Fallout Without Vaults?
This is just an idea i came up with a few weeks ago and i have decided to make it a blog post. basically it came to mind how influential vaults have been in the history of fallout and i began to wonder what fallout would be like without them. i am setting this out as a game by game thing so e.g. changes from fallout-fallout2-etcetera.
Fallout To start with fallout was based entirely around vault 13 so just eliminating that is a big change, that and the main protagonist of the game would no longer be the Vault Dweller but someone completely different. for the purposes of this i will call the protagonist The Wastelander. we can safely assume that the wastelander would somehow find out about the master and he would try to stop him. so for arguments sake lets say super mutants ransacked his town and the wastelander went on a vendetta. this should be easier for the wastelander than it was for the vault dweller because without the vaults there would be no cathedral for the master and also he would be VERY hard pressed to find "clean" humans for his army greatly slowing the expansion of his army. although he could just use regular humans their success rate is very low which slows his progress even further. you could even say that the master and his army would be about as much threat to the wasteland as any large gang of raiders and as the vault dweller discovered this species would die out after a single generation. its fair to say that without vaults fallout would have sucked pretty hard.
Fallout 2 carrying on from fallout, without vault 13 the village of arroyo would never have been founded because it is descended from the inhabitants of vault 13 and the vault dweller. so again for the purposes of this we can say that the survivors of the wastelanders town resettled somewhere else and slowly became tribal. a descendant of the wastelander who we can still call the chosen one was asked to retrieve a G.E.C.K to save his people. HOWEVER there was one problem with that, G.E.C.K'S were created by a company called FUTURE-TEC which was in turn part of VAULT-TEC so the probability of one existing is very slim. We can assume that after the chosen one leaves and returns empty handed (as he does in fallout 2) he finds that his village has been abducted by the enclave. the enclave, in favour of their F.E.V experiments the enclave would have to use their own citizens because they are the only "clean" humans in the world. the game would continue as normal until the chosen one saves his village and the innocent enclave civilians and blow up the oil rig. after returning to arroyo the enclave civilians with some pre-war know how could have helped the tribe fertilize their land. or not.
Fallout Tactics This one is very tricky. Another fallout game plot completely surrounded by vaults. the main plot of tactics is the brotherhood getting to Vault Zero and the calculator. The difference that vault zero has to the other vaults is that it was made for the pre-war government in essence so it is highly likely that vault zero would still exist. im just going to skip to the end for this one because that is when vault zero comes into play. it is possible that in this alternate universe the enclave would have control over vault zero. seeing as there was no vault network for it to control and it was used to store military tech it is likely there could be a small detachment of enclave forces stationed at vault zero that has lost contact with the hierarchy (which would be really cool.) if the brotherhood somehow managed to defeat the enclave then it could prove more beneficial than the previous canon ending because as well as a supply of pre war tech and research (which is easily accessable because the calculator wouldnt even had been created) they would also have a supply of enclave tech and research continued from the pre-war database. NO VAULTS FOR THE WIN!
Fallout 3 i would say that this game wouldnt be affected much in the way of plot. because the lone wanderer wasnt actually born in vault 101 after his mother died, james (the dad/liam neeson) would most likely have seeked refuge in rivet city with doctor li and when the wanderer came of age (19) it is likely he would have convinced his dad and the others to return to project purity in his mothers memory or out of necessity for water. apart from the lack of a G.E.C.K and the lack of super mutants which most probably wouldnt exist that far east the plot would stay the same from where your father dies up until the end of broken steel. it could be said that with enclave technology the brotherhood could have found a way to get project purity working perhaps making broken steel an extended campaign rather than a DLC.
Fallout New Vegas Out of all the fallout games this one is actually affected hugely! but how is this possible? vaults play no role in the campaign of fallout new vegas, or so you thought... "you see children..." *terrible 3-dog quote* there are 3 major factions that play key roles in the story of new vegas, the NCR which was actually created by the descendants of vault 15 who founded shady sands which later became the capital of the NCR effectively removing its existence from the game. next is new vegas itself governed by mister house. sadly however part of vegas' economic success is due to 2 reasons; A. the residents of vault 21 left and settled in and around new vegas becoming one of its first initial customers/citizens. without them the 3 tribal families would be bare casino's that had no one to fill them. B. the NCR was also pouring caps down mr house's gullet and since they never existed and the only remaining customers are the people of westside, eastside and other surrounding communities which were relatively poor apart from maybe goodsprings and novac, mr house would just be an old man with lots of robots and some tribal henchmen. the last influential faction in the mojave is the Legion. although the legion is made up of 87 tribes most of those tribes would be descendants from vault dwellers and so the legions forces would be limited in that sense. it is possible that the first battle for hoover dam was between the legion and the robots of new vegas naturally ending with the same result OR it is also possible that an entirely different faction would control new vegas in its entirety. can you guess who it is... no? ITS THE BROTHERHOOD OF STEEL!!! without their war with NCR the brotherhood would be the most powerful force in the west and would take NCR's place in the mojave. they would have either come to terms with mr house and worked alongside him or destroyed him completely and taken control of his robot army (with the help of the courier?) and totally annihilated the legion. also, with the leadership of father elijah they would also gain all the technological wonders of the sierra madre and big MT effectively making them more powerful than the original brotherhood. needless to say that across all of america the brotherhood would become the only superpower after eventually destroying the enclave remnants at navvaro rather than the NCR doing it.
I hope that you all enjoyed reading this as i did thinking/writing it. if you have an alternate theory you would like to surface by all means comment it below. if you have an idea you would like me to build on e.g if ***** did/didnt exist in fallout comment it below or message me it and i might make this into a series if it becomes at all popular.
P.S. this is my first ever blog post so please be nice.