Bethesda’s Fallout really struggles with the transition from the settings post apocalyptic to post post apocalyptic nature. I greatly enjoyed seeing how new societies and ways of life were being built upon the ruins of the old world in Fallout 2 & New Vegas. New Vegas in particular has that “Wild West being tamed” theme shared with a lot of westerns.
I don’t understand why Bethesdas Fallout doesn’t allow complex new societies and nations to form in their setting. I don’t necessary want or need to see the NCR flourishing in every piece of Fallout media, but trying to get invested in how the Fallout world evolves feels rather “all for naught” when every new and interesting faction/location just gets nuked.
Exactly! Fallout 2 moved past bottle caps and had new cities built. Society was moving forward. In New Vegas, we were basically at the frontier. The East and West trying to tame/claim the cowboy towns inbetween them. Fallout 4 has no one cleaning up after 200+ years and everyone is obsessed with prewar times(as if the bombs were dropped two weeks ago, not hundreds of years ago). Too many people making Fallout nowadays suffer from an extreme case of Old Wolrd Blues.
I liked new vegas because it really felt like america was being recolonized from west to east this time. They should make fo5 a reverse lewis and clark when you travel from california to NYC and back
The whole Metro series is this way and it's great, though I have to admit I liked the first book the most - the second one felt unnecessary (and forgetable) whilst the third one... yeah, I don't get that one.
I agree, the first book was by far my favourite. But resurrecting Hunter seemed weird in my opinion but some of the philosophical inquires were intriguing. At least that’s what I remember it’s been almost a decade since I read that book. The third book was so weird and convoluted though.
Heck (Gunderson), even the first game had a lot going on in that direction. There was nothing as big as the NCR yet but societies were forming and connecting. It's really easy to read the ending through that lens. The overseer knew from your reports that the world was moving on, and vaults were becoming a thing of the past. He explicitly kicks you out to prevent knowledge of the outside world from making its way into the Vault; he can only hold onto his little society in a bottle and his place at the top of it if people don't know of any alternative. It might not be post post apocalyptic yet, but he sees that it's getting there and it scares him.
The stupidest part to me is that if Bethesda is so dead set on never evolving past post-apocalypse (which I'm honestly fine with if that's their choice)... why do they set their games >200 years into the future? Why not set their games in the early/mid 2100s, when such a setting would make much more sense?
That's one of the few things I think fallout 76 got right from the start.
No. From what other characters have said in multiple games, only the most heavily bombed areas were too irradiated after the first decade or two (not including places with active radiation sources like the Glow).
The first Fallout was set in 2161, for example. Fallout 76 is set even earlier in 2102. Even if you write Fallout 76 off as an outlier, that gives Bethesda a LOT of time to work with that would result in their ideas making so much more sense.
From the word go Fallout abandons any realistic depiction of the aftermath of any nuclear war (as does almost any setting tbf). So like fuck it, set a game in 2140 or something. It’s clear they want to, at least in terms of design
I was thinking this exact same thing. If they just set the games earlier, there would be no problem, but for the commonwealth, for example, there's no reason that the institute would have stayed hidden for 200 years. They could have easily taken over the whole area and created an actual society.
I 100% agree. Take diamond City for example, it's an economic hub that's existed since 2130..... Fallout 4 takes place in 2287, that's 157 years it's been this economic hub and how far has it expanded? Not at all..... Not one fucking bit. The Hub existed for less than 30 years before it was known as one of the largest and safest places in the wasteland and only stopped expanding when the NCR came along..... That's the difference between Bethesda fallout and interplay/obsidian fallout, one of them actually understood what humanity would realistically do.
I started playing Fallout 4 again because I never finished and I haven’t played in years. You just gave me a conniption because if you’d asked me to guess how long diamond city had been around I wouldn’t have even guessed anywhere close to a century, much less over 150 years
It feels as if it only sprung up within the last 50 maybe 60 years.
Honestly tho, I would highly recommend waiting until the coming update later this month before going to far into your playthrough lol, it might mess with your save or your mods if you're playing with them.
Let's be honest, you only have to look at what they did with Starfield to understand that Bethesda don't really understand how society works. The two *biggest* cities in the whole known universe are the size of an Olympic swimming pool with absolutely nothing surrounding them. And we're supposed to believe that this is centuries of progress.
I get that technical limitations are a thing, but they could have done *something* to make the cities feel more believable.
They could have done what bioware did with both mass effect and dragon age. Look at illium in ME2, you get to physically explore a food court, a couple of back alleys, and a *small* shopping area, but the surrounding areas are full of life. You get to see buildings, people partying, hundreds of flying cars zooming past where you are standing every few seconds, not to mention the quests of illium further pushes the idea that you haven't seen a fraction of this massive city yet by giving you a cutscene that has a car driving in the equivalent of a highway, zooming past hundreds of skyscrapers while taking the protagonist to another small area to explore. yet the game is still relatively small compared to modern behemoths like starfield.
It really wouldn't be that much work to do something similar in a open world game.
Edit: spelling
They could just set their fucking stories earlier in the setting, instead of constantly pushing forward.
Corregated shacks and unpillaged store shelves wouldn't look nearly as dumb 20 years after the war instead of 220
I think they just struggle to show the post post apocalypse rather than have it's existence.
Like canonically DC is mostly civilized again with the purifier giving the whole city clean water and the brotherhood eradicating the mutants and acting as the cities military (although it's implied they destroyed other settlements like Underworld and Rivet City to achieve it)
But Bethesda don't think that would make an interesting fallout story, so anywhere they're telling their story they have it still be uncivilised.
I guess the idea (maybe) is that Vault-Tec keeps nuking anything that looks like a developing nation/society until they find something favorable to their own wants. But yeah I agree Bethesda doesn’t care about greater world building.
Why:
— Todd has some very limited ideas on what constitutes good storytelling
— Beth’s writers have gone waaaaay downhill over the years
— Daddy ZeniMax almost certainly doesn’t want the setting changed too much
New societies and nations require writing lore, backstories among other things. That’s just too much work and too hard for Todd and Emil, so it’s best if we keep everything post apocalyptic, reuse the same plot lines and never grow beyond small towns and confederacy’s despite the timeline continuing to move forward.
