#to quadruple homicide to steal drugs with no exit point in between

[artbyblastweave]

Getting back into fallout 4, and one tension that I’m noticing in the worldbuilding is that it’s trying to have it’s cake and eat it too between portraying the sort of wild-west episodic no-rules clownshow bullshit setup of fallout 3 (complementary) and portraying the kind of post-post-apocalyptic reconstruction of formalized society seen in 2 and New Vegas, and a lot of stuff gets muddled in the doing. For example, the Institute, with its kill-and-replace, cloak and dagger shit, seems like the kind of antagonist it would make sense to position opposite something like the NCR, where there’s a large enough ossified bureaucracy that there’s something worth subverting and infiltrating; it doesn’t hit the same when all that’s there to infiltrate is a handful of enclaves. (Implicitly this is what they threw in the CPG for, but that plot point isn’t fleshed out enough for my liking.) Piper and Nick are two character archetypes that make infinitely more sense to me when there’s freeside-or-strip levels of societal buildup instead of Megaton+1 levels of societal buildup. And a big, big one for me personally is Diamond City Blues, where the narrative is visibly fighting for its life to make a back-alley drug deal a compelling concept in a setting where prohibition isn’t even a conceptual glimmer in anyone’s eye and 98 percent of human activity consists of back-alley violence.