Artist reimagines Diamond City from Fallout 4 in realistic scale with developed surrounding streets
Artist Cormac Genshirt created concept art of Diamond City from Fallout 4 in realistic scale, showing how the Commonwealth's largest settlement would look with proper post-apocalyptic survival logic. The Photoshop illustration depicts Fenway Park stadium not just as a fortified base, but as a full settlement with developed surrounding blocks, agricultural plots, and defensive structures.
Diamond City follows the trajectory of real-world examples where urban communities contract during periods of system collapse into structures offering security, and stadiums are perfect for that – like the amphitheater in Arles, France during the fall of the Roman Empire.
Historical parallels do exist. The Amphitheatre of Nîmes in France gradually transformed into a series of houses and workshops after Rome's fall, preserving a defensive wall along the arena's perimeter. The Theatre of Balbus in Rome evolved by the 14th century into a defensive structure with residential and production spaces. A more recent example is Houston's Astrodome, which sheltered evacuees from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Had that crisis been part of an apocalyptic event, the stadium would have evolved from temporary refuge to permanent settlement.
Genshirt expanded Diamond City beyond the stadium, showing development of surrounding streets – exactly what's critically missing from the game version. Interestingly, Fallout 4 has mods that allow similar city scale expansion. In the original game, this proved impossible due to optimization constraints.
Criticism of the in-game Diamond City focuses not just on scale, but on survival logic. Some Fallout fans ask a key question – what do these people eat? Agriculture in the game's city is minimal. The settlement is positioned as Massachusetts' premier city, but where are the fields? There should be rows of grain or rice. If the population is paranoid, every house should have vegetable patches, since residents don't want to leave the city's safety to gather resources.
This reflects a fundamental flaw in Bethesda's Fallout design – wanting wasteland aesthetics where bombs dropped two years ago, while the setting takes place 200 years post-apocalypse. Most survivors live by scavenging, yet supermarkets remain full when the player arrives. Large-scale agriculture is absent. Regular containers in raider-inhabited areas contain pre-war items. The old world is preserved as a theme park for player exploration.
This artwork perfectly demonstrates what Diamond City could be with realistic survival logic, historical precedents, and scale appropriate to the region's largest city status.
