A ramble about Preston Garvey and a self-indulgent revision of the entire Minuteman questline
TDLR: The Minutemen faction sacrifices writing and Preston’s character as a means of shoveling errands and busywork at the player.
Preston’s issues as a character are entirely Doylist, meaning the fault of outside forces. His writing, his concept, his themes, those are solid. This is not a racehorse that broke its leg and was still sent down the track, like some characters. This is a horse that was hale and hearty, but they made it run in circles around cars in the parking lot instead of putting it in the race.
This essay is not going to be my most coherent one. Preston’s issues are so apparent, so in your face, it kinda feels like a waste of time explaining it. Just look at him and anyone with two braincells to rub together can see. But a lot of things in Fallout 4 sticks with me, even when I’m not in a Fallout 4 mood. Preston is one of those things. So neglected, so misused in the game, I couldn’t stop thinking about the bastard.
Before we get into what Preston is, in-game...what was he meant to be?
And you know what?
He’s close to Danse, post Blind Betrayal.
Preston Garvey started his military career as a fresh-faced, bright-eyed young man, who wanted to be another gun protecting the Commonwealth against whatever would harm it. He always had his faction’s best interests and ideals in mind. The first to wave the flag, the first to say the motto, the first to pick up a gun for it. He didn’t want heroism, or glory. He wanted to make the world a better place. It sounds cookie cutter, cliche, so sugary-saccharine. But this is the wasteland. This is in a world where everyone else seems content to succumb to futilism, to pretend there is no Better for the world.
Preston Garvey is, inherently, part of a rebel army. The Minutemen were a militia, a guerilla army of farmers and their children, banding together against the oppressive totality of raiders, mercenaries, anyone who would rather gnaw on bones than build to ensure everyone was taken care of. The Minutemen are the fuck you, we want to recover and heal faction, to the raiders’ fuck you, I have a right to wallow in the ruins.
The legend herself, the icon, the Queen, Ursula K. LeGuin once said; “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” The MInutemen might look like your average, boring heroes (we’ll get into why), but it is inherently badass to look at the literal End of the World and decide, no, actually, we don’t want to lie down and die.
Preston Garvey is not a boy scout, the Minutemen are not mall cops. They are furious, determined, and most dangerously, optimistic.
A young Preston Garvey joined under a blue banner, served under it for years...and watched as people who saw money, power, glory, took that banner and tied it into a noose.
Joe Becker died, and having not chosen someone to take over as General, all of the colonels squabbled for the position, wanting the fame, the cushy office. These people weren’t Minutemen, not at heart. The faction had grown so large, there was bound to be people looking only at the resources, what was in it for them. Preston, still a young man, but quickly losing his naivety and faith in his fellow Minutemen, watched as these colonels dropped their altruistic acts and demanded they get theirs.
And then Quincy happened.
The Minutemen were in disarray, following the Mirelurk invasion of the Castle, lacking a home base and their radio communications. But Colonel Ezra Hollis, potentially the last Colonel who gave a shit, heard that Quincy was under siege by Gunner forces, and he led his small, out-gunned squad to do whatever the fuck they could, until another Colonel came to provide the needed fire support. Hollis’ Minutemen succeeded in driving the Gunners back, and holding them off, but their help from Colonel Marbury never came. Preston watched as his Colonel refused to give up and let Quincy fall...and he watched as Clint, a ten-year veteran, betrayed everyone, chose money and a winning team over what was right.
Quincy fell. Preston Garvey watched as the refugees fell in a line, running for safety. Watched his comrades, who he had been fighting against impossible odds with for days, dropped with them.
Preston Garvey died, and I can tell you where. At one house, to the right, down the street from the museum, where the last other Minuteman lay dead in a yard. Where he became the Last Minuteman. Even if there were others who would call themselves such...they weren’t Minuteman, not really. The real Minutemen tried to save Quincy. Everyone else, who gave up, never believed at all.
Preston was still fucking furious at the hedonistic cruelty people indulged in and called inevitable. But he was alone, a failure, and had lost any reason to believe that there was a possibility of continuing. A point, a reason, yes. But the optimism...without that, there was no Minuteman army.
