Warning: If you’re the type of person who believes Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas were the worst entries in the Fallout series because they were “the most boringest”, you might want to turn back now.

What does lore friendly mean?

It’s like the word “literally”, which used to mean “literally”, but now it also means “figuratively”.

What is lore?

The backstory created around a fictional universe.

What does it mean when someone says, “this isn’t lore friendly”?

“I don’t like this but I can’t articulate why”.

No really, what does lore friendly mean?

No, really, there’s no consensus.

But how about this: something is lore friendly if it fits into and is believable in the game’s universe, and is consistent with the facts and timeline established by previous games in the series.

What Fallout games came before and after Fallout 4?

Fallout 1 (1997), Metacritic Score: 89
Fallout 2 (1998), Metacritic Score: 86
Fallout Tactics (2001), Metacritic Score: 82
Fallout Brotherhood of Steel (2004), Metacritic Score: 66
Fallout 3 (2008), Metacritic Score: 91
Fallout New Vegas (2010), Metacritic Score: 84
Fallout 4 (2015), Metacritic Score: 84
Fallout 76 (2018), Metacritic Score: 54

What lore was established in the prior Fallout games?

These were satirical, post-apocalyptic role-playing games in an atompunk retro-futuristic setting, influenced by the post-war culture of 1950s America, with its combination of hope for the promises of technology and the lurking fear of nuclear annihilation.

Besides Raiders, Super Mutants, Ghouls, Deathclaws, Vault-Tec, The Enclave, and The Brotherhood of Steel, these games contained:

Intelligent/talking Deathclaws (Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics)
Peaceful Super Mutant communities (Fallout 2, Broken Hills)
Heavy Metal music (Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, e.g. Slipknot and Killswitch Engage)
Time Travel and a TARDIS (Fallout 2 Guardian of Forever encounter and Fallout 1 Unusual Call Box)
King Arthur and the Holy Hand Grenade (Fallout 2)
Adult magazines (Cat’s Paw Magazine from Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics)
Porn actor brain used to run a computer that controls a vault (Fallout Tactics, Vault 0)
Child sex slaves and stripper poles (Fallout 1, Evergreen Mills)
Prostitutes and more prostitutes and even more prostitutes (Every game except Fallout 4, unless you count Magnolia)
Scores of cultural references (Every game, Fallout 2 arguably being the worst offender)
S&M bikini armor with breast physics (Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, Jane's outfit)
Brothels and bathhouses (Fallout 2 and Fallout New Vegas)
Cage dancers and pole dancers (Fallout New Vegas)
Sex-related perks (Fallout 2, Sexpert and Porn Star Reputation Titles)
Slaver pimps and regular pimps (Fallout 3 Eulogy Jones, Fallout 2 Pimps of New Reno)
Killable children (Fallout 1 and 2)
Hookers with pasties dancing on busy streets (Fallout New Vegas, sometimes the female NCR soldiers dance with them)
Sex slaves (Fallout 3, e.g. Clover)
All female characters as gratuitous pin-ups (Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel)
Star in a porn film at a porn studio (Fallout 2, Golden Globes porn studio)

You're talking about mods for those games, right?

No, all that stuff was in the base game(s).

But that's not lore friendly!

Re-read the first four Q&A's above. See what I mean now?

Is Fallout 4 lore friendly?

Sure, if you ignore... well…. come to think of it… not exactly.

How can you say that? Bethesda made it. Of course it's lore friendly!

When a game changes or ignores facts from previous games in the series, it breaks its own lore. Some quick examples from Fallout 4:

- Jet is now a pre-war drug available on the east coast.

- Ghouls no longer need to eat or drink water to survive. (Except when they do).

- With the exception of Virgil and Strong, Super Mutants are all hostile and stupid now vs. being able to integrate into society in previous games and even join the Brotherhood of Steel, if you believe Fallout Tactics.

- Robots now have personalities when originally they didn’t.

- Power armor is no longer exceptionally rare and doesn’t require training to use anymore. Also X-01 Power Armor and T-60 Power armor are… you know what, don’t get me started on those.

- Laser weapons work differently.

- Potatoes are now extinct and cats are no longer extinct.

- Bottle caps are somehow a viable currency on the east coast.

- The Brotherhood of Steel, whose mission is to acquire and preserve tech, wants to nuke ALL the technology in the Institute rather than preserving at least a portion of it.
 
Is Fallout 4 a realistic game?

