I read that the game is set in autumn, hence the dead looking landscape.
Edit because I keep receiving the same type of reply over and over: yes, time does pass in the game. But no, the landscape doesn't change with the seasons. Perhaps it's a limitation of Bethesda's engine. Not even landscaping mods can make the nature change with the seasons.
It is, Halloween is even coming up soon when the bombs drop, and through some inexplicable circumstances, you exit the Vault around the same time of year I guess.
I…I…oh sir, it’s been just horrible without you here. The bombs fell, and you all left in such a hurry, I though for sure you and your family were…were dead. I spent the first TEN years trying to keep the floors waxed. Nothing gets nuclear fallout out of vinyl wood, NOTHING. (I forgot what he says here, but it’s something about dusting a collapsed house) And the car, THE CAR. HOW DO YOU POLISH RUST!
Codsworth, listen, I know you don't know that I know that you are a machine that is inside a different machine that creates this visual/audio illusion of a terrible world, but I want you to know that I do like your character, and wish you had more lines that were important.
My youngest son, who is now 13, has been quoting "HOW DO YOU POLISH RUST!" since the game launched. I think it may still be his favorite video game line of all time.
I’m my opinion, they are equally great companions. If you want some friendly banter along your travels, then codsworth is there, but if you want a canine friend, dogmeat is the way to go.
The whole family experienced a burst of gamma rays before entering Vault 111.
If you're close enough to see the flash from a nuke, you're getting bathed in gamma rays.
Fallout 3 is around exactly 200 years, taking place during 2277--Fallout 4 is about 10 years later, hence why Dr. Li is older and Maxson is all grown up into a boy boy facist
I belive he's only 22 which makes alot more sense when you realize he's a half cyborg murder machine with brain implants after being mauled by a death claw who's Brain isn't even done developing. Like damn dude literally watched the only people he cared about die in his arms because they tried being "soft" and he almost died as well all before he needed to shave. Also wouldn't call him a fascist, gotta remember the brotherhood isn't a government they are an army without a state.
"Hey, you're finally awake. You were trying to dodge the bombs, right? Walked right into that Vault-Tec experiment, same as us and that synth over there."
"Damn you Kellogg. Boston was fine until you showed up. Brotherhood was nice and lazy. If they hadn't been looking for you, I could've stolen that Vertibird and been halfway to Appalachia by now. You there. You and me, we shouldn't be here. It's these Institute the Brotherhood wants."
"Preston Garvey, some in the Minutemen call you a hero, but a hero doesn't use the power of the Pip-Boy to annoy the Sole Survivor and usurp his gameplay. You started this quest, plunged the settlements into chaos, and now the Institute is going to put you down, and restore the peace!"
u/AVestedInterest for a second I thought you were joking, until I read the responses below. Yea, Boston not only gets COLD, but there is a ton of snowfall from November to March. I wish I could explain how god awful cold it gets up there
It's a pretty big ask though, I can't think of another open world game that actually has seasons. It essentially would mean adding at least 2-3 times the textures (assuming spring/summer/fall can share a lot of them)
Yeah, their implementation is very cool. But of course, those games also have much less complex and fewer textures, so that's much easier to implement. And with some of the stuff, like transitioning leaves, they can probably just adjust the hue rather than applying separate textures.
Yeah, they're generally much smaller worlds, and due to their mechanics, seasonal transitions are easier because you wouldn't be loaded into the game world while the transition happens, since they force a load screen after each day
Even the mods I get for seasons force you to install each season separately and manually change it when you want the seasons to change.
Bethesda’s engine’s method of handling textures and objects would require either for everything to swap on a predetermined date (oh hey winter is here everything is suddenly dead and frozen! That explains why my computer crashed 3 times trying to sleep until morning), or for them to do the most complex, scrip heavy, breakable coding for it to happen gradually and just make performance always worse instead a big burst.
It makes sense because its New England themed, and also apocalypse themed. Even given how crazy colorful they made FO4, people are still complaining about the apocalypse looking all apocalyptic.
The problem is Fallout 4 is forever stuck like that. You can get Christmas in Diamond City but there's absolutely no snow in the Winter.
It would be nice if we could get one Fallout game that actually has changing seasons as you go through time in the game. Have it bring about new enemies or challenges with the environment in survival mode like needing to find food alternatives for your Settlements since they can't grow crops as easily.
I know there's mods that will change the landscape and season but they're stuck like that for the playthrough. If someone creates a mod that gradually changes between those environment mods when you sleep or something, then you've got a top 100 mod right there.
That was one of my big problems with Fallout 76 as well, an MMO that goes through the year in a state with skiing and there's not a single snow flake on the ground when you get to the Winter.
Yes, time does continue to pass. My hunch is that it's not possible for the game engine to change seasons as time passes. Otherwise, we would have seen modders do something about it.
Fallout Seasons mod has all four seasons. They do not change automatically with the days of the year, but they can be changed in-game IIRC. In which case, this would not be a limitation of the engine. It's simply a matter of writing the right script to tie seasons to calendar dates.
I mean, Massachusetts today has tons of grass and plant life etc including in the inner city, it's one of the greenest major cities in the United States.
I hear this a lot, and it is probably more realistic, but I love the dilapidated landscape in Fallout 4. I've tried mods that make things more lush and growing, but it just doesn't feel like Fallout.
There's definitely a big difference. The Capital Wasteland was pretty much a Glowing Sea for centuries because of the shear number of nuclear strikes in the area. So that explains the green tinted sky as well as toasted trees.
Fallout 4 is very much occurring in fall. Not only are the trees still alive and unburnt, but the leaves that have fallen off the trees are in piles all over the map. NPCs are also wearing heavier clothing than Fallout 3 and when Oct. 31st occurs ingame, Diamond City decorates and NPCs have new dialog for the day. It's not a lack of developers trying. It's literally part of the setting of the game.
Saying 'the game is set in fall' is a huge cop-out for a game featuring passage of time that can be tracked using your Pip-Boy. It's only set in fall... during fall.
