What's been bugging me as of late is that buildings don't have moss/creepers/vines on them; Pavements don't have weeds coming out of them either!

This has gone more or less unnoticed for a decade!? For the record, I know of Vurt and other Flora overhauls, these add trees and grass, they don't touch buildings or roads.

I didn't realise this was a problem until I saw a mod that adds all of the above (it helps that I re-completed The Last Of Us this week so I had a point of reference too), the textures were unfortunately of low quality so I didn't install them.


Buildings with Vurts Overhaul:

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Mossy buildings:

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Hopefully building plant life gets some much needed attention.

Yeah it annoys me too, thank god with have talented modders that make grass and trees mods.
Id be nice if the next fallout game has a alot more green in it but i dont know how well that would work in the fallout world bc you have fallout nv giving you a hint of what will eventually happen to the Mojave desert. I wonder if that would happen to the rest of the wasteland too.

Goldencoley wrote:

This has gone more or less unnoticed for a decade!?

Should we tell him?

@Goldencoley This is not The Last Of Us. This is not The Walking Dead. This is Fallout. Fallout is inspired by old Mad Max movies and the concept of total nuclear apocalypse. It is NOT based around an infection or a virus. It IS based around the face of the Earth being bombed until it is a warm, dead, dusty land.

To remove that element of Fallout is best left to mods. Many others including myself would refuse to purchase a game that does not respect it's premise. I play Fallout for my Mad Max survival fantasies, not to play open world TLoU.

In fact, forget that. Let's make Fallout look like TLoU. Decorate the bombed out wasteland with green shrubs, dense foliage, palm trees and BOOM! You've got a recipe for not only making Fallout look like a cheap, low budget, uninspired knock off of TLoU, but you've also tainted the perception of the Fallout franchise forever!

What's so unique about the post apocalypse genre is that every franchise has it's own premises and interpretations. The Walking Dead, A Boy and His Dog and I Am Legend for example are very different stylistically. Metro and Fallout are both nuclear post apocalypses, but Metro is more dark, gritty and horrifying than the more light-hearted Fallout games. Don't get me wrong, Fallout has elements of horror, but Metro is far more explicit with this than Fallout. Fallout is more focused on survival against humans and rebuilding civilisation. It has elements of macabre humor especially in the originals, but it is not as explicitly dark as Metro for example.

TLoU and Fallout are also quite different. They don't even share similar premises! As previously stated, TLoU is centered around a virus and not nuclear wastelands. It makes sense for that game to be overgrown both stylistically and realistically, but not Fallout. You'd have an easier time trying to convince me that Fallout would look like Metro 2033.

@Heisenberg People have a very distorted idea of what a nuclear apocalypse is. If the game was set one or two years after the bombs fell, then yeah, the irradiated rock theme would make sense, but after 200 years? Plants recover. They have to, they're the basis of the food chain. If there's no plant life, then how the hell are animals or humans going to survive?

It's true that Fallout started with a irradiated dessert aesthetic. But, you know, it was set on the american southwest, 80 years after the bombs fell. Bethesda took the franchise and moved it to the east coast, a place that's colder and greener, and set FO4 a whoping 200 years after the end of the world. That requires a different aesthetic. When they decided to have a DLC set in Alaska, that needed a different aesthetic. If tomorrow they decided to use Hawaii as a setting, that would require a different aesthetic too. It wouldn't make sense for the entire world to be just dessert no matter where you go.

On that note, I'm guessing you really hate F76 then. That one is unrealistic but on the other direction. There's barely any radiation there. It's so green.

Well... I never thought about Fallout like that. Heisenberg made an excellent a point. I was always looking for "green" mods but this... this changes everything - I need total desert wasteland mod!

Yeah this sort of thing is up to personal preference, Fallout and any other game for that matter should stick to the artstyle and aesthetic they were envisioned with.

This is why mods are a wonderful thing you can make the experience whatever you want it to be, suited to your own tastes. Your adventure and world will be your own.

Fallout's nuclear war was likely SO much worse than a real life nuclear war (probably) would be.
The world was turned into a sea of fire, and entire continents sunk into the ocean. Pretty much everyone other than people in the vaults and the ghouls and such died. This was a _really_ bad war. Really bad. Nothing we could do in real life, as far as I know, would sink a continent into the ocean. Just as there were plasma weapons, there may have been weapons of mass destruction that don't exist in real life. But I don't think there's enough lore to know any more than that.