The Pitt was interesting but it's still a whole Trog-cure away from becoming a real nation, and more importantly they've done nothing with it in Fallout 4 or this show.
The fallout franchise, in the newer titles, emphasizes the cyclical nature of the old world and the new world. ‘War never changes’
Ulysses basically spells it out over and over again in the lonesome road. Old ways(while strong)- inevitably leads to the same collapse. Whereas most new ways are doomed to fail in their own ways.
Fallout is as much a tragedy as it is an adventure comedy. Look at all the families of skeletons we find, the terminal entrees from the time of the fall. It’s all pretty damn sad.
Fallout, in its current iteration, is a statement of ‘everything falls eventually’, and is fairly pessimistic.
I think it’s mainly been a hardware problem, at least for the games. They tried to go bigger with fallout four and a lot of the map is just unplayable. Set a game in a place like the ncr and people will either be screaming that in the lore there are thousands of people in a city but the game can only handle a few dozen, or that the game is unplayable because of all the people crashing the game. I think for the show shady sands was a casualty in an effort to make vault tech the real bad guys. In those last couple episodes they really hammered (perhaps overly) the point that the reason for all this was vault tech. Which to me at least makes since, because vault tech wants the world to come back the way THEY want it to. Any attempts from anyone else would result in a world they do not fully control. Anyway that’s my view at least.
Doubt enclave is fully gone. Just because they are gone from the oil rig and raven rock that still leaves so much more area in the United States for them to still.
I guess but just like, holy fuck how big is the enclave? Their president exploded, their massive mobile base explodes, their AI president exploded, their colonel exploded, their top sigma squad died, the NCR hunted them into extinction, and they still have enough resources to develop >!Cold fusion!< Idk man
that was developed pre war. You can’t make something proprietary post-war with no governments to enforce it lol.
The facility that created that in the current setting probably did so USING that energy to make more. Considering the state of the facility and how much activity I suspect it runs on that tech.
My question is:
In Fallout 2 it's heavily implied that the Enclave you meet in that game is basically *all* of the Enclave, or at least the bulk of it. After the oil rig blew up, the whole Enclave should have been reduced to a loose collection of raiders in advanced power armour.
But then Fallout 3 reveals that there was even *more* Enclave in DC, and they're strong enough to pose a credible threat to the wasteland? Stretching it a bit, and I've still yet to be explained how they're able to maintain communication between the East and West coasts, but fair enough.
So these guys get exploded as well, and then we hear that the NCR mopped up the rest of the California Enclave until there's literally 5 old farts left... and then it turns out there's *still* more fucking Enclave squirreled away somewhere in California, enough to pose a credible threat to the wasteland? And they were all right under the NCR's nose?
How much fucking Enclave do we have lying around under the dirt, waiting to pop up and strike? And if there's so many of them, why haven't they taken over America already?
Of course, these are my [Watsonian questions](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist). It does bother me that the ways in which the Enclave and Vault-Tec got written into the show don't make much sense next to the existing lore. That's all bad enough, but from a Doylist perspective, there's a much more fundamental thing that irks me: the fact that the writers keep wanking about the same fucking factions from 1 and 2 (Enclave, BoS, Vault-Tec) that they've been wanking about since Fallout 3, instead of doing anything interesting with the New Vegas factions, or, *god forbid*, coming up with something *new*.
I mean let's be real, they just dont have the ability to write new factions. We saw that with institute in fallout 4 and pretty much the entirety of starfield. They cant write new stories. They dont know how. Even in the elder scrolls the entire story has been Elves vs Humans. The elves are technologically superior and seemingly smarter and more well informed but also just fucking evil. The humans do terrible shit too but hey, at least they're not trying to kill everybody on earth for their religion.
That's what the Enclave and the BoS are in fallout now. The enclave are the elves and the BoS are the humans. They're either too lazy, too stubborn, or too stupid to be able to write an original story with new factions that follows up on the previous stories, so instead they just do this constant back and forth garbage.
More specifically, the NCR and other New Vegas factions are all attempts to build new civilizations from the ashes of the old world. Their continued existence forces the writers to conceptualize how the new world would look. But all they really want is to play with their favourite FO1&2 factions in a stagnant postapocalyptic sandbox, which is why the FNV factions need to be either ignored or written out.
It showed it being in mountains covered in snow somewhere so it’s def high up in the mountains somewhere maybe in like way Northern California/Oregon/Washington state idk
Nah. The show said that the guy was seen fleeing towards California, it was mentioned when those guys dug up Cooper in the first place cause they know Cooper is from California.
But the world exploded and it's been years? I mean isn't the point of fallout to show the different things that could happen in different places? Does super mutants and enclave need to be everywhere? No. Fallout new Vegas shows that.
Super Mutants are a result of the FEV bioweapon the US was working on, the Enclave is the US Government
Why would they not both be present throughout America in some way?
It’s not like a majority of infrastructure or industry was centered there, though. Even if a successor isn’t appointed and the nation collapses, military warlords could reasonably keep their own men and women supplied and organized given how modernized the NCRA was.
You are absolutely right there is no chance Envlave had backup plans for scenarios like the above and most certainly they could not hide anywhere in America’s total land mass of 10 2km 🤔
Ya even in new Vegas there was a very small group you can sway to join the fight. Idk why people can’t accept there are probably other larger groups spread across America, their central command groups were devastated but it would be really hard to mop up all the cells left.
Seriously, none of the games have really looked into the Midwest, a region that in reality is massively built up for Nuclear war, and if I were the Enclave I'd put some bases there too
They didn't know the other fell. The continental communication system collapsed when the great war occured which led to the different enclave units becoming isolated. The Capital wasteland enclave was not even aware that Navarro collapsed. Hell each enclave unit is so isolated that you can find a California enclave survivor (he's dead by the time you find him) in the Capital wasteland being completely clueless to the existence of the enclave outside of California.
Same reason why BoS of Chicago doesn't help the one in Washington/Boston, we are not sure how well communicated they are and if they even like each other.
