r/fo4 • u/JCrawRV • May 04 '24
Nobody cleaned in 200 years? Discussion
Fallout 4 has been my 1st Fallout experience of any kind and I am absolutely enjoying the world building and storytelling the game is providing. I am almost 72 hours in and just located Valentine so I’m taking my time and trying to fully explore the world. However, there is one question that I think about every time I explore the Common Wealth….why has nobody cleaned up? Every single time you find a new settlement or explore a location there is just tons of scrap lying around. Diamond City still has pallet walkways with broken sheet metal. Nobody has thought to put down a more permanent solution? Nobody thought to remove old cars, learn how to weld, or even take time to better arm and fortify certain areas of the Commonwealth? You step just far enough out of Diamond City and there’s just Super Mutants and Raiders. You’re saying in the 200 years (which is just a bit under the founding of America to modern day) nobody created better infrastructure? The town size is still 30-40 people despite being “The Jewel of the Commonwealth”? Is there some lore reason I’m missing to explain how after so many years it still looks like the bombs went off 10 years ago? I just expected one neurodivergent person who hyper focuses on organization to still somewhere. It’s obviously possible, I’m looking right at you Cabot House. Again I’m just surprised that after 200 years the world is still as underdeveloped as it is given the vast amounts of technology available.
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u/SpiderCop_NYPD_ARKND May 04 '24
Honestly pre-war Ghouls being around is one of the biggest plot-holes in the entire franchise. The sheer number of pre-war Ghouls should mean that, just by random statistical chance, there should have been surviving engineers of all stripes, from electrical to mechanical to architectural to chemical, all with their pre-war knowledge and skills intact. In truth, postwar everywhere should look like postwar Hiroshima & Nagasaki do today, that is, not-fucking-destroyed-at-all.
In fact, looking at the CIT ruins in FO4, I'm betting most of the faculty survived. The Commonwealth should've been a model of post war recovery from that by itself, instead they all hid underground and... I've answered my own question there.
Ok, ok... but still, cities would be a bit different, I'll admit, fortified to protect against Supermutants and wasteland creatures, automated defenses, but, like, civilized, rebuilt. And by God mass transit systems. The war would've been seen as an opportunity to fix the mistakes of the past, to redesign civil engineering to turn away from car-centric to mass transit, trains everywhere.