The show is apparently canon. It’s not like the All Roads comic, Fallout Tactics, or the Fallout Bible where it’s considered flavor materials and only elements of it are later added to the canon.
“We view what’s happening in the show as canon,” Bethesda director Todd Howard told Vanity Fair. “That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion.”
https://www.gamesradar.com/is-the-fallout-tv-show-canon-bethesda-games-todd-howard/
The show takes place in 2296 making it the furthest along we’ve seen the world of Fallout so it might gives us some leads on canon endings of Fallout 3, NV, and 4.
I’ve only watched through the show once but I am wondering what you felt were significant additions to the canon or lore of Fallout?
Here’s some stuff I thought of:
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We knew there were Vault-Tec brand vaults in Canada following the annexation because of letters found in mailboxes outside of Vault 101 in Fallout 3 but a lot of people assumed this would be limited to major cities. Some people believed the settlement to the north mentioned in The Pitt DLC was a reference to Toronto and thought there might be a vault there. The map in one of the latter episodes seems to suggest there are a lot more vaults up there than people thought.
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I feel like there were enough references to the situation the Brotherhood of Steel is currently in with the early episodes to suggest what happened to them in the non-isometric games but I’d need to rewatch it to dig deeper. I don’t know if there are mentions of their command structure or the Mojave chapter. Either would likely be a giveaway. I don’t think the destruction of the Prydwen in Fallout 4 is out of the question. In Fallout 4 Captain Kells talks about the prior construction of airships on the West coast and Scribe Rothchild from Fallout NV mentions a rogue detachment of the Brotherhood of Steel that might be able to fill emerging power vacuums.
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Even with Shady Sands gone I feel like the NCR might still exist elsewhere. The population of the NCR according to a holotape in Fallout 2 is around 700,000 and with around 30,000 people in Shady Sands I feel like that means there were a lot of people outside this region. Unless this is being retconned. The whiteboard in the show, if I recall correctly, had a note that said the fall of Shady Sands was in 2277 which would have put it during Fallout 3 and before Fallout NV.
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I think it has finally been confirmed that Vault-Tec kicked off the nuclear war in some way like the cancelled Fallout film from back in the day originally wanted.
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New Vegas might may have been destroyed. It looks like it isn’t lit up and the buildings have been further damaged.
If you look back at the blackboard, it never actually shows that the nuke dropped in ‘77 just that shady sands fell, and then an arrow pointing to a nuke going off.
That can mean a lot of things. Rome fell over the course of decades and centuries. We also see that shady sands is the “original” capital. So fall of shady sands could refer to a political event, such as starting a costly war with Caesars Legion over a damn,that led to a new seat of government, and then sometime later the city was nuked.
We also don’t know how old Lucy or Maximus are supposed to be in the show. Is lucy a fresh faced 18 year old, or mid 20s? That kind of changes when the bomb would have dropped. Max was clearly very young, maybe 5 when the bomb dropped. So if he’s 20 in the show, then that puts the bomb dropping sometime during 2281, which now lines up with new Vegas. If Lucy and Max are older, in their mid 20s, then yes it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But we also have to remember that they should be pretty young. Max is a fresh recruit out of boot camp that has been with the BOS since he was small enough to fit in a fridge. I think it’s safe to say that he’d be trained up as soon as possible. So he’s very likely only 18 to 20 when we first see him.
The same applies for Lucy, she has a vague memory as a child of shady sands. If she’s 25, then that means the bomb had to have dropped in ‘77 but if she’s 18, then it could have dropped as late as 2283, assuming she’s a normal human that doesn’t start being able to retain long term memories until she’s 4 or so. I think it’s likely that she’s supposed to be 18 or 20 in the show, as the first time we see her she’s getting married off. A vault with a limited population would want to encourage people to have children as young as is morally feasible for them, to ensure that there is always a new generation that is well trained to take over.
I was confused and a little upset when I first saw 2277 on the board too. But then I took a nap and really thought about what that means for the story of both the show and new Vegas. The first things I thought of were the above. And now that I’ve sat with it for a while, it also strikes me that the NCR was an entire country with a similar landmass to modern day Germany, and likely well over a million inhabitants. They were not a city state. Losing one city would be a national tragedy and a major blow to any country, but it wouldn’t lead to an entire collapse. Maybe there would be a period of breakdown around the city that could go on for an extended period if surrounding cities weren’t equipped to help. But, the country as a whole wouldn’t just crumble to nothing because one city was destroyed.
2277 is the date of the First Battle Of Hoover Dam. If the war with the Legion went poorly in canon, then history would look back at that battle as the start of the fall.