Preston is Danse Post BB, because he’s freshly disillusioned from his faction, horrified at the truth and betrayal. He has lost his identity, his values, unsure of where to go, if there’s anywhere to go. And then...salvation walks down the street of Concord, and walks him and his group back up the road to Sanctuary. Sanctuary.
And then comes in the fucking dialogue system (FDS) and the fucking radiant system (FRS), armed with folding chairs, to beat Preston Garvey’s rich character into a bloody, twitching pulp. We cannot talk about Preston without talking about how his faction questline plays. We simply have to, because it’s like a shotgun wedding from hell.
Let’s start with the very first quest in the Minutemen. Preston, while running for his fucking life from gunners, then ferals, then raiders, has somehow heard through the grapevine/radio he doesn’t have that Tenpines has a Corvega raiders issue. He asks you to do it because he’s busy guarding Sanctuary. Okay.
You go to Tenpines, Corvega, and back, and whoop, you are now Minuteman general.
You START THE MINUTEMEN as THE LEADER. Even fucking MAXSON waits for you to at least bump Danse off before making you a Paladin, but nope! Starting at the top, ending at the top. This kills progression in all senses. There is no sense of gaining ground, the Minutemen start with a General. Skyrim gets mocked for making you the leader of all factions, but good god, at least you had to earn it by sticking with them.
So, bad start.
Then you do some settlement stuff...which is handed to you in the worst fucking way. The FRS.
Where is Preston getting this information? How are people sending it out? Ignoring the logistics...it’s just boring. You talk to Preston sometimes, and he always says Go Here, Do This, Come back. Do this enough times, Preston wants to retake the Castle. At this point, you don’t have any men, it’s just you and Preston- wait, who the fuck are these people?! We’ve had soldiers this whole time?! Who hired them?! You take the Castle and it’s admittedly cool, if not a pain to restore for all your- okay, wait, I can only bring settlers? Where are all the men I supposedly have, there’s three soldiers here! Three soldiers, this is just a Clearing the Way radiant quest, but the moving in folks helped me kill the mirelurks!
Ugh, fine. You keep traveling, Preston gives you more- Preston?! I killed a Mirelurk Queen specifically for the radio tower, so I could get quests from the radio! Why is Preston still dispensing quests? It discourages you from talking to him, because you’ll get busywork cluttering your quest log. You can’t talk to Preston Garvey. You can’t fucking talk to him without doing him a favor first.
Y’know what makes this even more abominable? You are said to have soldiers, who could be doing this instead! Why am I going after kidnapped settlers when we have soldiers?! The General still has a kid to find and the Institute to explode! SPEAKING OF...
The Commonwealth Provisional Government was started by the Minutemen, and ended by the Institute. This is never brought up again. And it’s not even Preston who talks about it, it’s Nick. The Minutemen have very real reason to want the Institute gone, and a good excuse to get the player to want to destroy the Institute beyond “grrr synths/they took my baby.”
Anyway, you go get artillery from Ronnie Shaw at some point, build it in your settlements, and...make your farmers man them. Not soldiers. I know you can deck out your settlers with armor and weapons, but the fact that you have maybe 5 constant, non-random encounter soldiers, all at the Castle, is...it makes it feel hollow. Where is my army, Preston? Who am I leading?
So, you do the Main Quest, blow up the Institute. Blah blah. Blow up the Brotherhood, too. Blaaaaah.
Either way, let’s get into fixes. And by fixes, I mean, complete rehaul.
First thing’s first. The entire questline is bad. It’s radiant quests and then boom boom Institute. It starts and ends the exact same way, you being the general. Second thing, we need to go back to the old dialogue system; no more YES, NO, WHAT, SARCASTIC. Actual dialogue. Back to Fallout New Vegas’s system, that relied on all stats and perks. Actual conversations with branching paths.
Saving Preston at Concord is fine. Works. It’s the first radiant quest that sucks ass. Throw that system out entirely, and I do mean entirely. Don’t save it for anything, it needs to go. It cannot remain. No being sent to Tenpines because Preston heard from a little birdie.
Instead, you work with Preston and the survivors to fortify and set up Sanctuary.
