Fallout 4's Use of Religion

Hide your children and delete this blog from your bookmarks, because I’m about to commit that grave sin once more: I’m recycling a comment I made on Youtube into a rant.  Because I’m fucking evil, that’s why.

A few months ago, a small quest mod for Fallout 4 showed up on the Nexus, and as I still like to keep up with promising user adventures for the game, I checked it out.  It was a fairly decent little adventure, centered around religion (specifically Christianity), and its creator clearly put some time, effort, and most of all, sincerity into the work.  I didn’t personally get a lot out of it, but I can appreciate the work for what it is and intends.  The thing that interested me most, however, wasn’t within the mod itself, but rather the stated intent of the creator--he essentially was surprised at the lack of religious themes and content in Fallout 4, compared to previous games, and felt that there should have been more, making the mod to fill that gap a bit.

This interests me, because I feel that it’s quite the opposite.

Now, to clarify, the gentleman isn’t wrong on the point that religion has been a significant theme in the Fallout series prior to Fallout 4.  It certainly has.  The original Fallout 1 and 2 made mention occasionally of prewar Christian beliefs having slight holdouts here and there, albeit now passed along more through family than outright cultural communities.  More significantly, The Master’s army is as much a cult worshiping him and the ideals of super mutation as it is an actual military force in Fallout 1.  Fallout 2 ups the religious theme quite a bit by making the Hubologists (basically the Scientologists) a significant entity, incorporating tribal spiritual and paranormal beliefs frequently into characters and groups (such as Sulk* and Arroyo), and establishing a (largely ignored, admittedly) pseudo-Christian priest as a prominent figure in the major city of New Reno.  Fallout 3’s entire plot centers around a verse from the Bible, and introduces a cult of radiation worshippers, while Fallout New Vegas incorporates a decent smattering of tribal beliefs, introduces the Bright Brotherhood (which is yet another cult, but a refreshingly benign one), has a few more references to Christianity here and there, and gives Mormonism a substantial.background presence in its Honest Hearts DLC.  So yeah, while it’s never really a huge focal point of the game (the Master’s cult is a secondary revelation to the discovery of his military ambitions so the religious side isn’t the major mental image the player has of his forces, and Fallout 3’s Bible passage is significant for its poetic concept, not specifically for its religious nature), religion’s a definite part of the series.

And in a sense, he’s not completely wrong in thinking that there should have been more religious content in Fallout 4.  I agree from the perspective that Fallout 4 is about Boston and the surrounding area, and the fact of the matter is that the cultural history of Massachusetts, and by some extension the United States as a whole, is (unfortunately) hugely influenced by having been founded (or invaded, depending on your perspective) by the Puritans.  Given Fallout’s core premise of analysis of American culture and history, there really should have been some thematic spotlight shed on the whole Puritan thing.  Preferably one that emphasized what a bunch of self-important, philosophically self-defeating whiny dickweeds they were, but I’m not picky, I’d take whatever as long as it’s written well.

However, to get back to my main purpose, I strongly disagree that Fallout 4 is lacking in content utilizing religion.  I think, in fact, that it is the installment of the series with the most focus upon and influence of religion!

It’s just not blatant and outright proclaimed, that’s all.  Like, if you’re looking for narrative road signs spelling out who’s believing in what and which holy book’s influencing what faction, then yeah, there’s not much to be found--there’s a preacher in Diamond City who can wear whatever religious hat you want him to, the Children of the Atom are unfortunately mucking about here and there, and you can do a couple minor quests for some Hubologists in the Nuka World add-on, but that’s about it, and it’s all exceptionally tiny and mostly irrelevant.  If what you want is some overt, surface representation of religion, yeah, Fallout 4’s pretty weak.

But just because you don’t see it as obviously, that doesn’t mean it’s not there, and in great quantity.**  Remember how Shin Megami Tensei 3 didn’t so much directly analyze and fixate upon any specific, outright belief system (like most of the rest of the series does), so much as it made its focus the underlying, core approaches that religions are built off of?  Similar situation here with Fallout 4.  If anything, I would argue that the theme of religion plays a greater role in Fallout 4 than it has in any previous entry of the series...in the form of the Institute.

They may not wrap it up in the usual trappings that we think of being religion-related, but the Institute is basically a corrupt religious institution, in all the ways that matter. Its members blindly follow its single leader (even when they’re privately unsure of his vision), for starters.  Next, the leader they’re virtually unquestioningly following is a man who has used carefully selected language and rhetoric to refine the group's behaviors, and viewpoints on other people, very specifically to serve the organization's convenience and restrict the ability for different viewpoints on human nature to grow--this can be primarily seen in the Institute's terminology regarding Synths.  While not solely the property of social faiths and belief systems, there’s no denying that these kinds of manipulatively dogmatic behaviors are most iconic of religious groups (especially, though not exclusively, cults).

Then there’s the fact that the Institute is utterly, adamantly convinced that it is the sole salvation of all humankind, whether the rest of humanity agrees or not. It sees those not within it as unenlightened and in need of guidance because they're simply unequipped for self-determination.  From little grassroots compound-based cults on up to world-spanning titans of faith like Christianity, that one there’s a particular favorite of religions.  Tell me you’ve ever, ever seen any group wholly unaffiliated with a social religion engage in as much self-congratulatory back-patting over being the autonomously-appointed saviors of humanity (again, regardless of how humanity itself feels about the matter) as the Institute does.

Additionally, the Institute operates with fanatical devotion to ideals and goals that are almost completely undefined, described in vague terms of a better, shining tomorrow that only they know how to bring about, while having no concrete description of what that 'better world' end result will look like or how they'll know it when it comes about. And, for that matter, they carry on with this certainty of being the ones who will bring about this completely nebulous utopia also while lacking any concrete plan or set of steps specifically and logically leading to their desired conclusion.  Essentially, the members of the Institute all labor out of faith and faith alone that they're going to save the world.  Again, pretty big, signature behavior and belief of religious organizations, here.

These are not just random quirks of this faction--they are the most signature characteristics of the Institute and the ways in which it is run! And not a single 1 of them represents or even resembles the behavior of an actual scientific organization. These are the actions, mentalities, and methods of a religion, and a very worrying one, at that. Technological progress and fixation on scientific discovery are the Institute's trappings, yes, but these clothes don't cover up the fact that its members' behaviors, goals, beliefs, attitudes, and hierarchy are that of a cult , with Father as its charismatic leader.

And since the Institute functions as the faction upon which the strong majority of the game's lore, personal conflicts, philosophical questions, and narrative events are based, and as both the home and, effectively, genesis of the game's primary antagonist Shaun, I think it's reasonable to say that religion has never been a greater factor in a Fallout game than it is in Fallout 4.














* The game even commits to canonizing some degree of Sulik’s belief in the spirits as a fact of the Fallout universe.  While the Hubologists are as full of crap as the real-life cult they’re based on, and you can kind of disregard certain minor paranormal events and quests as being questionable at best as to whether they’re meant to be taken seriously, Sulik’s spirits are straight-up spitting facts.  When you ask Sulik what the spirits tell him of locations you visit, he occasionally relates insights about the area that he really couldn’t possibly know on his own.  And it’s hard to discount these as something intended not to be given real consideration as canon, because a lot of these bits are fully voiced, major lines of his dialogue--quite a lot of resources to put into something not intended to have any weight.  It’s certainly not the only time the series validates paranormal factors (The Sight of Mama Murphy and that Ug-Qualtoth nonsense, for example, are both validated to differing degrees on multiple occasions), but it’s significant for being the first, and perhaps setting the precedent that allowed those other examples to come about at all.


** As my sister, who graciously wasted way too much of her time listening to me blather on in this rant and is at least 90% of the reason it’s not garbage, as she is for almost every rant, pointed out, this is actually a good bit of Christianity right here--finding the non-overt factors of religion in Fallout 4 is perhaps not dissimilar to the whole thing of seeing God in the subtle and understated happenings of His works, and whatnot.

Fallout 4's Fourville Mod is Pretty Darned Great

Generally, when I make a rant listing the best mods for a game, I follow 3 main guidelines for what does and doesn’t get mentioned: A, it’s a mod that enhances the storytelling, lore, or overall core aesthetic experience of the game, (enhancing the post-apocalyptic exploration and ambient storytelling of Fallout, restoring planned content that didn’t have a chance to get implemented due to deadlines in a game like Knights of the Old Republic 2, correcting a glitch that prevented a quest from starting in a game like Planescape: Torment, etc); B, it’s very good (duh), and C, it’s authentic to the body and soul of the game. This last prerequisite is why I don’t mention many quest-based and campaign mods, because generally, there’s something about them that tends to make them stand out from the game proper. Sometimes it’s a contradiction to the actual canon of the game or series, sometimes there are elements in them that conflict with the setting or aesthetic of the source material, and sometimes the style and/or quality of writing for the mod is noticeably distant from that of the actual game. You can see this when looking at my list of Fallout 3’s best mods--though I give great praise to user content that captures the game’s post apocalyptic aesthetic by adding more elements of exploration, or restores some of the intended radio material and adds appropriate Fallout-based content to it, I don’t recommend a single story-based mod in that rant, in spite of there being dozens and dozens of such fan adventures available for the game. The simple fact is, as a general rule, such mods come across, at most, as fanfiction, rather than as true aspects of the game’s experience.

But there is the occasional exception.*

Fourville, a Fallout 4 mod created by one Seddo4494, is an exception of such quality that I can’t just quietly edit my original Fallout 4 mod rant to include it, as I have for a couple other mods that were released after that rant had been published. No, this one needs the full due of its own rant. Because Fourville is awesome. This mod, created by a single person, is a better, more genuine, and more substantial slice of the Fallout experience than anything the hundreds of employees of Bethesda have labored upon during the last 4 years.** It’s honestly more like a new, real DLC for Fallout 4 than it is just a mod.

First of all, Fourville is written really well. The dialogue is smooth, natural, and at the same level as the “real” game, as is the text of the holotapes, notes, and logs to be found. Which is very unusual, to be frank; user-created adventures can be decent, but there’s almost always a disconnect between the writing of a fan and the writing of the game proper. In most cases, the former is noticeably worse overall--and that’s not a mark of shame, or anything like that. A labor by 1 person for no certain reward beyond a love of the game is a different animal from the product of a team of professionals paid to do their job competently. And even if a mod’s writing is around the same level of quality as Fallout 4 as a whole, it still usually stands out for just aesthetic reasons. We all have our own narrative voice, after all, and the manner in which a mod’s author communicates, from phrases to choice in vocabulary to sentence structure, will typically differ enough from the writers of Fallout 4 that it does feel different.

But the narrative voice in Fourville manages to be so close in both quality and style to that of Fallout 4’s that it felt indistinguishable to me. Even the way dialogue and monologue is put together, such as the tone and pauses in some of the holotapes, feels authentic to the game.

