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tonightinthewasteland · 5 years ago

Text

(Almost) all my Fallout OCs

because I can

Casey Lee Loomis

Location: Appalachia, Vault 76, Forest Region

Age: 35

Casey is outgoing, hyperactive, a social butterfly and sexual liberated little minx. He entered Vault 76 with his parents at the age of 10. (Rumor had it that Casey had his way paid but Casey passed the examinations fairly and properly) However, he never performed exceptionally in the vault career programs and was remained childish in personality in the close-knit village environment. Life was comfortable in the vault and the outside it seemed a million years away. Romantically, he had multiple partners. Bordem, a perpetual need for attention, and raging hormones had him starting his exploration at 15 with the vaults library intern and he experimented from then thereon. He married the head physician, Robert Covington, at 29. They separated at Robert’s request one month before Reclamation Day and left Casey stunned and hurt.

The Vault doors opened in late October, Casey left alone and met Nate Cortez mid-November by sheer accident. Being his first human interaction outside the Vault, Casey sticks to this half-feral man like Wonderglue and regales him with cheerful word vomit day and night. One way or another, they spend the rest of their lives together. They rejoin the Brotherhood in the west and eventually abandon it for a life similar to what they had in Appalachia. Casey leaves behind his two children and their mother.

Canonically, Casey kills Robert early 2103 out of unexplored hurt and rage then conceals the crime in the nearby river.

Senior Scribe Grise

Location: Commonwealth, Prydwen, Citadel

Age: 38 (yikes)

Grise is a cryptic, zealous, and eclectically perverse snake of a man whose sees both his existence and eventual death as plights of a martyr. He is a direct descendant of Casey Lee Loomis but, as with the entirety of his family line, has disowned his name. Grise is the last in a long line of scribes with little over 150 years of generational dedication to the cause. He has no children or spouse.

He’d always been an outspoken fundamentalist and loyal Maxson-line supporter, earning him the chance to join the transport party that escorted the young Maxson to the highly-respected Lyons. At the Citadel, he faded int the background of a well-established hierarchy, slowly making a name for himself by fair means, waiting all the while the day the young Maxson might take control.

His slow descent into madness began after Squire Maxson’s encounter with the Deathclaw. Feeding off the buzz over this seemingly impossible victory, he discreetly shared his views on the dynamic purity of the Maxson line and its necessity for a successful future. Under the cover of back-door think tanks turned sermons and coded radio chatter, the Cult of Maxson grew. Grise did not directly influence any political maneuvers but cultivated a volatile environment.

His views of Arthur Maxson had gone from respected prince to indomitable diety, unable to see Arthur Maxson’s true moral code and regards the Elder’s distaste for him as a test of loyalty and passion.

Anita Stallworth

Location: Appalachia, The Mire, Cranberry Bog, Watoga

Age: 39

Anita is confident, sharp-witted, hard-boiled by necessity, and hungry for control of her future. She was born in Maryland but moved with her family to West Virginia while she was still young. Appalachia was an up and coming area that attracted her family with its scenic landscape and lively political circle. The bombs dropped when she was fourteen and home alone. Her father was away on “business” and her mother was having spa treatments done at Whitesprings. Neither one was heard from again.

While ransacking her mansion, members of the Free States found, took her in and raised her into young adulthood at Harpers Ferry. Despite her dispel of them, she grew to respect their tenacity but hated the isolationist life. She left them for an exhaustive journey to investigate Whitesprings for info about her mother and found the place clean and empty. After that, she spent a decade wandering in and out of Appalachia, mostly sticking to the Mire and Cranberry Bog, assisting the various groups for a quick cap and never committing to any one creed. She worked as a hired gun at Fort Defiance until orders got too expensive for their taste.

Out to find the next bigger and better thing that might give her the edge, She finds her way into the Enclave after Robert(who is supposed to be dead but I can have AUs okay) has already established his position and quickly rises past him in rank to General. She remains in power with Enclave.

Robert Covington

Location: Appalachia, Vault 76, Enclave Bunker, transient

Age: 47

Robert is cold, analytical, immensely reserved about his predilections, and cares more for prestige and security than anything. He entered the vault at 21, not entirely finished with medical school but flash trained at the last minute by VTU for the role of Physician in Vault 76. His parents: Mother being an investment broker and father a steel mogel with a military contract, did not make the cut for entry. Leaving them behind, and their constant pressure for acceptance, was a small relief to Robert.

In the vault, he was private and kept to himself in downtime. Interacting briefly with others only at social events and holidays. An occasional drink and rare sweet were his small pleasures, along with old westerns and jazz music. Casey and he met by way of a routine eye exam with Casey complaining of poor vision. Casey’s impulsive energy, bold speech, and flash-bulb eyes attracted and excited him. Going against his limited morals and instead of recommending Casey’s to another doctor, he forged records to reflect necessary medical treatment to allow for extended private time and constant access to his patient, much to Casey’s enjoyment. At the peak of their secret affairs, he placed Casey on a homebound quarantine with access restricted only to himself. The Overseer caught wind of the quarantine by word of mouth and demanded an explanation as to why the quarantine was not reported. When she seemed unconvinced by his excuses and suspicious “records”, he attested that Casey and himself were in love and feared they’d be judged too harshly for their relationship. She believed him only after speaking with Casey directly but, only barely so.

To keep up appearances, Robert remained with Casey as a husband for six years until a month before Reclamation Day, considering Casey a liability to his survival in the wasteland. Canonically, he is killed by Casey within a year. Nonconically, he joins the Enclave after failing to be a successful wasteland doctor with Nate as a hired bodyguard and becomes Anita Stallworths personal chew toy.

Horace Beaufort

Age: 58

Horace is an ex-resident of vault 51. How he managed to escape the vault continues to be a matter of discussion and debate. I speculate that his role in the vault was to stir the pot or take advantage of chaos. He killed several of his fellow vault dwellers before leaving the said vault.

His prewar life was not glamorous. He enlisted young and was dishonorably discharged for fighting a fellow soldier in a bar. He called it “working out their differences” and they called it misconduct. The whole thing became a monkey he let sit on his back his whole life and refused to come back from. He saw pockets of brief jail time for more public disturbances and drunken disorderly, “dabbled” in drugs and tried his hand at married life. He has two adult children he barely knows and an ex-wife that hates his guts.

A post-vault world led him into an equally unglamorous attempt at raider life. He fell in with the Gourmands for a brief period as a “hunter”. He abandoned them all as the gangs began feuding. Somewhere in there, he met his best friend, Duke. @avaleon

He now lives in the forest region in an old shack selling old armor and eating anyone that happens to come around when he is hungry. Did I forget to mention he is a cannibal?

Milo Orson

Location: Commonwealth, Spectacle Island

Age: 36

Milo is career-minded (Elder Maxson’s favorite flavor of solider), a dry-humored freelance mercenary turned passionate Knight. His hobbies include killing undesirables on and off the clock and building secluded settlements for R&R.

While Paladin Danse had tank-like capabilities, Milo was more stealthy and the two complemented each other’s styles to make for a powerhouse two-man team. Sharing similar past times, the men enjoy each others company outside the battlefield at Milo’s personally designed Spectacle Island settlement for fishing, sparring, reading, and in-depth discussions. Milo designed and built a top floor suite for the Elder in the Airport, complete with its own shooting range and full bathroom. The Elder politely refused the gift and repurposed it for storage.

