Fallout 4/WMG

The Commonwealth Minutemen Ending will turn out to be the "canon" ending in future installments
The following is taken verbatim from Fallout 4's WMG page on TV Tropes, and will be amended in the future.

This is because the Mintutemen do not have to destroy the Brotherhood (unlike the Institute or Railroad endings), but since they are basically an East Coast version of the NCR, it would make for an interesting conflict between them and the new East Coast Brotherhood if THEY were the ones who destroyed the Institute (unlike if the Brotherhood claim total control through their ending).

The vast majority of East Coast Raider gangs are actually the East Coast's version of Tribals
The following information has been taken verbatim from "See The Divide" on Tumblr, and is their original writing. This will be amended and altered in the future.

The thing is, how do we define tribes and tribals? Most of us probably associate them with Zion, people like the Dead Horses and The Sorrows. Which isn’t exactly accurate, not in Fallout’s world.

When we look at this picture, what do we see? Raiders, or tribals?

My guess is that everyone’s first instinct was to say “raiders”. But in fact, these guys are the Vipers whom we meet in Fallout New Vegas. They look like the usual raider gang, yes. And yet, the Vipers see themselves as followers of an ancient religion that revolves solely around snakes. There is some seriously weird shit going on among their ranks, let me tell you; like creepy monthly ceremonies where they drink a mixture of alcohol and snake venom to enter a trance - and no, not everyone wakes. When they reach maturity they are given a certain mixture of viper venom and are sacrificed to the Children of the Great Snake if they die - which  means that they get thrown down a pit full of snakes. Their leader is called The Great Snakekeeper. In the first Fallout game they wore armor made of bones, not the trivial leather armor we see in the picture. Because of their dangerous experiments with viper venom they’ve developed an unnaturally good health.

So, nobody would deny that this is a description of a tribe, not a raider group but a literal and very real tribe. But by the time we meet them in Fallout New Vegas they’ve had a lot of time to change into the people pictured above (consequences of the Brotherhood almost completely wiping them out), and now, as stated by the game’s loading screen they are just a “(slightly) more organized Viper gang”.

It’s not like they haven’t been into slavery and robbery while they lived in California. So what makes the developers call them “gang” instead of “tribe” now?

The big question I ask in this post is''': where is the line between tribes and raiders? Where does one stop and the other begin?'''

Let’s look at some other examples given to us by the games.

Now, we established that there are some difficulties in properly categorizing the Vipers. What about other “raiders”? Think of The Forged from Fallout 4. They have beliefs that border on religious, rituals and ceremonies, and they are obsessed with the power of fire. Can they be truly considered simple raiders? Or are they entering tribal territory?

On the other hand, we have the example of a group of Minutemen slowly turning into a raider gang. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the notes where the process is being documented by their leader, but long story short: they’ve been short on supplies, tried their best to remain good at heart in a cruel world but, at some point, started attacking caravans out of desperation. In the last notes the leader more or less confirms that they are actual raiders now, and that they aren’t the ones to blame - it’s just the world they live in.

The important detail of this summary is the evident disappointment and disillusionment with the current state of the world. And if you ask me, this detail is crucial for understanding the difference between raiders and tribes.

I am proposing the following interpretation: the difference between tribals and everyone else is how much they mourn the loss of the Old World.

Note that I didn’t say that it makes the difference between tribes and raider gangs. No, I meant exactly what I said.

Think back to the tribes of Zion. The important thing about them is that they are genuinely okay with the world they live in, they find it perfectly okay the way it is. The Old World affects them only insofar that they avoid places that have something to do with it, marking them as taboo. But aside from that, they live in the now, and they aren’t feeling the loss of the accomplishments of the world that existed before the bombs dropped.

Think about the Vipers. This tribe came into existence because a madman, a certain Jonathan Faust who fell into the pit and was attacked by vipers, forcefully converted other people and made them go through the whole process of venom-induced delirium that turned them into the first Vipers. They weren’t in their right minds after that. And they certainly didn’t miss anything about the Old World in this state anymore.

Think about The Forged who care only about the Fire. About the Great Khans that - more or less - peacefully live in the Mojave Wasteland. About the Treeminders of Fallout 3 that chose to live without technology.

Unlike the rest of the wastelanders they are content with the way they live. The “civilized” folk though - what do they do? They suffer. They complain. They see what was left of the Old World and compare it to the current state of the world. Old Diode Jefferson comes to mind with his quote: “''Here and now got its ups and downs, but… focusing on the past like it was way better? That’s just Old World Blues.''”

Every wastelander lives in this constant state of Old World Blues, not just the residents of Big Mountain.

You wish to make Follows-Chalk “civilized”? Make him hate the world he lives in. Make him mourn and feel the displeasure everyone else, aside from tribals, feels.

So, I hope it will get clear why I had to take such a long detour in order to answer the anon’s question. Why are there almost no tribes in the East, whereas the West is, or at least has been, crawling with them?

