Lonesome Road was great and I loved it for a lot of reasons, but I have mixed feelings regarding the presence of the Bomb in it. In the end, though, I think I like it, and it supports my idea that the most moral option in the game is the Wild Card ending.
On one hand, it feels too lackadaisy in terms of gameplay. There’s a dozen or so small warheads around the map that you have to detonate to progress or access special areas. I would like this if it felt more horrible to do. As is it feels somewhat detached from Fallout’s otherwise artful approach to the Bomb: satirical and reverent by turns but always with the tinge of horror to it. In the Divide, the warheads are just kind of themed progression mechanics without the satire or reverence to them.
The Courier detonates a Bomb. I know you can apparently set off a warhead in the middle of a settled area in Fallout 3, but that’s an option for the heinous and evil that people generally don’t seriously take. In Lonesome Road, it’s an accident. An unavoidable accident. And it’s an oh shit moment.
You’re just going down that Lonesome Road, and you throw a switch to open a door, and suddenly there’s klaxons and screeching metal and the drone of a rocket erupting into life, and a missile rising into the air, and in seconds you’ve gone from trying to open a door to watching as your carelessness is crystalized into the most horrible weapon in the world and then there’s a boom and you’re left standing there wondering what you have just destroyed, what you have just killed, what horror of the Old World you have just awakened.
And then there’s the finale sequence. A whole bunker full of Old World fire, and you get to decide what happens to it.
Maybe you’re a Legionary. Maybe you’re with the NCR. You think that the best way to secure the future for your faction is to wield that Old World fire and scour the earth of the enemy. Maybe you just want the burn the damned world.
The game makes it clear that unleashing those missiles will forever alter the face of the West. If you let them loose, the world and humanity will face the consequences for generations to come. It even goes so far as to describe the events of that conclusion as a second apocalypse. And there’s no way to avoid it.
Unless you have compassion and loyalty enough to rescue ED-E.
The basic kindness of rescuing your companion is the key to the special ending the game initially denies you. You have to go through extra pains for somebody else to win the right to full choice, and you have to be willing to let that somebody make a choice, a sacrifice, for that choice to be followed through on.
The Neither option is objectively the best choice in terms of narrative: the story is so much better with the drama and heroics of ED-E sacrificing itself on the altar of the Old World in the name of peace and safety for humanity. And the Neither option requires another sacrifice: missing out on the content of the post-nuclear areas you’d otherwise unlock.
A narrative sacrifice and a mechanical sacrifice. You have to give things up to save the world.
Because that’s what you’re doing: you’re saving the world. With compassion and mercy and love and maybe just the pure pragmatism of not wanting to drop the Bomb again, you save the world.
I think that’s what the Wild Card ending is supposed to be. To reject the warring nature of both factions, to reject the doctrine that says a person has any right to shape history for millions of other lives. To say that the community of Freeside, the solidarity of the Followers, the autonomy of the Mojave, these are all worthy things, useful things, things powerful enough to override the un-overrideable. House, Gen. Oliver, Caesar, they all want to control the course of history through the force of their will, their intellect, their strength: but the Wild Card Courier has a radically different approach. The Wild Card Courier rejects the power of the Old World.
The Wild Card Courier rejects the bomb. Even when it means giving up control, giving up a friend, giving up power: they reject the bomb. Just like they reject authority, even when it’s the harder way to go.
dededos
kaledo-art
2087
jacobvanloon
yousharknotpass