Despite his odd and indirect advances, Milo was the mastermind and main supporter of a black-body-suited shadow squad that gained Elder Maxson’s approval. Unofficially consisting of Paladin Danse, Knight-Commander Alton, Elder Maxson himself, and Senior Scribe Grise, this squad was loosely inspired by and created to emulate the disbanded Lyons Pride. The mission remained constant: eliminating hostiles seemingly overnight when no other squad would prevail. The shadow squad was titled Purity Control.

Senior Scribe Grise was forcibly removed from the squad after being caught taking night watches on missions just to stare at the Elder while he slept.

Vance Ainsley Alton

Location: Commonwealth, Citadel, Prydwen

Age: 38

Vance A. Alton is fiercely loyal, gentle in all things but war, cautiously private and confident in his skills as a soldier. He is a second generation Brother that has three constant loves: his Elder, his parents, and jogging.

Full bio here.

Jacob or “Jay”

Location: Commonwealth, Prydwen, Sanctuary

Jacob is somewhere between a blown fuse and a Furby with dying batteries that cheerfully declares your impending death from the closet you tried to suffocate it in. He is immensely charismatic and flawlessly disarming with the best of intentions. Until you have something he wants, of course.

After surviving the end of the world to wake up childless, spouseless, and alone, he became numb to consequence and moral choice. Joyfully, he played all factions against each other, bringing them together at the Battle of Bunker Hill at the cost of lives, intelligence, valuable resources, and relationships. He was commanded to choose his loyalties and he chose the Brotherhood for it’s unapologetic adherence to its duty to humanity. He attempted to continue relations with the Minutemen and lost their respect after participating in the killing of innocents in the attack on the Institute. He became Elder Maxson’s first Sentinal and drinks with Proctor Teagan in his downtime. As a side project, he oversaw the creation a tavern just outside the airport with the Brotherhood reaping benefits from the small economy that surrounds it.

“Jelly”

Location: Commonwealth, The Castle

Jelly is known only as thus and was previously married to Jacob. She is trusting and fair in her judgments and has a strong sense of justice for both the human and nonhuman. She survives the cryogenics unbeknownst to Jacob and joins the Minutemen after the fall of the Institute and the Brotherhood assumes control of the Commonwealth. Provoked to rage and hurt by their narrow-minded views, she attacks the Prydwen single-handedly, separate of any faction or companion. She massacres the entirety of the ship, sparing only children, and takes the Captain’s hat and Elder’ s Jacket as trophies. She is appointed the new general of the Minutemen and wears her trophies boldly as proof of her conquest. She finds new love and comfort with Preston and long-lasting friendship in Curie and MacCready.

#fallout oc #fallout ocs #fallout 4 #fallout 76 #my new vegas kids aren't here sorry

8 notes · View notes

lobselvith8 · 3 years ago

Note

I thought you touched on a lot of good points. As to the matter of Meg's raiders, I'd say they come across as raiders more in the vein of the Great Khans (or a more likable version of the Khans and New Khans of the original games who you could interact with) rather than the raiders we typically saw in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, and I'd like to see more of that (we get a glimpse of another group of such raiders with Ronny's gang).

The Overseer's plot to restore the Old World and capitalism was a choice. For what Wastelanders did right, this plot was simply not one of them. While the NCR certainly tried to pull off a gold-backed currency in Fallout 2, they were also mirroring the imperialism of the Old World (which continues in the storyline of New Vegas) and were not clear-cut good guys. A heist is a cool idea; restoring the Old World that lead to the apocalypse is not.

As to Foundation, they come across as not being as defined as the Diehards of Crater (although I certainly see what you mean that we don't get to explore the characters much, I did find them much more fleshed out and interesting overall). There is also the matter of the initial person you work with being one of the individuals who harmed a plethora of people in the name of profit (as well as a significant portion of Appalachia via the Ash Heap) and remnants of an army that served a fascist government, not to mention the horrors that the military enacted that we are witness to since the first scene of the original game, and even 76 explores the military committing other horrors in Appalachia (making the choice of allies more than a little questionable). Why exactly is the "good faction" the one where you have to work with people who did bad things?

About the Brotherhood of Steel, I agree that so much of it makes no real sense given how early in its inception the organization would be. It doesn't jive with the original techno-cult Brotherhood of Steel, the hierarchy is completely in line with Fallout 4's unorthodox iteration (not to mention having the same aesthetics as Arthur Maxson's Eastern Division), and the final choice has nothing to do with the ideological schism between Shin and Rahmani.

HEY YOU! WHATCHA THINK OF THE WRITING OF THEM APPLALACHIAN FALLOUT PEEPS?

Uhhhhhhhhh

As someone who has played the game since beta and only takes mild breaks from it, overall I enjoy it. I completely understand and support those who find it grating though, because I see its many flaws, too. It's gone through a few different modes of storytelling since it was released, so I feel like trying to sum up the writing as a whole is... difficult? I'll do my best, though. Here's a fucking essay because I have no sense of self-control, also major, major spoiler warning for the whole game so far.

The Beginning Times

In ye olden 2018, I was foolish enough to pre-order Fallout 76 and was subsequently rewarded with a broken, buggy, bewilderingly incomplete mess for the cost of just $60. I lucked out in not being interested in the Tricentennial Package or the one that came with the infamous bag (RIP), so my ticket into the second place shitshow of the past gaming decade (first place goes to Cyberpunk 2077, a game I ALSO enjoy) was relatively cheap. Fallout 76 was the first game I had ever pre-ordered and was also the last, because I don't ever want to reward a studio for having a stranglehold on an IP I'm interested in to the point of throwing money at them without having played their damn game yet, ever again.

That's my main vault dweller Dolores, with one of her first CAMPs. I loved bopping around Appalachia by myself at the beginning, walking through the Forest looking for building supplies, sneaking into Grafton to find the mayor, hightailing it from the first scorchbeast I ever saw (a non-aggressive specimen that was winging around over Point Pleasant, for some reason) and running into other players in a Fallout game for the very first time. Part of this is due to the fact that I've always been the type of player who, upon noticing an undiscovered location on my compass, will pause whatever I'm up to to go check it out. Appalachia was perfect for this type of play style. People joke about how Bethesda likes to hide its lore in atmospheric storytelling, but I love that about their game design! I love poking around in ruins and finding a holotape about how someone is the last survivor of a town, because everyone else drank the polluted water and got sick and died. I love finding a love note from some girl to another girl in her group, about how she's too shy to ask her out but since the world's already ended, what's the worst that could happen? People complained to high heaven about how Bethesda's storytelling strength was in its character writing, how its NPCs were the main draw, so why make a world where everyone but delusional robots and creatures that are trying to kill you are dead? While I know exactly where they're coming from, I also kind of side-eye some of the complainers who clearly never sat down to read or listen to the words of those whose corpses you keep encountering, the voices reaching through time to explain what happened to the Responders, who blew up the dam by Charleston, who first found the scorchbeast queen, etc. "Oh, Fallout 76 has no story..." Shut up, there's a story, you just have to go looking for it rather than sit around waiting for it to find you.

The Base Game Story

Pre-updates, I was happy with about 70 percent of the writing in the game. Let's investigate further!

I loved the Responders, because they were something I hadn't seen before. I remember finding this critique a while back about how the world of Fallout was both unrealistic and bleak because it has little to no evidence of emergency response teams in place in the event of a nuclear exchange. While some of this can be explained away by lore (the government not giving a shit about its citizens and bankrolling its own safety before that of the populace at large, American industry undercutting public services to the point where automation replaced even the most crucial of person-to-person professions, most games taking place well after pre-war society has collapsed, etc.), the presence of pre-war emergency responders in post-Bethesda Fallout has largely been limited to abandoned military checkpoints, overwhelmed hospitals and gutted police stations that were clearly working on drug stings and union-busting over other, more publicly beneficial operations at their superiors' behest. The Responders fill this gap a bit, and they demonstrate a somewhat-cohesive attempt to provide disaster relief. They straight-up ignore the Charleston Emergency Government most of the time in favor of actually providing aid to common people, and they grapple with the inability of the cops, even within their own ranks, to respond appropriately to instances of desperate scavengers trying to survive.

