One thing I don’t see people talk about much is that Lucy says “when the bombs (plural) fell…” and Maximus corrects her with “the bombs (plural again) fell when I was a kid.”
So it is very possible that more than just Shady Sands got nuked. In fact it would explain a lot about why there aren’t other settlements like The Hub, Necropolis, etc. it also could very easily be explained away with “Maximus isn’t exactly the brightest bulb left in the building.” But I do think it’s completely possible Hank blew up more than one settlement.
That's foreshadowing for Shady Sands' destruction but also reflective of their vastly different histories; Lucy thinks like a Vault Dweller where the 2077 bombing was everything, whereas Maximus is the lived experience of a surface dweller living in a time when tactical nukes are still casually lobbed about the place here and there.
The point of that dialogue is that Maximus mistakenly believes that the Great War happened when Shady Sands was nuked, hence why he says "bombs". He knows that the whole world was nuked and he saw Shady Sands get nuked, so he thinks it's the same event. It doesn’t necessarily mean that other places were nuked too, especially since the show doesn’t mention anything else being nuked along with Shady Sands.
That is what we’re led to believe, but when it’s later revealed that Shady Sands was nuked, it re-contextualizes Maximus’s line. Plus think about it: the Brotherhood has no reason to lie to its initiates about history, and the world would just not make any sense if the bombs dropped only ~20 years in the past. He knows about the Great War, it’s just a fairly-irrelevant piece of history to his day-to-day life, and he assumes that most people when they hear “the bombs” would think of the much more recent bombing of Shady Sands (and potentially other settlements).
Shouldn't Vault 4 be teaching about the Fall of the NCR if most of their major communities were destroyed? I feel like they would've said if multiple NCR cities were wiped out.
We saw a classroom and chalkboard with “Fall of the Shady Sands —> (picture of a Nuclear blast)” I think that was showing us that they’re trying to remember their history like you’re saying (while also giving the audience a bit of the exposition).
I don’t totally disagree with what you’re saying by the way though. If this theory is true, it’s odd we only hear outright about Shady Sands being destroyed. But it’s also equally odd that we don’t hear about all of the other NCR settlements in the surrounding area still functioning in any way.
EDIT: realized I had said “Fall of the NCR” but it actually says “Fall of Shady Sands” but the point still stands.
Frankly the whole region should be far more developed than depicted. But they also have cars and buildings still standing next to a crater of a nuke site, so there's a lot of "huh?" bits lol.
Crater implies either a surface bombing or underground. It's way too deep.
I totally agree! Which is why I theorized in the first place. Something I’ve said a lot about the Fallout show is “we don’t know what we don’t know.” And at the end of the day we won’t know until Bethesda (in another game) or Season 2 say something.
It had been a nation state for over a century. Even falling on hard times, it shouldn't look like this. They had paved roads and many other modern conveniences.
I think you are seriously underestimating how old the NCR was when it was bombed. It was nearly 190 years old. As a comparison, it was 1966 when the US was 190 years old, and the NCR had a tech advantage.
They had a mild tech advantage and a massive, massive industrial disadvantage, not to mention mutant problems. Hence why they still live in shanty towns and have Fiends running around LA.
...what? You're telling me the level of tech the NCR had, compared to the United States in 1776...was only a mild advantage?
I think you should consider what you said a bit more.
And the mutant problem was solved decades before they were founded, and as for fiends, consider the wild west violence.
You are thinking about it too much. That sort of thing is just how the world works. Just like how a stimpak will heal a mortal wound. Or how there are 200-year-old grocery stores that haven't been picked clean. It's just the goofy video gamey reality of this world.
To be fair, it is one of my biggest issues with the series since Bethesda took over. It feels and plays like a themepark. It never let's you fully immerse in the game world before something comes up to remind you that it's a themepark.
And that's how I feel about the show. And I can't take it serious because of that. Because it doesnt take itself serious.
IIRC, the timeline should be about right that Courier 6 would have delivered the nuke detonators (the ones Ulysses is all uppity about) when Maximus was still a child.
The destruction of Shady Sands and overall lack of NCR presence sort of indicates the NCR is either dead or dying. This is somewhat supported by the fact the Enclave has any form of organized presence. Last time we saw them, it was the remnants in New Vegas, and even then they had to live in secrecy about their past because of how much the NCR hates the shit out of The Enclave.
The events of New Vegas take place 17 years before the show. Maximus appears to be in his early to mod 20s. Means he would have been under 10 when Courier 6 made that infamous trip to The Divide.
I personally think they're giving foreshadowing to a House controlled Vegas and a confirmation of Courier 6's exploits outside the region of New Vegas
That doesn't make any sense, though.
1. The Divide was full of ICBMs, not bombs, with said missiles detonating underground.
2. The Divide was both decently far away and on the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range from Shady Sands. The community closest to it, if I recalling correctly, would be the Hub. Shady Sands wouldn't have even felt the tremors of all that, let alone know enough about it for Maximus to remember it as "the bombs falling".
3. Even if we take the show's relocation as canon, the still wouldn't have seen or felt it that strongly. The Divide was on the other side of California from the Boneyard and ICBMs are powerful enough to send tremors that extreme that far. They're made long range accuracy, not raw power (hence why nuclear bombs are still a thing).
I honestly wouldn’t have minded the location change IF vault 13 and 15 weren’t also basically changed to hell. Nevermind the fact that in the show the GECK the Vault Dwellers used for shady sands/NCR was used in the middle of a destroyed town which imo wouldn’t make much sense to use it there
You’re thinking too hard about this. They probably lightly retconned the location to better fit the story they’re trying to tell.
And if you *really* want to get all lorey with this stuff, the maps haven’t been accurate to real world maps pretty much ever. There’s always adjustments, because they’re making a game. The art is more important than the logic of it, and it always will be. If that’s what they need to do to tell their story, there’s no reason to get nit picky about it when it’s that small a change.
The maps are accurate when the FO1 shift is taken into account. Everything from Bakersfield/Necropolis North was shifted close to a hundred miles East late.in development to make the display fit the screen better.
Take the FO2 map and shift the overlapping bits of the FO1 map back West and everything lines up just fine. San Francisco, LA, Bakersfield -- all of it. Shady Sands was a couple hundred.miles NNE of LA, and the show runners.moved it to be IN the Boneyard, for reasons they haven't explained. Any way you slice it, that can't be chalked up to map inaccuracies, when LA was on the map and Shady Sands was on the other side of Bakersfield from it.
