Maybe Harold was a ghoul before he entered Mariposa? because it never truly explains if he his or not

​​@@sharpedog666onsidering the fruit growing from his head, and the fact that he became ugly looking after being knocked out in Mariposa (from what I remember regarding his dialogue), I think it’s safe to say he was human beforehand and became an FEV mutant.

​@@sharpedog666don't forget that ghouls in classic Fallouts are outcasts, even more than in later games. Harold was a vault dweller and he became an important caravaneer and merchant in the Hub before he was exposed to fev. When the mutation happened, he became a hobo in the Old Town.

Yes, radiation is and always has been the canon way ghouls are created.

Yep, Harold is more a FEV mutant than a ghoul, despite looking similar to ghouls. One funny thing is how in Fallout 3, Harold pretty much becomes the Fallout version of the Great Deku Tree (esp Wind Waker with the whole frequent spreading of seeds thanks to the FEV virus).

Maybe the real theoretical degrees in physics are the ghouls we made along the way.

Thats why they wanna go back there. It all makes sense.

@@Kaiserhawk Well, space is full of all kinds of radiation

As a theoretical ghoul, been there, done that. Uhh, smoothskin.

Do you work at Repconn? Are you… FANTASTIC?!

don't fall for the reply on your comment, it's one of those telegram scammers.

It would be nice if they didn't make a mockery of it these days.

Is it correct that Bethesda rejects Fallout: New Vegas as canon?

@@bricaaron3978 No, they love to sell overpriced cheaply made merch referencing it.

no, hairs sleepy

I noticed that too haha

I’ve made that exact same mistake before lol.

@@alfieburns9019 same. they're so similar your brain sometimes autofills the word without you even realizing it. and if i know what both of those words mean, then this guy definitely does. i came here to learn about fallout lore and he's teaching me more about DNA than school ever did.

@@kingdavid7516 real life autocorrect lol.

If I remember correctly, in the Bibles Avellone cites a list of animals who have been or could have been exposed to fev and this could explain why many animals are bigger o so strage (like the brahmins). Fev gave them an increased sized and an immunity to radiation, so it would be easier for them to survive and reproduce. Other creatures are more complex (deathclaws, nightstalkers, cazadores, wanamingos), but it's explained that they are man made experiments, even if this information can't be known by normal wastelanders.

Wasn't there a guy in F1, who was exposed to FEV, but became a ghoul? I can't remember his name, but he was the guy who was sent from Vault 13 before us to find a source of water, you could find him in Boneyard.

@@brucecampbellboyz That's Harold! I think the devs have always argued hr was special, and they even had a tree grow out of him since FO2, so I don't think he quite matches the average ghoul! :D

@@brucecampbellboyz you're right. It's Talius and I think he looks more like Harold than ordinary ghouls. It would be cool if in a future game we can meet him again or other fev mutants that aren't supermutants.

@@bjobs316 I think Talius said he got exposed to a great amount of radiation in Necropolis rather than FEV, and that turned him into a ghoul. I might be wrong tho.

I actually didn't know there was a difference. I never heard of a dosimeter until this and now I've gotta look it up!

She has latent fev already...they all do

@@Kyle-lv7sw what is this, the walking dead? I think by the time of fo2 all the FEV in the atmosphere would have cleared out, especially being a whole continent away from Mariposa

@athena5573 every one on surface has had DNA altered by fev

@@athena5573I thought so too until there was smoke in Vermont from the wildfires in California. Apparently it travels quite a distance.

@@Kyle-lv7sw based on what...

He literally says in the first 10 seconds that what he says isn't canon since he doesn't work at Bethesda.

​@@erc3338Yep. He's absolutely right. Though I do like hearing Tims canon vs corporate canon. It's nice to see where it falls and if it actually works and all that jazz. It's kind of like how Chris Claremonts original canon of Sabretooth being Wolverines father is just a bit of fun vs the canon explanation of the Comics/movies (for the present because canon can absolutely be retconned). I'm just saying it's nice to hear it from Tim Cains mouth vs a corporate entity.

​@@stevena488- I'm pretty sure Bethesda went with Tim's idea on ghouls.

​@@whiteegretx That's awesome!

No doubt. If TES has taught me anything, one should "canonize" whatever suits their view of the worldscape best. Not like Zenimax has cops.

Bethesda has sort of covered the process later on. I remember at least in Nuka World where a guy talks about how his friends all slowly lost their minds over time. Todd seems to stick to Cain lore at least in this topic.

@@plebisMaximus They also had a child ghoul locked in a fridge for 200 years with no sunlight or food so Bethesda isn't exactly consistent either.

