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[Neonivek]

Ok so I was thinking of tons of zombie games and noticed that no matter what they almost all have artificial scarcity. It seems like this is the go to choice for games.

If someone has a pantry it might have 6 packs of potato chips and a cola. If you raid their dresser it might have a single shirt... You won't find knives, forks, or other things.

Yet here are some games I can think of that avoid it completely
1) The Long Dark: The game takes place pretty much in an abandoned Lodging area/fishery/stuff and when you go to a genuine recently lived in location it will often have lots of resources.
2) Dead Rising: A mall to yourself and basically unlimited resources. Only story events can rob you.
3) State of Decay: Houses tend to have entire "supplies" and weapons are plentiful. The only "iffy" thing is ammo.

Yet these three cannot be the only exceptions. There MUST be other games out there that say "NO! what self-respecting house that isn't on hard times has less then a few jars of peanut butter?"

[Graknorke]

A lot of houses in Cata:DDA are chock full of stuff. Fridges full of food, cupboards full of cooking implements, bookshelves full of shit magazines, wardrobes full of clothes etc. It's just not too easy because the food goes off and the other common stuff has limited use.

[Girlinhat]

Not what I would call "survival" but Fallout does a bit better.  There's 'bits' everywhere, and they're actually usable.

[Yodamaster]

Project Zomboid houses aren't always bursting with valuable loot, but generally without fail there will be stuff in the cabinets and refrigerators.

[Tnx]

+1 for project zomboid.  Reddit server right now running some mods means most houses have a ton of random stuff, some more useful then others.  You'll find anything from spoons and forks to the survivalist house with boxes of MREs and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

[RickRollYou2]

Cata DDA is basically the slightly more in-depth (content wise, but it's also more "diverse"--for better or for worse) version of Project Zomboid, and Project Zomboid is the graphically enhanced version of Cata DDA, with nifty things like emotions.

[Majestic7]

Dead State is pretty good in this regard.

I think Fallout 3/4 actually fails badly, because according to the background it should be 200 years after the bombs. The world is more like 50 years after; most of the places with things should have been looted clear ages ago. You should rather find new makeshift stuff than pre-war things in pristine condition, untouched since the bombs fell.

But that is Betheseda for you. They make great place to explore, but hire baboons to do their writing.

[Neonivek]

Project Zomboid houses aren't always bursting with valuable loot, but generally without fail there will be stuff in the cabinets and refrigerators.

Always having stuff doesn't really qualify it.

A drawer in a random house won't have a full set of cutlery specifically because "If you actually had a endless supply of knives it would be too easy"

[Gabeux]

I think Fallout 3/4 actually fails badly, because according to the background it should be 200 years after the bombs. The world is more like 50 years after; most of the places with things should have been looted clear ages ago. You should rather find new makeshift stuff than pre-war things in pristine condition, untouched since the bombs fell.

But that is Betheseda for you. They make great place to explore, but hire baboons to do their writing.

I love Fallout, so I don't like bashing it. But this is really immersion breaking. I didn't feel it as hard in Fallout 3 for some reason (maybe because I was younger, or because the graphics used to be uglier, or simply because FO3 has a more 'wasted' environment).
I mean..I like those restoration TV shows from History channel as much as the next guy. The most preserved stuff I've seen that's 100 years old still looks like they're on the edge of their durability. So I doubt 200 years after a nuclear war, the world would be so 'neat'.
(Also, praise for you americans for that skill. Holy shit you're ninjas in preserving things).

I was wondering these days if limited resources in a game would be fun or terrible. So you take away artificial scarcity, make the resources not respawn, and..that's a survival game for you, I guess?
I don't follow survival games, though, so I bet there's something out there like this already.

[Graknorke]

Project Zomboid houses aren't always bursting with valuable loot, but generally without fail there will be stuff in the cabinets and refrigerators.

Always having stuff doesn't really qualify it.

A drawer in a random house won't have a full set of cutlery specifically because "If you actually had a endless supply of knives it would be too easy"

I'm pretty sure it's usually because there's no cutlery mechanics. +1 morale for eating with a knife and fork?

[EuchreJack]

I think Fallout 3/4 actually fails badly, because according to the background it should be 200 years after the bombs. The world is more like 50 years after; most of the places with things should have been looted clear ages ago. You should rather find new makeshift stuff than pre-war things in pristine condition, untouched since the bombs fell.

But that is Betheseda for you. They make great place to explore, but hire baboons to do their writing.

I love Fallout, so I don't like bashing it. But this is really immersion breaking. I didn't feel it as hard in Fallout 3 for some reason (maybe because I was younger, or because the graphics used to be uglier, or simply because FO3 has a more 'wasted' environment).
I mean..I like those restoration TV shows from History channel as much as the next guy. The most preserved stuff I've seen that's 100 years old still looks like they're on the edge of their durability.
(Also, praise for you americans for that skill. Holy shit you're ninjas in preserving things).

I was wondering these days if limited resources in a game would be fun or terrible. So you take away artificial scarcity, make the resources not respawn, and..that's a survival game for you, I guess?
I don't follow survival games, though, so I bet there's something out there like this already.

