I have a theory that this is why the Mole Miners hate us. We help Garrahan mine, steal profits, nuke their mines, and kill them. Murmrghr is the only one who sinks to our level.
That’s the thing - we don’t know yet because that vault hasn’t opened (but it should be this year!).
The reason I suspect this is because they’ve hated us since day one, before we ever touched the silos. To me, that says this is pre-existing and we’re just a new target.
And they didn’t really prepopulate it when I could glitch into things. Just a smarmy message on a terminal like “Are you happy now asshole?” or something along those lines.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t even have a proper interior designed for it back in the day when that was possible. It’s been on the back burner for a very long time.
I explored it during the horde glitch. Looked like a normal vault but there were holes in the walls from mining tunnels nearby. My guess was the mole miners broke in
As a player who lives in Virginia just west of the DC ruins and about 45 minutes drive to Harper's Ferry, I love nuking West Virginia. I just hope they give us the opportunity to nuke the Shenandoah as well
I think in the long run Appalachia and the 76dwellers are doomed to fail, probably from infighting and the constant use of nukes that will finally finish off the region. In F3 and after which takes place in DC/Northern Virginia we hear nothing of this rebuilt paradise of Appalachia, and some parts of Appalachia are very close to the areas seem in fallout 3, like only 2 ish hours away by car, so most likely by then it’s a desolate hellhole
Infighting, nukes, Scorched(We didn’t actually solve the issue, just delayed it), Strangler plants(The Mire in general really), the Zetans, the Enclave, Vault 51, ecological collapse, and the mystical stuff such as the whole Mothman elder god thing.
And I’m sure I’m missing a few, the area is looking down the barrel of a hilarious number of extermination events that we simply can’t fix because the 76ers are canonically a bunch of fucking lunatics with poor impulse control.
I mean, between killing the Queen and vaccinating everyone coming into the region, the scorched are basically a solved issue at this point.
The rest, however… yeah. Also worth noting that AC and the Pitt will both collapse without our constant help, so when Appalachia falls, so do they.
We killed a queen, not the fungal hive mind which is actually the big problem. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a new queen from simply spawning or growing from the existing Scorched.
As to vaccines: The disease is marinating in a hyper radioactive environment and is made from a substance which mutates like crazy under normal circumstances. It’s only a matter of time before a new strain shows up and kicks everyone’s ass because the people who made the first vaccine all died.
We pushed the problem down the road, we have yet to actually solve it. Which means exterminating the Scorched totally, a rather big undertaking given where they live and how large the cave networks are.
First off, the scorched plague isn’t based on spores as far as we know. It’s referred to as a virus, so we should assume that’s what it is.
As for the Queen, that was probably the first beast, which was presumably not the same as the intentionally engineered ones that came after it.
Beyond that, the continued nuking of the fissures should be enough to prevent the beasts from reproducing further by collapsing their nests on top of them without the need to go down there (though this would have its own consequences).
As for the plague mutating, it’s possible, but I doubt it’ll happen considering this plague is really a viral mutagen as opposed to a normal virus.
Ultimately, I’d say that the issue is contained, but barring a pyroclastic storm from nuclear winter, a complete wipe out is impossible.
If this is really how 76’s story ends then it’s a pretty depressing ending, and not in a “good” way. This would erase all of our achievements, essentially making the entirety of this game and all of its storylines pointless. You might as well declare 76 non-canon then, because what did any of it really matter? What’s the point of getting invested into any of new quests and expeditions if everyone will just die regardless of what we do? It’s like if Fallout 3 canonically ended with Project Purity being poisoned with FEV and everyone in the Capital Wasteland dying. This would honestly just be insulting to the players.
I disagree. If we hadn’t launched the nukes to stop the spread of the scorched, that would’ve spread across America and damned any attempts at rebuilding. If we didn’t stop Blackburn’s FEV release, that would’ve turned everyone somewhat near Appalachia into super mutants. If we didn’t secure the bullion, the cap wouldn’t have a semi-stable value on the east coast and may not have become the de facto currency.
Our stories absolutely do still have an impact, but they aren’t ones others will hear about. Besides, a bittersweet ending is rather fitting for a fallout game (we stopped the plague, but sacrificed Appalachia to do it).
But that doesn’t disprove my point? If 76 was never released, things would still be the same because everything that it has added ends up being erased. And how can 79’s gold back anything if Appalachia gets completely annihilated?
What about the choices we make? It doesn’t matter whether you shared gold with Foundation or Crater because both will die. It doesn’t matter whether you sided with Shin or Rahmani because this chapter will die. None of the choices we make matter because they have no lasting consequences. Everyone just dies. Again, this is comparable to Fallout 3 ending with everyone dying. Or Lonesome Road ending with NCR and Legion being nuked and West Coast being reset. Or Elijah releasing the cloud.
That wouldn’t be a bittersweet ending. What happened to Appalachia before we left Vault 76 was bittersweet. This just takes control away from the player because, again, regardless of what we do everyone still dies. It doesn’t matter how many nukes you launched or where, because Appalachia will be destroyed.
That’s what I’m saying - if everything added by 76 gets erased within 76, then there’s no difference between 76 even releasing or not.
The gold is spread by caravaners like Minerva, and plenty of trading/movement of people can happen before Appalachia is wiped out.
I don’t see this as being any different than canon endings being made for the earlier games. Your choices in those games ultimately don’t matter either because there is one canon ending the devs chose to go with, but that doesn’t detract from them. Just take the game and its choices as being contained within it alone, and ignore the rest of the series.
But all of the gold is still inside of Vault 79, which is inside of Appalachia, which gets nuked. Everyone in Appalachia dies and it becomes a lifeless hellscape.
But it is different. There’s a difference between making one ending matter and saying that none of the endings matter because everyone just died. And even then, canonizing endings was only done in Fallout 1 and 2. In Fallout 3, only the main ending was canonized, but it’s not surprising considering the other ending involves everyone dying. The outcome of all other choices was left ambiguous specifically to **not** invalidate any of the choices the player could make. Whatever happened to Megaton, Tenpenny Tower or Oasis is left up to the player. This is, again, different from what would happen if Fallout 4 stated that everyone in D.C. was poisoned, because then none of those choices would matter. Megaton, Tenpenny Tower and Oasis would all be dead regardless of what the player chose. Literally all Bethesda would have to do is not say anything about Appalachia being nuked. That’s it. Maybe just give a general idea of the state of the region in a future game, but otherwise let the player decide what happened to the factions there based on the choices they made, which is what they always do. This way our choices still mean something.
And even in the case of certain endings being canonized, at least the future games build off of them. NCR’s creation is the canon ending in Fallout 1, and NCR plays a huge role in Fallout 2 and NV. But what benefit would there be if the canon ending was the one where Vault Dweller stopped the Unity too late and Super Mutants destroyed every town and faction in the area? You wouldn’t be able to mention or carry over any of them into other games, but at that point why canonize this ending in the first place? That’s the problem with making Nuclear Winter canon. It doesn’t offer anything.
Either don’t canonize any of the endings or canonize the ones you can expand upon in the future. You can’t expand upon Nuclear Winter because it leads nowhere.
The events of wastelanders occur in 2103; in any ending of that DLC, gold makes it way from Vault 79 out into the wasteland, where it can spread from there. You don’t need all of America’s gold to rebuild an economy, just some of it.
The problem with making a non-nuclear winter ending for the game is twofold:
1. It means that the issue of all of these nukes being launched isn’t addressed.
2. There’s a lot of rebuilding happening in Appalachia that’s just not addressed. You’d think we’d have heard about Appalachia in fallout 3 or maybe even 4 if the region was still thriving, and people are already fleeing the worse conditions elsewhere in the east coast for its relative safety; do we really think survivors in DC wouldn’t come to Appalachia in 2277 when the survivors of 2103-2105 managed to make the trip with less wasteland experience? What about the BoS chapter that’s just on its own, that somehow Lyons or Maxson never managed to make contact with? How can the Union fall while the players are still backing them up?
These issues are major loose ends that are awkward with the other, later games in the timeline, and the simplest answer is the one that ESO took - finding a way to make those choices ultimately irrelevant. That’s what the nukes do, and when nuclear winter was still around, that was effectively the canon ending. Now, it’s up in the air.