And while still on the subject of the writing, the overall story and characters of Fourville are solid, too. The plot of this mod is simple, but enjoyable. Between its sequence of main and side quests, it flows naturally, and the story and settings are composed cleverly enough that even as you’re immersed in the mod’s surface-level adventures, there are bits and pieces here and there, such as certain dualities in the cast and the state of Mr. Quinn’s room, that subtly maintain a feeling of unease in you, as something is clearly out of place, and keeps you guessing about what may or may not be going on at a deeper level. It’s quite elegantly done, really, and the ultimate twist at the end of the mod is layered, interesting, and creative enough that even if you’ve guessed part of it, there’ll still be aspects of it that will pleasingly interest you and give you retrospective appreciation for the mod’s course.

Beyond the main quest, the rest of the adventure’s components are crafted well, too. While plenty of its quests are pretty basic bread-and-butter bits of “fetch this,” “kill these guys,” “go back and forth between these people” scenarios, there’s also a lot of mini-stories in Fourville that are dynamic and engaging, and work well with the characters and Fallout setting to keep your interest--I found the sidequests involving the Wattz factory and the doctor’s brother fun and even a little suspenseful at times. The mod has a purpose to communicate, and food for thought, and I really like that. As a matter of course, there are also some relatively difficult moral choices to be made in Fourville, too, as any good Fallout venture should have, and while I do tend to care perhaps a little too much about my actions in video games, I enjoy the fact that a couple of the choices I had to make in Fourville are ones that my conscience is still grappling a little with. In fact, I actually restarted the mod and played it a second time just because earlier into it, I backed a character who I came to believe is mistaken. If I care enough about the potential consequences of a decision that I go back and redo the whole adventure as a result, that’s a point in favor of that mod’s writing quality.

The characters are also pretty decent. Most are stock, meat-and-potatoes personalities that get the job done and nothing more, I suppose, but that’s true of a Fallout game as a whole, so it’s hard to see that as a flaw, and there are some individuals whose personalities, character history, and/or depth stand out for their high quality, such as old Mr. McNally, Roscoe, and Betty. Additionally, some of the after-the-fact characters whose stories are told through holotapes are really great--the story of the Armstrong family is quite compelling, the FEV scientist is a skillfully-created detestable asshole, and to be frank, I think the series of records left by a student and his teacher is among the best holotape stories that the entire Fallout series has to offer! And I should point out that some of my favorite moments of Fallout, period, have been journals left behind by characters in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and 4.

So in terms of writing quality, Fourville is top-notch from front to back. But I think it’s also important to recognize that it’s exactly as well-constructed on the material level, too. Fourville adds a decent handful of locations to the game, all involved in its quests, and they’re constructed very well--more than functional, they’re interesting to navigate, providing new playgrounds within the Fallout setting to explore and appreciate. Plenty of locations are straightforward and basic, but settings like the vertically-dominated apartment building, the dynamic flooded Wattz factory, and the cave of Mr. Abominable have more singular personality to better draw you into your ventures through them. The locations of Fourville are competently coded and organized, with few mesh conflicts, and with clutter items and containers arranged in quantity and placement that feels rewarding to careful exploration, but true to the standard that Fallout normally sets.

Another technical detail where Fourville shines: the voice acting. I have to emphatically applaud the actors who voiced Fourville’s large cast. It’s rare for a quest mod to actually have voice work for its characters, and on the occasions that you do find a fan adventure that has spoken lines, they’re pretty much always...well, it’s clear that the lines are being read by amateurs at the craft. And I don’t fault them that, because it’s a lot of work to add voiced dialogue, and the fans making these mods (and what talents they can reasonably gather for their projects) aren’t trained, paid professionals in quality recording booths. Still, there’s no denying that the quality or lack of spoken dialogue in quest mods is 1 of the biggest ways in which immersion is broken.

But Fourville’s voice acting? Clean, exact, varied, competent, and well-directed. The voice actors are on-point, they know how to use emphasis, emotion, and accent to build their characters, and they’re coming through loud and clear. If anything gives away Fourville’s status as a mod rather than a legitimate part of Fallout 4, it sure as hell ain’t the vocal work. I’m seriously impressed on this point.

And related to that, I also have to give special kudos to Fourville for its use of Nora/Nate’s dialogue, too. Another typical issue with quest mods is that Nora/Nate’s lines are silent, since obviously Courtenay Taylor and Brian T. Delaney are gonna be difficult to get hold of to record new lines for a fan project. Fourville gets around this, however, by having the Sole Survivor’s responses to dialogue and quest choices always use lines recorded for the main game, so as a result, Nora/Nate still seems to be an active part of Fourville’s events and community as she/he interacts vocally with others. Now, in fairness, this isn’t the only mod out there that’s done this, but Fourville has certainly incorporated Nora/Nate’s lines into its exchanges more naturally and intuitively than anything I’ve seen prior.

One more point of technical prowess in Fourville’s favor: this is not a small adventure. The size of this mod, with its quests, locations, characters, and alterations to existing locales, is that of an outright Fallout DLC--perhaps not as big as, say, Far Harbor or Point Lookout, but easily an adventure of greater size than Lonesome Roads or Operation: Anchorage. And definitely bigger than the majority of DLCs that Fallout 4 ended up with. To maintain the level of professional quality that Fourville has for a creation of such scope is very impressive.

Fourville’s also considerate with how it’s been set up. There’s a little content within it that will connect with the Far Harbor and Vault 88 DLCs, but you can still play this mod even if you haven’t purchased those add-ons. The quest related to Far Harbor is a very small and quick side mission which won’t even come up if Far Harbor isn’t installed, and the quest involving Vault 88 (in which you go on a pilgrimage of sorts to the Vaults of the Commonwealth) has been designed so that you can complete it with only the vanilla game’s available Vaults.

Beyond the strength of the writing and the careful architecture of its components, Fourville is, perhaps most importantly, a genuine Fallout experience on every major and minor level. The adoration its creator has for the series as a whole is proudly evident. Its main story is tied inseparably to the series’s major points of lore and approach to storytelling. It also incorporates elements and references to each of the previous major Fallout titles in a pleasant fanservice capacity, but not so strongly as to seem heavy-handed. It even references Fallout 76 with a joke at 1 point about holotapes being all the rage down in West Virginia--light enough to stay classy by not expressly criticizing Fallout 76 (although you know I’d have no problem with going all-in on the Bethesda-hate), but still scathing in its light touch through the effective implication that there’s no substance to the game to make use of beyond a quick wisecrack.

Beyond the tangible, Fourville shows a love for Fallout in its narrative methods and the little details. Fourville’s locations have solid ambient storytelling with their skeleton and object placement, which has been a detail of style for the Fallout series from its earliest days that works into its charm, morbidity, humor, and postmortem storytelling. Likewise, the number of and attention paid to the holotapes is a big plus. The creator of Fourville also clearly understands how big of a part exploration and hunting for objects of interest is to a post apocalyptic setting, because Fourville adds a new set of Bobbleheads to be found through its course that each confer little bonuses like (but not the same as) the original Bobbleheads in the game, giving you incentive to search every nook and cranny of each place you visit--and at least 1 of them is hidden quite cleverly, in a spot difficult to return to (I’ll give you a hint: sewer system), so they’re rewarding to find beyond just the, well, reward. The names of quests are often good references to bits of American culture, which is another fun little Fallout signature.

Fourville also takes great pride in connecting itself to Fallout 4, standing as a representation of the game it’s attached to in ways both great and small, some of which really brought a smile to my face, as someone who sincerely loved Fallout 4. While Fourville primarily uses its own locations for the majority of its quests, it nonetheless makes sure to incorporate many of the original locales of the Commonwealth into its course, and even some of Fallout 4’s own characters, which is a nice touch, because that cements one’s feelings of Fourville as a part of Fallout 4, not just a separate entity artificially grafted onto it.*** As you’d expect, synths and the conflict of the Institute are involved to a degree (although not in a major way--which is good for Fourville, as it’s allowed to focus on its own story and ideas).

As much as the bigger stuff, though, it’s also through the tiny details that Fourville connects itself to Fallout 4. Though Fourville doesn’t incorporate much of the settlement building system into its content, it does involve it a little in 1 quest, and it provides a separate Bobbhead stand for the Vault 4 Bobbleheads it adds, so you can display them just as you can for the main game’s set. Another quest actually incorporates the tokens you get for turning in Overdue Books, which is a gameplay quirk that Fallout 4 made surprisingly little use of, considering the trouble it must have been to set up, so it’s neat that Fourville remembered it, almost like fixing a slight oversight of the main game. As mentioned before, some of the game’s DLCs come into play, just enough to again build the feeling of Fourville’s being a part of Fallout 4’s whole, without (as mentioned above) closing the door on any player who hasn’t bought them. And Fourville even gives an opportunity during 1 quest to use some Silver Shroud lines! Who doesn’t love Silver Shroud content?

Finally, Fourville even extends the life of Fallout 4 beyond its own boundaries. 1 of its features is to add a big storage building in Boston, in which are dozens of locked safes filled with the property of the residents of the area’s Vaults. You can’t lockpick these safes, but passwords for these safes will, on rare occasions, be found on the corpses of feral ghoul enemies you’ve defeated. The contents of each safe are often interesting and fun, rewarding the player with item collections that tell you a little about their original owner, and even some rare or unique items, such as a variant of Maxim’s coat or 1 of the Fourville Bobbleheads. It’s fun to bring a password to this storage building and see what prize you’ve found, and since the drop rate of said passwords is way too low for you to get even half of them during the course of your Fourville experience, the mod has now given you a fun extra to look forward to when you play through other mods or revisit Fallout 4’s locations with feral ghouls in them. It’s a way more effective playing incentive than the usual find-and-return quest items like Viable Blood Samples and Technical Documents, because whereas those are just turned in for some caps that haven’t been relevant to you for the last 200 hours of your gameplay, the mystery of what you’re getting keeps you invested in turning the passwords in.**** Not to mention, playing an ethical character in Fallout 4 inevitably means cutting off the ability to turn in certain bounty items (the 2 types I listed a moment ago certainly do me no good), while the Vault resident passwords are something to look forward to finding regardless of past decisions, since they can always be turned in.

Now, of course, nothing is perfect, and Fourville does have a few problems. For starters, the NPCs that Fourville adds all seem to be at Level 1, instead of scaling at all to the player, or even being as capable as most NPCs in the regular game, which...I dunno, it’s not important, I guess, but it’s weird when so many of the individuals you may have to dispose of in the course of the mod’s events just fall apart immediately.

More significantly, there are a few spots in which Fourville can experience a bug or 2, and I can say from experience that at least 1 of them can make progressing a certain sidequest impossible without console commands. That’s always an irritation, no doubt about it. Still, I have to go easy on Fourville here, because for a mod as big and possessing as many moving parts as this, the fact that it works just fine 95% of the time is pretty impressive. I mean, it’s not like Fallout 3, 4, and New Vegas are technically perfect, either; even post-launch patches left all of them in a buggier state than Fourville’s in. Although far less immediately apparent, you could even say the same for Fallout 2; Killap’s Fallout 2 Restoration Project fixed over 1,000 bugs left in the game’s final version. So Fourville's slight technical imperfection really isn't that big a deal, in my opinion.