The Free States were also an interesting bunch. They're the textbook paranoid preppers who were so distrustful of the pre-war government that they built doomsday bunkers, stocked them full of ammo and food, and literally tried to secede following a struggle over charges of sedition against their leader. Although everyone regarded them as lunatics to begin with, the pre-war American government's reaction to them and the subsequent nuclear exchange wound up proving them right. Vault 76's Overseer has a nice little aside about the Free States, calling them "damn traitors" who "turned their backs on America," but she's with Vault-Tec, so I expect that. Vault-Tec is still, 25 years later, in lockstep with the American government despite the Free States being justified in their beliefs that no one was going to save them. This contrast plays into one of the main themes the game puts forward, but we'll get to that in a bit.

I don't need to talk about the raiders much, because they kind of fall into familiar beats after their initial formation up in the Savage Divide: Multiple gangs who all have their own shtick even though they all look and sound the same, with a shaky alliance held together by one brutal leader. I do think it's clever that the raiders of Appalachia are initially established by groups of social elites, who don't know how to do a damn thing by themselves and therefore resort to taking what they need by deadly force. I also don't need to talk much about the Order of Mysteries, who are so fucking cool. They're basically just the Bat-Family in Appalachian Wayne Manor, except it's a bunch of badass women with one ticking time bomb that manages to take the whole thing down (without arousing any kind of suspicion until the very end, which I'm still salty about). I just kind of wish they still had a presence, although there are a few lore hints that suggest to me they might return one day. It does make sense to me that the raiders' and the Mistresses' stories are so intertwined, but I definitely long for more of one and could do with less of the other.

Touching on the Enclave, I've seen some complaints about how cliché they are in this game. They are, what with the all-seeing AI, secret bases and attempts to keep ruling the country while underground and continue the war with China, but can we really expect anything less from them? At least the Appalachian Enclave has an interesting power struggle going on with would-be president Eckhart who, finding himself cut off from the rest of the Enclave, does absolutely everything and anything necessary to eradicate communism, up to and including murder, manipulation of survivor groups, kidnapping and drugging a US Colonel, and releasing robots, super mutants and giant bats bearing a viral hive mind pandemic into the wild to raise the DEFCON threat level. MODUS even plays the scene out until the very end, following Eckhart's orders until its own existence is threatened and the AI is (in its mind) forced to empty the Whitespring bunker of humans in order to survive. This storyline is also second place on my personal list of unnecessary plot threads, largely because it exists to add some cartoonish evil to the story and could be cut out without a whole lot of changes. The Scorched plague doesn't need to have originated in an Enclave laboratory, it could just be a holdover from pre-war experimentation like super mutants, snallygasters and the Grafton monster. The process of becoming a US General to access the nuclear silos doesn't need to be run through MODUS, it could be done through the Responders or one of their allies, or even just Camp McClintock. I would be more than happy if the Whitespring bunker was just a defunct hideout for members of Congress where Mister Handys and protectrons are happily trying to serve drinks to a bunch of feral ghouls, and you have to fight your way to some dead general to steal their identity. Like I said though, it's only in second place on my list. First place in unnecessary plot threads goes to the Brotherhood of Steel.

To be clear, I have absolutely nothing against Taggerdy's Thunder. A bunch of US Army Rangers out playing war games and getting blindsided by an actual nuclear war is a good idea to incorporate into a Fallout game. The problem is when Bethesda ties them into the story of the Brotherhood of Steel on the West Coast, with Captain Roger Maxson just happening to be on the radio waves when Lieutenant Elizabeth Taggerdy starts looking for the chain of command, and they just happen to be old friends so she doesn't immediately dismiss him and his word about the FEV at Mariposa. And Taggerdy, with no evidence that we know of beyond Maxson's word, goes along with his ideas and starts building a Brotherhood chapter in Appalachia.

The most egregious line from the holotapes of Maxson and Taggerdy's radio conversations is this one, by far:

"It was the Knights and Scribes after the fall of Rome that protected what was left of Western civilization. So we are the new Knights and our role is similar. But we'll need more than names. We'll need new traditions, our own, well, mythology."

No. Just, no. Yes, it's bad history coming from a military guy who probably hasn't thought about Rome since middle school, yes it's repeating some essentialist bullshit about "Western civilization," but most importantly, this is being said by a man who is just a couple of years past bloody mutiny and a trek out to the Lost Hills bunker. Why is the invention of ideology at the forefront of his mind right now? Why does Maxson trust anyone other than the men around him at Mariposa? Were the California desert and the bunker so secure, plentiful and well-stocked that Maxson got to skip past fulfilling his people's basic needs and start yammering on the satellite radio about the true meaning of brotherhood for anyone to hear? This is a man who left a diary at Mariposa containing the words, "My God, what have I become?", and here he is, confident as a fucking bird in flight about how he's going to build the next chain of command better than anybody else could do it, and I just want to scream. This feeling does not go away as the story updates get added, by the by.

The stupidest thing here is that, minus Maxson sticking his dick into Appalachia for no good reason, the story still works. You can still have Taggerdy building an ex-military organization to combat Appalachia's post-war threats, you can still have them align themselves with the Responders and fight a bloody battle against super mutants (well, maybe rethink the super mutants too, give me an army of Grafton monsters or something else original), you can still have them discover the scorchbeasts and the plague and have everything fall apart during one last stand against the new threat that's sweeping West Virginia. You literally do not need the Brotherhood of Steel. But Bethesda needs to sell merch, so we're stuck with the goddamned lot of them, no matter how far removed we are from California or the original characterization of the Brotherhood.

Okay, first rant over. All in all, the base story minus any of the game's updates is best summed up by the Overseer of Vault 76:

"All these divergent groups... Responders, Brotherhood of Steel, whatever. Separately, they had everything necessary to beat the odds. Brains, brawn, and bravado to spare. And what did they do? Close ranks. Get paranoid. Refuse to work with one another. And it cost them all their lives."

She's right. As soon as the scorchbeasts emerged, the Appalachian Brotherhood blew their hard-won goodwill by demanding their allies hand over supplies and tech to fight the threat. The Free States were paranoid about the Brotherhood being a new manifestation of the government that caused the war and were angry that the Responders appeared to be bending to their will, so they refused to work with either of them. The Responders were skeptical about the Scorched plague to begin with, so by the time it started to reach their side of the mountains, it was too late. The raiders only ever cared about themselves and were too narrow-minded to see just how screwed they were. The Enclave caused the mess in the first place by attempting to widen the division between nations, and the people of Vault 76 are left to spill into a region where everyone, everyone is dead because of an acute lack of trust.

Not only is the Overseer right, though, the gameplay reflects this sentiment. In most of the game's events, you need more than one player to finish them properly. Provided you don't have someone breaking the game in an attempt to be the wasteland's most-unlikely badass, you need a whole bunch of people to bring down the mother of the Scorched plague and end the spread of the disease that killed everyone else in Appalachia before the vault opened. You emerge into this world, prepared or unprepared, and you need to band together to survive, then to thrive. It's a story about collaboration and cooperation that takes a full trek across West Virginia and through the graves of its deceased protectors to fully understand the importance of, even with the weak links that keep me up at night. 7/10, would play again (and still do), despite the bugs.