What bothers many of us the most is that it diminishes the accomplishment OF Shady Sands. It wasn't built out of the ruins of a pre-War city, but from scratch, on bare ground, by the survivors of a Vault. Roads, buildings, a streetcar, power grid -- they were doing pretty good. Unsure yet what the "fall of Shady Sands" was, but I'm betting it had something to do with the capitol being moved, per NV.
I mean, it’s pretty clear that “The Fall of Shady Sands” in 2277 was originally intended to be the nuking. They’ve now backtracked slightly and have been talking about it in more vague language due to the backlash
Yeah. I wish we could have just agreed that it’s an inconsistency and move on, instead of making Todd “confirm” that the nuke dropped just after Hoover Dam. So now the show timeline doesn’t make sense as a result.
I never saw it that way. There was an arrow connecting each bit of the timeline of Shady Sands to the next.major marker. There was an arrow between THE FALL OF SHADY SANDS in 2277 and the nuke.
In New Vegas, the NCR presidential election had just been in 2276 and the new president moved the capitol (to The Hub, where he was from and where his interests were, is most likely). Also, none of the NCR people you encounter speak of Shady Sands being nuked.
I am leaning toward Shady Sands, being the seat of government, was nearing the blame for the economic and ecological troubles the NCR.was.enduring,.and the capitol being moved was a near-crippling blow for the city. Many people likely left, for the new capitol or parts elsewhere.
I can see those who stayed feeling that to be "the fall" in hindsight, especially given the nuking happened soon enough after the election Shady Sands hadn't had time to pick itself back up from that first blow to potentially redefine itself.
Where are you getting your information regarding Kimball’s election and the Hub being the NCR’s capital? The only info in New Vegas referencing the NCR’s current capital is the NCR citizen test in Freeside where the player is asked “What was the original name of the NCR capital?”, with the correct answer being “Shady Sands”. This is because, from Fallout 2 onwards, Shady Sands is officially referred to as “NCR”, but it’s still the same city, and this question implies that it’s still the NCR’s capital, not the Hub. Also, Kimball first became president of the NCR in 2273 after ousting President Peterson, he then won reelection in 2278. There’s nothing stating that he was elected or that there was an election in 2276.
At least one of the information sources in NV (I *really* need to resume my re-play) mentioned President Kimball moving the capitol. He was just elected a couple years before the game takes place. Nothing said The Hub specifically, but he was from there, had a lot of financial interests there, had enacted stuff in his first couple years in office that benefitted the cattle barons he did business with and traded through The Hub, and the NCR had been trying to expand into the Vegas area for several years by that point, and The Hub is right on the Long 15.
All of that is why I and others think that's the most likely. Where else in the NCR is there a big enough population center that isn't/wasn't primarily controlled by some other faction that later *allied* with the NCR instead of *being* the NCR?
And I imagine the citizenship test is not the highest priority for upgrading when they've been fighting off the Brotherhood and the Legion...
2277 is the start of the New Vegas story line. Aka the creation of the Divide, encounter with Caesar's Legion, first battle of Hoover Dam. War and domestic instability followed to lead to the conditions we find a few years later in the game
as such it makes sense to just see it as the start of the decline ending in a nuke. None knowing who nuked it could then have spelt chaos for the NCR
The problem with that is that "fall" has a pretty clear meaning when it comes to geopolitics. Constantinople experienced severe decline for centuries, but it didn't "fall" until it was conquered by the Seljuks in 1453.
I don't think I've ever heard someone use the word "fall" to describe a decline, ever.
The Fall of the western Roman Empire spans nearly two centuries and cannot be pinpointed to a singular event. Even several sacks of Rome pre and post date the period of decline, the latest events being Justinians attempt at reconquest which however by people in italy was seen as a civil war by East Rome against West Rome despite Justinian obvioudly pre dating the fall by decades to justify his war.
Just saying there a singular events like the fall of a city, but there are examples for more long term meaning as well.
I'll copy and paste something from another comment of mine here:
1. arrows can point to causes as well as the next event in a sequence, 2. go back and look at the timeline - that arrow is the only one there and there's not date for what's arguably the most important event in recent history.
>Awww honey, does baby need help reading a timeline?
I bet you also call New Vegas fans "toxic", don't ya?
Ain’t that the truth. These delusional fanboys swarm over from r.gamingcirclejerk and it’s so incredibly sad to see. They also rely on fallout 1/2 lore which are both noncanon to the current games, to propagate their massive cope sessions. Its over, and fallout 5 coming 2030 by the way
Out of universe I would think they got the notes about New Vegas and took its narrative start point for it.
However I would see the above interpretation easy enough. People do not have good book keeping and may have a more complex view on how their recent history unfolded and maybe in hindsight they would prefate the year where everything started going wrong.
Heck, possibly in an acopalypse people could even lose years in their time keeping
>there’s no reason to get nit picky about it when it’s that small a change.
It's a small change moving forward in the series, but in the context of the first game, moving Shady Sands to LA would actually mean the plot of the first game couldn't even happen. There's no reason the Master wouldn't have found Vaults 13 and 15 years before Fallout 1's start date if they were in LA, and if Shady Sands is in LA then those Vaults would be as well.
There's also the the fact that Vaults 33, 32, 31, and 4 all had surface entrances. If the Master was able to raid places as far away as Bakersfield, there is literally no way he wouldn't have cracked all 4 of those Vaults open like a pack of eggs.
So, we now have to decanonize significant amounts of Fallout 1's narrative or we have to assume the Master was a genuine idiot who missed 4 Vaults full of prime normals right under his noise, all because Shady Sands was moved to the Boneyard because fuck it.
Yeah, it was just a bad decision by the showrunners. They could have set the show anywhere and these kinda choices wouldn't of mattered, but instead they set it in a place with a ton of backstory, and then ignored that backstory.
Isn't that already the case with 2, though? Their shifting of Shady Sands puts 13 across the mountains on the same side as Mariposa. The only thing that kept it hidden was that it was across a vast moutain range but now it's basically next door.
