Fallout's Biggest Mysteries | Fallout Lore

Zetans require 100 or 200 years to gwt to their home world so they left earth after the war, took 100 years back to homeworld then came back with an invasion force or it was firther away and invasion plans were already in progress

( don't know if it was ever revealed they had faster than light travel).

Man I love how fans still try to find lore in new Fallouts when there is none on purpose. There's no continuity whatsoever in the first place. It's a pinnacle of Bethesda's writing and how they make games - they slap together "something" and then fans fix it. It works with the lore too. Them Zetians lore is straight up Naked Gun writting. I can't help but love it - it's a death of the author at it's finest. Just art.

I am not here to be friends with the Zatens. I'm here to purge the Xeno.

maybe the zetan spacesuits are for protection against diseases

Good 10mm does it

Most of these theories are cringe and non logical.

I prefer Fallout 2 for good reasons. The Black isle Team was doing a great Job. Bathesta is there to ruin the whole Story. I have no Idea how Close they Stick to the original Idea, but all the Design and its colorfulness disgusts me. Those Games are Made to sell, not to be great.

When the mysterious stranger shows up, do all the raiders yell stranger danger😅

The mysterious savior showed up to save dude for the 10th time that day and the dude was like you know it'd be even more helpful if you showed up like 3 seconds earlier and just shot the dude who almost killed me and thus the mysterious stranger was born

I like to imagine little alien cowboys riding giddy up buttercups into battle😅

Maybe the aliens were initially intended as an Easter egg or a little side joke

Technically the one dude is right. Doesn't really matter who started the Great war because everybody lost it

War doesn't leave winners. It leaves varying degrees of losers

The only way any of the vaults doing what they did makes any kind of real sense as if there's a massive vault-tech vault somewhere that's still receiving information from these vaults.
Otherwise they were just torturing people with no real end goal as each of those vaults fell silent. If they didn't send their information out, it was all just lost and some of these vaults were 100% designed to fail some of them rather quickly. So where is the backup plan for the survival of humanity? If the vast majority of their vaults were designed to torture and kill their inhabitants, they're not going to be a whole lot of humans left when they finally open those f**** if they ever intended to open some of them and some of the experiments they were doing, I don't know how that data could be relevant for anything useful whatsoever

Perhaps the mysterious stdanger is a Time Traveler. Which is why he helps the protagonists, agents of change for the wasteland, reguardless of who they're allied with.

perhaps the real mysterious stranger was the friends we made along the way

When I first played fallout 3 I was convinced that buttercup was a life-sized robot horse. I searched for one endlessly. Imagine of it was in NV. A robot horse to ride across the Mojave.

"Han" shot first, apparently.

Hahaha Gary!

I have a personal theory about Fallout having superheroes. Though their universe heralds propaganda, comic book heroes, and mascots like Nuka Girl as it’s their golden age of comics. There’s still a lot of prototypes and memorabilia still around the Commonwealth.

It leaves me to wonder if there actually were some masked crusaders that may have secretly fought sometime before the Great War. Perhaps secretly for the US or DIA, maybe even the Reds.

If not I think it would be cool to include a superhero quest-line akin to Cabot House.
Maybe we recover one of the Unstoppables that have been frozen, or get to witness one of their missions back in time showing how they were nuked on their final mission, memorializing them in comics.

Ultimately I think Fallout definitely has the room for some superhero adventures, as its already had elements of horror, supernatural, crime noire, and sci-fi.
And Fallout 4 practically includes memorabilia from almost all of the Unstoppables.

the biggest mystery is what happened to the rest of the world like Europe, Russia, Australia, etc.

My money on who started the Great War is Canada. They had the motive, being forcibly annex by the US. They possibly had the means, former Canadian now US citizens in the military and/or Vault-Tec employees. They are even crazy enough to do it.

The fallout 4 mysteries stranger arrival sounds like a left 4 dead special zombie

The Zetans likely started the Great War. There is a holotape in the Mothership Zeta DLC for Fallout 3. Its specifically Alien Captive Record 17, in which nuclear launch codes were being pried out of the captive military official by the Zetans. Its right there in the Cryo Lab.

