Fallout 4 Story Recap: 12 Major Plot Points You Need To Know

7. 2077: The Great War Begins... And Ends

Brutal though war may be, it'd be better to get it over and done with in a couple of hours rather than drag it on for a tortuous number of years, right? Answers in a postcard. It's not likely that was the explicit thinking behind the apocalyptic Great War of 2077, but the result was the quickest and most destructive war in human history. The Enclave's President, Dick Richardson, tells the player in Fallout 2 that it was the Chinese who fired the first bombs, but this is never confirmed. A relatively minuscule number of US citizens made it into the Vaults on time, but the vast majority of the country's - and world's - population perished. The fallout from the bombs was so powerful that it turned the world into an unliveable desert for years, and the impact was so great that the planet's topography was forever altered, with entire mountain ranges emerging in the aftermath of the blasts. Some who hid out in makeshift bunkers managed to survive, but the radiation turned them into ghouls, who created their own communities on the surface while the Vaults remained shut for at least the next 20 years. The Great War destroyed the United States as a nation, leaving a power vacuum that the Enclave took upon itself to try and fill, attempting to reunite the country - albeit without any impure elements like vault-dwellers, ghouls, and pretty much anyone who didn't wear a suit and wasn't descended from an Ivy Leaguer.