Rewriting Fallout 3

[Greymane]

Having finished all the endings in New Vegas after multiple playthroughs, I started thinking about Fallout 3 again and how much better it could have been.

 

Don't get me wrong, I still love Fallout 3. Unlike a lot of people seem to, I didn't feel that it was some sort of anti-Fallout or needed to be considered out of continuity for the universe. It was a far more entertaining sandbox to play in than New Vegas (where I honestly felt like you were on rails for virtually the entire thing) and thought it had some interesting ideas that just lacked for proper execution.

 

Still, after a few days of thinking about it I realized that more than anything, I'd love to see the story in Fallout 3 rewritten.

 

The first thing I'd change is who James was and what he was really trying to accomplish with Project Purity. It's stated goals are somewhat nonsensical. The Capital Wasteland already has water purifiers. We're told about them in both Megaton and Rivet City. While these are small scale affairs, they're apparently enough for these communities to have survived and even thrived. While a massive purifier for the entire tidal basin might not be a bad thing, communities in the area could have been better served by the development of more reliable and easier to repair small-scale purifiers.

 

So, what could Project Purity really have been for? The answer is found two fold, in the character of James and the skies of the Capital Wasteland.

 

First comes James, the Lone Wanderer's father. Who was he? In this incarnation of the story, he was not some random Follower of the Apocalypse-esqe scientist. Rather, James was a former Enclave scientist. He had been a child in Navarro when his family joined Autumn Senior on the exodus to Ravenrock. As they crossed the wasteland, a young James had witnessed first hand the decay and savagery that had befallen America. He watched as Enclave soldiers were forced to fight against feral ghouls, primitive wastelanders, or mutated animals at nearly every refueling point, at times even being overrun and forced to retreat with their vehicles tanks half-empty. He saw and would remember how many of their numbers were left by the wayside as vertibirds ran out of fuel or broke down on the long journey, leaving those who had been friends and companions like a trail of breadcrumbs across the waste.

 

These memories would stick with James through-out the years at Ravenrock as he was brought up and went into the scientific field, completely against his military parents desires. It was while doing research on old data logs brought from Navarro that James learned about the FEV virus and the Final Solution concocted by Enclave leaders years ago. He began to dig deeper into the data and of his own initiative began small scale FEV experiments. He saw the FEV virus as a solution to the horrors he had witnessed on the journey east. With the Capital Wasteland beset by raiders and super mutants, overrun with strains of mutated humanity, the Final Solution that seemed even more necessary now than it had in the days of President Richardson. By this time, however, the leadership of the Enclave had changed considerably. Neither President John Henry Eden nor Colonel Autumn had any desire to repeat the efforts, and possibly the mistakes, of the Enclave on the West Coast. When James's experiments came to light, he was forbidden from pursuing the matter further and the files on the FEV were sealed away within President Eden's personal memory banks. Refusing to let the matter go, James attempted to break into Eden and steal the data, but failed. Forced to flee from Ravenrock with Enclave security in pursuit, James barely escaped with his life.

 

He spent the next several years wandering the Capital Wasteland incognito, selling his skills as a doctor and watching in disgust what he saw as wasteland humanity making their flimsy efforts to establish civilization. Hit worse than perhaps any other location in the United States by the bombs of the Great War, the blasted and barren Capital Wasteland could only barely support life. Water was plentiful, yet contained to basins and streams, rather than the air, and the ground seemed unwilling to let plants take root. Birds did not migrate, crops almost never grew, livestock was often feeble and sickly, the skies stayed bleak and empty for months on end. Though the radiation of 200 years ago was largely faded into the background, unlike the West Coast humanity had yet to make a recovery. Witnessing all this, James slowly formulated a plan. He started to collect around him a small group of well-intentioned Wasteland scientists and even convinced the increasingly idealistic Elder Lyons of the Brotherhood of Steel to lend their support. To them, he proposed something grand. Project Purity; an attempt to restart the clogged and stagnated ecosystem of the capital wastelands. To bring back the rains lost to atomic fire 200 years ago. To make the wasteland grow green once again.