I thought the mystery stranger was a group of time travelers that help you or a Doctor Who thing going on where he looks different now and again

Praise Atom for this sermon. May you bathe in his heavenly glow 🙏

I mean we can meet the mysterious stranger son in new vegas and he will give us The Mysterious Magnum after we hired him

As stupid as pipe weapons are they still look better than the muffler with a spout aka the "assault rifle"

China nuked the United States because they found out about FEV

That Holly Barrisford performance is just perfect. I’ve never heard a more convincing dialogue delivery

Anything Bethesda is not fallout canon

I believe the zetans want humans genetics. sorta like HFY where we live on a death world to them, we are taller and stronger than them while managing to use small amounts of their tech to advance our own quickly. They had 800 years at best if they wanted to take us over, even noting that they were around before we were even a clear threat to them since 1600s humanity couldn't have fought back and won against them. So its clear they want humanity for something and since they were merging us with their own genetics in FO3, its most likely that or its just studying us and when they're done, they'll just eliminate us, I mean they have a weapon on the mothership that could wipe out whole towns without issues. Clearly time aint an issue for them so any problems from wiping us out from orbit are minor.

I think Vault Tec may have had a peace walker type AI system with the ability to fool Chinese nuclear defences into thinking they fired first in order to start the war.

The Mysterious Stranger mystery, pun unintended, should never be solved.

I realise that I am in the minority, but I find aliens to be such an unnecessary addition to Fallout…

I think that the “Vault-Tech” logo on the bomb is really an Air Force one

Fallout needs a tv show

Did the government know aliens were about to invade, and nuked the planet on purpose? big think

Dude we already lost a war to China… there is absolutely no way we could push them back to Beijing.

Aint that a kick in the head?!

I like to think the mysterious stranger is inspired by Ace Rimmer from the TV Red Dwarf. Arnold Rimmer encounters his alternate self, Ace Rimmer, through a series of parallel universe events. Ace is Rimmer's heroic counterpart, embodying all the qualities Rimmer lacks—courage, charm, and selflessness. Rimmer briefly becomes Ace by swapping places, experiencing a reality where he embodies those admirable traits. This encounter leaves a lasting impact, inspiring Rimmer to aspire to Ace's virtues, albeit intermittently. Eventually Ace Rimmer dies, and Rimmer has to become him. Maybe one day we will get a quest where we will help a young, cowardly person become the next mysterious stranger.

The scariest thing about nuclear war to me is that by the 70s nuclear weapons were becoming so powerful that bunkers under literal mountains, like Cheyenne Mountain, did not offer enough protection to survive a direct or near hit. Unfortunately, all these Fallout-style vaults located near urban canters would simply have been vaporized.

So was the government building their own underground bases, or did vault tech take over that responsibility?

it was china
they don't want to admit it because real china would be mad

Personally, I think that Vault-Tec started the war. This company is not producing living space in the safety of vaults, it is preparing for the experiments to begin, and peace is an obstacle to this. It seems that Vault-Tec was thinking of leaving the planet even before the Great War, so the probability that in the minds of the "people" behind the Vault-Tec the Earth was already something expendable.

The subject of Zetans has a huge elephant in the explanation. At some point, you get behind those weapons on the mothership, and you have an option to fire them at Earth. If they wanted to exterminate humanity they would just fire this weapon at cities a few times a century and with this stagnate the development of the human race. They don't need to get down to Earth in the "Signs" style of attack. The experiments they do are pretty chaotic, but it seems that the theme is creating new Zetans because they are a doomed race for some reason. There is also this silliness of the Zetans linking them to the "Mars Attacks" attitude that is making it difficult to understand what their motives truly are. Conquest however doesn't seem to be one of them.

Always wondered how they were gonna observe the vaults if the HQ was destroyed bc I think vault tec definitely wanted it to happen

It's likely the Zetans wear suits on earth as a precaution against contamination, and not because they can't breathe in our atmosphere. If this were the case, you wouldn't expect humans to be able to breathe normally on their ships.

I'm almost certain that if the mysterious stranger was recruiting I'd have been his first choice. I don't even need game mechanics to disappear I dart off at impossible speeds and survive impossible stunts just for fun and practice constantly.

Good content as always Syn! Your content and other fallout lore creators have been a huge inspiration for my fallout 2d20 campaign

Personally I still endorse the theory the zetans were trying to buy themselves more time in contrast to their own species being so fragile. One theory states that the reason they made abominations was that they were intentionally trying to splice human DNA and zetan DNA to save their own race due to huge amounts of cloning over thousands of years. Its pretty obvious they were watching humanity for a very long time, even Jack Cabot hints to this as well or perhaps a different race of aliens entirely. Thousands, perhaps even millions of years of cloning and then using the clone to make new clones was potentially making their species begin to de-evolve and become genetically damaged in such a way that their entire species literally faced extinction on a galactic scale.