The big difference between the East and the West, as we know it from the games, is the level of urbanization. The places we’ve seen on the East Coast are very urbanistic - both Boston and Washington D.C. The Mojave Wasteland and even California from what I’ve gathered are significantly different. And that means that the people of the Capital Wasteland as well as the people of the Commonwealth have no escape from this Old World Blues - they are constantly reminded of what the world used to be like, they are constantly faced with the great buildings, incredible constructions of old, past times, that are slowly falling apart while they try to survive in their barracks. There is no escape from this dichotomy, this discrepancy.

And that might be a reason why even the wiki page states that “tribes, for the most part, avoid living in pre-War ruins and instead settle in small villages or rural areas”.

There is little the people on the East Coast can do; they can’t help but identify with the place they live in, with this falling apart monument of the past.

And that was an unnecessarily elaborate way of saying:

- the feeling of loss is what separates the tribes from the rest of the wastelanders. Tribes live in the now and are content with the state of the world, unlike the “civilized” people that constantly mourn the death of the Old World.

- because the East Coast is very urbanistic and serves as a reminder of what the world used to be like, there are less tribes in the Capital Wasteland and the Commonwealth than in California and the Mojave Wasteland.

The next Fallout game will allow the player to utilize the Old Save Bonus
The following is taken verbatim from Fallout 4's WMG page on TV Tropes, and will be amended in the future.

Considering how Bethesda have proven themselves to be massive Bioware fans in this game - since they clearly were heavily inspired by Mass Effect when working on Fallout 4 - the next Fallout game will allow the player to import some of the old save data from their Fallout 4 playthrough. This will likely make it easier for Bethesda to preserve the player's choices in 4 without causing half the fanbase to scream bloody murder if they pick a definite ending.

Mr. Burke from Fallout 3 was actually a Synth
The following is taken verbatim from Fallout 4's WMG page on TV Tropes, and will be amended in the future.
 * Back in Fallout 3, we were introduced to one Mr. Burke. A creepy, cool, dangerous individual who worked for Mr. Tenpenny and tried to get the Lone Wanderer to blow up Megaton. Since we know Megaton didn't get blown up, it stands to reason that Burke is most likely canonically dead, but that's aside from the point. The point being, we didn't know anything about Burke. His past, where he came from. Even Tenpenny said that he just kind of showed up one day. Burke being an escaped, mind-wiped Synth makes a lot of sense in that regard; we know from Gabriel that not all mind-wiped Synths turn out good. It's possible that Burke is the result of a mistake or glitch in the mind wiping process that turned him into a sociopath.
 * Or hell, Burke might actually be an Institute Synth sent down to the Capital Wasteland to help cause chaos there and make sure that any relatively "local" threats are either neutralized or converted to the Institute's cause! After all, while we now know that it isn't canon now, Mr. Burke might have succeeded in getting Megaton - the second-largest settlement in the entire Capital Wasteland, where the Wasteland Survival Guide, a valuable book that would help teach Wastelanders to organize and generally be more of a threat to organizations like the Institute - wiped off the map. That would also remove some dangerous Pre-War tech (Megaton's infamous bomb) from being further studied and perhaps even reverse-engineered by the residents of Megaton.

The Drifter on the Bridge and Dogmeat's Origin
The following is taken verbatim from Fallout 4's WMG page on TV Tropes, and will be amended in the future.

If you explore post-war Sanctuary when you first arrive upon exiting Vault 111, you'll notice some interesting things: An old mattress in one of the houses (A blue house west of The House of Tomorrow), two unmarked graves behind a house (A yellow ruined house on the cul-de-sac), and a dead drifter next to a dead Mongrel Dog (at the very end of the bridge as you exit Sanctuary). A little further down the road, at the abandoned Red Rocket Truck Stop, you meet Dogmeat. Perhaps while you, the Sole Survivor, were still frozen in Vault 111, a group of three settlers made their way to Sanctuary Hills in an effort to escape the Commonwealth. While here, they were ambushed by a pack of feral ghouls, but not just nameless ones, the residents of Sanctuary Hills who never made it to safety in time (There is a random encounter where you're attacked by a pack of ferals with names of your old neighbors). Two of these settlers were killed, hence the graves, the man at the bridge was simply laying his friends to rest. This man was the previous owner of Dogmeat, and was injured by the feral ghouls when attempting to escape Sanctuary. Of course, with Codsworth in denial and stuck in his regular subroutines, he never intervened. This injured man, heavily bleeding, was perfect prey for a stray Mongrel, but the man had managed to kill the Mongrel with a tire iron before dying himself. Dogmeat simply ran, chasing the ghouls away and possibly to find help, and that's where he finds you, his new friend, at the cost of his old ones.

The Automatron DLC's title is a spoiler when interpreted with a different inflection
The seemingly innocuous title of the DLC could have been a spoiler. While most people latched on to the Automatron DLC as a recurring character from the previous game, considering the events and how they unfold during the storyline, could the title spoiled the fact that the main antagonist of the DLC is the Auto-matron?
 * Confirmed, the official Traditional Chinese translation of this DLC says "Mechanic Matron."


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