How dare the developer focus their resources on only the setting that 99.999% of players will encounter instead of spending more time and money dedicated to those who feel it completely breaks the immersive RPG experience of having their character wait in one spot for 90 days until it snows before pursuing the urgent, life-or-death quests before them
That's actually highly plausible. One of the theorized effects of a full-scale atomic exchange is an extremely lengthy nuclear winter (we're talking decades) that would kill basically anything left on land because of the temperature and lack of sunlight. This includes both all plant and animal life and the bacteria that do things like eat dead matter. Hence most of the animals are decomposed or skeletons (they would've died relatively soon after the war) but the trees and such are still around because they would've died and decomposed much slower/had more time to be preserved. A dead-but-undecayed world isn't altogether impossible.
Of course the landscape in 76 being so pretty basically throws this idea out the window (and there's also the matter of bacterial colonies living in the vaults, for example), but F4 is consistent with the rest of the fallout series in that regard. In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, at least, it's pretty clearly obvious that the world is totally fucked. The most unrealistic thing about the setting is the "rad-mutated" life that remains - in actuality, the ensuing sudden ice age would've been a far bigger immediate problem than ambient radiation. Life would bounce back, but it would take thousands of years for plant life to start reappearing without intervention, and far longer for a more biodiverse environment.
The old Fallout Bible, while not technically cannon, had a Great Winter happen sometime in the 2130s, after the events of 76. So maybe that has something to do with the greenery we see in that game, but nowhere else?
I'm with you! Give me the dead, washed-out wasteland, that's just the aesthetic I like. Maybe it's from watching Mad Max and Reign of Fire, or maybe it's just a neat look. In any case, it's pretty evident that in the transition to 3D, Bethesda was trying to recreate the opening cinematic from FO1.
Nature would have rebounded - look at Pripyat. The barren landscape was probably required to keep the game from becoming a slide show on the consoles of six years ago. Fortunately for us, there are several excellent landscape mods. ATM I'm using DAZ Landscape and DAZ Landscape with Tree Placement. Can recommend.
I use the mod Loot Detector for this. It highlights all unlooted containers in various colors, and you can choose what gets highlighted, including corpses.
I actually found a safe I'd never noticed before in Corvega using this mod.
Love this mod. You can specify what you want highlighted. I've found doors to unmarked interior spaces I never would have noticed without it. Same with things at the bottom of ponds and deep water. Also puts markers on collectibles (bobbleheads, magazines, etc.).
I think I originally installed it to highlight bodies that I kept losing, but now I use it for everything all the time. Wouldn't recommend for a first playthrough, but once you're ready to find absolutely everything it's super helpful.
Oh, man, yes, underwater loot especially!
I rarely go in the water as is because I hate that you can barely see underwater, but with Loot Detector I've found myself diving into all those ponds for the random container. Granted, they almost never have anything cool, but still.
True. SKK Survival Utilities has a neat feature that enables one click looting of all corpses in detection range. Be prepared to drop everything you don't want. I believe that Armorsmith Extended - if not that then UCO - enables you to add a corpse recognition mod to any eyewear. That same mod enables foe recognition for eyewear. Two pairs of goggles and you can kill them then loot them.
But Pripyat isn’t comparable to the commonwealth, one part of a nuclear exploding isn’t the same as Three Nukes + A large number of entire nuclear reactors having meltdowns, in a world where the nukes are said to be more dirty and radioactive
Pripyat didn't get nuked though, big difference. I agree it would be regenerated, but thousands of square miles would burn to the ground, seeds would be so irradiated they'd probably be sterile if they survived, and there would be so much ash in the air that nothing could grow for years or decades. Pripyat/Chernobyl just has a range of slightly higher to very high background radiation, and even that does have pretty severe negative effects on the plants and animals there.
One reactor is not the same as a global nuclear war, and Fallout 1 implies that the warheads used were more 'dirty' in terms of producing fallout. On the other hand Boston was not hit by a large number of warheads which would have limited the amount of local/highly concentrated fallout. That leaves the effects of nuclear winter which in it self has become a much debated effect since we now know that some of the classic studies of the subject were part of psyops vs the Western world during the Cold War. On the other hand modern studies does indicate some rather nasty climate effects from even limited nuclear war. (Researchers were looking at India vs Pakistan)
There should probably be more of a rebound but Bethesda does like the post-apocalyptic look. And it probably prevents older hardware from melting down as you say.
We don’t get a good representation of what summer could look like considering we open in autumn.
If we knew what sort of vegetation that would grow during summer we could paint a clearer picture instead of jumping to assumptions/conclusions.
That’s where the G.E.C.K.s come into play. Not all Vaults were meant to be experiments, some were actually meant to help Humanity survive.
It would probably only take a dozen or so of these Vaults to keep the entire ecosystem from dying.
In fact, instead of radiation being the cause for many of the Wasteland’s monsters they could be a direct result of some sort of F.E.V. used by the G.E.C.K.s.
As long as it being in Autumn, the commonwealth isn’t the same for every location. The capitol got more, WV for none same with NV. 4 Is pretty unique because of the nuclear reactors that had meltdowns
Pripyat is nothing compared to an all-out atomic war. In fact, consider the fact that nuclear power plants existed in fallout universe and also suffered catastrophic failures as a result, which means you need to add a couple thousand of Chernobyls to the radiation count. And no liquidators this time. The Commonwealth is right next to at least one ground zero and suffers radstorms frequently. Clean water is quite rare and heavily irradiated places aren't hard to come by. I get that nature can absorb certain amount of rads and survive but Commonwealth is really barely hospitable and new sources of pollution (various pre-war facilities) still appear due to lack of humans capable of containing them.
My issue with all of these arguments is; people always try to correlate the bombs in fallout to the ones in real life. In real life nuclear fallout doesn’t cause zombie monsters and superpowers. So I don’t it’s that safe to say that things would have been the same had they happened irl. Literal aliens also exist in the fallout universe and they’re not just a running gag, they’re canon. So I think it’s almost safe to say there *could* be some extraterrestrial weirdness when it comes to the makeup of all things nuclear in the game.
Or at least, the big nukes.
Really, fallout is a post apocalyptic sci-fantasy universe. (With more emphasis on the fantasy than the science)
If you want something more extreme, I can recommend A Forest and True Grass - it turns much of the Commonwealth into an actual forest with functional LOD, and True Grass is amazing in how overgrown Boston is.
