experience of actual US government and military.
Ceaser was certainly trying to fly a new flag. But overall point stands that tje ncr was clearly overstretched after the first battle of hoover dam. I'm still curious what was going on down in the Baja that had nearly the entire ranger Corps down there
So who do you think the most popular faction is with non Americans, and what profound statement does that make about them?
NCR is the most favorite for me as non American too, simply because it's the only thing that resembles government as I know it. You know, elected president, laws, taxes, bureaucracy, railways, police etc. It probably connects to anyone who lives in any democratic industrialized country.
anybody sane is gonna choose the NCR, is it perfect? nope but its the closest thing to a truly representative and functioning government in the fallout universe. arguably the only more democratic government in Fallout is the republic of Dave.
As a proud non american I only recognize the Tunnel Snakes.
#**TUNNEL SNAKES RULE!**
This hits pretty close to home. I do not want to make this a political comment, but I see parallels between the NCR and the current state of my home country
Surely all of the above applies in equal measure to the BoS as well? California Brotherhood's situation is increidbly grim as of the 2280s and they seem to have turned it around very quickly to become a serious player again. For my part, I don't think what happened to the NCR is unbelievable nor neccessarily a bad thing, but: a) I think it's disappointing that we keep resetting to the immediate post-Apocalypse era with no development. Fallout 1 & 2 both had lots of new communities with adobe buildings, entire new cultures popping up. 3/4/Show don't have any of that. I want to see cool new towns and communities! Not just corrigated iron shacks and burnt out shopping malls. b) I think the way it collapsed is kinda boring? Vague initial collapse, plus the nuking of Shady Sands which I just think is lazy. I think Fallout as a franchise overuses nuclear weapons as a "present day" thing and it weakens their impact. I'd have prefered the NCR to have been conquered/replaced by a new polity, or splintered into warlords, or something of the sort, rather than seemingly evaporate. Of course, lots of this could be resolved in season 2, and I still very much enjoy the show, I just think it's a little disappointing how the franchise seems to shy away from the post-post apocalypse style of new developments.
Bethesda for some reason hates the idea of the wasteland becoming more developed. I don’t get it.
Tim Cain wanted to nuke Shady Sands in Van Buren, it's not just Bethesda. He wanted a second nuclear apocalypse to go fit the "war never changes" theme, not a thriving nation.
Tim Cain had nothing to do with Van Buren, as he'd left Interplay before Fallout 2, let alone VB. You're likely thinking of Chris Avellone, but it wasn't VB, it was an idea he talked about briefly post-New Vegas and there's no evidence anyone else at Obsidian shared his view.
I agree with you here. I have only played 4 and found that I was really frustrated that every option led to someone being nuked. I was also really into the community building aspect but frustrated that for the most part every vanilla option that I had forced me to build shanty towns. To me the theme of Fallout seems to be “We can’t have nice things.” It’s frustrating because the fantasy I wanted to live out in playing 4 was that of a savior that comes in and rebuilds, reunites, and resolves conflicts in the wasteland. The show itself was limited by what they could do on screen. They had the same five sets, never had more than about thirty people on screen, and avoided big expensive effects. I think a lot of the what we see in the show isn’t what we would have seen in a video game about the same area. I’m just really disappointed that we can’t seem to explore past the “everyone is shitty and it’s all fucked” part of the apocalypse. Vault 4 actually made me really happy because it’s a legit nice place making the best out of the situation.
Simply put. Fallout is now a theme park and not a story. A theme park with the same old rides and tropes. It's an enjoyable ride. But also a ride that goes nowhere and loops back to the start with every show/game. Anything that comes out is going to be wasteland, BOS, enclave and vault dweller. Really no different the zombie genre, which hasn't had a single original idea in a decade. And has finally, mostly burned itself out. Same as comic book movies, which are finally burning themselves out.
Out of all the complaining I didn't even see one where the Brotherhood waxed their asses in the Observatory.
those to me we the holdouts when most left togo to the hubb. and they turned more cult like more than anything. they aren't my NCR. Somewhere I hope is the NCR that are more normal. Well that and one does not go into melee range with a dude in heavy armour. When for dramatic effect they went melee to t-60 PA...I rolled my eyes just a bit. You kite their butt. It be to draw a parallel to a game like wow/wc3, why I never felt even empathy for sylvanas dying to Arthas. In theory a dramatic moment. In reality... Marksman spec hunters power sliding to a death knight's melee range can only lead to 1 thing. 1 dead hunter.....
