I agree with most of you.

I think for the apocalyptic game, the location and interrior art is very important. look at the example FO 3 : Capitol building, Broken bow air carirer, DC,museum, other crumble building, i spent a lot of time sightseeing around instead of really playing the game. lol, it is a master piece.

just imagine you play the fallout in the intact city without great war ?

FNV is trying too hard to be both a Red Dead game and a Mafia game. The only time it really felt like Fallout was in the Brotherhood/Enclave bunkers. So yeah, Fallout 4 needs to get away from the NCR, more midwest, where the Brotherhood and Enclave still exist in some shape or form.

Being from the midwest, I would love to see a Fallout game take place in this area. Perhaps a place like Minneapolis.

My feeling is that things have progressed too far. Moving to an area that has been neglected would make society more desperate without needing to roll back the clock.

I personally would love to see the game go to the ruins of a legitimate city...not DC. But Chicago or NYC. Miami would work too. It would be cool to wander around in some collapsing high rises.


The Commonwealth could be alright if the rest of the area isn't super teched out.

I see no necessity for emminent post apocalyptia. An intricate and detailed recovery world is fine. I just don't see the need for desolation, desperation, or any other des- you might have a morbid fondness for. There's still plenty room for frontiers as things stand, which is the big thing. A zeerust world turned into a world of scattered outposts. There's still plenty of opportunities to battle barbarians at the gates and travel broken highways between cities.

I don't get it. A large quantity of the posts here WANT to stay in that doom and gloom [censored].

Fallout- 80+ Years after the war, yet we thrive and slowly revive.
Fallout 2- 120+ years after the war, things are starting to go on the up.
Fallout Tactics/BoS-Both of those were just random coat tail hanging messes.
Fallout 3: Plunges us into the equivalent of 30-50 years after the war.
Fallout: New Vegas- Humanity is starting to flourish in ways, the world is harsh but we can make it.

I like that New Vegas brought us on track again. I was introduced to the series VIA Fallout 3, I still enjoy the game, but apart from beautiful arcitecture, the world was relatively barren and mostly filled with hostiles and 3-4 major communities. 200+ Years after a war of any kind, we shouldnt be stuck in that mode of 'derp derp I raid cuz I can lol' mentality. We should be sort what we see in F:NV, established trade routes, electricity, farming, slow rediscovery of old world technology. I mean, if the game keeps using Gamebryo and goin 'lol here is another dead world with only 3-4 cities' It might as well be called 'Fallout:Like 3 but it isnt'

Venture too far from the "doom and gloom" and the game becomes less post-apocalyptica and more generic sci-fi. This is partly why personally I like the first and third games more than 2 and New Vegas.

IMO, obviously.

here's to hoping FO4 is a 3d re-telling of Richard Grey's story, and how he became the master. There's a lot of backstory there, and Mr. Grey was quite the badass wastelander supposedly, so I'm sure his story would be quite entertaining. Also, Harold as a human would be epic beyond epic.

But you, like a good many others, neglect to keep in mind 'post apocalyptia' is

A. A word for 'after a tragic disaster' we don't have to continuously be an endless cycle of generic rubble and barren rock, Fallout as a whole has always been about the progression and security of Mankind.

The point is that Fallout was born as a post-apocalyptic game, quite a "raw" setting with people just starting to re-settle. I think New Vegas makes a lot of sense (far more than F3) in how some things develop but generally speaking, the farther away from the post-apocalypse we get, the farther away from one of the main thematics of the Fallout setting we get.
Especially with Bethesda's notion that each game should go forward chronologically, I think there is a sense of the setting becoming watered down even more than it currently is. The 50s inspired visuals was always a part of the games, but there was an equal amount of classic post-apocalyptic "settling across a new world" feel.

How can one possibly confuse a wild west frontier with schizo tech for generic sci-fi? Did I miss that episode of Battlestar Galactic? Did Star Trek have a series focused on a single planet with distant outposts and caravans after they cancelled Enterprise?

There's nothing generic sci-fi about it. The next step after New Vegas is moving into a return to the age of the locomotive, not space ships and aliens. Paved roads minimum.

And we've still got an NCR civil war and the suppression of the remaining tribals to look forward to. We haven't even gone intercontinental yet! There's been no talk of ships travelling across the ocean. At least not in any significant number.

yes i do believe you are correct, we're going to see the fallout world step in a post-apocalypse cowboy western setting with the re-dawning of the locomotive. i think they will play it so that the world is still too corrupt to advance beyond the age of locomotives again, but we'll see.

I think the thing we're all struggling with (or at least I am) is the vast difference in the feel of the "world" between FO3 and FNV. The DC wasteland was a series of City-states that still felt like an apocalyptic nightmare. FNV, and the NCR in particular, feels like a world with new governments just waiting to make the same mistakes again. I think FNV has more politics because people wanted politics in Oblivion (like in Morrowind) and didn't get it. Maybe too much of a good thing.

For me it feels less like FO because of the lack of the Enclave and BOS; granted BOS is there (somewhat) but that's really what defined FO3 and its completely absent. I'm also struggling with not really liking -any- of these factions (they're all scum except possibly the Followers); its hard for me to connect. I just want to wander the wastes cuz I don't trust any of these losers. Let them nuke themselves and I'll clean up the mess.