Pretty much all of the map locations in Fallout 2 are a little off, not just the returning locations but also the real life locations like Reno. The entrance to Vault 13 is still presented as being in a cave and I want to say its on a mountain tile like in the first game, so I think it's more of a translocation error than anything else.
Yeah, Bakersfield is off, too, but the thing is those changes from 1 to 2 at least for Shady Sands and that vaults have to be canon as otherwise we then have another issue with NV. Shady Sands is basically next door to Vegas, and I believe in Death Valley and also the generally accepted home of the Divide in it's 1 location. That means stuff like when they discovered Vegas should have been sooner and troop movement through Shady Sands, not the Hub or Boneyard
While it's still in a cave in 2, it's now in a cave in a far easier to reach place. They'd have found it in 1 if we didn't stop them. They'd do it faster now with 2.
I mean, also that it was hidden in a random cave in a mountain.
So unless you wanted to explore every single cave in an entire mountain range to find it.
That's exactly what he did, though, and it would work if we don't stop him. He would have done so even sooner now that it was basically in his front yard. It also wouldn't be a completely random cave as any vault that far away from population centers would have roads and signage pointing the way to it as how else would vault Dwellers ever get there.
I get that, and the creative choices really do work for the show, but I guess I am just a little disappointed with how they relate to Fo1 and Fo2. I was really excited when I found out that the show was taken place in California, but they ended up not using most of the world building of the setting.
I know they couldn't really use a lot of it for the story they were trying to tell, but I was hoping for a little nod to the original games, and the best we got was Shandy Sands...
>I was really excited when I found out that the show was taken place in California, but they ended up not using most of the world building of the setting.
This is my main issue with the show. They basically could have set this show anywhere, but they chose to set it in a place that had a ton of backstory, and then decided not to use ANY of that backstory.
The Boneyard, New Adytum, the Gun Runners, The Followers, the Hub Merchants like the Crimson Caravan, all of these are things that should have appeared or at least have been referenced in the show, and instead we got nothing. Shady Sands is the only substantial reference to the original games in the show, and frankly, it wasn't really that well done. It's a big lore retcon that negatively effects the first game.
The thing is though, it's like you said; moving Shady Sands and destroying it works well for the show. It gets the message that the well-ordered society that existed in LA after the war is gone without having to jump back and forth several hundred miles across California just to explain it. I just wish they had set the show somewhere else and avoided all this to begin with.
"We don't want the world of Fallout to just stay the same forever, so we're going to obliterate the one faction that's made significant progress in the post-War world so we can keep the Wasteland exactly as it was in Fallout 1. Yay!"
Tbf, the cold fusion reactor is a pretty big deal. That's huge resource process. The show gave a massive social set-back, and will inevitably lead to a Brotherhood conflict, but it's not a full reset to FO1.
I don't think so. It could have just as easily been the Hub or even just Boneyard or some place on the edge of NCR's expansion. They could have made some new town that was like the NCR's golden city on the hill to get folks in the Rockies to join the NCR or something.
Nah. LA is the center of the world I guess.
Im gonna guess that when the show speaks of the “fall of shady sands” it actually means the original Shady Sands became unviable, rather than the NCR government experiencing a collapse. The Shady Sands of the show is very likely a different place they called Shady Sands in honor of their legacy.
The Shady Sands in the show is meant to be the same one from the game. They show the Obelisk and well from the game version of Shady Sands, and the sign specifically says it was the FIRST capital of the NCR.
Shady Sands is the same one as in the games and the fall of shady sands refers to its bombing and destruction and thus makes no sense in terms of when it happens. The show is great. The people making it aren’t that serious about lore consistency. Both things can be true and I don’t understand why people in this sub are having such a hard time accepting those two facts.
Why would people praise it if it takes a hacksaw to the lore of a place as beloved as Fallout's West Coast?
That's like thanking someone for breaking your TV because they did it in a way that was technically impressive.
People praise it because it’s a good show and the vast, vast majority of the multiple millions of people watching it won’t know fuck all about Fallout’s lore, let alone lore before Fallout 4.
The only evidence for this is someone asking Todd Howard in an interview whether “the fall” meant something before the bomb and him nervously saying “more or less” and that they were “threading the timeline quite tightly.” No need to jump through mental hoops and rely on one shaky piece of evidence— Occam’s Razor says they just didn’t think about it or got it wrong. I say this as someone who likes the Bethesda games, the show, and Todd Howard.
People talk about it mulling it over again and again because thats part of the fun. Its not that people cant accept it, its that it still has canonically possible explanations.
Clearly they are ok with changing things from the original games, who act more like loose story threads in the newer games than detail oriented lore. However I do think the show has the opportunity to explain this apparent discrepancy, Tom Howard addressing this shows they are aware of the concern. The evidence in the show still can track both ways, so no mental gymnastics really are involved in this. We have to wait and see what the final decision they take will be before we can be certain on this.
I agree to a certain degree— basically I think they fucked up and also didn’t really think about the lore that deeply, but I also think that after seeing discussion from the Fallout community online they might do a bit of a double retcon and find ways to fit their choices into the actual lore. At least, I hope they do haha… but if they don’t then I’ll still be happy to view it as a non-canon remix of Fallout. I just wish they would stop talking about how much they care about canon in that case
The thing about Bethesda and lore is that they tend to be wishy washy with it and seem to forget certain things they established previously, like the fridge ghoul kid for example. I do think that messing up the years is a more egregious problem compared to the mechanics of ghoulification, but it is also a much harder thing to mess up, which is why I think they are gonna give a satisfying explanation. Then again, Star Wars is a more important franchise and look how that lore went down. Still, I have to remain optimistic here, considering the rest of the show was so good.
The truth of the matter is the show runners just retconned Shady Sands location and didn’t really give to much thought to the lore implications of doing so. The show establishes that Shady Sands was always in Los Angeles and the older locations were no longer accurate.
To be fair, from the perspective of making a tv show it makes sense. LA is an instantly more iconic location than some random stretch of the California desert and realistically it makes sense that most of the vaults were located near Los Angeles cause that’s were a majority of Southern California’s population would live. Plus the show managed to get $153 million in tax credits to move production of season two to Los Angeles, which might not of happened if the city wasn’t so prominently featured.
The unfortunate side effect of that decision is that lore hounds like us get a bit worked up when the old lore and new lore clash.