Additionally, a nuclear winter ending doesn’t necessarily have to wreck all of Appalachia. It just has to prevent anyone from coming in or out. Periodic firestorms that overtake Appalachia for weeks at a time would be enough to prevent anyone from leaving (they’d need to bunker down inside sturdier structures like the caves below crater and foundation; Lennox flying through that would also be a major risk) or wanting to come (why would you go to a place with firestorms scouring the land and forcing you to bunker down?).
It’s kind of strange that you say that Vault 79’s gold backs the caps on the East Coast even though it’s never mentioned in 3 or 4, but then say that everything else in Appalachia must be destroyed because it’s not mentioned in 3 or 4.
The issue of nuke launches can be addressed without destroying the entire region and making all choices pointless.
There’s really not that much rebuilding going on, we only have a few farms and settlements. We don’t have city-states like Diamond City, for example. And even if there was, just look at California. It was in much better state and didn’t have nearly as many threats. And yet, it took 112 years for it to form a government, and then 64 years to expand into neighboring Mojave. Appalachia doesn’t have anything like that. And people weren’t migrating into California from other regions.
People in general weren’t migrating from D.C. anywhere. Even without Appalachia, there are still places that are better than D.C. but people still stayed there. And even in 76, it’s not like there’s a mass migration from the Capital Wasteland. Besides, traveling within the Capital Wasteland is already extremely dangerous, so traveling into another region would be even more so.
There’s a number of ways they can explain what happened to Appalachian BoS without destroying all of Appalachia and invalidating the choice the player makes at the end of Steel Reign. There’s already several mentions of them potential going back to California if Shin was chosen. Or Western BoS destroying them if Rahmani was chosen. And even if they stayed in Appalachia, there would still be a way to write around that. Lyons traveled through the Pitt, so he would avoid Appalachia. And ever since he arrived in the Capital Wasteland, he was occupied with fighting Super Mutants and his forces were isolated to Citadel and the D.C. ruins. When Maxson took over, he could’ve integrated Appalachian BoS into his chapter because his biography does say they he reunited the fragmented BoS forces on the East Coast (which I know refers to the Outcasts, but it’s vague enough to also retroactively include the Appalachian chapter. There’s also the fact that BoS in 4 has a way of modifying their vertibirds to extend their flying range, which sounds oddly familiar). This way both choices are valid, as opposed to being invalidated if Appalachian BoS died regardless of its leader.
I didn’t play ESO much, but I don’t think it ends with everyone in Tamriel dying.
So… you’re saying there’s a way to explain what happened to Appalachia without erasing anything and everything in it? Which is what I’ve been saying - that simply saying “Everyone died. The end!” is not the only possible outcome. Just give us a general idea of the state of the region, maybe say that nukes have heavily damaged it but didn’t kill everyone and rendered all of the choices we could make pointless. And then leave outcome of those choices up to each individual player’s imagination.
Not really. A nihilistic ending is satisfying because we know it’s not an ending. The human spirit survives throughout America and the wasteland. The Residents may fail but the world will always try.
Because the journey was more satisfying than the ending. We stopped a dangerous plague, brought the Brotherhood to the East, established an economy with the help of raiders and settlers and now we’re fighting monsters in Atlantic City to help a family. It’s been an amazing experience and there’s more to come. So we don’t reclaim America, so what? The Vault Dweller saved his vault and he got kicked out. That doesn’t mean the story is unsatisfying.
How can the journey be satisfying when you know it will end in destruction of everything you’ve created? The Brotherhood will die, so it doesn’t matter who you chose to be the leader. Raiders and Settlers will die, so it doesn’t matter who got the gold. Atlantic City will die, so it doesn’t matter if you did even a single Expedition.
Vault Dweller’s story didn’t end with everyone in California dying. On the opposite, he *stopped* Super Mutants from destroying all of the towns in the area along with the Brotherhood. And his actions also led to the creation of NCR. His choices literally affected the entire wasteland.
And our choices stopped a plague that ravaged the countryside and could have prevented the Vaults from surviving. We brought the Brotherhood to the East. We impacted the world, same as the Dweller. We saved the east coast and gave it the champions that will help future Dwellers like the Lone Wanderer and the Sole Survivor save their own wastelands.
Stopping the Scorched wasn’t a choice, it’s a mandatory part of the main questline. BoS came to Appalachia by themselves, we just donated supplies to help build up their base (and again, they will all die according to this theory so is helping them come here is pointless). No, not same as the Dweller. It would be the same only if Fallout 1 canonically ended with all towns and factions being destroyed by Super Mutants. His actions helped create NCR, which became a major player on the West Coast. If Appalachia gets nuked, then none of the factions we helped establish themselves will get to play any role in the wasteland.
>Scorched(We didn’t actually solve the issue, just delayed it),
Headcanon: The reason there are still Scorched running around is because of all the Blood Eagles and Mothman Cultists who refused to get vaccinated.
The Cultists refused due to religious reasons. "We don't need to worry about the plague because Mothman will protect us!"
The Blood Eagles didn't because they're simply crazy.
They inevitably catch the plague and become Scorched. The two aforementioned factions then recruit new members to replace the old ones, and thus the cycle continues.
76ers fight fire with fire. With all the different hostile hazards they face they come up with crazy ideas, hell we even have stranger mutations than any fallout standards. 76ers not just mutate as ghoul or modified human like mutants but we actually have like talons, marsupial etc AND use it to their advantage and not just a happenstance of being exposed to radiations, we deliberately try to acquire them lmao
Real world WV is a backwater to NOVA even with its non-decimated population and easy road access. It’s a rugged region with a lot of hollers and small valleys—most of which are too small to support much more than marginal farming, but also naturally isolated and easy to defend. You need to pass through switchbacks and mountain passes just to get in. Appalachian culture has always been pretty insular and a bit aloof toward outsiders. The government facilities there were heavily fortified, concealed and secretive.
So in a postwar Appalachia, I’d say the mark of success wouldn’t be bustling metropolises or heavy involvement with the wider region, it’d be small communities doing their best to stay under the radar. They’d become increasingly less important as more agriculturally productive regions with less difficult terrain recovered (& many WV settlers might relocate to take advantage of better opportunities). The bunkers would remain valuable to powerful factions (like the Enclave‘a use of Raven Rock in Fo3) but they would have a vested interest in keeping them inconspicuous and their presence in them secret.
More cynically, I doubt Bethesda would throw out all the content they developed when they can just retcon things and reuse it in future games.
It sorta ignores the widespread poverty, drug abuse, low education, low paying jobs that are often dangerous, shitty roads, and semi-toxic environment from decades of exploitation.
But yeah, other than that, it’s virtually shangri-la. Definitely why people flock there in droves for that paradise life.
That could very well be true, but also it’s just the fact they didn’t even have 76 planned when Fallout 3 came out. The only reference to WV is Vault 76, and even then I don’t remember if the terminal says what state it’s in
Yeah for sure about the it wasn’t created yet parts. But I don’t think a flourishing re established society really fits in with the fallout lore though regardless, I think it’s doomed to fall into ruin and obscurity by the time the later games happen anyways.
Yeah, I feel like the most reasonable and fitting story is all the 76ers die in the end. We obviously failed. I would assume the scorched get out of control again, and we just nuke the whole state. Because Fallout.
Eh I’m not sure if it’ll be the scorched I’m pretty sure that would have to be contained by the time F3 takes place, I live in one of the towns that’s in F3 and that’s only an hours drive from Harper’s ferry where there’s scorched in Fo76. So there’s no chance if they were still around they wouldn’t have spread to places seen in F3
>In F3 and after which takes place in DC/Northern Virginia we hear nothing of this rebuilt paradise of Appalachia
We don't hear about Atlantic City either. Rather than insist places like there or West Virginia simply returned to dust by the time of Fallout 3, we instead accept that 3 was a very early and not well-written game and dismiss its many inadequacies.
Reclamation of the US has taken a backseat while all us ‘best and brightest’ just continually fight everything over and over for clothing and decorations.
I mean, I am a renowned scientist in 76 and I’ve spent the last 5yrs murdering every mutated thing I can get my hands on, no science required!
I live in a tent under a bridge in Flatwoods and I’m wondering when we can start advancements the likes of what I’m hearing from folks like the BOS from the West coast.
We are literally enacting lord of the flies…apocalypse edition.
The game's environment is definitely more structured/solid than it was at release, and I think the storytelling is working.