But it was FO3 that broke away from the formula, not New Vegas. The politics and civilizations starting to arise were already very much in effect in Fallout 2 where you had big settlements such as New Reno, Vault City, the NCR etc. Which is partially why so many people feel FO3 doesn't make any sense because there is zero progress on the East Coast, and at the same time, stores are still full of pre-war goods and so forth. Which makes one wonder just what people have been doing for the last 200 years (this is a really long time).

And again, the BoS representing F3 is something that also feels totally out-of-whack when considering the history of the entire series.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n40Un4GP6E&p=5673E752DDCFD38D

(But I still liked the show )

Yes they (we) are messy creatures, or we can be. But it's one thing to litter. It's another to let trash pile up in your own house. There are slobs everywhere, but it seems unreasonable that EVERY single person in the Wasteland is one.

And countless others that follow it.

But until Fallout 3077, I don't think we will be out of earth.....

I don't mind seeing the Fallout series progress timewise, but I'd like it to slow down abit. Not take jumps of 40 - 80 years but more like 10 - 15 years apart. DLCs can be used to make smaller timeline jumps of 1 - 3 years. There's been talk from npcs you meet in FONV that the NCR has gotten too big too fast to control its member states. So a revolution/civil war within the NCR is always a possable game in the making.
As for the complait that it doesn't feel like Fallout without the BoS and Enclave,... Well for the most part the BoS were enemies, or at best uneasy allies in FO 1 & 2. Also the BoS was already having problems with thinning numbers in FO2. By the time of FO4, Lyons BoS plus the Outcasts might be the BoS, or at least the largest group of them left. As far as the Enclave goes, they are pretty much wiped out on both the East and West coasts by the time of FONV. If the Enclave exists at all, it would be in small groups in the Midwest.
As for what area Fallout should vist next, there have been plenty of great suggestions so far. Up and down the East coast, Chicago area, just of the Colorado river, etc. Remember with a nuclear war and climate warming, many places on the coasts and in the South, (ie. Miami, New Orleans), would be under water.

I would love to play a fallout game before the great war. Imagine GTA with laser weapons, crazy robots and cars with fusion engines :shocking: .

Isn't that Crackdown?

Then your not getting it.
That "doom and gloom ****" as you called it, is what most people enjoy about the game.
As evidenced by this thread.
They need to stop advancing the timeline, or eventually the game will have to change it's name from "Fallout" to "Restoration"

You know, Fallout, the bad part of what happens after a nuclear war.
Restoration, meaning societies advancing and what-not.
Tell me, what's the name of the game?

Y'know, Fallout doesn't have particularly much actual fallout. Not Fallout 1 and not Fallout 3. None of 'em. Fallout 3 has random patches of radiation for no reason, along with random irradiated water also for no reason, but there's no actual fallout anywhere in the game.

So saying that Fallout has to be pessimistic doom and gloom "nobody can rebuild after 200 years" just because of the name is pretty silly.

And frankly, the "doom and gloom" is harmful to immersion at any point after Fallout 1. Certainly by now, civilization should be getting back on its feet. It took humans less than two hundred years to go from muskets and water wheels to atomic bombs and landing a man on the moon, and that's without the boon of surviving caches of prewar knowledge about.

Really, if Bethesda wanted to have a doom and gloom Fallout game, they should have set it shortly after the war. Setting Fallout 3 when they did was a mistake for the feeling they tried to convey. Not if they wanted to immerse people who actually think about the setting they're playing in, as opposed to people who blithely nod their head in favor of getting to the next lolnuclear explosion.

Personally, I think that the story of the NCR's development is one of the most interesting plot threads in the entire franchise, both because it's interesting in its own right, but also because it's not stupid like "lol, 200 year old food." Many old school Fallout fans agree with me... And many people who actually think about their games agree with me. It's called verisimilitude. Fallout isn't realistic, but it has to make sense and be internally consistent and logical. Fallout 3's atmosphere fails this test for the time it's supposedly set.

If the franchise were to sit in the same burnt out crater with every game, you'd quickly have everything growing stagnant and uninteresting. As long as it is handled right, you can have it where you can have post-apocalyptic cyberpunk and desolation within the same setting.

I agree with the OP and the general consensus that a game setting in the future from New Vegas will start to lose the flavor of post apocalyptic feel. But I suppose it's fair to think about what we mean by Post apocalyptic. What characteristics do we look for that kind of feel in a game? In Fallout, the desolate wasteland and ruins set up the signature apocalyptic ambiance. Any hint to civilization was reduced to shanty towns where buildings were mostly shacks built from debris with dirt floors.. No houses, no pre war casual existence. Also, there was this dichotomy, the wasteland, of the present, up above and the secretive high tech entrappings of the past, underneath. Both provided intrigue and wonder, worthy of exploration. Now FNV is starting to feel like everything is pretty much figured out, with less emphasis on mystery and more into survival, choosing sides in conflict. Whatever happened to being a lone wanderer with a new and strange world ahead of him?

I also agree that a game setting directly after the nuclear war would be awesome...maybe Manhattan, New York? It would be very interesting to see the early emergence of ghouls and mutants, the roots of the BoS/Enclave - as the player has to survive in a world that's literally falling down all around them and civilization is on a major meltdown.

I do agree the series shouldn't advance too far into the future now. Although I have a feeling that there will be a final game where everything is tied up and figured out, then the world nukes itself again.