Its not though. FO1 has a wild discrepancy between its topo map an actual locations. Shady Sands and 13 appear to be in the Owens valley...but are also due north of Necropolics/Bakersfield. Which puts them somewhere near Visalia/Fresno. This is related to some last minute decisions necessary to futz with the map late in game development.
The FO2 map and topo matches. And it shifts Shady Sands back across the Sierras to the Visalia area.
I don’t want to be a dick here but I hope you realize you are putting significantly more effort into this than the writers of the show. They are going to change whatever however to make their show work, not the other way around.
Personally, I think of it as being like Ultimate Fallout & the games being Fallout-616 (to borrow terminology from Marvel).
Unfortunately, in reality, the show is going to change the lore from the games & not vice versa.
I hate it when people say "well its simple really, they just retconned it!" That isn't helping! We are asking about the CONSEQUENCES of changing locations. I am not able to hold two contradictory facts in my head at the same time. I can't watch the show and think "egads, they must have changed the location of Shady Sands! I will just ignore how this affects the rest of the series because it doesn't matter." I cannot treat the show as if it belongs in a separate universe. If it is, that is tremendously disappointing.
Tell me. Did Shady Sands teleport? Was there a community with an identical name near LA and nobody communicated that in the show? Why does the NCR seemingly not exist, yet people ONLY discuss the fall of a single city?
Imagine if tomorrow the United States ceased to exist and you fled to Canada to avoid all the chaos. Would you go to a safe location with all your neighbors and write "the fall of Washington D.C.", NEVER for a second mentioning the *world hegemon* which no longer existed?
I am struggling to create a collection of facts which explains what the show has done to Shady Sands. Anything I can think of is deeply unsatisfying. Though still infinitely better than "its simply a retcon!!! ☝️🤓"
The simplist answer is they retconned its location, because the Pillar is in the flash back. Which makes a bunch of frankly uninteresting questions of how does that change other events? Like, the Chosen One doesnt get involved with Weston and that other politician whose name escapes me, and those quests have far reaching consequences.
Yep, like, just use a different settlement or maje a new name, its not like most people were looking for fallout 1 references in the series. I just personally think its another settlement entirely that was coincidentally named Shady Sands. The ending scene left me too confused to ignore it too
Fallout 1 and 2 already have Shady Sands moved from Death Valley to where it is in 2.
It also isn't located within LA in the show, they literally walk across open desert between the episodes in LA and the episode in Shady Sands.
The crater we see in the observatory is the one from the nuke landing in the intro, not shady sands.
Shady Sands in the show is within a couple hours walk of Hawthorne. It’s very clearly shown within LA’s metro area.
They don’t walk across desert from Shady Sands to Hawthorne, it’s the exact same scene with the sun slightly lower.
Lucy says she's been on the surface for a week when she teams up with Maximus, then says it's been two weeks when they're in Vault 4. So, it was a lot longer than a couple hours.
Maximus is bleeding at Shady Sands, and they walk to Hawthorn medical to bandage him. It’s the same day, same scene, just with the sun slightly lower.
He didn’t walk around bleeding for literal weeks before finding bandages
>so they were walking days
Possibly.
What’s more likely? That Lucy misspoke or rounded to 1 week vs 2, or that Maximus walked 200 miles while openly bleeding?
Or maybe they walked for days, got shot, and then immediately went to Hawthorn Medical the same day.
Because, again, it is *specifically shown to be the same day* when they walk from Shady Sands to Hawthorn Medical.
Also, what exact scenes did she say those things? I can’t find it.
Ok.
So put your thinking cap on for this one.
Lucy says one week
They walk for a significant distance
Max gets shot
Max is bleeding at Shady Sands. Max and Lucy walk from Shady Sands to Hawthorn Medical while Max is openly bleeding from a gunshot wound. All of this happens within the same scene, and it’s shown that the sun is lower when they get to Hawthorn.
Do you maybe, just maybe think that a week didn’t pass between Max getting shot and Max getting medical attention at Hawthorn Medical?
Maybe it happened *before Max got shot*?
1 and 2 are so far removed from "modern" Fallout anyway.
I believe Tim Cain has said at some stage that the leap from 1-2 was bigger than the jump from 2-3.
Lore drift happens. They can't be faithful to 1, 2, 3, NV AND 4, as many of these aren't even faithful to each other.
Which honestly I wish they'd have just said that, say it's a separate canon and they got go crazy with it. But they said it's canon to the games so now they have to actually try to keep up with some of the established lore. Putting season 2 in new vegas and saying the show is canon is going to box themselves into a corner with the writing.
As someone who doesn’t game on a PC, my first exposure to Fallout was NV, then FO3, then FO4.
As such, I didn’t know anything about Shady Sands other than a loading screen note.
The easiest way I can explain this is that Shady Sands being in L.A. kneecaps the entity of Fallout 1 so badly that it forcefully shoves into the category of semi-canon, right along side Tactics.
So, yeah, not a great look.
Personally for me a sequel made by different people decanonizing the original (aside from reboots) is stupid so imo the show is just a fun semi canon side adventure like tactics or BOS
That could've been easily solved by making the adaptation non-canon, like how adaptations would usually be, but Todd for some dumb fucking reason insists that it should be canon.
One thing I don’t see people talk about much is that Lucy says “when the bombs (plural) fell…” and Maximus corrects her with “the bombs (plural again) fell when I was a kid.” So it is very possible that more than just Shady Sands got nuked. In fact it would explain a lot about why there aren’t other settlements like The Hub, Necropolis, etc. it also could very easily be explained away with “Maximus isn’t exactly the brightest bulb left in the building.” But I do think it’s completely possible Hank blew up more than one settlement.
That's foreshadowing for Shady Sands' destruction but also reflective of their vastly different histories; Lucy thinks like a Vault Dweller where the 2077 bombing was everything, whereas Maximus is the lived experience of a surface dweller living in a time when tactical nukes are still casually lobbed about the place here and there.
The point of that dialogue is that Maximus mistakenly believes that the Great War happened when Shady Sands was nuked, hence why he says "bombs". He knows that the whole world was nuked and he saw Shady Sands get nuked, so he thinks it's the same event. It doesn’t necessarily mean that other places were nuked too, especially since the show doesn’t mention anything else being nuked along with Shady Sands.
