Fallout 4... is coming (10 Nov 2015)

[Agent Fisher]

So, someone alerted me to easy money. Brahmin feed troughs, to produce fertilizer; scavenging stations, to find items with plastic, plus other random materials.


Chemistry station+fertilizer+plastic= Jet

Jet= caps

The minutemen are now a cartel, cooking and selling Jet across the Commonwealth.

[Vendetta]

I'm not sure what caps are for, except building shops at your settlements to spit out more caps to build more stores. I've never bought anything and I'm level 38.

Reminds me, I need to turn that Starlight Drive-In parking lot into a giant wasteland mall.

[Thunderfire]

I'm not sure what caps are for, except building shops at your settlements to spit out more caps to build more stores. I've never bought anything and I'm level 38.

I bought legendary weapons , ammo and resources.

[Jub]

I'm not sure what caps are for, except building shops at your settlements to spit out more caps to build more stores. I've never bought anything and I'm level 38.

I think caps are supposed to be for buying ammo at higher difficulty settings, that or maybe for buying legendary weapons. I'm not 100% sure myself though.

[PREDATOR490]

the settlement has no food or water. I cannot even build the damn recruitment radio so I have a settlement that cannot be settled... uh ok, thanks Bethseda ?

Supply lines, sir, supply lines. Basically, you select a settler, hit the button for supply lines and send them to a different settlement. They'll establish a route, and from that point on, you can share food, water, and raw materials between those settlements. An example, the Castle has an industrial water station, I added a couple more and supply lined between that the airport, no worry about water. Enough open space at the castle to establish a mutfruit grove, and badda bing, badda bang, enough food for both settlements.

I know about supply lines but the airport settlement confuses me to what the developers were thinking by putting it there.

You can build at the airport but the options related to actually making settlement stuff are restricted.

I.E All the things that are actually for settlers are removed like stores and resources. Even the ability to place the defenses that settlers can be assigned to is removed.
So... it seems that I have the ability to build a settlement that cannot actually be settled but I can build beds - Who the hell am I building beds for then ?
Settlers should only show up if you have a recruitment beacon - Which you cannot build and if they do show up, what are the supposed to be doing ?
No stores, no place to put farming shit down for them and you cant build anything that requires settlers to do a job.


Spoiler

Thus this building area seems designed to have the player build a personal base next to the BOS - Fair enough but then the map shows a happiness indicator for this settlement. Who the hell am I supposed to be keeping happy if noone lives there ?
My extra companions if I decide to 'base' them there - Do I seriously need to feed / supply my companions at this base ?

Alternatively, the Settlers that show up are going to end up being my own personal army sitting right next to a BOS base - ultimately, that seems a bit strange and sets up for a massive disconnect in belief. BOS is going to let the player assemble a personal fortress of 20 soldiers outside their base and what will the player even need them for ?
Your stuck with one companion so building a base of personal soldiers that sit around doing nothing is... pointless.

This got even more confusing because when the BOS Prydwen shows up it ALSO has a settlement indicator with Happiness and population. So you have the Airport settlement directly under the Prydwen and the Prydwen itself as a settlement which is technically the same damn place. I sent companions to the airport - I ended up with different population / happiness numbers between the Prydwen and the Airport. After seeing this, I decided to just ditch the area and setup elsewhere because it was making me nervous about the game story turning this into a future nightmare.

Not to mention that I ended up having companions disappearing randomly into a magic room you cannot access next to your settlement. I used the command to let me walk through the wall to figure out what was going on. Oh look, the magic room has bits of Liberty Prime inside it and I just built a base right outside the doors. It does not take much of a leap of thought to conclude that room will be accessible later and / or lead to a story conclusion which I may have potentially screwed up by building a complex outside the doors. If a fight breaks out... holy shit is my computer going to collapse at having 20+ NPCs vs all the Brotherhood and the Prydwen overhead.

For a giggle, I started a fight with the BOS just to see how badly it went - Things did not go well for the BOS until the game engine crashed as air support goes up against my fortress defenses.

