Falloutposting In 2024

When you arrive in the Commonwealth, it is a deeply paranoid, disorganised mess. Most of its major settlements have fallen, and its failed attempts at West Coast-style unification and mutual defence are a distant dream.

The game's major antagonist is the Institute: a shadowy organisation that is the subject of much rumour and almost infinite terror. While there are a few occasions where they get what they want by brute force (University Point, the Switchboard), mostly they operate via deception. Their whole deal is that they replace people with Institute-loyal Synths, who then act in the interest of the Institute, and against the interests of the communities where they live.

Everyone in the Commonwealth is terrified that the person to whom they are speaking is lying to them about everything – including their identity – and this constant threat of identity theft is why Synths face almost insurmountable prejudice everywhere, even when they are actively fleeing the institute.

In political terms, the most significant replacement is Diamond City's mayor, McDonough. The Great Green Jewel is actually run by the Institute ("Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" – as while Diamond City is partially referencing the baseball diamond, yes, it is clearly also referencing The Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz). McDonough's opening "I am not a Synth" speech references Richard Nixon – "I am not a crook". McDonough is a liar.

In emotional terms, the most significant replacement is the player character's own son, Shaun. The Institute has created a child doppelgänger of your missing boy and planted him in Diamond City, so you can spend a portion of the game believing that Shaun is a 10-year-old hostage of the Institute – rather than the guy in charge of this colossal mess.

Deception is rife in Fallout 4. It's built into the core of the narrative. And it pops up all over.

Early in the game, you'll hear a lot about how Diamond City is the finest city in the Commonwealth, and Goodneighbor is a den of criminals. Explore a bit and you'll discover that, despite its polite veneer, Diamond City is a dangerous place: it has already expelled all its ghoul citizens, it has become highly stratified along class lines ("The Colonial Taphouse would like to remind everyone that you are not welcome here. Upper Stands residents only!"), and its police force not only refuses to investigate disappearances, but will blacklist citizens if they object to this policy. Meanwhile, Goodneighbor has ousted its former gangster rulers and is working its way toward becoming a stable community – one that gives sanctuary to everyone.

What people told you, and what's actually happening, are not the same.

Vault 81 is initially presented as a safe place, if a little rickety. Do their quests and you will uncover a whole hidden section of the vault – and that these people are actually the very lucky survivors of a failed Vault-Tec experiment: they intended to use them to test deadly diseases, but were thwarted by the first Overseer.

Is this place really what it looks like?

Deacon, your Railroad companion, and an apparent survivor of multiple Institute purges, is obsessed with the nature of deception – and he spends a significant amount of his dialogue tree warning the player character not to just trust what people tell them. Piper, the journalist in Diamond City, discovered a conspiracy that killed her father and threatened to destroy her whole community in her youth – and consequently is driven to uncover lies and deception elsewhere via her newspaper.

This is a thing.

So why does Moe Cronin matter? Because it's a rare occasion where Fallout 4 gives you an immediate heads up about the bullshit.

Usually, if this is your first playthrough, you have no immediate way to know if a character is telling the truth or not. Your character has spent the last 200 years in a vault. You, the player, may have played previous Fallout games – but this is the first one to be set in Boston. Maybe you know what a Super Mutant is, but you know nothing about the area's history. You have to play the game: do the quests, talk to the NPCs, read the terminals, to find out whether a thing is true or not. Sometimes, at the end, you still don't know for sure. It's just your best guess. People can just say anything to you.

Here, though. Well – you can't immediately tell if Moe is lying or mistaken when he talks about baseball. But is it plausible? For a start the Fallout games have always been mildly satirical, so it's worth noting that – yeah, up to a point this is intended to be funny. But also:

Despite what the tweet says, there are in fact no Ghouls in Diamond City that anyone could ask. There have not been for some time. It's a fairly significant plot point that they were all driven out years ago. People with long memories are not welcome there.

There are robots! Most of them do not seem baseball oriented – neither Percy nor Miss Edna have anything to do with sports. I have no doubt that Nick Valentine could at least give an overview of how baseball worked, but it is abundantly clear that Nicky is on thin ice in Diamond City. There are people who are profoundly grateful to him, sure; there are also people who mutter darkly about the dangers of allowing a Synth to live in the city. Nick is also deeply ambivalent about his implanted memories, and only confides in the player character about them once you've had time to develop a rapport. So I don't really think picking fights with the Diamond City merchants about pre-war crap is high on his priority list.

There are almost certainly books and holotapes about baseball somewhere in the wasteland – vault dwellers talk about playing baseball – but there is no evidence that there are any in Diamond City, or even anywhere reasonably accessible to Diamond City residents. The library is currently occupied by hostile Super Mutants.

What Moe says is actually completely consistent with the way you see baseball bats used in the wasteland. You don't see a lot of people playing baseball games. You do see a lot of raiders defending their territory with baseball bats.

Moe is a salesman, and he is specifically selling the bats as melee weapons. His story is tailored to appeal to the kind of person who already wants to beat people to death with baseball bats.

But here, for once, you the player actually know better. You are a primary source on how baseball was played. So you know what he's saying is nonsense. And you know what you can do? You can tell him that! You can describe the actual rules of baseball to him. Know what he says if you do that? "I like my version better". So now you know. You've told him how baseball works, and Moe is going to keep on telling lies about it – because those lies are both more interesting, and more profitable to him.

This is, you know, thematically relevant.

I know this is a lot. I know I'm going on. But what I'm trying to say is: this isn't one of the things that's bad about Bethesda. This is one of the good things! Moe is a minor character. You don't even have to talk to him. But his dialogue leans in to Fallout 4's major theme, and once again warns the player character not to just believe everything they hear.

Someone writing this cared enough about the story they were telling, about the minor characters and setting, and the theme they're establishing here, to do that.

I'm not trying to take a swing (so to speak) at the author of the tweet either. I'm really not. I'm sad. Because "Bethesda is stupid!" is a narrative that can just consume everything else going on. It's so much more interesting if, instead of leaning into that, you look at a character like Moe and ask: "Okay, why would he say that, in universe as a character?" and beyond that, given that he is a made-up person serving a larger narrative "Why would they make him say that? What are they trying to say about their world?"