First, you work with Preston to shore up Sanctuary’s defenses. As you work with him, he’s polite, but curt. Professional, but not warm, open. He expresses gratitude, but definitely not trust. He doesn’t know you, he doesn’t know what your motives or wants are. You can tell him about Shaun, but he’s still not sure about you. He can’t afford to be and will tell you that outright, but...he needs someone to go see if anyone survived Lexington or Concord. He knows his other Minutemen split up with other survivors, he doesn’t know if they made it out. You can offer to go find them, or stay and protect Sanctuary. If you go, the other survivors will set up Sanctuary on their own without your help.
If you stay and Preston leaves, you plant crops with Marcy, getting to know her and potentially, she cracks and shows some vulnerability. She doesn’t soften right away, she’s still traumatized, but you get to see why she’s the way she is now. She just lost her baby, her home, all of her friends and family. Was just failed by the people who swore they’d protect them all. Betrayed by them.
Then, you work with Sturges to get a water pump/purifier running. Sturges will tell you about Quincy in some detail, explain how it went to shit. He talks about how the Minutemen were needed more than ever, but crapped the bed at the last minute. Sturges says he thinks there’s a place in the world for the group, but with the last living soldier clearly reeling from everything that’s happened, he thinks it’s safe to say the Commonwealth is on it’s own.
Next, it’s the bed situation with Jun. He barely says a word, only quietly thanking you for your help. If you choose the right dialogue options, he’ll say you remind him of Colonel Hollis, very brave and kind, even when it was a bad idea to help. Hollis didn’t survive, but you did. Maybe it’s not all bad, maybe Hollis wasn’t wrong, just of bad luck.
After, no matter who goes to find the bodies of the other Minutemen and Quincy locals, some Corvega raiders attack Sanctuary when they come back. It’s only a small scouting party, looking for Mama Murphy. You kill them, and Preston is freaking out and about to pack up and keep everyone moving farther. It’s up to you to calm him down and offer to go kill them. If you’ve picked certain dialogue choices before and Sanctuary has a high defense score, Preston will join you on the trip to Corvega. It’s on this journey + throughout it you can tell him about the fate of his comrades, or he tells you. If he doesn’t accompany you, you two talk about it when you get back to Sanctuary after killing Jared.
Either way, It’s here that Mama Murphy tells you about Diamond City, not in the museum.
You do the main quest now, and when you get to Diamond City, you overhear people talking about the Quincy massacre, and what a shame that the Minutemen are gone. Someone talks about how McDonough forced all the ghouls out, and they moved up to the Slog, but now the Slog is having mutant troubles. From there, you can go decide for yourself if you want to do the Minuteman questline. The first few quests were just to organically show you the settlement system, dialogue system (the old, good one), and dungeon crawling, the explore-loot-return loop. It’s here that the Minutemen branch off from the main quest.
If you choose to save the Slog, you have the option of saying you’re there on Minuteman business, even if you’re not a Minuteman. Choosing this is what gets you in the faction proper.
You can keep finding settlements and offering help. Doing this, Preston eventually catches word through Diamond City Radio and demands to know what the fuck you’re doing. You have a lot of options to choose from, but only the altruistic, optimistic ones will earn Preston’s trust. Anything else, he might just try to kill you, if you, like, say you’re doing it for money. But if you’re doing this for good reasons, he’s on board. Surprised, unsure this will end well, but...hey, if you want to try, he won’t stop you. If Sanctuary has enough settlers, defense, and you’ve turned enough settlers into guards (which have a different character tag, when assigned to defense posts), Preston will offer to accompany you, and that’s how you get him as a companion.
So, you and Preston wander around, doing quests, and helping out settlements. Help enough settlements, they’ll realize hey, we’re all on good terms with this Minuteman, and this person who’s basically a Minuteman...let’s just get the Minutemen back, yeah? People band together, settlements you’ve provided for will get settlers on their own. Eventually, people at settlements approach you and offer to help, what needs doing? If you have a settlement quest/errand, you can assign them to it, and they’ll complete it for you. This snow-balls until you’re taking over the Castle, for all these guns-for-hope to gather around and manage trade routes and work. You get the radio tower. You get an army. You get artillery, automatically built at every settlement in a designated spawnpoint.