I can just imagine what will happen if the BOS goes hostile while I have all my companions and 20 settlers sitting in a custom built fortress outside Liberty Prime's armory underneath the BOS Airship. Thus, I am in the process of repacking and moving to the movie theater.

The building system is awful in this game but it is further made silly because the areas where you can actually build are restricted. The game would give the illusion that players can free-form build what ever they want but the size limitation puts a cap on how much you can build in an area.
Then you have pre-selected areas where you can build which suffer from issues with the free-form aspect.

I.E The building stuff is primarily focused on using flat squares so they give the player terrain which is rarely flat so you end up with buildings 'floating' or clipping horrifically with other objects. This is why I seriously think the settlement system should have been better implemented by having a one or two free form sandbox areas the player can use which are made specifically easy to build on. Thus, make it flat, no objects and nothing nearby to cause issues.

Instead they give the player multiple areas with pre-established objects that cannot be removed and terrain that actively works against the game engine. I.E AI that ends up falling through floors or pre-fab buildings that hover off the ground with no support.

[TheFeniX]

I.E The building stuff is primarily focused on using flat squares so they give the player terrain which is rarely flat so you end up with buildings 'floating' or clipping horrifically with other objects. This is why I seriously think the settlement system should have been better implemented by having a one or two free form sandbox areas the player can use which are made specifically easy to build on. Thus, make it flat, no objects and nothing nearby to cause issues.

Under Wood > Floors there's foundations of wood and concrete. These are allowed to be placed clipping into the ground to give you a flat surface to build off of. Don't feel bad for not figuring this out because it's not fucking explained at all. Of course, this eats into your build limit even more.

[Jub]

They should have made an auto extruding foundations for prefabricated building chunks, and floors. That way you could start a building on a hill and a concrete foundation would come down from it and fill in the gap that would otherwise having your building hover. Things like placeable support pillars, for making raised buildings, would also help with making structures look less stupid.

Giving you more tools like the ability to deform terrain, remove skeletons, tear down unwanted structures, build on a grid, build from an overhead view, etc. would have also been very nice. As would more options, documentation on how settlement building works, a corkboard where you can assign settlers new tasks (and see what they're current doing) without having to go find them, and the ability to make named characters in settlements actually work, would turn settlements into a feature I'd feel better about using.

[PREDATOR490]

I.E The building stuff is primarily focused on using flat squares so they give the player terrain which is rarely flat so you end up with buildings 'floating' or clipping horrifically with other objects. This is why I seriously think the settlement system should have been better implemented by having a one or two free form sandbox areas the player can use which are made specifically easy to build on. Thus, make it flat, no objects and nothing nearby to cause issues.

Under Wood > Floors there's foundations of wood and concrete. These are allowed to be placed clipping into the ground to give you a flat surface to build off of. Don't feel bad for not figuring this out because it's not fucking explained at all. Of course, this eats into your build limit even more.

Can get around the build limit aspect with cheat engine - Until a mod comes out that fixes it at least

That said, I use concrete foundation and the NPCs have issues falling through them or if you try to build on wildly erratic terrain those blocks can end up being just as bad for hovering off the ground. Not to mention that if you want to bypass stupid things like bushes clipping through the floor you have to set the foundation high enough to over shoot them which further enhances the chance you will be hovering off the ground. Naturally, this avoids the fact that even building a floor foundation of decent size can easily chew up the entire extent of your size allotment.

Built a new complex at the movie lot - Easily the best spot I have encountered due to it being nicely flat. It would have been really damn helpful if the game would allow a 'Scrap All crap' option for building. It is kinda a dick move to give players a zone to build in with a set limit on what they can build then pre-fill it with garbage the player has to individually find and trash which goes from entire buildings to broken lights on the ground.

Especially annoying when the movie lot has a bunch of radioactive containers that need to be removed but unless your suitably protected your gonna be lit up scrapping the damn things.

[TheFeniX]

Built a new complex at the movie lot - Easily the best spot I have encountered due to it being nicely flat. It would have been really damn helpful if the game would allow a 'Scrap All crap' option for building. It is kinda a dick move to give players a zone to build in with a set limit on what they can build then pre-fill it with garbage the player has to individually find and trash which goes from entire buildings to broken lights on the ground.

