Fallout: The Frontier - Released!

Time is money. And getting therapy after being traumatized by scalies, foot fetishism, and underaged-girl-enslavement being forced into your favorite game also costs money. But I don't disparage them for that because watching the shitstorm from the sidelines has been incredibly entertaining to me.

The whole "enclave is objectively evil" thing is so baffling to me. Shouldn't you attempt to portray ideologies that you disagree with in the interest of player choice, and try to make their motivations make sense? I'm pretty sure Josh Sawyer and John Gonzalez don't agree with the ideals of Caesar's Legion, and Tim Cain didn't think that all humans needed to be turned into mutants. You can't join the Enclave in Fallout 2 either but at least it was for reasons that made sense in the context of the plot, and they weren't all 2D caricatures.

Emphasis on "hardcore" Fallout fans. It's now the time where I have to inform you that Fallout 4 is, regrettably, a game that exists.

Y'know, Chris Taylor once said that "Fallout is giving the world to the player and saying, 'Yeah, if you want to do this, do it. There's a reaction to it. Or if you want to do that other thing, do that. I don't care what you do, but you will care, because there will be consequences for your actions.'" But weirdly enough, it's apparently easier to spend hundreds of hours making the game action-packed, rather than adding depth or a branching narrative. Hell, even if you're a shitty writer, you can still give the player a choice. Literally not a single person who worked on Fallout 1 was a professional writer of any kind.

 

Well to be fair, that’s pretty much how the organization was portrayed in Fallout 2. It was New Vegas that first portrayed Enclave members as more morally ambiguous and three-dimensional. The organization itself is pretty objectively evil, but that’s no reason to not allow the player to join them. The player shouldn’t be allowed to join them because he/she is a “mutant” in their eyes.

 

Well yes, obviously genocide is bad. The point is that in Fallout there is no "objectively evil" from the perspective of the game world. Even in Fallout 2, there were members of the Enclave that defected (the oil tanker captain) or could be convinced that the Enclave's mission was wrong (Dr. Curling), or sided with the Chosen One to fight Frank Horrigan. The reason that you can't join them in Fallout 2 is because they regard you as a mutant, not because they're "too evil".

 

In the Frontier you had Wrench and her ex-boyfriend who were both ex Enclave and wanted to help people.

 

You mean the dogfucker? Point taken I guess. But what I'm getting at is that there's a fundamental difference in how the faction is portrayed.

The actual person in charge of the Enclave in The Frontier is a literal Wolfenstein Nazi expy. In Fallout 2, at the very least there was a bit of nuance to the enclave's plan. You could have a conversation with the people in charge, discern their motives, hear them attempt to rationalize it, argue against it, ect. And the actual grunts on the ground aren't moustache-twirling evil incarnate, they're people coldly doing a job who are "just following orders". A lot like how actual heinous dictatorships operate. The writing in the Frontier is just so uniformly awful that they really didn't take any of these factors into consideration.

 

The nuance of the Enclave doesn't come from the game having characters rationalizing their belief system like they did with the mutant Unity, but through humanizing the people in the Enclave who one would argue were "just doing their jobs". Navarro has a lot of such cases. The game went to lengths to paint Cookie, the Navarro scientists, the vertibird guard, Dr. Curling and several others as surprisingly human folks one might argue were just doing the job assigned to them with no thought to why. Curling being unique in that he did know. He's the closest thing Fallout 2 has to a "Master" moment. But unlike in the Master's case, Curling comes across as brainwashed and can be talked down on moral grounds. The other major oil rig characters were a jaded, spiteful politician and a big thug you can't talk to.
I'm fine with not portraying the Enclave ideology as redeemable(Fallout 2 never did), but to paint ever member of the Enclave as a mustache twirling hive mind with no individuality will always be a downgrade of Fallout 2's portrayal. If you can't expand on that human element the way NV did, don't use the Enclave.

