Fallout 3 vs. Fallout New Vegas

[escobert]

I never played fallout to be friends with either faction or really to give two trouts about the story. Scavenging is why I played fallout (and now DayZ)

[sharkythesharkdogg]

A nuclear meltdown isn't the same as a nuclear bomb. Also, wildlife isn't doing too terribly in chernobyl today. Animals live long enough to reproduce, and their offspring do too.

Yeah, there's some people doing interesting research about that situation. It's interesting to me at least.

[Mirage]

That video is actually one of the things I based my earlier statement on.

That the area is not fit for human habitation doesn't mean that the area is completely destroyed and just just a huge area of dead organic matter.

We set the bar pretty high for individuals of our own species. We don't like birth defect rates that twice as high as in other areas, even if there's still enough healthy offspring to keep the population stable. Also, a significant portion of baby animals are going to die because their siblings don't share the food evenly anyway. If there are some serious birth defects in one of them, they'll probably be one of those that didn't get enough food. We don't like twice as much cancer in the adult population, because we live much longer than most other animals. A lot of animals are going to die before they get the chance to develop radiation-caused cancers because injuries are a lot more serious to them, and some are just plain going to be eaten by bigger animals before they develop cancers as well.

Humans also wait longer before they breed. If you wait 20 years before having children, the radiation is going to have a lot more time to smurf your genetic material up than if you have children after 3-4 years or even earlier, like many animals do.