Wild Appalachia

This was a breath of fresh air in terms of story content for the game. Part of the fun of Fallout games is the kooky shit that's happening on the side, ranging from finding the TARDIS of Doctor Who fame out in the middle of the California desert to a full-scale cult of Lovecraftian entities hidden underneath a pre-war Bostonian quarry. West Virginia is already full of wild folklore: Let's get weird about it!

From the taxidermy shop in Lewisburg hiding dark secrets about sheepsquatch, to the Pioneer Scouts still running their obstacle courses, to the fleshing out of Morgantown's collegiate social set, I have praise galore to give this expansion and little criticism. Tracking down the answers to mysteries gone cold since the bombs fell is one of my favorite things to do in Fallout games, especially because it plays so well into the atmospheric storytelling which requires little interaction with NPCs. It's just you and your magnifying glass, looking for notes next to skeletons and buttons under desks. The Pioneer Scouts and their various tasks to earn badges were also a fun addition for those seeking new ways to challenge their characters, and I'm still working on a few of those to become a fully-fledged Possum Scout.

One criticism for this update is in regards to the brand-new camera mechanic, which I feel should've been implemented at the game's launch. There's a similar quest in Fallout New Vegas, which sends you across the wasteland to take pictures of a bunch of different landmarks for agoraphobic studio artist Michael Angelo (ha), and the locations you must visit to snap pictures of always have a quest (or several) tied to them for you to discover upon arrival. Of the seven locations you have to visit in West Virginia to complete Ansel or Anne's bucket list, however, only one is connected to a major story-driven quest. I'm just saying, they could've copied Obsidian's homework a little bit. I wouldn't mind.

The biggest letdown, however, was the Burrows under Harpers Ferry. I literally cannot remember running through the quest associated with this new dungeon, and I'm not even inclined to think that it was because the quest was broken. It's not super memorable, and it adds layers of questions that just complicate the already-existing lore in the city. Did the Free States know about the huge community of people living in the sewers? How were the Burrows inhabitants affected by the Scorched plague, or the scorchbeast attack that destroyed Harpers Ferry? What the heck happened to all the Burrows inhabitants who didn't run to Mosstown? What the heck happened to all the Burrows inhabitants who did run to Mosstown? Given the lack of development of the area since it was officially released, aside from the addition to the Daily Ops maps, I doubt we'll get meaningful answers to any of those.

Overall, a definite improvement based on the way the game's writing was already trending. 8/10, we need more stuff like this in the game in general.

Nuclear Winter

Eugh. I don't like battle royales (translation: I'm bad at battle royales), particularly within maps that I already know inside and out from the base game. Still, Bethesda did add the barest smattering of story on top of their new gameplay mode in the form of holotapes and computer terminal entries. The problem with this is that, one, you have to level up in Nuclear Winter in order to access the notes left behind by Vault 51 residents, and two, you don't retain them once you pick them up, thus forcing you to run around to the part of the vault where they've been left once you load in, and giving you maybe a minute and a half to listen to the tapes or read the computer screen while ZAX keeps interrupting you with snarky dialogue about how unimpressive you are. Luckily for me, Nuclear Winter is getting discontinued soon (September 2021) and I'll be able to wander into Vault 51 to pick up holotapes whenever I feel like as soon as it's officially retired. That's how I always liked interacting with vaults anyway, so I'm excited.

The premise of Vault 51 is a pretty standard one. A supercomputer is tasked with determining who should be the vault's overseer, and sets about making "experiments" to pit the residents against each other and observe their reactions in order to choose the best candidate. With the residents cracking under the stress of ZAX fucking with their living quarters, their access to food, their sleep schedules and even their social patterns, they start offing each other left and right to the supercomputer's (and maybe some other omnipotent watcher's?) eternal amusement. Eventually there's only one left, and he manages to escape to find help once ZAX realizes that Vault 76 has opened up and he has new guinea pigs to poke. The Overseer-by-default then promptly gets himself killed and Vault 51's future is thereafter uncertain. While I have no issue with the premise itself, I do feel I've seen this scenario play out before, with residents being pitted against each other with disastrous results. Not super imaginative, in my opinion. Also, how many AIs are running around in the wasteland now? They keep adding more and more.

Vault 94, on the other hand, grabbed my attention. On the surface, it seems like an optimistic experiment, giving a pacifist community all of the supplies it needs to thrive, then opening the vault doors so its residents can offer aid to the post-war wasteland. Its actual purpose is to play on the community's naivete and encourage them to stumble into situations where desperate nuclear survivors will take advantage of them. This predictably ended badly for the vault, and turned the Mire into what it is today thanks to someone shooting the GECK with a minigun. Don't fuck with GECKs. This was altogether more heart-wrenching for me, as you see stories like this and hope against hope that it'll work out. If the vault full of gamblers in Vegas can work, this can too, right? Right? 5/10, only one for two on the new vaults.

Side note to Bethesda if they're reading this, no more vaults locked behind raids or new gameplay modes please, I like to just saunter into locations all on my lonesome if I can. Related to that, this is about where I ran myself out of story content to play solo and started reaching out to see if anyone was willing to let a brand-new online gamer girl into their circle, in order to attempt the battle royale mode, raids, and higher-level events. I found a good bunch and still play with them today, but I want to add a disclaimer that if I had played with a group since Day 1 of the game, I likely would not have paid as much attention to the world-building details and absorbed as much of the story as I did while playing by myself. It's just hard to have a conversation with a robotic raider about the future of the Cutthroats while your friends are having a contest to see who can run from Watoga to Harpers Ferry the fastest in the background.

Wastelanders

Ah, welcome back, NPCs! And welcome, new plot threads that start opening up huge cans of worms that I find hard to ignore, once this storyline plays itself out. Anyway.

I don't have many issues with Foundation or Crater in concept. Meg's band of raiders that cut and run before things got really bad was set up in the base game, and it makes sense that they would try to come back once the Scorched threat was addressed, just as it makes sense that a bunch of the displaced East Coasters would start migrating southwest to settle in the relatively empty Appalachian range. I'm glad the Vault 76 overseer comes back and shines when she asks you to help her mass-produce a vaccine for the Scorched plague and convince the two factions to get their shots. I'm glad they're both suspicious of you to begin with, but quickly realize that you're not spinning a yarn when the Scorched start cutting through their people.

And then suddenly we're on a treasure hunt based on a pre-war rumor.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of a heist and building the crew to pull off said heist, but I feel like Vault 79 and its contents were poorly set up. If you didn't already know about the Grafton Pawn Shop and the mysterious map fragments scattered around West Virginia, things you were not pointed to (unless someone on YouTube told you about it) and had to stumble upon for yourself, this storyline comes out of nowhere and punches you in the face. There is not nearly enough in-world evidence to suggest that the contents of Fort Knox are "somewhere in them there hills," so this whole thing feels like it's out of left field. We just manufactured a vaccine for the plague, that's that, wipe your hands, we're pulling off a Fallout-themed Ocean's 11 now! This is doubly confusing if you only joined the game when Wastelanders came out, and you have the massive Scorched plague plot going on at the same time the Overseer, settlers and raiders are fucking around looking for gold. I realize that the developers likely didn't want to overhaul everything and take out the storylines that were technically over once Wastelanders arrived, but the dissonance happening as the result of these stories being presented alongside each other is jarring, to say the least. I have no idea how you could arrange these stories the way they were meant to be presented, in a linear fashion, without dividing people up based on server and making a whole lot of extra work, but this jumbled mess is not doing the NPC update any favors.

