Making good decisions in Fallout 3

For those of you who don't know, here is some background into the fallout series.  Some really brief background.  The nuclear war that we were all terrified was going to happen?  It happened.  October 23rd, 2077, the war began.  Most of humanity were wiped out, of course, with us still having enough nuclear weapons to wipe us all out several times over.  But there were people who survived, a generous number of whom were living in massive underground vaults, which would protect the inhabitants in case of nuclear war.  That they did, leaving the massive fireballs and nuclear fallout to reduce the world outside to essentially rubble, and leaving the people outside the vaults to either die in the conflagration, or die of radiation sickness, or turn into ghouls.  Ghouls are humans who survived the nuclear war, although not without some side effects, as they have lost their hair, their skin has decayed to make them look like walking corpses.  And most of them have turned feral.

The world outside still has the vague image of the world that was, but by the time you get to it, it's all broken.  The world that humanity made, with its humorous 1950s robots, its industry, its homes and

airplanes, it's all broken now, all smashed. The people who are left outside, they're essentially living day to day, and just trying to scrape by. There are good people and bad people, and all sorts of morally dubious people, and it is this world that you come to, and decide how you're going to play.

Now, spoiler alert, I played this wrong.  When your vault opens, and you are able to leave, you are sort of supposed to go towards the massive obvious town just past the vault.  That's the town that sprang up around the vault, hoping one day that the vault would open back up, and they'd be let it.  It was also the town built up around an unexploded bomb, Megaton.  And I gleefully walked right by it, and into the wasteland.  And yes, I got all kinds of lost, and turned around, and ended up fighting enemies way too difficult for me.  And that was fine.  But after stumbling back to the place where I was supposed to go in the first place, the moral dilemmas begin.  Because, you see, there are good and bad options available everywhere.  There are thing to do that are both right and wrong all over the place, and usually they're pretty simple to figure out.

The simplest of all happens in Megaton.  It's easy primarily because of the whole white hat black hat dichotomy that is so popular.  Let me introduce you to Mister Burke.  Here he is.  Did you notice his black hat and shifty eyes?  He is wearing a suit, has a black hat on, and is essentially offering you money to blow up the town of Megaton, killing everyone inside.  Now, this is obviously, cartoonishly evil, really.  There's no good reason to go along with his plan to murder everyone in the town by setting off the atomic bomb, but that's the offer on the table.  The only reason for blowing the town up is that Alistair Tenpenny, the ruler of nearby Tenpenny tower, thinks that it's ugly.  Yes, that the town of Megaton is a blight on the landscape.  A post-apocalyptic landscape that looks like this:

It really couldn't look any more blighted, but there we are. So you've got a guy in a black hat offering you money to blow up a town because it for some reason looks uglier than the rest of the blighted landscape, and that's the whole motivation.  And the guy that you'd have to get rid of and stand against to blow the town up is Lucas Simms, mayor and Sherriff of Megaton.  There he is in his cowboy hat and sherriff's badge, looking the part. And looking at this, it's pretty obvious which choice is the one that you're going to make with a good character, and which one you're going to make if you're trying to build up an evil character.

But one of the things Fallout does and does really well, is to be exceptionally hard.  Not hard in the sense of traditional gaming, which is to say that if you don't press buttons at the right time, then you'll die and have to start over.  No, the game is straightforward to progress in.  You have guns, mines, and a hilarious method of pressing a button to pause time and target the individual arms, legs, and torso of enemies.  They don't have that on you.  So, yes, it's a simple enough game to progress in.  What isn't simple, though, is how they set up the moral choices for you.  This moral dilemma of whether to side with Lucas Simms or Mister Burke, it should take you all of five seconds to figure out.  The good option is to side with the Sherriff, the bad option is to side with the cartoonish villain.  But the interesting thing comes up afterwards, and this is where the game shines.  

Lucas Simms is the good guy.  And as the good guy sherriff, there's a good chance that he's going to die in this exchange.  Either you'll blow him to kingdom come with the bomb, or you'll find that when you report Burke to the authorities, Burke will kill Simms before you can get a shot off on him.  Fine fine fine.  And if you tried to, or succeeded at rescuing Simms, Burke dies, the bad guy gets removed, order is restored, and all that.  But then you learn about the bobblehead.

In Fallout, you have stats.  And your base stats are pretty well set.  They don't go up that much.  You can get equipment that helps, and weapons that help, and you can wear outfits that buff you up, and take chems (drugs) to help out, but your base stats are locked for the most part.  But finding bobbleheads changes that.  If you find a bobblehead, your stats go up permanently, and it's one of the few ways to do it.  But this bobblehead is located in Lucas Simms' house.  His locked house.  His locked house that you have to break into to access.  And if you get caught picking the lock, the town will turn against you and try to kill you.  So you have to sneak in, in order to steal from the Sherriff.  

And as I say, this is where the game really shines.  It's not hard choosing sides between Simms and Burke, that part's easy as pie.  Simms is the good guy, Burke is the bad guy, and unless you're going for all out black hat bonanza, you're going to want to steer clear of siding with Burke.  But the bobblehead is something you really want.  It's sitting there, taunting you with its flexed muscles, and you know that the only way to get it is to steal it.  You can search for whatever wikis you want, but there's really no way to break into that house that is clean.  And you realize that these moral choices are muddier than you thought they were .  

Now, you may say that taking this bobblehead doesn't count as stealing, and that's true.  The game's system of Karma won't punish you for taking it directly, but it will punish you for breaking into the house, and for taking anything else in the house, even if nobody's watching.  Oh, sure, if you're really sneaky you can get into the house without anyone watching, and take things without being seen, but you'll lose karma regardless, because karma doesn't depend on who is watching.  Moral actions are not based on getting caught.  

In this sense, Luther's explanation to the commandments is important.  Martin Luther tells us that it isn't enough to not technically steal, but that we should help our neighbor to keep what is theirs, and to work hard to sustain their possessions.  Even if it's something that we want.  And this is the hard part about playing Fallout, that the big moral choices are easy to make, like whether or not to blow up a city, but the small ones are incredibly hard.  And in that way, it mirrors life.  Oh, sure the commandment to not murder is a simple one on the surface.  Don't kill people, easy peasy.  And on the surface, the commandment to not steal is easy too, but then you may ask yourself, if it's something you really want, 'would anyone notice?'  You can easily claim that nobody would see, that you could get away with it, that Simms wasn't using it anyway, and all that.  You could claim that, but every time you hear that 'you've lost karma' noise, and the little devil face shows up at the top of the screen, you know that it's not about getting caught.  It's about doing what's right.  And sometimes, and quite frequently, both in life and in Fallout, doing what's right is a lot different than doing what is easiest.

Next week, we're going to get into the hardest decision in the whole game, which has a lot to do with Tenpenny Tower.  

PJ.