Fixing Fallout: The Lone Wanderer
Hello Everyone and welcome back to Fixing Fallout, the series where we talk about how to fix badly written, problematic, and other instances of just general problems in fallout. Last time, we covered the Chemfiends. This time, we will cover Fallout 3's Lone Wanderer and their forced backstory. Remember, there's no stupid concepts. There are only stupid writers.
Fallout 3 has many biblical motifs, from the heavy use of Revelation 21:6, to an ending that invokes the Binding of Isaac, the Crucifixion, and the Sins of hte Father verse all in one. In addition, the minor character Daniel Littlehorn is actually a reference to the description of the devil in the Book of Daniel, ("And upon his brow he had ten great horns and one little one as well, and was terrible to look upon.")
Your father is a deeply religious man who cites scripture for his inspiration in project purity, and despite this - your character has no particular religious views, nor is your character given the opprotunity to reject any such.
I don’t really want to play a tradcath (totally unsurprising for anyone who knows me) but that doesn’t change that the OPTION TO DO SO should logically be there given all that. The option to play someone who feels deeply afraid of God or disturbed by what’s happened to the world under the eyes of God should be there. The Cult of Atom is in the first town and that’s just…never brought up? We’ve been raised our whole life by a religious man who based his life’s work on a Bible quote and abandoned us and we don’t find the cult of an apocalyptic weapon either deeply disturbing, deeply hilarious, or just confusing? Or just repulsive in its own right? Or can’t even be curious about it? We can’t express any of this? What? Hell, there’s a church in Rivet city and we can express NONE of this to them. There could well be an option to play the Lone Wanderer as still deeply faithful, deeply atheistic and antagonistic to the god of his father, or something in between - and it's never really addressed.
And that's just one facet. What about your father's obsession with science? Or the general attitude you were obviously raised with towards violence given what your father says to you during the fight with butch (you can't let people like butch push you around. You have to stop it or you'll never see the end of it.) You don't have to agree with that hell, some of these things contradict each other and roleplaying THAT out could be an option! Let me RP wasteland Desmond Doss (on purpose, not just as an accident of a no kill run, actually give me dialog for it) if you're going to have this many biblical motifs and our dad is a doctor, it's RIGHT THERE!
If you’re going to give a character a backstory, you need to give the player options on how to react to it, good or bad. How the Lone Wanderer should feel about their father, his god, his science, etc, should all feature heavily in the story and in dialog trees and instead absolutely none of it does! And that's just the Wanderer, their dad, and their little family upbringing. That isn't even touching the weird relationship they probably have with authority in general given Vault 101's authoritarianism and panopticon-esque microstate. The only time that's ever brought up is in joke dialog with moira, though. The concept of a game like this that gives you a forced backstory isn't inherently bad, in my opinion but they then need to let you roleplay a million different reactions to that backstory to flesh out the character they've then created.