But that's "old lore." The new generation of fallout players is largely influenced by Bethesda, and Bethesda doesn't care about the lore with the same fanaticism as a lot of players do. Opposite to what is being said here, I think Boston and Concord look too nice. Even if there hadn't been a war, 200 years of rain and decay probably would have done more damage than we see. But Boston is a really, really important city. It would be a crater. The lore was that New Vegas was special, it's defensive capabilities installed by Mr. House were not normal, made it safer than anywhere else from the nukes. And it was still targeted 70 times by nukes. Boston, very important and less defended than the uniquely safe Vegas, would have been hit AT LEAST as many times as Vegas. 70 nukes! No city. No crumbling ruins.
A crater. I do like that there's a lot of weird plant life in fallout 4, that is probably adapted to the radioactive water; it's why I used a mod to give them a night-time glow.

But they hand-waved that, because, I guess it's fun to be able to see recognizable crumbling landmarks.

DC on the other hand, its storyline is that it's still contaminated. There's almost no fresh, clean water anywhere. Even rivet city was in danger of extinction because of the lack of clean water. I had to wonder if there was something going on that was still actively belching radioactive contaminants into the area, keeping the water so terrible even after all that time. But once I saw the commonwealth, it's hard to go back to DC and not want to tell them "To hell with this, just flee to the north. This place is truly a shit hole." It's no wonder that there's limited plant life, if something is still actively irradiating all the water.

@Sirdanest The problem with making a war so catastrophic is that you end up without a setting for the game. I mean think about it. Suppose the world became this giant dead rock with nothing but craters and more craters filled with roaches and ghouls. At first that would be so cool, but after hours and hours of just that, nothing but an endless, barren wasteland of death, with nothing to find, or to explore, it would become incredibly boring.

Also, my problem with people who want an all dessert fallout is that Nuclear fallout doesn't actually create desserts. I get that the point is to make it seem barren, but a dessert is just an specific kind of ecosystem. You could have Earth becoming something like the tomb worlds from Stellaris, a contaminated, bleak piece of rock, but simply making the entire world look like the Sahara makes no sense.

Here's another issue, plant life is the basis of an ecosystem. If there's no plant life, then neither animals not humans can survive. And again, I get it that the point is there's no abundance of anything anymore and people are struggling, but you can't take it to a point where it isn't even plausible for the world to exist.

Notice how despite plant life taking so much of a hit, animals are not actually rare. Which is the exact opposite of what should happen.

Now, it's not just Bethesda. Look at Fallout NV. Does Zion look to you like a place that went through a nuclear war? There's clean water and fresh fruit everywhere! In fact, I don't think there's a single irradiated place. If not for the signature flora and fauna, it wouldn't even look like Fallout. But that's always been my point. Plants eventually recover, the world would go on somewhat similarly to how it was before, only it would take a while and new species would come out of it. I don't think it's actually possible to get to the point where you completely destroy Earth's ecosystems without also destroying the planet itself.

Fallout 1 and 2 had a well-loved setting, so I have no idea what you mean by "no setting." Most of the world had been blasted away, but the world was slowly recovering and people were rebuilding. I don't think there was a single real lilfe pre-war building or landmark in the game.

Zion being fine makes sense. Almost certainly not a major target for bombs... there was nothing of strategic value there. Wasting nukes on a bunch of rocks and tourists would be weird. So... of course it's doing ok. I'd have been confused if it had been hit repeatedly by nukes. It would be almost as weird as shooting nukes into a random spot on the ocean. Nothing there to kill, really.



As for animal life, I can't explain where people and animals are getting their food in such abundance . I'm assuming that mutated animals can drink irradiated water. It's one of those complaints that people have made over the years that Fallout 3 didn't make any attempt to make a plausible setting, it was just supposed to be a fun setting, and it was; Rivet city and Megaton were odd, interesting ideas for a town and DC has fun apocalyptic ruins of landmarks.
I don't care too much, though, I don't take expect Fallout to be a perfectly accurate nuclear survival simulator.

First of all, two centuries later, the world should look like the exclusion zone of Chernobyl and surroundings: FULL of green and life. Life adapts, always finding a way.

The barren "ecosystem" would perhaps last a few years after a nuclear apocalypse, but interesting enough, the world after a nuclear apocalypse shouldn't look like a desert , but the complete opposite. The world should have been engulfed in a decade-long winter, with all the fallout, particles and dust released in the atmosphere, blocking a large portion of the sunlight, decreasing the temperatures worldwide by the dozens.
Nuclear winter, atleast for the first two-three decades, is a much more realistic view. The dust concentration in the atmosphere will eventually decrease to pre-war standards, the atmosphere itself perhaps will be even better than pre-industrial 21th century standards, without humanity ruining it with smog and other industrial wastes.

