FAO Feral Ghouls: You Are Not Zombies

[SiNNeR]

your body and brain have been damaged by extreme doses of radiation. you did not rise up out of a grave. you have no reason to congregate in grave yards. despite all similarities to zombie tropes you are actually not zombies. stop pandering to trends you don't even have the ability to acknowledge

thank you

 

 

 

 

 

seriously, this just makes no real sense. I understand the design reasons for it, given the popularity of zombies, but lorewise it doesn't really seem to make any kind of sense at all. granted ferals seem to be scattered all over the commonwealth (is it just my imagination or is the ratio overwhelmingly skewed towards feral ghouls rather than regular ghouls in comparison to other Fallout games?) but their preferred habitat does seem to be rather zombinspired

[Arnaeus]

Maybe they're rapidly decomposing and subconsciously looking for a place to rest? ;)

 

I didn't notice the number of ghouls on graveyards. Most of them keep attacking me in swamps and half sunken villages or in areas full of toxic waste. But you're right about the number of feral vs regular ghouls. I find more ferals in one place than regulars in all of my settlements.

[Raycheetah]

Given that old cemeteries in FO4 are (mostly, with the exception of one, raider-occupied mausoleum) not valued territory by pretty much any other sort of enemy, and that ghouls are pretty much everywhere, it should come as no great surprise that they are what turns up in these abandoned graveyards. I could see the point of the complaint if they crawled up out of the graves, but they're merely loitering among the tombstones, much as they do anywhere else they're found. ='[.]'=

[Moraelin]

Pretty sure that FO3 already had FAR more ferals than regular ghouls. The non-feral ghouls can be counted on your fingers. There's Gob, the Underworld gang, Roy and his gal, and I'm drawing blanks when I try to remember any more. On the other hand, ferals were EVERYWHERE. There was no shortage of them in almost all metro tunnels and stations. Hell, even the museum of history had more ferals INSIDE than the non-ferals, and that was the main non-feral settlement.

 

New Vegas also had OVERWHELMINGLY more ferals than non-ferals. In fact, it had only a couple of non-ferals total.

 

Also, yeah, here they turn up in just about any place that hasn't been cleared out by raiders or supermutants or such. Hubris Comics or Super Duper Mart or the national guard training place for example have a LOT of them, and they're hardly cemeteries. Cemeteries don't even have that many ghouls, by comparison. I'm pretty sure there were more ghouls in, say, Hubris Comics than in any cemetery on the map.

 

As Raycheetah says, it seems to me like cemeteries just fit as the kind of place where nobody goes in to clear the ghouls.

[Warmaker01]

Feral Ghouls had always been more abundant than the regular ones. Even going back to FO1 & FO2, there would be 1-2 regular Ghouls in a mixed population, and MAYBE 1 area where it was heavily populated by regular Ghouls. But you encounter far more of the hostile, Feral variety. I remember being a bit too trigger happy in FO1 & FO2 and started preemptively shooting at "regular" Ghouls because of far too many encounters with the Feral variety. They didn't move like the Ferals do in FO4 which is a new thing. Ferals were found anywhere but going inside a ruined building and most especially underground locations was a sure bet in finding them. This was persistent in the FO games.

[mwhenry16]

Feral vs regular: the equalizer is bullets.

[Arnaeus]

Question: Is it fallout lore that there are more ferals than regular ghouls and more human badguys than settlers or is it just because the player needs something to kill?

[Moraelin]

Well, as you undoubtedly realize, there really is no other fallout lore than what's in the games. It's not like they're based on any books or anything, so there really is no other source of lore than what was in the games.

 

And as Warmaker said, in ALL the canon Fallout games there were more ferals than civilized ghouls. So I guess that's the lore.

[Arnaeus]

What you get to see and whats lore (i.e. written in ingame logs of mad scientists) can be different. Plus I really don't remember FO1+2. ;)

 

I'm asking because many games present you a lot of enemies but the number of civilians is somehow scaled down, so they don't have to create cities and camps with hundreds of people.

[Warmaker01]

Question: Is it fallout lore that there are more ferals than regular ghouls and more human badguys than settlers or is it just because the player needs something to kill?

Yes, starting back to FO1, this had generally been true. The franchise takes nods from various sources but a big one is Mad Max / The Road Warrior, especially Road Warrior. Now the latter of course had no Ghouls and such. But the basic idea of the setting heavily influenced Fallout:

 

No big central government with a military and police force to ensure security and defense. No sense of regional law, other than what the locals can muster up by force in defending themselves. Road Warrior went with the idea of a small pocket of "good people" huddling together for mutual protection and resources. Outside their walls was a lawless land with bands of people doing whatever the hell they want, and would sooner kill you to get your stuff.

 

Anyways, the Feral Ghouls I already covered in my previous reply. But yes, it's traditional in Fallout for "good people" to be badly outnumbered by Raider, Merc groups on top of the Super Mutants and critters out there. There are I believe, 2 regions that can be considered relatively safer to live in: The NCR out in the West Coast and FO3's Capital Wasteland by the time of FO4's timeframe. Capital Wasteland is still likely to be more dangerous than the NCR. However, according to FO4's ingame lore, the Brotherhood succeeded, rebuilt, and got stronger, Project Purity was a success, the Enclave was annihilated. That's the best that region has had since the bombs fell.