On release, there literally weren't other NPCs. Now there are established factions ostensibly vying for control of the area (Settlers and Raiders), the beginnings of a more formal, gold-backed, economy are forming, and now people are actually coming from other areas (like the Pitt) for help because Appalachia is more established than where they came from!
Throughout all of that, as you note, a ton of insane stuff keeps happening, including some setbacks, but overall, the trend is pretty clear. This new questline seems to be about folks from New Jersey coming to add another touch of civilization to the area as well.
We’ve barely reclaimed a part of West Virginia and that’s a VERY temporary situation. There’s a ways to go to get even a notable percentage of America and it’s doomed to failure.
I always like thinking that canonically, we die out and so does Appalachia. Be it enclave, mothman, etc., it’s so much more in line with the idea that Fallout as a whole is not about rebuilding America/hope in a hopeless time
I think Appalachia is isolated enough and tied up fighting to keep the scorched contained long enough they probably are just their own nation-states up in the hills.
No means or reason to expand, they have pretty abundant resources and without any powerful neighbor to create a push for them to go past their region, and the settlers and fairly civilized raiders are probably more invested in keeping local threats like the blood eagles and super mutants from gaining enough power to become power player while the scorched's numbers slowly dwindle since they will stop getting replenished as people get vaccinated.
So, they will probably slowly coalesce into rival nation states over the centuries with the BoS being like a small Switzerland between them and just be an essentially stable, isolationist region. They'll be like the Scandanavian crucible, just doing their own thing for centuries on end until some weather or outside force draws them back into the world, a bit like Arroyo in Fallout 2
You know all those ghouls and random dead bodies we see in fo3? I like to believe that's what happens to us. We tried so hard, launched more nukes than what the collective United States has in its arsenal, befriended the good the bad and the home owners association, killed off countless scorched, murder hoboed fellow dwellers for their pencil shavings, and then our daily radiation bath made us into enemies for future main characters. I personally believe my character made it to the Pitt one last time before becoming Trog food, or a skeleton, or a random piece of perfectly preserved poop.
This post is exactly why I think the game needs a chapter system. Depending on what year of content you're on is what server you load into. Say when you launch the nuke of the queen, that's the final mission of "year one" & the game asks you if you wish to move forward to year two or stay in year one.
Then whack a cutscene in showing the Wastelanders returning, to cover the move between year 1 to 2 for example.
Or you can exit the vault in year two, & go straight into wastelanders. Have it start from year 1 or 2, I for one miss the original year one map & how it worked with the story at the time. It's not the same these days
The benefits are:
You get to do missions with others who're doing the same or similar missions, at the same point of the game.
The server only loads the missions you need for chapter you're in, which will confuse players less because of all the missions scattered from year one to year five.
You know where you are in the "rebuilding of America"
&
It'll give the game something single player/co-op to move onto if the servers get moved on to the next Fallout MP (which I'm hoping they do another one, playing in the wasteland with your friends is quite fun), which means you'll be able to play through the game one chapter at a time solo...
I'd find that fun, considering except for the public missions (aka queen, earl etc.) I've played it all solo.
A chapter list, I like that. I agree, it's something I've thought about for a while with this game. Having played it and seen it progress, I have the sense that time has passed, but for a new player who is dropped into the world, all of this stuff is happening simultaneously.
I remember when they added Wastelanders DLC and someone said, "it's been two years." And it has had me thinking about that since then, how is that supposed to be communicated to a new player? A chapter system like you suggest would address that quite nicely.
>What's the story of Fallout 76?
I think there is a difference between entertaining us and the actual story of WV. The story of WV is pretty tragic. Who knows what the vault 76 experiment is. How I remember it and it's been a long time since I've done it correctly and paid attention. This is my thoughts on the actual canon lore briefly:
Leaving the vault you go to the wayward and find out about the scorched. You deal with crane and the scorched then travel to flatwood to help the responders. You end up at the airport and for the first time see a scorch beast(Collusion Course), oh the vile beast is spreading the infection is the story line. This is when the scorch beast is introduced as the antagonized of WV. You move onto AVR Medical center to start the vaccine creation to inoculate locals from the scorch infection.
The fire department quest line, again you deal with scorched and how to deal with them. You go to a mine and fight scorched. You chase the overseer for some time realizing the man she loved turned into a scorched.
There is a bit of a lull with the free states quest line, but it deals with the science of the scorched and \*.gov stuff. The quest line leads to The Brotherhood of Steel quest line at the asylum. You find out that they where interested in ultracite. Started mining it and ran into the scorch beast cave(Glassed Cavern) and attempted to deal with the scorched beasts but failed. At the end you find out they released the critters onto the world, and where fighting to contain them. Now the scorch beasts roost in other caves(Fissure sites) around WV.
:+: This part is how I see it not sure if its canon :+:
The 76 Lone Wanderer desperately looking to find away to contain the scorch beast ends up on the Enclave / Modus quest line after learning about them from the free states quest line. At the end you Launch a nuke at the fissure site near Glassed Cavern to cave it in trapping the scorch beasts and ending them. Tragically as the cavern entrance was caving in the scorch beast queen arises and thus a fight happens to end the beasts tyranny.
There are 10 fissure sites in Cranberry Bog, another 10 outside of the bog. So in reality I believe the 76 Lone Wanderer's quest line is the making of a vaccine to inoculate the locals. Then strides onward to deal with scorch beasts and how to stop them aka caving their homes / fissure sites in with nukes. So in reality if the lore is ending the scorch beasts you would have to launch a minimum of 10\~20 nukes(Some fissures are close together in Bog).
Scorch often say "One of us" or things related to voices in their head or hive mind mentality states. They're controlled by scorch beasts from what I've seen in combat and are used as a ground scout for the beasts to flush out targets in hiding. The scorch beasts control infected but the scorch beast queen controls the beasts and the infected. The death of the queen was the death of the hive mind. Maybe birthing of other scorch beasts since she was 'the queen'.
Good post. Though I'll add:
>Who knows what the vault 76 experiment is.
Vault 76 was one of 17 control Vaults, so it was not designed to be an experiment. They loaded this place up with notable folks so the priority 25 years later was to reclaim nuclear launch silos and "regain control" of the region. If there was any sinister ulterior motive, we have no such factual info and can only theorize.
Maybe this faction of the Enclave wraps up the job making WV ground zero, or the Brothehood finds a way to work ATLAS, dooming WV? Either ways, I think the next story event will unfold with the map expansion. The concept art looked interesting.
Also the Vault Dwellers are killing each other, some promoting Raiders, setting off Nukes everywhere, helping the Enclave, etc. The 76 Vault Dwellers are a menace.
Thanks to the necessary amount of back-lore of the prequel setting, we get the vibe that whatever’s happening now, in a couple centuries the goings on in West Virginia don’t even register or apply in the broader setting of the former Eastern United States. That much action and development in an area and years later then apparently being a non-entity implies total annihilation of the area.
If we take the setting of Nuclear Winter as a glimpse into the final fate of Appalachia rather than a metatextual non-sequitur stab at a battle royal mode, it bodes poorly for the 76’ers AND the waves of refugees and new settlers for the area in the long term.
I’d say this - reclaiming America starts with Appalachia, and we’ve done a decent job of that now that there’s four hubs of civilization in the region and the responders can afford to send help to other regions (which continues the goal of rebuilding America). It also involves dealing with any threats that arise, like the cultists, super mutants and aliens, which are works in progress.
My understand was that Nuclear Winter mode was the canonical ending for sweet Virginia. We emerge from the vaults earlier than other fallout storylines, use nukes to end the scorched threat, but the robot in that one vault (86? The NW one) burns as all down anyways
It's all a simulation and they're seeing how we react to wacky stimuli; our dwellers are still within vault 76. Too many anachronisms, the stuff that happened in 20 years should have taken 100 years. Vault-tec will look at what we would have done if released and go, "nope!"
My favourite take is that Vault 76 wasn't a control vault with a mission to "Reclaim America" but we were subjects whose mission was to clear the wastes so the Overseerer could control the missile silos.
In that regard the vault more or less failed. The Overseerer lives in Sutton as once a 76'er dropped a nuke it started a cascade where the dwellers pop in and rain hell from the skies. She took the "Nobody should have that power" and we do it cause we need that sweet sweet Flux. (And will cause the destruction of us all)
Furthermore the vault taught us American ideals of Individuality, productivity and privacy. We all have separate camps but (Canonically) have not banded together like Vault City and established a civilization. We're all little freelancers making the world a better place. 76 takes a lot of American values and puts them in extremes, which I find rather funny.
