I still think that what i said in my first post, but no that i see the thread again, i am wondering.
Did the Geck actually been used ?
I mean, you get a scribe that actually sent you look for a geck in order to improve the water purifier.
But...
When the Enclave stormed the Jefferson Memorial, wasn't Dad already doing a new experiment, after he improved the water purifier, without a geck ?
An experiment that may have succeed, as we didn't had the chance to see the end ?
Also, what blocking the Enclave in some way, was that the water purifier became damaged, that the room was full of radiation, and that they didn't have the fucking code.
At the end, they took the GECK, but can we be sure they used in that water purifier, locked, damaged and full of radiation ?
The Lone wanderer knew the code, wasn't afraid of radiation or sent a mutant/robot to activate it and remove the radiation.
But is there actually someone confirming at the end that the Geck was actually used ?
Or could we consider that the Water Purifier was already on the verge of succeeding when the Enclave stormed the Jefferson Memorial and was only activated when the BOS took it back ?
I'm not sure how you could misunderstand so much. At least give Bethesda SOME credit; their poorly-written narrative had enough coherence and questions-answered that there were very few possibilities left to investigate.
James was preparing the Purifier for working with the GECK, because he acquired ample information on how it worked over the years he spent in 101 and in his conversations with Braun in 112. Also they had to get the Purifier and the equipment setup up and running again after 19 years of being abandoned. He wasn't running some kind of "new experiment" to get it working without the GECK. That was just gameplay convenience to have the player do some trivial task elsewhere so that they would be in "the perfect place at the perfect time" (a pipe with a convenient hole in it to witness a scripted scene), a narrative gimmick, not some kind of plot significance.
What "blocked" the Enclave was the activation code, nothing more. The radiation wasn't going to stop them, either Bethesda would have honored that their APAs would leave them unharmed, or they would have ignored good ideas in favor of more bad ones, like "they'd just toss in an expendable troop to activate it, then die, because they're evil!" At least it's unlikely that they'd be stupid enough to go with the latter choice because they already used the Deus Ex Machina injection to save Autumn from the exact same excessively-lethal-radiation that killed James in seconds, so why not just employ some more of that on whoever put in the code? Regardless, it was JUST the code that they needed. Not more tech, not more help, not more scientists... they had plenty of all of those. This is further reinforced abundantly when the Lone Wanderer is interrogated by Autumn into giving up the code at Raven Rock, and showcasing immediately prior that they had acquired the GECK from 87 and installed it into the Purifier.
I don't know if you played the game before or after the ending was patched, but if you played it when it was first released, you'd realize that Bethesda's original story was that the Lone Wanderer felt compelled to make the sacrifice, or was a douchebag and had Sarah make that hard choice. There was no other alternative, even if you had Fawkes or Charon or the robot at your side, because all they cared about was making the ending binary: Were you a Saint or a Sinner? Not a bad idea, all by itself, but this is
Fallout, where the much bigger picture IS supposed to matter. So yay, they patched the ending after MANY MONTHS of dissatisfaction, but then they just made it convoluted anyway, knocking you and Sarah out regardless of your choice, so all their focus on your karma went for naught.
They said multiple times that the GECK is what led to the success of Project Purity; yes, tons of confirmation.