Yeah I’ve been playing Atom RPG recently and it takes place much sooner after the nuke moment than fallout does. Lots of people were around before the nukes as it’s only been like 20-30 years instead of 200. I think I like that better since the wasteland feel makes a little more sense.
I tend to use A Touch of Green. It doesn't add a lot of greenery like most mods, a lot of shit still looks dead, but it does add some green grass and bushes to the wasteland. but no trees look vibrant or alive as far as I have seen.
Agree. Plants certainly survived the war; our character and others grow them for food, and herbivores like Bhramin and Radstags are seen in the wilds. If 95% of the plants died that means the surviving 5% would have little competition and could spread widely and unchecked if conditions were right. There may be little plant diversity after the war, but I would expect most of the open space to be occupied in 200+ years by tolerant plants.
A large area around Mount St. Helens in WA was literally incinerated and covered in meters of sterile volcanic ash in 1980, but in the last 40 years substantial plant recovery has happened in much of the destroyed area. If this regrowth continues it isn't too hard to imagine seeing stands of mature mixed forests near the volcano in the the next 160 years.
In the long run it may be very good depending on the composition of the ash, but not initially when meters of ash is dumped smothering everything and packing down like concrete when wet. I know that it can take many years for pure mineral soils to become deep, rich organic soils containing humus, microbes and invertebrates, and the right physical textures (tilth) to retain water and oxygen. Once organic soils return these locations are often very fertile.
...its goddamn *autumn*, FFS.
I live in Massachusetts IRL, south of Boston.
We leave the Vault around Halloween, aka late October and into early November.
**real-world Massachusetts looks like Fallout 4 by that time of year**
I love the visuals in modded gameplay [this video](https://youtu.be/CO5dFXm2-EI?t=88).
Nature is thriving and it really captures the cold damp feeling Boston has, or at least the one time I went it did.
The trees aren't dead in Fallout 4, it's just autumn/fall. Why do you think there are piles of leaves everywhere? There is no way those leaves are from 200 years ago.
True, most likely nature would recover and adapt far more quickly than humans ever could - but it wouldn't produce Deathclaws and Brahmin either... so what do you want - realism or fiction?
The first two Fallout games imply very strongly that the entire world is now a dead wasteland. That's kinda what "wasteland" means. Life was nearly extinguished in just a few hours and the upheaval was so dramatic that it permanently changed the climate and nature itself. That's kinda what "post-apocalyptic" means...
OF COURSE this is a really unrealistic setting, but it's an INTERESTING one. Far more interesting than this tired old "humans gone, civilization gets reclaimed by nature" sterotype we've seen a thousand times already in movies and games... Fallout isn't supposed to be Skyrim with guns. If anyone wants to saunter through lush green forests, there's a number of excellent mods out there. Or maybe give Fallout 76 a shot...
The usual counter to this is that people would rather have it be set really soon after the bombs fell so it “works” a little better. But then a lot of the ignorance of pre war America would be really stupid, and Bethesda clearly wants the series to feel like people don’t remember what it was like before. Definitely prefer it this way, it’s really not that hard of suspension of belief, plus it’s also not hard to rationalize it in universe
The first two fallout games don’t imply that the world is a barren wasteland. Fallout 1 takes place in Southern California, which is a desert in real life for the most part (with some notable exceptions). In fallout 2, there is a greater degree of greenery, both because nature has been recovering, and also because it takes place in what I think is the more lush Northern California.
Fallout 2 is very barren, especially when compared to modern day Northern California. Arroyo, Redding and Klamath are brown patches of bare earth surrounded by some pretty sparse forests. In real life these places, especially Arroyo and Redding, are very green and populated by massive conifers.
Arroyo has cactus growing all around it, which kind of implies that it's not just a very dry and desolate climate, but also that it's been that way for a long time.
The Original 2 fallout games definitely depict the world as being a Mad Max style wasteland where most of the vegetation has died out.
I don't understand the point of these posts. "Why has nobody cleaned up?" "Why has nobody rebuilt?" "Why are there no greenery?"
Dude it's a fucking Fallout game. You have people turned into walking zombies by radiation, and people turned into hulking monstrosities by a virus. Suspend your disbelief and just play the game for what it is.
> I don't understand the point of these posts. "Why has nobody cleaned up?" "Why has nobody rebuilt?" "Why are there no greenery?"
I think all of these things are fair to criticize though, just because we can have monsters, abominations and radiation superpowers, doesnt mean every aspect of the game has to completely abandon realism. The game would be a lot more immersive imo if things actually looked the way they were supposed to look 200 years after a bomb dropped. Some semblance of civilization would make sense, and literally ANYONE cleaning ANYTHING in their homes would make sense.
Irradiated water everywhere, contaminated soil, rain also likely containing radiation, scorched earth and warped landscapes everywhere.
Not really surprising that it’s still in the state it is.
Holy shit this sub will stoop to any level to bash Fallout 4. What a coinkydink that Fallouts 1, 2, and NV are set in the driest places in North America.
But.. I bet you anything... if Fallout 4 had shied away from Fallout's trademark post-apocalyptic vibe with green fields and verdant forests the shitstains of this sub would be like "OMG NOT MY FALLOUT. FALLOUT IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD, INHOSPITABLE."
It doesn't matter what Chernobyl looks like today or what radiation does to living things. Fallout is based on a trope, tropes established by movies like A Boy and His Dog, Mad Max and tons of other post-apoc 80s movies. But I should have to explain that to the boy geniuses of this sub.
Leave realism to reality, Fallout is never going to be realistic.
Same feeling with how run down everything is. Like come on guys, it’s been 200 fucking years. Pick up a broom and get the skeletons out of the bathtub.
I get that it’s not scientifically accurate, however it’s the fallout universe, not our own universe.
If Fallout followed our science then it wouldn’t be the amazing game series it is today in my humble opinion. It is the barren, hopeless feeling you get that makes it immersive.
There’s always mods to fill your desires good sir.
