Screw you, game designers 2: The Wrath of Khan

So the other day I blogged about some shit having to do with a two year old video game.  Said video game, Fallout 3, had pissed me off with some questionable morals.  Well, I finally finished Fallout 3, and now I’m pissed about something else entirely.  Namely, I’m pissed about the very end of the game.

The entire focus of the game is something called Project Purity.  The main character’s father and several other NPCs in the game worked on the Project for some time back in the day, but failed to get it running and so abandoned it.  The intent of the Project was to mass-purify the irradiated water in the area surrounding the purifier, thus providing clean water to everybody in the area for the first time in over 200 years.

Of course, this being a video game, there are bad guys that want to control the purifier for their own nefarious purposes.  The very end of the game is a fairly cool sequence where you mount an attack on the bad guys who have taken over the purifier, take control of it yourself, and then decide what to do with it.  In order to provide some tension, however, it is revealed that the purifier’s power systems were damaged in the fighting, and it needs to be turned on right the hell now or it will explode (whoever heard of having to turn something ON because it is damaged??)  The problem is, the control room that has the “on” switch is heavily irradiated.  Anybody who goes in there will die.  Ok, I liked Wrath of Khan too, but can we not copy the ending please?

The hell of it is, when Spock sacrifices himself at the end of Wrath of Khan, that’s an actual thing that has to be done or lots of people will die.  And somebody does indeed have to sacrifice himself in order to prevent this.  Spock’s whole ethical belief system basically requires him to make this sacrifice, and he does, and everybody cries, and it’s a great fucking ending.

Now, I bet some of you are bracing yourself, waiting for me to explain why I don’t think “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” and how it’s bullshit that the only “good” way to end the game is to sacrifice yourself.  Well, buck up!  I’m not going to do that.  Sacrificing yourself to directly save countless lives is something I consider noble, and if faced with a clear situation like the one in Wrath of Khan or the (more contrived) one in Fallout 3, I’d like to think I could be the hero.  No, there’s something far more pernicious about the ending that I’m going to bitch about, and it has to do with this guy right here.

Meet Fawkes.  He’s a super mutant.  You meet him earlier in the game (just about one main-quest mission before the endgame, actually) and if you’re playing the hero, you probably freed him from his prison and let him go.  If you did so, you found out something special about Fawkes.  He is highly resistant to radiation.  In fact, part of what he offers you in exchange for freeing him is his services in retrieving the game’s macguffin from where it rests inside a highly irradiated room.  See, he knows you’ll probably die if you go in there to get it yourself, so he offers to retrieve it for you if you let him out.

Furthermore, if you free Fawkes, he returns later in the game to help you out, and offers his services as a follower.  In fact, it’s rather hard not to end up with Fawkes as a follower at that point, since something happens just prior to that point that causes all your other followers to disappear and go back to their home bases, waiting for you to come around again and re-hire them.  So there’s really no reason not to take Fawkes with you at that point, at least for a little bit.  And if, like me, you went right from that point into the endgame, Fawkes is there with you when you must make this awful choice to either sacrifice yourself or let someone else do so in order to save Project Purity.

Now those of you who have been paying attention may have noticed something rather important in what I’ve just written.  It sure didn’t escape me while I was playing!  In case you missed it, though, here it is laid out for you:

1.  There is a control room full of dangerous radiation that somebody must enter in order to save countless lives.

2.  Fawkes is essentially immune to radiation.

Do you see it now?  After briefly mulling over these facts, I came up with what I thought was the correct answer:  Send Fawkes in to press the button!

It seems perfectly logical, doesn’t it?  If you’ve been playing the hero, you saved this guy who would normally be your enemy.  In return, he helped you out a bit, and offered his further services later on.  This is your way out of the dilemma!  This is your reward for playing the hero the whole game–you get to live!  Everybody gets to live!

Not so fast, sunshine.

Here’s what really happens.  You turn to Fawkes.  You ask him to enter the control room and flip the switch for you, since, hey, you’ll goddamn die if you have to do it yourself.  And he refuses.  That’s right.  He says no.  Not because it will hurt him (because it wont).  Not because he thinks it’s a bad idea (he doesn’t, apparently) or for any other reason that makes any kind of fucking sense.  No, he refuses, because it is “your destiny” and he doesn’t want to deny you that.

What?  Fuck you Fawkes!  I’ll decide what my goddamn destiny is!  And I’ve just decided it’s NOT to die here needlessly if there is another, perfectly good option to take!  And hey, look–there is one!  I don’t have to send another fragile human in, either, to die in my place–I can ask the guy who will not be hurt by the radiation to help!

But no, Fawkes knows best.  He knows my destiny, and my destiny is to go in there and get fried.  Thanks a ton, man.

So yes, another hearty FUCK YOU to the designers of Fallout 3, who couldn’t be bothered to come up with a non-shitty reason why Fawkes (or Charon, the ghoul follower you can have, or that robot dude who can become your follower if you’re non-good) can’t go into the chamber for you.  I would have accepted “It’s too much radiation, even for me” or something like that.  But no, he mutters some shit about goddamn destinies, and fuck me anyhow for asking.

Can you imagine how goddamn awful Wrath of Khan would be if there were an established character on the Enterprise who was immune to radiation?  And if this guy had, earlier in the movie, retrieved some important object from a huge room full of radiation so that Kirk wouldn’t have to?  And then at the end,  if Spock turns to him and said “logically, Ensign ImmuneToRadiation should go in there and do the thing with the warp core that needs doing” the guy said “I’m sorry Spock, I can’t do that.  It’s your destiny to go in there and die so we can make Search for Spock.  So go on, get in there bub!”  Would that be a satisfactory ending?

The hell of it is, if you purchased and installed the first downloadable expansion for Fallout 3, you CAN ask Fawkes (or Charon, or the robot) to go into the chamber for you.  Because hey, there wouldn’t be much point to an expansion if you can’t fucking play it because you’re DEAD.