I was just thinking about how few children there are in the Mojave. Maybe it's just a harsh world, or whatever.
But the point that occurred to me is how utterly different the moral choices would have been, if every faction had a "normal" amount of children, or even pregnant women. Other than House of course, I can see him not having children around.
Khans, Legion, Kings, NCR, the Brotherhood... everyone with at least some children around. Even the Enclave oil rig in Fallout 2 would have had to have had children on it unless out of nowhere the Enclave was suddenly having a population crisis.
All but the most savage or stone-cold Couriers would have probably behaved very differently. Or felt pretty damn bad, at least. War is awful, and, I guess, never changes, as they say.
I know most of my Couriers/Chosen Ones would have felt differently about it.
There's no way my (relatively) decent courier would have blown up the brotherhood base if it had a reasonable population of children among their population. The presence of even one pregnant woman would have protected the kings from my (relatively) decent NCR but socially inept character. I'd never casually nuke a legion base if children were there (as slaves or otherwise.)

That is all. Just ruminating today.

I think it's more of a design decision to make the game playable. Downloaded the mod "rePOPULATED Wasteland" before and experienced massive frame drops.

It would be awesome if the engine could support stuff like in assassins creed where you see a REALLY populated town.

You make an interesting point. I only recall seeing children in two instances. The introduction to fallout 3 where your character had their birthday. And the one kid later on in the wasteland that had his family eaten by ants or something like that.

I don’t recall ever seeing children in New Vegas.

In fallout 4 all I have seen so far was Piper’s sister and a couple of kids in one of the surviving vaults.

Population levels with regard to the engine’s limitations could be a factor. But even then it shouldn’t be too taxing to add a few here and there to humanize the different factions. Having to fight for a faction’s cause as well as their next generation would add some depth to the immersion.

The biggest thing for me would be changing the good or bad-ness of certain actions. The Brotherood were heavily armed xenophobic assholes one step away from killing you, at least at first. It's easy to see why you might be ok blowing them up in some cases.
But give them children, and now you have to kill innocent people for House, and that can change everything for some couriers. It would be a flat "no fucking way" for my high-karma goody-two-shoes courier.
For a gory game that is about nuclear war, and claims "war never changes," it really does sanitize war tremendously. You can fight a whole war with only killing genuinely bad people" (if you want,) with no collateral damage or civilian casualties at all.

God can you imagine Vault 3 if there were kids in it?

When I was writing a New Vegas fanfic (I'll post it here eventually maybe well...maybe...) I was thinking a lot about little details here and there infrastructure-wise. One of the things I described was a Fiend slum, filled with tens of people, some with children, suffering from numerous addictions and whatnot Trainspotting-style. Was rather horrible to consider.

Fallout has an interesting relationship with children. Whereas you could kill them in the isometric Fallout 2 it didn't come across as that bad because they were just silly pixels that ran around, and the game did punish you with the "Child Killer" title if you did do it. At the same time, they made Myron, the absolute worst f*cking character ever, technically a child, where the game was actively encouraging you to murder him even though you'd get the negative "Child Killer" title.

I think with the lack of kids in New Vegas they were responding to the issue of censorship. Where you have quests where you kill off entire groups of people, people rating your game are gonna raise an eyebrow if kids are running around said groups (the Germans censored the original Fallout, people would be even more touchy about the first-person games)

The other reason why there are less kids in New Vegas (my own theory) is that people found the kids in Fallout 3 obnoxious and annoying.

On a more meta-level, child actors tend to suck. That kid running the Boomers museum is easily the worst-read character in the game, so I can sympathize with Obsidian wanting to deal with as little of that as possible.

If you think children have to be more immersive in the Fallout Universe try this mod : https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/63554

Rapist factions will now use children as soldiers.

There are very rarely well-developed child characters in dangerous settings. They're usually there to get in trouble or cause trouble, or just be in the background. Well-developed children with realistic personalities rather than stereotypes must be incredibly hard to write, which is weird, since everyone of us was once a child.
I guess writers were all one-dimensional annoying people when they were kids?

