November 22, 2017 6:24 AM EST
That's an interesting topic, and something I haven't really put much thought into.
I suppose the reason I like fantasy is because it's so vastly different to our own world, and since most aspects of it are made up you don't really need to bother on whether or not it "makes sense" from a realistic stand point. And for me, it's kind of "the more alien the world, the better". GoT I like, but I still find Middle-Earth and Tamriel to be more enjoyable. More new things to see and learn about, I suppose would be a good way of explaining it. Just in TES itself, I find Morrowind's world (with mushroom trees and living Gods) to be a lot more entertaining than Skyrim's (with the more familiar Norse setting and (for fantasy) dragons), which in turn I prefer over Oblivion, which Magic and Elves aside, is a lot more similar to a real-world Medieval setting.
Which is one of the reason's I've never been able to get into Fallout. All or at least most of the places and items can be found in the real world, and I've never found it's Lore to incredibly realistic, since it's actually mean't to be in our world; it's been 200+ years, but the closest mankind's come to rebuilding is a few make-shift towns of a couple dozen people, which somehow have access to 200+ year old food that's still edible.
Though I admit I probably put too much thought into how things like that's possible, it just makes things a lot more believabe when it's not actually in our world to begin with. Had Fallout have been based on another planet or have a completely different timeline to our world, I'd probably find it a lot more believable. If TES had a 250 year old box of mac and cheese, I could attribute that to some magic that's been keeping it edible, or making it deteriorate slower or something. But since Fallout doesn't have magic to begin with, I'm forced to believe that my character's eating food from two centuries ago.
But again, I probably put too much thought into how food and water can survive hundreds of years, instead of just the playing the game :p