If the nuclear apocalypse happened in our universe, food wouldn't technically be a problem, since most of the population would die and the surviving members of our species would largely cultivate underground, since we have the technology to do it, pretty much accessible to anyone. Domes would easily be constructed during the nuclear winter, after the firestorms stopped. And, most probably, there would be near-zero raiders roaming the streets.

@Sirdanest

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Fallout 1 and 2 had a well-loved setting

Yes, of course. But remember that back then you had a fundamentally different kind of game. The classic isometric RPGs were much smaller and contained. For you to have a massive open world game, were you can explore literally every corner, there needs to be stuff to find. It's half the game. What would the point of an open world if there's nothing but open wasteland?

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Zion being fine makes sense. Almost certainly not a major target for bombs... there was nothing of strategic value there. Wasting nukes on a bunch of rocks and tourists would be weird. So... of course it's doing ok. I'd have been confused if it had been hit repeatedly by nukes. It would be almost as weird as shooting nukes into a random spot on the ocean. Nothing there to kill, really.

I agree with your assessment, but Zion WAS bombed. Or at the very least radiation spread from the surrounding areas. Remember the Survivalist's diaries? How he describes being stuck in a cave for months waiting for radiation to dissipate?

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As for animal life, I can't explain where people and animals are getting their food in such abundance

Well, yeah. That's kind of my point. There doesn't seem to be enough plant life to sustain the fauna, let alone the people.

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I'm assuming that mutated animals can drink irradiated water.

Probably, but they're still going to need food.

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I don't care too much, though, I don't take expect Fallout to be a perfectly accurate nuclear survival simulator.

No, obviously not. I'm just big on world-building. I find a franchise that much easier to enjoy if the world around it makes sense.

@Niar26

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First of all, two centuries later, the world should look like the exclusion zone of Chernobyl and surroundings: FULL of green and life. Life adapts, always finding a way.

Well, the world would still have deserts, those are natural ecosystems. It's just that it wouldn't become just one massive desert. And that's kind of the point. It's one thing to have a desert setting if the game takes place in Vegas, that makes sense. But Boston is a completely different place, it needs a different aesthetic. I get that people remember the classics very fondly but it doesn't mean that every single thing about the classics will always makes sense.

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If the nuclear apocalypse happened in our universe, food wouldn't technically be a problem, since most of the population would die and the surviving members of our species would largely cultivate underground, since we have the technology to do it, pretty much accessible to anyone. Domes would easily be constructed during the nuclear winter, after the firestorms stopped. And, most probably, there would be near-zero raiders roaming the streets.

The problem is that there are elements of the post apocalyptic genre that people have come to expect whether they make sense or not. Raiders is a good example. Yeah, I get that societal collapse would allow a lot of resentful and angry people to go violent, like in Somalia, or the US these days apparently, but in the Fallout Universe, pretty much the only people that survived were sheltered in Vaults. And those would be middle class, moderately wealthy people, likely from a good background, not criminals or underclass malcontents. So, where exactly did raiders come from?

It's not just that though, the list goes on.

Life recovers, after the rads are gone (or they mutate to some fantasy monster,apparently.) The entire story of f3 was that this hadn't happened yet; all of the water that wasn't purified was still poisoned. Honestly I wish they'd offered SOME explanation for why the water was still so putrid with radiation, but if they did I missed it. It really seemed like there must be something still pumping rads into the water somewhere "off the map," like some malfunctioning pre-war nuclear-powered facility. The world building in f3 just wasn't really carefully thought out in regards to the ecosystem, less so than any other fallout I've ever played (I haven't done '76.)

Every other fallout game,to my knowledge, showed places where life was coming back, like the joshua trees of the mojave, or the fallen leaves in fallout 4, which were probably not 200 year old fallen leaves of the pre-war era. At least I hope not, that's a bit hard to swallow. Maybe the post-war fallout 4 should have taken place a month or two earlier; if it had taken place a few months earlier,and everything was still dead, I'd have been a little skeptical of the setting. Something should have recovered -- if nothing recovers after 200 years, the world is probably a lost cause.

Fallout 1 and 2 weren't just an empty wasteland, despite having no famous ruined landmarks. They were just post-war rebuilding efforts, kind of like how megaton.

