OP is comparing OUR past 200 years (that some would call the fastest changing centuries in human history) to a 200 year period right after a (fictional) near extinction event for our species (and an actual extinction for some other species). Extremely flawed comparison.

Your history's pretty funky. While you're correct about the whole idea of the Dark Ages Myth, the arguments you provide aren't the best.

It's true that not much was lost following the fall of Rome from a technological stand point, and the fall was more of a social and political setback.

However, it is untrue that no or little technological advancement was made in the Early Middle Ages. However, advancement was focused on practical instruments. Wheelbarrows, horse plows, the wind and water mill, etc. Technological advancement wasn't dead, it just changed focus.

Additionally, the tribes that conquered Rome were mostly not nomadic. They were agrarian and were looking for a place to settle down, not to eventually move on with their flocks. They also were fascinated with Roman culture and tried to preserve it, particularly the Ostrogoths, but internal turmoil, and, in the case of the Ostrogoths, attacks by the Byzantines foiled those attempts.

It also had little to do with absolute monarchs; Rome itself was also an absolute monarchy. Meanwhile, the feudal monarchies that developed by the end of this period were most definately not absolute.

Finally, the Church had nothing to do with stopping technological progress, in fact, monks were responsible for preserving much of Roman knowledge. Monasteries were the primary schools before the rise of the University system (which the church also contributed to).

And approximately none of this is relevant to Fallout.

Unlike the fall of Rome, the nuclear war fundamentally changed the environment and human society globally. Humanity wasn't sent back to the Middle Ages, it was sent back to the Stone Age... but now we had guns and man-eating monsters.

That's why you've seen so little advancement in 200 years.

I didn't ask for this feel.

This is a good post and I agree with the points you make.

I just wanted to nitpick on something, we did lose a lot of technological advancements with the fall of Rome. Off the top of my head, a lot of architectural advancements such as how to build a dome only supported by itself, plumbing and flying butresses. We also lost the ability to make concrete. Greek fire, Damascus steel and others also come to mind.

The Byzantines had all of these technologies.

In fact, it was the Byzantines that defended Constantinople against the Arabs AFTER the fall of the Roman Empire with the Greek fire.

Damascus steel is believed to just be steel where the alloys were mined from a particular vein that had really low amounts of impurities and possibly high amounts beneficial trace elements. It's believed that once this vein happened to run bare that Damascus steel came to an end... I hardly would call that a technology... just a miracle of nature. At any rate, nothing dates the disappearance of Damascus steel to the fall of the Romans.

If I wanted reality in my games - any games - I would not be playing RPGs in general.

Secondly, the idea of the FO world before the bombs is a very kitschy version of 1950s imagining the future. And if you think about the '50s in our reality, one of the big things was the change in food preservation and prep - that is when a lot of foods started having additives and bright packaging - it's fast and easy and will stay on your shelf! Yay! And it's prettily packaged, cleverly marketed, you hardly have to do anything, just dump the contents in a pan... whatever. It's taken upwards of 50 years for people to realize that all the chemistry applied to the foods we eat, harvest, grow, slaughter may not be the best for us. It's very easy for me to imagine a world where that stuff was thought to be awesome and had no known side effects.

Additionally, whose to say that after the bombs fell, regardless of 80 years or 200 years, that a nuclear winter may have preserved things, or that pockets of humanity held it together for a while before disintegrating as lack of resources and the rest of the world caught up to them. So they could have continued to manufacture things for a while, or tried to, etc.

Just random thoughts - to be honest, I play games like this for, you know, fun. Not serious business. I like my Fancy Lads cake and eat it too!

Yay, MSTK3! You've seen the kickstarter, right?

Really, the 200 year jump from OB to Skyrim made you wonder about... shooting lightening from your palms? The continued use of swords and axes by warriors? The disintegration of empirical rule... because that never happens in the real world... Oh, wait.. Roman civilization...

It was said that Bethesda was to blame for bringing the current events 200 years from the war. But the original games brought it 164 of the 200 forward in time. That is all.

A long time ago - about seven or eight years ago IRC - I came to this forum because my Dad was trying to get me into Morrowind. I was playing Oblivion and loved it but my dad kept saying "You gotta play Morrowind. Morrowind is awesome." I tried it but I couldn't get past the ugly graphics and stilted gameplay. I made a post on this forum about how awfully unrealistic Morrowind was (compared to Oblivion ... I know, I know, logical right, but hey I was a teenager, okay?!)

Someone told me: "Engagement of the imagination requires enough reality to make the unrealistic believable." That may not be exactly right but that's how I remember it.

Okay so my life didn't change. But I've thought about that quote a lot over the years. I thought of that quote while playing Borderlands 2, then the original Borderlands, all the Bioshock games and other games that don't begin with B's, like the Half-Life franchise, Left 4 Dead, Dragon Age Origins and it's relatively uninspired offspring. Portal, Left 4 Dead and other games not made by Valve. I thought about it while playing Skyrim. And I had to reach back to it A LOT during the my last six months of playing ESO.