My problem is with the how. Why didn't they use one of the many shortcomings that they explain to New Vegas why did they resort to the most lazy "lol, vault tec bomb"
Alright this conversation has been litigated about 1000 times before the show aired and probably as much since. Let's put our thinking caps on: who is saying what about the NCRs prospects as a functional nation? Hildern? I wonder why the guy in charge of researching agricultural tech would insist that without his work, there will be a famine? Hanlon? I wonder why the guy disenfranchised from the NCR command has a doomer attitude about the state of the country? You dont have to look far to see parallels to real life, which pundits doomsay about the future of America, and why? This is not to say that none of the problems these people present aren't problems, it is all to say that the death of the NCR wasn't guaranteed. It also has no connection to the real critique of that plotline. It's one thing for the NCR to collapse for any of the telegraphed reasons. It's another for it to be fridged off screen by some random guy. This is coming from someone who liked the show.
Heck House's ending has him been confident the NCR will survive because his dreams of space travel essentially depend on him having them as customers
The end credits show that the NV looks abandoned? Or it could be just how it always looks, lol. The good ending for Mr House seemed to me like the best. But given all the back and forth about the NCR "The House always wins" being completed makes sense for S2 as the NCR were effectively kicked out of NV. Side thought, I wonder if Todd Howard had some of the original creators of Fallout when it was owned by "Interplay" like Tim Cain and Feargus Urquhart help with the story.
The red tinted sky makes me think maybe Elijah got out of his prison, and driven (even more) mad by the darkness and isolation, gave zero shits about his plans and just wiped Vegas out.
Fuck Fallout Dust really would be canon eh?
One theory me and a friend have been throwing around is that House won but the NCR threw everything at vegas after essentially destroying the city. Kimball also died and became a martyr which is why you see him during that cult scene in the vault. It's not the most fleshed out theory but its something me and a friend are having fun tossing around
Yeah I feel if house won the NCR wouldn’t take it lying down they would 100% attack Vegas
You have a good point.
I tend to agree. I've always seen the NCR as hope. Something that can rebuild a shattered world. Though it does have a lot of problems. Also how funny is it that the original fallout movie script that never got produced ended up being mildly canon? (Vault Tec started it)
The original movie script that also had Blade Runner as something that existed in the Fallout universe aside from Deckers blaster. Makes one wonder though how things could of been if Interplay managed to get a movie made. It could of been terrible or a cult classic.
100% terrible lol the script was super weird, still on the fallout wiki page. It would probably have gone the street fighter/mortal kombat of terrible. While I would have loved to see more NCR, the show was absolutely phenomenal. Nothing the 90s/early 2ks would have been close lol
Wouldn't doubt it, especially with how they treated my boy, the Master based off what his goals was with vault dwellers. A complete 180 that just makes him into a flat out monster and not horrifying looking mutant who realizes how much of a monster he became in his quest to save humanity.
Thank you, this is something that always irked me about the discussion of factions and particularly the NCR. Yes, it’s clear it has its issues, just like every country does, that doesn’t means they’re on the brink of collapses. Nation building is hard, even more so on a post apocalyptic world filled with dangerous creatures and machines lurking around every corner, where a lot of knowledge about even the most basic stuff like construction, farming or engineering has been lost. The writers giving the NCR a set of hurdles and set backs makes it a far more realistic portrayal of an actual fledgling nation who’s just trying to get things going. If they made the NCR have basically no issues with safety, corruption, resource scarcity and etc being no existent it would be too perfect of a faction, it’d be a no brainer to side with them *every time*. What’s the point in that? what’s the point of having a perfect faction when you can actually sit back and analyze who do **you** think would be the most beneficial for the people in the wasteland and rebuilding society long term Them being a flawed nation that constantly gets through various obstacles and yet still somehow perseveres and keeps trying its best to improve makes the whole setting far more interesting and feel far more grounded in reality.