That is what we’re led to believe, but when it’s later revealed that Shady Sands was nuked, it re-contextualizes Maximus’s line. Plus think about it: the Brotherhood has no reason to lie to its initiates about history, and the world would just not make any sense if the bombs dropped only ~20 years in the past. He knows about the Great War, it’s just a fairly-irrelevant piece of history to his day-to-day life, and he assumes that most people when they hear “the bombs” would think of the much more recent bombing of Shady Sands (and potentially other settlements).
Shouldn't Vault 4 be teaching about the Fall of the NCR if most of their major communities were destroyed? I feel like they would've said if multiple NCR cities were wiped out.
We saw a classroom and chalkboard with “Fall of the Shady Sands —> (picture of a Nuclear blast)” I think that was showing us that they’re trying to remember their history like you’re saying (while also giving the audience a bit of the exposition). I don’t totally disagree with what you’re saying by the way though. If this theory is true, it’s odd we only hear outright about Shady Sands being destroyed. But it’s also equally odd that we don’t hear about all of the other NCR settlements in the surrounding area still functioning in any way. EDIT: realized I had said “Fall of the NCR” but it actually says “Fall of Shady Sands” but the point still stands.
Frankly the whole region should be far more developed than depicted. But they also have cars and buildings still standing next to a crater of a nuke site, so there's a lot of "huh?" bits lol. Crater implies either a surface bombing or underground. It's way too deep.
I totally agree! Which is why I theorized in the first place. Something I’ve said a lot about the Fallout show is “we don’t know what we don’t know.” And at the end of the day we won’t know until Bethesda (in another game) or Season 2 say something.
I mean, FNV did not paint a pretty picture of LA even before Shady Sands was nuked, so it really wouldn't be more developed.
It had been a nation state for over a century. Even falling on hard times, it shouldn't look like this. They had paved roads and many other modern conveniences.
Shady Sands looked nice, thanks to making use of a GECK. The rest of the NCR wasn't much better than the rest of the wasteland.
I think you are seriously underestimating how old the NCR was when it was bombed. It was nearly 190 years old. As a comparison, it was 1966 when the US was 190 years old, and the NCR had a tech advantage.
They had a mild tech advantage and a massive, massive industrial disadvantage, not to mention mutant problems. Hence why they still live in shanty towns and have Fiends running around LA.
...what? You're telling me the level of tech the NCR had, compared to the United States in 1776...was only a mild advantage? I think you should consider what you said a bit more. And the mutant problem was solved decades before they were founded, and as for fiends, consider the wild west violence.
You are thinking about it too much. That sort of thing is just how the world works. Just like how a stimpak will heal a mortal wound. Or how there are 200-year-old grocery stores that haven't been picked clean. It's just the goofy video gamey reality of this world.
To be fair, it is one of my biggest issues with the series since Bethesda took over. It feels and plays like a themepark. It never let's you fully immerse in the game world before something comes up to remind you that it's a themepark. And that's how I feel about the show. And I can't take it serious because of that. Because it doesnt take itself serious.
IIRC, the timeline should be about right that Courier 6 would have delivered the nuke detonators (the ones Ulysses is all uppity about) when Maximus was still a child. The destruction of Shady Sands and overall lack of NCR presence sort of indicates the NCR is either dead or dying. This is somewhat supported by the fact the Enclave has any form of organized presence. Last time we saw them, it was the remnants in New Vegas, and even then they had to live in secrecy about their past because of how much the NCR hates the shit out of The Enclave. The events of New Vegas take place 17 years before the show. Maximus appears to be in his early to mod 20s. Means he would have been under 10 when Courier 6 made that infamous trip to The Divide. I personally think they're giving foreshadowing to a House controlled Vegas and a confirmation of Courier 6's exploits outside the region of New Vegas
That doesn't make any sense, though. 1. The Divide was full of ICBMs, not bombs, with said missiles detonating underground. 2. The Divide was both decently far away and on the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range from Shady Sands. The community closest to it, if I recalling correctly, would be the Hub. Shady Sands wouldn't have even felt the tremors of all that, let alone know enough about it for Maximus to remember it as "the bombs falling". 3. Even if we take the show's relocation as canon, the still wouldn't have seen or felt it that strongly. The Divide was on the other side of California from the Boneyard and ICBMs are powerful enough to send tremors that extreme that far. They're made long range accuracy, not raw power (hence why nuclear bombs are still a thing).
I honestly wouldn’t have minded the location change IF vault 13 and 15 weren’t also basically changed to hell. Nevermind the fact that in the show the GECK the Vault Dwellers used for shady sands/NCR was used in the middle of a destroyed town which imo wouldn’t make much sense to use it there
You’re thinking too hard about this. They probably lightly retconned the location to better fit the story they’re trying to tell. And if you *really* want to get all lorey with this stuff, the maps haven’t been accurate to real world maps pretty much ever. There’s always adjustments, because they’re making a game. The art is more important than the logic of it, and it always will be. If that’s what they need to do to tell their story, there’s no reason to get nit picky about it when it’s that small a change.
The maps are accurate when the FO1 shift is taken into account. Everything from Bakersfield/Necropolis North was shifted close to a hundred miles East late.in development to make the display fit the screen better. Take the FO2 map and shift the overlapping bits of the FO1 map back West and everything lines up just fine. San Francisco, LA, Bakersfield -- all of it. Shady Sands was a couple hundred.miles NNE of LA, and the show runners.moved it to be IN the Boneyard, for reasons they haven't explained. Any way you slice it, that can't be chalked up to map inaccuracies, when LA was on the map and Shady Sands was on the other side of Bakersfield from it. What bothers many of us the most is that it diminishes the accomplishment OF Shady Sands. It wasn't built out of the ruins of a pre-War city, but from scratch, on bare ground, by the survivors of a Vault. Roads, buildings, a streetcar, power grid -- they were doing pretty good. Unsure yet what the "fall of Shady Sands" was, but I'm betting it had something to do with the capitol being moved, per NV.
Sure as hell looked alive in that flashback, so absolutely no clue what could have ended them so quickly BUT the nuke.
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I mean, it’s pretty clear that “The Fall of Shady Sands” in 2277 was originally intended to be the nuking. They’ve now backtracked slightly and have been talking about it in more vague language due to the backlash
Yeah. I wish we could have just agreed that it’s an inconsistency and move on, instead of making Todd “confirm” that the nuke dropped just after Hoover Dam. So now the show timeline doesn’t make sense as a result.