 

It's an excellent point actually. Thinking back on the Enclave in Fallout 2 and there are an awful lot of "normal" people serving the insanity of Richardson. The prank call guy, Dornan, the Navarro chef and the bickering mechanics. All came off as remarkably normal people "just doing their job" to commit genocide

 

Wasn't this putz's favorite Fallout number 3? the game that had the Enclave twirling their mustache from the second they showed up in a top hat 3 floors tall to show you evil they are. in fact they ate kittens.

 

That to me is extremely heinous behavior. It is fine for them to criticize other peoples mods but to drive people off the Nexus and prevent them from modding again is outright shameful. The Codex talks a lot about how many of these freaks from big mod teams gather together on Discord to chase off modders who politics or beliefs don't align with their own or if they said or did something that "offended" them in the past. Cancel culture is quite prevalent in the modding community now. I am honestly surprised that they haven't come after me or Th3Overseer as we both tend to mock these people in our mod descriptions. They would have gone after Someguy2000 if he didn't retire from the mod scene at the right time.

That is a problem with people today. Thanks to the internet people today don't venture outside their circle jerks. They only want to hang out with people who confirm and support their world view. The moment that someone comes into their Discord that doesn't share their views they block or ban them. This attitude really stunts peoples maturity and behavior. The way how you grow as a person and gain more wisdom and insight is by interacting with people who share different beliefs then you and acknowledging them.
When these people try to add politics into their works it comes off as one-sided, jaded, condescending, and smug. They don't have the maturity and insight to look at things from the other side.

 

The only example of mod harassment I've seen AS OF YET was Xilandro threatening Rikku with butchering his content just to be a cunt after Rikku was gone. Say what you want about Rikku, his content or his deathclaws, but Xilandro was the bad guy in that scenerio. Was not aware of tgspy harassing anybody. DAMN. Fuck that.

 

Wait a second.

The one-dimensional villainous Enclave...
The simplistic "good vs evil" morality...
The preposterous endless supply of vertibirds in a scarcity society...
The implausible giant robots/vehicles that in no way fit in the Fallout universe (Liberty Prime, Enclave Crawler)...
The ability to destroy in-game locations with superweapons as a quest reward...

Holy shit, it makes SO much sense.

 

You know what? If the deserters just brought those vertibirds to hoover damn, they'd wipe out the Legion presence in Mojave in an hour. The conflict of NV would be utterly meaningless. And they're just over in Portland playing with their dicks while they fight a Legion so well equipped that they could wipe out the NCR in Mojave if they brought their shit with them. So smoothbrained.

 

Turns out Cannibal Johnson lost their Enclave Phone and didn't want to tell the rest of the group because it would have made him look like a jerk, so he just told them the Enclave is gone. what an asshole.

 

I don't think you understand how FUCKING IMPORTANT IT IS that they use ALL of them to rescue a postal worker that they met yesterday. As we all know the most important functioning component of any army isn't men, or materiel, or resources. It's the friends we made along the way.

Besides, they have the helicarrier for all of the other boring non-courier-rescue-mission related errands.

 

I cringe everytime i see a cutscene from the NCR path and it's them basically sucking the Courier's dick.

Not surprised it was made by fans of Fallout 3, because that's a game that likes to suck the playable character's dick for doing mundane shit. This also applies to Oblivion and Skyrim.

 

I joined the Mage's Guild yesterday, and now I'm the Guildmaster because quest writing.

 

I don't recall Fallout 3 sucking your dick much at all, compared to most other Bethesda games. It mostly just kinda sucks your dad's dick??

 

atlest when someguy did it in bounties 3 it was more believable as it's implied alot of time had past between nvb 2 and 3.

 

Surprised you didn't mention Fallout 4, which is perhaps the most egregious example. Sure Preston Gravy, I'm literally a crazed psychopath who wandered in from the wastes, and I just tried to murder all of you before I found out you were unkillable, but if you want to make me supreme leader of the minutemen after knowing me for ten minutes who am I to say no?

Y'know if Bethesda had been in charge of writing Fallout 1 I'm pretty sure the entirety of Vault 13 would have jerked you off and crowned you the new overseer after finding the water chip.

 

someone at Bethesda must have taken the chosen one at face value in fallout 2. failing to see it was a joke on the concept.