The advice helped me get past any number of horribly bad plot twists in any number of manga series - as well as any number of serial dramas. It helped me become a fan of Fringe, a show that I secretly love despite it's many, many inconsistencies.

Whenever I find myself wanting to say, "Hey, this is game/manga/show is unbelievable," I try to focus on what is believable about it, what I love about it, even if it's just one thing. Based one that principal, Fallout 3 was easy to accept. Fallout 4 is even easier because I loved Fallout 3.

The reason I'm telling you this is because I believe - and I could be wrong because I'm basing it on your avatar - that you were the person who posted this all those years ago. Just thought you'd like to know. Or maybe not.

As soon as I start playing a video game, I suspend disbelief.

Also:

I didn't say that technological advancement stopped. I said that it was slowed particularly in certain areas (such as sciences that may conflict with the church such as astrology).

And to say that Rome was an absolute monarchy is a bit misleading...

It was the Roman Republic for 500 years before the first Emporer rose to power. They had consuls that had 1 year terms of power, the senate, and the assembly. It was the first government of its kind and a model for many governments to come.

It was from this time of being a Rebulic that the foundation of the Roman culture was established. And from those roots that a lot of the fruits of progress were later bore.

And on your comment about going back to the stone age... that's exactly my point...

The stone age will never be again. If you kill everyone then it's just the end of the world... If you kill almost everyone and destroy every single piece of technology... the bulk of our knowledge is still going to live on.

People are still going to know how to cast, and forge, and generate electricity and hydrolics, and make magnets and motors and firearms and explosives.

Within a couple months we have factories and water treatment facilities and mass production farms.

Even people of average intelligence alive today have a basic understanding of how things work and will be able to reproduce them.

Within just a few years we'd be right back where we were in terms of technology.

We're never going to go back to the stone age... it just isn't possible.

I think you are minimizing the effects of radioactive fallout on vegetation. Back during the Cold War when nations were frequently testing nuclear devices on the surface (as opposed to underground testing), nations were able to detect significant radiation upticks in airborne particles clear on the other side of the planet. From single detonations. Now consider the concentration when 10,000+ bombs detonate in just a matter of hours.

Back when the US Government was suggesting that life after a minor nuclear exchange (<500 bombs detonated) was possible, the government-issued handbooks on post-nuclear war Agriculture stated that it would be necessary to scraqe off 18 inches of topsoil just to plant the next crop. That's @6 million pounds of dirt per acre. All of that soil was considered to be unusable because the radiation would at a minimum adversely affect anything grown in it. And keep in mind that the half-lives of a lot of the radioactive elements is often measured in centuries. With heavier doses of radiation, the dirt would be thoroughly sterilized and seeds wouldn't even be able to take root. Rain cycles and wind effects would still be in effect (probably even more exaggerated in force and intensity) and over the course of a century the extent of erosion would be tremendous. So DC looking like AZ isn't too far fetched. But noting that the distribution of fallout wouldn't be even throughout the world -- Oasis in FO3 for example -- after a century or so, Mother Nature would have likely started to reassert Herself. But I suspect that the number of drastic floral plant mutations would have a botanist thinking that it would be best to just start the catalog from scratch.

we've already seen the effects of large scale releases of radiation, it happened at Chernobyl. All the plant and animal life was killed. But if you go back today, aside from the deserted and decaying buildings, you would never know anything had happened. First the plants came back, then animals. People always overestimate these things. They did the same thing with the ExxonvValdez spill, and the same in the gulf. Both the planet, and life in general are far more resilient than people think. And that's a good thing, cause if they weren't, we probably wouldn't be here

I've heard it said that it's not the planet and the environment we have to worry about; they'll patch themselves up in no time. It's us humans we have to worry about. Earth can, and will, patch itself up long after we're gone. There's just nothing we can do to this planet that will render it completely lifeless and that's a damned good thing.

humans went through a growth spurt ,op

200 years in the medieval days - and not much changed

200- years in the industrial revolution years and EVERYTHING changed

200 years in Fallout lore- when the world ended- and its pretty consistent tbh

yea, pretty much. Another example is some of the places they've found stuff living. Places like deep underwater where light never reaches living off the heat from thermal vents despite the massive pressure. Some of it is just incredible

You are overlooking the sheer scale between the two scenarios. Chernobyl was, at worst, not more than the equivalent of ONE 20-megaton bomb. (Probably much, much closer to just a 1-megaton airburst.) What would plantlife at Chernobyl be if it was 20 times more intense? That's what you would get over much of the landmass when 10,000+ nukes go off around the globe in the space of just several hours. The amount of radioactive fallout that gets put into the jet stream of the upper atmosphere would blanket practically everywhere with a couple of feet of radioactive ash. Nuclear Pompeii on a global scale. What doesn't get burned off in the subsequent firestorms raging everywhere is likely to be so thoroughly irradiated it would be absolutely sterile for at least a century.