- You can carry hundreds of pounds in your pocket
- Weapons, including mini-guns and handheld cannons, disappear when you holster them
- Most guns still work after 200 years and ammo is plentiful
- Shoot someone without a helmet in the head and they keep attacking you
- You can build an entire structure with minimal scraps of steel and wood
- You can pickpocket someone’s clothes off their body without them noticing.
- (If female), your law degree has given you elite military skills
- People leave skeletons lying around at their place of business
- Hardly anyone ever picks up the trash where they live
- Enemies, after seeing you mow down their comrades with a minigun, will charge at you with a melee weapon.
- VATS
- Legendary enemies
- Handheld nuke launchers
- Cotton clothes that last over 200 years
- Laser weapons with recoil
- Sleeping magically heals serious injury
- You can breathe underwater
- Your skeleton can be infused with indestructible metal
- Radiation can regenerate your lost health
- Reading magazines can give you super-human abilities.
- And more....

Does Fallout 4 take itself seriously?

The world of Fallout 3 received criticism for neglecting to show how places like Megaton could exist. There’s not enough vegetation or farming to support human life in the region. Everybody would be dead.

Fallout 4 addressed that specific criticism, but didn’t go much further. There are farmers and traders, but where is the industry?... the miners and manufacturers of base goods like textiles, metals, machinery, chemicals, and equipment that allow for traders in places like Diamond City, or the robot factory in Automatron, to exist? Are we to believe that all the goods these people are trading have lasted over 200 years in usable form?

The motivations of the major characters and factions are not well defined, and the… this is going to become a rant. Just watch this… and this… and maybe this too. Also this if you want.

Is Fallout 4 a bad game?

Not at all.

Fine, but it’s a bad Bethesda game.

Not really.

Okay, but it’s a bad Fallout game.

Fallout 4 is the best Fallout game in the series.

That’s just like, your opinion, man.

It’s probably your opinion too.

No way!

If you want to know what people really think, stop listening to what they say and watch what they do.

Steam Statistics, peak number of players today (late September 2018):

20,414 Fallout 4
3,720 Fallout New Vegas
190 Fallout 3
129 Fallout 2
130 Fallout 1

25,413 Skyrim and Skyrim SE
1,567 Oblivion
331 Morrowind

Far more important than what people are complaining about, is what they’re not complaining about, because they’re too busy enjoying it.

What’s your point?

Gamers don’t play games they dislike over and over again when better ones are available for lower prices.

That’s not fair. Fallout New Vegas came out in 2010

Skyrim came out in 2011. It still has more players than Fallout 4.

But Elder Scrolls is a more popular franchise than Fallout

Not according to the sales figures from the most recent single-player releases in each franchise, but point conceded.

New Vegas is a better game than FO4, it just came out on an older game engine

If you say “Fallout New Vegas had better story, dialogue, characters, and role playing options than Fallout 4”, few people would disagree with you.

But FNV isn’t a better overall game than Fallout 4. If it were, you’d be playing it right now instead of reading about Fallout 4 mods.

I’m only playing Fallout 4 because…..

It doesn’t matter why you’re still playing Fallout 4. Could be the gameplay, graphics, settlement building, animations, gun play, boob mods. Who cares? All that matters is you’re playing it because, even though you don't want to admit it, you think it’s the best Fallout game that’s available for you to play.

Why can’t I stop playing this horribly flawed game?

Because it’s fun.

Why is it fun?

Because the lore takes a back seat to the gameplay, and to a lesser extent, the plot.

Bethesda changes the Fallout lore as they need to, as did Black Isle before them, in order to make the gameplay more enjoyable for you.

Vaults weren't originally social experiments, Super Mutants weren’t originally supposed to be basically immortal, and Ghouls and Deathclaws were supposed to be confined to specific geographic areas.

But then someone decided to make a sequel. And you’re not gonna release a new Fallout game without Super Mutants, Ghouls, Deathclaws, and a new version of Power Armor. Case in point: Bethesda went so far as to put the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 76.

You tweak the lore however you need to so that interesting gameplay elements have a reason to exist in the latest game. So that people will play it.

What does this have to do with your mods? I just want to play something “lore friendly”.

If most people really meant that, the endorsement rankings for Fallout 4 quest mods wouldn’t look anything like they do. Seddon’s mods would be #1 through #5, with some other less-played quest mods close behind.

If you truly wanted more vanilla content, you’d be playing it. You’re here because you want something different.

Perhaps, but can you tone down the crazy in your mods?

Can you be more specific?

I don’t like all the clean interiors, they break my immersion.

You mean like the Institute and Vault 81?

Those are different. You put functional bathrooms in yours.

Most residences built in the United States during and after the 20th Century came with functional indoor plumbing. I don't know why Bethesda chose to exclude bathrooms from most of their residential buildings. Or toilet paper from Vault 81.

When we build an interior living space, we make it habitable: kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, electricity, HVAC, and plumbing. Toilet paper and towels included.

But why are there people swimming in bathing suits?