I also think that the companion that Fourville adds, Logan, falls a little flat. He’s fine enough, as a personality, and the mod puts in the effort to give him a character arc and quest, like the rest of the game’s companions get, and good on Seddo4494 for that. And I greatly respect the work that went into giving Logan a ton of lines that react to the environment, immediate circumstances, and even the game’s story events--from what I understand, Logan will have things to say about many of the main game’s quests and sidequests, which must have required a tremendous amount of work to make happen. As much as I respect that, though, as a character, Logan just doesn’t feel all that interesting to me...I didn’t get invested in his story even as much as I did for some of the regular characters of Fourville, and one’s instinct is to expect more from a party member than an NPC. He’s not bad by any means, but I’d wander the wastelands with most of the vanilla party members of Fallout 4 before I did Logan.

Lastly, the Fourville quest involving the video game doesn’t really sit well with me. I don’t dislike it, exactly, but part of its course is to make a light critique on the current state of the gaming industry. A critique I wholeheartedly agree with, make no mistake! But at the same time, the simple, barely-born state of video games in the Fallout universe doesn’t really accommodate the commentary that Fourville’s making about them. It feels like the kind of lore conflict you see with most other quest mods, where the user’s pulling the Fallout setting a little too far to make it do what they want. And this would normally be a bit of a dealbreaker for me; in most cases, breaking immersion even once like this is what keeps me from actively promoting a mod on this blog. However, considering how great everything else about Fourville is...well, I can let 1 thing like this go, I reckon. Even a petty, nitpicky hardass like me can be reasonable when the payoff overall is so superb.

Fourville by Seddo4494 is a truly excellent mod, a work of high quality in both writing and construction. And it’s a terrific, immersive Fallout experience that appeals to the deepest of fan love for the series. Already a valuable commodity under normal circumstances, the chance to enjoy a rich, authentic Fallout experience is especially priceless in current times, when those who hold the franchise’s license have completely lost their fucking minds (or at least their understanding of basic ethics). I’m adding it to my list of the best Fallout 4 mods, but I really wanted to take the time to give it a full rant of its own, because it’s more than worthy of such. If you love Fallout, check out Fourville!












* Shocking excellence aside, the Calfree Trilogy perfectly captures the Shadowrun experience that Harebrained Schemes created with their campaigns, and uses the series’s own official lore as the foundation to its stories. If anything, the Calfree Trilogy stays even more faithfully adherent to Shadowrun canon than the official games themselves do.

Meanwhile, the Mass Effect Happy Ending Mod may not be perfect (although it IS very, very good), but it certainly represents a far more intelligent, consistent representation of the heart and soul of Mass Effect than the toxic, idiotic ending with which Bioware sullied Mass Effect 3. Rather than a deviation from authentic core of the series, MEHEM is the only recourse for anyone who cares to end the Mass Effect trilogy in a fashion true to itself.


** Not that this says a whole lot. The act of consuming an entire can of seasoned breadcrumbs while listening to a bardcore remix of Pokemon music in the bathtub is a more authentic Fallout experience than Fallout 76. In fact, I’d wager that the only thing that could possibly be less Fallout than the current state of Fallout 76 is whatever alteration or addition Bethesda happens to next make to it.


*** In fact, in that regard, I’d actually say Fourville feels more authentically intertwined with Fallout 4 than some of the game’s actual downloadable content. Automatron, Vault 88, and Nuka-World could’ve been added to any Fallout game, really.


**** If this were an EA game (not that Bethesda is any better than them, these days), I’m sure there’d be a joke here about this being what actual surprise mechanics look like.

Fallout 76's Wastelanders Downloadable Content

If Wastelanders had come out the day that Fallout 76 was released, it would still be too little. If Wastelanders had been the greatest adventure ever created, it would still be too late.

"Don't waste your time and money" continues to be the only advisory that I can in rationality and good conscience offer regarding Fallout 76.

Fallout 2's Temple of Trials Makes No Goddamn Sense

There’s no denying that Fallout 2 is a great RPG, as one would naturally expect of a Fallout game.* But great doesn’t mean perfect, and every player’s sure to find something or other about the game that they don’t particularly like. Most of these complaints vary from 1 person to the next (I, personally, am annoyed to no end by the stupid, pointless, damaging retcon of super mutant sterility; thank Susano-o they Yo Dawg’ed that retcon later on in the series), but there are 2 parts of Fallout 2 that are pretty much universally reviled: the Temple of Trials, and Overseer Lynette. In the latter case, it’s expected, as Lynette was engineered with masterful craftsmanship to be an even more unequivocally frustrating and loathsome human being than Bobby Kotick, a man whose mere existence ironically champions the cause of nihilism. Less intentional, however, is the general irritation that players have with the Temple of Trials, which is generally (and accurately) seen as a tedious, clumsy, heavy-handed tutorial mission that’s as unnecessary as it is pointless and unwelcome. As an opening to a game, Fallout 2’s Temple of Trials is close to the worst that RPGs have to offer, for several reasons that I’ve gone into in my rant on the genre’s worst beginnings.

But you know what I just realized the other day, while talking with a friend who’s just started playing Fallout 2? I realized that we’ve only been scratching the surface of how bad the Temple of Trials is. For 20 years, we’ve been so caught up with being annoyed at the Temple of Trials for failing as a gameplay device, that we never noticed that it also fails on the far more important narrative level, too!

To whit: this temple’s existence doesn’t make sense.

To begin with, let’s just talk about thematic consistency. How does this stupid fucking dungeon fit into Fallout? This is a dungeon taken straight out of a fantasy-styled RPG, not a post-apocalyptic future RPG! This religious structure of stone walls and imposing steel doors would look perfectly at home in a western fantasy game like The Elder Scrolls or Neverwinter Nights, or countless JRPGs like Grandia or Threads of Fate, but nothing about it fits with the Fallout universe. I’m racking my brain, and coming up short: I’m fairly certain that there is not a single other location like this in the entire series. Supposedly it’s a structure that existed before the war, which the Vault Dweller just happened to stumble across during his founding of Arroyo...but it’s too archaic to fit with the many pre-war structures and locations of the modern world, even in terms of what we’ve seen of prewar structures devoted to more supernatural pursuits. It’s just totally out of place in this game and series...which just makes it all the worse that it’s the first dungeon of Fallout 2, because the first impression it’s making on a player is completely alien to every single moment of the game that will follow!

But beyond the aesthetics, it also makes no sense within the game’s own lore!

Because seriously, why the hell does the village of Arroyo exist entirely outside of the temple? They’ve got this massive, perfectly fortified stone structure with several rooms in it, and they just leave it totally and completely unused at all times, save for the 2 times in the village’s history when the village elder and the Chosen One go through it as their trial for being Arroyo’s leader and fetch-quest schmuck, respectively. In a single room, the village keeps the Vault Dweller’s clothing in a shrine, but every single other of the half-dozen rooms in this thing, along with the spacious and long hallways connecting them? Completely empty and unused. For 75 years, this thing has sat within a stone’s throw of the Arroyo village, and they’ve never so much as used it as a tool shed! And hell, even the single room being used as a laundry museum has only been that way for the last 30 years or so, since the Vault Dweller didn’t leave Arroyo for several decades after founding the village, and we can safely assume that he himself didn’t have the idea to ostentatiously immortalize his long johns there. And the temple’s use as a testing ground has been for even less time, since the village elder took the first test in it 2 years after the Vault Dweller left! That means that for like half of Arroyo’s existence, they used this giant, sturdy, safe mountain fortress for absolutely fucking literally nothing.

This is a village whose residents live in a bunch of crappy tents! These people don’t even have the luxury of a hut’s stability! No one ever looked at this colossal multi-roomed cliff-side palace and thought to themselves, “Hey, maybe we could hang out in there sometimes, instead”? There was never a particularly bad patch of weather over the course of 75 years that made the prospect of having to live in easily-destroyed, easily-blown-away tents less appealing than hanging out in an actual structure? I mean, I know the community’s all about raising brahmin and plants, and hunting-gathering, but they could still do all that during the day, and then go to sleep at night with a real, actual roof over their heads!

Hell, the Vault Dweller was a guy who lived his entire life in an enclosed structure built into a mountain, and only left it because he was forcibly exiled. After founding Arroyo, he never once got homesick enough to recreate the living experience he grew up with? The fact that this struggling little village never considered using the Temple of Trials for anything is already hard to swallow in terms of overall logic, but it also runs contrary to 1 of the few things we can safely glean about the Vault Dweller’s character!

For fuck’s sake, Arroyo, there are people in the Capital Wasteland who count themselves well off if they can secure a shack in the shade of a crumbling piece of a highway overpass. There are ghouls in the Commonwealth so hard up for a solid living space that they’ve created an entire settlement around the remains of a communal swimming pool! And you assholes are just sitting around in tents, ignoring a fortress safe haven that makes most of the actual fortresses in this series** look like rickety little cabins built by someone using Fallout 4’s Settlement Builder for the first time?! I feel like an exasperated parent scolding a picky child to appreciate his dinner because there are starving people over in such-and-such country!

Hey, Arroyo, remember that time in the middle of Fallout 2, when the Enclave showed up to kidnap your entire village’s population and savagely gun down everyone who resisted? Yeah, that was awful. Too bad you guys didn’t have a giant mountain fortress with defensible solid steel doors you could have holed up in, huh?

Screw the Temple of Trials, man. It’s a bad decision in terms of gameplay, it’s completely wrong aesthetically to the Fallout series, and it just makes no goddamn sense conceptually.













* Even if one would be dead fucking wrong 3 times on this matter.


** The Brotherhood’s Citadel (Pentagon), the Master’s Cathedral, and the Minutemen’s Castle, for example.

Fallout 4's Sole Survivor is a Synth Theory: Shaun as Evidence

Quick Question Before We Begin: Are any of you fine folks good at getting assets out of games? I'm looking for a picture of the infamous chair from Xenogears, but I can't find a sprite of it online that doesn't already have 1 of the idiots in the cast sitting in it. Can anyone help me out on this, find or rip the sprite of the stupid thing by itself? I'd be very grateful!

Anyway, on with the rant.



Is the Sole Survivor a synth?

The possibility that Nora or Nate could, in fact, not be the real parent of Shaun, but simply 1 of Fallout 4’s innumerable artificial human replacements, is something that a few of the more imaginative players put forth when Fallout 4 was a recent release, one which was generally dismissed as the realm of fanfiction and nothing more. And for good cause: there was not a single tangible piece of evidence to point to as cause to believe it a possibility, and the fact that we start the game on the fateful pre-war morning in which the world was destroyed seemed like ironclad proof that Nora/Nate was the real deal. I dismissed the idea as just an interesting but ultimately baseless notion.

I also dismissed the nutjobs that had certain ideas about 1 particular secret that Rose Quartz might be hiding in Steven Universe, too.