It’s here that, by popular vote, you’re offered the position as General...but you can turn it down. You can hand it to Ronnie, or Preston. Both of of them agree, no, the people and the new Minutemen want you, but they’ll take it if you pass enough dialogue checks. Ronnie will run the Minutemen like a hardass, fierce and cynical to deter a second collapse, but Preston runs it like a community. He believes that cynicism was what killed the first Minutemen, and that constant reminder of who and what they do this for will keep motives pure. No matter the general, the Minutemen are now a solid force in the Commonwealth, stronger than ever, making everyone piss their pants. And it got this way because you wanted to help.
It’s at this point that Preston’s conversation about his depression unlocks, and his romance.
But the fun begins when the Gunners take a modicum of offense to all this.
Sanctuary is put to the sword, the Castle is attacked, and best of all, the old Colonels show their face, either on the side of the Gunners as bosses, or trying to weasel their way into the Minutemen again. Preston loves killing all of them, hates sparing or talking them down. These fuckers left him, Quincy, the Commonwealth to die, they are traitors, they are pure scum.
The Minutemen, they fight back. You take squads into Gunner camps and clear house, take it over. People stop working with or hiring the Gunners because they don’t want to piss off the General, whoever that is. The Gunners aren’t on the ropes yet, but they’re staring down Minutemen barrels and it’s only a matter of time before this explodes into someone getting wiped off the face of the earth.
Somewhere in-between looking for the Institute, you get kidnapped by Gunners and taken to Quincy. They’re using you as either a hostage, intending to kill you to prove a point, or torturing you for fun, taking the piss out of the idea that the puny militia could ever stand up to- hey, why am I hearing gunfire?
Preston and the Minutemen storm Quincy, putting it under a siege not even the Gunners could ever have hoped to accomplish. If the Minutemen were dog food, the Gunners are kitty treats. It’s a swift, brutal execution of every green-wearing bastard. They don’t even have time to prepare before Preston himself kicks the door down and frees you, then runs back out to continue bashing people’s heads in with his rifle. You meet up with Ronnie, and she points you down Preston’s warpath, gently asking if you can go stop before he gets himself killed trying to throttle Clint. As you chase him down, you see Clint up on the highway, looking down, before he walks away, presumably to meet Preston.
You can go find Preston, kill Clint before he gets to him, or go kill Baker first. If Preston gets to Clint, you’ll hear him screaming bloody murder before they start the fight. They’ll fight until you go finish Clint off. Once Clint drops, Preston has something of a nervous breakdown. Ronnie and other Minutemen show up, she takes over and tells you to finish clearing Quincy with the other soldiers while she gets Preston out of the fight. You can listen to her, or insist you stay with Preston. If you stay, you clear the way for Ronnie’s group to get back behind Minutemen lines just outside of Quincy. Baker can be killed by NPC Minutemen, so you don’t have to worry about it too much.
The Minutemen have Quincy again, Preston is recovering from his panic attack, and Ronnie is foaming at the mouth at the idea of going at Gunner HQ. You can agree or disagree. If you’ve been killing the Colonels, Preston will think that the Gunners are in such bad shape, it’s only a matter of time before they kill themselves with infighting, just as the Minutemen did. If you’ve spared the Colonels, he’ll want to finish off the Gunners, as they’re still too organized and armed to leave alive. If Ronnie is General, the Minutemen attack Gunner HQ anyway, no matter what, but if not, the player can influence Preston or make the decision themselves.
Laying siege to Gunner HQ cements the Minutemen’s place as the strongest army in the Commonwealth. With this ending for the Minutemen, non-important/notable raider hideouts will be cleared automatically, either because soldiers killed them, or the Minutemen were so oppressive, they couldn't find anyone to raid. Other factions will speak more carefully to you, be gentler when describing their intentions. Maxson and other BOS soldiers, if you join them, will mention that being so close to the Castle was unintentional, and they’re nervous about the Minutemen turning their artillery on the Airport. You’ll have a harder time getting the Brotherhood to go to war with Minutemen in this ending. Everyone in game will acknowledge what the Minutemen become, through your efforts.