I have had to remove so much out of The Castle in order to make room for my stellar defense work. Settlers get food and beds, nothing else. They can sleep with the sound of multiple Heavy Laser and Missile Turrets instead. I'd do some traps, but you waste so much build junk trying to wire them all up to switches. And they don't last long anyway.

Especially annoying when the movie lot has a bunch of radioactive containers that need to be removed but unless your suitably protected your gonna be lit up scrapping the damn things.

Yea, I didn't know they were scrappable at first, but I already had a hazmat suit from some crazy guy's little shelter out east.

I'm still looking for a new place to send all my companions. A little piece of home. Annoyingly, Home Plate would be a good place for this, but you can't send them there. It's an interior cell with plenty of buildables to let them sandbox. Annoys me how much of an afterthought it was. Since getting the Beer Bot for Sancutary, a lot of the NPCs like to congregate around it. Has made the areas annoying. I've tried to setup a pub with a TV, jukebox, etc. But no one uses it and you can't move Beer Bot within an area, only send him somewhere else.

Oh well, waiting for mods. Although from what I've read, the Skyrim SDK actually works (about 80%) with F4. I might try and give it a go this weekend. See what I can break.

[Typhonis 1]

Adhesive is gold. 3 tato+ 3 mutfruit+ 3 corn + 1 purified water = 5 adhesive. All you need are some plants or settlements...Abernathy Farm and Greygarden....a cooking station Sanctuary Hills and viola....caps and experience for free.

[PREDATOR490]

Built a new complex at the movie lot - Easily the best spot I have encountered due to it being nicely flat. It would have been really damn helpful if the game would allow a 'Scrap All crap' option for building. It is kinda a dick move to give players a zone to build in with a set limit on what they can build then pre-fill it with garbage the player has to individually find and trash which goes from entire buildings to broken lights on the ground.

I have had to remove so much out of The Castle in order to make room for my stellar defense work. Settlers get food and beds, nothing else. They can sleep with the sound of multiple Heavy Laser and Missile Turrets instead. I'd do some traps, but you waste so much build junk trying to wire them all up to switches. And they don't last long anyway.

Especially annoying when the movie lot has a bunch of radioactive containers that need to be removed but unless your suitably protected your gonna be lit up scrapping the damn things.

Yea, I didn't know they were scrappable at first, but I already had a hazmat suit from some crazy guy's little shelter out east.

I'm still looking for a new place to send all my companions. A little piece of home. Annoyingly, Home Plate would be a good place for this, but you can't send them there. It's an interior cell with plenty of buildables to let them sandbox. Annoys me how much of an afterthought it was. Since getting the Beer Bot for Sancutary, a lot of the NPCs like to congregate around it. Has made the areas annoying. I've tried to setup a pub with a TV, jukebox, etc. But no one uses it and you can't move Beer Bot within an area, only send him somewhere else.

Oh well, waiting for mods. Although from what I've read, the Skyrim SDK actually works (about 80%) with F4. I might try and give it a go this weekend. See what I can break.

I gave up on the Castle as soon as I saw the damn thing. That place personifies the problem of handing the player a place to build in that is completely wrecked and cannot be repaired or cleaned up to make building sensible. It makes no damn sense to occupy a position that is wrecked into a state that makes fortifying it impossible and the game wont let you actually fix things up.
Same goes for places like Sanctuary - Give the player wrecked homes that cannot be scrapped but do not allow them to be fixed up even as much as patching up the holes in the walls.

This is what makes the free-form building aspect ironic - Give the players the ability to build their own complexes and you end up with players constructing mega fortresses out of garbage while the 'major' powers or population centers of the franchise have been sitting in ruins of for 200 years.
By the time the player is done with a small amount of their exploration of FO4 it gets amusing the player is looting tin cans and bottlecaps when it is reasonable for the player to be literally ripping walls down / tearing out the various technology freely lying around in ruins to feed the settlement system.
I even hoped that was what the game would end up doing. Since the loot aspect of the game dies quickly so having the player loot for the settlements would make going into the ruins worth more than some random guns and food stashes.