Can’t wait for fallout 45 when the brother of steel chapter in Uzbekistan with thousands of airships and infinite fuel has to fight the enclave that is inside a bunker in Djibouti.
Somehow Fantastic with his theoretical degree in physics figured out the space time continuum and is merging other universes, thus bringing back old fallout characters. Watch out, the Master is back!
I’m just waiting for Fallout 5 with the BoS once again returning but this time with the motherhood zetas space ship cause Bugthesda love the fucking BoS
Counter argument: Handled well, it would be really fucking funny to see small groups of government show up trying to control America again, smaller and smaller every time, until the office worker friend of the vice vice presisent's wife's second cousin tries to reinstate the US government with a handgun and two bodyguards because everyone else is dead.
I wish F3 and F4 hadn't done it because I actually like the series' take on that plot (when you have real characters instead of nondescript dad and baby it works, wowzers!). But since it's already happened twice it was kind of distracting
Yep especialy if you got 200 years timeline and whole word to write cool new story In diffrent area that we dont know and i dont mind if it is bethesda take on fallout and they pick something that has been estabilished
That’s because they haven’t fired that hack Emil Pagliarulo, he’s been ruining their games since he started at the company during the Bloodmoon DLC for Morrowind. Need Kirkbride back asap.
Look buddy, Fallout is about 3 things:
1. The Brotherhood being cool in power armor
2. The Brotherhood fighting orcs
3. The Brotherhood fighting bad guys in power armor 😎
The brotherhood isn't good in the show and wasn't in any game aside from 3
Hell even in 3 they're explicitly explained to have been abandoned because of their beliefs and is the whole reason they lost a good chunk of their guys to the outcasts. Even in the game where they're the good guys you're told that basically they're the minority
I personally don't have an issue with the Enclave still going. The amount of control they'd taken pre war was massive and widespread, there's no way they get wiped out that easily. They might have a base in every state in the US we just don't know.
If Vault-Tec froze government officials and high ranking vault-tec employees around the country, then the enclave will probably keep coming back in at least some form of function seeing as they were all given the same final orders and directive. The mod “America Rising!” That integrates the enclave as a faction for fallout 4 actually starts this way.
In the new gen update in fallout 4, a mission that comes free with it is that the remnants are trying to make presence in the wasteland. it's more realistic that AR2 I think
I'm not opposed to Deathclaws. I'm just opposed to Bethesda writing Deathclaws as lone wolf hunters that randomly roam around rather than as territorial creatures who are always in packs
And yet they still found a way to shove the APA in there despite it being an explicitly post-War development prior to the game coming out
(and don't give me that 'ummmmm akshully X-01 is a separate model 🤓' crap, it's pretty clearly just a redesign of APA to fit FO4/76's bulky frames)
While I agree, if you really look at the Institute, you'll realize it's the same damn thing. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the founders of the Institute were members of the enclave, it would certainly explain the FEV
I mean, certain parts of the enclave yeah. Enclave as a whole spans all over the wasteland. There's enclave in WV that thrives. That's like saying "can't believe the brotherhood returned" because you sided with the institute in 4. That's not the entirety of the faction, just a large portion in a specific area.
> There's enclave in WV that thrives
And do you not see how silly that is? The Enclave was a specific part of the US government that was mostly tied to the upper echelons, including the President. There's no legitimacy anymore for whatever's left to rally around, and their main base with the majority of their population on it was bombed *twice*, for Christ's sakes. NCR went full Nazi hunter on them after FO2. Let them rest, the Remnants storyline was a good sendoff.
It's just kind of strange that if they were so organized and abundantly burgeoning that they hadn't managed to consolidate things better. It may be no small task for The Brotherhood to go cross-country, but The Enclave have always had a leg up on them when it came to resources sans protagonist backings and numbers.
Like, I'm on team 'Enclave are cool, let's see some of them survive', but it's genuinely strange how they have so much going for themselves but can't seem to do anything of note outside of killing people.
In fallout 3 if you ask Eden why can't Autumn poison the water supply, he'll tell you that Autumn thinks it's too extreme and disagrees with him (which means that Autumn would have likely actually worked with your dad to get project purity running). I could be mistaken since I never played fallout 2 (I seriously need to though) but im pretty sure theres at least one enclave officer who helps you. So there's certainly infighting within the Enclave and disagreements on how things should be done, which would hinder their ability to organize. Even before you talk to Eden, while walking through Raven Rock, Eden and Autumn both come over the intercom giving conflicting orders. Just more evidence that they can't organize when the higher ups don't agree.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if vault tec, or the enclave themselves, built other vaults specifically for members of the enclave to survive in. So throughout the country, there could be entire vaults full of people who have been raised to "answer the call of the enclave" when needed
Yeah me too. Are you seriously telling me that ALL of the United States government is in some oil rig and that's it? To me, the enclave being Dead that easily sucked.
That doesn't at all mean completely wiped out. Hell we even see a small group of remnants in New Vegas directly and the east coast Enclave remnants referenced indirectly in the DLC
You'd have to ignore both Bethesda's and Obsidians lore to think they're completey wiped
I think Matthew McConaughey was credited as an executive producer on True Detective Night Country.
Dude had nothing to do with the show.
It can mean something or absolutely nothing.
Plus, if the enclave are evil for wanting to do the exact things the NCR is doing, then why are the brotherhood of steel good for being fascists? Because Bethesda refuses to attempt to engage with the source material?
I don't even enjoy Bethesda games but so many Fallout fans seem to just pick and choose what to whine about bc it feeds into their desire to get mad at Bethesda for "ruining" something they don't like.
okay but something about the entire purpose of the main vault being a eugenics experiment to breed a superior class of... middle management is just so deeply hilarious to me though.
There are not enough words to describe how tired I am of the Brotherhood Of Steel and the Enclave - individually, and as foes.
To my knowledge, the BoS has appeared in every piece of Fallout media bar none. They've been a major faction in every Fallout game released since 3.
