Man, it would be such a massive upgrade for the western US if the borders had been carefully negotiated by... literally anyone, for any reason. They're actually just mostly straight lines drawn at random by people who had never been within a thousand miles of them, and they make absolutely no sense at all.
Also, for the record, I hate the idea that cities and the rural areas surrounding them should be separate and have no shared finances and no say in how each other are run. That's a stupid plan that would immediately result in rural areas having their infrastructure fail, and the cities then all starving. It is a very, very stupid idea, and the very fact that there is a big urban/rural cultural divide is one of the things killing America.
I'm starting to get worried that Obsidian will be the first of Microsoft's recent acquisitions to get EAed. They make neat little $40 AA games that I really like, but Microsoft seems just convinced that if they can use a massive budget to fix the bugs and give them the shiniest new graphics then they'll somehow turn an Obsidian game into the next Skyrim, and that just doesn't even begin to make a lick of sense. They do not and have not ever made that kind of game. The closest they ever came was Fallout: New Vegas, and that's because they were literally working with Bethesda's game engine, and the things people love most about that game are the things that make it the most different from a Bethesda game.
Now not only were they trying to sell this game for $70, but the next one's going to be $80. Obsidian is screwed, and that makes me sad.