@@jromero9795 we don't talk about _that_ quest

​@@jromero9795@plebisMaximus: Thing is, Bethesda's not hearing anything specific they might actually decide to address at some point due to the sheer volume of tantrums that've been thrown over its handling of the series. How could they possibly hear it over the mountain of hatred they have to face every morning? Here's the thing: "Believability of character and concreteness of world have never been priorities [for Bethesda] compared to visual iconography and expansive dungeoneering." -- Noah Gervais. In fact, the lore has been amended and retconned to such an extent that Fallout worlds are typically no longer coherent or believable. Noah pointed out that the originals and New Vegas were "strange, but believable" and that certain aspects of Bethesda's Fallouts, e.g. the BOS operating in W. Va., "only make sense from a marketing perspective, not a lore-driven one." In 76, it actually detracts from the world the artists and developers were trying to craft. Had Taggerdy's Thunder remained Taggerdy's Thunder instead of being made over in the image of the BOS, for example, all the factions of 76 would have been unique to the series with the exception of the Enclave, which made a modicum of sense given the region's proximity to Washington. Otoh, the base game world would have turned out to be utterly dark and gloomy -- without the gallows humor we've come to know and love in Fallout games -- unless it had undergone a major rewrite. I remember them saying they wanted the next Fallout to be "more serious" in tone, no doubt so they could tell a story as gripping as Mass Effect's, a series from which they've taken enormous inspiration. (Maybe a little too much. FO4 dialogue wheel anyone?) The "serious" approach pretty obviously doesn't work for Fallout, which is satire at its core. That's why people are saying Bethesda "never understood Fallout" or "doesn't know it's own IP" and the hell of it is, newer generations of players have no idea what the original Fallouts were essentially all about unless they go back and play them. 'Hubris Comics' is just a funny name to them, but hubris is what led to the Great War in the first place. Heh, "Hubris Comics."

@@lrinfi Some retcons are more severe than others and can impact a player's immersion, no matter how expansive or explorable the world is. The ghouls no longer needing food or water is a pretty big deal and the humor derived from this may not have connected as the writing team intended.

Eh, F1 took place 84 years after the bombs dropped. The character saying they lived 20% longer than humans might have been lying or making it up as supermuties were probably not being studied adequately. I personally like to think their lifespan is on the long side of sharks, so original dumb supermuties might regularly live 250+ years (if they survive that long) with the longest-living specimens, perhaps the healthiest/purest/smartest surviving well past that to say 500 years. Practically immortal on a human lifescale, as that'd be at least 3 times the current average lifespan (if not 20 times, assuming the average age is only in the 20s due to the ultra-violence and lack of sanitary medical clinics, unaffordable pre-war drugs and other treatments not withstanding).

i also liked this as the source of your perk "powers" in 3 and 4 at least, as in those it was a pretty clearly uncontaminated human who encounters trace FEV during the game.

It’s a virus though, it’s a living thing. It’ll shave died or been rained to the ground a very long time ago. Even if it explains old ghouls it doesn’t explain new ghouls, and FEV wouldn’t be used in weapons given it was a supersoldier serum lmao

I mean, yes, but I think the insects irradiated into giantism comes more from the retorfuturism vibes than anything else. The "big bug" movies were a whole subgenre of sci-fi during the middle of the 20th century. I think Fallout 3 even named one of its quests after the most acclaimed one (1954's "THEM!")

Aliens were a joke in Fallout 1, 2 and NV. And should have been a joke in Fallout 3.

@@fredrik3880 As awful as Mothership Zeta was, with a few years of hindsight, have Bethesda ever actually said that it was a "canon" DLC? It's never been referenced again, as far as I'm aware. Better to treat it like a weird 'what if' one-off special to a serial.

@@comfylain yeah bethesda should def treat it as a joke as well

He said they were just a joke in Fallout 1 but he's fine with them in later games.

​@@fredrik3880there was an alien corpse in The Glow.

