If Fallout 4 Was Good

And when we’re talking about population density in the mainland US the area west of the Mississippi in general is usually less populated. The northeast is and usually has been the most densely populated portion of the country. Which actually explains why there’s less people there in the fallout universe if you think about it.

More cities with more people likely means more bombs per square mile. More death, more radioactive fallout, more buildings getting leveled.

Nevada sucks, generally, for creating large amounts of population density. Las Vegas and Reno are monuments to man’s hubris, generally, and an exception to the rule of the southwest which is that it’s hard to create large scale societies there. And Las Vegas was protected by Mr. House. He shot down or deactivated most of the bombs that targeted it.

The west coast generally got a lower density of bombs. The west had large scale governments fighting over resources. Concrete yards, supply chains, cities and towns built around vaults, cities run by crime families, generally less radiation in the water supply at least in some areas.

The northeast though got more bombs, more fallout, and two major additional issues. Super mutants and the institute.

The DC area has a bunch of unintelligent and extremely violent super mutants that are not only eating people but also kidnapping people to turn into more super mutants. They have fucking machine guns and suicide bombers and are nearly bulletproof. How do you set up supply lines in that kind of environment? And despite all that people are still trying to set up caravans. Megaton, despite looking kinda gross and being under the thumb of a weird Irish businessman, is a functioning society. Rivet City is a center of scientific research.

Smaller lightly fortified communities like Big Town frequently get raided by super mutants and raiders. These people have been under constant attack for like two centuries. West coast super mutants are generally smarter and can be talked to. Reasoned with. Not so in DC.

We know that the Boston supermutants are the direct result of the institute. That process is traumatic and violent in a number of ways that are just left unexplored by Bethesda, but the most important fact about them is that they are abandoned after the tests are complete. Sure they are left in specific locations but as other blogs have suggested that’s likely because teleportation follows some inverse square law. The fact that there are super mutants at the MIT building is not because they are working for the institute but that they are just being left there.

This is also why I find the supermutant attack on diamond city so interesting, because there is the interpretation that the supermutants attacked diamond city, but the representation of supermutants in fallout 3/4 echos so many 1950s ideas about race that I can’t take it seriously. Supermutants are victims of crime against humanity. I think it’s far more likely that they learned to be at least defensive around humans because humans don’t react well to big green people.

Like one of the venders in diamond city - Solomon chemicare - has this one quest you can do where you have to go out and acquire some ferns for his chems. This quest leads you to a small flooded town with several dead bounty hunters who had the misfortune of running into ghouls trying to fufill Solomon’s order. Solomon will reward you pretty well for doing this quest, but I want more. This quest should create the beginning of a relationship between him and the player where he can rely on us to get something while he can get us chems.

Boring

Uhm? You get to be a spy and start a slave uprising?

Bad characters

Deacon is a compulsive liar that you can eventually get to trust you and opens up to you about his past and you still don’t even know for sure if he’s lying about that and Glory is a supposed spy that goes in loud and guns blazing into every situation and PAM is an artificial intelligence that’s implied to be kinda lesbian about Glory and the whole H2-22 storyline makes me cry don’t look at me

It’s just the institute storyline with a few changes

Yes the series is a critique of war generally. But there’s also a lot of elements to it clearly satirizing American exceptionalism which both these days and in the 1950s-60s era the game is based on have connections to corporate capitalism, including corporations that make stuff that fuels the military industrial complex.

Series can be about more than one thing at a time and there can be meaning in a work that the author(s) didn’t intend. If you look everywhere in fallout you see the destruction brought on not just by capitalism and communism’s dick measuring contest, not just by incompetent politicians, but greedy corporations, lack of regulation, hoarding of resources.

Of course not all of these issues are necessarily unique to capitalism and much of it is about war in general but it’s nearly impossible to walk through a fallout game and not be confronted by the destruction also caused by corporate greed. Much of the radiation in the fallout universe is caused by inappropriately disposed of nuclear waste that was already a problem pre-war. Nuclear fallout doesn’t last for 200 years but leaking barrels of toxic waste sure do.

The fallout universe very specifically stagnated culturally around the 50s to early 60s.

But wait. Eulogy Jones in Fallout 3 has a disco inspired outfit. Disco was a very 70s thing.

These two details together paint a reality where the massive counter cultural and environmentalist movement of the baby boomer generation still happened but somehow got brutally suppressed. Or perhaps society culturally regressed back to the 1950s at some point.