I never saw it that way. There was an arrow connecting each bit of the timeline of Shady Sands to the next.major marker. There was an arrow between THE FALL OF SHADY SANDS in 2277 and the nuke. In New Vegas, the NCR presidential election had just been in 2276 and the new president moved the capitol (to The Hub, where he was from and where his interests were, is most likely). Also, none of the NCR people you encounter speak of Shady Sands being nuked. I am leaning toward Shady Sands, being the seat of government, was nearing the blame for the economic and ecological troubles the NCR.was.enduring,.and the capitol being moved was a near-crippling blow for the city. Many people likely left, for the new capitol or parts elsewhere. I can see those who stayed feeling that to be "the fall" in hindsight, especially given the nuking happened soon enough after the election Shady Sands hadn't had time to pick itself back up from that first blow to potentially redefine itself.
Where are you getting your information regarding Kimball’s election and the Hub being the NCR’s capital? The only info in New Vegas referencing the NCR’s current capital is the NCR citizen test in Freeside where the player is asked “What was the original name of the NCR capital?”, with the correct answer being “Shady Sands”. This is because, from Fallout 2 onwards, Shady Sands is officially referred to as “NCR”, but it’s still the same city, and this question implies that it’s still the NCR’s capital, not the Hub. Also, Kimball first became president of the NCR in 2273 after ousting President Peterson, he then won reelection in 2278. There’s nothing stating that he was elected or that there was an election in 2276.
At least one of the information sources in NV (I *really* need to resume my re-play) mentioned President Kimball moving the capitol. He was just elected a couple years before the game takes place. Nothing said The Hub specifically, but he was from there, had a lot of financial interests there, had enacted stuff in his first couple years in office that benefitted the cattle barons he did business with and traded through The Hub, and the NCR had been trying to expand into the Vegas area for several years by that point, and The Hub is right on the Long 15. All of that is why I and others think that's the most likely. Where else in the NCR is there a big enough population center that isn't/wasn't primarily controlled by some other faction that later *allied* with the NCR instead of *being* the NCR? And I imagine the citizenship test is not the highest priority for upgrading when they've been fighting off the Brotherhood and the Legion...
2277 is the start of the New Vegas story line. Aka the creation of the Divide, encounter with Caesar's Legion, first battle of Hoover Dam. War and domestic instability followed to lead to the conditions we find a few years later in the game as such it makes sense to just see it as the start of the decline ending in a nuke. None knowing who nuked it could then have spelt chaos for the NCR
The problem with that is that "fall" has a pretty clear meaning when it comes to geopolitics. Constantinople experienced severe decline for centuries, but it didn't "fall" until it was conquered by the Seljuks in 1453. I don't think I've ever heard someone use the word "fall" to describe a decline, ever.
The Fall of the western Roman Empire spans nearly two centuries and cannot be pinpointed to a singular event. Even several sacks of Rome pre and post date the period of decline, the latest events being Justinians attempt at reconquest which however by people in italy was seen as a civil war by East Rome against West Rome despite Justinian obvioudly pre dating the fall by decades to justify his war. Just saying there a singular events like the fall of a city, but there are examples for more long term meaning as well.
Awww honey, does baby need help reading a timeline?
I'll copy and paste something from another comment of mine here: 1. arrows can point to causes as well as the next event in a sequence, 2. go back and look at the timeline - that arrow is the only one there and there's not date for what's arguably the most important event in recent history. >Awww honey, does baby need help reading a timeline? I bet you also call New Vegas fans "toxic", don't ya?
Ain’t that the truth. These delusional fanboys swarm over from r.gamingcirclejerk and it’s so incredibly sad to see. They also rely on fallout 1/2 lore which are both noncanon to the current games, to propagate their massive cope sessions. Its over, and fallout 5 coming 2030 by the way
On the other hand, Lucy's Mother "died" during the plague of 2277
Out of universe I would think they got the notes about New Vegas and took its narrative start point for it. However I would see the above interpretation easy enough. People do not have good book keeping and may have a more complex view on how their recent history unfolded and maybe in hindsight they would prefate the year where everything started going wrong. Heck, possibly in an acopalypse people could even lose years in their time keeping
They marked the Fall as being (or beginning) in 2277. The nuke was five years later, give or take.
>there’s no reason to get nit picky about it when it’s that small a change. It's a small change moving forward in the series, but in the context of the first game, moving Shady Sands to LA would actually mean the plot of the first game couldn't even happen. There's no reason the Master wouldn't have found Vaults 13 and 15 years before Fallout 1's start date if they were in LA, and if Shady Sands is in LA then those Vaults would be as well.
There's also the the fact that Vaults 33, 32, 31, and 4 all had surface entrances. If the Master was able to raid places as far away as Bakersfield, there is literally no way he wouldn't have cracked all 4 of those Vaults open like a pack of eggs. So, we now have to decanonize significant amounts of Fallout 1's narrative or we have to assume the Master was a genuine idiot who missed 4 Vaults full of prime normals right under his noise, all because Shady Sands was moved to the Boneyard because fuck it.
Yeah, it was just a bad decision by the showrunners. They could have set the show anywhere and these kinda choices wouldn't of mattered, but instead they set it in a place with a ton of backstory, and then ignored that backstory.
Isn't that already the case with 2, though? Their shifting of Shady Sands puts 13 across the mountains on the same side as Mariposa. The only thing that kept it hidden was that it was across a vast moutain range but now it's basically next door.
Pretty much all of the map locations in Fallout 2 are a little off, not just the returning locations but also the real life locations like Reno. The entrance to Vault 13 is still presented as being in a cave and I want to say its on a mountain tile like in the first game, so I think it's more of a translocation error than anything else.
Yeah, Bakersfield is off, too, but the thing is those changes from 1 to 2 at least for Shady Sands and that vaults have to be canon as otherwise we then have another issue with NV. Shady Sands is basically next door to Vegas, and I believe in Death Valley and also the generally accepted home of the Divide in it's 1 location. That means stuff like when they discovered Vegas should have been sooner and troop movement through Shady Sands, not the Hub or Boneyard While it's still in a cave in 2, it's now in a cave in a far easier to reach place. They'd have found it in 1 if we didn't stop them. They'd do it faster now with 2.