But it's still nice to tour the recognizable ruins, so I have a complex love-hate with Boston not looking like there was a nuclear war. To me it looks like, maybe a virus killed everyone, as it would leave the buildings standing unlike dozens of nukes smashing into the city. I'd have loved a lore explanation for why Boston wasn't pounded to dust, but the more games Bethesda does, the less special Vegas becomes as its once held the uniqueness of being a city that wasn't hit.

I bet they'll do New York and Chicago someday, and we'll find out that those towns also weren't actually hit by nukes either (in order to preserve the landmarks.) It will be fun seeing the NY skyline in ruins, but weird that it wasn't hit. Heh... I'll come back to this someday with fallout 6 or so, and see if I was right.

@Sirdanest Well, Bethesda is big on fan service. Weapons in FO3 couldn't be modded. They likely didn't think about that because weapon modding wasn't a thing in the classics. But it became very popular through mods and in FNV, so they go "Oh, you like mods? All right, let's give you the ability to mod your weapon so much that you can turn a pistol into a sniper rifle and vice versa!". It's the same with the ruins. "Oh people liked Vegas because it wasn't a putrid green sludge and you could actually recognize real world locations. Let's make Boston look like there was barely any war at all". The one case where they won't pay attention seems to be when it comes to making the game more complex rather than less.

The interesting thing is their world is simultaneously too well preserved and too destroyed. Monuments, buildings and towns are still standing 200 years later despite the fact that no one has done anything to preserve or restore them. But the world looks like its residents just recently crawled out of the rubble and have barely started restoring it. They don't even clean the places they live in since you can find ruins and skeletons in settlements.

Oh, and then there's Fallout 76 which is really lush. There's barely any radiation there at all.

Fallout 3 water problem, i think, can easily be explained:

-Unexploded, still-live atomic bombs. Let's be honest, Washington DC shoudln't have a single structure standing, since it was supposed to be hit with dozens of atomic bombs, if not hundreds. Removing the tops from the chain of command is a winning strategy. We saw, though, thanks to Megaton, that there was a clear example of an atomic bomb not exploding, while still being live and armed. The water close to it was getting heavily radiated, so it would make sense that lots of bombs might have hit the ocean river without priming, and might be still giving off radiation on the basin, poisoning all the water.
-Lots of nuclear waste. The landscape is filled with nuclear waste barrels. They are everywhere. I might think that the water was getting irradiated even before the bombs sent the world to the apocalypse.

Fallout 3's atmosphere was great. It felt like a harsh, unforgiving wasteland. Despite this, it also was very inviting. From the moment the player steps out of the vault and their vision adjusts to the brightness of the outside world there's a sense of adventure and exploration. It was also a great callback to Oblivion's sewer escape sequence where the player is immediately dropped into this large open world with a thirst for adventure. Bethesda are brilliant at doing this.

The green tint is annoying at first, but only after one mods it out or plays Fallout NV/4/76 do they truly miss the greens of the Capital Wasteland. New Vegas understandably substituted the green for the brown/amber, while Fallout 4 and 76 shamefully went for a Pixar color palette that would've better suited a TES game than a Fallout entry. Sad really. Seems like Bethesda decided to dump all the color Skyrim deserved into Fallout 4.  Unfortunately, Skyrim is a fantasy game and Fallout 4 is the post apocalyptic one, so definitely not the best decision ever made.

And as others have said, it makes sense why the Capital Wasteland is a shithole regardless of whether or not it's been 10 minutes or 200 years. Ironically, Fallout 3 has more diversity in it's landscapes than any other modern Fallout game. Head West and you'll find barren dried up and cracked Wasteland, head East and you'll find dead cities and subway tunnels, head North and you can find Oasis which is full of life and greenery. Fallout 4 is nothing but cities, downtown areas and the Glowing Sea on the South West region of the map which is used for a staggering 1 quest. New Vegas is nothing but pure desert with settlements scattered everywhere.

I think it's absolutely ridiculous that anyone would want a colorful, vivid and lush Fallout game. The player has to be visually immersed and making the game look like a fairytale isn't making me worry about where my next meal or fight is coming from.

Heisenberg wrote:

Fallout 3 has more diversity in it's landscapes than any other modern Fallout game. .

Fallout 76 has more diversity in its landscapes and overall atmosphere than F3-FNV-F4 combined, to be honest.

@Heisenberg

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I think it's absolutely ridiculous that anyone would want a colorful, vivid and lush Fallout game. The player has to be visually immersed and making the game look like a fairytale isn't making me worry about where my next meal or fight is coming from.

The world IS vivid and colorful. You know what isn't immersive for me? Seeing a world completely tinted with an strange artificial green color when that's not something radiation would do. Or the fact that it hasn't changed in the slightest 200 YEARS after the apocalypse happened.

