Mllemaenad's Blog

And here we have the overseer. Not all overseers are aware they're a part of an experimental program, but this bastard is ... moreover he's been throwing people at this problem without success for a while now (although Izzie is currently unaware of the extent of that – she just knows about Ed) so the whole "you're our only hope" routine is a bit rich.

This, however, does lead to one of the most stressful parts on Fallout: the fact that you have a time limit. My general approach to RPGs is "ignore the main quest and bother every NPC in sight", but that's ... problematic if you still want to have a vault at the end of it.

I always think the argument about whether Fallout is about capitalism is a bit peculiar. Because ... okay. At the highest level of interpretation, it is not. It is fundamentally a story about the conflict between the human impulse toward civilisation (kindness, cooperation and the push toward a better standard of living for everyone) and the impulse toward destruction (greed, corruption and violence).

Every Fallout entry contains people striving for the former, from the Followers of the Apocalypse who make their debut in the first game in the series right through to the Responders in Fallout 76. These people may be flawed and make mistakes, but they are always trying to make the world better. And every story also contains people committed to the latter. These are people who believe that only a particular group counts as humans with rights, and everybody else can be killed or be enslaved without even the faintest of moral qualms. They are the Master and the Unity, the Enclave, the Brotherhood of Steel, the Legion, the Institute. They're all bad news because none of them will cooperate beyond themselves.

Fallout is not, after all, a story about how capitalist America is bad and communist China is good. It is pretty damn clear that every nation in the world that had even a sliver of power before the war was abusing it; everybody was hoarding resources; everybody was succumbing to aggression.

The narration starts with Rome. It's not that humanity somehow invented greed, corruption and violence alongside capitalism and would be instantly rid of them if we abolished it. Go ask the people of Sicily about Verres. Or the people of Carthage about – well, you can't, because Carthago delenda est, after all.

Fallout is not about capitalism. But.

The thing is, Fallout, as a series, is almost entirely interested in America. It only occasionally bothers to tell what was happening anywhere else in the world. Even the information on China, America's great adversary, is pretty damn thin on the ground. Could I tell you anything sensible about what, say, Indonesia was doing at any point in the Fallout universe? No, no I could not. The writers are simply not interested in the rest of the world.

That means that when they explore a country's slide into corruption and violence the particular country they're interested in exploring is America. And that means they absolutely spend a lot of time analysing how capitalism led America to this bloody end.

Every terminal that fearmongers about unions, every story about employees being casually killed and maimed, every grim justification you can find of horrors perpetuated in the name of profit will make you pause and think ... huh. The American system is not doing itself any favours here.

This all gets muddied, of course, because Bethesda loves its microtransactions, like a lot of other companies. Yep! They are engaging in plenty of their own shitty behaviour over in the Atomic Shop. This particular bit of narration in my screenshots predates Bethesda, of course, but ... well, 1997 was a long time ago. It's all Bethesda discourse now.

Whatever else is going on, the narratives of Fallout tend to put aggressive capitalism in the same bucket as its other destructive forces. I think the game writers usually know that, even if the marketing department does not.

To roll back a little, Fallout very much starts with the war crimes. It's interesting that this is the first thing you see. Not the bombs and their devastation, but the prelude to that. The first thing you know about this universe is that the Americans have invaded Canada and are now cheerfully murdering people in the streets there.

It also tells us about the rampant consumerism, of course: the cars and the robots and so on. But the murder comes first. Then, to the tune of Maybe, the camera pans out and you see where this has led.

This isn't, of course, to say that the war was a good thing. The deaths and the destruction are inexcusable. And when you play the games you meet plenty of people (often ghouls) who lived through that era and did not somehow deserve the apocalypse.

Okay, well. While I a) try to get my brain into gear enough to write more about Fallout: London and b) work out why The Outer Worlds 2 just keeps bloody crashing when I get near this one guy in Fairfield no matter what I do with it ... this is Isobel, usually called Izzie, sometimes known as the Vault Dweller.

I made her in the Vault 13 demo, partly because I want to run around in it a little bit, and partly because Izzie usually looks like this ...

... for the simple reason that Fallout doesn't have a character creator. You're up to your eyeballs in stats, but you're going to look like that no matter what.