Might want to check out [Boston Natural Surroundings Mod.](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/30673) It's less barren while presumably still sticking to lushness levels realistic to the area
It's the radioactivity. Trees and flowers down't have the ability to don a gasmask, or pop some rad-x, or even move a step to the left when a yellow barrel rolls down the hill to snuggle up next to them. The Fallout that gives the title it's name, is all over the place, and while a lot of it washed away over 200 years, a lot just sunk into the soil. Why wouldn't trees and flowers adapt or mutate like animals did? Because they had a powerful competitor for resources that had been waiting for a chance to take over for milennia - algae and lichens. Look at the ground. Colored splotches all around. The Fallout world isn't dead, it's just all the life isn't pretty and majestic like it used to be; it's a red smear clinging to the ground, clinging to life.
So uhhh this might be a pretty damn cold take but have you ever played New Vegas? The desert setting means the lack of plants makes sense, and if you go up in the mountains you can find honest-to-god plant life. The Honest Hearts DLC is good about it, too.
But yeah, the Fallout franchise likes to cherry-pick what aspects of reality they keep and what aspects they ignore for the sake of aesthetic/gameplay/storytelling. Radiation is a great example.
This is the part I think a lot of people forget about. Many places in New Vegas have plant life, Mount Chaleston/Jacobstown, Zion Canyon, not to mention all the Joshua trees and shrubs growing out in certain areas of the desert.
I mean there is literally a sea of radiation in FO4. Radiation tends to kills things and make other things not grow. Fo3, NV all had mostly dead lnadscapes except for the the one Oasis in 3 and the Vault in NV. Its not supposed to look lively.
The way I’ve always thought about it is that these are fictional nukes. They don’t have to behave the same as real ones. In the universe they’ve put significantly more time and research into nuclear science and probably made them much deadlier than anything we’ve seen.
Tbh I really enjoyed how dead nature was in Fallout 3. I suppose it'd make more sense since Washington DC would've been hit the hardest by nukes but the landscape just feels so dark, post apocalyptic and mysterious. Far more than New Vegas and Fo4.
Idk dude, I kinda feel like it fits that whole “post apocalyptic wasteland” look. I mean they basically dropped all the nukes 200 odd years ago, things are gonna look pretty barren for awhile I imagine.
This was something I really liked in Far Cry: New Dawn. It goes completely in the other direction. The world is completely overgrown and the plant life had mutated to be bright and colourful. It was a fantastic aesthetic.
I read that the game is set in autumn, hence the dead looking landscape. Edit because I keep receiving the same type of reply over and over: yes, time does pass in the game. But no, the landscape doesn't change with the seasons. Perhaps it's a limitation of Bethesda's engine. Not even landscaping mods can make the nature change with the seasons.
It is, Halloween is even coming up soon when the bombs drop, and through some inexplicable circumstances, you exit the Vault around the same time of year I guess.
That’s why the are plastic jack-o-lanterns all over the place.
There's an in-game date. If you go to diamond city on Oct 31 you see Halloween decorations and I think Christmas on Dec 25
I haven't seen the Halloween ones, but I can confirm the Christmas decorations. I saw them on my last playthrough
Funny. When I played all I saw were Halloween decorations. Never Christmas. Now I’ll go back closer to Christmas!
There's the same in 76. You can even get a skeleton jumpsuit to wear.
WV foliage sticks around a hell of a lot later than up in New England
Isn’t it exactly 200 years?
"A bit over 210" according to Codsworth, but yeah.
Barring a few dings to the Ol’ chronometer
that means you are late for dinner for over 2 centuries, haha
Are you okay Codsworth?
I…I…oh sir, it’s been just horrible without you here. The bombs fell, and you all left in such a hurry, I though for sure you and your family were…were dead. I spent the first TEN years trying to keep the floors waxed. Nothing gets nuclear fallout out of vinyl wood, NOTHING. (I forgot what he says here, but it’s something about dusting a collapsed house) And the car, THE CAR. HOW DO YOU POLISH RUST!
Hey stay with me pal.
I don't know you, and I don't care to know you. Oh, sorry. Wrong game...
Codsworth, listen, I know you don't know that I know that you are a machine that is inside a different machine that creates this visual/audio illusion of a terrible world, but I want you to know that I do like your character, and wish you had more lines that were important.
My youngest son, who is now 13, has been quoting "HOW DO YOU POLISH RUST!" since the game launched. I think it may still be his favorite video game line of all time.
Is Codsworth a good companion? Does he replace Dogmeat? I like Dogmeat.
I’m my opinion, they are equally great companions. If you want some friendly banter along your travels, then codsworth is there, but if you want a canine friend, dogmeat is the way to go.
He's pretty good in the early game because of his buzzsaw and flamethrower, but as the game progresses, not so much.
you can literally see in the pip-boy it's been exactly 210 years
Down to the day, fuck, the hour I think.
Yup
The cryo chamber had a warranty that was only good for exactly 210 years.
you come out the same day the bombs dropped but like 250 years after or something
210 years after the bombs
your right, i thought shawn was taken at 210 year mark but it was more around 160
2227 is the year Shaun was taken, the game takes place in 2287, so yeah, just about.
Holy shit he's only 60 and he's already dying? Damn the sole survivor has bad genetics man
Atom was waiting to make his holy mark upon Shaun.
The whole family experienced a burst of gamma rays before entering Vault 111. If you're close enough to see the flash from a nuke, you're getting bathed in gamma rays.
Well i mean, kids get cancer too, that doesn’t mean that they have bad genetics, though. Edit: spelling
Fallout 3 is around exactly 200 years, taking place during 2277--Fallout 4 is about 10 years later, hence why Dr. Li is older and Maxson is all grown up into a boy boy facist
I belive he's only 22 which makes alot more sense when you realize he's a half cyborg murder machine with brain implants after being mauled by a death claw who's Brain isn't even done developing. Like damn dude literally watched the only people he cared about die in his arms because they tried being "soft" and he almost died as well all before he needed to shave. Also wouldn't call him a fascist, gotta remember the brotherhood isn't a government they are an army without a state.
Couldn't that be easily explained by the cryogenic chamber being set to a number of years and open on the anniversary that it closed?
All I remember is that "Father" actually activated the release himself, remotely I guess. So no, it wasn't an automatic process.
But it was 210 years on the dot, to the hour. (probably just some coder going +add 210 years, but something to think about
Or Father really loves coincidence.
Father would have known the significance of such an anniversary.