We know that in the fallout universe the transistor wasn’t invented until the 2060s whereas in our universe it was invented in 1947. In the fallout universe at the point of the Great War they had 1980s level internet. Basically just company-wide message boards and local email.

And when we’re talking about population density in the mainland US the area west of the Mississippi in general is usually less populated. The northeast is and usually has been the most densely populated portion of the country. Which actually explains why there’s less people there in the fallout universe if you think about it.

More cities with more people likely means more bombs per square mile. More death, more radioactive fallout, more buildings getting leveled.

Nevada sucks, generally, for creating large amounts of population density. Las Vegas and Reno are monuments to man’s hubris, generally, and an exception to the rule of the southwest which is that it’s hard to create large scale societies there. And Las Vegas was protected by Mr. House. He shot down or deactivated most of the bombs that targeted it.

The west coast generally got a lower density of bombs. The west had large scale governments fighting over resources. Concrete yards, supply chains, cities and towns built around vaults, cities run by crime families, generally less radiation in the water supply at least in some areas.

The northeast though got more bombs, more fallout, and two major additional issues. Super mutants and the institute.

The DC area has a bunch of unintelligent and extremely violent super mutants that are not only eating people but also kidnapping people to turn into more super mutants. They have fucking machine guns and suicide bombers and are nearly bulletproof. How do you set up supply lines in that kind of environment? And despite all that people are still trying to set up caravans. Megaton, despite looking kinda gross and being under the thumb of a weird Irish businessman, is a functioning society. Rivet City is a center of scientific research.

Smaller lightly fortified communities like Big Town frequently get raided by super mutants and raiders. These people have been under constant attack for like two centuries. West coast super mutants are generally smarter and can be talked to. Reasoned with. Not so in DC.

On another note - I’m unfortunately unfamiliar with the other fallout games - but I also think that ferals are a huge Boston problem. (I play on very hard or survival) ferals are generally impossible to deal with early game and I can’t imagine what it was like to deal with a feral attack without quick saves. They aren’t restricted to the subways like in other games - from what I’ve seen. They just lie and wait almost always in groups. There are a few places I just avoid because ferals have so much heath and they can’t be dealt with as a group. I’ll walk into stores or places and just walk right out because one feral means many ferals and it’s just a problem.

Not to mention the ammo sink. Raiders give you 308 and 38 plus shotgun ammo on the side. Same with super mutants but at a lower return. Institute gives you laser ammo. Triggermen give you 45 and 10mm. Gunners give you everything that’s good. But ferals give you nothing

I think that’s what you often encounter mine fields near ferals. It’s not because people want to keep you out.

And a pipe pistol or a shotgun is sufficient for most raiders. I mean level one is still a pain, but they don’t work against ferals. You can’t run from them once they’re on to you. They are basically living minefields. There are a few early spots designed to teach the player this, but like ferals are something I think most traders would be hard pressed into walking into and it’s not like there are a lot of well equipped npcs in the common wealth.

There are a few buildings right outside that house ferals (they also exist near raiders with a mini nuke - cheers) and they are quite aggressive. It’s best to go around.

If you go to the corvega plant you’ll get the military broadcast radio station and if you listen to it you’ll start a quest that will take you to one of the police stations. If you head there directly from corvega you come across a small medium density town whose first welcome in it is mines, but next to that is a very large feral population. They also happen to inhabit the subway station in the city but Alas. If you make the mistake of waking all of them up, you have a problem.

The first is that [no spoilers - I don’t care that this is a 10? Year old game] the treasure of Jamaica Plains is guarded by feral ghouls. It’s a town - an entire fucking town - littered by a creature that will literally throw themself at their target [think zombies in movies that are fast and hordish]. In the lore - mainly the minute men - they will actively chase and pursue their targets.

But these are people, and they have to deal with the perception other people have about ferals. I don’t get the impression from the ghouls in goodneighbor that people don’t meet ghouls all that often. I think without the previous reblogs I would/did - not think about all the violence that non ferals deal with. But I think it makes me all the more empathetic. There is and should be a lot of emotion when ghouls talk about.

Like, in the elderscolls series, they have a whole bundle of months, but nothing changes between them. Not the weather, not what NPCs say to you, and what things are intractable. I have thousands of hours in these games and i still can’t tell you the months or the eras or any of it l, because it doesn’t matter and that disappoints me.