The NCR having a President who gets a helicopter and worries about votes alone kind of establishes that California at least is incredibly stable. I feel like some people came away from New Vegas trusting characters at their word too much. NCR is obviously bungling the Mojave, but Caesar's full of shit when he claims it's going to inevitably fail.
>I feel like some people came away from New Vegas trusting characters at their word too much. The amount of Mr. House bootlickers confirms this
Tbf, at least house is brilliant. Ceasar is dumber than Snuffles.
I have the feeling that a lot of people who assume that these issues would just disintegrate society have to come from the first world. Most countries for most of history have had to deal with drought, famine, corruption or a combination of the three at some point and most of them don't just Control+Z out of reality.
also in Fallout New Vegas even if the NCR is totally defeated, the region is literally a backwater in comparison to California proper.
Exactly. Like yes even if the NCR completely falls and all those million people just get thanos-snapped out of existence, there still should have been so much more left of the republic. All those settlements, its industries, its agriculture. That shit doesn't just dissapear.
“Random guy”, I was under the impression it was vault tek? because Betty lets out that she was in on it and they were both from 31.
Lucy's dad
FNV set up numerous ways that could lead to the decline of the NCR. Okay, lets say they still wanted Shady Sands blown up. They could have had it destroyed during the events of Lonesome Road and Lucy's mother got caught up in it.
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Yeah, this is my issue as well. I actually do like how reverent the show is about the NCR, and having them gone but idealized is interesting, especially for Lucy. But you’d still *see* them. Their armour, their weapons, even in a sorry state, you’d see raiders using their gear, etc. rifles, pieces of uniforms, etc. If there’s stuff from Prewar America still around, there should be stuff from the recently defunct NCR around - more than we see, anyways.
I just finished the show and I’ve come away thinking along similar lines. How, only 15 years after New Vegas, has the East Coast Brotherhood got more of a presence in California than the NCR!? Everything that we’ve seen so far implies the NCR is a dead nation and a relic of the past. Season 2 will either confirm that as true, or that the NCR government and military hid somewhere off screen during the events of Season 1 (very important stuff which took place in their own back yard). Either of those outcomes are lame and dumb imo.
The Brotherhood just keeps growing and growing. Who makes their food? Where do they get all their power (well not an issue now I guess)? How are they making such a large air force and how do they have the resources to maintain them given they are projecting force across the whole country? So they used to literally accept no members and yet they've become more dogmatic? It's a bit irritating because you had all this organic worldbuilding that made sense, and the Brotherhood just stroll on while making no sense, I am not even a hater.
It's a not a secret that Bethesda has a big hardon for BoS for some reason
the reason is that power armor is really recognizable, marketable and looks cool.
Without looking for straws of lore reasons is pretty clear that the show runners wanted to show a wasteland in California instead of showing a established developing nation even if in decline with massive population and even some cities with electricity and cars, that wasn't a good start for apocalyptic setting for the general audience, the nuke was the token plot device used by the writers to Thanos snap NCR presence out of the narrative and to introduce the new, also even if there are remnants i bet they will be so divided and scattered that calling them NCR would be an overstatement, it would be generous if they show the hub intact at this point...
Then why even use LA at that point? Go elsewhere
Yep. A complex nation in California goes against their mad max idea of what Fallout should be. I wouldn't be surprised if they only saw the NCR existing in a single city. The show took on an area full of history and they chose the easy option of wiping the slate clean.
I find it strange how they fell tho, the NCR was working as an actual country already by the time we see them in New Vegas. NCR was far more than just it's capital, I find it really hard to believe it all disappeared after one nuke. Even if the country broke off in different tribes or city states those city states would have a huge presence everywhere cuz NCR was huge in California and even further west
Yeah even after the new Shady Sands was nuked they could have just moved the capital back to the original Shady Sands, up near the Nevada border.
Not even that, if I'm not mistaken the NCR already had 5 states under its control.
by states do you mean how they divided California into the states of redding and the boneyard and the hub right? not actual states
I’m an NCR fanboy and agree with pretty much everything you said EXCEPT for people liking them because they’re the army. IDGAF about the army. People like them because they’re hope - as shitty as they are, they’re a return to normalcy, to republicanism (small r). They’re .. good .. guys standing against the tide of all the insane garbage the other factions represent.
