Playing Fallout, I was playing my typical character; an incredibly smooove, goodlooking, intelligent, diplomatic, charisma-out-the-ears type. Yes, as you can probably guess, there’s a form of compensation going on here.
Anyway, since I was playing this kind of character, I naturally wanted to defeat the Master the clever way; don a robe and talk my way into an audience with him, then gleefully point out the errors in his master plan then leave before he killed himself in a fit of depression at his own stupidity.
En route to his church, I came across the Followers of the Apocalypse, who suggested they send down a bunch of scouts to help. Now misled, by the word ‘scouts’, I assumed that what these people would do would be, well, wander around the permiter, deal with a couple of suspicious guards, then stand back and let me do my thing. Scout stuff in other words. So I agreed.
Turns out, their idea of scout stuff was rather different from mine. *They * wanted to come along too. Going to elaborate precautions, I searched out my contact, disguised myself, located secret doors, climbed up stairwells, prepared ids… all for nothing since the four spear-toting thugs at my back kinda gave the lie to the whole ‘new initiate’ story.
I hissed at them to go away, but, not being technically companions (and companions in Fallout, while I’m on the subject, are the most useless bunch of glorified scraps of cannon-fodder ever to wander the wastes) I couldn’t actually talk with them, and all they’d say were things like ‘Let’s go’. Not, unfortunately, with reference to my instructions.
Oh well, I said to myself, they are but four people with crappy leather armour and spears. We will be fighting gun-wielding monks, power-armoured supermutants, and weird things with giant scorpion tails. They won’t last long and after that, I can continue with the original plan.
So. We slaughtered everyone upstairs and downstairs in the church. We made a frontal assault on the old vault below the church, and fought our way down through the levels. They had guts, I’ll give those Followers of the Apocalypse that. I saw several colourful examples of their guts strewn across the floor on several different occasions. Every now and then I’d try and run ahead, but the tireless, loyal scouts always followed close behind.
They died fairly quickly, all except one. Somehow, miraculously, with nothing but her spear and crap armour, she survived each fight, accompanying me all the way down to the final level. To a corridor around the far end of which lurked about thirty power-armoured mutants.
I looked at her thoughtfully. I looked down the corridor. My lips moved in a frenzy of calculation.
I thought: Wow. She’s survived so much, at such great odds. I thought: She’ll be able to tell her grandchildren about fighting alongside the Vault Dweller to save the world. I thought: I am not going through one more fucking battle.
Well, you can probably see where this is going. As nicely as possible, I lifted my sniper rifle and shot her in the head, then donned my disguise robes and wandered past the super mutants.
I humbly suggest that this single moment of gameplay manages to capture the entire spirit of Fallout
Now check out this segue.