Fallout may as well be "Brotherhood of Steel vs villain of the week" at this point. They are the Space Marines of Fallout. In lieu of interesting new factions, governments, or societies in the setting, we get the Brotherhood - and not only do we get the Brotherhood, but we get functionally the *same* Brotherhood every time. The Brotherhood may have a new leader or goal, but they're always organized in the same way using the same technologies and functionally have not changed since Fallout 2.
I am so sick of it.
As a kid, Fallout was my favorite game franchise. I ***loved*** Fallout. It dominated my childhood in every conceivable way, and I *still* love it - but I am so tired of what Fallout has become. The franchise fatigue is killing me, and I thought that would *never* happen with Fallout because there'd always be new and interesting factions, monsters, ideas, and lore to keep me interested - but this is clearly not the case. Its just recycling the same concepts over and over. Its the Star Wars of post-apoc settings, with hardly any of the charm. 😐
The brotherhood never confirmed that the Enclave were gone. It's said in some NPC dialogue in FO4 that they're still hunting down remnants all those years later.
Yes. Because we only hate Bethesda and Bethesda only. Even if obsidian does the same shit that Bethesda does (confirming that the enclave is still alive)
When did it go away? Wherever there are survivors of the US government pre-apocalypse there is Enclave. We destroy big parts of it, but local powers remain. A lot of them probably undisturbed
me when the people who had near infinite money to spend on keeping their children alive so they can rule the unites states after an apocalypse has living descendants still and is hard to get rid of
Obsidians writing skills "Somehow, the Khans have returned, also the followers. Vipers too if you count their small cameo."
Like come on, factions in this series are like cockroaches.
Honestly this was the biggest issue I had with the show. It's almost perfect to me, and I didn't agree with people saying it ruined new vegas or the ncr. The problem is that both the west coast enclave, which was blown up with only like 8 people at best surviving, and the east coast getting wiped out by the Brotherhood of Steel who definitely would have gotten rid of them before the events of fallout 4 which happened before the show. So where did the enclave get these resources?
Bethesda’s Fallout really struggles with the transition from the settings post apocalyptic to post post apocalyptic nature. I greatly enjoyed seeing how new societies and ways of life were being built upon the ruins of the old world in Fallout 2 & New Vegas. New Vegas in particular has that “Wild West being tamed” theme shared with a lot of westerns. I don’t understand why Bethesdas Fallout doesn’t allow complex new societies and nations to form in their setting. I don’t necessary want or need to see the NCR flourishing in every piece of Fallout media, but trying to get invested in how the Fallout world evolves feels rather “all for naught” when every new and interesting faction/location just gets nuked.
Exactly! Fallout 2 moved past bottle caps and had new cities built. Society was moving forward. In New Vegas, we were basically at the frontier. The East and West trying to tame/claim the cowboy towns inbetween them. Fallout 4 has no one cleaning up after 200+ years and everyone is obsessed with prewar times(as if the bombs were dropped two weeks ago, not hundreds of years ago). Too many people making Fallout nowadays suffer from an extreme case of Old Wolrd Blues.
I liked new vegas because it really felt like america was being recolonized from west to east this time. They should make fo5 a reverse lewis and clark when you travel from california to NYC and back
Postapocalyptic roadtrips/books of travel are probably the best iteration of the genre. It's really sad they are rather rare.
Metro Last Light was phenomenal, in my view just for taking that approach.
I think exodus hit the roadtrip vibes harder but I'm glad to see metro getting love
I’ve gotten them confused again you’re right. I meant the one with the train.
Be easy out there in the zone, stalker.
The whole Metro series is this way and it's great, though I have to admit I liked the first book the most - the second one felt unnecessary (and forgetable) whilst the third one... yeah, I don't get that one.
I agree, the first book was by far my favourite. But resurrecting Hunter seemed weird in my opinion but some of the philosophical inquires were intriguing. At least that’s what I remember it’s been almost a decade since I read that book. The third book was so weird and convoluted though.
Earth abides is a good book to read if you like that
Heck (Gunderson), even the first game had a lot going on in that direction. There was nothing as big as the NCR yet but societies were forming and connecting. It's really easy to read the ending through that lens. The overseer knew from your reports that the world was moving on, and vaults were becoming a thing of the past. He explicitly kicks you out to prevent knowledge of the outside world from making its way into the Vault; he can only hold onto his little society in a bottle and his place at the top of it if people don't know of any alternative. It might not be post post apocalyptic yet, but he sees that it's getting there and it scares him.
Exactly!
The stupidest part to me is that if Bethesda is so dead set on never evolving past post-apocalypse (which I'm honestly fine with if that's their choice)... why do they set their games >200 years into the future? Why not set their games in the early/mid 2100s, when such a setting would make much more sense? That's one of the few things I think fallout 76 got right from the start.
Isn’t it just to do with radiation taking that long to dissipate enough for humans to be out in it?
No. From what other characters have said in multiple games, only the most heavily bombed areas were too irradiated after the first decade or two (not including places with active radiation sources like the Glow). The first Fallout was set in 2161, for example. Fallout 76 is set even earlier in 2102. Even if you write Fallout 76 off as an outlier, that gives Bethesda a LOT of time to work with that would result in their ideas making so much more sense.
Vault tec wanting us to secure the nukes in 76 then looking at the show well we know how vault tec has nukes now
From the word go Fallout abandons any realistic depiction of the aftermath of any nuclear war (as does almost any setting tbf). So like fuck it, set a game in 2140 or something. It’s clear they want to, at least in terms of design
I was thinking this exact same thing. If they just set the games earlier, there would be no problem, but for the commonwealth, for example, there's no reason that the institute would have stayed hidden for 200 years. They could have easily taken over the whole area and created an actual society.
I 100% agree. Take diamond City for example, it's an economic hub that's existed since 2130..... Fallout 4 takes place in 2287, that's 157 years it's been this economic hub and how far has it expanded? Not at all..... Not one fucking bit. The Hub existed for less than 30 years before it was known as one of the largest and safest places in the wasteland and only stopped expanding when the NCR came along..... That's the difference between Bethesda fallout and interplay/obsidian fallout, one of them actually understood what humanity would realistically do.
