I'll say up front I don't expect anyone else to have this same perception, but, it's been in my head for years and is hard to shake now.

Here it is.
There was no all-out nuclear war. Yeah. The lore in f1 and f2 was wrong, or deeply exaggerated. Sure, there were nuclear explosions and there was a terrible war with China. The glowing sea and a few other such spots exist, yes. But a full-on nuclear war? For me, almost certainly not. I believe it was meant, lore-wise, to have been a nuclear war in the old days. But it's effectively ret-conned now.

From Fallout 1:
"In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders."

From New Vegas:
"They returned with tales of a city untouched by the warheads that had scorched the rest of the world."

New Vegas is supposed to be UNIQUELY spared the apocalypse, that reduced the world to cinders. Boston is in bad shape, technically, but it actually probably looks better than Boston's ruins would actually look if they were abandoned for 200 years. The city itself absolutely does not look nuked, not at all. Ruined for 200 years, sure, but not nuked. Concord looks surprisingly close to pristine.
Don't get me started on the greenery in f76, twenty-five years after the world was supposedly reduced to cinders. If anything at all that should be 100% proof that the world wasn't reduced to cinders. 25 years isn't enough time to recover from the sheer brutality of the annihilation described in the earlier games.

Next, immigration. We see foreign accents like Irish, Russian, and many others, not just on the east coast, but all the way across the country. There is a New Zealander in the Mojave! Just stop for a moment and think about the difficulty it would be, not just for these people to still be alive, but to be able to travel that distance -- and even WANT to travel that far away into the unknown. So maybe Russia and New Zealand are in such bad shape that people would be willing to flee all that way. But, if they're that bad off, how did they do it? How did New Zealand even know about the Khans, know that there was a home waiting for them so many thousands of miles away? Build a ship out of cinders? It's more like that the devs just went "Lol I like accents" and didn't think any further.

The only conclusion is that continents did not sink into the ocean. The entire world was not reduced to cinders. Major cities like Boston were inexplicably not targeted by nukes, and I guarantee you Boston would have been a target. But they just weren't -- We can see it with our eyes so clearly. It wasn't hit.

I have this opinion as well with each game slowly adding more lore from the outside world. We were made to believe the outside world was destroyed by nuclear fire but as the series goes on it shows that there are other people out there that survived it's just the games are only touching the surface. Bethesda with the next game could do multiple locations set in other countries. We had VR, Space, etc so I believe some outside world things would be for the best and with future hardware that makes it more of an likely outcome.
Not only that but going more into the outside world we have to talk about the oceans which was one of the areas the was heavily underused in Fallout 4 but overall location wise. We know next to nothing about it and Fallout 4 had the chance to at least have a semi interesting sea besides the submarine.

I think Rage was a better Bethesda take on a 'wasteland' with genuine struggling against the apocalypse than Fallout 3+ but you never know.. they might base the next game in México or Alaska where there was heavy nuclear bombardment or warfare. + with much more powerful consoles and computers and a better game engine hopefully we will see a proper world destroyed survival rpg again like the originals.. and no goddamn building hopefullyy!!!!

i have a fallout head cannon too but i no share

Bethesda just can't keep their writing straight. They've straight-up admitted that they don't care when questioned about Jet in Pre-War vaults.

At this point with how inconsistent every game is with the other, you're free to imagine whatever you want as canon, Fallout's identity is pretty all over the place and is more of a theme than a canon at this point, especially with the ridiculousness that is Fallout 76.

bizzclaw wrote:

Bethesda just can't keep their writing straight. They've straight-up admitted that they don't care when questioned about Jet in Pre-War vaults.

At this point with how inconsistent every game is with the other, you're free to imagine whatever you want as canon, Fallout's identity is pretty all over the place and is more of a theme than a canon at this point, especially with the ridiculousness that is Fallout 76.

That is the way I see it. Especially because we don't know when they will make a new one . Even then you are right their writing keeps getting worse for the series as times goes on.

Fallout lore is absolutely dead in the water if they do fallout 5 with the assumption that 76 is canon.
This coming from me, who was fairly chill (compared to the rest of the internet rage) about fallout 4.
There was no nuclear war as described in 1 and 2. Just... not. The world seen in '76, twenty years after the "bombs" is just too... living, too green for a world that was reduced to radioactive ash, with whole continents sinking.

I would love to see something set way further in the future, where there is nothing left, or even a second nuclear war, with the NCR, so you get double wasteland.