That’s generally how pools work.

Pools and functional indoor plumbing are not lore friendly.

Perhaps you should speak with management at the Tops, Ultra-Luxe, and Gomorrah hotels in New Vegas.

You even have people showering naked in the bathrooms.

That’s how showers work. Of course, if you don’t want NPC’s taking showers to be naked, don’t use that nude mod you forgot you installed.

But I only use CBBE for the nevernude option.

And you only read Playboy for the articles.

What’s Playboy?

Nevermind.

What’s with all the pop culture references?

It's not a Fallout game without pop culture references. The quantity here pales in comparison to the amount contained in the Fallout base games, especially the older ones.

But surely including pimps and prostitutes in Fallout 4 is going too far?

Just because you didn’t play the previous Fallout games doesn’t mean these elements weren’t present, or even pervasive, in those games.

And why isn't all the music in your mods made prior to 1960?

Because that's not how music works, even in the Fallout world.

Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 contained references to modern music, including in-game posters of Maynard James Keenan from the American rock band Tool, taken from album art of the band's 1993 album "Undertow", and then Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel actually used heavy metal music in the soundtrack.

While it's theoretically possible that around 2077 America suddenly experienced a 1920-1950's musical nostalgia kick, trying to recapture a sense of "the good ol' days", that doesn't imply all other forms of music would have disappeared.

Fallout's early 20th century musical emphasis started when Bethesda took over the franchise with Fallout 3. While this saved money on royalty fees, it didn't necessarily make sense from a lore or realism perspective. Real people enjoy different types of music, and a diverse array of genres exists to serve individual tastes.

In Fallout 4, over half the songs are either from Fallout 3 or are about bombs or the end of the world (Crawl out through the Fallout, Atom Bomb Baby, Rocket 69, Uranium Rock, Uranium Fever, The End of the World, etc.) These are not songs that would have been popular with people living in the 2077 Commonwealth. In the real world, over 90% of top ten billboard songs are about love or sex, not bombs and death, and it's been that way for a long time.

You can argue that maybe the early 20th century songs are the only ones that survived because songs recorded on later mediums (e.g. digitally) were wiped out by an EMP or something, but that doesn't hold up because we can still read digital information on terminals in Fallout 4.

There's also this weird aspect of Bethesda's lore where African Americans exist, but have almost no impact on American culture, especially the direction of 20th and 21st century music.

Blues, Jazz, Rock & Roll, Hip-Hop, Rap, R&B, even House and Techno - all these innovations of 20th century popular American music are the products of African American musicians. Musical titans like Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Little Richard, Ray Charles, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, and Bo Diddley were all alive and making music before the divergence in the Fallout universe. Where did their music go?

Over three-quarters of the Fallout 4 soundtrack is from Caucasian artists. Speaking of which, see if you can spot the black guy in the Bethesda employee group photo.

You even made a joke about the backlash against Nu-Metal being the downfall of modern music and the cause of the oldies music revival?

It's a joke told by a confused robot. But given Bethesda's musical disconnect from history and reality, how crazy is it?

In our timeline, Glam Metal bands like Winger, Slaughter, Warrant, and Poison ended up causing such a backlash in the early 1990's, initially manifested in Grunge Music, and culminating in the Nu-Metal fiasco, that R&B and Hip-Hop took over as the most popular genres, effectively banishing all post-1985 rock & roll music from American radio stations.

MTV stopped playing music, and there was even a brief Swing Music revival, so who is to say that a similar but slightly different set of circumstances wouldn't have played out in the Fallout universe?

Fine, but Sarah Lyons is dead, silly. The terminal said so.

You’re free to believe whatever you read on a computer screen. Millions of people do it every day on Facebook, Reddit, and 4chan.

Bethesda games use a technique called unreliable narrator. Like with the Dwarves in Elder Scrolls. What happened to them? Lots of NPC’s have a theory, but the theories presented to the player in the game conflict with each other.

Deep down, if you really believed that single, uncorroborated entry on a Prydwen terminal that she “fell in battle”, you wouldn’t be here searching for alternatives.

And Preston Garvey, why?

You wanted that just as much as the rest of us.

Fusion City?

What other Fallout game has a seedy tourist destination in the middle of a desert with clean interiors, rule of law, pools, restaurants, shopping, etc.?

But this is Fallout 4.

So talk to Bethesda. They're the ones who chose to ignore certain characteristics from the previous six Fallout entries and neuter the game to appeal to a more general audience. All we can do is mod the game - to align it with the wider Fallout universe - and fill in the gaps left by Fallout 4.

I skipped all the terminals and most of the conversations. Was there something important I missed?

Possibly.

I have some more complaints about the lore.

You know what they say: those who complain loudest about lore….