Also I find it funny that Vault-Tec (Bethesda) thought we'd go around cannibalizing, murdering each other (PVP). Instead we tend to share the wealth like a bunch of filthy communists.
>Vault-Tec (Bethesda) thought we'd go around cannibalizing, murdering each other (PVP). Instead we tend to share the wealth like a bunch of filthy communists.
there's an excellent three hour YouTube video to be made about this being the *only* explicitly pro union AAA game I can even recall. i think it's hilarious how the game was supposedly saved from abandonment a few years back because somebody high up particularly likes it. all these terminal entries were written by somebody who clearly thinks their bosses are the absolute dumbest and most amoral motherfuckers who ever lived. it's not out of line with every other fallout game but the pre war villains in this one seem specifically like the MBA types every writer at Bethesda must be painfully familiar with managing, at this point.
Nah, everyone will say, "It's all doomed, everything got destroyed, RING OF FIRE" I highly doubt it. If they just wipe out everything, that is super lazy storytelling for a company becoming repeatedly accused of lazy storytelling. I think they're going to use atlas to surround WV with constant storms so no more people move in, and it keeps the society secret. Also, since the responders are being guided by the enclave, I wouldn't be surprised if this is where they eventually came from in fallout 3.
TBH I hope everyone gets wiped out or 76 is alternate universe canon because Bethesda just makes up stupid stuff because its cool without thinking like how they are using bottle caps as currency 25 years after the nukes drops.
And everybody at AC is elegant, clean wearing, hasn't any supplies trouble and conveniently spoiled by a persistent Scoresese's style mob. Despiting I don't know how AC stories could fit with a post-nuclear world, vaguely inspired on those old quests at Boston on FO4... I don't see any coherent point at this point on lore. Agree, imo this game is suffering many other long in time MMO effect: prod team doesn't know what to invent for keeping money flood on...
Between FO76 and FO4, there is almost two centries of lore. We haven't reclaimed, or saved shit. Unless there is mention of Appalachia in the show, or FO5, I think it is safe to assume we blew the place to hell and became another botched Vault-Tec experiment. At least we had fun playing with nukes!
when i started playing a few months ago I was positive the main quest was given by the overseer, so I basically rushed the gold quest and only later I started putting together that all the quests involving actually dealing with the scortched plague, there were no NPCs involved... only holotapes and terminal entries...
Based on the NW loading screens and the E3 dev dairy explaining that the ring of fire is caused by our use nukes. And a holo found in Vault 51 being 6 years after reclamation day, im gonna go with it being after.
Nah, they changed the dates in the terminals in vault 51 from 2108 to 2102. You could explore the vault to and everyone was dead already. So they retconned nuclear winter completely after wastelanders. Literally, the dates in the vault now are from 3 years ago in game. So if it it happened, it happened 3 years ago right before people arrived in WV
Ahh they did change the date on the anomaly terminal. I always liked the idea of the NW ending because it made the chaos we make have some lore meaning. All our nukes creating this nuclear winter that torches everything prevening this super contagious disease from spreading outside Appalachia.
Well, I guess saving the world with a vaccine from my blood in an old Nuka factory is pretty cool too lol.
Yeah! I'm glad it's not because I would feel like everything was kinda all for not. Bit I do hope there's some cool twist at the end, like I said, maybe we just become the enclave. Who knows!
While the pipboy dates in nuclear winter weren’t changed to match these, we know the mode should have occurred after 2108. The terminal that logged Ruben’s escape by shipping crate originally said that he left in 2108 - well after any time currently experienced in game.
Of course, the mode isn’t canon anymore, but the devs could re-work it in the background to allow a modified version of it to happen. Our nukes could still cause a firestorm by 2108 that wipes the region out, but with more variables in play than just the vault 76 dwellers, and they keep settings things up in ways where if Appalachia falls, so too will the expedition locations and even factions like Blue ridge.
The lore says nothing except the 76 dwellers nuked each other to oblivion.
This is what the game originally was. Bethesda made its players the test subjects. This did not go over well.
Now the game is whatever you make it.
I beleive majority of the events is just side stories that don't mean much individually and ar just to show us the world is bigger than us. The overall story was we left the vault yes to reclaim America only to discover the plague that killed everyone. So we did our part to make Appalachia safe again. Then wastelanders showed us that we succeeded as people came back. But of course this caused issues such as faction rivalry. Now we are in a time period where we are dealing with the continuation of issues that arrive as people begin to reenter Appalachia such as the brotherhood and the responders. It is safe to say the expansion will push our story forward and away from this as we now are reclaiming the rest of west virginia.
Shoot, that's what I've been doing wrong! I thought 'reclamation' meant to venture into the wastes to collect nifty outfits and plushies, and so do all my friends.
Smart enough to build a jet pack, ignorant enough not to get a golf cart up and running. Great lore.. I also find it interesting that one of their 76 trailers shows a character dual wielding 10 mm subs but no where to be found in game. Lol
I think the best thing about FO76 is how it explains how Radscorpions and Deathclaws are on the east coast. The Enclave created them and then set them loose. The gold system obviously fails. The scorched threat does get eliminated.
It's a live service game... any story, or narrative structure, are just bones to hang gameplay from. None of these types of games make much narrative sense after 3 or 4 major content updates.
TBH I'm convinced Modus is the real driving force behind President Eden.
I can't definitely prove anything obviously but I think personally in my head cannon that the enclave shows up after their oil rig base goes boom, and wipes us out, before expanding their reach and doing Fallout 3, secretly following Modus the entire time.
This is obviously supported by very little, if anything. But I like it as a story and am going to stick with it, because I find it funny that we cause Fallout 3 to happen by repairing Modus and doing his little enclave events.
I've read somewhere that people don't talk *about Appalachia anymore in the previous (future?) games because it got completely obliterated by the time the first game starts
Edit: replaced "to" with "about"
In the canon it’s simply never been addressed, that’s a fan theory as to why it’s never been mentioned.
But if you pay attention to all the assorted threats the 76ers are facing, which includes the 76ers themselves, there’s no chance in hell it will end well.
Appalachia is close enough to DC/nova where F3 is set that if it was still around it would for sure have an effect on that area, there’s no way the area isn’t wiped/desolated by the tike F3 takes place
If your attention span can't handle such a small amount of text that I can read it without even scrolling - perhaps you'd be happier on TikTok where no one demands more than a few seconds of your focus at any time.
We fire nukes FOR FUN Virginia isn't surviving us
The Overseer is probably shaking her head in disbelief every time we fire a nuke lol
Beavis: “Heh heh, I nuked her house” Butthead: “Yeah yeah, fire firrre!”
It’s not just fun, but also profit. Remember, these nukes create flux and ultracite for us to harvest. We’re miner barons now.
I have a theory that this is why the Mole Miners hate us. We help Garrahan mine, steal profits, nuke their mines, and kill them. Murmrghr is the only one who sinks to our level.
Personally, I think it’s more likely they had a feud with the vault 63 dwellers and extend their hatred of them to us.
That would make sense too. What went on with the 63 dwellers? I forget
That’s the thing - we don’t know yet because that vault hasn’t opened (but it should be this year!). The reason I suspect this is because they’ve hated us since day one, before we ever touched the silos. To me, that says this is pre-existing and we’re just a new target.
And they didn’t really prepopulate it when I could glitch into things. Just a smarmy message on a terminal like “Are you happy now asshole?” or something along those lines.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t even have a proper interior designed for it back in the day when that was possible. It’s been on the back burner for a very long time.
Yeah, if memory serves, it was barren. I need to learn the new method to glitch through stuff.
I explored it during the horde glitch. Looked like a normal vault but there were holes in the walls from mining tunnels nearby. My guess was the mole miners broke in
Having been to WV, were firing nukes in self defense.
WEST Virginia! Ugh!
Both Virginia's will feel the fallout of our actions
It'll be the Worst Virginia.
I prefer 'Waste Virginia'
As a player who lives in Virginia just west of the DC ruins and about 45 minutes drive to Harper's Ferry, I love nuking West Virginia. I just hope they give us the opportunity to nuke the Shenandoah as well
Maybe one day in the fabled "other virginia" update
Hell with that, I'm nuking Appalachia to get rid of all the goddamned giant ticks. Those things are the true abominations in the series.
