Temporal Conflict

[Adipose]

As most of you've probably figured out, there's a temporal aspect of FO4 that's fundamentally in conflict. The nature of the conflict stems from the fact that the "Sole Survivor" was in cryo stasis for 210 years. As a result of that, I question whether the world would still be as thoroughly trashed as it is when the character emerges. In order to play the game I've suspended a lot of disbelief and just forged ahead.

 

[HeyYou]

Well, you have experienced settlers, no? That should explain why the world still looks pretty much the same, even 200 plus years after the war. It seems no one in the commonwealth understands how to use a broom, or shovel, or hammer. :) They just whine a lot, and expect the SS to do everything for them. :)

[aurreth]

A lot of people bring this up, myself included. It usually comes up while discussing "clean" building mods.

 

Bethesda has no concept of time, and apparently everyone there failed history. They can't seem to remember that in less than 100 years we went from horse drawn carts to steam locomotives, and barely 100 years later we landed on the moon. And that was without knowing it could be done, without a leg up from books and computers that survived the apocalypse, without pre-war ghouls that still remember what a broom is. Not to mention people have access to the vaults, arguably the peak of pre-war technology.

 

The whole Institute super science vs. primitive wasteland raiders is the plot of Zardoz, arguably the worst science fiction movie ever made (and not even so bad it's fun to watch, I've tried, you just can't be drunk or stoned enough.) I mean Gen 1 and 2 synths are a treasure trove of salvageable metal, electronics and micromotors. People wouldn't be afraid of them, they'd be hunting them down, setting traps for them, etc. It's not that they are that hard to kill, our ancestors hunted mammoths and sabretooths with far more primitive weapons. And as has been pointed out many, many times no one would blow up the Institute. Invade and conquer, yes, but not destroy (and that should be a mod!)

 

So yes, a tremendous amount of suspension of disbelief (or a total ignorance of history) is required.

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

So much things that I completley agree with!

 

Like, why is there so much useful stuff to loot in all those buildings. After 200 years?

Why are there still locked areas, after 200 years?

 

People would have broken intot and looted every single building within less then a year!

 

Especially things like the military buildings or the vaults!

 

 

I certainly would :laugh:

 

 

 

It almost feels like the rest of the world also got frozen for 200 years, so nothing really happened during that time ...

Except in the institute, where almost "too much" happened:

I mean, how did they even build that place?

Just take the glass of the main elevator as an example:

How did they manage to produce a perfectly straight glass "tube" that his 30 meters high and has a diameter of about 2 meters?

Making something like that would be impossible if you had all the space and resources.

But making something like that in an "improvised" way, underground?

Come on!

Or all the smooth curved metal wall panels?

You need huge machines to bend large sheets of metal like that.

That is not something that you just do with handtools!

 

Sorry for the rant ...

[Madrias]

Sadly, this conflict between 200 years and the amount of trash left around is present in all of the 3D Fallout games.

 

Fallout 3, I could half forgive because it was the first, and because the D.C. Ruins were clearly nuked into oblivion, and there's too many raiders for anyone to be concerned with cleaning up.

 

Fallout New Vegas manages to be a little better about cleaning up some of the mess, but it also feels a lot like 50 years after the bombs, not 200.

 

Fallout 4 continues the trend of feeling like 40 or 50 years after the bombs fell, not 210.

 

All they'd have to do in any one of those games is pick up the trash and remove the corpses from the places they eat, sleep, and work in. New Vegas and Fallout 4 both show communities rebuilding.

 

I could forgive the lack of technological progress because of the lore behind the resource wars, but even still, I agree, there should be signs of people rebuilding more than just communities. Sure, the electronics might be fried, but surely someone can manage to get one of those pre-war vehicles to work. Clearly every raider is a fair hand at slapping together a pipe gun, so why aren't there more variations on crude weapons?

 

Then, as already mentioned, you have the Institute, the pendulum swung too far the other way. It's like they continued with 2077 technology and advanced 200 more years, but with what bloody resources? Synths would be hunted down and destroyed, scavenged for parts.

