4 is the most newbie-friendly. It's a great way to get familiar with Fallout. It's main story isn't the strongest, but the exploration and gunplay is a lot of fun, and it's more user-friendly than 3 or New Vegas.
@Fallout Fazbear you can finish the game with the Railroad or BOS friendly with the Minutemen if you play it right. I might be wrong, but I think you can finish with the Institute allied with the Minutemen as well.
@TinLicker46 don't forget about Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, TN. It's an entire amusement park dedicated to Dolly Parton. That would be a wild location in Fallout.
All flying bugs. They're so hard to hit if you're not in VATS. And cazadores are brutal.
4's story isn't great, but exploring the Commonwealth is excellent. Every building you can enter has some enemy, lore, or loot. Although downtown Boston crashes far too much.
It depends on if you can keep the supply chain going. Drones are highly complex machines that require a lot of special parts (both mechanical and computer). So you need enough people with the resources, talent, and machinery to produce them. Then you have to have people who are skilled in using them. Then you have to have an organization large enough and rich enough to buy them.
Would a random raider group love to get their hands on a drone? Sure, absolutely. But most don't have anywhere near the resource or talent pool to make them.
The Institute might have the resources and knowledge, but they're already creating synths quite successfully. They have no need for drones. (Isn't there a conspiracy that the birds in the Commonwealth are Institute synths? Can't remember if that's confirmed or not).
Caesar's Legion might have need for drones, but I doubt they have the technical knowledge to produce them.
The BOS might have the knowledge and resources, but they seem to have a pretty small population spread throughout the country. I don't know if they have a large enough manufacturing base to pull it off. Besides, they seem pretty locked in on power armor.
The Enclave might make sense. I haven't played 3 yet.
Excluding the Enclave, the only faction that might have the resources, knowledge, manufacturing base, and need for drones is the NCR. I'm sure their soldiers would love to use those against Caesar's Legion. But in NV, we see that the NCR's supply lines are very precarious. Maybe they can do more in the heartland, but they can barely keep their frontline soldiers supplied with basic food, ammo, or medical supplies, much less high tech drones.
Like everyone said, cars exist canonically, but not in game. However, I'd like to make another point. Cars require quite a bit of infrastructure to be practical. You have to get all the resources, make a factory to mass produce them, then you need to make sure there are usable roads and enough fuel stations that are regularly supplied. Even if you have all that, you have to have a consumer base which needs cars and has enough resources to buy them. Based on most of the places we've explored, there just isn't the economic or industrial base to support an automotive industry.
I know canonically, the cities we visit are much larger than they appear in-game, but still, where would a resident of Diamond City go in a car? Most of Boston is a warzone with junk littering the roads, and it's not worth driving around inside Diamon City's walls. I haven't played 3, but I believe Megatron and Rivet City have similar issues.
New Vegas is actually big enough that you could use cars inside the Strip and the surrounding areas, but the roads are awful, and people seem to make do well enough by walking.
The only place I'm aware of that has the safety, stability, and infrastructure to make cars viable is the interior of the NCR, at least before whatever happened between New Vegas and the TV show.
I played 4 first, and I never listened to the radio. It just annoyed me. But now that I'm playing New Vegas, I love listening to the radio. When I replay 4, I'll give the radio another shot.
I like D&D. How's the Fallout TTRPG?
I want Fallout 5 more than a NV remake, but I don't want it in NY. NY is so over played, and I think it would feel too much like Boston and DC. There have been a lot of other ideas thrown out that I would much rather have like Florida, New Orleans, Texas Triangle (Dallas, Houston, Austin/San Antonio), Detroit/Great Lakes, Atlanta, Seattle/Pacific Northwest.
A centaur would be wild
It never feels empty. There's always some house to loot, some side quest to play, or some lore to read. You can enter a building, you're gauranteed to find something.
It's my favorite Fallout game, but honestly, it's pretty ugly. And a lot of things are just empty. Maybe I'm spoiled because I started with 4, but every building in 4 has loot or stuff to find. A lot of times, I run to a group of abandoned trucks or an interesting farm, and there's just nothing in it.
Also, I like the idea of skills, but sometimes a quest boils down to just having the right skill and then clicking the corresponding dialogue choice. It's kind of anticlimactic.
I like the Minutemen winning because it's fun imagining the good guys winning. But the Brotherhood winning better aligns with Fallout's vibes, and I think it makes the story more interesting.
I loved how the vaults looked identical to the games. And I loved the absurd, over the top humor. It definitely understood the Fallout vibe.
@AngryMonkeTartar
For points 1-3, you are correct. Shady Sands didn't get nuked until after New Vegas, but it did fall in 2277, whatever 'fall' means. The NCR probably does exist in some form, but everyone in the show acts like Moldaver's bunch is the last remnant. That's not a great sign that one small group (which gets wiped out in the finale) is the only mention of the NCR in the area around what used to be the NCR's capital. And yes, the ghoul serum is still a mystery. But the show seems to go out of its way trying to make the viewer think that the Ghoul needs it to avoid going feral.
Technically, the show does not contradict lore. But the writers sure seem to enjoy toeing the line with established lore and making things seem like they contradict lore. It's frustrating when there are so many things we see or hear in the show, and the only way to make them work with established lore is to shrug and say "we don't have the information".
I'm not saying the show ruined previously established lore, but it sure didn't go out of its way to fit in neatly with the canon lore we already have.
I know Todd Howard said that they have the timeline in order, and there are no retcons needed, but I still don't like the fall of Shady Sands happening in 2277. I don't know why they couldn't have pushed it back a few years to after New Vegas so there's no controversy.
I'm also not a huge fan of what seems like the collapse of the NCR. I know we don't completely know what happened, but Bethesda just seems stuck on keeping Fallout a post-apocalyptic world instead of a post-post-apocalyptic. It's been 200 years, but every time someone seems to make something out of the wasteland, it just gets torn down again. I want to see the wasteland grow. Instead, it just feels repetitive and meaningless.
Also, not a fan of the mysterious serum the ghouls have to take. It seems to imply if they don't take them, they'll be feral in less than a month (the Ghoul takes one every day). Maybe the second season will give more clarity, but as written in the first season, it seems like the writers are going against eatablished ghoul lore.
Honestly, most of my issues are lore related. Non-lore related things I don't like: I think Marcus is a bit too dumb sometimes. Him being clueless about sex was bit unbelievable. I don't have much else to complain about. Besides the lore stuff, the show was pretty dang fun.
I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was fun seeing the world of Fallout in a tv show. The writers clearly cared about the source material, and Amazon definitely didn't scrimp on the budget.
I get that Todd and the writers have the timeline worked out on their side, and maybe season 2 will reveal more. But I don't know why they couldn't have just said Shady Sands blew up in '82. It would have been so easy to avoid this controversy.
You could do a lot with the CDC being in Atlanta