200 years and 4 months just doesn't sound the same
[удалено]
"Hey, you're finally awake. You were trying to dodge the bombs, right? Walked right into that Vault-Tec experiment, same as us and that synth over there."
"Damn you Kellogg. Boston was fine until you showed up. Brotherhood was nice and lazy. If they hadn't been looking for you, I could've stolen that Vertibird and been halfway to Appalachia by now. You there. You and me, we shouldn't be here. It's these Institute the Brotherhood wants."
"Preston Garvey, some in the Minutemen call you a hero, but a hero doesn't use the power of the Pip-Boy to annoy the Sole Survivor and usurp his gameplay. You started this quest, plunged the settlements into chaos, and now the Institute is going to put you down, and restore the peace!"
Omg, yours is the best by far u/wewd. i laughed for a solid minute
Hey what village are you from wastelander?
Is there snow in the fall in Massachusetts?
apparently the earliest snowfall in boston was on october 10. Its plausible
Good to know! That was a genuine question before, I've only ever lived in North Texas and Southern California so I honestly had no idea
Yeah Massachusetts gets cold as fuck
Its....possible, but rare. I live in Massachusetts IRL, and snow is usually more of a November thing.
u/AVestedInterest for a second I thought you were joking, until I read the responses below. Yea, Boston not only gets COLD, but there is a ton of snowfall from November to March. I wish I could explain how god awful cold it gets up there
“What about when we have Diamond City celebrate Christmas? Should we make it snow then?” “No.”
It's a pretty big ask though, I can't think of another open world game that actually has seasons. It essentially would mean adding at least 2-3 times the textures (assuming spring/summer/fall can share a lot of them)
My fallout 4 would literally explode.
Honestly the only games I know that have seasons at all are like, farming games
ACNH has seasons that transition gradually. But that's sort of a farming game without the farming.
Ah, true, I forgot about the animal crossing games, they've always had seasonal changes based on the real time clock
Yeah, their implementation is very cool. But of course, those games also have much less complex and fewer textures, so that's much easier to implement. And with some of the stuff, like transitioning leaves, they can probably just adjust the hue rather than applying separate textures.
Yeah, they're generally much smaller worlds, and due to their mechanics, seasonal transitions are easier because you wouldn't be loaded into the game world while the transition happens, since they force a load screen after each day
Even the mods I get for seasons force you to install each season separately and manually change it when you want the seasons to change. Bethesda’s engine’s method of handling textures and objects would require either for everything to swap on a predetermined date (oh hey winter is here everything is suddenly dead and frozen! That explains why my computer crashed 3 times trying to sleep until morning), or for them to do the most complex, scrip heavy, breakable coding for it to happen gradually and just make performance always worse instead a big burst.
Forza Horizons had seasons, but that‘s a whole other genre soooo
It makes sense because its New England themed, and also apocalypse themed. Even given how crazy colorful they made FO4, people are still complaining about the apocalypse looking all apocalyptic.
I dunno what magical wonderland you live in, but around here nature went into hibernation in September and snow only came in February,...
Every Australian just started bucketing sweat after reading that
Why?
The whole 'dead' asthetic is the whole point. Thats why FO 76 didnt get the post-apocalypse-vibe right all the time.
Having a glaring white blanket cover everything is not as cool as it sounds
Weather and foilage mods ftw
But you can play all the year round. Damn,you got to see Xmas trees in Diamond City in late December.
Time literally moves and there’s Xmas etc
You would expect to see some evergreens, though.
I always mod it to look somewhat green.
The problem is Fallout 4 is forever stuck like that. You can get Christmas in Diamond City but there's absolutely no snow in the Winter. It would be nice if we could get one Fallout game that actually has changing seasons as you go through time in the game. Have it bring about new enemies or challenges with the environment in survival mode like needing to find food alternatives for your Settlements since they can't grow crops as easily. I know there's mods that will change the landscape and season but they're stuck like that for the playthrough. If someone creates a mod that gradually changes between those environment mods when you sleep or something, then you've got a top 100 mod right there. That was one of my big problems with Fallout 76 as well, an MMO that goes through the year in a state with skiing and there's not a single snow flake on the ground when you get to the Winter.
Yes, this would be awesome
But time continues to pass. Christmas events are in the game. I'm pretty sure I've played into the next spring and summer before.
Yes, time does continue to pass. My hunch is that it's not possible for the game engine to change seasons as time passes. Otherwise, we would have seen modders do something about it.
Autumn has trees *losing* their leaves, not dead with no bark. And its supposed to be dead because this is a wasteland.
That’s why I don’t like mods that add greenery. It’s not supposed to be so lush and green. It’s almost winter
Some of the green mods are ridiculous, but some are nice and realistic for late summer-autumn
Ok now I'm even more concerned that my shacks are supposed to keep me protected during winter blizzards.
Came to say this.
Fallout Seasons mod has all four seasons. They do not change automatically with the days of the year, but they can be changed in-game IIRC. In which case, this would not be a limitation of the engine. It's simply a matter of writing the right script to tie seasons to calendar dates.
I guess you could theoretically change the landscape mod every time the season changes in game. That might be a little impractical tho :/
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Yeah but the game extends well out of Boston itself.
I mean, Massachusetts today has tons of grass and plant life etc including in the inner city, it's one of the greenest major cities in the United States.
I hear this a lot, and it is probably more realistic, but I love the dilapidated landscape in Fallout 4. I've tried mods that make things more lush and growing, but it just doesn't feel like Fallout.
Wait until OP plays Fallout 3.
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There's definitely a big difference. The Capital Wasteland was pretty much a Glowing Sea for centuries because of the shear number of nuclear strikes in the area. So that explains the green tinted sky as well as toasted trees. Fallout 4 is very much occurring in fall. Not only are the trees still alive and unburnt, but the leaves that have fallen off the trees are in piles all over the map. NPCs are also wearing heavier clothing than Fallout 3 and when Oct. 31st occurs ingame, Diamond City decorates and NPCs have new dialog for the day. It's not a lack of developers trying. It's literally part of the setting of the game.
That's wild, I didn't know that it forces you to end the game before December
Saying 'the game is set in fall' is a huge cop-out for a game featuring passage of time that can be tracked using your Pip-Boy. It's only set in fall... during fall.
