The issue is that the games do not really hint at this. Little Lamplight is literally some pre-war field trip troop of kids that's been going on for a century. When the bombs dropped is when it started. If it was maybe some settlements little storage bunker and the kids distrust adults because some Raider group killed their parents and tried to enslave them it make some more sense, or if it was literally some orphanage.
Honestly, if the game really was supposed to take place 12 years after the war and they changed it mid production, then the lack of explanation makes sense. It's sloppy, tho. They really should have tried to make SOME sort of explanation as to why there are still a colony of kids there 200 years after the original group. Like, a simple encounter of a woman leaving her child at the gate telling them that this is a better life for them, only to walk out in the wastes and eventually get killed after leaving Lamplight. Then you at least get the idea that this is a sort of orphanage for desperate wastelanders.
Oh man, I hope it has tons of heccin' self aware quips!
This is really the only way I can rationalize a lot of the retarded shit in Fallout 3. If you just shift the clock back to 10 years after the bombs fell the whole game makes so much more sense.
It's just another reference to Fallout 3. Bethesda added The Zetans to the lore with 3 and it's basically just the same thing as in that game. There's a crashed alien ship that's hard to find and full of radiation that gives you the alien blaster. Same shtick, it's meant to get you to clap and fart and shit yourself all over because you recognize it from that other game you like.
Oh fuck you're totally right I completely forgot. I need to play Fallout 1 again, I've been holding off on playing classic Fallouts again for the Sonora translation.
I feel like the 'it was a gag' argument falls apart when those things were treated with exactly the same relevance as finding Dogmeat, or, to belabor a point, the Zetans in 4.
With Starfield having its own set of Traits, maybe there's hope something like Wild Wasteland can return in a future Fallout.
Honestly, I agree. I've even seen New Vegas modders hide shit behind the Wild Wasteland trait. And you could use it to such great effect. Unique weapons held by a dangerous enemy, special boss encounters with a giant firebreathing Deathclaw named Godzilla, and clever little references. And if you're not a fan of seeing some pop culture references or having some sillier encounters you just... don't take the trait.
Again, the original Fallouts and the background lore of Fallout pretty much saw American exceptionalism as a bad thing, and anti-communist America was portrayed as some kind of corrupt, hedonistic society that kinda deserved to get nuked, so I don't really see this as a departure. It's like when Warhammer 40K started appealing to SJWs and some 40K fans got pissed, ignorant of the fact that Warhammer 40K was made as a satire of what Britain's Left saw as conservative militarism and religious fanaticism.
I'M just tired of "adaptations".
Don't forget the Fist of the North Rawr weapon in Lonesome Road Wild Wasteland gives you... which sadly doesn't cause your enemies to explode when killed.
I mean, it legitimately depends. I'd hate to live in one of the big cities in the Fallout world for obvious reasons, but the suburbs and rural areas are probably decent enough places to live. Keep in mind the USA is also the last intact nation on Earth pretty much, having both the last real reserves of oil as well as a very slow but still steady roll-out of fusion power to replace fossil fuels. That intact and productive industrial base also meant it was making bank exporting consumer goods to a completely wiped-out Europe following their war against the Middle East. Going by the Fallout Bible (and Fallout 3/4) the Chinese invaded Alaska in 2066, so the US that's presented to us right when the nukes fly has been engaged in a bloody war of attrition against the Chinese for eleven years, including Chinese use of bioweapons against us (hence initializing the Pan-Immunity Virion Project to immunize everyone against every disease, but we know what comes out of that once the side effects happen). It isn't until 2076 that we see a major breakdown in law and order in the US with food riots as a result of wartime shortages hitting their peak, and that's with us engaging in a land war not just in Asia but China itself for the past two years to force them to redeploy men and supplies away from Alaska.