 

In secret, however, he worked on Project Purity's true purpose; to introduce a modified Forced Evolutionary Virus into the atmosphere itself, allowing it to spread across the globe with the wind and the rain and wipe out every last trace of mutant humanity on planet Earth. Working off memory alone, he began to attempt to recreate the FEV. Time and again, his efforts failed, while Project Purity progressed splendidly. More than once, James was forced to slow their efforts with sabotage. In the end, however, two things would happen that would put on hold Project Purity's secret goals and it's stated ones. The first was James' relationship with Cathrine, a completely unexpected and yet honest development. James love for her not only distracted him from his work, but started him on a path to find some way he might spare her, and soon the child they would produce, from it's ravages. It led him towards exploring the history of the Vaults, which included the still-sealed Vault 101. The second event was the coming of the Vault 87 Super Mutants, with whom the Brotherhood of Steel feel almost immediately into hostilities with. Their support for the project withdrawn as they committed forces elsewhere, the work station at the Jefferson Memorial came under increasing threat from raider clans who had long lurked near by.

 

Faced with increasing attacks by raiders and even probes by the Super Mutants who saw them as allies to the Brotherhood, James realized that their position at the Memorial was rapidly becoming untenable. Needing somewhere safe not merely to continue his work, but to keep his child as well, James broke up Project Purity and made for Vault 101.

 

Later in the game, James should actually become a full-on Companion and travel with his child so that you can learn more about him and see what a well-intentioned and yet deeply flawed individual he is. You would see the combination of bitterness, horror, and earnest desire to "fix" the world that would lead him to try something so drastic and terrible. In addition to learning about him, he can learn about you. Taking him to places you have visited, showing him the effects your efforts have had, you should be able to sway your father off the path he has set himself on. Demonstrate to him that there is hope for the Wasteland and the people who live there. Or, alternatively, you can end up reaffirming his convictions, if not openly joining him in his goals. This will ultimately come to a head when you travel to Vault 87, where depending on prior events, you are there to either locate a G.E.C.K. and/or a batch of FEV.

Edited February 11, 2011 by Greymane

[evilneko]

Like you, at first I didn't really like the plot of water purification on a massive scale. Over time (and several discussions) though, the idea grew on me, and now I believe that the purifier is most likely the right choice to maximize benefit to the people of the wasteland. I never really considered the weather, but then, I considered the lack of weather in Fallout 3 to be simply an oversight (or deliberate omission) by the developers. There would, quite obviously, be weather. Nukes or no, you're not going to be sitting next to that much water without getting rained on.

 

For me, it goes something like this: with clean water, you can start manufacturing (gradually) clean soil. Throw in Harold to increase soil production dramatically, and you could have a rebirth of agriculture, possibly within even a single lifetime. After that, the recovery of the wasteland would accelerate naturally.

[hurrdurrmurrgurr]

I'd prefer an entire rewrite of the story, keep the supermutants dominating DC but instead of BOS fighting them have the ghouls wage war with them. Instead of helping the player in the typical good guys role have the ghouls hunt down humans since they view humans as future mutants and believe that by killing off the humans they can win through attrition. In the end the player realises that the ghouls plan to flood DC with irradiated water and ghoulify or kill every human to cut off the mutant supply and reinforce their own numbers. The player stops the ghouls at the water purifier/pumping station but returns to their vault home to find that the supermutants FEV'd everyone inside. The lone wanderer walks into the sunset, roll credits.

 

This sort of story would add more impact to the Pitt since the only real human home is a slaver fortress and by killing Ashur you'd be dooming the slaves to fend off the mutants and ghouls. OA would be the same but would feature the bos instead of the outcasts as a way to show just how little they care about the regular people. Point Lookout would remain the same, Broken Steel would be changed to finding and destroying the FEV production facility where everyone is being dragged off and finally Mothership Zeta would remain just as abstract and out of place as it does now.

Edited February 14, 2011 by hurrdurrmurrgurr