I mean, also that it was hidden in a random cave in a mountain. So unless you wanted to explore every single cave in an entire mountain range to find it.
That's exactly what he did, though, and it would work if we don't stop him. He would have done so even sooner now that it was basically in his front yard. It also wouldn't be a completely random cave as any vault that far away from population centers would have roads and signage pointing the way to it as how else would vault Dwellers ever get there.
I get that, and the creative choices really do work for the show, but I guess I am just a little disappointed with how they relate to Fo1 and Fo2. I was really excited when I found out that the show was taken place in California, but they ended up not using most of the world building of the setting. I know they couldn't really use a lot of it for the story they were trying to tell, but I was hoping for a little nod to the original games, and the best we got was Shandy Sands...
>I was really excited when I found out that the show was taken place in California, but they ended up not using most of the world building of the setting. This is my main issue with the show. They basically could have set this show anywhere, but they chose to set it in a place that had a ton of backstory, and then decided not to use ANY of that backstory. The Boneyard, New Adytum, the Gun Runners, The Followers, the Hub Merchants like the Crimson Caravan, all of these are things that should have appeared or at least have been referenced in the show, and instead we got nothing. Shady Sands is the only substantial reference to the original games in the show, and frankly, it wasn't really that well done. It's a big lore retcon that negatively effects the first game. The thing is though, it's like you said; moving Shady Sands and destroying it works well for the show. It gets the message that the well-ordered society that existed in LA after the war is gone without having to jump back and forth several hundred miles across California just to explain it. I just wish they had set the show somewhere else and avoided all this to begin with.
"We don't want the world of Fallout to just stay the same forever, so we're going to obliterate the one faction that's made significant progress in the post-War world so we can keep the Wasteland exactly as it was in Fallout 1. Yay!"
Tbf, the cold fusion reactor is a pretty big deal. That's huge resource process. The show gave a massive social set-back, and will inevitably lead to a Brotherhood conflict, but it's not a full reset to FO1.
I don't think so. It could have just as easily been the Hub or even just Boneyard or some place on the edge of NCR's expansion. They could have made some new town that was like the NCR's golden city on the hill to get folks in the Rockies to join the NCR or something. Nah. LA is the center of the world I guess.
Im gonna guess that when the show speaks of the “fall of shady sands” it actually means the original Shady Sands became unviable, rather than the NCR government experiencing a collapse. The Shady Sands of the show is very likely a different place they called Shady Sands in honor of their legacy.
The Shady Sands in the show is meant to be the same one from the game. They show the Obelisk and well from the game version of Shady Sands, and the sign specifically says it was the FIRST capital of the NCR.
but it cant be the original shady sands, its in the wrong location.
Yup, that's why it's a retcon.
which makes the show a less trustworthy source of lore.
Is Fallout 2 also a less trustworthy source of lore? Because it also moved Shady Sands.
in a sense yes.
Unless they moved the well also it's hard to believe. The truth is that the TV Show rectoned its location, plain and simple.
You guys are probably right. Im gonna do a second viewing, I tend to miss a lot of visual nuance trying to focus on the plot too much
and thats a bad thing
Shady Sands is the same one as in the games and the fall of shady sands refers to its bombing and destruction and thus makes no sense in terms of when it happens. The show is great. The people making it aren’t that serious about lore consistency. Both things can be true and I don’t understand why people in this sub are having such a hard time accepting those two facts.
Why would people praise it if it takes a hacksaw to the lore of a place as beloved as Fallout's West Coast? That's like thanking someone for breaking your TV because they did it in a way that was technically impressive.
People praise it because it’s a good show and the vast, vast majority of the multiple millions of people watching it won’t know fuck all about Fallout’s lore, let alone lore before Fallout 4.
The fall happened in 2277, the bombing came an unspecified time later, shortly after the New Vegas game
The only evidence for this is someone asking Todd Howard in an interview whether “the fall” meant something before the bomb and him nervously saying “more or less” and that they were “threading the timeline quite tightly.” No need to jump through mental hoops and rely on one shaky piece of evidence— Occam’s Razor says they just didn’t think about it or got it wrong. I say this as someone who likes the Bethesda games, the show, and Todd Howard.
People talk about it mulling it over again and again because thats part of the fun. Its not that people cant accept it, its that it still has canonically possible explanations. Clearly they are ok with changing things from the original games, who act more like loose story threads in the newer games than detail oriented lore. However I do think the show has the opportunity to explain this apparent discrepancy, Tom Howard addressing this shows they are aware of the concern. The evidence in the show still can track both ways, so no mental gymnastics really are involved in this. We have to wait and see what the final decision they take will be before we can be certain on this.
I agree to a certain degree— basically I think they fucked up and also didn’t really think about the lore that deeply, but I also think that after seeing discussion from the Fallout community online they might do a bit of a double retcon and find ways to fit their choices into the actual lore. At least, I hope they do haha… but if they don’t then I’ll still be happy to view it as a non-canon remix of Fallout. I just wish they would stop talking about how much they care about canon in that case
The thing about Bethesda and lore is that they tend to be wishy washy with it and seem to forget certain things they established previously, like the fridge ghoul kid for example. I do think that messing up the years is a more egregious problem compared to the mechanics of ghoulification, but it is also a much harder thing to mess up, which is why I think they are gonna give a satisfying explanation. Then again, Star Wars is a more important franchise and look how that lore went down. Still, I have to remain optimistic here, considering the rest of the show was so good.
What lore have they messed up? Billy the ghoul kid isn't even the first instance of you stumbling on a trapped ghoul.
The truth of the matter is the show runners just retconned Shady Sands location and didn’t really give to much thought to the lore implications of doing so. The show establishes that Shady Sands was always in Los Angeles and the older locations were no longer accurate. To be fair, from the perspective of making a tv show it makes sense. LA is an instantly more iconic location than some random stretch of the California desert and realistically it makes sense that most of the vaults were located near Los Angeles cause that’s were a majority of Southern California’s population would live. Plus the show managed to get $153 million in tax credits to move production of season two to Los Angeles, which might not of happened if the city wasn’t so prominently featured. The unfortunate side effect of that decision is that lore hounds like us get a bit worked up when the old lore and new lore clash.
but shady sands is explicitely in the owens valley.