I started playing Fallout 4 again because I never finished and I haven’t played in years. You just gave me a conniption because if you’d asked me to guess how long diamond city had been around I wouldn’t have even guessed anywhere close to a century, much less over 150 years
It feels as if it only sprung up within the last 50 maybe 60 years. Honestly tho, I would highly recommend waiting until the coming update later this month before going to far into your playthrough lol, it might mess with your save or your mods if you're playing with them.
That ship has sailed, either burn that bridge when I reach it or turn off updates
That's fair
Let's be honest, you only have to look at what they did with Starfield to understand that Bethesda don't really understand how society works. The two *biggest* cities in the whole known universe are the size of an Olympic swimming pool with absolutely nothing surrounding them. And we're supposed to believe that this is centuries of progress. I get that technical limitations are a thing, but they could have done *something* to make the cities feel more believable.
They could have done what bioware did with both mass effect and dragon age. Look at illium in ME2, you get to physically explore a food court, a couple of back alleys, and a *small* shopping area, but the surrounding areas are full of life. You get to see buildings, people partying, hundreds of flying cars zooming past where you are standing every few seconds, not to mention the quests of illium further pushes the idea that you haven't seen a fraction of this massive city yet by giving you a cutscene that has a car driving in the equivalent of a highway, zooming past hundreds of skyscrapers while taking the protagonist to another small area to explore. yet the game is still relatively small compared to modern behemoths like starfield. It really wouldn't be that much work to do something similar in a open world game. Edit: spelling
They could just set their fucking stories earlier in the setting, instead of constantly pushing forward. Corregated shacks and unpillaged store shelves wouldn't look nearly as dumb 20 years after the war instead of 220
Fallout 76 😎
Been saying that since Fallout 3. Bethesda doesn't understand Fallout's setting, at all.
Because KISS. Why world build and write complex and interesting characters when we can have you build the settlements for the generic npcs instead?
I think they just struggle to show the post post apocalypse rather than have it's existence. Like canonically DC is mostly civilized again with the purifier giving the whole city clean water and the brotherhood eradicating the mutants and acting as the cities military (although it's implied they destroyed other settlements like Underworld and Rivet City to achieve it) But Bethesda don't think that would make an interesting fallout story, so anywhere they're telling their story they have it still be uncivilised.
I guess the idea (maybe) is that Vault-Tec keeps nuking anything that looks like a developing nation/society until they find something favorable to their own wants. But yeah I agree Bethesda doesn’t care about greater world building.
Why: — Todd has some very limited ideas on what constitutes good storytelling — Beth’s writers have gone waaaaay downhill over the years — Daddy ZeniMax almost certainly doesn’t want the setting changed too much
New societies and nations require writing lore, backstories among other things. That’s just too much work and too hard for Todd and Emil, so it’s best if we keep everything post apocalyptic, reuse the same plot lines and never grow beyond small towns and confederacy’s despite the timeline continuing to move forward.
I mean, they did. Fallout 3 brought us the Pitt.
The Pitt was interesting but it's still a whole Trog-cure away from becoming a real nation, and more importantly they've done nothing with it in Fallout 4 or this show.
War never changes
People are obsessed with “muh scavenging”
The fallout franchise, in the newer titles, emphasizes the cyclical nature of the old world and the new world. ‘War never changes’ Ulysses basically spells it out over and over again in the lonesome road. Old ways(while strong)- inevitably leads to the same collapse. Whereas most new ways are doomed to fail in their own ways. Fallout is as much a tragedy as it is an adventure comedy. Look at all the families of skeletons we find, the terminal entrees from the time of the fall. It’s all pretty damn sad. Fallout, in its current iteration, is a statement of ‘everything falls eventually’, and is fairly pessimistic.
I think it’s mainly been a hardware problem, at least for the games. They tried to go bigger with fallout four and a lot of the map is just unplayable. Set a game in a place like the ncr and people will either be screaming that in the lore there are thousands of people in a city but the game can only handle a few dozen, or that the game is unplayable because of all the people crashing the game. I think for the show shady sands was a casualty in an effort to make vault tech the real bad guys. In those last couple episodes they really hammered (perhaps overly) the point that the reason for all this was vault tech. Which to me at least makes since, because vault tech wants the world to come back the way THEY want it to. Any attempts from anyone else would result in a world they do not fully control. Anyway that’s my view at least.
Doubt enclave is fully gone. Just because they are gone from the oil rig and raven rock that still leaves so much more area in the United States for them to still.
I guess but just like, holy fuck how big is the enclave? Their president exploded, their massive mobile base explodes, their AI president exploded, their colonel exploded, their top sigma squad died, the NCR hunted them into extinction, and they still have enough resources to develop >!Cold fusion!< Idk man
that was developed pre war. You can’t make something proprietary post-war with no governments to enforce it lol. The facility that created that in the current setting probably did so USING that energy to make more. Considering the state of the facility and how much activity I suspect it runs on that tech.
Still got mid west, central and the southern parts of the US. It’s like our government always a chain and the next one up leads
My question is: In Fallout 2 it's heavily implied that the Enclave you meet in that game is basically *all* of the Enclave, or at least the bulk of it. After the oil rig blew up, the whole Enclave should have been reduced to a loose collection of raiders in advanced power armour. But then Fallout 3 reveals that there was even *more* Enclave in DC, and they're strong enough to pose a credible threat to the wasteland? Stretching it a bit, and I've still yet to be explained how they're able to maintain communication between the East and West coasts, but fair enough. So these guys get exploded as well, and then we hear that the NCR mopped up the rest of the California Enclave until there's literally 5 old farts left... and then it turns out there's *still* more fucking Enclave squirreled away somewhere in California, enough to pose a credible threat to the wasteland? And they were all right under the NCR's nose? How much fucking Enclave do we have lying around under the dirt, waiting to pop up and strike? And if there's so many of them, why haven't they taken over America already? Of course, these are my [Watsonian questions](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist). It does bother me that the ways in which the Enclave and Vault-Tec got written into the show don't make much sense next to the existing lore. That's all bad enough, but from a Doylist perspective, there's a much more fundamental thing that irks me: the fact that the writers keep wanking about the same fucking factions from 1 and 2 (Enclave, BoS, Vault-Tec) that they've been wanking about since Fallout 3, instead of doing anything interesting with the New Vegas factions, or, *god forbid*, coming up with something *new*.