Yes, it seems that time makes fools of all of us in some cases, save the few crazies who piece together a ludicrous theory from scraps of nothing. Just as SU episodes in the past year have blown our minds with revelations that make previous innocuous details suddenly heavy with significance and foreshadowing, so, too, did the Far Harbor DLC suddenly shine a light of feasibility on the possibility that Fallout 4’s protagonist is, in fact, a synth. Suddenly tiny details, like the Railroad’s chair outside Vault 111, had a new possible importance (did the Railroad set up recon because the Institute had been in the area frequently lately--say, to put a brand new synth in the cryo chamber, and then “awaken” it?), and, in an especially clever twist, the greatest evidence for Nora and Nate’s authenticity became the greatest evidence otherwise (the fact that we, the player, only know them from the point of that single prewar morning forward is worked into the story itself, as the earliest thing that Nora/Nate can her/himself recall in specific detail--and the fact that the Memory Den only brings forth a single memory from her/him that has happened during the game’s own course brings even more suspicion to it all!). It’s a brilliant move, honestly, because there’s just enough tiny, tiny related details in the game’s course that Nora/Nate being a synth could be plausible, yet nowhere near enough to possibly be able to assert it for sure. This unanswerable question becomes, in a genius stroke of writing, a part of Far Harbor’s overall theme and exploration into the concept of Truth, and an example of how personal truth is not always so hard and fast within reality as we’d like to think. Is the Sole Survivor a synth? It is impossible to prove one way or another, based on what hard evidence the game has given us.

But there’s more to finding the truth than just sniffing out the material details. When Sherlock Holmes fails...go Hercule Poirot. Follow the trail of human nature.*

Forget whether or not we can prove that Nora/Nate is a synth. It can’t be done. But what we can do, is prove whether or not the question should even arise. What we can prove is whether or not Father, AKA Shaun, would have created a synth of his parent to begin with. Does it fit Shaun’s personality to do so?

Before we begin: because this rant’s gonna be long and it gets tiresome pretending that I value Nora and Nate equally as possible protagonists, I’m just gonna refer to the Sole Survivor as Nora from here on out for my own convenience. Sorry, everyone who denied themselves a superior voice acting performance** and narrative spirit. Just, I dunno, copy-paste this rant into a document program and find-replace all the “Noras” with “Nates” if it bothers you overly.

So, does it fit with who Shaun is for him to have replaced the real Sole Survivor with a synth? To initiate Nora’s search for him, a set of trials to prove the boundaries of her parental love for him...to bring her into the Institute with the intention of making her his successor and its leader...to leave his child synth self in her care...does it make sense for him to do all this for a synth? And not only that, but to have done all this for a synth when he had the opportunity to use the real Nora, instead?

No! No indeed. No...as long as you take Shaun at face value. No, as long as Shaun is the relatively normal psychological entity that he presents himself as.

But if Shaun is a sociopath? Yes. Yes it does.

See, here’s the thing about Shaun. He’ll argue to his mother’s face against the notion that synths are people. As with the rest of the Institute’s members, he contends that synths are not real. And he believes that. But what he isn’t telling you--what he might not really even consciously realize himself--is that, if we measure other people’s reality to ourselves in terms of our ability to identify with their minds and hearts, our ability to empathize with them, then to Shaun, no one is real.

Shaun does not possess empathy for others, regardless of whether they’re men or machines; he almost says so himself in the game: during an argument, you can get him to tell you that he doesn’t feel strong emotions, that he didn’t have the kind of upbringing that taught him the importance of loving others. Not an outright self-diagnosis of psychopathy, but pretty darn close! Close enough that it throws certain other things about him into a new light, like the fact that methodology of the Institute under his reign has been one of cold, scientific barbarity, in which humans are kidnapped, experimented upon, and replaced with synths with no regret whatsoever.*** What remorse he expresses about these sacrifices never goes beyond words, words he simply knows he’s supposed to parrot the way all Institute members have parroted them. He doesn’t care about the surface people that he hurts, only the results he gets from their pain...and that’s because he can’t care about them, doesn’t have the capacity to feel the emotional reality of any human being beyond himself.

But just because Shaun doesn’t care about others, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing he does care about. He certainly does care about the Institute: its vision, its progress, and its experimentation. No evidence needed for that one; just about everything he says and does proves it beyond any doubt. And even if he can’t connect to the feelings of other people, he does have his own emotional needs that he’s interested in satisfying--after all, he deliberately sets up Kellogg to be killed by Nora during her quest, as a form of revenge on Kellogg for having taken Shaun from his parents as an infant and thus denying him the joys of being raised by a loving family (a loss and need that Shaun at least recognizes in himself, even if he doesn’t understand what that is, much like an infant recognizes it’s hungry for the first time and cries out for sustenance, even though it doesn’t know what food is). He assumes that retribution is something his mother also wants, but it’s clear from his reaction and words, if she tells him it wasn’t, that it was actually about his own satisfaction. The possibility that it was something that would give Nora closure is, at the very most, only half the reason Shaun set the scenario for Kellogg’s demise...and even that is more easily seen as a part of his experiment with Nora than any empathetic connection to her needs.

See, that’s the crux of things with Shaun: it’s all an experiment, and it’s all about seeking to fill the emotional hole that his lack of a loving family created within him. He can’t make sense of humanity through any sort of personal connection, so he instead seeks to understand his species through his intellect, through scientific pursuit alone--and thus he experiments, and seeks to replace the irrational, problematic human race with one that he can understand, because he himself has created the new race and programmed it. He has multiple reasons for unthawing Nora (whether she’s the original or a synth), but the reason that stands out to me as the most true and important, and that which he himself admits to, is that he wanted to see what would happen. He wanted to understand his parent, wanted to understand the family and love he had never had...but he didn’t go to Vault 111 himself, thaw her out, and have a heart-to-heart. He didn’t take the leap and put himself into an unknown, organic situation. No, he instead crafted a few scenarios, put events into motion, and sat back to watch what would happen from a safe distance. Shaun’s method of finding closure on what he was denied, his way of understanding where he came from, his parent, family and love and what could have been...it’s to make it an experiment.

I mean, just...really think about this for a second. Put yourself in the same situation. You’ve gone your entire life without knowing your parents. Without having a strong, loving bond with anyone else, either as a child or as an adult. You’re near the end of your life, and the what-could-have-beens are weighing upon your mind, now that you know your finite time in this world is nearly up. And so, as the last major act of your life, you decide that you want to finally know your long-lost parent, to know how your life began before it reaches its end, to stand face-to-face with the being that represents an entire other existence you could have had. Everything you’ve wondered about yourself but were never able to answer, is locked within this parent. After over 60 years of waiting, you are going to have a chance to meet your parent, for the first time, and in the last major moment of your existence.

Think about all that. Immerse yourself in sixty years of orphanhood, in the desperation of mortality to know total personal closure with yourself. Imagine having your entire perspective on humanity defined by the act of being torn away from your mother and father, and never given an adequate replacement. Feel all that within yourself, and then ask:

What kind of man in this situation would make this reunion an experiment? Not someone emotionally and psychologically sound, that’s for sure.

So Shaun wants answers to his life, closure on the what-ifs, but his first priority is to stand apart and watch as an observer, to seek very personal answers through very impersonal experimentation rather than direct emotional connection. So...why wouldn’t he replace Nora with a synth?

Synths aren’t real to him, but, truly, neither are human beings, not in the sense of reality that the rest of us experience, a reality built on whatever level of empathetic foundations each of us uses for identifying with others. Insisting on differentiating between “real” humans and synths is something Shaun does, true, but that distinction is really just a convenient way to maintain control over the latter. And Shaun very much likes control--just look at the dictatorship he’s established over the Institute as a whole, where he can simply decide for the rest of them who their next leader will be, or order his fellow researchers to pursue meaningless projects that they themselves know have no useful application or knowledge to be found--like his having a synth duplicate of his childhood self created for no reason beyond use in an experiment to satisfy his own personal curiosities. With that child synth, he’s already filled his own part with someone else, at least temporarily, in this experiment, this little play of his, even though he’s alive and has every reason to just play his own role from the start. So if he’s changed out 1 capable actor in the drama with a synth, why not change out the other one? Even if the experiment is to set events in motion and then see what happens naturally, replacing his original mother with a synth for this indulgent little drama still affords him the security of control at its beginning. And then there’s the simple fact that Shaun prefers to work with and experiment on synths--if nothing else, there’s credibility to the notion that he would replace his own mother with a synth for this experiment simply because everything Shaun is about, science-wise, is synth research.

Beyond the fact that it makes sense for this sociopath to decide to use 2 dolls to enact his play instead of just 1 when he feels no greater personal connection to humans than he does to synths, Shaun’s actions and words at the end of the game also make sense of the possibility that the Sole Survivor is a synth. Unfreezing Nora, creating a child synth Shaun for her to find, watching her take revenge for both of them against Kellogg, observing how far she’ll go to find her child...this whole experiment has been like a child playing with his dolls, expressing himself through what he has them do in ways that he can’t through words or conscious understanding alone. So the fact that, no matter what faction you side with, Shaun will always entrust the care of his child synth duplicate to Nora is telling: it’s not a turn-around of Shaun’s mentality toward synths, it’s him asking Nora to continue playing the game of house he’s created, asking her to take care of his most important toy.

It’s a legacy perhaps as vital to him as his legacy with the Institute itself: after all, do we know that his final words to his parent in the plot’s Institute path, “You’ve made a boy’s dreams come true,” is about the Institute’s success? He’s not saying “you’ve made a man’s dreams come true,” he’s not saying “You’ve made your boy’s dreams come true,” he’s deliberately referring to himself as a child entity, unattached grammatically to his mother. And as a boy, was his dream really the furthering of the Institute’s goals and the cementing of its dominance in the region...or was it the dream of having the loving family that was denied to him? That sure sounds more like the dream of Shaun as a boy than the ambitions of the Institute, which better suit the dreams of Shaun as a man. I think that in this ending, Nora has made his dreams come true by being a successful part of an experiment, a childish play to see what his life would have been like that he could, in his last days, live vicariously through. Creating the child synth Shaun means that this play can go on after his own death, a legacy of a second life for Shaun along the path he never had a chance to travel the first time that will last as long as the Sole Survivor’s life...and if she was as much a synth as the child she cared for, why, then the game could be played forever. A legacy of the family Shaun wished for, overcompensated for its being stolen from him the first time by making it eternal this second time.

We all seek a way to make ourselves immortal, a way to comfort ourselves with the thought that even if we don’t continue forever, something important about us will. Some people want to leave their mark upon the world through their work. Others seek immortality through the family that will outlive them. Shaun wishes to do both: his own flesh and blood continuing to lead the institute, a living legacy of his work, and a parody of the domestic life he’d missed out on, a living legacy of his family. And in both cases, his legacy can last forever, if he uses an ageless synth instead of a human.**** And the whole point of leaving a postmortem legacy on the world is to make it as close to a piece of immortality as one can manage, right?

So in the end, the answer to the question is a resounding Yes. Yes, it is within Shaun’s personality to have replaced the Sole Survivor with a synth. Well within his character, in fact. It fits his methods, it fits his mentality. It fits what we know about him from his own dialogue, and it fits what we can infer about him through circumstance and seeing what he has created. It fits the needs of a sociopath, it fits the needs of a man who yearns for the loving childhood he never got to have, and it fits the needs of a man seeking to leave as lasting a part of himself in the world as he can while his mortality looms over him.

