The problem is what players expect. (Images attached)
In Fallout 1, LA, at least what people think of LA, was
gone. San Fran was the same in 2. There was no Hollywood to visit, to have a whacky questline about, there was no sterotypical San Fran beyond the Asian community and that was explained well, and the golden gate bridge makes an appearance only with the Hubologists. Tactics, as well, didn't have us fighting under the Gateway Arch. We expected those things to be gone, though maybe back in the early days a few might had complained about it.
In Fallout 3, however, DC is
there. It looks like it was bombed with chemical weapons, not nukes. (And no, Neutron Bombs don't leave pretty holes, they just make smaller holes, the damage should be greater if it was just Neutron Bombs). The Washington Monument is there. The Capitol is there. The Mall. The Smithsonian. The *Pentagon*, the military command center of the USA, was STILL there. The White House was gone, but only as a small crater that apparently was the epicenter of a nuke...and right across from it were apartment buildings where the BoS were. In Fallout NV, Vegas is there, and it's handwaved that it was because House installed anti-missile lasers on his tower (gee, wouldn't that had been useful for THE REST OF THE UNITED STATES), and in Fallout 4, Boston is somehow there, and there's one nuke impact far off to the southwest, the glowing sea. Bunker Hill is there. Diamond Park. The MIT. Etc.
Any game made in NYC, made either by Obsidian OR Bethesda, *will* have the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, Ellis Island, the Empire State Building, Yankee Stadium, Central Park, Broadway, etc,
as a given. At most, there might be a big hole in some 'unimportant' area like Brooklyn or Noho, but not to close to Chinatown or the Manhattan Bridge!
The vast majority of the fanbase doesn't want to play in the ruins of a nuclear blast, they want to play a post-apoc America game with a nuclear blast site far away as a tough arena to challenge themselves, as to not damage what they know as familiar. Realistically, Manhattan will be nothing but rubble, with most of the buildings broken away, and since we're dealing with thousands of nukes on each side, we could see even impacts along the main highway out of the Bronx, Floyd Bennet Field, LaGuardia, JFK, Newark Airport, and DEFINITELY Port Elizabeth, with one general nuke in the middle of each borough to wipe out the civilian populace. This is what nukes *do*. They're not bunker busters, they're not human-be-gone, they're the outburst of controlled nuclear fission or fusion to destroy cities. But the masses don't want that. Thus my reservations about NYC, even though I would love it, and hell, I don't want to play with a bare manhattan in the background either. But to pull it off would take incredible skill, because we will ask, 'Why wasn't New York nuked? Why isn't it a flat expanse of fused stone?' Lasers, again? A Miscalucation? A lot of Anti-Missile Missiles? A daring sacrifice by the mayor?
NYC, logically, will be something like this:
But we'll probably get this, but with more landmarks intact:
