Having binged my entire way though Fallout, I have some further thoughts (spoilers ahead!).
WOW. Like, seriously. WOW.
They’ve done an amazing job. There are only three things that stood out to me as inaccurate, and two of those are fairly accurately explained.
The first is ghouls using a drug to avoid turning feral. To my knowledge there is no mention of this in any other Fallout media. Ghouls are tough, get healed (to some extent) by radiation, can live for centuries, and sometimes go irreversibly insane and turn into mindless, cannibalistic monsters. There seems to be some link between age and going feral, but it’s very vague – some ghouls remain sane for centuries, whole others lose their mind within a few years.
To my mind there’s no reason that ghouls in California couldn’t have stumbled over a pre-war drug that fends off going feral, or even developed such a drug. We know that Dr Barrows in D.C. is looking for treatments for the ghoul condition, there’s surely similar researchers in California. If it’s a comparatively recent development then it wouldn’t have had time to spread to the rest of the wasteland, which would explain why it doesn’t show up in any of the games
The second issue is Maximus getting stuck in his power armour after Thaddeus stole his fusion core. This should be impossible – from the games we know that you can easily get out of power amour even when your last core runs out, and you can move (albeit very slowly) in non-powered power armour.
This is easily explained by the fact that Maximus has never actually been trained! He’s using armour that he stole and has very little idea what he’s doing. There’s probably a release somewhere inside that opens the suit without power, and another one that allows the suit to articulate, but he has no idea where they are, or that they even exist. So when the power goes out, he’s screwed.
The final issue is the big one – the location of Shady Sands. Shady Sands is supposed to lie directly east of Vault 13, which is in the vicinity of Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada. It absolutely cannot be over 300km south west in the Angel’s Boneyard. I can’t think of a single way to deal with this – maybe it’ll be explained in Season 2 (we’re gonna get a Season 2, right?) or maybe it’s just something we’ll have to live with.
Anyway, spectacularly well done to everyone involved, and roll on New Vegas!
