New Vegas is explicitly set on the edge of the NCR's territory, it's still the "wild west" (or east, from the NCR's perspective), the place civilisation hasn't reached yet. With the implication that back home things are a lot less of a wasteland and people are actually getting on quite nicely, and New Vegas is mostly only a wasteland because, well, it's the Mojave Desert, go and look at it now...
Fallout 2 is supposed to show how things have progressed since 1. There's a lot more, bigger, and cleaner towns and cities, bottle caps aren't currency any more because the NCR is established enough to issue its own currency and powerful enough to make it stick, etc.
They are stories in a world which is actively rebuilding. They did put an end to the nuclear wasteland. Bethesda just scrapped all that so that they could have endless dungeons that nobody else had ever been in (except the requisite 15 raiders to every other human, who do they raid?) despite them being five minutes walk away.
That's also why the Brotherhood of Steel are irrelevant and on the verge of collapse in Fallout 2 and New Vegas because, well, they were obsessed with the past and the future got built without them. The world moved on.
Depends which original studio. Fallout 1 and 2 were made by considerably different teams. The original original game director finally managed to get the original original IP back and made Wasteland 2 and 3. (Fallout was basically "Wasteland but EA own the rights and won't let go".I guess thats why the original studio decided to make Outer Worlds: its basically what would happen if Mr. House was successful in his efforts to restore Earth, because he is such a capitalist that any society he would successfully make would probably follow his model and encounter the same problems as the one in Outer Worlds.
Fallout is bound up with Americana. Also, it's not supposed to be the 1950s, it's supposed to be what 1950s America thought the 2150s would look like. If it was recognisable as Fallout but not in America, it would have failed at not being America because other countries had other visions of what the future would be like based on what their present and recent past had been like.Originally Posted by Rodin