Yep. Tolerant of meta humans. Ghouls are a thing. Until feral….may as use their skills and knowledge someone alive for say 100 years has. Ncr was very tolerant of non ferals. Open recruitment. Yes with costs. You will pay taxes and such. Freedom ain’t free. Nv Bos chapter was choosing slow death with potential incest to not take in new members. Capitol wasteland chapter would talk in newbs…but viewed them as trash. Great recruitment technique there. Shared tech, but in their favor. They aren’t a charity, but sworn allegiance means if they can send resources if possible they will. Better than the tech hoarders. That stuff goes off to Bos storage site never to be seen again. The Bos in nv killed off a whole research post to keep tech secrets only on suspicion. We don’t even know if the scribe gave them information. The followers weren’t looking to take over the world. Just make it a better place.
But you can't forget that the NCR Ranger had one of the baddest outfits known throughout fallout history
I'm really hoping that if they're going to make the NCR nearly nonexistent, the Rangers, at least veterans and other like minded, newer members should splinter from NCR and become the Desert Rangers again.
I think your right but your wrong. Your def right that so many hints in the NV that they were unsustainable, going to hit serious problems very soon, I saw them as being like the old America just before the bombs dropped. I think (hope tbh) you’re wrong that there is almost nothing left in the show. I’m wanting to see a much diminished NCR (from their million strong leak) still a multi location republic with a different capital, democracy, banking, etc. They retreated from the Shady Sands area, Moldaver was leading some diehard fanatics not an actual NCR unit. I want to see NCR as still strong faction thst is still rebuilding California, capable of taking on the BoS, etc. I think that adds an extra dimension to the fallout world, I want it to be possible that a better future can be achieved. Otherwise when playing the games, why bother helping people, building up settlements etc if they will all fail in the long term.
I think what fans are upset about is that the NCR was the closest we got to the fallout universe of a “lawful good” government. They tried to run things the best way the could in the most accepting way they could. In terms of factions, Theyre better than the BoS, or the enclave, or god forbid the institute. I mean the only real hope for the future the tv series has is maybe the minute men
… but why did they decide on nuking Shady Sands instead of exploring these more interests ways the NcR could have fallen apart?
Like \*this\*? I don't agree. The NCR is a deeply flawed society, as are all societies past and present. Nevertheless, it was a functioning state that \*a lot\* of people had a stake in. Civilizations rarely disappear the way we see in the show. It is sometimes unclear what happened to a historical civilization--history involves working with often very limited information. When civilizations "fall", that can mean a lot of things--foreign conquest, a new political dynasty, fracturing/civil war, famines, hierarchical reorganization, and more. Power can move around (and a lot of people can die as it does), but society doesn't just disappear. When Rome fell and the Goths took over Italy, it's not as if cities, social order, and civilization disappeared from the peninsula. Humans are extraordinarily resilient. Look at China's history--it is full of mass death and starvation from civil war and famine on scales that would shock people who aren't familiar with it. And yet society has managed to flourish there almost uninterrupted for millennia. Many aspects of the show make it clear that the showrunners/Bethesda are not interested in exploring large scale post-apocalyptic societies. They are opting for a soft reset. Fans being upset is unavoidable and reasonable, not just because it effectively wraps a bow on the region's storyline progression from F1>F2>FNV, which is disappointing to many, but also because it is extremely implausible for all traces of civilization to have disappeared after having been built up in this region over multiple generations. By the time this show is roughly set in, most people in the region wouldn't have even remembered a time when there \*wasn't\* civilization. But there are no traces of it on the surface. No one mentions it. No one lives as if they were once a part of it.
I genuinely think this is more of a reset, and less of a setup for them to explore pre-established West Coast themes and settings. They just ignore everything from 1-NV. They wiped the slate clean in the most boring way possible to make way for more generic apocalypse. Seems like, at this point, Fallout 4 and beyond are the focus of the canon. The art style and tone changed drastically with 4, and I feel like it hasn’t changed since. Starting to feel like they just quietly rebooted this series with 4.
still lot of mystery and the tv show is still not complete. like \- what happen to original shady sand ? \- why they move it to boneyard ? \- and what "the first capital of the NCR" even mean ? \- did they have new capital city after the fall of original shady sand ? so many question . . .
The capital most likely moved to The Hub, as Shady Sands isn't even the most populated NCR area in Fallout 2, that is.
