T w e n t y S i d e d

I actually really enjoyed watching the fight at the end of this episode. It was hilarious chaos with emergent humor. I think the damage sponge foes are generally a bad thing in this game, but if anything should be a damage sponge, it should be a sentry bot. It’s when you run into a human in street clothes that can take a half dozen shotgun blasts to the face that my patience starts to wear thin.

I think these moments of combat intensity would work better and more frequently if they felt a bit more intentional. In Diablo or Borderlands, you plow through mooks. Every N encounters is a badass. Every N badasses is a boss in an impressive location. But here there’s just a bit too much randomness at work. You’ll have a couple of legendaries back-to-back, but then both of them will be overshadowed but a nameless foe inexplicably higher in level than everything else in the area, which winds up being about as strong as the boss encounter at the end, which is then followed by a stream of mooks instead of the action winding down. I can understand why the open world parts are chaos (although Borderlands managed to make its open areas work) but far too often the murder dungeons feel just as unstructured.

The encounter at the end of this quest was one of the moments when it felt like the encounter was actually appropriate for the quest.

EDIT: As Mumbles pointed out below, you can see her tour the Nuka World DLC (and see the son she mentioned in this episode) on her YouTube channel.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Some people ignored the main quest. Some people did all the endings in various playthroughs. Some people were able to side with more than one faction.

I’m torn. I think the Minutemen are the least crazy in their goals, but the most boring to actually work with. I’ve played many characters to level 30, but I’ve only ever seen the ending credits once. I sided with the Institute. Yes, they’re evil imbeciles with no coherent goal and yes they force you to murder the other factions for no good reason. But when it was all over, I knew I’d get to live in a place with electric lights, clean food, and toilet paper.

Maybe life will be uncomfortable living with the guilt that I helped the robo-Fascists. Is that more uncomfortable than living in a pile of rubble and trading gunfire with supermutants and killbots every night? I doubt it.

But let’s say you have to choose once and for all. You have to choose one faction and destroy all the others because the game says so. Brotherhood of Steel, Minutemen, Institute, or Railroad. Which faction do you choose, and why?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So which choice is more vacuous and pointless?

1. Imperials vs. Stormcloaks.
2. Railroad vs. Institute vs. Brotherhood.

This can be about ideology, but it can also be a matter of aesthetics. Which conflict got the most investment out of you, or made you care about a particular faction?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.