Well, one can argue in Fallout games that areas should be on a sliding scale of Background Radiation and Loot, with areas that have only recently become "safe" in radioactivity having the most loot.
Immersion still breaks because:
1) Why can't scavengers just wear anti-radiation suits and pump up on Rad-X?  Even from the first game, why is the Survivor the first one to figure out that they can loot The Glow just by doing this?
2) Fallout's complete treatment of radiation is...unscientific.  Uranium, the primary component in modern nuclear weapons, has a half-life in millions of years.

...
I like Cataclysm: DDA.   It is like the Zombie version of UnReal World, another game with more realistic survival and scarcity mechanics.

[Flying Dice]

The STALKER games, in a sense. Not in the "houses full of loot" way, but that's because buildings generally are burned-out shells. Rather, just about every human you kill will have a decent amount of ammo, food, gear, &c., there are stashes fucking everywhere, and artifacts aren't exactly scarce (especially in the early zones--they're literally just lying around everywhere, and you can make an easy 50-60k rubles just by scooping up trash artifacts).

[ZebioLizard2]

I think Fallout 3/4 actually fails badly, because according to the background it should be 200 years after the bombs. The world is more like 50 years after; most of the places with things should have been looted clear ages ago. You should rather find new makeshift stuff than pre-war things in pristine condition, untouched since the bombs fell.

But that is Betheseda for you. They make great place to explore, but hire baboons to do their writing.

I love Fallout, so I don't like bashing it. But this is really immersion breaking. I didn't feel it as hard in Fallout 3 for some reason (maybe because I was younger, or because the graphics used to be uglier, or simply because FO3 has a more 'wasted' environment).
I mean..I like those restoration TV shows from History channel as much as the next guy. The most preserved stuff I've seen that's 100 years old still looks like they're on the edge of their durability.
(Also, praise for you americans for that skill. Holy shit you're ninjas in preserving things).

I was wondering these days if limited resources in a game would be fun or terrible. So you take away artificial scarcity, make the resources not respawn, and..that's a survival game for you, I guess?
I don't follow survival games, though, so I bet there's something out there like this already.

Well, one can argue in Fallout games that areas should be on a sliding scale of Background Radiation and Loot, with areas that have only recently become "safe" in radioactivity having the most loot.
Immersion still breaks because:
1) Why can't scavengers just wear anti-radiation suits and pump up on Rad-X?  Even from the first game, why is the Survivor the first one to figure out that they can loot The Glow just by doing this?
2) Fallout's complete treatment of radiation is...unscientific.  Uranium, the primary component in modern nuclear weapons, has a half-life in millions of years.

...
I like Cataclysm: DDA.   It is like the Zombie version of UnReal World, another game with more realistic survival and scarcity mechanics.

Fallout's radiation is a mix of 50's SCIENCE! thought of it and a bioweapon FEV

[Dorsidwarf]

2) Fallout's complete treatment of radiation is...unscientific.  Uranium, the primary component in modern nuclear weapons, has a half-life in millions of years

You're selling uranium short, it's 700,000,000 years. In any case, Pu-239 is the usual fissile material, with a half-life of "only" 23,000 or so years.

But that's not what causes radioactive contamination levels to drop in an area.

There's several stages.

1) Settling of fallout.
Fallout, or airborne radioactive elements, typically dirt and debris irradiated and thrown into the atmosphere, begins to settle rapidly. Wind will carry it a long way, but in a few years (or months, if the blasts are airblasts rather than near-ground detonations) almost all of the material will be on the ground.

2)Washing-out
Once the radioactive material is on the ground, it's not going to be anywhere near as dangerous.

Alpha radiation, which is the most irradiating, can be blocked by a sheet of thick paper. It's basically harmless, unless it gets inside you (see: airborne fissile materials), because it can't penetrate your skin. This is why workers at nuclear powerplant disasters wear masks.

Gamma radiation is far harder to stop. It'll go through six feet of lead easily, but crucially, it's very unwilling to irradiate in the sense of "make radioactive", because it's literally gamma-ray electromagnetic waves. As a result, only persistent emitters are dangerous - irradiated food is irradiated with this, and that's not radioactive, after all.

Beta radiation is the serious one in the long-term. This can be stopped by thin sheets of most metals, but can irradiate the body through clothes, skin, etcetera.

3) Fadeout
Luckily, as wind and rain occur, particles on the ground will be buried, washed into the soil, and into waterways (Not so lucky for water-based life!). It will remain dangerous for decades at a minimum - chernobyl was a tiny release, and it's still not safe to live long-term in pripyat. But then again, it's been less than fifty years. By the 200-year mark, the chernobyl area will probbably be safe, unless you feel like rubbing your face on the inside of that big-ass containment dome they're building on it to prevent new release of fissiles if the reactor has another hissy fit.

And even at chernobyl today, you can visit the power plant and look at the construction work from the nearby road, then leave, with no effect on health.

TL:DR
Honestly fallout over does it with the amount of radiation left. I mean, sure the DC area is a no-go, because that'll have been hammered so many times I doubt there's more than a crater left. But any city where there are buildings standing, is probbably habitable.
 At least, if you like cancer. Not that that's a serious worry for the average Fallout citizen with the all mutants, deathclaws, super-mutants, bandits, raiders, nazis, Super Nazis, and aliens after them.

[Graknorke]

I dare you to hold a chunk of uranium next to your junk.

K. You have to acquire it though.