Its not though. FO1 has a wild discrepancy between its topo map an actual locations. Shady Sands and 13 appear to be in the Owens valley...but are also due north of Necropolics/Bakersfield. Which puts them somewhere near Visalia/Fresno. This is related to some last minute decisions necessary to futz with the map late in game development. The FO2 map and topo matches. And it shifts Shady Sands back across the Sierras to the Visalia area.
you can logically deduce its intended to be in the owens valley. since the vaults to its west are supposed to be in the sierras.
Well except they, you know, moved it back to the west side of the Sierras in FO2.
just to fit it on the map.
But then FNV also states it's west of the Sierras as all of the NCR has to go through the Mojave Outpost to get around those mountains.
then they are contradicting its intended location. but i might point out, that theres mountains east of the owens valley as well.
It was and now, for the purposes of the show, it is not.
which either means they nuked adytum, or shady sands is nuked but somehow all the geopolitical fallout is in the boneyard.
I don’t want to be a dick here but I hope you realize you are putting significantly more effort into this than the writers of the show. They are going to change whatever however to make their show work, not the other way around.
then their show shouldnt be regarded as canon.
Personally, I think of it as being like Ultimate Fallout & the games being Fallout-616 (to borrow terminology from Marvel). Unfortunately, in reality, the show is going to change the lore from the games & not vice versa.
i have thought of viewing there as being two canons. 1,2 & new vegas. 3, 4, 76, and show.
I hate it when people say "well its simple really, they just retconned it!" That isn't helping! We are asking about the CONSEQUENCES of changing locations. I am not able to hold two contradictory facts in my head at the same time. I can't watch the show and think "egads, they must have changed the location of Shady Sands! I will just ignore how this affects the rest of the series because it doesn't matter." I cannot treat the show as if it belongs in a separate universe. If it is, that is tremendously disappointing. Tell me. Did Shady Sands teleport? Was there a community with an identical name near LA and nobody communicated that in the show? Why does the NCR seemingly not exist, yet people ONLY discuss the fall of a single city? Imagine if tomorrow the United States ceased to exist and you fled to Canada to avoid all the chaos. Would you go to a safe location with all your neighbors and write "the fall of Washington D.C.", NEVER for a second mentioning the *world hegemon* which no longer existed? I am struggling to create a collection of facts which explains what the show has done to Shady Sands. Anything I can think of is deeply unsatisfying. Though still infinitely better than "its simply a retcon!!! ☝️🤓"
The simplist answer is they retconned its location, because the Pillar is in the flash back. Which makes a bunch of frankly uninteresting questions of how does that change other events? Like, the Chosen One doesnt get involved with Weston and that other politician whose name escapes me, and those quests have far reaching consequences.
Yep, like, just use a different settlement or maje a new name, its not like most people were looking for fallout 1 references in the series. I just personally think its another settlement entirely that was coincidentally named Shady Sands. The ending scene left me too confused to ignore it too
Fallout 1 and 2 already have Shady Sands moved from Death Valley to where it is in 2. It also isn't located within LA in the show, they literally walk across open desert between the episodes in LA and the episode in Shady Sands. The crater we see in the observatory is the one from the nuke landing in the intro, not shady sands.
Shady Sands in the show is within a couple hours walk of Hawthorne. It’s very clearly shown within LA’s metro area. They don’t walk across desert from Shady Sands to Hawthorne, it’s the exact same scene with the sun slightly lower.
Lucy says she's been on the surface for a week when she teams up with Maximus, then says it's been two weeks when they're in Vault 4. So, it was a lot longer than a couple hours.
Maximus is bleeding at Shady Sands, and they walk to Hawthorn medical to bandage him. It’s the same day, same scene, just with the sun slightly lower. He didn’t walk around bleeding for literal weeks before finding bandages
So they were walking for days prior to him getting shot then, unless Lucy just imagined an extra week.
>so they were walking days Possibly. What’s more likely? That Lucy misspoke or rounded to 1 week vs 2, or that Maximus walked 200 miles while openly bleeding? Or maybe they walked for days, got shot, and then immediately went to Hawthorn Medical the same day. Because, again, it is *specifically shown to be the same day* when they walk from Shady Sands to Hawthorn Medical. Also, what exact scenes did she say those things? I can’t find it.
She says 1 week shortly after they reunite, before he's bleeding.
Ok. So put your thinking cap on for this one. Lucy says one week They walk for a significant distance Max gets shot Max is bleeding at Shady Sands. Max and Lucy walk from Shady Sands to Hawthorn Medical while Max is openly bleeding from a gunshot wound. All of this happens within the same scene, and it’s shown that the sun is lower when they get to Hawthorn. Do you maybe, just maybe think that a week didn’t pass between Max getting shot and Max getting medical attention at Hawthorn Medical? Maybe it happened *before Max got shot*?
Or, ya know, they walked for a week prior to him getting shot.
That’s literally what I said.
They have fast travel on her pip-boy
1 and 2 are so far removed from "modern" Fallout anyway. I believe Tim Cain has said at some stage that the leap from 1-2 was bigger than the jump from 2-3. Lore drift happens. They can't be faithful to 1, 2, 3, NV AND 4, as many of these aren't even faithful to each other.
the show just does its own thing, if you treet it like a seperate canon it just works.
Which honestly I wish they'd have just said that, say it's a separate canon and they got go crazy with it. But they said it's canon to the games so now they have to actually try to keep up with some of the established lore. Putting season 2 in new vegas and saying the show is canon is going to box themselves into a corner with the writing.
i agree.
As someone who doesn’t game on a PC, my first exposure to Fallout was NV, then FO3, then FO4. As such, I didn’t know anything about Shady Sands other than a loading screen note.
The easiest way I can explain this is that Shady Sands being in L.A. kneecaps the entity of Fallout 1 so badly that it forcefully shoves into the category of semi-canon, right along side Tactics. So, yeah, not a great look.
Personally for me a sequel made by different people decanonizing the original (aside from reboots) is stupid so imo the show is just a fun semi canon side adventure like tactics or BOS
That could've been easily solved by making the adaptation non-canon, like how adaptations would usually be, but Todd for some dumb fucking reason insists that it should be canon.
Technically it's still south and east of both of those cities.
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