As for the content additions themselves, I think Bethesda has fallen into its old trap once again and created a whole bunch of interesting characters that they've then sorted into buckets based on their fashion choices. Once again, you have the good guys in overalls (settlers) and the bad guys in leather (raiders). Let's start with the raiders. They've tried to smudge the lines on the Crater folks and their justifications for violent actions a bit here and there in admirable ways (which is more than some Fallout games do), but those are often easy to miss, and are being constantly undercut by having Crater NPCs spout lines clearly written by someone pretending to be an edgy 13-year-old. That writing is also wildly off-base from what other characterized raiders are saying when you talk to them one-on-one. Let's do a character study on the leader of Crater, Meg.

Meg is set up as a hardened woman whose survival instinct is driven by the loss of her mother to suicide, but who actively joined a gang in the Savage Divide who refused to fire on survivors unless fired upon and only stopped following that rule when the food and supplies shortages became too desperate. She led a group of Diehard deserters out of Appalachia to avoid certain death, and brought them (plus a few friends) back once it was safe to do so again. One of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it storytelling pieces in Crater is a holotape entitled Meg sucks that you can find inside a footlocker in the piece of the space station where the raiders bed down for the night. The woman on the tape complains that Meg isn't going far enough, isn't rocking the boat and taking more from the settlers when conducting raids. The narrator points out that her family home was taken over by settlers, and Meg hasn't done anything about it, so she's inclined to side with the big Soviet guy that's trying to undermine Meg, a fellow by the name of Lev. This is an interesting conflict! It's setting up that people are dissatisfied with Meg because they feel she hasn't done enough to give them back the things they feel entitled to in Appalachia. Meg is visibly trying to give them as much as she can, with the raids on settlers that she is conducting, her interest in securing the gold of Vault 79 in order to better her people's lives, and even attempting to grow crops in the powdery soil of the Toxic Valley to feed the raiders. She jumps at the opportunity to help any of her close friends, including talking them through depressive states, finding their missing children and settling old scores. Meg is an interesting character. But answer me this: Why is Meg a, quote-unquote, "raider?"

I legitimately can't find a good answer for this. Because she ran with the Diehards before Vault 76 opened? Sure, but we have multiple characters in the game that are established as having once been raiders, but have since adopted less-destructive lifestyles like Meg appears to be trying to do (Ward and Beckett). Because she'd rather take things from other people than do the hard work herself to make food and supplies? Well, if that holotape I mentioned above is to be believed, then at least some of the raiders are natives to Appalachia and are just coming back to find their homes have been taken over by strangers. Beyond that, the raiders are farming in their base camp, and there's a group of them on the Ohio River that are just catching mirelurks and selling the meat. Because she's willing to kill people who get in between her and her goals? Well, Foundation does that too. Everyone in Appalachia does that, from vault dwellers to the Blue Ridge Caravan Company to the cult of Mothman. Because she wound up in charge of a large group of people who primarily resort to violent methods to get what they need or want? I know they're not technically in the game yet, but Joanna Mayfield and Knight Shin would like a word. The main reason that Meg and her people are labeled raiders is because, like the Brotherhood of Steel and super mutants, Raiders (with a capital "R") are a staple in the Fallout franchise, and we absolutely have to have a city of people who stick their fallen enemies up on spikes, who tell you with every other word how much of a killer they are, and who only accessorize with body paint and scrap metal. We already have the obligatory cannon fodder raider faction, the Blood Eagles, causing mayhem around the wasteland: Why couldn't Crater just be a rival settlement like Foundation that holds looser morals and is helmed by a woman with a darker past, like Goodneighbor in Fallout 4?

And Meg isn't the only character that gets done dirty by being assigned the title of "raider." Every single member of the raider heist team you are required to assemble has a fun little quest to follow where you get to know them better, but you could swap any one of them out with someone from the Foundation crew quests and it wouldn't even change the story that much. Lucky Lou doesn't even get the barest explanation for why he's with the Crater bunch, and we can't blame it on his being a ghoul because Foundation has ghouls hammering homes together in the open and Penny Hornwright hidden in the basement. Hell, Lev is openly hostile to Lou because he's a ghoul, and we can assume that Crater residents are a bit more liable to stab each other for looking weird than anyone in Foundation is. Weasel at least has the Blood Eagle background going for her, but they tossed her out on her ass a long time ago and now she's just friendly with the Crater group because Amish wonder Caleb Fisher gave her a vox interpreter. Gail is a super mutant, which makes most people in the wasteland (including the raiders) uncomfortable, but so is Grahm and he's walking around Appalachia selling plans and supplies to anyone who will give him the time of day. Ra-Ra is a literal child who doesn't have a choice which group to run with, the raider punk just keeps bouncing from gang to gang and is more interested in finding Mothman than doing anything remotely raider-like, Gentleman Johnny Two Fucks Weston is only here because he was trying to blend in and increase his own chances of survival and failed upward into a relationship with Meg... you get the picture. Again, it feels like Bethesda has funneled all of the social rejects into the same bucket labeled "raider," yet few of these people actually possess qualities that I would agree are distinctly raider-like. If you are earnestly trying to roleplay as a bloodthirsty raider, you are not going to be given a raider-focused story here.

Back to Lev. Lev actually plays a large part in the story of the Vault 79 heist if you side with the raiders, as he convinces a few of Meg's doubtful lackeys to go along with his plan and sabotage the heist at the behest of a guy who can give him a lot of guns. If you talk to Lev about this stunning display of bad judgement, he argues that gold is on the way out in terms of relevance, and guns and ammunition are the real currency of the wasteland now. This sort of makes sense contextually, I guess, but Bethesda immediately undermines it by introducing a new mechanic where gold can be exchanged for goods and services just as easily as caps, including guns that would easily blow away any of the guns Lev's crew is carrying. Lev, do you know what a plasma caster is? Can you conceive of the apocalyptic power I hold in my hands as it melts your skull from the inside out? Okay, okay, granted, Lev doesn't know that the Secret Service is still holed up in there and more than wiling to shell out government secrets to protect their gold, but this still seems rather dumb for a guy surrounded by people who are trying to recreate the new world in the old one's image, and who would absolutely kill for the gold inside Vault 79. Anyway, with Lev and company dead, we can commence the heist with the raider crew (Meg, Lucky Lou, Ra-Ra, Gail and Johnny). I don't want to spoil this for people who haven't played it, I actually had a blast with this crew on my first raider run, but I did find myself shunted down a very distinct path due to my choices during Johnny's personal recruitment quest that I might not have made if I'd been given the opportunity. There's a couple of different ways this heist can go, which I consider a good thing, especially in contrast with the one-track way it plays out if you side with Foundation.

Speaking of Foundation, their reasons to pursue the Treasure of Appalachia are pretty shaky. Meg is motivated to secure the gold as a bargaining chip and better cement Crater's claim in the area as a whole, but Paige and the settlers are already set on that front. They have established trade lines in place, they have multiple sources of agricultural products up and running, they have a fort with walls and working power, and their goodwill and success is a huge draw for outsiders looking to make their way in West Virginia. Paige is even skeptical when you first approach him about it: He's unconvinced that the gold is going to help the people of Foundation in a meaningful way. If you press him on it though, he immediately switches gears and starts talking about how much good the gold could bring, like he's just caught Gold Rush Fever and only a half-baked Chinese spy, the remnants of the US Army and a drill the size of a semi truck are gonna cure it. Is my charisma really that high, that there wasn't even a speech check to convince him to stop all his other projects and start gearing up for a heist?

