Fallout Series Timeline Adds Up, Says Todd Howard

That's good to know... but i still hate the story told in the show wasn't on a fallout 5 instead. It has major revelations for the whole series and many won't even know about them.
Like... why were the bombs dropped? Who dropped them and why?
These are very core pieces of story for the franchise and to see them dropped in a tv show is sad.

Glad someone put these nerds in their place

New Vegas a black sheep? It's the best game, the closest to the spirit of the original Fallout, with all the modern bells and whistles. Bethesda is the black sheep. Fallout IP is like Star Wars. It's dead, sold to a corporate entertainment company. They can generate all the content they want, it's a dull shell.

'They' nuked Shady Sands?! WTF? Who? Now I have to watch the show.

@AllenSnyder

Should anyway, its good

@Nem It will likely be referenced in Fallout 5, same as references happen in TES. Not everyone is gonna play the entire series or watch the show and they know that.

@bluesylvanite You beat me to it! 😂

@B0udoir hear, hear! 100% right. I do love Elder Scrolls, but dreary apocalypse survival Bethesda fallout kills everything that made Fallout. Vegas was made by mostly the original devs

Then why is it confusing at all? This is just PR management. Todd being Todd.

@NEStalgia only 7 of the original devs worked on it out of 45.

@EchoRange Yes, but most of those (unlike the folk who made Fallout 3) had played the first two Fallouts. Those 7 were also senior people, and many of those who didn't work on Fallout 1 did work on Fallout 2 and/or Van Buren (Black Isle's Fallout 3 which ended up getting cancelled), such as New Vegas' project lead Josh Sawyer.

This nuking of Shady Sands is fairly typical for Bethesda though. They like to destroy the settings of previous games in their series. From Red Mountain erupting and destroying Morrowind, to the Great War wrecking Cyrodil. When Elder Scrolls 6 comes out, expect to discover that Skyrim has collapsed in some way.

>"increased focus on the alt-history that binds it all together"
It's not alt-history when it happens in the future, surely. Alternative history is something that actually happened being changed, like if the Nazis won WW2. Would you call Star Trek alt-history? Though, granted, a small part of the setting might cover alternative versions of actual historical events, that's not the focus at all.

@B0udoir Yeah, he called it that before too. There are 5 Fallout games made by Interplay or previous key staff that worked on the series there. There are 3 games made by Bethesda. Of those three, one of them is more like an MMO Lite, so that should really be the black sheep. And given that the series started as a turn-based tactical RPG, at the time FO3 was definitely the black sheep.

@Matroska The timeline is supposed to diverge around the 1940’s though. I wouldn’t look too much into it as the Fallout world is kinda nonsense(but works on a surface level) but the basic idea seems to be that after WWII people used nuclear power a lot more and modern computer micro chips were not invented, or invented much later, in this universe.

These kinds of Retro Future worlds don’t actually hold up under even the slightest scrutiny though, it’s more of a purely artistic approach I feel.

@EchoRange Key people. And Feargus isn't technically "credited" on the game.....but he's (was - obviously the CEO title doesn't exist now under MS but he's the studio head still) the studio CEO, of course he was involved. It was mostly the Troika guys that were temporarily Awol and a bit of a rivalry for a while during that time.

The Bethesda games are a complete tone shift in the series, from a dark comedy parodying human civilization in rebuilding to an actual apocalypse survival. The Interplay games use the apocalypse as a historical backdrop to setup the world as it became, where people have been living in vaults for generations and the world they see is so warped and skewed of the "before times.". The Bethesda games focus on the apocalypse itself as the world, and takes it all seriously, and focuses on a recently lost world, it's a completely different core concept. But New Vegas was a return to the original worldview.

@ChrisDeku Oh I know that, I was just saying the stories all take place post-2077 when the bombs dropped. Obviously there's build up to that but, like Star Trek, there's an element of of alternative history in the backstory, but to call the stories of the series alt-history seems wrong when they're all in the future. It's not exactly The Man in the High Castle.

When the article says "increased focus on the alt-history that binds it (the Fallout series) all together" it seems pretty clear he thinks the whole thing is alternative history.

@B0udoir I don't disagree with what you say about Bethesda's games, although I'll give them credit for having actual memorable party members in FO4, a first for their RPGs. That said, the Fallout TV series is actually genuinely good. It's interesting that despite Bethesda's part in making the show, it's set in California like the true FO games and not on the East Coast like Bethesda's stuff.

@Matroska I went on a trip in North California/South Oregon, and I made a detour through Klamath, Reno, Redding. Damn they are such beaten-up areas that you don't see the difference between Fallout and the reality!

@Wiceheid it also wouldn’t surprise me if the NCR hold was short lived. The legion was insane and would have lasted even shorter, but the NCR side quests paint a pretty vivid picture of inept command and short sighted goals. Even Boone can’t stand them, despite retaining respect for some of the ideals. It’s pretty believable that it fell pretty fast.