This does not prove that the Sole Survivor is a synth. As I said before, that cannot be proven, at least not as Fallout 4 stands now. But it does prove that it’s not only possible in terms of simple, face-value material evidence, but also in terms of narrative intent, in terms of the character and soul of the game’s central figures and ideas. I daresay, in fact, that it would add even more depth to the fascinating character of Shaun, and resound elegantly with the themes and ideas that Fallout 4 puts forth. On the surface level, whether the protagonist of Fallout 4 is a synth is a choice for the player to make, a choice on what to believe...but below the surface, as you explore the layers of storytelling within the game, there is, to me, no choice to be made, for Fallout 4 is a more thoughtful, more meaningful, more nuanced and fascinating story when Nora is, in fact, a synth, in large part because of what it means for and confirms about the character of the game’s villain. To me, the Sole Survivor is a synth.


















* Also, just for the record: Hercule Poirot is way better than Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, that’s right. I just fucking typed that.


** Although, I’ve said it before, but I do want to repeat it: Courtney Traylor does the better job as the Sole Survivor, but there’s definitely nothing wrong with Brian Delaney’s performance. I daresay in most games like this, he would have been the more compelling voice actor. Traylor just really nails the role with her perfect combination of wistful regret, determination, and wry humor, is all.


*** Now to be fair, that was also how the Institute was operating prior to Shaun’s command, too (otherwise he wouldn’t have even been there to start with). But he certainly didn’t lessen the immoral, inhuman practices of the Institute at all while he was in charge, and by all accounts actually stepped them up.


**** It doesn’t fit in with the general tone of the rest of the rant, but it’s also worth noting that making the next great leader of humanity (in his eyes, at least) a synth would also be thematically appropriate in terms of Shaun’s role as the heart and soul of the Institute. After all, would that not be a fittingly literal example of the Institute’s work as the future of humanity?

Fallout 76 is a Failure on Every Level

Well, it’s finally happened: a bad Fallout game has been created. Yes, that which we had once, in the sunny childhood of our innocence, thought impossible, has come to pass. That which could not be, is. A bad Fallout game--the thing beyond what we could have imagined is reality! The dread eventuality that I never once believed possible, has...has...

...Ha ha ha ha ha! Okay, I can’t keep that shit up.

Yeah, I am pretty obviously a huge, diehard fan of the Fallout series, but I ain’t some naive schmuck. The idea that the vaunted name of Fallout could be sullied with a bad game, surprising? Come on, Internet! Do you people not remember Fallout Tactics? Did you somehow block Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel from your conscious minds? I mean, if you did, power to you, please teach me your mental technique because I’d like to do the same. But yeah, as much as I adore the Fallout series, it’s not like Fallout 76’s horrendous suckitude is some foray into new territory. It is, at most, an expedition that just slightly extends the boundaries of Fallout’s territory in the Land of Shitty Shit that Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel originally lay claim to. Also? I don’t know how anyone with both an understanding of storytelling methods in video games and experience with Bethesda as a developer could possibly have the slightest doubt that Fallout 76 was going to be awful upon hearing that it would be online-only.

Of course, just because I have a good enough grasp on Sesame Street benchmarks to understand that a game series starts at 1, not 3, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have major grievances against Fallout 76. I may remember that the Fallout series is quite capable of disastrously bad side ventures, but I certainly didn’t want that to come to pass again!

But hey, who doesn’t take major issue with this abhorrent, sloppy, careless cash-grab? At this point, Todd Howard’s association with the Tell Me Lies song, previously seeming like a flash-in-the-pan meme that wouldn’t last, is now pretty much permanently cemented into gaming history. As far as griping about stuff goes, Fallout 76 is low-hanging fruit. Diablo: Immortal reminded the gaming community at the beginning of November that AAA publishers will inevitably betray their creations, sell their integrity, and fuck the fans that made their success possible in the ass for a quick yuan, and then mere weeks after Blizzard had put the gaming community back on its guard, Bethesda delivered a validation of every single fear anyone and everyone had had since hearing that the game would be online-only. Fallout 76 is already a slap in the face to any man or woman foolish enough to purchase it, but it had the misfortune of coming right when people were already abuzz with annoyance over a not entirely dissimilar situation.

Still, even if everyone’s already venting their well-justified anger over it, I’d nonetheless like to throw in my own two cents on the matter, because most of the complaints about this game come back to a certain few glaring errors (which, don’t get me wrong, are irredeemably bad), and Fallout 76, in my opinion, is just so much more of a complete blunder than just these particular egregious errors. On every level, Fallout 76 is a failure.

Let’s start with the first and most important matter: Fallout 76 is a failure as a Fallout game.

Fallout is characterized by many qualities, and it can’t truly be Fallout without any of them, but at its heart, this is a series which explores, analyzes, criticizes, and lauds the culture and history of the United States, and through that, humanity itself. From its 1950s aesthetics to its old-timey musical focus, from its major stories that grapple with the USA’s foreign policy and imperialism and history of prejudice and constant struggle to find leaders who put the will of the people over their own desires and toxic capitalism and the inability of the human species to learn from its mistakes, to its subplots of baseball and comic book characters and scientologists and aliens and casinos, from its incorporation of distinctly American landmarks and products and accents to its incorporation of countless references of USA-familiar people and media for the sake of quick jokes, Fallout has made it clear from the start that it exists to be a lens through which we can view ourselves as a country, for the sake of understanding who we are and how we came to be us, of good-naturedly laughing at ourselves, of uncomfortably seeing our shameful acts, mindset, and history exposed, and of taking pride in the many traits that make us uniquely great. To both joyously celebrate and harshly critique the United States of America is to be Fallout.

Fallout 76 does not do this.

Oh, to be sure, it goes through the motions. There are West Virginia landmarks to be found. A bare few of them even are more of the local kind of landmark than stuff that’d be more well-known on a national level. The main music is...uh...well, it ain’t old-timey like it really ought to be, as a 70s song, but then, plenty of the songs appropriated for the series before have been from the 60s, so I guess it’s fine, and it certainly fits.* Some of the holotape stories left behind incorporate professions and accents and other human elements recognizably connected to the region.

But that’s all they are: motions. They have no more life or purpose than the after-death twitches of an ant after someone steps on it. What is the meaning? What are these locations and ideas supposed to convey to us about the American state, mentality, method, anything? What does any of this stuff say about us? For that matter, what does any of it say about West Virginia itself, its people, its history, its culture, etc? These references and locations and recorded diaries, none of them are put to any USE, they don’t analyze or celebrate or criticize anything! There is no thought or message behind any of it, and for that, 76 is more like a molt of Fallout than the actual beast.

The immediate and most easily visible cause of this failure is, of course, the lack of characters in this game, which is 1 of the major complaints everyone has with Fallout 76: a lack of NPCs. After all, how can you explore such a very alive, human thing as the United States without alive, human actors? Characters like Caesar, House, Arthur Maxson, Elder Lyons, Vault 13’s Overseer, and James brought to life their games’ examination of America’s history of and/or connections to culture-extinguishing genocide, dangerously narcissistic entrepreneurship, thoughtless bigotry, selfless charity, xenophobia, and dedication to providing a high quality of life to its citizens. Major organizations like the NCR, the Railroad, and the Institute likewise gave compelling, living voice to Fallout’s analysis of the USA’s ties to unfair economic imperialism, fighting and sacrifice for the sake of others’ freedom, and a harmful Us First mentality. Hell, even just very minor NPCs like Sierra, Nathaniel Vargas, and Iguana Bob allow Fallout to speak to us about American tendencies toward blind product loyalty, self-destructively unreasoning patriotism, and disregarding the rights, feelings, and health of consumers in lieu of making a profit. Fallout 76 has no one.

But with that said, it wouldn’t be impossible to make a proper Fallout narrative based entirely around postmortem stories. Very difficult, but not impossible. Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, another post-apocalyptic RPG which I like to call Studio Ghibli Fallout, uses after-the-fact storytelling for at least half of its overall narrative, and what’s more, that’s the method that best conveys the part of FDFRotM that’s about the quiet loss of a world ended and the extraordinary palette of humanity that world contained within its every inhabitant. As powerfully emotional and beautiful as FDFRotM can get with its main story, I would contend that its best narrative feature is its postmortem stories! If Bethesda had put the proper focus on saying something about our country and ourselves, if they had put their absolute best effort into appropriately tying that message to this empty wasteland through a thoughtful, well-crafted narrative of recorded messages, it could have worked.

But they didn’t. The narrative of Fallout 76 is an afterthought. They didn’t have the slightest intention to use its landmarks and tepid flirtations with West Virginia culture toward any greater purpose. It’s clear, looking at this game, that from the beginning of the game’s development, the highest level of thought they put into these ties to WV was the equivalent of a bored tourist pointing briefly at a landmark and saying, “Oh, look at that,” checking the place off a little travel list, and then going back to doing something else.

And I knew it would be this way, from the moment they said Fallout 76 was going to be an online-only adventure, because the level of narrative control you need to make a story with deeper content like the standard for Fallout isn’t something you can achieve when you first have to accommodate and put a focus on all the gameplay angles that perpetual communal online play creates.

So that’s how Fallout 76 is a failure on the level of being a Fallout game. But it’s more than that. It’s also a failure on the level of being a Fallout game, too.

No, that’s not a typo. I mean that on a more detail-oriented, technical level, it still fails to be a Fallout. What I’ve said so far has argued that it’s a game trying to play a role whose script it hasn’t bothered to read. But at the same time, it’s not even wearing the right clothes for that role!

Fallout 76 is a failure as a Fallout because it can’t be bothered to don the trappings of Fallout’s lore correctly. Now, look, I recognize the fact that the history and details of the Fallout universe have been changed before, and while that’s really annoying, I’ve generally forgiven Bethesda for it. The reason for this is that previously, Bethesda’s mistakes with the Fallout series’s lore have never been too terribly damaging. I mean, while they’ve bent a few of the bigger details, the biggest outright breaking the company’s done that I’ve seen has been the whole thing with Jet--Fallout 2 clearly stated that Myron, a character in the game, creates Jet, yet Bethesda’s later Fallouts contradict this by saying that Jet is a pre-war drug. It’s possible to rationalize this retcon well enough as Myron simply taking credit for knowledge of a drug that didn’t make it to the western USA before the world’s end (it certainly fits the little slimeball’s personality well enough), but it’s a definite screw-up on Bethesda’s part. Still, even considering the large role Jet plays in Fallout 2 and its recognizable nature as a Fallout item, we’re not talking about a huge, monumentally important piece of lore, here, so I’ve never held such a thing too strongly against Bethesda. After all, Obsidian made a few lore screw-ups themselves in Fallout: New Vegas (such as forgetting who actually created the Mr. Handy, which is arguably a more significant entity of Fallout lore than Jet). And hell, nothing Bethesda did in Fallout 3 or 4 was anywhere near the level of boneheaded, pointless, anti-lore stupidity that Fallout’s own creators pulled in Fallout 2, when they decided to retcon super mutants’ sterility--a lynchpin to the plot of Fallout 1 and the downfall of its antagonist The Master--for the sake of having 1 character make a joke after banging a hooker.** Bethesda never retconned anything so terribly as that.