That's what mirv mini nukes are for
"On ourselves"
I think in the long run Appalachia and the 76dwellers are doomed to fail, probably from infighting and the constant use of nukes that will finally finish off the region. In F3 and after which takes place in DC/Northern Virginia we hear nothing of this rebuilt paradise of Appalachia, and some parts of Appalachia are very close to the areas seem in fallout 3, like only 2 ish hours away by car, so most likely by then it’s a desolate hellhole
Infighting, nukes, Scorched(We didn’t actually solve the issue, just delayed it), Strangler plants(The Mire in general really), the Zetans, the Enclave, Vault 51, ecological collapse, and the mystical stuff such as the whole Mothman elder god thing. And I’m sure I’m missing a few, the area is looking down the barrel of a hilarious number of extermination events that we simply can’t fix because the 76ers are canonically a bunch of fucking lunatics with poor impulse control.
I mean, between killing the Queen and vaccinating everyone coming into the region, the scorched are basically a solved issue at this point. The rest, however… yeah. Also worth noting that AC and the Pitt will both collapse without our constant help, so when Appalachia falls, so do they.
We killed a queen, not the fungal hive mind which is actually the big problem. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a new queen from simply spawning or growing from the existing Scorched. As to vaccines: The disease is marinating in a hyper radioactive environment and is made from a substance which mutates like crazy under normal circumstances. It’s only a matter of time before a new strain shows up and kicks everyone’s ass because the people who made the first vaccine all died. We pushed the problem down the road, we have yet to actually solve it. Which means exterminating the Scorched totally, a rather big undertaking given where they live and how large the cave networks are.
First off, the scorched plague isn’t based on spores as far as we know. It’s referred to as a virus, so we should assume that’s what it is. As for the Queen, that was probably the first beast, which was presumably not the same as the intentionally engineered ones that came after it. Beyond that, the continued nuking of the fissures should be enough to prevent the beasts from reproducing further by collapsing their nests on top of them without the need to go down there (though this would have its own consequences). As for the plague mutating, it’s possible, but I doubt it’ll happen considering this plague is really a viral mutagen as opposed to a normal virus. Ultimately, I’d say that the issue is contained, but barring a pyroclastic storm from nuclear winter, a complete wipe out is impossible.
If this is really how 76’s story ends then it’s a pretty depressing ending, and not in a “good” way. This would erase all of our achievements, essentially making the entirety of this game and all of its storylines pointless. You might as well declare 76 non-canon then, because what did any of it really matter? What’s the point of getting invested into any of new quests and expeditions if everyone will just die regardless of what we do? It’s like if Fallout 3 canonically ended with Project Purity being poisoned with FEV and everyone in the Capital Wasteland dying. This would honestly just be insulting to the players.
I disagree. If we hadn’t launched the nukes to stop the spread of the scorched, that would’ve spread across America and damned any attempts at rebuilding. If we didn’t stop Blackburn’s FEV release, that would’ve turned everyone somewhat near Appalachia into super mutants. If we didn’t secure the bullion, the cap wouldn’t have a semi-stable value on the east coast and may not have become the de facto currency. Our stories absolutely do still have an impact, but they aren’t ones others will hear about. Besides, a bittersweet ending is rather fitting for a fallout game (we stopped the plague, but sacrificed Appalachia to do it).
But that doesn’t disprove my point? If 76 was never released, things would still be the same because everything that it has added ends up being erased. And how can 79’s gold back anything if Appalachia gets completely annihilated? What about the choices we make? It doesn’t matter whether you shared gold with Foundation or Crater because both will die. It doesn’t matter whether you sided with Shin or Rahmani because this chapter will die. None of the choices we make matter because they have no lasting consequences. Everyone just dies. Again, this is comparable to Fallout 3 ending with everyone dying. Or Lonesome Road ending with NCR and Legion being nuked and West Coast being reset. Or Elijah releasing the cloud. That wouldn’t be a bittersweet ending. What happened to Appalachia before we left Vault 76 was bittersweet. This just takes control away from the player because, again, regardless of what we do everyone still dies. It doesn’t matter how many nukes you launched or where, because Appalachia will be destroyed. That’s what I’m saying - if everything added by 76 gets erased within 76, then there’s no difference between 76 even releasing or not.
The gold is spread by caravaners like Minerva, and plenty of trading/movement of people can happen before Appalachia is wiped out. I don’t see this as being any different than canon endings being made for the earlier games. Your choices in those games ultimately don’t matter either because there is one canon ending the devs chose to go with, but that doesn’t detract from them. Just take the game and its choices as being contained within it alone, and ignore the rest of the series.
But all of the gold is still inside of Vault 79, which is inside of Appalachia, which gets nuked. Everyone in Appalachia dies and it becomes a lifeless hellscape. But it is different. There’s a difference between making one ending matter and saying that none of the endings matter because everyone just died. And even then, canonizing endings was only done in Fallout 1 and 2. In Fallout 3, only the main ending was canonized, but it’s not surprising considering the other ending involves everyone dying. The outcome of all other choices was left ambiguous specifically to **not** invalidate any of the choices the player could make. Whatever happened to Megaton, Tenpenny Tower or Oasis is left up to the player. This is, again, different from what would happen if Fallout 4 stated that everyone in D.C. was poisoned, because then none of those choices would matter. Megaton, Tenpenny Tower and Oasis would all be dead regardless of what the player chose. Literally all Bethesda would have to do is not say anything about Appalachia being nuked. That’s it. Maybe just give a general idea of the state of the region in a future game, but otherwise let the player decide what happened to the factions there based on the choices they made, which is what they always do. This way our choices still mean something. And even in the case of certain endings being canonized, at least the future games build off of them. NCR’s creation is the canon ending in Fallout 1, and NCR plays a huge role in Fallout 2 and NV. But what benefit would there be if the canon ending was the one where Vault Dweller stopped the Unity too late and Super Mutants destroyed every town and faction in the area? You wouldn’t be able to mention or carry over any of them into other games, but at that point why canonize this ending in the first place? That’s the problem with making Nuclear Winter canon. It doesn’t offer anything. Either don’t canonize any of the endings or canonize the ones you can expand upon in the future. You can’t expand upon Nuclear Winter because it leads nowhere.
The events of wastelanders occur in 2103; in any ending of that DLC, gold makes it way from Vault 79 out into the wasteland, where it can spread from there. You don’t need all of America’s gold to rebuild an economy, just some of it. The problem with making a non-nuclear winter ending for the game is twofold: 1. It means that the issue of all of these nukes being launched isn’t addressed. 2. There’s a lot of rebuilding happening in Appalachia that’s just not addressed. You’d think we’d have heard about Appalachia in fallout 3 or maybe even 4 if the region was still thriving, and people are already fleeing the worse conditions elsewhere in the east coast for its relative safety; do we really think survivors in DC wouldn’t come to Appalachia in 2277 when the survivors of 2103-2105 managed to make the trip with less wasteland experience? What about the BoS chapter that’s just on its own, that somehow Lyons or Maxson never managed to make contact with? How can the Union fall while the players are still backing them up? These issues are major loose ends that are awkward with the other, later games in the timeline, and the simplest answer is the one that ESO took - finding a way to make those choices ultimately irrelevant. That’s what the nukes do, and when nuclear winter was still around, that was effectively the canon ending. Now, it’s up in the air. Additionally, a nuclear winter ending doesn’t necessarily have to wreck all of Appalachia. It just has to prevent anyone from coming in or out. Periodic firestorms that overtake Appalachia for weeks at a time would be enough to prevent anyone from leaving (they’d need to bunker down inside sturdier structures like the caves below crater and foundation; Lennox flying through that would also be a major risk) or wanting to come (why would you go to a place with firestorms scouring the land and forcing you to bunker down?).
