Microsoft and Bethesda are creatively incompetent. They don't really want to say anything. They just want a funny theme park full of kitschy shit so they can pander to fans.

They're fucking soulless morons.

The first fallout was interesting because it was pretty fresh. The 2nd was a bigger exploration, with some interesting questions about remnants. I don't really remember 3 but it had some weird narrative problems, I think.

New Vegas actually asked a new interesting question: who rebuilds after?

And then 4 just shits the bed because Bethesda has no soul. It's also mechanically a mess. Power armor in the intro, except it sucks? Fuck everyone who thought that was a good idea.

the Wasteland hadn’t changed at all despite it now being centuries since the bombs fell

That's one of the things that annoys me about Fallout: it's just so unrealistically barren. I mean, we have real-life examples in places like Hiroshima and Chernobyl, and the reality is that pretty damn quickly after the bombs, they'll be just as green again as normal. Don't get me wrong, obviously there should still be mutated creatures and ruins and stuff, but it should all be super-overgrown, too.

Not to mention, centuries is plenty of time for civilization to at least clean up a lot of the debris and such, and even make decent progress recovering. Realistically, the state of the world in Fallout is more appropriate for a setting a decade or less after the war.

As far as depictions of life after nuclear war goes, I wish we could have a game more like Alas, Babylon.

To be fair though, it's only been within the past two hundred years that we've seen progress like this. Before that, there really were generations between significant advances.

Well, maybe not now, considering how corporate it's become. But in the period of 2010 and 2015, you could make a decent sequel. The 23rd century era of Fallout is pretty much creatively bankrupt, but Fallout in the 25th century is workable. What Fallout is missing is the rebuilding of society. The NCR side of things in NV comes close, but it's clear they still have a ways to go to achieve pre-War levels of society. Where's the NCR variant of Nuka Cola, for instance? Or industry for making all those bullets the NCR uses (Pitt doesn't count)? Or the logistics for large scale transport, like trains?