If you let the Gunners dissolve, you’ll see Gunners having left for raider groups, groups of them killing each other, Gunners trying to get in with the Minutemen. Those Gunners, if you’re general, you can take them on, kill them, or turn them away. General Ronnie will kill them, General Preston’s choice depends on if you have been more merciful, or grudge-holding. People will comment on the Gunners wasting away into little more than scavengers, and with enough time, if you go to Gunner HQ, you find it empty and abandoned. People are less scared of the Minutemen this ending, as they didn’t obliterate the most dangerous local army in a show of total force and revenge. The Brotherhood is more likely to go to war with you, less intimidated, but the Railroad will offer their spy network if you agree to help them rehabilitate and save synths, provided you’ve spoken positively of synths.
Either ending, the Institute will try to destroy the Minutemen, as they destroyed the Commonwealth Provisional Government in the past. But now, the Minutemen have the firepower and intel to destroy the Institute, or take it over, if you so choose. Even if you don’t follow Shaun, if you choose to or convince General Ronnie/Preston to spare the Institute and use it for the Commonwealth’s benefit, you are left with it under your control, enforced by the Minutemen.
So. What does this revision do?
I dislike when people portray him as an innocent, gentle little sunshine boy, and not as an army vet who survived where none of his fellow soldiers could. This man has an edge to him. He isn’t a small sad puppy, he has something of a mean streak in canon. In this revision, Preston has opportunities to demonstrate layers of his character, showing how his trauma and guilt has effected him. You get to see it for yourself, rather than hear about it. You can see him break down in Quincy, you can see him resist the idea that strangers can have good intentions, you can see him rebuild his hope for the Minutemen and himself. And you can also see him lose patience for people who have wronged him, want to cut down anyone who would threaten his people, be kind of irrational and lashing out.
I also dislike that the Minutemen have no visible effect on the wasteland, nothing you can actually see. No one else sees it, either. Here, people will acknowledge the Minutemen’s power. And, c’mon, in game, you are the only one doing anything. In this rehaul, you get things started, but people will be active participants in restoring the Minutemen, will build settlements for you. You can go decorate and fiddle around, but you won’t have to worry about water, food, beds, and defense, they’ll get it sorted themselves. The busywork is also passed off to soldiers, who you could potentially catch in the action as they clear out mutants or save kidnapped settlers.
And the finale of facing off against the Gunners, and either destroying them, or brushing them off as a decaying tantrum with guns, gives the Minutemen something to do for themselves, beyond the Institute. You’d have to lock off Quincy and Gunner HQ, so the player can’t clear them without going through the questline, but that’s fine, other quests do that. But the Gunners are never brought up, not really. It also lets Preston confront his greatest trauma and come up victorious, even if it hurt, and when deciding on the fate of Gunner HQ, lets him evolve as a person and take influence from the player, depending on their relationship.
I think, as the de facto companion for his faction, Preston’s arc needs to be directly tied to it. The other companions don’t really have this either, but Preston got the short straw in that he was his faction. Everything came from him and was turned in to him. He became a dispenser for quests instead of one person in this group, with his own ideas about how to run it, his own fears and guilt about how it failed the first time. He doesn’t reflect the Minutemen, their ideals. Who they are as a collective.
Deacon, Danse, and X6 have their own massive writing issues, but it’s clear that they are representations of their factions. Deacon is an all-over-the-place trickster type trying to keep shit together, the Railroad is a clown car trying to smuggle slaves to safety. X6 is a cold, ruthless, logical Terminator, the Institute are cold, sterile, ends-justify-the-means scientists. Danse is a stern, no-nonsense soldier with a good heart under the Power Armor, the Brotherhood is a tight-knit brotherhood, an army with good intentions that often forgets who those good intentions are meant to serve.
Preston...he’s a good guy, a traumatized one. The Minutemen...you have 5 nameless “Minuteman Soldier” NPCs, and Ronnie. So...the Minutemen is Preston, Preston is the Minutemen. He isn’t allowed to be Preston, who is a Minuteman. He’s Preston the Minuteman.
That’s a damn shame.
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