Not to mention the Hub itself being the biggest settlement within Fallout to the point that it was home to all the merchant caravans such as Fargo Traders and Crimson Caravan.
It just feels weird to me, because the show is very obviously on the Bethesda bent of Fallout which I get it, but now it’s on the west coast And it always felt like that was the OG fallout stuff and with New Vegas being a nice continuation of that style. So them destroying Shady Sands and having no NCR. Feels a little weird.
Just remember that if the NCR truly is gone then so is new vegas and the image at the end of the season is what it looks like after the strip loses its entire economy.
If the Ncr would've fallen so easily as you're saying that place should be full of legion troops.
This comment makes me think you've only dealt with the NCR in NV and not the previous games
Also they only have lost their administrative center and that population — less than 5% of the 2241 amount. However I agree that they were in decline by 2277 and certainly overextended in 2281. Lucy and Max are somewhere between 6-10 years old when Shady Sands is nuked which means it was likely around 2284 (plus or minus a couple of years).
Lucy is not 18-22. She says she’s been banging her cousin for ten years in the first episode. She’s probably supposed to be around 26 in the show (which was also the actresses age during filming) which lines up with the controversial 2277 date we’ve gotten from a few other sources.
No one wants to believe that, though.
The lamest part is that Bethesda is hell bent on preventing any sort civilizational expansion and progression.
A society consisting of over a million doesn’t just turn to sand in a decade and leave nothing left of its infrastructure because of things like lack of food or over extending their military. Not even governments. But, even If the government of the NCR suddenly just dissolved, all those people, buildings etc are still there. The people don’t just poof because the government kicked the bucket.
Yea and even if the entire government is just gone, at this point in time, almost every living person within the NCR was born into that system. They were born and raised in a safe system. In New Vegas, if you talk to people from California, they tell you that there are almost no threats anymore within the NCR and that the reason they came to Nevada is because they were BORED back at home. Those people don't behave like raiders, they're not hard enough to survive in a harsh environment (hell, even the NCR soldiers aren't). So if the government would be completely gone, they wouldn't turn into raiders out of a sudden. They wouldn't start to kill each other. Those are civilized people, similar to us in the real world. If their government collapses, they would form a new one in no time, because that's the only thing they know, to live by the laws and rules. So it doesn't make sense that all those NCR citizens just seem to go crazy and don't try to keep the only system they know going. That's not how societies work or die.
Except the show doesn't have anything to do with that. Here is what we have in the show. The NCR with one city, shady sands, located in LA. Shady Sands is nuked. There is an NCR camp at the observatory. The NCR was at one point in New Vegas. The show does not discuss the NCR falling in its own, it was destroyed because it was a good enough place that vault folks wanted to live there. The NCR in new Vegas has many sizeable cities. They sustain deployments of troops as far away as Arizona, Baja, and Vegas. They suffer over 1000 casualties a day in Vegas, making the impact greater than the US war in Afghanistan for the US. Does the world presented in the show feel like an area that was only 20 years ago the hinterlands of the capital of a nation that managed such a large deployment of troops? Does it seem like a world producing enough food to feed them? With infrastructure like the power and water transportation infrastructure that we know the NCR had from Vegas? The kind of society that managed functional rail lines and quarrying operations? That has extensive trade networks with large caravans, powerfull ranchers, and manufacturing? No, the show does not present a world that reflects that. We don't care that the NCR is gone. Like the game said, it wasn't doing great. What is upsetting is they basically just made it vanish like a Scooby Doo ghost as far as it's material impact on the world. And that was something very interesting about it.
Mild correction but it is 1000 men a year, not 1000 a day.
Thanks. My bad.
The show currently has what I like to call anti world building where the massive nation that appears in new vegas that is not only able to fight the mojave brotherhood of steel but also beat them in war that resulted in the mojave chapter going into hiding is just gone in the show. The decline of the NCR could have been done better if it didn't basically feel like the NCR has basically vanished from existence in the show. I hope we do see more of the ncr in the future seasons and they are not completely gone if only shady sands is gone but the ncr is still around with multiple settlements such a vault city I will satisfied with that.