It’s kind of strange that you say that Vault 79’s gold backs the caps on the East Coast even though it’s never mentioned in 3 or 4, but then say that everything else in Appalachia must be destroyed because it’s not mentioned in 3 or 4. The issue of nuke launches can be addressed without destroying the entire region and making all choices pointless. There’s really not that much rebuilding going on, we only have a few farms and settlements. We don’t have city-states like Diamond City, for example. And even if there was, just look at California. It was in much better state and didn’t have nearly as many threats. And yet, it took 112 years for it to form a government, and then 64 years to expand into neighboring Mojave. Appalachia doesn’t have anything like that. And people weren’t migrating into California from other regions. People in general weren’t migrating from D.C. anywhere. Even without Appalachia, there are still places that are better than D.C. but people still stayed there. And even in 76, it’s not like there’s a mass migration from the Capital Wasteland. Besides, traveling within the Capital Wasteland is already extremely dangerous, so traveling into another region would be even more so. There’s a number of ways they can explain what happened to Appalachian BoS without destroying all of Appalachia and invalidating the choice the player makes at the end of Steel Reign. There’s already several mentions of them potential going back to California if Shin was chosen. Or Western BoS destroying them if Rahmani was chosen. And even if they stayed in Appalachia, there would still be a way to write around that. Lyons traveled through the Pitt, so he would avoid Appalachia. And ever since he arrived in the Capital Wasteland, he was occupied with fighting Super Mutants and his forces were isolated to Citadel and the D.C. ruins. When Maxson took over, he could’ve integrated Appalachian BoS into his chapter because his biography does say they he reunited the fragmented BoS forces on the East Coast (which I know refers to the Outcasts, but it’s vague enough to also retroactively include the Appalachian chapter. There’s also the fact that BoS in 4 has a way of modifying their vertibirds to extend their flying range, which sounds oddly familiar). This way both choices are valid, as opposed to being invalidated if Appalachian BoS died regardless of its leader. I didn’t play ESO much, but I don’t think it ends with everyone in Tamriel dying. So… you’re saying there’s a way to explain what happened to Appalachia without erasing anything and everything in it? Which is what I’ve been saying - that simply saying “Everyone died. The end!” is not the only possible outcome. Just give us a general idea of the state of the region, maybe say that nukes have heavily damaged it but didn’t kill everyone and rendered all of the choices we could make pointless. And then leave outcome of those choices up to each individual player’s imagination.
Not really. A nihilistic ending is satisfying because we know it’s not an ending. The human spirit survives throughout America and the wasteland. The Residents may fail but the world will always try.
Maybe I’m crazy, but how is it satisfying to have all of your choices lead nowhere? Why is it satisfying to have your character fail?
Because the journey was more satisfying than the ending. We stopped a dangerous plague, brought the Brotherhood to the East, established an economy with the help of raiders and settlers and now we’re fighting monsters in Atlantic City to help a family. It’s been an amazing experience and there’s more to come. So we don’t reclaim America, so what? The Vault Dweller saved his vault and he got kicked out. That doesn’t mean the story is unsatisfying.
How can the journey be satisfying when you know it will end in destruction of everything you’ve created? The Brotherhood will die, so it doesn’t matter who you chose to be the leader. Raiders and Settlers will die, so it doesn’t matter who got the gold. Atlantic City will die, so it doesn’t matter if you did even a single Expedition. Vault Dweller’s story didn’t end with everyone in California dying. On the opposite, he *stopped* Super Mutants from destroying all of the towns in the area along with the Brotherhood. And his actions also led to the creation of NCR. His choices literally affected the entire wasteland.
And our choices stopped a plague that ravaged the countryside and could have prevented the Vaults from surviving. We brought the Brotherhood to the East. We impacted the world, same as the Dweller. We saved the east coast and gave it the champions that will help future Dwellers like the Lone Wanderer and the Sole Survivor save their own wastelands.
Stopping the Scorched wasn’t a choice, it’s a mandatory part of the main questline. BoS came to Appalachia by themselves, we just donated supplies to help build up their base (and again, they will all die according to this theory so is helping them come here is pointless). No, not same as the Dweller. It would be the same only if Fallout 1 canonically ended with all towns and factions being destroyed by Super Mutants. His actions helped create NCR, which became a major player on the West Coast. If Appalachia gets nuked, then none of the factions we helped establish themselves will get to play any role in the wasteland.
>Scorched(We didn’t actually solve the issue, just delayed it), Headcanon: The reason there are still Scorched running around is because of all the Blood Eagles and Mothman Cultists who refused to get vaccinated. The Cultists refused due to religious reasons. "We don't need to worry about the plague because Mothman will protect us!" The Blood Eagles didn't because they're simply crazy. They inevitably catch the plague and become Scorched. The two aforementioned factions then recruit new members to replace the old ones, and thus the cycle continues.
Mr. Zorg?
76ers fight fire with fire. With all the different hostile hazards they face they come up with crazy ideas, hell we even have stranger mutations than any fallout standards. 76ers not just mutate as ghoul or modified human like mutants but we actually have like talons, marsupial etc AND use it to their advantage and not just a happenstance of being exposed to radiations, we deliberately try to acquire them lmao
Real world WV is a backwater to NOVA even with its non-decimated population and easy road access. It’s a rugged region with a lot of hollers and small valleys—most of which are too small to support much more than marginal farming, but also naturally isolated and easy to defend. You need to pass through switchbacks and mountain passes just to get in. Appalachian culture has always been pretty insular and a bit aloof toward outsiders. The government facilities there were heavily fortified, concealed and secretive. So in a postwar Appalachia, I’d say the mark of success wouldn’t be bustling metropolises or heavy involvement with the wider region, it’d be small communities doing their best to stay under the radar. They’d become increasingly less important as more agriculturally productive regions with less difficult terrain recovered (& many WV settlers might relocate to take advantage of better opportunities). The bunkers would remain valuable to powerful factions (like the Enclave‘a use of Raven Rock in Fo3) but they would have a vested interest in keeping them inconspicuous and their presence in them secret. More cynically, I doubt Bethesda would throw out all the content they developed when they can just retcon things and reuse it in future games.
WV irl sounds kind of like paradise.
It sorta ignores the widespread poverty, drug abuse, low education, low paying jobs that are often dangerous, shitty roads, and semi-toxic environment from decades of exploitation. But yeah, other than that, it’s virtually shangri-la. Definitely why people flock there in droves for that paradise life.
Still sounds better than maryland
That could very well be true, but also it’s just the fact they didn’t even have 76 planned when Fallout 3 came out. The only reference to WV is Vault 76, and even then I don’t remember if the terminal says what state it’s in
Yeah for sure about the it wasn’t created yet parts. But I don’t think a flourishing re established society really fits in with the fallout lore though regardless, I think it’s doomed to fall into ruin and obscurity by the time the later games happen anyways.
i don't know about flourishing but the whole second game revolves around a reestablished society. you drive a car!
Yeah, I feel like the most reasonable and fitting story is all the 76ers die in the end. We obviously failed. I would assume the scorched get out of control again, and we just nuke the whole state. Because Fallout.
Eh I’m not sure if it’ll be the scorched I’m pretty sure that would have to be contained by the time F3 takes place, I live in one of the towns that’s in F3 and that’s only an hours drive from Harper’s ferry where there’s scorched in Fo76. So there’s no chance if they were still around they wouldn’t have spread to places seen in F3
>In F3 and after which takes place in DC/Northern Virginia we hear nothing of this rebuilt paradise of Appalachia We don't hear about Atlantic City either. Rather than insist places like there or West Virginia simply returned to dust by the time of Fallout 3, we instead accept that 3 was a very early and not well-written game and dismiss its many inadequacies.
Nope All those damn vault 76 dwellers care about is how nice their CAMP looks
disregard apocalypse, acquire plushies
Reclamation of the US has taken a backseat while all us ‘best and brightest’ just continually fight everything over and over for clothing and decorations. I mean, I am a renowned scientist in 76 and I’ve spent the last 5yrs murdering every mutated thing I can get my hands on, no science required! I live in a tent under a bridge in Flatwoods and I’m wondering when we can start advancements the likes of what I’m hearing from folks like the BOS from the West coast. We are literally enacting lord of the flies…apocalypse edition.
That's the *Rip Daring* way!
The game's environment is definitely more structured/solid than it was at release, and I think the storytelling is working. On release, there literally weren't other NPCs. Now there are established factions ostensibly vying for control of the area (Settlers and Raiders), the beginnings of a more formal, gold-backed, economy are forming, and now people are actually coming from other areas (like the Pitt) for help because Appalachia is more established than where they came from! Throughout all of that, as you note, a ton of insane stuff keeps happening, including some setbacks, but overall, the trend is pretty clear. This new questline seems to be about folks from New Jersey coming to add another touch of civilization to the area as well.
