i don’t think who shot first is important to the games

I previously wrote that the Fallout ambiguity was the point, and the more we know about the pre-War world actually detracts from the setting IMHO.

The pre-war civilization went from haunting to set dressing. It’s easy to point to Bethesda for this phenomenon, but (if we’re being really honest with ourselves) the problem started in Fallout 2. The game became a franchise, and its own lore began to eclipse the general irony. In the original Fallout the pre-war culture was as alien to the world’s inhabitants as it was to ours. Part of what made it work was the very little that was revealed in the bombed-out ruins. Now we have a fairly liberal (yes, even in FO2 and FNV) takes on the human condition, while the player has an encyclopedic knowledge of the pre-war world.