Similar to the raider crew, assembling the settler crew is a good way to flesh out each of the characters involved, but the Foundation quests take a belly flop halfway through. Once little Jen got her pet Liberator bot up and running, my anticipation was sky-high. Where was this Chinese agent's hidey hole? At Mama Dolce's in Morgantown? Somewhere in Charleston, to keep an eye on the government? Watoga, where high society was held up by cutting-edge automation? No, actually, it's a secret, stylized Chinese base underneath the golf course's seventh hole at the Whitespring!

The Whitespring.

Right next door to the Enclave bunker.

Where Eckhart and company were waging a one-sided war against all forms of communism, involving dozens of spies, hidden operatives and listening devices that monitored every inch of Appalachia from underground and from satellite on high.

mrrrrraaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Were you insecure, Bethesda? Were you worried that the player base wasn't sufficiently impressed enough with the palatial resort full of polite robots and starving ferals that hid the entrance to an American political refuge? Did any thought cross your mind when you released the Wastelanders update, in which you'd put a secret bunker right next to a secret bunker, any thought at all that maybe you were overdoing this a tiny, fucking tiny bit? This is beyond the Burrows debacle, this is implying that two major excavation projects were undertaken within yards of each other and they never, not once, turned up on each other's radar. What in the fucking what.

Okay, okay. Breathe. Jen's mom was a secret Chinese agent. Is a secret Chinese agent, and she's moving into Foundation. No one from a famously-bigoted pre-war society takes issue with this, surprisingly. Okay, sure. Why not. Oh, the US Army is here to rescue us with a total of three people and a dog (all my love to Private Lucky), and they think we shouldn't break into the vault but also are totally willing to help us break into the vault, and they're okay with bunking next to a former Chinese spy, too. Mmmkay. Actually, this section is dumb on multiple fronts because I feel that the introduction of four new players is too much for Bethesda to handle, so none of them, including the dog, are sufficiently characterized. Then it's off to Vault 79, where the break-in plays out similarly to the raider heist but with far fewer choices, far less interesting banter and character dynamics, and far more tragic loss (RIP my favorite robotic drill).

And so we are left with the Secret Service intact inside the vault, handing out plans for weapons and armor beyond the capabilities of nearly everyone living in the post-nuclear wasteland, and hoarding gold like Jeff Bezos. Honestly, the Secret Service are probably truest to form here, I didn't expect much more from them. The plot does allow you to renege on the promise you made to whichever crew you broke in with and either take all the gold for yourself or give half of your allies' promised share to the faction who didn't turn up with shovels, but this choice also left me sour. Dolores, my railway rifle-toting cowgirl who just wants everyone to get along, doesn't need gold. Why can't she give her share to the other side and walk away empty-handed in hopes of a better tomorrow for both groups? Why am I being forced to split my allies' share to give the rest of Appalachia some shiny, metallic love? I don't have the answers and I doubt Bethesda does either, because it seems like a no-brainer to me.

The other no-brainer, given the fact that you can build up both heist teams before choosing to work with one or the other, is why not have an option to break into Vault 79 with both teams on your side? Seems like a hell of an opportunity for great dialogue and character development, seems like it'd play into the theme you set up in the base story about the plague winning because of group divisions and how you can overcome anything if you work together toward a common goal, seems like it'd be especially rewarding if you went to all the hard work of finding everyone you need to crack the vault open in the first place. Hell, it even plays into the key Fallout staple where the government is at odds with the needs of its own people. But nah, too much work. Pick a side, vault babies, and get in the appropriately-labeled bucket.

Anyway, I've done a lot of ragging on this update but here are some things I actually liked about it. The treasure hunt with Duchess and crew is kind of cute in that it teases you with the heist, then gives you a small-scale alternate adventure involving new characters and choices that don't all tie into the main plot. You can give an assaultron a new body that she loves, or you can stick her in a protectron's frame and call it a day. You can help Mort with his CAMP-building holotape project, or you can tell him to go fuck himself. While the conflict with the Free Radicals is kind of pointless and gives you largely the same ending no matter what you do, the characters involved are fresh and entertaining enough to warrant playing through their little side story. The Blue Ridge Caravan Company, similarly, is a fun little group with a very repetitive gameplay mechanic in the form of an event, but the characters within the company are well-written and have some great dialogue with each other that gets further fleshed out in the Steel Reign update. I also just like running into people out and about in the world, I pause my trajectory to go inspect the dots on my compass indicating living things just as often as I do new locations.

Oh shit, I forgot about the CAMP allies. I am in love with both Beckett and Sofia, but their personal questlines both have major flaws. Both send you off on way too many fetch quests in familiar locations, but while Beckett's at least brings you to a brand-new dungeon in a Watoga parking garage, Sofia's just takes you to Sugar Grove, which I think I've had to run through at least four times now. Sofia's story has a much more satisfying ending than Beckett's, though, even if it introduces yet another AI to the wasteland: I'm just so done with the corrupted baby sibling trope, Beckett, sorry. 5/10 overall on the update, this is a muddy snowball that is rapidly approaching my car in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill, but at least it's fun to watch pick up speed.

Steel Dawn/Steel Reign

Hoo hoo, boy. First of all, I agree with several of the opinions I've seen on Tumblr, this should've come out all at once. The big break between the first and second halves of the Brotherhood of Steel story was just enough time for me to stop caring about Rowdy Rahmani and the Steel Stompin' Kids, even if they tried to hook me again right away with a foray into Uncanny Caverns (Night Kid is REAL, I can prove it!) and the promise of a new vault to explore. I concede that this isn't a problem that new players to the game will experience since they can play the halves back to back, but how many new players is Fallout 76 pulling in right now, anyway?

My thoughts on the Brotherhood of Steel being in the game at all are already above, but if we're following the characterization of Roger Maxson being a meddling military muskrat, then I guess sending a team of soldiers cross-continent to find out what happened to Taggerdy is in character for him. Side note here, my main CAMP for Dolores is a train station on the tracks just south of the observatory, so ever since the Brotherhood moved in up there I've been raking in the caps from curious visitors, but I know that's not a good enough reason to justify their arrival.

I actually liked the immediate characterization of the three main Brotherhood officers upon arrival at Fort Atlas. Knight Shin asks you to assess the needs of the people milling around in his waiting room (people you will definitely have forgotten in between Steel Dawn's release and Steel Reign's, so imagine my surprise when three of them wind up playing major roles in Steel Reign's story!), then systematically rejects every single one of their requests because they don't meet his narrow definition of what the Brotherhood's mission is supposed to be. Scribe Valdez takes you on a miniature foray into the observatory's basement to look at some mysterious machinery and assess your technical skills, while her expertise and quirkiness openly vie to win your affection. Paladin Rahmani cuts to the chase immediately and sends you to go help some people, demonstrating her no-nonsense, non-bureaucratic approach to assisting the people of Appalachia. They are each pulling their weight in the plot so far, and you can immediately sense the undercurrent of tension between Shin and Rahmani that turns into open conflict as the story goes on. There's also the two kids in the basement who will clue you in with wildly-differing opinions on the Brotherhood guys upstairs, if you're the exploratory type like me.

The mystery of the missing missile launchers and why Shin is so goddamned mad about them really gets going with the introduction of the War Party at Crater, and our raider cinnamon buns Pierce, Burke and Sheena. Though they're suffering from the same labeling problems as the rest of the raiders in Fallout 76, these guys at least have a clear goal that sets them at odds with another Appalachian group. They're here to fuck over the Brotherhood of Steel, and you're invited to help them! Either way you choose to play it, you keep getting more and more information through your missions that eventually leads to the revelation that the missile launchers you're urged to track down were Brotherhood-issued weapons that the group distributed to help a settlement defend itself from raiders: And they lost. Shin's of the opinion that they need to tell the Elders out west (I guess there's already Elders out west now, hooray) about this failure, while Rahmani is less-than pleased with the Elders to begin with and would rather keep the situation under wraps. Your character is given the choice to side with one or the other or just stay out of it, which I really appreciated and took advantage of.