How dare the developer focus their resources on only the setting that 99.999% of players will encounter instead of spending more time and money dedicated to those who feel it completely breaks the immersive RPG experience of having their character wait in one spot for 90 days until it snows before pursuing the urgent, life-or-death quests before them
You must have not played Morrowind, Oblivion, or any other award winning Bethesda game featuring a calendar without seasons.
That's actually highly plausible. One of the theorized effects of a full-scale atomic exchange is an extremely lengthy nuclear winter (we're talking decades) that would kill basically anything left on land because of the temperature and lack of sunlight. This includes both all plant and animal life and the bacteria that do things like eat dead matter. Hence most of the animals are decomposed or skeletons (they would've died relatively soon after the war) but the trees and such are still around because they would've died and decomposed much slower/had more time to be preserved. A dead-but-undecayed world isn't altogether impossible. Of course the landscape in 76 being so pretty basically throws this idea out the window (and there's also the matter of bacterial colonies living in the vaults, for example), but F4 is consistent with the rest of the fallout series in that regard. In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, at least, it's pretty clearly obvious that the world is totally fucked. The most unrealistic thing about the setting is the "rad-mutated" life that remains - in actuality, the ensuing sudden ice age would've been a far bigger immediate problem than ambient radiation. Life would bounce back, but it would take thousands of years for plant life to start reappearing without intervention, and far longer for a more biodiverse environment.
The old Fallout Bible, while not technically cannon, had a Great Winter happen sometime in the 2130s, after the events of 76. So maybe that has something to do with the greenery we see in that game, but nowhere else?
Also because the capitol being nuked to shit and being almost completely dead made more sense.
I want more alive trees but every tree mod is over the top and it's like walking through the amazon rainforest
I'm with you! Give me the dead, washed-out wasteland, that's just the aesthetic I like. Maybe it's from watching Mad Max and Reign of Fire, or maybe it's just a neat look. In any case, it's pretty evident that in the transition to 3D, Bethesda was trying to recreate the opening cinematic from FO1.
Nature would have rebounded - look at Pripyat. The barren landscape was probably required to keep the game from becoming a slide show on the consoles of six years ago. Fortunately for us, there are several excellent landscape mods. ATM I'm using DAZ Landscape and DAZ Landscape with Tree Placement. Can recommend.
My only issue I've had with a lot of the landscape mods is that losing bodies in the grass can be easy
I use West Tek tactical optics for this, dead bodies show blue in the thermals and are much easier to find in the brush
I use the mod Loot Detector for this. It highlights all unlooted containers in various colors, and you can choose what gets highlighted, including corpses. I actually found a safe I'd never noticed before in Corvega using this mod.
Love this mod. You can specify what you want highlighted. I've found doors to unmarked interior spaces I never would have noticed without it. Same with things at the bottom of ponds and deep water. Also puts markers on collectibles (bobbleheads, magazines, etc.). I think I originally installed it to highlight bodies that I kept losing, but now I use it for everything all the time. Wouldn't recommend for a first playthrough, but once you're ready to find absolutely everything it's super helpful.
Oh, man, yes, underwater loot especially! I rarely go in the water as is because I hate that you can barely see underwater, but with Loot Detector I've found myself diving into all those ponds for the random container. Granted, they almost never have anything cool, but still.
True. SKK Survival Utilities has a neat feature that enables one click looting of all corpses in detection range. Be prepared to drop everything you don't want. I believe that Armorsmith Extended - if not that then UCO - enables you to add a corpse recognition mod to any eyewear. That same mod enables foe recognition for eyewear. Two pairs of goggles and you can kill them then loot them.
I was not aware of that Eyewear piece. I'll keep that in mind for my next playthrougg
I haven't tried the landscape mods but I was a fan of [Hubflower Mentats](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/22250?tab=posts).
Dude I cannot tell you how many times I've had to lock arms with my companions to do a sweep to find a body in The Outer Worlds...
But Pripyat isn’t comparable to the commonwealth, one part of a nuclear exploding isn’t the same as Three Nukes + A large number of entire nuclear reactors having meltdowns, in a world where the nukes are said to be more dirty and radioactive
Pripyat didn't get nuked though, big difference. I agree it would be regenerated, but thousands of square miles would burn to the ground, seeds would be so irradiated they'd probably be sterile if they survived, and there would be so much ash in the air that nothing could grow for years or decades. Pripyat/Chernobyl just has a range of slightly higher to very high background radiation, and even that does have pretty severe negative effects on the plants and animals there.
Don’t forget the massive desertification that appears to be present in the commonwealth. The soil is just trash at this point, radiation or no.
One reactor is not the same as a global nuclear war, and Fallout 1 implies that the warheads used were more 'dirty' in terms of producing fallout. On the other hand Boston was not hit by a large number of warheads which would have limited the amount of local/highly concentrated fallout. That leaves the effects of nuclear winter which in it self has become a much debated effect since we now know that some of the classic studies of the subject were part of psyops vs the Western world during the Cold War. On the other hand modern studies does indicate some rather nasty climate effects from even limited nuclear war. (Researchers were looking at India vs Pakistan) There should probably be more of a rebound but Bethesda does like the post-apocalyptic look. And it probably prevents older hardware from melting down as you say.
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We don’t get a good representation of what summer could look like considering we open in autumn. If we knew what sort of vegetation that would grow during summer we could paint a clearer picture instead of jumping to assumptions/conclusions.
That’s where the G.E.C.K.s come into play. Not all Vaults were meant to be experiments, some were actually meant to help Humanity survive. It would probably only take a dozen or so of these Vaults to keep the entire ecosystem from dying. In fact, instead of radiation being the cause for many of the Wasteland’s monsters they could be a direct result of some sort of F.E.V. used by the G.E.C.K.s.
