Coming from fallout 2, I hope this isn't TOO controversial, although it probably will be.

A lot of the iconic fallout monsters had their start in the first two fallout games. Their origins, to me at the time, seemed like localized phenomenon.
The radscorpions, lorewise, are mutated emperor scorpions from a petshop. The deathclaws were a military experiment. The geckos are obviously mutated desert geckos of one sort or another. And so on. So many of them seemed local derived from a local event or local eco-system. Or so I thought, at the time.
SO years later, 3,000 milies away, I find deathclaws, scorpions, and geckos. Somehow, there are mutated geckos on the east coast. There was no sense of a local eco system in the fallout universe anymore. No life was local -- it was ALL nation-wide.
Now some real life animals are really good at spreading out from their origins, like coyotes and bobcats. But... all fallout life occurs everywhere?
I was disappointed. Even to this day, I wish the monsters of DC felt like they'd come from different eco systems.
Not to mention that at the end of fallout 2, I really felt like the Enclave and the Brotherhood were dead or dying factions, and not, as of game end, super-power armadas -- even considering rebuilding attempts.

Well, game designers are lazy at that point. It's Fallout, so we get same monsters at all games - why to bother to make something different. No matter where we are - same monsters. That's how they think.
We can say, that radiation cause gigantic insects anywhere, but truth is this. I do expect to find radscorpions and geckos in FNV, rather than F2 and F3, but...... If deathclaws are military experiment - ok, we can find them anywhere - as there is military bases, but same goes for them too. No unique wildlife for every Fallout.
If going to game point - both Enclave and Brotherhood are dying factions. They both are isolationist factions.They do not accept new members and both factions just want to rebuild world, but only at their point of view. That mean, in new world there is no place for survivors. Other words, they ranks will thin constantly, as despite their tech superiority - survivors will not just step down and will grow faster.
As it seen in FNV - despite all tech and training- Brotherhood is almost dead and Enclave did not exist.
Survivors will always grow faster and also adapt to world condition, while Brotherhood and Enclave ranks will always go down.Until the day, when survivors will attack them in their own bunkers.

The Enclave and Brotherhood have been repeatedly "dying factions" only to end up being a super-power in another game. They are really, really good at rebounding, I guess. They breed like a mutated cross-country pet scorpion.
I was actually surprised that fallout 4 didn't rebound the enclave into a super power again. I am betting, fallout 5 probably will.
I'd still prefer to see eco-system specific mutations, though. The radstags were the right idea.
It's just on my mind now because I'm soon going to revisit fallout 3 through ttw, for the first time since it came out.

These are good points. I really dislike the approach of viewing things like the Brotherhood or the Enclave as "staples" so we have to include them. I enjoyed the semblance of an overarching narrative that was there between Fallout 1-2 (and to a degree New Vegas). Games like Tactics, BoS, 3 and 4 throw a lot of that to the wind.
I think Bethesda wanted there to be some recognisable elements when they introduced 3, which explains the BoS, Deathclaws and the like, but honestly, I feel like the move to the East coast is one of the worst decisions in the entire franchise. The east coast is a woefully underdeveloped location. The west had more history, more established lore... And even if Beth wanted to tell their own story, the stories they have told on the east coast are IMO pretty dull. Aside from the Institute there's no real sense of any established power in the East. The BOS and Enclave are both western powers, so in other words it just feels like the entire east coast just lay dormant for 200 years.

It doesn't help that recycled enemies like the Super Mutants exist purely for the sake of it. I mean, ask yourself this: What was the purpose of Super Mutants in Fallout 3? They don't actually factor into the plot at all. They feature as an enemy in places like DC or Vault 87, but they add nothing to the story. Same in Fallout 4. it's just one example of something (that I won't call lazy, the model work and design is cool) that infects these games. There's no sense to the worldspace, no forward thought in regards to establishing a greater narrative.
The thought to put super mutants in comes before the the reason for their existence. For example, they have super mutants in 4 as enemies... because the Institute made them. End of story. There's a little quest involving them, but it's so minor, so inconsequential and will almost certainly never be mentioned again. It's examples like this that really bug me. There's no consistency, no feeling of a developing and growing world, just cool ideas, like "now the Brotherhood have an airship, and a fleet of Vertibirds, and now they're super fascist despite the last time we saw them they were on the verge of a charity organisation"... this would actually work IF the setup was there... if the seeds were planted, like a young Arthur Maxson was question Elder Lyons, or we had a little more interaction with people like the Outcasts, or disgruntled BOS members, but we don't. It all happens off screen and we just get told about it in the next game. From a RPing perspective it's really annoying to see all the authorship of your character be snatched away without any real opportunity to contribute to the growth of a group in a meaningful fashion.
I could ramble on but I won't. Suffice to say, my opinion on the east coast is that it's a bland worldspace that's got no real consistency. I'll pick up my next Fallout when they head back west.

Yeah, the super-mutants being everywhere is another one. I guess... maybe... it's possible? But in a world with mad scientists who can do all kinds of weird stuff, and mutants, there's untapped potential for something new. No need to recycle the super-mutants for fallout 3 and 4. The institute was weird enough and "mad-scientist competent" enough to have made something completely new that could have filled the same role as the super mutants. I'm not mad, I'm just a little disappointed at the lost potential.
Because it's almost as if in travelling to DC we'd gone all the way to andromeda only to see things that really didn't seem that different, somehow. Uncanny.