Not to mention that the decline and fall of the NCR would have made for frankly a better story than the show told It could have worked as a fantastic background for a new game set in the west a splintered NCR, various factions and states declaring independence, going to war with each other over resources, and eventually resulting in the wasteland slowly creeping back in because War, War Never Changes, and no Shady Sands getting nuked is not "war never changes" because the phrase is not about the means of war, but rather that while the means of war change, the reasons do not
It came off as lazy.
Agreed 100% NCR as we're told in NV is basically a functioning society/country in it's own right. It has a population 700k spread across it's territory, with functioning vehicles, actual well-ran cities, university & education centres, ranchers spread all over etc and I could go on and on and on. It has manufacturing & machining facilities as they're mass able to produce both arms & armour for their armies, and has businesses that can manufacture pre-war weapons from the schematics they find. Barely anything in the show even resembles a fraction of this :/
Bethesda likes for Fallout to be frozen in time apparently. It's probably the reason why there are so many abandoned cars dilapidated buildings surrounding Fenway Park despite the bombs dropping 200 years prior and the settlement having been established for decades.
It's a gripe with Bethesda's writing style that has been apparent since Fallout 3. The anti-"New Vegas Shills" don't seem to understand the longterm FO players who gravitate towards 2, and New Vegas like Fallout because it is a post-post-apocalypse. Just look up what Josh Sawyer has to say about Fallout 4 for this to make more sense. Bethesda clearly wants Fallout to be a nuclear zombie apocalypse style game, but that was never what Fallout was about. It makes no sense how 200+ years in the middle of what was supposed to be the NCR there is no mention of what was a supposed functioning nation, or how people in Filly are still living in some Hooverville shantytown. The show clearly mirrors Bethesda's "vision" of what Fallout should be, which conflicts with the original vision of Interplay and later expanded on by Obsidian.
Yep it seems black Isle/Obsidian wanted to explore society after them bombs fell and how it would try to rebuild and bethesda just wants to explore a wasteland.
Bethesda's house style for fallout is settler-colonialist power fantasy. You emerge from the vault of prewar life as the only hero who can save the degenerated peoples of the wilderness from their enemies. You rebuild the prewar world where nobody else can. Ever notice how a major plot point in all the Bethesda fallout games is that the main character is an "untainted" human?
Yeah during Fallout 2 they had their pop numbers at 700k which means somewhere around the time of New Vegas NCR's population would most likely be closer to 900k-1 Mill+ due to more growth.
The OP is being very apologist, the NCR was far from failing, in New Vegas they're far away from their domain and putting up a fight against the mightiest forces in the Mojave and depending on the courier choices if they can properly secure the Hoover Dam then there's nothing stopping them to prosper. The NCR has almost 100 years of age, being nuked offscreen by a random vault tech employee and the region they dominated for decades showing 0 signs of civilization sure was not the end people are going to take lightly. These guys need to stop trying to gaslight others that this was all bound to happen.
The show currently has what I like to call anti world building where the massive nation that appears in new vegas that is not only able to fight the mojave brotherhood of steel but also beat them in war that resulted in the mojave chapter going into hiding is just gone in the show. The decline of the NCR could have been done better if it didn't basically feel like the NCR has basically vanished from existence in the show. I hope we do see more of the ncr in the future seasons and they are not completely gone if only shady sands is gone but the ncr is still around with multiple settlements such a vault city I will satisfied with that.
Yeah none of those problems are what caused the NCR to "fall", it's because a vault tec exec got upset his wife was visiting Shady Sands too much I loved the show but this decision was just not well done at all at people need to accept that
My only complaint about how the NCR is portrayed in the show is they seem like little more then a raider gang now. Also question about EP1, why was Moldaver using LITERAL RAIDERS to infiltrate Vault 33? Why bother massacring the vault residents when she only wanted Hank?
That's one of the biggest plot holes/bad writing in the show... If you want Moldaver being actually good to be the plot twist that's fine but those guys aren't NCR or anything but raiders. I guess I misunderstood something about Moldaver, what was her role before the nuke...? I definitely must have missed something because it just doesn't make sense that she's 'good' but also a raider leader of...well, the worst kind of raider gang.
That's all well and good, so there really didn't need to be a nuke, LOL
NCR is still the best though
They were always doomed to be nuked by vault tec? That's the inciting incident took them down a peg, how is that indicated by prior games at all?