...Until Fallout 76, that is. Like I said, I’ll forgive relatively minor infractions on the Fallout lore like Jet, and Mr. Handy, and so on. But Bethesda was so damn determined to include every possible iconic Fallout variable, to really just scream “IT’S FALLOUT, SEE!?!? SEE!?!? SEEEEEEE!?!?!?!?!” while they shove series signatures like deathclaws and super mutants in your face, that they just utterly twisted the canon into unrecognizable shreds. For example, Fallout 76 jumps through absurd hoops to include the Brotherhood of Steel, an inclusion which retroactively makes the previous games’ lore incomplete, because you’d THINK, at some point during all the previous Fallouts in which you can learn and read about the early days and formation of the BoS, that somewhere it would have been mentioned that the order’s founding commander apparently had a fucking pen pal in West Virginia who decided she’d open a BoS franchise of her own. You’d think that might have been mentioned somewhere in the histories. Hinted at sometime in the many conversations you have with dozens of Brotherhood of Steel members about their order from Fallout 1 onwards. Implied in the smallest way! But it wasn’t, because the idea is silly, and only a soulless greedy dumbass looking to make a quick buck would greenlight it.

And the Brotherhood of Steel are far from the only major twisting and breaking of lore that 76 is guilty of. Honestly, for a game so utterly devoid of story content, it’s actually kind of astounding how much it can manage to fuck up the series lore. Super Mutants? This is the fourth independent outbreak of Forced Evolutionary Virus mutants in the series now (and by far the least believable). Did the US government just sell vats of FEV as part of some promotional package before the war?*** Why is it so damn common? This stuff was supposed to be the most insanely top secret shit in the world! Now we’re supposed to believe that the government was testing it in a lab, and also having Vault-Tec use it for their experiments in Vault 87, AND that MIT for some reason had some lying around, AND that the government decided to just infect an entire goddamn town in West Virginia with the stuff to see what would happen? All at the same time!? Fucking Nuka-Cola Quantum had a smaller distribution range in the pre-war United States than this biological super weapon!

Also, why are all the ghouls in Fallout 76 already feral? This game takes place a mere 25 years after the end of the Great War. It’s an established fact that after many, many years, most ghouls eventually lose their minds and become zombie-esque ferals, and it’s implied that this is the inevitable fate of all ghouls, although there’s really no proof of that. But even though the time it takes varies from 1 ghoul to another, there’s a substantial enough population of sane ghouls in the USA even over 200 years later that it’s irrational to think that a sizable portion of the ghouls a mere 25 years after the bombs dropped would have gone feral--and it’s ludicrous to think that ALL the ghouls in West Virginia would have succumbed! Since the game is careful to differentiate between natural ghouls and those created by the Scorched Plague, with the former apparently being completely immune to said plague, you can’t just say that the Scorched are the rest of the ghouls; they’re a separate thing. So where the hell are all the mentally functional ghouls in this damn state?

Jet’s not inconsequential to the Fallout universe, but it’s at least small enough that you can make allowances for messing up its lore. But we’re talking about the Brotherhood of Steel, the single most important and influential faction in the entire series, which plays an absolutely essential role in 3 of 5 Fallouts, and an important secondary role in the other 2! We’re talking about ghouls, the major (sort of) non-human race whose afflictions have been a crucial part of countless side stories and quests throughout the series! And we’re talking about super mutants, THE iconic bad guys of Fallout, whose very existence is the foundation of Fallout 1’s plot, an absolutely essential part of the history of Fallout 3, and a heavy indictment against the main villains of Fallout 4! In all earnesty, I cannot think of what other iconic elements of the Fallout series could possibly be worse to carelessly mess up!

So you see, Fallout 76 fails on the level of being a Fallout, not just in heart and spirit, but also in body and mind. Not only can it not be bothered to even try to accomplish the task that its name requires of it, but it mars and breaks the assets it has borrowed. And so we reach the next level: Fallout 76 is a failure as a Fallout, but what about simply as an entity of its own? As an RPG in its own right, how is it?

Bad. Really bad. Awful, in fact.

Indeed, this game might just fail harder by basic RPG standards than it does by the lofty expectations of the Fallout series! Because even if Fallout 76 is unable to (nor even tries to) say anything about America, I will give it, at least, that it’s got the quiet exploration of a post-apocalyptic world that’s another of Fallout’s staples, even if only barely (hard to maintain the tense, atmospheric interest of poking about ruins and the wastes when there’s just so comparatively little to actually find). But as just an RPG, it doesn’t get anything right! The “plot” of this game has less depth, less complexity, than a number of games from the days of the NES, and even the Sega Master System! Seriously, pit Fallout 76’s story against Phantasy Star 1, The Magic of Scheherazade, and even several non-RPGs like The Astyanax, and Fallout 76 is the inevitably the loser--this 2018 title designed to take actual dozens if not hundreds of hours to beat has less substance, less compelling human drama, and lower quality plot twists than a 1989 side-scroller that you can beat in 2 or 3 hours.

Nor is this straightened slinky of a storyline meaningful or emotionally fulfilling. Beyond being terrific commentaries on the USA, the Fallout series is, of course, a great collection of tales that speak to us of ourselves and greatness in a general sense. Even if Fallout 3 had no commentary on the generosity of the American spirit and the way that the will and welfare of the people continues to inevitably clash against the selfishness of our government leaders, it would still be an awesome story of dedicated, selfless human kindness, of the courage to stand against not only danger but also one’s own laws in order to do what is right, and of a child who embodies her/his parents’ greatest qualities and fulfills their legacy of heroism as she/he finishes the father’s work to enact the mother’s dream for the world. Even if Fallout 1 had nothing to say about the USA’s old tradition of isolationism and the importance of not losing diverse individuality in a land defined by its ideals of unity, it would still be a badass story of a man saving a harsh world from the festering wounds its past has left upon it, only to find that in leaving to fight for the sake of his home’s survival, he’s now so changed that he has no place there. Even if Fallout 4 had no investigation of our history of human exploitation, our cold war paranoia, and our recent fascination with finding and embracing our personal identity, it would still be a compelling story of both the strengths and the limits of a parent’s devotion to a child, of ordinary people banding together to stand for extraordinary ideals, and of the fascinating idea that artificial humanity could, in fact, be in some cases more truly human than many so-called “real” people. Beneath the celebrated mantle of their franchise, the major Fallout games that have come before have been excellent RPGs in their own right for their stories.

And yes, as noted before, the game does have a lot of the holotapes and so on of little mini-stories of now-dead individuals to fill you in, but, frankly, that’s just not enough. Certainly, this storytelling device can be an effective one, but, as stated above, it’s clear that Bethesda did not bring its A Game to this aspect of 76. None of the lore stories in this game reach the strength of many of those found in previous Fallouts, and anyway, just because something is an effective part of a storytelling process, that doesn’t mean it can support an entire narrative all by itself. Mustard is a great condiment to put some pep in your sandwich, but it’s not a meal in and of itself--even the terrific after-the-fact stories in Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, which I believe are the best example of this narrative device, didn’t exist in a storytelling vacuum. They helped make it great, but there was still an actual plot and real story events in the game that defined FDFRotM’s pace and purpose. And hey, who knows, maybe that title could’ve managed to pull off a plot solely held together with such stories--it was really good at them, after all. But Fallout 76’s writing isn’t even close to Fragile Dreams’s equal, even in those rare moments when it did seem like someone at Bethesda was putting a little effort into it, and it most definitely cannot pull together a compelling narrative from these logs and vignettes.

Of course, a superlative RPG can be created from more than just a strong story--a plain or even weak story can be held up quite adequately with a great cast and an emotionally powerful narrative. I love the second half of Tales of Legendia, for example, even though its story is, taken as a whole, only average, simply because it explores a lot of memorable and deep characters, sells you on the great connections they have as a family, and is filled with human drama that speaks to you on a personal level. But here, once again, Fallout 76 fails--and this time, the failure does begin and end with Bethesda’s disastrous decision to keep its game barren of characters. Because obviously, it’s hard to have any human connection to a cast that doesn’t exist. And yes, some people have pointed out that there ARE some NPCs in the game, in fact, namely the quest-giving robots and a super mutant trader...but these “characters” really just are nothing more or less than their role in your gameplay. They no more add to the human experience of the game than do the soulless, single-minded shopkeepers in any other RPG that spend their lives in a single spot behind a desk, awaiting your decision to Buy or Sell a potion. The Fallout series has given us such memorable personalities as Harold, Myron, Lynette, Moira, Yes Man, Lily, Glory, and Codsworth, such interesting entities as Nicole, Marcus, Goris, Elder Lyons, James, Madison Li, Boone, Caesar, Piper, DiMA, and Father, and such amazing characters who are both powerfully memorable and deep as Sarah Lyons, Veronica, Ulysses, Deacon, and Nick Valentine...when that’s the sort of standards against which to measure, it’s kind of hard to even feel like Fallout 76’s lame quest-spouting and money-changing narrative automatons even qualify as NPCs.

And, of course, the facts that the protagonist of this game has no personality whatsoever, and that there’s a lack of any real antagonist figure, don’t help. Even by silent protagonist standards, your role in Fallout 76 is utterly lifeless--the Vault Dweller, the Chosen One, the Lone Wanderer, and the Courier all had honest, personal stakes in their adventures, even if the games did suffer from their lack of characterization, as did the Sole Survivor, thankfully an actual participant in the game’s story for once. In Fallout 76, you just play 1 of a bunch of nameless goons released carelessly into the wasteland for a job with no apparent personal relevance to you. No “Save your home,” no “figure out why some guy shot you in the head,” nothing--you can’t even reasonably pretend to care about what’s happening! And of course, while other RPGs are usually smart enough to make up for their mute main character’s lack of input with an involved and vocal surrounding cast, obviously Fallout 76 has no such fall-back. Likewise, the villain of this story, if so it can be called, is a silent, faceless plague.

Bethesda, when people say that a great villain should be a mirror to the hero, they don’t mean that if you’ve written a horrendously boring hero with no presence whatsoever, your villain should be the exact same!

But hey, again, none of this is a surprise. Because when you make a game for the purpose of online gameplay, this is gonna happen. The strongest reason to voluntarily play a game by yourself is because you want to experience is storytelling qualities, and control the pace and environment in which you discover them. So when Bethesda made this game online-only, it was making something quite clear: the story elements of Fallout 76 were so unimportant in the eyes of its creator that there wasn’t even a point to allowing the players to experience the game in a way that emphasized them. It was clear from the start that they weren’t going to give a shit about this game as anything more than an online cash-grab; the most surprising thing, really, is that they even bothered to include what half-hearted attempts at lore and plot are there.

So yeah, Fallout 76 is not just a failure as a specific brand of RPG, but as an RPG of any kind. I have felt more life and significance in the plot and cast of Kemco games than I have with this pile of crap. Which leaves just 1 more level for the game to try at. If it can’t be a success as a Fallout, which is a specific kind of RPG, and it can’t be a success just as an RPG, which is a specific kind of video game...can it at least be a success simply as a video game, period?

Uh, no. God no.