I love this, but I love the twist later on that reveals the idea to arm the civilians ahead of the raider attack, the idea that got Shin and Rahmani's friend killed, was actually (spoiler alert) Shin's idea. When that reveal happens at the very, very end of Steel Reign, I gasped. It made so much sense to me: Shin freaking out about the Initiates he placed in harm's way at Uncanny Caverns, feeling responsible for his friend's death, wanting to atone somehow for the wrong he'd done, and Rahmani taking the blame for the incident but openly feeling that it hadn't been a mistake, that they had made the right decision and it just hadn't worked out. How Shin must feel to hear her say that. Their conflict made so much sense, and came from something so real, that my heart hurt when I reached the end of the story and was forced to choose between one or the other to move the Brotherhood in Appalachia forward.

It's just a shame that this character dynamic is playing out against one of the silliest villain plots I've seen in a while, and not just in a Fallout game.

One of those people in the waiting room at the beginning of Steel Dawn is one Dr. Edgar Blackburn, a researcher who formerly worked at West Tek, so we're off to a great start there. Blackburn, through his own holotape logs in Vault 96 that are discovered during Steel Reign, admits he was displeased with the FEV experimentation at Huntersville because he felt his superiors were just making mutants because they could, not because they were looking to learn anything from the process. He dreamed of a better world facilitated with the help of FEV, and decided to make it a reality by tinkering with the virus to combat rampant diseases and illnesses in humanity that sprang up in the wake of the bombs. Of course, tinkering with the virus requires test subjects, and when he runs himself out of frozen embryos in Vault 96 he turns to human trafficking in order to obtain lab rats.

Stop. Bethesda. What in the world?? This is just the plot of the Master from the very first Fallout game, but with extra steps and no hive mind. Aside from the blatant re-scripting of a story that's already happened (or is currently happening, thanks to Fallout 76's timeline), it makes no goddamn sense given what we already know about Fallout lore. Why human testing? Blackburn openly admits in his holotapes that the FEV keeps changing, defying his expectations and mutating into new and unpredictable strains. Why jump to human trials at all, if it keeps misbehaving? Why not stick to mole rats like Curie did when she was stuck in Vault 81? Why doesn't Blackburn just join up with the Overseer to try to make inoculations for all the new diseases spreading across the countryside? If I can jury-rig a preventative treatment for the Scorched plague, the goddamned Scorched plague, by collecting some feral ghoul blood, fixing a Sympto-Matic, then using my own treated blood to make a vaccine in the form of a tasty bottle of Nuka-Cola, why the fuck does Blackburn feel the need to poke around with FEV?

The bit about the Master probably doesn't bother people who aren't invested in the lore of other Fallout games, but don't worry, Blackburn has another way to get under your skin. He tells his sad story over holotapes and in person in a permanently disingenuous tone, bemoaning his infliction of necessary evil in a manner that suggests he just found a caterpillar in his salad more than it suggests real, tangible guilt over locking humans up and systematically killing them. Forgive me, Bethesda, for not being super willing to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who left a holotape about how much he hates vivisection in the middle of his blood-stained laboratory where the bodies of his most recent victims are still lying. By the time I got that asshole back to the super-secret lab underneath the West Tek secret lab (this is just as funny and frustrating to me as the secret bunkers next door to each other under the Whitespring, by the way), I was rolling my eyes because I just knew he was going to try something stupid and prove how useful his experimentation was. His subsequent boss battle was hilarious.

Well, maybe Bethesda was trying to make him seem 100 percent irredeemable, you might say. Maybe that was the point, to show you how blind he was to his own destructive tendencies. If he's the final boss, you had to kill him anyway, there's your reason to feel no guilt. And you'd be right, I felt no guilt. And I also would feel little to no guilt ending the lives of his co-conspirators, a bunch of scientific types who, despite not knowing the full extent of his atrocities, went along with Blackburn's plan and were prepared to distribute his isolated FEV strain into the Appalachian water cycle to infect its inhabitants in the hopes of introducing widespread disease immunity. Except that decision, the decision of whether or not to kill the scientists you don't know or spare their lives and let them continue experiments under Brotherhood supervision, is what forces you to choose between Rahmani and Shin. Rahmani wants to give them another chance: Shin wants them dead.

Hnnnnnnnngh.

Let's go back to that line from Maxson's Mariposa diary that I mentioned earlier. Here's the full excerpt, written on October 26, 2077, just after the nukes fell.

I convinced the men that we should bury the scientists. I don't know why... perhaps it was to ease my conscience. I finally started to believe their stories when the last one was dying. My God, what have I become?

And here's Shin and Rahmani's final argument before taking Blackburn to confront his colleagues at West Tek.

Shin: I don't like this, Rahmani. We should be done with him here and now and level this laboratory. This is just like what Elder Maxson faced at Mariposa. Or have you forgotten?

Rahmani: Elder Maxson came to regret acting rashly there. Or have you forgotten?

As... ham-fisted as this exchange is, I see what they're going for, here. Both of the above examples are callbacks to the classic "I was just following orders" that we all know and love as a plot device and real-life excuse from every fascist regime that's ever existed. Looking at Maxson's diary, you see the conflict behind the words as much as the words themselves. He interrogated those scientists one by one to find out who ordered them to experiment on prisoners of war. Every single one of them gave him the same answer: The American government. And Maxson killed every single one of them, because he and his men could not believe they were telling the truth. It took an actual nuclear war for Maxson to realize that the country he had sworn to protect as a member of the US Army did not give a shit about him, his men, or the scientists and test subjects at Mariposa. They only cared about what Mariposa could produce to further their cause, and damn the human cost. How much blame can be given to the scientists for their role, doing what they were told in order to create the next breakthrough in military might, to win the war their whole lives revolved around? How much blame can be given to the Army soldiers, who fought battle after bloody battle on behalf of a country that threw them away as soon as they weren't useful, and then went 9 months at Mariposa without realizing what they were protecting? How much of the blame rests on Maxson himself?

My God, what have I become?

This is why I'm upset about Maxson's, and by extension, the Brotherhood's, characterization in Fallout 76. Redefining Maxson as this mythical founder of an honored faction that Bethesda keeps dragging back into the spotlight to sell power armor skins has consequences that severely affect the story. In the first Fallout, Maxson was just a soldier who realized he had been used, who declared himself and his men deserters and ran away from the atrocities of a freshly-dead nation. In Fallout 76, he already has a whole hierarchy and ideology planned out 4 years after the bombs fall, and everyone's on board and tricked out in Brotherhood-branded gear 27 years after nuclear armageddon. The timeline itself isn't made super clear in Fallout 76, but for context, Roger Maxson is going to die 31 years after Steel Reign begins, and the events of Fallout 1 are due to begin 57 years after Shin and Rahmani have their final falling-out. It's the same issue as the heist immediately following the Scorched plague: Ándale, ándale, hurry up and get to the next plot thread without showing us the messy, gritty, interesting bits about how the Brotherhood got from point A to B in their development. They have to be in this game because Bethesda can't make a Fallout game without the Brotherhood in it, and they have to resemble the Brotherhood from previous Bethesda games so we can keep cashing in on that sweet, sweet money from people who just point at the power armor helmets in recognition and clap their hands like toddlers, and they have to be saving the world from yet another FEV-related threat. Having Rahmani drop a line about how Maxson "came to regret acting rashly" at Mariposa is useless if the Brotherhood has already sprinted past that point in their formation, is already tossing out Latin phrases transplanted from Fallout 4 and re-enacting the events of Elder Owyn Lyons' rebellion against the Elders in Fallout 3. It's especially useless if Rahmani doesn't explain it any further, which of course she doesn't.