[Enigma]

I also find it really idiotic that even after 210 years, no one has managed to build a house without a multitude of holes. If people from all the way up to the 19th century can build homes that does not look like Swiss cheese, then why can't the survivors of the 23rd century?

[Gaidin]

I also find it really idiotic that even after 210 years, no one has managed to build a house without a multitude of holes. If people from all the way up to the 19th century can build homes that does not look like Swiss cheese, then why can't the survivors of the 23rd century?

Best guess? Sudden mass loss of specialized skill. Cities tend to be like that. I need a wall fixed, the first place I go is a phone. Picture the vast majority of that getting killed or massively handicapped within seconds or a few weeks. You might have better luck in the Appalachians or areas that were less likely to be targeted. Or if they were targeted the people were just more likely to know how to fix a wall because it'd save a buck to buy the material and fix it themselves.

[Jub]

Best guess? Sudden mass loss of specialized skill. Cities tend to be like that. I need a wall fixed, the first place I go is a phone. Picture the vast majority of that getting killed or massively handicapped within seconds or a few weeks. You might have better luck in the Appalachians or areas that were less likely to be targeted. Or if they were targeted the people were just more likely to know how to fix a wall because it'd save a buck to buy the material and fix it themselves.

That would cause problems for the first ten years, maybe even an entire generation, but what about the other 190 years after that? Did nobody even think to nail a few more boards or sheets of metal over massive open gaps? Seriously when shacks in a favela or in the poorest parts of Africa look better than anything in the wasteland after 210 years of rebuilding, that's not due to a sudden lack of skill.

[Gaidin]

You're asking about building a house in an environment where the traditional reaction if you survive is to run for the hills. You moving the goalposts to boarding the holes and windows now? There is plenty of that, mostly used as environmental exploration limitation by level designers, but it's there. Not my fault you miss it. Now move your goalpost back to building a building itself.

[Jub]

You're asking about building a house in an environment where the traditional reaction if you survive is to run for the hills. You moving the goalposts to boarding the holes and windows now? There is plenty of that, mostly used as environmental exploration limitation by level designers, but it's there. Not my fault you miss it. Now move your goalpost back to building a building itself.

First of all, the original statement that your replied to was,

"I also find it really idiotic that even after 210 years, no one has managed to build a house without a multitude of holes."

So statements about simply patching existing homes make sense. This isn't to mention that that the people in your settlements, specifically Sanctuary can't figure out how to fix the still standing builds located there when given months to do so. Also, we do see houses built post war, such as the shack built up at the Abernathy Farm. However, this house is still just a random collection of junk nailed into something vaguely house shaped, it's still going to be draughty, leaky, and generally not a very pleasant place to live. This isn't how real people would choose to live, especially not given 200 years to do better.

If we look at the poorest places in the world today, they still manage to craft better housing than what we see in fallout 4. Take for example the Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, it's not a nice place to live by modern standards, but it's a damn sight better than what we see in fallout. It's not exactly built by educated citizens either. If you'd rather an example from someplace that's more of a wasteland how about we look at houses and markets built in Niger, one of the poorest and least developed places in the world.



This is a step above most markets we'll see in the wasteland.



Even in a place with little to work with besides the very earth, we see sturdy mud brick houses. Even if that takes more skill than nailing junk to junk, you'd think people would manage this in 200 years.

That said, the wasteland does have trees, trees that will grow back if given time, and that makes building something like a log cabin pretty easy to accomplish. All you'd need is an axe, which is well within the tech level we see in fallout. If you wanted to get fancier you would probably want a saw and a hand drill, but you don't need anything other than those tools and some trees to build a solid log house. So why doesn't anybody build something extremely simple like a log cabin, with a stone hearth in the 200 years after the bombs?

[TheFeniX]

I generally ignore the stupidity of the Fallout setting. Beth dropped the post-post apocalyptic setting (humanity actually rebuilding) and went with a simple post-apocalyptic one. The idea that people are surviving in an area with water so toxic swimming in it for 30 seconds will kill you and radiation storms is dumb. But the gameplay works out.