 

Then there's the endgame issues. If you nuke the Institute, you've just destroyed the most advanced stockpile of technology the world has seen since the great kaboom. It should be possible to tell every faction, "Hey, these guys might have the technology to rebuild the world. How about instead of just blowing it all up, we go through, clear the place out, and keep it for ourselves?" If you shoot down the Prydwen, there should be scavengers everywhere, dying by the dozens to the few Brotherhood survivors as they try to get close enough to pick through all that sweet loot that just fell from the sky.

 

It's a disconnect between "Number of years" and "state of the world" that leads me to always believing the bombs fell 50 years ago, not 200+.

 

I'd love to see a city in Fallout where the residents have gone around and cleaned up their trash, figured out a sustainable source of power, buried the long-dead skeletons and made a graveyard, and then managed to repair a few buildings beyond just "Well, it has four walls, mostly, and there's at least half of a roof, so it's good enough. Sure hope a radscorpion doesn't come through my wall again."

[HeyYou]

The institute may have been there before the war...... At least, that's what I figure, seeing the advanced level of tech there.

 

Sending out synths as scavengers would likely work fairly well too.... if they think they are going to get in trouble, they can just teleport back to their base. Most of the folk of the commonwealth would see that as them being destroyed in some fashion, as teleportation is just WAY out of their league.

[aurreth]

The institute may have been there before the war...... At least, that's what I figure, seeing the advanced level of tech there.

 

Sending out synths as scavengers would likely work fairly well too.... if they think they are going to get in trouble, they can just teleport back to their base. Most of the folk of the commonwealth would see that as them being destroyed in some fashion, as teleportation is just WAY out of their league.

 

I'd have skipped the whole teleport thing. It would be a way more interesting game if you had to locate the secret surface entrance, fight your way through the beasties inhabiting the sewers under CIT, get sidetracked into other tunnels and caves, and finally get to the old Institute robotics labs where they created the robots and early synths needed to build the actual institute. That would be a huge amount of content that would be freakin' easy to make because they already have all the parts. And you'd feel like you actually accomplished something more than killing one courser.

[HeyYou]

 

The institute may have been there before the war...... At least, that's what I figure, seeing the advanced level of tech there.

 

Sending out synths as scavengers would likely work fairly well too.... if they think they are going to get in trouble, they can just teleport back to their base. Most of the folk of the commonwealth would see that as them being destroyed in some fashion, as teleportation is just WAY out of their league.

 

I'd have skipped the whole teleport thing. It would be a way more interesting game if you had to locate the secret surface entrance, fight your way through the beasties inhabiting the sewers under CIT, get sidetracked into other tunnels and caves, and finally get to the old Institute robotics labs where they created the robots and early synths needed to build the actual institute. That would be a huge amount of content that would be freakin' easy to make because they already have all the parts. And you'd feel like you actually accomplished something more than killing one courser.

 

I keep hearing rumors about a hidden physical entrance........ but, have never encountered one myself. Even when I did an institute play-thru...... I like the idea. :) A labyrinth of tunnels/rooms, with one pretty safe path, and a whole bunch of rather dangerous ones. :D

[aurreth]

I keep hearing rumors about a hidden physical entrance........ but, have never encountered one myself. Even when I did an institute play-thru...... I like the idea. :smile: A labyrinth of tunnels/rooms, with one pretty safe path, and a whole bunch of rather dangerous ones. :D

 

There is a physical entry through the sewers. It's located east of Greentech, down in the river. It's enabled at a certain point in the Minuteman story after Sturges finds it using the network scanner tape. Autoload door, InstituteTunnel01ExtToInt, 0017E1C6P.

 

It's way more interesting than "poof, I'm there".

 

Edit: Not "enabled", you can enter the first room any time. But to go further requires a keypad code that Sturges gives you during The Nuclear Option. A 10 second edit to disable the blocking gate and you'd have a physical entrance you could use anytime. lol Might be fun to try it.

Edited August 11, 2021 by aurreth

[HeyYou]

Interesting. :) I may have to go have a look.

 

Would be even more fun to have synths use that entrance occasionally. Might make going in that way more interesting. :D