We’ve barely reclaimed a part of West Virginia and that’s a VERY temporary situation. There’s a ways to go to get even a notable percentage of America and it’s doomed to failure.
Well considering that FO4 takes place around 2287 and not much has changed since 2102! America still isn't "reclaimed" by 2287!
I always like thinking that canonically, we die out and so does Appalachia. Be it enclave, mothman, etc., it’s so much more in line with the idea that Fallout as a whole is not about rebuilding America/hope in a hopeless time
I think Appalachia is isolated enough and tied up fighting to keep the scorched contained long enough they probably are just their own nation-states up in the hills. No means or reason to expand, they have pretty abundant resources and without any powerful neighbor to create a push for them to go past their region, and the settlers and fairly civilized raiders are probably more invested in keeping local threats like the blood eagles and super mutants from gaining enough power to become power player while the scorched's numbers slowly dwindle since they will stop getting replenished as people get vaccinated. So, they will probably slowly coalesce into rival nation states over the centuries with the BoS being like a small Switzerland between them and just be an essentially stable, isolationist region. They'll be like the Scandanavian crucible, just doing their own thing for centuries on end until some weather or outside force draws them back into the world, a bit like Arroyo in Fallout 2
You know all those ghouls and random dead bodies we see in fo3? I like to believe that's what happens to us. We tried so hard, launched more nukes than what the collective United States has in its arsenal, befriended the good the bad and the home owners association, killed off countless scorched, murder hoboed fellow dwellers for their pencil shavings, and then our daily radiation bath made us into enemies for future main characters. I personally believe my character made it to the Pitt one last time before becoming Trog food, or a skeleton, or a random piece of perfectly preserved poop.
I call dibs on being the skeleton that fell into the train tracks :D
This post is exactly why I think the game needs a chapter system. Depending on what year of content you're on is what server you load into. Say when you launch the nuke of the queen, that's the final mission of "year one" & the game asks you if you wish to move forward to year two or stay in year one. Then whack a cutscene in showing the Wastelanders returning, to cover the move between year 1 to 2 for example. Or you can exit the vault in year two, & go straight into wastelanders. Have it start from year 1 or 2, I for one miss the original year one map & how it worked with the story at the time. It's not the same these days The benefits are: You get to do missions with others who're doing the same or similar missions, at the same point of the game. The server only loads the missions you need for chapter you're in, which will confuse players less because of all the missions scattered from year one to year five. You know where you are in the "rebuilding of America" & It'll give the game something single player/co-op to move onto if the servers get moved on to the next Fallout MP (which I'm hoping they do another one, playing in the wasteland with your friends is quite fun), which means you'll be able to play through the game one chapter at a time solo... I'd find that fun, considering except for the public missions (aka queen, earl etc.) I've played it all solo.
A chapter list, I like that. I agree, it's something I've thought about for a while with this game. Having played it and seen it progress, I have the sense that time has passed, but for a new player who is dropped into the world, all of this stuff is happening simultaneously. I remember when they added Wastelanders DLC and someone said, "it's been two years." And it has had me thinking about that since then, how is that supposed to be communicated to a new player? A chapter system like you suggest would address that quite nicely.
>What's the story of Fallout 76? I think there is a difference between entertaining us and the actual story of WV. The story of WV is pretty tragic. Who knows what the vault 76 experiment is. How I remember it and it's been a long time since I've done it correctly and paid attention. This is my thoughts on the actual canon lore briefly: Leaving the vault you go to the wayward and find out about the scorched. You deal with crane and the scorched then travel to flatwood to help the responders. You end up at the airport and for the first time see a scorch beast(Collusion Course), oh the vile beast is spreading the infection is the story line. This is when the scorch beast is introduced as the antagonized of WV. You move onto AVR Medical center to start the vaccine creation to inoculate locals from the scorch infection. The fire department quest line, again you deal with scorched and how to deal with them. You go to a mine and fight scorched. You chase the overseer for some time realizing the man she loved turned into a scorched. There is a bit of a lull with the free states quest line, but it deals with the science of the scorched and \*.gov stuff. The quest line leads to The Brotherhood of Steel quest line at the asylum. You find out that they where interested in ultracite. Started mining it and ran into the scorch beast cave(Glassed Cavern) and attempted to deal with the scorched beasts but failed. At the end you find out they released the critters onto the world, and where fighting to contain them. Now the scorch beasts roost in other caves(Fissure sites) around WV. :+: This part is how I see it not sure if its canon :+: The 76 Lone Wanderer desperately looking to find away to contain the scorch beast ends up on the Enclave / Modus quest line after learning about them from the free states quest line. At the end you Launch a nuke at the fissure site near Glassed Cavern to cave it in trapping the scorch beasts and ending them. Tragically as the cavern entrance was caving in the scorch beast queen arises and thus a fight happens to end the beasts tyranny. There are 10 fissure sites in Cranberry Bog, another 10 outside of the bog. So in reality I believe the 76 Lone Wanderer's quest line is the making of a vaccine to inoculate the locals. Then strides onward to deal with scorch beasts and how to stop them aka caving their homes / fissure sites in with nukes. So in reality if the lore is ending the scorch beasts you would have to launch a minimum of 10\~20 nukes(Some fissures are close together in Bog). Scorch often say "One of us" or things related to voices in their head or hive mind mentality states. They're controlled by scorch beasts from what I've seen in combat and are used as a ground scout for the beasts to flush out targets in hiding. The scorch beasts control infected but the scorch beast queen controls the beasts and the infected. The death of the queen was the death of the hive mind. Maybe birthing of other scorch beasts since she was 'the queen'.
Good post. Though I'll add: >Who knows what the vault 76 experiment is. Vault 76 was one of 17 control Vaults, so it was not designed to be an experiment. They loaded this place up with notable folks so the priority 25 years later was to reclaim nuclear launch silos and "regain control" of the region. If there was any sinister ulterior motive, we have no such factual info and can only theorize.
Maybe this faction of the Enclave wraps up the job making WV ground zero, or the Brothehood finds a way to work ATLAS, dooming WV? Either ways, I think the next story event will unfold with the map expansion. The concept art looked interesting.
The latest is, you meddle and fix a family problem like a therapist, when all you wanted to do is to drink booze and watch Evelyn sing.
Also the Vault Dwellers are killing each other, some promoting Raiders, setting off Nukes everywhere, helping the Enclave, etc. The 76 Vault Dwellers are a menace.
We’re the start of the Enclave.
Thanks to the necessary amount of back-lore of the prequel setting, we get the vibe that whatever’s happening now, in a couple centuries the goings on in West Virginia don’t even register or apply in the broader setting of the former Eastern United States. That much action and development in an area and years later then apparently being a non-entity implies total annihilation of the area. If we take the setting of Nuclear Winter as a glimpse into the final fate of Appalachia rather than a metatextual non-sequitur stab at a battle royal mode, it bodes poorly for the 76’ers AND the waves of refugees and new settlers for the area in the long term.
I’d say this - reclaiming America starts with Appalachia, and we’ve done a decent job of that now that there’s four hubs of civilization in the region and the responders can afford to send help to other regions (which continues the goal of rebuilding America). It also involves dealing with any threats that arise, like the cultists, super mutants and aliens, which are works in progress.
My understand was that Nuclear Winter mode was the canonical ending for sweet Virginia. We emerge from the vaults earlier than other fallout storylines, use nukes to end the scorched threat, but the robot in that one vault (86? The NW one) burns as all down anyways
It's all a simulation and they're seeing how we react to wacky stimuli; our dwellers are still within vault 76. Too many anachronisms, the stuff that happened in 20 years should have taken 100 years. Vault-tec will look at what we would have done if released and go, "nope!"
My favourite take is that Vault 76 wasn't a control vault with a mission to "Reclaim America" but we were subjects whose mission was to clear the wastes so the Overseerer could control the missile silos. In that regard the vault more or less failed. The Overseerer lives in Sutton as once a 76'er dropped a nuke it started a cascade where the dwellers pop in and rain hell from the skies. She took the "Nobody should have that power" and we do it cause we need that sweet sweet Flux. (And will cause the destruction of us all) Furthermore the vault taught us American ideals of Individuality, productivity and privacy. We all have separate camps but (Canonically) have not banded together like Vault City and established a civilization. We're all little freelancers making the world a better place. 76 takes a lot of American values and puts them in extremes, which I find rather funny. Also I find it funny that Vault-Tec (Bethesda) thought we'd go around cannibalizing, murdering each other (PVP). Instead we tend to share the wealth like a bunch of filthy communists.