The year is 2161 and she is 29 years old, a trained engineer (who was sent out at least in part because she knows what a water chip does, and might recognise a suitable one even if the designs have changed), a third generation survivor, and, as you can possibly make out from the screenshot above, she is not the first person the overseer has sent out to deal with the broken water chip crisis.

Beside Izzie lies Ed. Ed, so the game will tell us, is dead. And that's about all that's officially said about him. He is supposed to be a Pulp Fiction joke (Zed's dead) but he does not have a motorcycle for Izzie to take ... not that she would know how to ride it if he did.

He's also supposed to give you a sense of how perilous the wasteland can be and ... yeah, Ed's succeeding at that admirably here. My head canon is that he is another engineer, reasonably comparable in age to Izzie, known to her as a colleague and that he was sent out several months prior when they still thought there was a chance of fixing their current system.

It's not exactly surprising to learn that Ed is, in fact, dead. Since he didn't return, that was the general assumption in the vault. However, the overseer did very much conceal the fact that his body has been lying right outside the damn door. That is some new and alarming information.

I tend to believe that Ed did get a little further than this – maybe even all the way out of the cave system. But injury or exposure forced him to crawl back and ... when no one opened the door for him he met his end right where his journey began.

Izzie isn't a heroic volunteer. Given her druthers she'd have stayed put and tried to keep the vault systems running as long as possible. They drew straws, and she got the short one. Just bad luck. That said, she is fairly resigned to the task. She has no illusions about the water situation: they're going to run out, and being trapped in an underground bunker with hundreds of people dying of thirst does not sound like a good time.

And so, the Wayfarer's journey came to an end, but it was not the end of history, only the beginning.

Because in mankind's pursuit of power, there is no price too high, no life too valuable, and no ideal too sacred."

Because war, war never changes.

And that's it! Took me months, but I finally finished it. I do have more general thoughts on the game and its ideas ... but not right now. I've been playing for hours and I'm too tired to be articulate.

But I'm happy with where Hannah ended up, and I had a great time with this one.

Arthur Mountbatten's mind slowly but surely began to falter.

Before the darkness could take him, he spend the remainder of his days making up for lost time.

He helped others the best he could in this strange new world that he had helped to create.

When the time came, he would ask the Wayfarer for one final favor: an end to his troubles.

He would do it with a smile, for what better person could give him his death than the person who gave him life?

Mad Jack returned to the only place he could ever truly called home: His Gym.

The crusade against the shadows of the past was not marked by the fall of his enemies, but the rise of a new Mad Jack. Once a haven for his own tortured psyche, the gym evolved into a sanctuary for the forgotten and neglected souls of London. Here, he imparted lessons not just in physical strength, but in the virtues championed by the Wayfarer.

Kiera continued her pursuit through the capital, always seeking greater and more daring gains.

But though riches greased her palms, it was never enough. And so, she decided to leave London, endeavoring to explore beyond the capital. Her new quest is the become the most famed adventurer in the world.

Archie has finally found his place in the world beside the Wayfarer.

Half sidekick, half friend. They were inseparable for the rest of their days. He never stopped adventuring, his sharp tongue getting into trouble that he always barely squeaked out of.

The Thamesfolk disappearance, thanks to the Wayfarer, stopped almost entirely.

With time, wounds healed, and the Thamesfolk finally began to climb out of their tunnel sewers.

The Vagabonds and the Isle Of Dog Syndicate established a wary peace.

Though trust can never be truly established, the street at least were more free of violence. Eventually it became the new norm and the times of constant warfare were looked back on as a red day not to be revisited.

One morning, Thomas Black was found assassinated at his desk. A red knife was stuck in his back. The inevitable struggle continued for the next few months.

The Syndicate's influence declined under pressure from rival gangs. Sebastian Gaunt was never seen again.

But stories of enforcers disappearing overnight without anyone noticing infected the Syndicate hierarchy.

The Wayfarer retrieved all the lost plays for the troupe at Shakespeare's Globe. The theater prospered in the new world as it had in the old, entertaining the people of London indefinitely.

The free and fair elections were not kind to the Gentry, who failed to form a majority in the subsequent Parliament.

As time went on, the law no longer turned a blind eye to their extractive policies. This financial shock caused a significant decline in the Westminster Surplus.

Now on equal legislative footing with the rest of London, the Gentry redirected considerable resources into lobbying for their interest.

This investment would ensure they return their economical dominance.