I’m not good at rating games for just being games, honestly. While I have my enjoyable mindless diversions (as you read this, there’s an 80% chance that I’m currently playing Super Smash Brothers Ultimate), I mostly engage with video games for the same reason I do with books, anime, shows, cartoons, movies, and so on: in the hopes that they’ll speak to me, make me think, offer insight into the human condition that I haven’t considered, and push me to explore new regions of heart and soul. So I’m not gonna go into this in depth. But in strict terms of whether this game is fun, whether it has merits in terms of simple gameplay and enjoyment? Fallout 76 fails.

As more than a few people will tell you, it’s objectively flawed in the technical sense. As in it has bugs. Tons of them. It’s buggier than a goddamn anthill! And when your priority with a game has solely been to focus on the gameplay elements--that’s the elements of just playing the game, now--that’s absolutely unacceptable. If you’re going to sacrifice everything worthwhile about an RPG to focus solely on its playability and nothing else, then the game better goddamn work! And yet Fallout 76 released with as many glitches and oversights as any of its predecessors--more, in fact, since it has all its own problems AND has inherited quite a few from Fallout 4 which after 3 years Bethesda hasn’t bothered to fix even though all it would take is stealing a few lines of code from the damn modding community that DID repair the issues years ago on their own time!

Add to that the fact that Bethesda’s decided no modders can touch the game for a year--modders being the ones who traditionally improve Bethesda’s products to the point that they’re actually playable, because God forbid this absurdly rich developer actually do their own fucking tech work and release a functional product by themselves. Add to that the fact that a significant amount of items and other content are locked away behind a manipulative, evil in-game currency system. Add to that the fact that there’s practically no protections in the game to keep people from cheating. Add to that the fact that there are areas designed so poorly that you can get yourself stuck in them without any way of escaping besides killing yourself and spawning elsewhere, as well as settlement sites that have enemy spawns right in the middle of them that stay functional even after you’ve built a base there. Add to that the fact that even the stuff that works as intended is sometimes just bad all on its own--the PVP system is designed in a way that causes most players to just ignore it because it’s not worth the time, and the HP-to-attack-power ratio makes battle with just about anything a tedious slug-fest, for example. Add to that the fact that the game lacks basic necessary functions of online games that have been standards for over a decade, such as a push-to-talk button! And finally, maybe most damningly, add to all of that the fact that the goddamn servers at Bethesda can’t handle the game consistently,**** booting you back to the main menu (what a GREAT idea to make it online-only, huh?) frequently--the servers can’t even handle some of the game’s primary features; they crash if 3 nukes go off in the same area!

Basically, if Fallout 76 was the Catholic Church, we’d need an entire clone army of Martin Luthers hammering away to accurately theses-out all the shit that’s wrong with this game. It’s like they wanted to create the western RPG equivalent of Lunar: Dragon Song.

Bethesda apologists/stockholm-syndrome-sufferers like Oxhorn (who, if a Bethesda executive whacked him in the dick with an aluminum bat, would, I think, find a way to argue that this action was not only completely acceptable, but actually a good thing), have, of course, tried to make the argument that since it’s an online game, Bethesda will naturally have no choice but to make patch after patch to fix the game’s issues until it’s actually in working order. That’s a nice thought and all, but not only does nothing in the company’s history suggest this will happen, but it’s also really not that great a defense. “Yeah, guys, it’s a abysmal maelstrom of refuse right NOW, but if you’ll just patiently twiddle your thumbs and wait for a few months, THEN it’ll be modestly acceptable! I mean, who purchases a video game and then expects to be able to play it within the same calendar year, right?”

Some people have also pointed out that Fallout 76 is better when playing with friends. This is true. And, in the interests of fairness, that IS a point in the favor of a game specifically designed around the idea of cooperative and/or competitive play. But the simple fact is that it doesn’t make up for the fundamental technical problems that will inevitably mar you experience, friends or no, and there’s absolutely nothing, besides a coat of Fallout paint, that it offers that you couldn’t get from playing a different game with your friends--and that different game is more likely to actually function correctly, too. Anything is more fun when done with people you like--are the movies that Mystery Science Theater 3000 shows somehow less objectively bad, just because watching it alongside a wisecracking guy and robots is fun? Your enjoyment with friends only lasts until they get bored and move on to better games--or in the short term, get disconnected from the server again.

Also, it’s worth noting that everything around this game seems to fail, too. Bought the game at full price? You get to feel like a fool immediately afterward, as Bethesda drops the price almost in half in a desperate attempt to sell it. Want the special edition canvas bag they promised? It takes the very real threat of litigation for false advertising for you to actually get what you paid for. Want to get a refund because you don’t like the game? Well, because Bethesda only allows digital sales through its own services, they don’t have to give you jack shit once you’ve downloaded it--the equivalent in the real world would be a store refusing to return the jeans you just bought 14 seconds before on the grounds not that you’d put them on, but simply that you’d put them in your shopping bag. Putting in a customer service request? Well, I certainly hope you enjoy the prospect of random other people being able to see and respond to your support ticket, as well as gain access to your private data. And as a bonus, expect Bethesda’s initial response to each and every one of these issues to be flippant and cheerfully dismissive.

Thus, I say that Fallout 76 is a spectacular blunder in totality. It fails on every single possible level. It fails as a Fallout game, both in soul and in body. It fails as an RPG. It even fails at simply being a video game. And Bethesda fails at everything they do in regards to it. Fallout 76 is a raging, out-of-control trash fire, like someone set flame to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for all the reasons commonly pointed out by its players--but I thought it was worth noting that it’s a failure on every level, and that the real cause of this isn’t just the immediate, glaring problems highlighted by reviews, but rather the root of those problems: a lack of interest on Bethesda’s part in giving their product substance, and a lack of competence in making it functional. Shame on every man and woman who’s had a hand in the decision-making process of this fiasco.
















* Although I kinda feel like the theme song for a Fallout set in West Virginia being Take Me Home, Country Roads, a song which is just outright about West Virginia, might be a little TOO fitting. Fallout 2 didn’t feel the need to begin with Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco. Fallout 1 didn’t require the Bee Gees’ California Girls to set its stage. Fallout 4 didn’t open by slapping you in the face with the fucking Kingston Trio’s Charlie on the MTA! The signature old classics for every major Fallout title before 76 have always been concerned with the major plot points of their game, or the overall concept of the Fallout universe’s setting, rather than just blatantly wailing the name of the state they take place in.

But then, as I go into above, there IS nothing to this game beyond its scenery, no matter of substance in story nor cast, theme nor intent, so what other song could you possibly use to convey a game so genuinely lacking in intellectual or emotional matter? Will.i.am would want way too much money for any of his work. So really, a song which boils down to “West Virginia is a place THAT EXISTS” represents the apex of Fallout 76’s mental value.


** Chris Avellone has said that it was only meant as a joke, not a retcon, but--and it’s hard for me to blaspheme against the mighty Avellone, believe me--I think that’s just him trying to cover for a decision he only realized in retrospect was really dumb. This nonsense already starts with Marcus the super mutant making a joke, and then, when asked to elaborate, he says, without the slightest hint of levity or deception in his voice or words, just his regular conversational tone, that it just took some years for the “juices” to start “flowing again.” For this statement to be a joke in response to having cracked a joke would be awkward and narratively out of place, and it wouldn’t fit the voice acting nor dialogue’s wording. I’m pretty sure this scenario was originally meant to be in earnest.


*** I exaggerate, of course. After all, by Bethesda’s logic, if a vat of FEV had been promised as part of some special deal, then the only thing that Vault-Tec, MIT, and West Tek would have actually received would be a bottle of Mello Yellow.


**** And keep in mind, this game has, by all indications, not sold even close to as well as Bethesda wanted it to. So if the servers can’t handle even the reduced number of forsaken, miserable souls who had the misfortune to purchase Fallout 76 right now, what the fuck was Bethesda planning to do if it had actually met its sales expectations?

Fallout 4's Railroad Faction: Why I Side with Them

Maybe someday I’ll write a Fallout rant that isn’t 5+ pages long. You never know. It could happen.

Definitely not today, though.



Fallout 4 allows you to select from 4 separate factions to determine the fate of the post-apocalyptic Commonwealth of Massachusetts. You can choose the Minutemen, which is basically a collaborative military force of the Commonwealth’s farmers and other common populace all pooling their resources to become a self-sufficient and protected series of communities. You can support the Brotherhood of Steel’s east coast chapter, fresh from Fallout 3’s Capital Wasteland. You can side with the Institute, who see the future of mankind in scientific advancement and replacement. Or, you can throw your lot in with the underdogs of the struggle, the Railroad, whose goal is to be the champions of Synths, helping them to live safe, sound, and most importantly, free.

This sounds like a fair number of choices, of course, as many as Fallout: New Vegas offered, and technically it is, but the less ambiguous ethics of Fallout 4’s factions means that, ultimately, it actually becomes a choice between 2 groups, instead of 4. If you’re playing an immoral, evil character, your only options are: A, the Institute, which remorselessly commits atrocities regularly against the people of the Commonwealth and values directionless scientific advancement toward some intangible, undefined ideal of future human perfection over the actual, living human beings working and suffering to make a decent, livable society in the Commonwealth, or B, the Brotherhood of Steel, which has been twisted and ruined by its current leadership, becoming a fanatical military group of bigots who define humanity by specific genetic conditions rather than valuing self-aware intelligence and empathy wherever it may be found.* And if you’re playing as a character who is not a complete asswipe, your choice is between the Minutemen and the Railroad.

Comparing the Minutemen and the Railroad, the choice seems simple enough. While it’s clear that the Railroad has a noble cause in standing up for the Synths’ freedom and wellbeing, as any organization trying to assist slaves and the downtrodden is noble, the Minutemen, pound for pound, accomplish the greater good with their cause. The Minutemen provide protection and stability to the entire region’s otherwise vulnerable settlers, farmers, and traders. They help establish and build settlements, they directly oppose hostile elements that prey on the weak like raiders and super mutants, they send armed patrols through the Commonwealth, they establish trade routes and lines of communication between settlements, and they jump to assist towns and settlements even outside of the ones who have agreed to be a part of their alliance. Well, okay, you do a lot of that stuff yourself as the protagonist, but, y’know, the idea is that the Minutemen as a whole are doing that. They oppose the Institute because it threatens the entirety of the Massachusetts populace. In essence, the Minutemen are helping pretty much everyone, by default including what Synths the Railroad has freed and established in the Commonwealth, and on top of that, they’re establishing an overall society from which higher levels of safe civilization can emerge and prosper.

The Railroad, on the other hand, just frees a very specific group of people** from slavery, and tries to keep them safe. They oppose the Institute specifically because it enslaves those people, not necessarily because it’s evil overall. Agan, this unequivocally makes the Railroad a morally good cause, and were it just them, the Brotherhood of Steel, and the Institute, there would be absolutely no question which faction was the right one to side with. And to some extent, they’re still laudable even by comparison to the Minutemen, for the people of the Railroad are putting their lives on the line by directly opposing the greatest threat (the Institute) with the least resources to do so. More than that, they are the sole voice and shield for an entire race of oppressed people. Even the Minutemen are at best ambivalent about Synths, so without the efforts of the Railroad, a great number of conscious, feeling, thinking people would be utterly helpless to escape from their enslavers. Though in some ways the Railroad can be criticized for turning its back on the regular people of the Commonwealth (although what exactly people expect this tiny, frugal coalition of mostly non-fighters to do about the grand problems the Commonwealth suffers through is beyond me), in other ways they are more noble than even the Minutemen, for the Minutemen themselves do stand to benefit from their good deeds, while the Railroad’s members risk everything completely selflessly, having nothing to gain personally from helping the Synths who cannot help themselves.