What doesn't work out is that post-apo humans can build large settlements, laser-muskets, artillery, clean salt-water for drinking use, etc: and yet will play a "hammer on wall" animation for years and never even weld a flat piece of steel back onto a metal house frame. You can't even disable the houses with the console. It's seems to require editing the actual cell. Or that painting the super--huge stadium walls with green paint is important, but leaving everything else as rusted shacks is fine.

Anyways: weather commands have been found. About 3/4 through the page. I've been enjoying FW 001ca7e4 so much. I made a batch file for it. You can also modify any NPC appearance through SLM combined with a bit of camera manipulation.

[Gaidin]

You're asking about building a house in an environment where the traditional reaction if you survive is to run for the hills. You moving the goalposts to boarding the holes and windows now? There is plenty of that, mostly used as environmental exploration limitation by level designers, but it's there. Not my fault you miss it. Now move your goalpost back to building a building itself.

First of all, the original statement that your replied to was,

"I also find it really idiotic that even after 210 years, no one has managed to build a house without a multitude of holes."

So statements about simply patching existing homes make sense. This isn't to mention that that the people in your settlements, specifically Sanctuary can't figure out how to fix the still standing builds located there when given months to do so. Also, we do see houses built post war, such as the shack built up at the Abernathy Farm. However, this house is still just a random collection of junk nailed into something vaguely house shaped, it's still going to be draughty, leaky, and generally not a very pleasant place to live. This isn't how real people would choose to live, especially not given 200 years to do better.

If we look at the poorest places in the world today, they still manage to craft better housing than what we see in fallout 4. Take for example the Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, it's not a nice place to live by modern standards, but it's a damn sight better than what we see in fallout. It's not exactly built by educated citizens either. If you'd rather an example from someplace that's more of a wasteland how about we look at houses and markets built in Niger, one of the poorest and least developed places in the world.



This is a step above most markets we'll see in the wasteland.



Even in a place with little to work with besides the very earth, we see sturdy mud brick houses. Even if that takes more skill than nailing junk to junk, you'd think people would manage this in 200 years.

That said, the wasteland does have trees, trees that will grow back if given time, and that makes building something like a log cabin pretty easy to accomplish. All you'd need is an axe, which is well within the tech level we see in fallout. If you wanted to get fancier you would probably want a saw and a hand drill, but you don't need anything other than those tools and some trees to build a solid log house. So why doesn't anybody build something extremely simple like a log cabin, with a stone hearth in the 200 years after the bombs?

Can we dig that shit into the concrete ground that is our society? You're showing me the dirt that is africa. Not the modern technology I can wing off of after a nuclear explosion after everybody that knows anything has run away if they haven't died. Really.

[Jub]

Can we dig that shit into the concrete ground that is our society? You're showing me the dirt that is africa. Not the modern technology I can wing off of after a nuclear explosion after everybody that knows anything has run away if they haven't died. Really.

Yes, because concrete and asphalt don't last hundreds of years without maintenance, not to mention that a pickax would break up a concrete slab pretty well given a bit of time and some hard days work. If you look at real life examples of abandoned cities they decay pretty rapidly when they aren't maintained. Look at Chernobyl and how degraded it is after 30 years. Now try to picture that another 180 later, hint it won't look like Fallout 4.

This isn't even taking into account that most of the game's area isn't paved over. There is a lot of dirt to dig in, lots of trees to cut, loads of rocks to quarry so all the raw materials for new buildings are there. Given that crops seem to take around a day to mature in the crazy fertile soil of the wasteland, you could even start tree farms for lumber.

The fact of the matter is that there is no excuse for the way the Fallout setting is.

[Enigma]

I'm beginning to wonder if the reason we can't scrap the rest of the houses in Sanctuary is that Bethesda will release a DLC allowing us the ability to demolishing them and add more building abilities for a price. In fact, I'm practically betting on that happening.