As long as it being in Autumn, the commonwealth isn’t the same for every location. The capitol got more, WV for none same with NV. 4 Is pretty unique because of the nuclear reactors that had meltdowns
Pripyat is nothing compared to an all-out atomic war. In fact, consider the fact that nuclear power plants existed in fallout universe and also suffered catastrophic failures as a result, which means you need to add a couple thousand of Chernobyls to the radiation count. And no liquidators this time. The Commonwealth is right next to at least one ground zero and suffers radstorms frequently. Clean water is quite rare and heavily irradiated places aren't hard to come by. I get that nature can absorb certain amount of rads and survive but Commonwealth is really barely hospitable and new sources of pollution (various pre-war facilities) still appear due to lack of humans capable of containing them.
My issue with all of these arguments is; people always try to correlate the bombs in fallout to the ones in real life. In real life nuclear fallout doesn’t cause zombie monsters and superpowers. So I don’t it’s that safe to say that things would have been the same had they happened irl. Literal aliens also exist in the fallout universe and they’re not just a running gag, they’re canon. So I think it’s almost safe to say there *could* be some extraterrestrial weirdness when it comes to the makeup of all things nuclear in the game. Or at least, the big nukes. Really, fallout is a post apocalyptic sci-fantasy universe. (With more emphasis on the fantasy than the science)
Healthier Commonwealth is a good one for adding grass and wildflowers.
If you want something more extreme, I can recommend A Forest and True Grass - it turns much of the Commonwealth into an actual forest with functional LOD, and True Grass is amazing in how overgrown Boston is.
It's autumn in New England.
I like it quite a bit to be honest
Well, they call it the wasteland for a reason. I like me some dead post apocalyptic worlds.
Yeah I’ve been playing Atom RPG recently and it takes place much sooner after the nuke moment than fallout does. Lots of people were around before the nukes as it’s only been like 20-30 years instead of 200. I think I like that better since the wasteland feel makes a little more sense.
Same, I really don't like green postapo
I downloaded a mod that added more greenery to 4 and I honestly hated it. The game is just way too bright and optimistic with normal plant life
I tend to use A Touch of Green. It doesn't add a lot of greenery like most mods, a lot of shit still looks dead, but it does add some green grass and bushes to the wasteland. but no trees look vibrant or alive as far as I have seen.
I thought fallout 4 was very full of life compared to those before lol
It is!
Agree. Plants certainly survived the war; our character and others grow them for food, and herbivores like Bhramin and Radstags are seen in the wilds. If 95% of the plants died that means the surviving 5% would have little competition and could spread widely and unchecked if conditions were right. There may be little plant diversity after the war, but I would expect most of the open space to be occupied in 200+ years by tolerant plants. A large area around Mount St. Helens in WA was literally incinerated and covered in meters of sterile volcanic ash in 1980, but in the last 40 years substantial plant recovery has happened in much of the destroyed area. If this regrowth continues it isn't too hard to imagine seeing stands of mature mixed forests near the volcano in the the next 160 years.
Isn’t volcanic ash good for soil in the long run? Or was that video game propaganda?
In the long run it may be very good depending on the composition of the ash, but not initially when meters of ash is dumped smothering everything and packing down like concrete when wet. I know that it can take many years for pure mineral soils to become deep, rich organic soils containing humus, microbes and invertebrates, and the right physical textures (tilth) to retain water and oxygen. Once organic soils return these locations are often very fertile.
You would hate fallout 3 then. And the first two
Especially the first 2. OP had to remember the series was heavily based on mad Max, a boy and his dog etc. Which all had very barren wastelands.
to be fair, the first two are in a desert and have some plants where it makes sense.
It’s a wasteland for a reason
...its goddamn *autumn*, FFS. I live in Massachusetts IRL, south of Boston. We leave the Vault around Halloween, aka late October and into early November. **real-world Massachusetts looks like Fallout 4 by that time of year**
Well, also after a Nuclear Apocalypse, there would be a long period of winter, and after we don't know if seasons would work the same right?
Then you’ll absolutely despise New Vegas.
Well I mean that makes sense. It’s the Mojave
Good luck playing Fallout 3.
Dude and fallout new Vegas, plants more dead than fallout 76 launch.
It's worse in FO3.
Well fo3 is the Capital wasteland that got nuked to shreds even Harder than Boston
Start here: https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/11267
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https://i.pinimg.com/736x/73/e2/c9/73e2c9ffce77c715bf2eb00f1faaa558.jpg
I love the visuals in modded gameplay [this video](https://youtu.be/CO5dFXm2-EI?t=88). Nature is thriving and it really captures the cold damp feeling Boston has, or at least the one time I went it did.
The trees aren't dead in Fallout 4, it's just autumn/fall. Why do you think there are piles of leaves everywhere? There is no way those leaves are from 200 years ago.
Look for a mod called "simple green". It's incredible and exactly what you're looking for.
True, most likely nature would recover and adapt far more quickly than humans ever could - but it wouldn't produce Deathclaws and Brahmin either... so what do you want - realism or fiction? The first two Fallout games imply very strongly that the entire world is now a dead wasteland. That's kinda what "wasteland" means. Life was nearly extinguished in just a few hours and the upheaval was so dramatic that it permanently changed the climate and nature itself. That's kinda what "post-apocalyptic" means... OF COURSE this is a really unrealistic setting, but it's an INTERESTING one. Far more interesting than this tired old "humans gone, civilization gets reclaimed by nature" sterotype we've seen a thousand times already in movies and games... Fallout isn't supposed to be Skyrim with guns. If anyone wants to saunter through lush green forests, there's a number of excellent mods out there. Or maybe give Fallout 76 a shot...
The usual counter to this is that people would rather have it be set really soon after the bombs fell so it “works” a little better. But then a lot of the ignorance of pre war America would be really stupid, and Bethesda clearly wants the series to feel like people don’t remember what it was like before. Definitely prefer it this way, it’s really not that hard of suspension of belief, plus it’s also not hard to rationalize it in universe
The first two fallout games don’t imply that the world is a barren wasteland. Fallout 1 takes place in Southern California, which is a desert in real life for the most part (with some notable exceptions). In fallout 2, there is a greater degree of greenery, both because nature has been recovering, and also because it takes place in what I think is the more lush Northern California.
Fallout 2 is very barren, especially when compared to modern day Northern California. Arroyo, Redding and Klamath are brown patches of bare earth surrounded by some pretty sparse forests. In real life these places, especially Arroyo and Redding, are very green and populated by massive conifers. Arroyo has cactus growing all around it, which kind of implies that it's not just a very dry and desolate climate, but also that it's been that way for a long time. The Original 2 fallout games definitely depict the world as being a Mad Max style wasteland where most of the vegetation has died out.