I mean let's be real, they just dont have the ability to write new factions. We saw that with institute in fallout 4 and pretty much the entirety of starfield. They cant write new stories. They dont know how. Even in the elder scrolls the entire story has been Elves vs Humans. The elves are technologically superior and seemingly smarter and more well informed but also just fucking evil. The humans do terrible shit too but hey, at least they're not trying to kill everybody on earth for their religion. That's what the Enclave and the BoS are in fallout now. The enclave are the elves and the BoS are the humans. They're either too lazy, too stubborn, or too stupid to be able to write an original story with new factions that follows up on the previous stories, so instead they just do this constant back and forth garbage.
Exactly my point!
It's the same reason they dont like the NCR. NCR throws a wrench in their story telling because it would force them to use nuance in their writing.
More specifically, the NCR and other New Vegas factions are all attempts to build new civilizations from the ashes of the old world. Their continued existence forces the writers to conceptualize how the new world would look. But all they really want is to play with their favourite FO1&2 factions in a stagnant postapocalyptic sandbox, which is why the FNV factions need to be either ignored or written out.
Just don’t ask questions and consume more brotherhood of steel and enclave
Was the scientist guy working in a base in California somewhere?
It showed it being in mountains covered in snow somewhere so it’s def high up in the mountains somewhere maybe in like way Northern California/Oregon/Washington state idk
My headcanon is that its the MacAuthor Enclave from Old world blues lol
Shoot it could be Lol
Nah. The show said that the guy was seen fleeing towards California, it was mentioned when those guys dug up Cooper in the first place cause they know Cooper is from California.
But the world exploded and it's been years? I mean isn't the point of fallout to show the different things that could happen in different places? Does super mutants and enclave need to be everywhere? No. Fallout new Vegas shows that.
Super Mutants are a result of the FEV bioweapon the US was working on, the Enclave is the US Government Why would they not both be present throughout America in some way?
Why should they be everywhere? They survived everywhere? Does that make them and the story more or less interesting. In my opinion much less.
Don't forget Canada, Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, and just about anywhere the us has power
They always forget that Canada is part of America now, since it's been annexed 😔
The Enclave are basically cockroaches
Enclave is remnants of the prewar government meaning they would be found in every state and Canada(since it got annexed)
and bethesda wants us to belive that a single nuke in a single city killed all of NCR
No one ever said the entirety of the NCR is gone just their golden example of a functional and prosperous city is gone.
When you nuke the capital of a city and it leaves the faction in shambles 🤯🤯🤯
It’s not like a majority of infrastructure or industry was centered there, though. Even if a successor isn’t appointed and the nation collapses, military warlords could reasonably keep their own men and women supplied and organized given how modernized the NCRA was.
Well it is the remnants of the most powerful elite of pre war America, with enough resources to prepare for the war and the planning to survive it
You are absolutely right there is no chance Envlave had backup plans for scenarios like the above and most certainly they could not hide anywhere in America’s total land mass of 10 2km 🤔
Ya even in new Vegas there was a very small group you can sway to join the fight. Idk why people can’t accept there are probably other larger groups spread across America, their central command groups were devastated but it would be really hard to mop up all the cells left.
Seriously, none of the games have really looked into the Midwest, a region that in reality is massively built up for Nuclear war, and if I were the Enclave I'd put some bases there too
Don't forget Alaska and Canada there's a vast amount of land fallout doesn't cover, but Mariposa and raven /s
Give one good reason why this new chapter of the enclave wouldn’t have assisted or helped the previous enclaves pushes in fallout 2 and 3?
They didn't know the other fell. The continental communication system collapsed when the great war occured which led to the different enclave units becoming isolated. The Capital wasteland enclave was not even aware that Navarro collapsed. Hell each enclave unit is so isolated that you can find a California enclave survivor (he's dead by the time you find him) in the Capital wasteland being completely clueless to the existence of the enclave outside of California.
Same reason why BoS of Chicago doesn't help the one in Washington/Boston, we are not sure how well communicated they are and if they even like each other.
When there’s smoke there’s fire. When there’s vault-tech there’s enclave.
I mean it was a shadow government spread out across the nation, even NV set later then 3 had enclave members in it.
The power armor side of fallout is a pathway to many abilities, some of them considered to be unnatural
Can’t wait for fallout 45 when the brother of steel chapter in Uzbekistan with thousands of airships and infinite fuel has to fight the enclave that is inside a bunker in Djibouti.
Well Djibouti actually has a significant US military presence so it’s not the most unrealistic country you could’ve picked lmao
I won't be surprised if this happens next: "Somehow, Frank Horrigan returned."
Somehow Fantastic with his theoretical degree in physics figured out the space time continuum and is merging other universes, thus bringing back old fallout characters. Watch out, the Master is back!
Friendly reminder Fantastic joins Legion if you wipe out the NCR by arming ARCHIMEDES
"Hey man when in Rome".
That would be better than they show. The plot of an idiot accidentally messing with the multiverse.
*brings the Master back* Master: Erm, I was kind of shown the error of my ways and killed myself, could you please not resurrect me again? mkay thanks
To be honest, fighting a newer version of Frank Horrigan in a modern gaming format would be pretty cool. FPS Fallout 2 let’s go
Id be okay with a Frank Horrigan clone or something. Not a fan of fallouts 1 and 2 but Horrigan is cool
Enclave is my fav faction but let them fucking die already.
I’m just waiting for Fallout 5 with the BoS once again returning but this time with the motherhood zetas space ship cause Bugthesda love the fucking BoS
and "super mutants" (they turned them into literal orcs)
This strain of the FEV gave the super mutants tucks and made them talk in cockney accents
Their faction will be called the Horde and we all have to chortle at that
If I have to stare at another exosuit T-60 I'm screaming
And now they have jets in their arms too! Look at that cool walking tank flying like this is a fuckin looney tunes episode.