[Vendetta]

This isn't even taking into account that most of the game's area isn't paved over. There is a lot of dirt to dig in, lots of trees to cut, loads of rocks to quarry so all the raw materials for new buildings are there. Given that crops seem to take around a day to mature in the crazy fertile soil of the wasteland, you could even start tree farms for lumber.

The fact of the matter is that there is no excuse for the way the Fallout setting is.

There's even actual iron mining and smelting going on.

Except the only people who can be fucked with it ever are raiders. (The Pitt in FO3 and the Forged/Dunwich in FO4).

Fallout 4 isn't as bad as Fallout 3 for being a wasteland of incurious idiots who have never left their houses in two hundred years and can't even sweep the fucking floors, but it's still nowhere near as much of a world as the non-Beth Fallout games.

[ray245]

Built a new complex at the movie lot - Easily the best spot I have encountered due to it being nicely flat. It would have been really damn helpful if the game would allow a 'Scrap All crap' option for building. It is kinda a dick move to give players a zone to build in with a set limit on what they can build then pre-fill it with garbage the player has to individually find and trash which goes from entire buildings to broken lights on the ground.

I have had to remove so much out of The Castle in order to make room for my stellar defense work. Settlers get food and beds, nothing else. They can sleep with the sound of multiple Heavy Laser and Missile Turrets instead. I'd do some traps, but you waste so much build junk trying to wire them all up to switches. And they don't last long anyway.

Especially annoying when the movie lot has a bunch of radioactive containers that need to be removed but unless your suitably protected your gonna be lit up scrapping the damn things.

Yea, I didn't know they were scrappable at first, but I already had a hazmat suit from some crazy guy's little shelter out east.

I'm still looking for a new place to send all my companions. A little piece of home. Annoyingly, Home Plate would be a good place for this, but you can't send them there. It's an interior cell with plenty of buildables to let them sandbox. Annoys me how much of an afterthought it was. Since getting the Beer Bot for Sancutary, a lot of the NPCs like to congregate around it. Has made the areas annoying. I've tried to setup a pub with a TV, jukebox, etc. But no one uses it and you can't move Beer Bot within an area, only send him somewhere else.

Oh well, waiting for mods. Although from what I've read, the Skyrim SDK actually works (about 80%) with F4. I might try and give it a go this weekend. See what I can break.

I gave up on the Castle as soon as I saw the damn thing. That place personifies the problem of handing the player a place to build in that is completely wrecked and cannot be repaired or cleaned up to make building sensible. It makes no damn sense to occupy a position that is wrecked into a state that makes fortifying it impossible and the game wont let you actually fix things up.
Same goes for places like Sanctuary - Give the player wrecked homes that cannot be scrapped but do not allow them to be fixed up even as much as patching up the holes in the walls.

This is what makes the free-form building aspect ironic - Give the players the ability to build their own complexes and you end up with players constructing mega fortresses out of garbage while the 'major' powers or population centers of the franchise have been sitting in ruins of for 200 years.
By the time the player is done with a small amount of their exploration of FO4 it gets amusing the player is looting tin cans and bottlecaps when it is reasonable for the player to be literally ripping walls down / tearing out the various technology freely lying around in ruins to feed the settlement system.
I even hoped that was what the game would end up doing. Since the loot aspect of the game dies quickly so having the player loot for the settlements would make going into the ruins worth more than some random guns and food stashes.

You can sort of fix the wall without mods. Simply use the wooden falls with concrete pavement to build a new wall. That works out quite well for me.

Yes, because concrete and asphalt don't last hundreds of years without maintenance, not to mention that a pickax would break up a concrete slab pretty well given a bit of time and some hard days work. If you look at real life examples of abandoned cities they decay pretty rapidly when they aren't maintained. Look at Chernobyl and how degraded it is after 30 years. Now try to picture that another 180 later, hint it won't look like Fallout 4.

This isn't even taking into account that most of the game's area isn't paved over. There is a lot of dirt to dig in, lots of trees to cut, loads of rocks to quarry so all the raw materials for new buildings are there. Given that crops seem to take around a day to mature in the crazy fertile soil of the wasteland, you could even start tree farms for lumber.