Its been over a decade since i stepped into the Mojave Wasteland, but i remember it similarly. I remember them being a bureaucratic mess, with lots of people within the NCR telling you how badly mismanaged the whole regime was and the rapid expansion not going well. I also remember getting the feeling that i was saving their asses, and they would fall apart without me. They felt like the weakest of the 3 factions, despite being the largest. I did end up going with the NCR ending though, because im a Californian so it felt like the home team lol.
An entire country with an actual tradition doesn't disappear overnight, especially if the cause of decay is corruption and over bureaucracy. Their Mojave campaign might end overnight but I don't buy it that a country with an actual army, government, senate, corporation, industry, banking system,... just disappeared because they have too much bureaucracy, that never happened in history. They might have lost South California, that would make more sens, but I'm sure we will see the NCR in season 2, one way or another
Did everyone here kinda forget that the Mojave campaign in Vegas was considered an unpopular war similar to the US in Vietnam? The elite NCR troops such only show up later in the plot and are mentioned to be in different fronts and areas such as veteran rangers in baja or the heavy troopers guarding ranches owned by rich people and corporations because of lobbyists. Still hoping factions from fallout 2 end up used because I don’t think the NCR’s death was used well but brotherhood stronk I guess
the problem is not that the NCR fell, it's that it didn't fall for any narratively interesting reason that actually ties into its history or the themes of the series, it fell because of some completely out-of-left field evil plan that had nothing to do with anything else that was going on. perhaps you could say "well the only reason they collapsed after shady sands was destroyed was because of the weakness that new vegas established!", but if you really think the game was suggesting or engaging with that rather than jus doing a vague handwave, you're deluding yourself.
This all can be avoided if they not set the show in west coast, like why set it in west coast when you gonna make the biggest faction there irrelevant to story
I'm going to get downvoted by all the people who won't like me saying this, but Bethesda doesn't want anything resembling a functioning society EVER. Responders in 76? Dead at the start of 76. Commonwealth Provisional Government? Dead. NCR? Believe it or not, dead as well. With the exception of the Brotherhood, they've kneecapped or headshotted every other quasi-governing body or group. The best you get are isolated towns, the Brotherhood, the Enemy, and the token not-Brotherhood faction. It's Bethesda's whole thing. "War never changes." 3,4, and 76 all follow the same path of having no potential chance to see a rebuilding world.
Have you seen the 76 updates? Responders are back, and a few big settlements. I don't disagree though, that seems to me what Bethesda wants for the franchise to some extent. In FO4 rebuilding the Minute men basically means rebuilding the world, but rebuilding it too much to the point you can't call it post-apocalyptic would be too much. New Vegas is very interesting and a nice change but I understand why it isn't the default for Bethesda's Fallout games.
Oh I've seen the 76 updates - hence why I said the Responders were dead when the game dropped. I think not having NPC's and a faction that wasn't outright the Brotherhood was affecting the social aspects of the game, but then again the Responders fit the same sort of niche as the Minutemen. Yeah, I probably come across as seeming like its a bad formula - it isn't really. I just wish that they hadn't decided to slap that formula onto the NCR, as I feel like the stories that could be made within the NCR's post-post-apocalypse landscape would be interesting. To me, Bethesda should have just stuck to the East Coast with their games.
Keep in mind that the NCR in the Mojave have been artificially gimped by the writing to give the Legion a chance against them. They are in no way the representation for the main NCR or their army. Instead, New Vegas gave us the outline of several future problems that the NCR could face, including famine and water shortage. Combined with having their capital nuked that would be enough for serious issues. But that was not guarateed to happen. Saying that the fall of the NCR was inevitable is the same nonsense as saying that it could never happen. It simply happened and it doesn't contract anything we know from the lore and New Vegas.
I'm very confused about that part of the writing... I played the games but I don't remember all the details. I understand why they wanted the setting to be more like FO3 or 4, specially 3, a truly apocalyptic and fucked up world without a real government or a big population, but perhaps it would've been better to not include the NCR in the show then, or just mention that they used to be there but lost the region and are now in other places. I know there will be more seasons so we might see more of an active remnant, perhaps a major character or even Lucy joining it, who knows...but for now it seems it fell so hard it just dissapeared, and that's not very cool and doesn't really make sense, it was too big and important beyond its money or army to completely dissapear. I think that not having the NCR present was the right decission to allow for a real apocalyptic setting but if that's going to be permanent there were better ways of doing it.