House saying: "Destroy that military outpost full of nothing but weird xenophobic fanatics" is different from "Destroy that that bunker full of families." I think it changes the order extensively. The BOS bunkers should be full of children. The early fallouts sure had guts. I do agree that they got away with it because it's just a bunch of pixels. Stuff like that didn't start getting really controversial to the media and politicians until it could be more graphically presented.

Damn i downloaded a mod just to kill those little shits in little lamplight, i liked the interaction that your courier can have with the little boomers, everyone with a dialogue check, depending on your charisma and stuff like that, pretty good.

I would like to see more children in the legion Fort(aside from that little girl that ask you to recover her teddy bear from the mongrel breeder)

So much things that New Vegas could have been, imagine if it had the same development time as 3, still a better RPG than 3 and 4 lol.

I tend to agree with the others. I think the less kids in this game, the better.
In fact, I'd say the same thing about all "essential" NPC's. Those bug me and make me feel limited in my playthroughs. Being able to kill just about anyone is one of the many things that separates Fallout from the other popular game franchises, in my opinion.

Un-killable kids (and no/few kids) are new ideas of the modern fallouts.  I definitely accidentally killed a kid in the early fallouts.  I am not sure that anything was "essential" back then.

Edit: I'd also like to point out, if memory serves, that the child killer perk actually ended up showing a strange bright spot in a cruel world. Because both good AND evil characters would turn on you if you were a known child killer. Even evil people valued children in Fallout 1 and 2. Most people did not actually want to see the end of life, they just had very selfish or dictatorial intentions. Even the Enclave's genocidal plan was in their eyes "saving" humanity rather than ending it,although since their plan involved killing children as well as adults, they would have been viewed as the evilest faction around.

I use mods to make my game as realistic as a Fallout game should or could be. I think there should be families, pregnant women and kids in all the factions. It would make your decisions harder, but that's what makes your character unique to your playthrough.
Also in Fallout 3 there were children in Megaton when you blow it up.
There should have been children in Nipton when Legion attacked and slaughtered everyone. They would have been likely enslaved.
The world is a dark place and the hard choices you have to make should reflect it.

I'm sure the devs would have liked to put such things into the games, but with the current state of the gaming landscape it's not possible. All the controversy that it could cause for having NPCs that are children and pregnant women that you have the ability to potentially kill will bring too much bad press to the game.

Then if they do put them in but make them unkillable it'll just piss off people that want the total freedom to do so.

So they just opt to have them not be there in the first place avoid all the problems.

Dunno if its already brought up, or at least a moot point, but I do recall seeing kids NV, as someone stated, in the boomer territory but also in freeside.
certainly post apocalyptica is in no way child friendly

There are a few kids, but generally not in places where you are asked to commit genocide-like slaughter. Understandable, I suppose. Back in the days when the Fallout franchise allowed for child-killin', it was still viewed as THE ultimate evil. Even bad people, if I recall, would hate you for killing children.

So if there was a realistic number of children, people like House would be without a doubt monsters by the standards of the classic fallout wasteland for wanting to blow up the BOS indiscriminately. In the old fallouts, I'd never be crazy enough to take a mission that involved blowing up a building with kids inside. You'd be on the run forever.

Can imagine a bunch of little mafia kids in Vegas giving you the same rude ass lip they give you in Skyrim? I'd go nuts.

Sirdanest wrote:

I know most of my Couriers/Chosen Ones would have felt differently about it.
There's no way my (relatively) decent courier would have blown up the brotherhood base if it had a reasonable population of children among their population.  The presence of even one pregnant woman would have protected the kings from my (relatively) decent NCR but socially inept character.  I'd never casually nuke a legion base if children were there (as slaves or otherwise.)

Reading this and the other replies does make me want this in, to challenge me further. Ahh i feel bad just thinking about it

I get that the developers didn't want to waste precious engine resources throwing in mostly "useless" children characters -- but it's absolutely unrealistic that the Brotherhood have no children, not one. And we know they don't really recruit.
It would mean that if House doesn't want to be seen as the greatest monster in the fallout universe, he'd need a better plan. It might also make his plan look more practical and less utterly heartless, if he found a way to save the children before killing the BOS. I know I felt reluctant to murder the whole lot of them even though I didn't really like them.
House is fairly heartless, but child killing in traditional fallout was impractical because of the sheer level of evil associated with it.