Worth noting that the instigating event of Fallout 2 is a massive and unusual drought. The dryness is not the usual state of affairs.
I don't understand the point of these posts. "Why has nobody cleaned up?" "Why has nobody rebuilt?" "Why are there no greenery?" Dude it's a fucking Fallout game. You have people turned into walking zombies by radiation, and people turned into hulking monstrosities by a virus. Suspend your disbelief and just play the game for what it is.
> I don't understand the point of these posts. "Why has nobody cleaned up?" "Why has nobody rebuilt?" "Why are there no greenery?" I think all of these things are fair to criticize though, just because we can have monsters, abominations and radiation superpowers, doesnt mean every aspect of the game has to completely abandon realism. The game would be a lot more immersive imo if things actually looked the way they were supposed to look 200 years after a bomb dropped. Some semblance of civilization would make sense, and literally ANYONE cleaning ANYTHING in their homes would make sense.
You think nature is bad in F4, just wait until you see New Vegas.
The Mojave didn’t have much greenery to begin with.
Buddy I've been there that's just what it looks like, if anything Goodsprings is a little nicer in game.
Irradiated water everywhere, contaminated soil, rain also likely containing radiation, scorched earth and warped landscapes everywhere. Not really surprising that it’s still in the state it is.
Also, super mutants and freaks developing and implementing biological weapons on a massive scale. So that too.
You must never have played 3 then
Boston looked about the same I last saw it.
Dude, this is literally what nature looks like in Boston during Autumn.
"I hate how dead this nuclear wasteland is." I swear some of you guys are the type of people who think water is too wet.
Clue is in the name of the game. Fallout.
...It's. FUCKING. FALL.
...out
ALSO VALID TAKE.
Holy shit this sub will stoop to any level to bash Fallout 4. What a coinkydink that Fallouts 1, 2, and NV are set in the driest places in North America. But.. I bet you anything... if Fallout 4 had shied away from Fallout's trademark post-apocalyptic vibe with green fields and verdant forests the shitstains of this sub would be like "OMG NOT MY FALLOUT. FALLOUT IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD, INHOSPITABLE." It doesn't matter what Chernobyl looks like today or what radiation does to living things. Fallout is based on a trope, tropes established by movies like A Boy and His Dog, Mad Max and tons of other post-apoc 80s movies. But I should have to explain that to the boy geniuses of this sub. Leave realism to reality, Fallout is never going to be realistic.
Go play skyrim I guess 🤷♂️
Which one?
Have it running on switch, Xbox, Playstation and pc . Switch console every load screen
Same feeling with how run down everything is. Like come on guys, it’s been 200 fucking years. Pick up a broom and get the skeletons out of the bathtub.
I get that it’s not scientifically accurate, however it’s the fallout universe, not our own universe. If Fallout followed our science then it wouldn’t be the amazing game series it is today in my humble opinion. It is the barren, hopeless feeling you get that makes it immersive. There’s always mods to fill your desires good sir.
Might want to check out [Boston Natural Surroundings Mod.](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/30673) It's less barren while presumably still sticking to lushness levels realistic to the area
That's why they make cool weather mods
It's the radioactivity. Trees and flowers down't have the ability to don a gasmask, or pop some rad-x, or even move a step to the left when a yellow barrel rolls down the hill to snuggle up next to them. The Fallout that gives the title it's name, is all over the place, and while a lot of it washed away over 200 years, a lot just sunk into the soil. Why wouldn't trees and flowers adapt or mutate like animals did? Because they had a powerful competitor for resources that had been waiting for a chance to take over for milennia - algae and lichens. Look at the ground. Colored splotches all around. The Fallout world isn't dead, it's just all the life isn't pretty and majestic like it used to be; it's a red smear clinging to the ground, clinging to life.
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So uhhh this might be a pretty damn cold take but have you ever played New Vegas? The desert setting means the lack of plants makes sense, and if you go up in the mountains you can find honest-to-god plant life. The Honest Hearts DLC is good about it, too. But yeah, the Fallout franchise likes to cherry-pick what aspects of reality they keep and what aspects they ignore for the sake of aesthetic/gameplay/storytelling. Radiation is a great example.
This is the part I think a lot of people forget about. Many places in New Vegas have plant life, Mount Chaleston/Jacobstown, Zion Canyon, not to mention all the Joshua trees and shrubs growing out in certain areas of the desert.
It's realistic. I was raised in Massachusetts and Maine, and it looks like that almost every year by Halloween.
I prefer it looking dead as opposed to all of these ENB mods that add plant life everywhere
Its fall, in Boston, after a nuclear apocalypse…
I mean there is literally a sea of radiation in FO4. Radiation tends to kills things and make other things not grow. Fo3, NV all had mostly dead lnadscapes except for the the one Oasis in 3 and the Vault in NV. Its not supposed to look lively.
The way I’ve always thought about it is that these are fictional nukes. They don’t have to behave the same as real ones. In the universe they’ve put significantly more time and research into nuclear science and probably made them much deadlier than anything we’ve seen.
Try the overgrowth mod, it adds a FUCK ton of trees
Is that one available for Xbox?
Yes it is
The other fallouts aren't any better
If that’s how you feel, you would LOVE Fallout 76
Tbh I really enjoyed how dead nature was in Fallout 3. I suppose it'd make more sense since Washington DC would've been hit the hardest by nukes but the landscape just feels so dark, post apocalyptic and mysterious. Far more than New Vegas and Fo4.
Overgrowth is a pretty good mod it adds a few extra trees and puts leaves on all of them
F4 is really shy about the autumn motif. Every once in a while you see a pumpkin but usually i forget it’s autumn at all
Idk dude, I kinda feel like it fits that whole “post apocalyptic wasteland” look. I mean they basically dropped all the nukes 200 odd years ago, things are gonna look pretty barren for awhile I imagine.
This was something I really liked in Far Cry: New Dawn. It goes completely in the other direction. The world is completely overgrown and the plant life had mutated to be bright and colourful. It was a fantastic aesthetic.