How can I accurately capture the sensation of doing a tedious fetch-quest. You know how, over the course of living for many years on this earth and having a variety of experiences, you begin to develop an intuitive understanding of the connections between cause and effect? Now imagine that intuitive faculty manifested as a physical organ, perhaps a sensitive fleshy ridge on your forehead, between your eyes. Now, imagine that someone repeated flicked it with their finger, but if you could endure it some indeterminate number of times (they refuse to tell you how many in advance), they'll reward you with a piece of chocolate (or whatever it is that people who aren't shameless hedonists with an untamable sweet tooth use to motivate themselves).
In other words, it's annoying.
Last time I left off, I'd played the game for 16 hours, and had only one remaining faction to befriend. Now, six hours later, I've done it. The Brotherhood of Steel is my ally, and I'm ready to rescue president Kimball from an assassination attempt and defeat the Legion at Hoover Dam.
So, what epic deeds did I commit to gain the trust of this notoriously reclusive and paranoid group of survivalists and technological preservationists? Well, first I went to three different map locations to retrieve holodiscs from the corpses of Brotherhood patrols. Then I went to three different map locations to speak to Brotherhood scouts. Finally, I went to three different vaults, to find various spare parts in isolated lockers.
It's pure padding. Many of these locations were associated with sidequests, so if you'd been delaying your visit to the Brotherhood, you'd be forced to backtrack extensively. If you're like me, and have been focusing pretty hard on the main quest, you'll inevitably get sucked into a lot of time-consuming rigmarole (even though the quest triggers are usually elsewhere, you still have to deal with the enemies and obstacles).
Yet I can't be too upset, because one of these psuedo-sidequests was one of the best to appear in any Fallout game (and, in fact, is so compelling that it could stand on its own as a separate game) - the exploration of Vault 11.
At the entrance of the vault, you find some skeletons and a holotape. Something happened here that was so terrible the only survivors were driven to suicide. And it is with that in mind that you enter the Vault itself, and see on the walls a collection of cheery and colorful campaign posters. The Vault was having an election. Yet these posters are astonishingly negative. It's like the candidates don't want to be elected. As you search through the Vault, you learn more and more from the computers, and find that Vault 11 had a strange tradition. At the end of each year, the Overseer was sacrificed, under the threat that if the vault dwellers did not pick a sacrifice, the vault's computers would kill them all. Since the first Overseer was so despised for keeping this condition a secret, it became traditional to link the offices.
And the more you learn about what went on, the more horrible it becomes - political factions arise to manipulate the elections, using them as a source of terror and extortion. Eventually, the strongest faction pushes too far, blackmailing a woman for sexual favors in exchange for not nominating her husband and then backing out of the deal, so she goes on a killing spree, and is made Overseer as punishment. She changes the rules so the Overseer is chosen by random chance, and Vault 11's society falls apart. A civil war kills most of the inhabitants.
Except the final five. Who refuse to cooperate with the computer any longer. And then learn that it was all for nothing. The sacrifice was meant to test their morality, to see if they would go along with it. All Vault 11 had to do was say "no" and they would have been set free, with no consequences whatsoever. But they failed.
It's a bleak story, but the presentation saves it. The rusting atmosphere of the vault, the desperate, yet oddly generic tone of the campaign posters, the voice of the various messages you find, and, of course Fallout's trademark aesthetic of ironic 1950s optimism combine to make this perfect little horror story that really lands the emotional gut punch.
Everything after that is a bit of a let down, though to be fair, it would be even if it weren't a tedious fetch quest. Vault 11 is just that good.
After a couple more hours of running around (in a vault with mutated carnivorous plants and another vault filled with drug-crazed raiders), I was able to secure my alliance and move on to the true endgame. Yes Man has informed me of an assassination plot against the NCR president (although, for reasons I can't quite comprehend, wearing Brotherhood of Steel faction armor when he tells you causes this quest to automatically fail) that threatens to undermine the stability and prosperity of New Vegas. Obviously, as a hero (albeit one who splatters his numerous enemies with a giant hammer at the slightest provocation), it is my duty to stop this.
Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, this mission is entirely antithetical to my particular skillset, so it will probably be a huge pain in the ass that I'll need to repeatedly replay before I get it right. Then again, whoever said being a hero was easy?
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