Part 12
Update 11It's ghouls all the way down as we make our way into Cambridge to answer the distress call. There's a lot of terrain to use to our advantage and some ammo, as well as mines all over the place. I'll just go ahead and say that this week we only got two quests done, but they're pretty long ones so it'll all work out. The new audio setup brings back a tiny bit of the echo from earlier, but it's much reduced and now we can hear. You might be able to pick up the difference as far as situational awareness goes watching this video.
Tax Refund posted:
If that's the case, that actually brings up a decent possible explanation for ghouls. Human + extreme radiation = death (normally), BUT human + certain drugs + extreme radiation = ghoul. And because most people on those drugs are taking them addictively, most ghouls go feral due to drug withdrawal interactions of some kind (maybe the drug doesn't work on ghoul biology, or maybe the dealers who survived the bombs just don't like selling to ghouls). But some people were taking drugs not because they were addicted, but because it was prescription medication -- and those people don't go through a nasty withdrawal and thus don't turn feral. Hence why there are non-feral ghouls in Fallout 3 -- and while we haven't seen any in Fallout 4 yet, when Preston Garvey talked about ghouls, he said that some of them were "just... people", which implies that we'll meet some non-feral ghouls at some future point.
Won't be too long before we meat some non-feral ghouls and this is an interesting idea, but there are a few cases that seem to suggest it might not be 100% true. Then again, it's possible that 21st century America in the Fallout continuum had much more widespread use of drugs as part of the general social issues in that time period. I'll make a note of this for when we do find one of the more difficult cases for this to apply to.
White Coke posted:
In Fallout 3 there was a ghoul scientist who you helped to make Ultra Jet, a much more powerful form of the drug because the normal stuff isn't powerful enough to work on ghouls so this is as good a theory as any for why people become ghouls beyond random chance.
Gotta love that the game's lore is open enough to allow this kind of theorizing.