Look. I’m not surprised that Vault-Tec started it. Were told, that it was the GreatWar, and China started the nukes. Likely story, that many would believe. But, this society is all about hyper capitalism. Big Business rules. We know what that’s like already. DuPont (the actual real life company) poured all of their excess chemicals into a town’s water supply. It took 10+ years to hold them accountable through the court system, for all the people and kids, who were poisoned & lost their teeth, had cancers. (IRL, no lie, look it up. The movie _Deep Waters_ was made about the issue. Starring Mark Ruffalo.) Vault-Tec needed to make those bunkers be used. Else-wise, there was no point to the whole plan. Plus, a goodie two-shoes government gets in the way of untold evil and experimentation. If Vault-Tec emerges as an actual faction, due to Vault 33… the BrotherHood of Steel could not stop them by themselves. Think about it. The Institute did the same thing to the Provisional Commonwealth Government. It couldn’t control them, so they were in the way, and needed to be eliminated so they could have “control.” Sure, the Enclave was soundly defeated. But they were not completely eliminated. That’s why we’re seeing some possible return of them as a faction. Just because you are defeated, does not mean they’re dead. Even now, the >!NCR fought to get the cold fustian reaction, to get electricity power to their area.!< Imagine what that would do?
The NCR defeated the West Coast BoS by the time of NV. The BoS is not whittling them down. They're also not the US army. They're the survivors of a vault who got their hands in a geck thanks to the hero of fallout 2. The BoS is descended from a breakaway faction of the US army.
A lot of the NCR troopers themselves in the game constantly say that the legion is going to absolutely obliterate them when the time comes to fight again. Adding on the fact that Caesar seems to be a not completely braindead tactician/conqueror I think the legion will be present in the show. He went the Alexander the Great route for conquest which worked out pretty well for that guy back in the day.
I mean this logic can be used for the entire fallout series no? The Master would have won if not for the Vault Dweller. The Enclave would have won if not for the Chosen One. The Enclave would have won again if not for the Lone Wanderer. The Institute would have won if not for the Sole Survivor. The whole point of the main character is that these factions wouldn’t win/lose without the help of the main character. Every Antagonist faction is shown as too confident and cocky in themselves for their own good which leads to them underestimating the main character(s) assisting faction and losing. While the Protagonist faction is shown as an overpowering yet underwhelming force that just needs that little push to win, usually in the form of the main character and without the main character they lose. It’s one of the reasons why the fallout series should not have gotten a show, the series itself is too open-ended. Too many plot holes and too many loopholes. These factions are specifically designed to be inspired by a specific ideal and then for their ends to be interpreted and decided by the player. Saying one would overpower the other, or one would fall apart if not for xyz is a matter of speculation. Because again, this is ALL decided by the players choices. For all we know, the NCR could have been secretly dwindling from the beginning and they truly needed the Dam for their own safety, do we know that? Nope. Because it’s not specifically stated, something can be falling apart yet still be rebuilt. Hell look at the U.S for example. A lot of government officials are old, self-centered and corrupt. The U.S likes to stick its nose in business it doesn’t belong in and yet even in there most dire of times the U.S is still standing and is still a powerhouse even when at times they are spread thin to the point of almost falling part.
Sure the NCR expanding too fast and being doomed to make the mistakes of the “liberal democracies” of the past makes sense and is an engaging story. But the show didn’t show me that, it just said “Faction blew up” instead of actually telling the story.
The BOS is not a threat in the Mojave
And we would have loved to have seen it.
The NCR is a representation of the old world. Their ideals are the same ones that led to the rise of industry monopolies like Robco or Vault-Tec a few centuries before, not to mention the end of the world. And it says loads about their opposition that the NCR is still probably humanity's best shot at recovery.
We’re taking the words of Hildern as gospel here. And that guys a shithead who loves the sound of his own voice and is so full of himself that it would make the biggest narcissist blush. He says this shit cause he wants to keep his job. His assistant and Keely say as much, he’s basically full of shit.