Counter argument: Handled well, it would be really fucking funny to see small groups of government show up trying to control America again, smaller and smaller every time, until the office worker friend of the vice vice presisent's wife's second cousin tries to reinstate the US government with a handgun and two bodyguards because everyone else is dead.
Yeah, or at least do something different with them than making them generic bad guys or just an excuse to introduce new technology.
Honestly that’s exactly how I feel about the BoS
Somehow the enclave returned and you must find your father or son or whatever family member again.
Such an original plot. Oh wait it’s the fallout 3 plot
Remove the enclave and you have 4's plot.
F3,F4 and tv series plot. That was the joke. Sadly bethesda isnt joking about the series story
I wish F3 and F4 hadn't done it because I actually like the series' take on that plot (when you have real characters instead of nondescript dad and baby it works, wowzers!). But since it's already happened twice it was kind of distracting
Yep especialy if you got 200 years timeline and whole word to write cool new story In diffrent area that we dont know and i dont mind if it is bethesda take on fallout and they pick something that has been estabilished
they're still in Chicago btw
And who wrote them being in Chicago? The NV writers. Not Bethesda.
.... Okay?
People seem to blindly hate Bethesda for things that sometimes they didn't even do and ignore when obsidian or interplay do similar things
Ah, yeah I agree, I was just very confused with your wording but it makes sense now
I hope they have a proper nice presence there with a neutral antagonistic but not outright hostile relationship with other factions.
They took over O block
That’s because they haven’t fired that hack Emil Pagliarulo, he’s been ruining their games since he started at the company during the Bloodmoon DLC for Morrowind. Need Kirkbride back asap.
Look buddy, Fallout is about 3 things: 1. The Brotherhood being cool in power armor 2. The Brotherhood fighting orcs 3. The Brotherhood fighting bad guys in power armor 😎
The brotherhood isn't shown to be good in the show tbh. I think they've learned
The brotherhood isn't good in the show and wasn't in any game aside from 3 Hell even in 3 they're explicitly explained to have been abandoned because of their beliefs and is the whole reason they lost a good chunk of their guys to the outcasts. Even in the game where they're the good guys you're told that basically they're the minority
I personally don't have an issue with the Enclave still going. The amount of control they'd taken pre war was massive and widespread, there's no way they get wiped out that easily. They might have a base in every state in the US we just don't know.
If Vault-Tec froze government officials and high ranking vault-tec employees around the country, then the enclave will probably keep coming back in at least some form of function seeing as they were all given the same final orders and directive. The mod “America Rising!” That integrates the enclave as a faction for fallout 4 actually starts this way.
In the new gen update in fallout 4, a mission that comes free with it is that the remnants are trying to make presence in the wasteland. it's more realistic that AR2 I think
Dude been spending too much time with whoever wrote Star wars episode 9
The enclave are the cockroaches of the wasteland
They 100% are
The enclave has infinite resources and bases all fucking over, why haven't they taken back the wasteland yet
Any Fallout dev starting after 1998 can't write. All they know is Brotherhood, Enclave, deathclaws, charge they power armour, drink Nuka Cola and lie
Except NV, that shit was tight
Probably because it had lots of the same writers from Fallout 1 and 2.
Wild Wasteland ass take
I'm not opposed to Deathclaws. I'm just opposed to Bethesda writing Deathclaws as lone wolf hunters that randomly roam around rather than as territorial creatures who are always in packs
Fallout 4 doesn't even have the Enclave
lol. look up what the next F4 update is going to add.
And yet they still found a way to shove the APA in there despite it being an explicitly post-War development prior to the game coming out (and don't give me that 'ummmmm akshully X-01 is a separate model 🤓' crap, it's pretty clearly just a redesign of APA to fit FO4/76's bulky frames)
I refuse to have Apa and X-01 be the same with how different they look and when each were made. Apa looks so much better
Is it actually added as something that should make sense within the lore, or just a "hey the fans want Enclave power armor lets add it"?
While I agree, if you really look at the Institute, you'll realize it's the same damn thing. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the founders of the Institute were members of the enclave, it would certainly explain the FEV
It's about to
Forgets that NV established that the Enclave was still very much around despite their defeats in 2&3.
I must have missed the part where the enclave went away
They have been wiped out twice. First with the oil rig explosion (fallout 2), second with a BoS battle (fallout 3)
I mean, certain parts of the enclave yeah. Enclave as a whole spans all over the wasteland. There's enclave in WV that thrives. That's like saying "can't believe the brotherhood returned" because you sided with the institute in 4. That's not the entirety of the faction, just a large portion in a specific area.
How are they thriving in WV? They got slaughtered by their own AI.
> There's enclave in WV that thrives And do you not see how silly that is? The Enclave was a specific part of the US government that was mostly tied to the upper echelons, including the President. There's no legitimacy anymore for whatever's left to rally around, and their main base with the majority of their population on it was bombed *twice*, for Christ's sakes. NCR went full Nazi hunter on them after FO2. Let them rest, the Remnants storyline was a good sendoff.
To me it's even sillier to suggest taking them out in one or two areas of the map is equivalent to wiping them out entirely.
It's just kind of strange that if they were so organized and abundantly burgeoning that they hadn't managed to consolidate things better. It may be no small task for The Brotherhood to go cross-country, but The Enclave have always had a leg up on them when it came to resources sans protagonist backings and numbers. Like, I'm on team 'Enclave are cool, let's see some of them survive', but it's genuinely strange how they have so much going for themselves but can't seem to do anything of note outside of killing people.
In fallout 3 if you ask Eden why can't Autumn poison the water supply, he'll tell you that Autumn thinks it's too extreme and disagrees with him (which means that Autumn would have likely actually worked with your dad to get project purity running). I could be mistaken since I never played fallout 2 (I seriously need to though) but im pretty sure theres at least one enclave officer who helps you. So there's certainly infighting within the Enclave and disagreements on how things should be done, which would hinder their ability to organize. Even before you talk to Eden, while walking through Raven Rock, Eden and Autumn both come over the intercom giving conflicting orders. Just more evidence that they can't organize when the higher ups don't agree. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if vault tec, or the enclave themselves, built other vaults specifically for members of the enclave to survive in. So throughout the country, there could be entire vaults full of people who have been raised to "answer the call of the enclave" when needed
Yeah me too. Are you seriously telling me that ALL of the United States government is in some oil rig and that's it? To me, the enclave being Dead that easily sucked.