Dirty bombs exists as a concept, deliberately causing as much fallout as possible, that could be the reason certain places in fallout (like the glowing sea) still have enormous amounts of radiation 200 years later, while other places are perfectly habitable (like the boneyard) also it seems someone at Bethesda realised the whole foliage thing finally lol

​@@sierra1513 I think the term you were more looking for is neutron bombs? Though those operate less on spewing radioactive materials out, and more on converting much of the energy in a nuclear blast into intense gamma ray bursts. In either case while I want to agree, this just seems like a thing they didn't think about, or didn't care about. The Glowing Sea was pretty clearly caused by a standard atomic warhead hitting, you can see it right at the beginning before you're sent down to the Vault (though if we're speaking realistically, Nate/Nora should have been permanently blinded looking directly at it that close, and the shockwave would have hit them much faster, with them also getting lethal gamma rays, unless these nuclear devices ARE ultra-efficient and there isn't much of a gamma ray release and...gah, circular logic). Occam's razor says they probably didn't think about any of this, and/or didn't care. Looking at Pete Hines and Emil Pagluriano, its a very safe bet. Generally, states don't use dirty bombs, they're extremely wasteful, and no clear eyed military strategist wants to pollute their target permanently like that, especially since in a theoretical war, you'd be taking over of what's left of that. It'd be odd for the Chinese to switch to rad spewing bombs imo, especially when ICBMs are so expensive in the first place. You wanna cause destruction, not poison. Terrorists pursue dirty bombs because it's the best they could have access too (weapons grade uranium and plutonium's logistics chains are *extremely* well guarded, one of many reasons hence we haven't had terrorists with nukes yet. Even the South Africans, who had the most successful guerilla nuclear weapons program, their four finished warheads were all standard atomic devices with a clean chain reaction.

We had deathclaw eggs in Fallout too. I think the idea was that, being reptiles, they could reproduce asexually, like many lizard species and even some snakes and scorpions.

@@CainOnGames Oh, that's interesting, I guess Fallout NV retconned that then, and only in the Obsidian Canon since it conflicts with the current Canon. Since it has Alphas and Matriarchs, meaning their not all Female.

@ValdVincent well if I recall correctly FEV infected animals generally could reproduce it was FEV infected humans that couldn't

​@@ValdVincent 'Alpha males' as pack are mentioned in Joseph's dialogue in Fallout 2 too, so it seems to have originated in that

Bruh

it's saturday

@@franklinhirsch1654 I was high as hell when I wrote that my b

He doesn't really talk about New Vegas, because he did not work on it.

I'd say that by the time New Vegas was made, this take on the lore was probably forgotten - in Fallout 4 aswell, I think Hancock explains he wanted to become a ghoul specifically to live longer, as if becoming a ghoul immediately guarantees a longer lifespan

​@@spuddle5375 well in hancocks case he actually didn't do it for the lifespan, but didn't wanna be his human self anymore (didn't wanna be recognized or look at himself anymore after all he had done) he jokingly says the silver lining is immortality but if you ask about that he clarifies its not immortality, but some ghouls live a long time as for searchlight I think it's implied there were a lot of soldier there considering it was seen as a prime target for the legion, so the ones you see are a smaller percentage of the NCR population there (definitely a higher survival rate than real life, but ghoulification is still not certain)

he was in NukaBreak, some bloke with a BB gun

Harold (and Talus) are failed supermutants with similar properties to ghouls, but technically aren't.

@@oknodiangames6 Harold was only partially exposed to FEV, I think he was knocked out and had his head land in a puddle from an tipped over barrel of FEV. One of the people that was with him however was fully submerged in a vat of FEV, this happened at the same time as Harold was knocked out.

To be fair the Eddie Winter tapes only mention something about getting radioactive material from a corrupt contact in a shipping company, as well as him mentioning a doctor with a theory of something like ghoulification caused by exposure to radiation specifically. As for Hancock I’m pretty sure the drug is mentioned as being radioactive, or having something to do with radioactivity. Honestly Bethesda seems to rely on the “radiation causes mutations” idea far more than the classic games did, the most I can think of in regards to widespread FEV being mentioned is Curie talking about FEV *Hypothetically* becoming airborne Edit: Here’s the relevant Eddie Winter quote: “You know those idiot brothers at Wicked Shipping? The ones smuggling the radioactive material? I put the screws to 'em. Got some of the stuff. I've been working with this doctor in East Boston. Guy's a fucking genius. Listen, I know it sounds crazy... but he had this theory... The right kind of radiation exposure, at the right amounts... it can change human cells. Mutate them. Baby... I can live forever. Yeah, I know... It could kill me. I'm willing to chance it. But I can't risk losing you. So I'm the guinea pig. And I've been getting... treatments.”

Yeah, didn't think about it before, but I agree. It would be more interesting if the East coast had it's *own* technology-preserving group, that is perhaps similar to the Brotherhood of Steel in some ways, but different in many other ways.. instead of just having the same organization spread across the whole continent. Same with various other unusual and interesting things (factions, creatures, whatever). Have something different on the East coast. I guess Bethesda didn't have the confidence to stray too far, at the time they made their first FO game (FO3).