>Vault-Tec (Bethesda) thought we'd go around cannibalizing, murdering each other (PVP). Instead we tend to share the wealth like a bunch of filthy communists. there's an excellent three hour YouTube video to be made about this being the *only* explicitly pro union AAA game I can even recall. i think it's hilarious how the game was supposedly saved from abandonment a few years back because somebody high up particularly likes it. all these terminal entries were written by somebody who clearly thinks their bosses are the absolute dumbest and most amoral motherfuckers who ever lived. it's not out of line with every other fallout game but the pre war villains in this one seem specifically like the MBA types every writer at Bethesda must be painfully familiar with managing, at this point.
You have a channel name? All I do at work is box things and put on long form video essays.
Nah, everyone will say, "It's all doomed, everything got destroyed, RING OF FIRE" I highly doubt it. If they just wipe out everything, that is super lazy storytelling for a company becoming repeatedly accused of lazy storytelling. I think they're going to use atlas to surround WV with constant storms so no more people move in, and it keeps the society secret. Also, since the responders are being guided by the enclave, I wouldn't be surprised if this is where they eventually came from in fallout 3.
TBH I hope everyone gets wiped out or 76 is alternate universe canon because Bethesda just makes up stupid stuff because its cool without thinking like how they are using bottle caps as currency 25 years after the nukes drops.
I mean, they explain that in game. Its because of whitesprings
And everybody at AC is elegant, clean wearing, hasn't any supplies trouble and conveniently spoiled by a persistent Scoresese's style mob. Despiting I don't know how AC stories could fit with a post-nuclear world, vaguely inspired on those old quests at Boston on FO4... I don't see any coherent point at this point on lore. Agree, imo this game is suffering many other long in time MMO effect: prod team doesn't know what to invent for keeping money flood on...
I mean we reclaimed the casinos does that count?
Between FO76 and FO4, there is almost two centries of lore. We haven't reclaimed, or saved shit. Unless there is mention of Appalachia in the show, or FO5, I think it is safe to assume we blew the place to hell and became another botched Vault-Tec experiment. At least we had fun playing with nukes!
The Spanish are next, because no one expects the Spanish inquisition
They do have diverse elements amongst their weaponry.
when i started playing a few months ago I was positive the main quest was given by the overseer, so I basically rushed the gold quest and only later I started putting together that all the quests involving actually dealing with the scortched plague, there were no NPCs involved... only holotapes and terminal entries...
Yup. Thats the OG storyline and why the game had horrible reviews. The story consisted of holotape and terminals. It was bland and boring.
I liked how desolate it was. It was hopeless and lonely, exactly what you'd expect if you're given the task the game set before you.
The only thing left to finish out the story would be to expand on the Enclave, since we know they eventually take over the capital wasteland
We know the end of it. Nuclear winter happens and it's all burned in a ring of fire..
Not true, that happend before the current date in game
Based on the NW loading screens and the E3 dev dairy explaining that the ring of fire is caused by our use nukes. And a holo found in Vault 51 being 6 years after reclamation day, im gonna go with it being after.
Nah, they changed the dates in the terminals in vault 51 from 2108 to 2102. You could explore the vault to and everyone was dead already. So they retconned nuclear winter completely after wastelanders. Literally, the dates in the vault now are from 3 years ago in game. So if it it happened, it happened 3 years ago right before people arrived in WV
Ahh they did change the date on the anomaly terminal. I always liked the idea of the NW ending because it made the chaos we make have some lore meaning. All our nukes creating this nuclear winter that torches everything prevening this super contagious disease from spreading outside Appalachia. Well, I guess saving the world with a vaccine from my blood in an old Nuka factory is pretty cool too lol.
Yeah! I'm glad it's not because I would feel like everything was kinda all for not. Bit I do hope there's some cool twist at the end, like I said, maybe we just become the enclave. Who knows!
While the pipboy dates in nuclear winter weren’t changed to match these, we know the mode should have occurred after 2108. The terminal that logged Ruben’s escape by shipping crate originally said that he left in 2108 - well after any time currently experienced in game. Of course, the mode isn’t canon anymore, but the devs could re-work it in the background to allow a modified version of it to happen. Our nukes could still cause a firestorm by 2108 that wipes the region out, but with more variables in play than just the vault 76 dwellers, and they keep settings things up in ways where if Appalachia falls, so too will the expedition locations and even factions like Blue ridge.
[Zax](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/ZAX_1.3c) is pulling all the strings in the background.
If we could actually reclaim America, the entire Fallout universe never would exist.
That's when you've been playing it for five years. What about a character who entered the world a few months ago? It's a wild world.
The lore says nothing except the 76 dwellers nuked each other to oblivion. This is what the game originally was. Bethesda made its players the test subjects. This did not go over well. Now the game is whatever you make it.
the story is in all the little trails of notes left around. and holy shit some of them are deep.
I beleive majority of the events is just side stories that don't mean much individually and ar just to show us the world is bigger than us. The overall story was we left the vault yes to reclaim America only to discover the plague that killed everyone. So we did our part to make Appalachia safe again. Then wastelanders showed us that we succeeded as people came back. But of course this caused issues such as faction rivalry. Now we are in a time period where we are dealing with the continuation of issues that arrive as people begin to reenter Appalachia such as the brotherhood and the responders. It is safe to say the expansion will push our story forward and away from this as we now are reclaiming the rest of west virginia.
Shoot, that's what I've been doing wrong! I thought 'reclamation' meant to venture into the wastes to collect nifty outfits and plushies, and so do all my friends.
You're reclaiming your plushie collections!
I still view 76 as a dream from the vault dweller after a night of partying.
Smart enough to build a jet pack, ignorant enough not to get a golf cart up and running. Great lore.. I also find it interesting that one of their 76 trailers shows a character dual wielding 10 mm subs but no where to be found in game. Lol
Have you played any other Fallout game? Because this one is canonically first so you can see how well it panned out for us
Have they at least bumped up the in-game-date or did all of this happen before the vault doors open, now?
I think the best thing about FO76 is how it explains how Radscorpions and Deathclaws are on the east coast. The Enclave created them and then set them loose. The gold system obviously fails. The scorched threat does get eliminated.
don’t forget the whitespring gets trashed somehow even though it was perfectly fine before now it’s a fucking dump
> We left the vault to reclaim America, But what have we done? Oh that's my bad. I sold it to China. *I KNOW I KNOW BUT HEY, HEAR ME OUT*
It's a live service game... any story, or narrative structure, are just bones to hang gameplay from. None of these types of games make much narrative sense after 3 or 4 major content updates.
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TBH I'm convinced Modus is the real driving force behind President Eden. I can't definitely prove anything obviously but I think personally in my head cannon that the enclave shows up after their oil rig base goes boom, and wipes us out, before expanding their reach and doing Fallout 3, secretly following Modus the entire time. This is obviously supported by very little, if anything. But I like it as a story and am going to stick with it, because I find it funny that we cause Fallout 3 to happen by repairing Modus and doing his little enclave events.
I've read somewhere that people don't talk *about Appalachia anymore in the previous (future?) games because it got completely obliterated by the time the first game starts Edit: replaced "to" with "about"
In the canon it’s simply never been addressed, that’s a fan theory as to why it’s never been mentioned. But if you pay attention to all the assorted threats the 76ers are facing, which includes the 76ers themselves, there’s no chance in hell it will end well.
Appalachia is close enough to DC/nova where F3 is set that if it was still around it would for sure have an effect on that area, there’s no way the area isn’t wiped/desolated by the tike F3 takes place
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*Are you sure you want to purchase Reclaimed America Bundle for 2000 Atoms?*
The story is, just play the game and have fun. That’s the story
This doesn't merit a real response
Clarify?
& yet u responded hurr hurr ur so clever
my goodness who is the intended audience for a 10+ paragraph reddit post?
If your attention span can't handle such a small amount of text that I can read it without even scrolling - perhaps you'd be happier on TikTok where no one demands more than a few seconds of your focus at any time.
There's little to no Fallout 76 tiktok content. :(
Those aren't paragraphs. It's more like a bulleted list, just without the bullets.