Fallout 4's Commonwealth as seen by a resident

[Dansen]

I want to talk about the world as a resident of Boston. Its a surreal experience having a post apocalyptic game set in the city I was born and raised in. Its really fun and entertaining to have an idea where I am more or less,since all the major landmarks are properly placed in relation to each other. However the scale is really small, by an absurd degree. Now I understand you can't make everything to scale but a lot of the places are absurdly small or missing areas that would make for interesting settlements.

There are a few examples but none exemplify this more than Boston Commons. That park is huge but in game it is barely a city block. The commons should have been the "National Mall" of the game. We could have had a quest centered around the area parodying "Make Way for Ducklings"(children's book set in the commons, they even have statues of the fictional ducks in the park). Side note: enter the shack next to the pond, you wont regret it.

Another disappointing area was Charlestown. Where the hell is the Charlestown Naval Shipyards? The only representation of it is "Old Iron Sides", and even then you find it on top of a building. The place is pretty big as it houses a few retired navy ships as well as being a docking area for naval ships passing through. It even has a dry-dock. i just looked it up and it was active into the seventies. We could have seen another major rivet city like settlement there.

However the most egregious mistake(using hyperbole here), is the lack of Boston Harbor Islands. The only one present in the game is the most boring of them Spectacle Island, an Island that was used as a land fill. There are quite few Islands of note; There is the series of forts built in WW II found on Long Island, Paddock's island and Lovells Island. There is Georges Island home to the colonial fort warren. Its way bigger and more interesting than fort independence (the castle). What if a vault had been built beneath it? Hell even Thompson's Island which houses a privet boy's school with a decent sized campus.

Now you might be saying, they can't include everything and I would be inclined to agree with you, its just that it feels like Bethesda didn't really take advantage of the area they chose. There are a myriad of places that would have made for interesting settlements/faction locations. Then again fans from the other cities of other games must feel the same way. I still have more exploring to do and I look forward to finding the places they decided to keep in the game. Now I want to turn it over toy you guys, are you happy with the Commonwealth or is it lacking compared to previous entries in the franchise, what do you like or dislike about it?

 

[Extra-Ordinary]

Then again fans from the other cities of other games must feel the same way.

Yep. I'm pretty close to Seattle (but then again, if you live in Washington state you basically always describe where you live to others as "near Seattle"), and Seattle in Infamous: Second Son is kind of an "almost" version of Seattle. There's a sort-of ferry terminal, a sort-of Pike Place, I'm pretty sure the building where my mom works isn't even there. The Columbia Center's not there either; tallest tower in the city, it's not there, not really, it got replaced by some silvery-lookin' building.
My mom wanted to see if we could get to Alaskan Way, we couldn't find it. I'm not asking for street signs, I get why they wouldn't be there; but my mom knows where it is, directed me around, we couldn't find it.
I can deal with it though, it's a video game, I got cooler stuff to do than sightsee a digital version of a city that only takes me an hour-long ferry ride to get to.
Besides, got the Science Center right, so I can jump all over those dinosaur statues, it's awesome.

As for what you actually wanted to know: Eh, I'll take it. I like the Commonwealth. Don't know if I like it as much as DC but Fallout 3 was my first Fallout game so it definitely has the feels-like-the-first-time advantage.

 

[Fappy]

The Walking Dead Season 1 captured Georgia fairly well. Driving down I-75, arriving in Macon and then heading east along I-16 towards Savannah. They represented Savannah pretty well, especially River Street (where you meet the blond chick with the climby thing). I recognized where I was on River Street immediately! It was a surreal experience to say the least.

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip

According to Bethesda, they went right through Boston to pick up locations to use, tried to generate a few and...worked on alot, and then had to cut back. Obscure references to one of the people being an actual Bostonite would be a bedroom full of comics.

*Shrugs*

Nobody's perfect. Besides, not everything would survive a nuclear war.

 

[SerBrittanicus]

The history of the fallout universe and that of the real life universe are only the same up until 1945. The nuclear apocalypse is more than 100 years after that and Fallout 4 is set another 200 years again after that - I would hazard that Fallout Boston would look very different to real Boston after 300 years of diverging history and a nuclear war. Since no-one seems to even be repopulating the city I can't believe there is as many buildings/landmarks left as there is in game especially with all the constant fighting that seems to take place.

In any case Bethesda always has small scale cities/settlements in their games - I suppose there are limits to what even they can do even with all their success.

 

[pookie101]

the style of the buildings is completely different from modern boston so there was obviously alot of brand new construction in the fallout boston before the bombs

 

[SmugFrog]

The history of the fallout universe and that of the real life universe are only the same up until 1945.

That's a good point - cities change dramatically over 50 years or so. Areas that were once empty fields now have sprawling city areas. I think Bethesda compresses the game for the sake of gameplay, both for the sake of the gamers and to not be creating the city indefinitely. These days many gamers complain about the wide-open worlds when they feel they can't complete everything or see everything. The wonderful part of it is that's where mods come in (I can't wait to see those boarded up houses opened up and stories people will create).

 

[Soviet Heavy]

The history of the fallout universe and that of the real life universe are only the same up until 1945.

Actually its a little further than that. The Lake Mead B-29 crashed in 1948, and some of the assault rifles from New Vegas were developed in the 60s. The end of WW2 is definitely the divergence point, but there are still hints of our world appearing later in the timeline.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Robert Rath wrote a great piece about Hong Kong in Sleeping Dogs and reality, on this very site. (I still don't understand why new Escapist management got rid of his column). The general gist was similar to yours and is inevitably the same in any sandbox game representing a real world city (GTA Liberty City and Los Santos f.ex also). A game world can only be so large....while there's no question that a developer *could* make a digital facsimile of a real city to scale, it would be too large to make for a fun game. It would be empty expanse with nothing noteworthy for us the player to do or interact with.

There's also practical issues. A real life scaled city would take real world hours to traverse, there would inevitably need to be larger maps and more textures and larger hard drives needed to contain it. To make a fun game, they have to cut it down to be of a size that leaves enough room to have different areas and landmarks and feel sufficiently big that there is exploration to be done, while being small enough that said exploration is rewarding and varied, that travelling doesn't take actual real world hours and that around any given corner could be something of interest.

In Rath's column, he described various areas as representing more than just themselves. One area might f.ex have elements of three distinct and large places in the real world, but it's condensed down to a smaller size for the game. It will have some iconic landmarks, but two-three streets later you're somewhere else (whereas the real world it'd be a lot longer). I've never been to Boston, nor Washington DC for that matter, but the Commonwealth and Capital Wasteland both, I'm sure, capture enough of their real world counterparts to give the game the poignancy and legitimacy of being set there while keeping the games fun to actually play.

Fallout is quite lucky in the regard that the apocalypse grants them a great deal of freedom in redefining real-world areas. Since the bombs fell, new species, radiation and human survivors changed the landscape. Add in VaultTEC with their own business agenda, there is a lot of creative freedom to reinvent Boston to suit the time, setting and make for a fun game. The timing of the events in FO in particular are helpful, since the bombs didn't fall for a good few years from present day which means that much could happen between today's Boston and the one that was frozen in time post-apocalypse and the one that emerged in the years following.

 

[IceForce]

Reading through this thread makes me lament the fact that I live in a real-world location that will never be modelled in a video game.