@IRORIEH The good thing about having the Bethesda games set on the East Coast is that you don't have to worry about them destroying the lore any further.

I agree with pretty much everyone else in this thread that the way Bethesda handles pre-existing elements of Fallout is pretty bad. It's easier to re-use things that are familiar than to come up with new ideas. But even still, the original things that Bethesda brings to the table end up being boring. To use the example of creatures, Yao Guai are pretty neat but it's hard to fuck up something as simple as a bear. Radstags are lazy, they're literally deer but with the same gimmick as Brahmin that we're all used to. Every original faction that Bethesda has created are boring and forgetful. For Fallout 3, Talon Company and the Regulators were all I could think of, both boring generic good-guy/bad-guy extremes meant to satisfy the gameplay mechanics of a now abandoned karma system. Fallout 4 has the Institute and Minutemen. The Institute is alright but I still wished they were more fleshed out, but it won't matter anyway because I doubt they'll be returning in the next game considering most of the endings had them blowing up. I haven't done a playthrough sided with the Minutemen and I never will because I think settlement building is a lazy attempt at making the game more like Minecraft that made the shareholders happy and allowed Bethesda to get away with only making only a handful of tiny cities in the entire game. The Children of Atom return from Fallout 3 and in the span of a few short years, managed to somehow expand greatly.

tl;dr: Bethesda is lazy for reusing elements of the setting in a way that doesn't make sense but is even worse at coming up with their own ideas. East Coast games mean that the good stories of the originals+NV are left alone.

Some very good points; I don't want Bethesda anywhere near the west coast.  

Also calling mutated bears by the same chinese name given to them by prisoners on the west coast -- that's as far as I'm concerned, (accidental?) proof that the west and east coast are in heavy, constant communication somehow.  Because that's a really obscure thing to call a mutated bear.

Edit: I didn't mean to submit this right there.

Anyway, as for super-mutants in fallout 3, I wonder if it wouldn't be too difficult to mod them into some other kind of human-like mutant. Various creatures like nightstalkers are pretty solid proof that crazy splicing of multiple animals are possible. So we've really are not using the full crazy potential of monsters in fallout. Crazy genetic splicing could allow for all kinds of new local creatures to make up for there being no scorpions, super mutants, or geckos. Maybe they could have been humans spliced with ... something. I haven't made up my mind yet, but the potential is there. It's not beyond the institute or pre-war scientists to have tried it.

There was a mod (likely abandoned long ago) for fallout 3 that was going to make the enclave the dominant presence in DC, apparently removing the brotherhood presence (I don't know exactly.)
I would have been ok with this if it had been the original canon. A few very powerful enclave survivors who on a mission or patrol (so not at the oil rig) could fled to DC, and found ruins that had laid mostly in chaos for 200 years. They didn't have any version of the NCR or the like, rebuilding society on a big level. The enclave wouldn't be a power-armored armada, this was just too unlikely after the pasting they got in fallout 2.
These guys, just being grunts and maybe a scientist, weren't fanatics like the president, and wanted to survive, so they --- started recruiting.
I'm ok with that. It pits the enclave as actually rebuilding society (if in the form of a dictatorship) rather than just having a crazily evil "kill almost everything." I'm also ok with a strangely charitable brotherhood not making an appearance.

The core both for Enclave and Brotherhood are purity. Only in FTactics Brotherhood recruit native and they admit, that original Brotherhood will not accept that. So, i'm sorry, but it is very hard for me to see how both will start to recruit survivors. So, best we can have from them to increase presence is master/slave. And that will not increase their ranks.
Instead of that, i always see no logic in both F3 and FNV(even more in there), that u cannot make own faction and take command of all. I mean u do all the job, u get all that contacts, followers, factions,towns, communities,ppl that are on your side and what? U trow all that and just walk away.
At that point, building a town/base is good direction, but it's just for color. No really effect anything.
Why not to build and recruit? After all u do
Anyway, designers will call they lack of creativity with keeping Fallout "lore" and recognizable . So, even IF they made something, we have to expect same monsters/factions etc. Since they even steal modders ideas and claim them as their own.........

If, say, only four or five or so enclave grunts survived to reach DC, they might very well abandon some or all of the tenants of the purity agenda, and just be trying to survive and dominate.
I'm only interested in this idea because the plots of fallout 3 were recycled when I'd been hoping for a new story. Again, the enclave was somehow a fully recovered super-power armor, trying to be almost comically genocidal. Again, a quest for a water chip. And again, all the familiar factions and monsters even after going 3,000 miles.

Sirdanest wrote:

If, say, only four or five or so enclave grunts survived to reach DC, they might very well abandon some or all of the tenants of the purity agenda, and just be trying to survive and dominate.  
I'm only interested in this idea because the plots of fallout 3 were recycled when I'd been hoping for a new story.  Again, the enclave was somehow a fully recovered super-power armor, trying to be almost comically genocidal.  Again, a quest for a water chip.  And again, all the familiar factions and monsters even after going 3,000 miles.

I think it's pretty universally accepted today that when it came to plot and familiar elements, Bethesda kinda under and overdid it. It's great if FO3 was your first introduction to the series to have some of those iconic things in there, but it seems odd going back to 1 and 2 and seeing how sparse, desperate, and different the factions and their power and influence are. The Brotherhood wasn't a collection of militarized do-gooders trying to fight brutish supermutants. Hell, even supermutants weren't just generic enemies like they are in FO3. It plays a part in why a lot of people considered New Vegas to be a better experience overall, a lot more care and creativity on display.