The fact of the matter is that there is no excuse for the way the Fallout setting is.

There's actually one town that doesn't look like a shack in Convenant. I turned that place into my settlement as fast as I could with nice beds and etc.

[Nephtys]

Fallout 4 has some oddities in how it's written that are... well. Sorta off-putting.
It's cool that you're now a pre-war person who's been frozen. That's great, it makes you the anachronism who can be ignorant of how things are, and also be the special mary-sue savior as you're actually someone unique. Unlike NV, where this random mail deliverer actually is an ultra badass savior.

But for a 200-ish year post-apocalypse, people sure behave as if they were direct survivors or only a generation after, with references to how sucky it is to live after the world's ended, habits and clothing and mannerisms that seem at odds with what'd seem to be like 5-6 generations of folks who've only known the post-apocalypse. They instead continue to enjoy pre-war foods, clothings, etc that make it all feel like the nuclear war had just happened within living memory.

But well. Game's still fun to explore.

[Gaidin]

Yes, because concrete and asphalt don't last hundreds of years without maintenance, not to mention that a pickax would break up a concrete slab pretty well given a bit of time and some hard days work. If you look at real life examples of abandoned cities they decay pretty rapidly when they aren't maintained. Look at Chernobyl and how degraded it is after 30 years. Now try to picture that another 180 later, hint it won't look like Fallout 4.

This is a fair realistic timeline point. But it's not really making a point about what's on screen. The foundations are still there, the roads are still there. What you're saying is they should've called an engineer and said what would this crap be like in 200 years without good maintainence. That I agree with. But the average person isn't building on that crap unless it's mostly a lean-to. And unless they're just kind of living in what's already there and boarding over what's already there.

This isn't even taking into account that most of the game's area isn't paved over. There is a lot of dirt to dig in, lots of trees to cut, loads of rocks to quarry so all the raw materials for new buildings are there. Given that crops seem to take around a day to mature in the crazy fertile soil of the wasteland, you could even start tree farms for lumber.

Is most of suburbia around Boston? Or did they break off their own timeline in the 50s? I honestly can't tell you how much they winged on their own there and how much might have been...similar.

The fact of the matter is that there is no excuse for the way the Fallout setting is.

The fact of the matter is, there never has been according to you. Most of them should have every building you're in falling down around you if you want to name a number like 30. That's fine. But lets look at the Fallout setting. Fallout took place 84 years after the war. Fallout 2 took place 164 years after the war. Fallout 3 took place 200 years after the war. Fallout: New Vegas took place 204 years after the war. Fallout 4 is taking place 210 years after the war.

One question: Now we bitch? After looking the other way for so long? Nah. I liked the setting for the others. I've got no reason not to like this one unless I either A) just don't like Boston(which I'm loving) or B) feel like being a hypocrite. As a programmer/EE who has to put up with movies and TV shows bullshitting my profession all the fucking time...suspension of disbelief is a...unique talent. I'll live. Why? Because fun.

[Vendetta]

The fact of the matter is, there never has been according to you. Most of them should have every building you're in falling down around you if you want to name a number like 30. That's fine. But lets look at the Fallout setting. Fallout took place 84 years after the war. Fallout 2 took place 164 years after the war. Fallout 3 took place 200 years after the war. Fallout: New Vegas took place 204 years after the war. Fallout 4 is taking place 210 years after the war.

Fallout 1 and 2 largely don't consist of a few people sheltering in the ruins of the pre-war America though.

They consist of settlements wholly built after the war and of varying complexities.

New Vegas has a mix of new settlements like Goodsprings, Nipton, and Novac (which all have reasonable structural integrity for the inhabited homes) and existing ones like Primm and Vegas which are in reasonable repair (and again possess far more structural integrity than the random collections of leaky junk seen in Bethesda's Fallout games.

The other Fallout games sell the world as one that has rebuilt after the apocalypse, but has done it in a weird way.

Bethesda's Fallout games don't sell their timeline, Black Isle/Obsidian's do.