T w e n t y S i d e d

The biggest complaint about this series is that a lot of my objections to the story are over “trivial” things. This is true in parts, but it’s also missing the point. The story of Fallout 3 is fractally bad. It’s bad at many different levels and it often takes people a while to realize just how far the brokenness goes. The fact that the themes of Fallout 3 are wonky isn’t enough to ruin the story on its own. And the fact that Dad is really flat and the only actions he ever takes are destructive isn’t enough to ruin the game either. But when I hammer the game for having nonsense goals, people often defend it on the basis of its themes, or characters, or the places you visit. You can’t drill down through the layers to find a single point of failure that we can point at and say, “Here. THIS is where it all went wrong!” It’s a big interconnected mess and it takes time to document all the failures.

So all those early “trivial nitpicks” were part of a long process to head off all the usual defenses of Fallout 3 so we wouldn’t get caught up in looping cul-de-sac arguments, because I didn’t want to end up discussing the entire game in a kind of nested reverse of “D because C because B because A”. This is long and nitpick-y because the problems are far-reaching.

But here’s the payoff. This is where all the mistakes converge into a completely idiotic conclusion…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 5”

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 the themes are a mess, the setting is nonsense, and the most important character is a dumbass with a really intelligent sounding voice. But Dad isn’t the only man in this world who would lose to a wooden signpost in a thinking contest…

The Enclave are all dumb jerk idiot heads.

To be fair, they were never very bright. But at least they were dummies with a goal. Let’s just hand-wave the massive avalanche of contrivances and coincidences needed to explain how they somehow knew what Dad was doing and showed up five minutes after we turned on the power at the purifier, even though this place was free for the taking for the last 18 years. Fine. They’re here. Let’s talk about why.

Let me ask you about the Enclave in Fallout 3: What do these clowns want? At the end of the day, how are they hoping to improve their lot in life? What do they need? Land? Not likely, and this land is worthless anyway. Food and water? These people don’t have any. Slaves? The Enclave has a doom fortress of robots and magical technology to do their work for them, so the last thing in the world they need is a bunch of hungry, disease-ridden, irradiated slaves stinking up their nice clean base. And besides, what work needs to be done?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 4”

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.