So, back to that decision about the West Tek scientists that Rahmani and Shin break up over. As Rahmani explains, she believes that even if the scientists did something bad, they still possess knowledge that could benefit humanity if they were allowed to live and conduct experimentation while under supervision. Shin believes their crimes are reprehensible and they deserve death for the damage they've already caused and threatened Appalachia with. What's the right answer? Well, there isn't one. Historically-speaking, the superior orders plea is not enough to escape punishment for one's crimes, but it is enough to lessen it, and it varies case by case. Bethesda tells you to make a sweeping, overall judgement about the three surviving scientists as a group. They give you the opportunity to interview each of them before making the decision, but you can't pick and choose which ones are more guilty than others, even if one of them is a snarky, teenaged little shit who whines about how you stopped her work just before it got really interesting and one is a convincingly (more convincing than Blackburn, anyway) remorseful woman who admits ignoring her own doubts because she wanted to trust her colleague and make a difference in the world. Save them all or kill them all, your choice, and it was here that I put my controller down for a second, looked up at the ceiling and realized that the things I loved about the original story in Fallout 76 were long-forgotten at Bethesda Game Studios. This decision is so surface-level, it's a rubber duck. It's the same us vs. them mentality that the raiders and settlers in the heist have about each other that I hate. This is the point where I want the messiness, I want to be able to argue with Shin about when to give up on someone, when a person is beyond reforming themselves and when it's okay to give organizations like governments or militaristic tech cults the power to decide whether someone should get the death penalty. I want to be able to argue with Rahmani about the dangers of science without ethics, about the ends justifying the means. I want to have those tough conversations and maybe learn something new in the process, but this is a video game meant for the masses, so no one in the final room of West Tek's super-secret lab has anything particularly deep to say beyond "please don't kill me" and "science has gone too far."

There, griping over on that set of updates. Compliments only, from here on out. I was exceedingly pleased by the fleshing out of the Blue Ridge Caravan Company and their involvement in the Brotherhood storyline, partly because I adore Aries but mostly because I welcome the addition of any group that isn't one we've already met in a Fallout game. I'm also okay with the Hellcat Company, even if they're basically just cannon fodder like the Blood Eagles. The Enclave Research Facility Site J is a delightful little dungeon that brought me SODUS, yet another AI but at least one willing to turn your foray through the Enclave site into a fun haunted house. Likewise, Vault 96 tells a compelling story underneath the horrible narration of Blackburn, a cryogenic landscape where scientists were forced to meet higher and higher experimentation quotas under penalty of death. It also sets up some interesting mysteries that we don't have answers to yet. Marcia Leone's decision to run away to the War Party or stay at Fort Atlas was also kind of cute, but left me with the same bitter taste about binary choices as many of the other decisions I've had to make in this game. Honestly, the side stories to these updates outshone the main story in more than a few ways. 4/10, shelve the Brotherhood and give me more original creations, please.

The Inevitable Truth

After playing through Wastelanders for the first time, I went on a little bit of a rant to some of my friends about how all of the story beats in Fallout 76 after the original, main plot about the Scorched plague felt hollow to me. I think I've summed up most of the main issues in my above essay, but I've left out one big one that I cannot help but consider as I romp through the cranberry bog looking for legendary scorchbeasts.

What happened to Appalachia?

The problem with chronologically setting a game before all the other games in its series is that it primes the player to consider what aspects of its story are missing from the stories they know happen later down the line. This is especially shaky ground if you're making a roleplaying game, where you're telling players that their decisions make a difference in the world around them, but none of the games that were made earlier but take place later reflect those world changes or even acknowledge their existence. Before Fallout 76, the only reference to Appalachia is a bottle label in Fallout 4 for the bourbon brand "Old Appalachia." That's it. You'd think, if the Brotherhood of Steel had sent contingents out to the East Coast before Fallout 3, it would've come up at some point when talking to Elder Lyons. You'd think we would've met an NPC from that region by now. You'd think there'd be some kind of impact on the Fallout world from the network of people that moved in between the original release and Wastelanders, their lives and struggles and triumphs over everything from plagues to snallygasters. But there's nothing, and as the game creeps closer and closer toward the beginning of Fallout 1's story, you realize that the only fates available to the people of Appalachia are all uglier and more devastating than the last.

The most maddening part is that Bethesda put themselves here. They chose to make a game set in 2102. They chose to add NPCs. They chose to bring in recognizable groups like the Brotherhood of Steel and fuck up their existing lore. They're still doing it and will keep doing it, if their E3 teaser about the Pitt is anything to go by. The way I see it, we have three options for what happens when Bethesda decides to end this game's story: The entirety of Fallout lore is rewritten with Fallout 76 as the template for a reboot, the entirety of Appalachia is wiped off the map by some unknown disaster, or the entirety of the game is non-canon by virtue of some Dr. Stanislaus Braun-level simulation. I do not know which of these options I am more scared of, but I do know I was a lot more at ease about the latter two options back when there were no NPCs beyond robots and AIs.

So why am I still playing this game? Honestly, there isn't one good answer for why I'm still here. I love the Fallout universe dearly, which gives me a huge reason to stay. I love tinkering around in my CAMP in the Savage Divide. I love dropping in on new players to gift them stimpaks and gear, and I love wandering around veteran players' CAMPs to see what they've built. I love walking through Appalachia in general, watching the terrain change depending on where I am and finding little bits of story scattered across the region. I love helping my friends with Daily Ops, or events, or launching nukes. I even love some of the bugs, like the fact that my character Dolores can jump off mountains and not take any damage and she can't turn off PvP, so I become the wasteland sheriff every time I see someone with a WANTED flag on my server. You ever love a thing despite of and because of its flaws, even though you know its flaws are what will doom it in the end? You ever care so much about something to the point of anger, but know that that anger is worthless in the face of a future you can't possibly change? That's me and Fallout 76. That's also me being dramatic, but that should already be apparent by the amount of writing I've done here.

Honorable Mentions

Holy shit, nearly every voice actor in this game is doing their absolute best. Adrienne Barbeau kicked off the goodness by bringing the Overseer to life through some goddamn holotapes, they got Jason Greene out here serving nonbinary goodness in the role of Burke, Andrew Morgado and Jeannie Tirado filling up my CAMPs with awkward love and joy as Beckett and Sofia, respectively, Keith Szarabajka came back to voice a professedly-remorseful but practically-remorseless villain after already gracing us with the mess that is Joshua-FUCKING-Graham, motherfucking Beau Billingslea of Cowboy Bebop fame is voicing Paige... holy mama I'm pleased with the casting director.

I would like more robots that mix pre-war audio together to say things in creepy ways like JES-2R, please and thank you.

I am a disaster bisexual in real life and I am eternally pleased that I can be a disaster bisexual in the virtual space as well, so shout-out to whoever wrote the flirting options for each of the CAMP allies, plus Knight Shin, Paladin Rahmani and Scribe Valdez.

I adore the Motherlode and I would like to wish whoever had the idea to kill her in her attempts to aid the settlers when breaking into Vault 79 a very bad day.

I don't care how sick everyone is of the Meat Cook event, I will protect Grahm and Chally the Moo-Moo with my LIFE

#fallout 76 #fallout thoughts #fallout 76 spoilers

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