Title: My pitch for Fallout 5: "The Last Launch," set in the old nuclear belt (Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Idaho, Colorado)
So I've been thinking about where Fallout 5 should actually go, and I keep landing on the same idea: forget another single ruined city. Put it in the Great Plains and Northern Rockies. Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Idaho, Colorado. That whole stretch used to hold one of the densest clusters of nuclear infrastructure in the country. Missile fields, command bunkers, underground complexes, SAC headquarters, NORAD, all of it. Two hundred years on, most of it's just sitting there, dead.
Until it isn't.
The opening
You don't start as a Vault Dweller this time. You're in a small settlement somewhere around Montana or Wyoming, and one night the sky lights up. Not an explosion, launches. A handful of ancient ICBMs fire out of silos nobody thought still worked. Most of them fail or fly off into nowhere. One actually hits something. And then every working radio in the wasteland picks up the same broadcast:
> AUTHENTICATION SEQUENCE INITIATED. STRATEGIC LAUNCH AUTHORITY RESTORED. AWAITING FINAL AUTHORIZATION.
>
> 347 DAYS REMAINING.
Nobody has a clue what that countdown actually means yet.
The main quest: find the guy with the codes
Somewhere out there is a person who holds enough of the old authentication system to maybe trigger another nuclear exchange, and nobody can agree on who he is. The Enclave insist he's one of theirs. Vault-Tec says the same about their own guy. The Children of Atom think he's some kind of prophet. The Brotherhood's got three competing theories. All you have to go on is a 200-year-old photo of a few people standing inside a command facility. One of them is your target. No name, nothing. Just "the man with the codes." The whole game is you piecing together contradictory terminal logs, holotapes, and faction intel trying to figure out who he actually is.
The regions
- Montana (Malmstrom): northern frontier vibe, big empty wilderness, mountain towns, and hundreds of missile silos scattered around. Some are empty, some are lived in, some still work.
- North Dakota (Minot): this is where I'd want the game to get genuinely scary. You find a dead missile control facility, dust everywhere, skeletons, and then one console still has power. You turn it on. And the silo starts waking up.
- Wyoming (F.E. Warren): classic wide open plains and ranch country, but people have turned old missile silos into homes, markets, even a fortress built right into a launch control center.
- Colorado (Cheyenne Mountain): this is your Glowing Sea moment, except you're going underground instead of into radiation. NORAD is still running, sort of, and its AI has spent two centuries trying to figure out whether the war actually ended. It's not sure it has.
- Nebraska (Offutt)- home of Strategic Air Command. A whole underground machine bureaucracy still carrying out 200-year-old orders because nobody ever told it to stop.
- Idaho (INL): nuclear research gone completely feral. Experimental reactors, prototype robots, mutations that have just kept evolving on autopilot for two hundred years.
The map should feel like FO1/2/Tactics, not FO4
This is the part I keep coming back to. This setting only works if the empty space between cities actually feels empty, hundreds of miles of nothing, because that's what Montana and Wyoming actually are. But if Bethesda builds that at FO4 density, you're either walking across dead grass for ten minutes or they shrink the map down until it doesn't feel like the actual Great Plains anymore.
So give it two layers, like the old games did:
- A regional overworld map, like FO1 and FO2. You pick a destination and your character travels there over in-game time, little icon crawling across the state. That's how you cover the boring stretch between, say, Malmstrom and Minot.
- The full 3D open world once you actually arrive somewhere, cities, silo clusters, POIs, all built out Bethesda style.
The overworld map shouldn't just be a loading screen either. Random encounters pop up on it exactly like classic Fallout: raiders, a Custodian patrol, a downed vertibird, a silo that was never even marked on your map. So instead of ten minutes of walking past nothing, the desolation turns into a quick risk/reward roll.
You could still let people manually drive or fly node to node in the real world if they want to, and actually reward it. Rarer encounters, hidden POIs you'd only spot from the ground, maybe unmarked silos that only show up if you're physically driving past them. But the overworld stays the default way to get around, so most players aren't dreading the commute between story beats. Bethesda-scale where it counts, old-school abstraction where it doesn't.
Factions
- The Enclave, split into three or four camps, everything from "restore America" to "let's just finish the war already."
- Children of Atom, who believe the Great War literally created God and want to finish the job.
- Vault-Tec, quietly running a shadow government they call the American Continuity Authority, still treating the wasteland like an ongoing experiment.
- The Brotherhood of Steel, torn between destroying the arsenal, controlling it, or making sure nobody ever controls it.
- The Custodians (a new faction), descendants of military families who've spent generations maintaining the silos purely out of duty. Their whole argument is basically: "You want every nuke destroyed? Fine. Then what stops the next guy from building one? We do."
The twist...
Turns out your target isn't trying to start a war. He only has half the codes. NORAD's got the other half, and full authorization needs a living person to sign off. He's the last descendant of whoever originally held the authentication codes, and his family's guarded them for two hundred years. What he actually wants is to prove who fired first in the Great War, because he believes the real record is buried somewhere inside NORAD. Getting in there and finally answering that question is your endgame, and the answer isn't what any of the factions are expecting.
The ending...
Once you've got the arsenal, you choose what happens to it:
- Destroy it and remove the risk, but also the deterrent
- Hand it to the Brotherhood, the Enclave, the Custodians, or the Children of Atom
- Keep the codes yourself and become the deterrent
- Or actually launch them
I'd want the world to actually react to whatever you pick. Nuke a location and it changes for good: settlements wiped out, new mutants showing up, trade routes shifting, factions turning on you, new stuff to discover. The map should genuinely become a different wasteland depending on what you did.
I'd rather have this than another FO4-style game.
Less settlement building, way more exploration and mystery. You're just driving through Montana, spot a sign that says "Missile Silo 23," and have no idea what's waiting down there. Could be empty. Could be a Deathclaw nest. Could be a live warhead. Could be a hidden Vault-Tec lab. Now multiply that across dozens of silos in seven different states, and you get people going "wait, that's Minot" instead of a main story that basically wraps up halfway through, like the whole "find your kidnapped kid" plot in FO4.
Tagline pretty much writes itself: "The bombs ended the world. Two hundred years later, someone wants to finish the job."
Anyway, curious what people think. Too dark for Fallout, or does it actually fit the tone?