Regardless of whose ideals are truly higher, though, it’s quite clear that the Minutemen do the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. The Railroad performs a service to freedom and morality that the Minutemen do not in freeing and specially safeguarding Synths, but the Minutemen perform many more acts of good that the Railroad does not. So, ultimately, if the issue of deciding which faction to support in Fallout 4 truly was a question of which one was better, I would wholeheartedly advocate choosing the Minutemen as the faction you ally with to take down the Institute and save the Commonwealth. Completely and totally.

The thing is, though, that unlike all other faction combinations, with the Railroad and the Minutemen, it’s not an either-or scenario.*** And that being the case, the fact is that the Sole Survivor can do the most possible good for the Commonwealth, short and long term, by allying with the Railroad.

Let’s examine the goals of the Minutemen, shall we? Ultimately, the Minutemen want a safe, stable Commonwealth civilization in which everyone is free and secure to pursue a positive life. In pursuit of that end, the Minutemen need several things to happen. They need a strong and dedicated leader to take the reigns of their group. They need to retake their old base of operations, the Castle. They require settlements across the Commonwealth to pledge to support the Minutemen. By extension, the Minutemen want those settlements linked, by trade and other social relations, and built up to be strong, productive, and self-sufficient. The Minutemen want to force the predators of the weak and innocent out of the Commonwealth--the raiders, the Gunners, the super mutants, etc. They need to establish a strong and large enough force to send patrols through the Commonwealth to keep its roads and ruins secure. And, of course, the Minutemen must bring about the end of the Institute. With all of this accomplished, the Minutemen will have the strength and momentum as a military force and as a collaborative union of the people of the Commonwealth to build a greater community of the Commonwealth’s citizens.

Here’s the thing, though: all of that can be accomplished for the Minutemen, without actually choosing them as your endgame faction.

If you support the Railroad instead of the Minutemen, very little changes for the latter. Even while committed to your alliance with Deacon’s bunch of Synth-loving super spies, you can still accept the role of and act as the General of the Minutemen. You can help Preston and his Minutemen buddies retake the Castle, and then help them to reestablish it as their HQ. You can dive into radiant quests and settlement building, and thus acquire all the same settlements and support for the Minutemen from the people of the Commonwealth, and enhance them to your satisfaction. You can still return to those settlements to fight off attacks, and you still have exactly as many opportunities to eliminate raider gangs and other hazards through exploring the Commonwealth. Actually, you can do slightly more by siding with the Railroad, since a few of the post-game sidequests they give you has you hunting down a raider gang that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to attack. You can still have built up the Minutemen enough that their members are seen now and then patrolling the Commonwealth. And finally, it doesn’t really matter to the Minutemen whether they’re the ones to end the Institute, or whether it’s the Railroad that does the job--the important thing is simply to cease its threat to the people of the Commonwealth.

So you see, as long as you’re willing to dedicate the time and effort to do so, the Minutemen can have their goals accomplished even if you decide to side with the Railroad as your endgame faction. The good that the Minutemen accomplish is greater than the good the Railroad accomplishes, but it’s also not mutually exclusive to the Railroad’s good--you can support them both.

But of course, the question then becomes: isn’t the same true, in reverse? Since the Minutemen do not object to or obstruct the Railroad’s operations, couldn’t you also just choose the Minutemen as your faction to oppose the Institute, and still do the majority of the quests to help the Railroad? In fact, since the Minutemen don’t require you to act as a double agent in the Institute for so long as the Railroad does, you could argue it’s better this way around, since you won’t be forced to even mildly assist the Institute as a Minuteman the way you would as a Railroad agent.

Well, the answer is no. It’s not an equal matter on both sides, I’m afraid. If you support the Railroad, you can still accomplish every goal of the Minutemen and put them in the position to do all their good for the Commonwealth. But if you support the Minutemen, you cannot accomplish quite as much of the good the Railroad could have.

There are 2 major parts of this imbalance. The first is that in the attack on the Institute, the Railroad has specifically coordinated the captive Synths there to join the fight for their freedom and be involved in escaping from their captors. I’m sure that, during the Minutemen’s attack on the Institute, plenty of Synths use the opportunity to escape, but given that they weren’t expecting it, there’s a greater chance that many of them get caught in the middle of the fighting and perish, or don’t escape in time. And for those Synths who do escape the Institute during the Minutemen’s attack, they have no immediate protector, plan, or provider in the Commonwealth to help them, putting them at risk. The Railroad’s attack on the Institute, on the other hand, accounts for the freedom-seeking Synths of the Institute, and the Railroad has experience with guiding and safeguarding new Synths in the Commonwealth. So, ultimately, more good is done for the lives of the innocent and the free by the Railroad than the Minutemen in the final Institute attack.

The other reason, and the more compelling one, I think, is quite simply a case of which of the 2 factions needs the prestige more. See, the Commonwealth knows of the Institute’s demise once it happens, and Travis Miles does a report in which he acknowledges the Sole Survivor and the appropriate faction as the ones who ended the nightmare. Thanks to the gentle urgings of Diamond City Radio and Publick Occurrences, the people of the Commonwealth know that they owe a debt of gratitude, and to whom. And that goodwill is something that will benefit the Railroad’s cause a lot more than the Minutemen’s.

Oh, make no mistake, the Minutemen require goodwill to operate. It’s incredibly vital to them, in fact. The Minutemen is an organization that can’t survive if the common man doesn’t have faith in it. People’s willingness to trust and cooperate with the Minutemen is the lifeblood of these citizen soldiers, because the Minutemen ARE the people.

But the fact is that, provided you have appropriately built the Minutemen up, they have that goodwill. Your actions prove to the settlements which join up that the Minutemen can be trusted, and the game shows clearly that the Minutemen have regained their prestige in the eyes of the Commonwealth’s people. Random NPCs can comment in passing their approval of the work you’re doing in leading the Minutemen, and some of them can even stop your companion Preston and initiate a conversation with him in which they thank him for his work as a Minuteman. Hell, there’s enough positivity about the Minutemen that you can encounter a scam artist who seeks to impersonate Preston and take advantage of people’s gratitude by extorting them for donations. So it’s safe to say that the Minutemen can garner as much goodwill from the Commonwealth as they require even without being the ones to put the Institute down.

By contrast, though, the positive publicity of being the saviors of the Commonwealth would be a really, really great boon to the Railroad. The fact of the matter is that most people in the Commonwealth associate Synths with the Institute’s evils, and thus understandably have a paranoid fear of them. That kind of paranoia could lead to many acts of violence against the newly freed Synths attempting to find a place in this new world; this isn’t the kind of fear that is going to go away overnight, death of the Institute or not. But the knowledge that the Railroad, the faction known for being the champions of Synths’ rights and wellbeing, was the one to save the Commonwealth...well, that could go a long way to convincing a lot of the Commonwealth’s people to give Synths a chance, out of respect and/or gratitude to these saviors who think that Synths are worthwhile people. And considering that, with the destruction of the Institute, there’s now a ton of new Synths that the Railroad needs to move through and out of the Commonwealth in an attempt to set them up with new lives, to such an extent that the Railroad is actually openly securing checkpoints along the routes through which they guide their Synth charges, having the approval of the citizens is an important thing. Side with the Minutemen, and the Railroad will simply have to keep to a completely underground operation, and the Synths it cares for will continue to be at risk of oppression from their neighbors if ever discovered.

Admittedly, there is, I suppose, 1 other benefit to the faction that defeats the Institute, which I just brought up a moment ago: the military checkpoints, located here and there across the map. And in that regard, the Minutemen will do more good with them than the Railroad, since the Railroad’s agents occupy these checkpoints with the intention of securing safe passage for Synths, while the Minutemen take the checkpoints simply as a means of providing greater protection to travelers through the Commonwealth. So there is that factor to take into consideration...nonetheless, since the Minutemen will send out patrols through the Commonwealth anyway, and since I think it’s fair to also count the provisioners with which you connect your settlements as an additional measure of patrolling security, giving the Minutemen the military checkpoints is sort of just a case of strengthening one of the acts of good they already perform, while the benefits the Railroad garners from being the ones to defeat the Institute are otherwise outright unavailable.

So basically, that’s why I chose to support the Railroad during my playthrough of Fallout 4. I’ve seen a lot of people criticize the Railroad, and the players who throw their lot in with it, for choosing to help the few instead of the many. And that’s just not the case, because more or less all that the Minutemen accomplish for the greater good, they can still achieve if you side with the Railroad, while the reverse is not true. Side with the Railroad in Fallout 4, and you really can have your Fancy Lads Snack Cakes and eat them too.













* Also worth noting is that the Brotherhood of Steel isn’t really much better for even just the regular people of the Commonwealth. Yeah, they’ll definitely make the place safer, but they’ll have the Commonwealth’s citizens provide the Brotherhood with their food whether the citizens want to or not, and they’ll occupy and fortify whatever location strikes their fancy. The Brotherhood provides assistance by force, and independent of any wishes or stipulations that the people it supposedly protects might have. It’s basically like an organized crime protection racket, if a protection racket actually did offer protection. It ain’t the worst thing going on with the Brotherhood, but it is still a wrong.


** For the sake of this rant, we’re going to forego an argument about whether Synths are people and just jump right to the part where we all agree that they are. If you really want a rant where I lay out the reasoning behind that, then I can provide, but I daresay even the game itself isn’t too ambiguous on the matter, with party members like Nick, Curie, and Danse, characters like DIMA, Glory, and Mayor McDonough, and situations like Roger Warwick’s Synth’s slip of the tongue, the fact that the Synths are capable of wanting freedom, and the ambiguity of Synth-hood being a question for Kasumi and even the protagonist herself during the Far Harbor DLC. So yeah, we’re gonna just roll forward with the understanding here that Synths are people no more or less deserving of rights, happiness, safety, and all that jazz than any human or ghoul.


*** Okay, technically speaking, you CAN support the Minutemen without making an enemy of the Brotherhood of Steel. But members of the Brotherhood do express unease at the idea of the Minutemen being an armed peacekeeping force, and unless the BoS decide to turn around and go home--which doesn’t seem likely to happen; the game makes no indication that they will and they’ve already committed to setting up strongholds and policies in the Commonwealth--contention and conflict are pretty much a guarantee. Two rival peacekeeping forces in the same area is a recipe for problems already, and all it will take is the Brotherhood deciding it wants a particular settlement for strategic/scientific purposes, the Minutemen deciding they don’t take kindly to the BoS strong-arming their farmers into giving up their crops to the Brotherhood, the Brotherhood opening fire on innocent ghoul settlers, or some other inevitable incident of their incompatible ideologies and goals for the two factions to go to war.