If I am going to be playing a game for hours, which is what Fallout is designed for, I want a setting that I can enjoy. Green-puke tint everywhere gets tedious really fast.

Fallout has never been some sort of Hardcore survival game anyway. I'm never worried about my next meal or fight regardless of how colorful the world is.

gavin gold wrote:

The world IS vivid and colorful. You know what isn't immersive for me? Seeing a world completely tinted with an strange artificial green color when that's not something radiation would do. Or the fact that it hasn't changed in the slightest 200 YEARS after the apocalypse happened.

Fallout apocalypse =/= Real world apocalypse

Fallout apocalypse can be as dramatic as they want it to be. Fallout takes place in an alternate timeline. If they want the effects of the war to last the next 500 years that's what they'll do. People need to stop comparing a real world post apocalypse to Fallout. It's a video game and like all video games design takes priority over realism.

Let's say hypothetically that a future Fallout game takes place 500 years after the Great War. Society has been rebuilt and the effects of the war are nowhere to be seen. Lush forests and clean, pure rivers flow through urban metropolises. Where's the fun in that? And why's this shitty game called 'Fallout' anyway?

I remember walking through Oasis in Fallout 3. I thought "What a beautiful area!". I didn't think "I wish the rest of the Wasteland was like this."

gavin gold wrote:

Fallout has never been some sort of Hardcore survival game anyway.

False.

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Fallout apocalypse can be as dramatic as they want it to be. Fallout takes place in an alternate timeline. If they want the effects of the war to last the next 500 years that's what they'll do. People need to stop comparing a real world post apocalypse to Fallout. It's a video game and like all video games design takes priority over realism.

The franchise itself has established that radiation clears in a few months. Yet 200 years and it is still there? And that's not even the worst part, it's easy to look for ways to justify having highly irradiated areas. The problem is the world is frozen in time. Nothing grows or changes, no one does things as simple as cleaning their windows or removing the trash from the floor.

Adding variety to the world makes for a more interesting setting. Suppose you have proper settlements, and vegetation and pockets of radiation. Now, towns look like small pockets of civilization that contrast with the wasteland, and that contrast makes the ruins stand out more, rather than the whole world being a just a big pile of rubble. Vegetation (which would be mutated just like animals are) grows all around taking over entire buildings and ruins, which is creepy and reinforces the idea that civilization has mostly died out. Pockets of radiation are a throwback to the event that caused all of it and remind you that a mistake that catastrophic cannot be easily fixed. That would be far more interesting, and visually pleasing, than just artificially tinted toxic sludge everywhere.

If you need proof of how much people dislike the green tint, just consider how popular fellout was.

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Let's say hypothetically that a future Fallout game takes place 500 years after the Great War. Society has been rebuilt and the effects of the war are nowhere to be seen. Lush forests and clean, pure rivers flow through urban metropolises. Where's the fun in that? And why's this shitty game called 'Fallout' anyway?

Let me throw the question back at you. Suppose the game takes place 10000 years after the Great War. Should the world still look like the war just happened?

Dude, look, I don't make the games. Criticize Bethesda for making them that far removed from the apocalyptic event, not me for pointing out that it doesn't make sense for the world to still look like the war was a recent event two centuries after it happened.  

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False.

Except it's true. The classics weren't survival games. FO3 wasn't a survival game. FNV and FO4 added hardcore/survival mode which is nice in terms of gameplay but still doesn't make them survival games.

While I feel that different regions would certainly be effected differently by the bombs (look at plant life in comparatively lush regions like Zion and the Mojave vs places like New California and the Capital Wasteland) in most places the bombs would, as others have pointed out, cause total destruction. But there's a greater issue at play here that goes hand in hand with fallout from the great war.

While there is certainly plant life all over the place, but the real issue is lack of nutrients in the soil. The devastating effects of nuclear detonation, contamination from radiation, and the lack of environmental regeneration have had devastating effects on the foundations of plant life. Outside of less polluted regions or well maintained farms, with fertilised and watered soil, most of the wasteland hasn't really got the nutrients to support the kind of plant life we see somewhere like Point Lookout, and even in places where we do find it, plant life is scarce, often malformed and defective, unless you're talking about places like the NCR, where projects and resources have been established to combat this. Even in the commonwealth, the quality of farming crops isn't really that great.

It's not really anything to do with a lack of plant life. There's not a single fallout game that hasn't featured vegetation, it's more to do with how terrible a state most of the planet is in.