What we see of vegetation in the FO games is actually a not too unreasonable representation of Nature struggling to make a comeback. That is, if you felled most of the trees and counted the rings, you would likely discover NONE are older than 50 years. The reason that human-made structures still exist is likely because they were built on concrete, cement, or asphalt foundations, and therefore didn't get eroded as badly as the surrounding dirt. What we see in the way of forests probably came from wind-borne seeds that originated in the few not-too-heavily-irradiated areas of the planet. (Or maybe some GECKs were brought to the surface and popped open about a century ago.)

Rome was founded as a monarchy, then went through a period as an oligarchy before spending it's "golden age" as an absolute dictatorship. They certainly weren't big on the idea of social progress.

And astrology isn't a science. It's a pseudoscience. And you may be thinking of astronomy (which IS a science) but that would also be incorrect. The church preserved the works of Ptolomey and Aristotle all the same. If you're talking about Galileo, the popular understanding of him is mostly wrong, and you're a month milenia early anyway.

On the topic of the Stone Age, I still don't agree. In a period following nuclear war we have chaos and anarchy. These are not ideal conditions for civilization to develop in. Most people are just trying to survive, not rebuild humanity. Most people don't know how to create electricity, or make a computer, or a television, and even if they could, when would they have the time? In between staying alive and not dying?

Factories? If you could produce goods, who would you sell to anyway? There is no trade, the resources necessary are completely dried up. And you're just a target for raiders.

It's not that everyone forgets, it's that everyone is too busy trying to not die to worry about recreating the technological marvels of the past.

The size of the blast doesn'treally matter. The radiation at Chernobyl killed everything, it just recovered. The same is true with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everything was destroyed and killed. Cancer rates went through the roof. People died from the radiation for years. But within 5o years both cities were rebuilt and repopulated. Direct nuclear strike on two mid size cites only knocked them out for a decade or two. As Malcolm famously said in jurasic park ( and the premis of the book)............life finds a way

If it was all realistic, then it wouldn't be Fallout 4 anymore, it would be Post-Apocalypse Simulator 6.0 or whatever...

And nobody would buy it, and Bethesda would go out of business for spending so much money making a game only 200 people would actually play.

Again, you are missing the scale. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were able to "bleed off" the radiation effects into the surrounding countryside. That is, the intensity at the center of the bomb blast dropped dramatically and rapidly. The same holds true for Chernobyl. But when the entire world has become a bad case of radiation measles, there's nowhere for that intense radiation to bleed off to. The radioactive fallout would still be drifting down from the upper atmosphere for the next 20+ years. (Rad storms in FO4. A nice addition IMHO.) And the longer that organics are exposed to radiation, the more thoroughly they become sterilized (if not simply killed outright). Given just how much radiation rained down on the planet, it wouldn't be just 18" of adversely affected topsoil; it would be more like several meters of sterilized dirt. It wouldn't be until erosion got down to the NOT-irradiated soil and brought it to the surface before seeds would have anything to take root in.

So NOT 200 years . Thank you for proving my point. As for It was said that Bethesda was to blame for bringing the current events 200 years from the war which is what they exactly did?Not sure why you phrase it as "blame" either. 2077-2277(start of FO3)= 200 years. I don't know how this is so hard for you to understand.

I'm not disputing that nor am i debating the premise of this thread.

I am disputing this comment alone.

No such jump was made and yeah, if you ignore the existence of the previous games sure it's an impractical jump but you can't do that because Fallout one and two DO exist. Bethesda made a jump of 34 years from the events of fallout 2 and 10 years from the events of fallout 3. period. fact. end of discussion, so lay off me.

The 200 years thing never made sense. Even 100 years would be a stretch.

But I believe that isn't the point, and it's just a silly sci-fi universe, so who cares.

http://www.johnlocke.org/site-docs/lockerroom/movinggoalpost.gif

Either vegetation recovers quite soon after the war - or animals and humans die off shortly afterwards. ( beside this, many plants can tolerate more radiation then humans ) There is no way, that animals ( especially as big as deatclaws ) and humans survive without vegetation.If you assume that radiation is that bad that vegetation has not recovered in even 200 years the following would happen. First, the food chain would collapse, and after a few decades all free oxygen would vanish ( fires, oxidation etc ) . GAME OVER. And for the buildings, search for the docu "life after people" - that shows what would happen to our buildings as soon as no one heats and maintenance them anymore. Never underestimate the effect of freezing water in cracks over time .... ( as an example ). The decay would be far more progressed, even without the destruction of atomic bombs in the beginning.

However you might still be able to create a bacteria char ...