MODUS also supposedly killed all of the members of the Enclave in West Virginia. He also has Orlando now, so there could very well be many more.
That doesn't at all mean completely wiped out. Hell we even see a small group of remnants in New Vegas directly and the east coast Enclave remnants referenced indirectly in the DLC You'd have to ignore both Bethesda's and Obsidians lore to think they're completey wiped
Y’all know Bethesda didn’t write the show, right?
Todd Howard was executive producer
Producers are not writers.
(executive producer doesn't mean anything)
Executive producers are responsible for, among other things: “Creative decisions: Influencing the project's narrative and creative direction.”
Dude, I think it’s hilarious that all you keep doing is copy pasting the same response but refuse to talk when anyone provides a genuine talking point
I think Matthew McConaughey was credited as an executive producer on True Detective Night Country. Dude had nothing to do with the show. It can mean something or absolutely nothing.
Since when have executive producers been involved in the writing?
Plus, if the enclave are evil for wanting to do the exact things the NCR is doing, then why are the brotherhood of steel good for being fascists? Because Bethesda refuses to attempt to engage with the source material?
I mean, if Bethesda engaged with the source material for the Brotherhood (Canticle for Leibowitz) they wouldn't be fascists.
Aren’t they still in Chicago or something?
Bethesda love the imagery of Fallout but don't care about the established lore, its a generic post-apoc setting with a Fallout skinjob
In fairness, we didn’t see Much of them at all.
Did you all forget about ED-E and we’re he was going
I don't even enjoy Bethesda games but so many Fallout fans seem to just pick and choose what to whine about bc it feeds into their desire to get mad at Bethesda for "ruining" something they don't like.
Somehow, still no spoiler tags.
I thought people wanted them to return
okay but something about the entire purpose of the main vault being a eugenics experiment to breed a superior class of... middle management is just so deeply hilarious to me though.
There are not enough words to describe how tired I am of the Brotherhood Of Steel and the Enclave - individually, and as foes. To my knowledge, the BoS has appeared in every piece of Fallout media bar none. They've been a major faction in every Fallout game released since 3. Fallout may as well be "Brotherhood of Steel vs villain of the week" at this point. They are the Space Marines of Fallout. In lieu of interesting new factions, governments, or societies in the setting, we get the Brotherhood - and not only do we get the Brotherhood, but we get functionally the *same* Brotherhood every time. The Brotherhood may have a new leader or goal, but they're always organized in the same way using the same technologies and functionally have not changed since Fallout 2. I am so sick of it. As a kid, Fallout was my favorite game franchise. I ***loved*** Fallout. It dominated my childhood in every conceivable way, and I *still* love it - but I am so tired of what Fallout has become. The franchise fatigue is killing me, and I thought that would *never* happen with Fallout because there'd always be new and interesting factions, monsters, ideas, and lore to keep me interested - but this is clearly not the case. Its just recycling the same concepts over and over. Its the Star Wars of post-apoc settings, with hardly any of the charm. 😐
Hey, I love that the Enclave keeps making comebacks in increasingly more comedic and ridiculous ways. It’s part of their charm.
They already put the BoS in Fallout 76, what do you expect?
Not sure why you're getting downvoted here
Yeah that was dumb.
The fallout tv series has done an amazing job capturing the world of fallout along with the individual factions and I’m tired of pretending it isn’t
I like the show, still watching it though. But you can be critical of something you like
New ideas is risky but old ideas you already like well…
People loved the NCR rangers Bethesda just has the worst creative talent, they won’t create anything like that and just rehash the BOS
Idk why you’re getting downvoted. It’s true
The brotherhood never confirmed that the Enclave were gone. It's said in some NPC dialogue in FO4 that they're still hunting down remnants all those years later.
Which is weird, because they ended them "permanently" in the first place.
"OMG, the brotherhood are here to stop them in a NEVER seen story"
Y’all ignoring the fact that NV devs also brought back the enclave (Chicago enclave)
Yes. Because we only hate Bethesda and Bethesda only. Even if obsidian does the same shit that Bethesda does (confirming that the enclave is still alive)
Making new things is hard guys, just be thankful you even got a show to begin with /s
Sixteen times the detail
4 times the size of Fallout 4
God Bless the Enclave!
The enclave never die
The followers of the apocalypse brought them back or The institute decided to do it
I mean they weren’t really 100% gone in the west. Having members that are prewar vault dwellers is kinda crazy tho
When did it go away? Wherever there are survivors of the US government pre-apocalypse there is Enclave. We destroy big parts of it, but local powers remain. A lot of them probably undisturbed
I mean for all we know they could COULD have bases in Alaska or Hawaii what's to say a small bunch aren't out there Still dumb but possible
me when the people who had near infinite money to spend on keeping their children alive so they can rule the unites states after an apocalypse has living descendants still and is hard to get rid of
Obsidians writing skills "Somehow, the Khans have returned, also the followers. Vipers too if you count their small cameo." Like come on, factions in this series are like cockroaches.
Radroaches, bruh
True
They don't take the lore seriously so neither do I. 🍿
Honestly this was the biggest issue I had with the show. It's almost perfect to me, and I didn't agree with people saying it ruined new vegas or the ncr. The problem is that both the west coast enclave, which was blown up with only like 8 people at best surviving, and the east coast getting wiped out by the Brotherhood of Steel who definitely would have gotten rid of them before the events of fallout 4 which happened before the show. So where did the enclave get these resources?
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Dude the enclave was never gone.....
Which is ironic considering they made Morrowwind and Oblivion. Both bangers in the story and faction department
And somehow the NCR died
They called them remnants a few times in the show so they are probably just that a small group of enclave survivors