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The nuclear war happens in 2077.
Fallout 3 happens in 2277.
During those 200 years people in DC don't just fail to rebuild civilization. They even fail to get rid of the random pre-war garbage inside their own homes!
New Vegas (which starts in 2281) is better but still way too post-apocalyptic. I want my Fallouts to be post-apocalyptic but they should have been set much sooner after the war (maybe 70 years, just long enough that almost no one who remembers the pre-war world is left) and even then settled people shouldn't live in shacks.
That is funny. 200 years is a long-ass time to build a civilization. America was rocking it within like 50. Although if I remember there is talk in some of the games about some very large empires that had risen and fallen in the last 200 years.
I've noticed that fiction authors tend to dramatically overestimate how long history actually takes.
It's tough, cause a lot of history did take a long long time. The "dark ages" lasted like 500-1000 years and are significant for having little to no technological advancement. Before then empires would last hundreds or thousands of years without ever developing things like electricity or using the same exact agriculture practices. Then again, as I mentioned, history after the 18th century exploded and got super condensed.
Based on how the fallout games work. It makes a lot more sense for society to rebuild quickly. They have electronic written communication and working electricity/power plants basically right off the bat. If the writers wanted to make it make sense they would have to put more work into explaining that we were sent more into the dark ages after the bombs dropped. But that just isn't true in the lore because there are well educated people that canonically survived right after the war and began rebuilding immediately.
It makes a lot more sense for society to rebuild quickly.
The Enclave had the desire to restore their control of the entire continent and a small army of supersoldiers. They may not have had the capability to manufacture more plasma rifles and power armor, but they had the recorded knowledge needed to restore that capability and they were up against small, disorganized, and poorly armed bands of survivors. Maybe they couldn't emerge from their bunkers right away because the surface was uninhabitably radioactive, but survival on the surface became possible long before 200 years had passed.
The games are much more about the rule of cool than realism and that's not a bad thing. I'm just being pedantic.
Yeah, my bet is that the writers did look at it as starting over from square 1 after the bombs dropped just as a writing shortcut. But after many games of lore it's clear that that's not what happened so it's just a vestige of a plot hole.
Not to poke holes, but isn’t part of the lore that generations went by in the vaults? It’s not 200 years on the surface.
Only the ones who could afford it.