Except that the Vault Dweller could end up with a Neutral karma rating, so there goes the good/evil thing. Plus, even if you’re a good character, what is the point in needless sacrifice? The good gets done even if Fawkes or Charon goes in, right? And such a choice is even MORE good because you don’t sacrifice Sarah Lyons. Plus you, the good Vault Dweller, stay alive to do even MORE good. So yeah, the best option would be to have the character cut off from ALL companions except Lyons at the end, forcing the issue.
I’m failing to see why Cuckoorex seems to be so offended by the ending of Fallout 3, but eh, to each their own. And yeah, the easiest solution would have been to contrive some reason for the companion to stay outside, ie: “The Enclave is trying to outflank us! The Pride and Fawkes will stay out here to watch our flank, 101 and I will go in and secure the Purifier.”
Or, yaknow, “Eeew! Charon got squished by Liberty Prime! He’s everywhere!” 
EDIT: And of course, if your character ends up as a neutral, then it would be the choice here that determines if he’s Neutral Selfless or Neutral Selfish. 
It’s because the rest of the game is so good that I’m so let down by the ending, but even moreso by the fact that the developers admit to knowing that the ending is lame but they not only didn’t come up with the easy solution (which you and I both did, independently) but they (or at least one of them) seem to think it’s no big deal anyway. You ever see a movie, and you think, “this is awesome!” and then the ending is just LAME, and you and your friends can come up with a half-dozen ways the ending could have been more satisfying? That’s me versus Fallout 3.
I was actually going to post a proposed rewrite to the ending that was very similar to what you posted; either have the companion(s) be assigned to some other task during the final assault or have some scripted sequence where they get knocked out (not killed, as you may want to have them around when the expansion hits that allows for continuation after the main quest) before you reach Project Purity. Then you don’t even have to do another animation or voiceover for the ending, and it makes sense to have to make the choice of self-sacrifice or allowing someone else to sacrifice themselves.
Well, sending Charon in (if there was an option to do so) isn’t exactly a “neutral” thing, it’s just a “smart” thing. No point in needless sacrifice, as you mentioned. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t have quite the same ring as “The hero sacrifices him/herself for the greater good,” which is why it should never be a valid option from a developer’s perspective.
Including it changes the options from:
A. Sacrifice Yourself (climactic storytelling, good)
B. Sacrifice Lyons (climactic storytelling, evil)
to:
A. Dumbly Sacrifice Yourself (why bother?)
B. Dumbly Sacrifice Lyons (why bother, she’s a valuable ally, why is she so retarded to not see option C herself anyway?)
C. Smartly have Charon take care of it (anticlimatic)
Faced with those 3, you might as well just remove A&B as no-one will pick them anyway.
But yeah, we’re in agreement as to how Bethesda handled it was stupid.
I’m of the opinion that forcing the main character to die (or even someone else) is quite silly and inappropriate for a Fallout game. I’ve heard some similar things for the Megaton/Tenpenny Towers, and the Ghouls/Tenpenny Towers quests, where the designers Did Not Do The Homework. Fallout is fundamentally about meaningful choices, which is what set it apart from most other RPG’s, then and now. It could survive the death of turn-based (although I hope to see that used again), but meaningful choices are its lifeblood.
The choice here boils down to One evil thing and one stupid thing. But even the fact that you’re not given any other choices, or the opportunity to fix things up properly, make it suck. Likewise, most of y’alls proposed “solutions” involve messing with the player and forcing them down paths they probably don’t want, because if they had wanted they’d have done them.
I think you shoudl have the opportunity to, at a bare minimum…
- Go in yourself and die.
- Go in loaded down with rad-meds of various kinds.
- Send someone else in, who may or may not go, depending.
- Walk away, grab loot, and leave.
- Nuke the whole area.
Actually I’ll defend the second, at least ( spoilered for those who still haven’t done that one ):
[spoiler]Ignoring a quest bug ( don’t convince the inhabitants to let ghouls stay without first broaching the issue with Tenpenny first ), the usual complaint I see is that solving the quest the “good” way ends up with the ghouls eventually wiping out the “normals”, unless you whack Philips and his sidekick Masters immediately after he moves in to the tower. There is no indication this is necessary, so most folks either don’t pick up on this at all, only do so on a later play through or after they read a thorough walkthrough.
But the fact of the matter is that Tenpenny and Roy Philips really ARE nasty bigots. Tenpenny makes his opinions clear ( and Mr. Crowley confirms ) and Philips has a massive chip on his shoulder as conversation with him makes clear. The very first thing Philips does is whack ( offscreen and assumed, granted ) Tenpenny. That he then contrives an excuse to eliminate the rest of the normal humans later comes as no surprise, given his nature.
I rather like this ugly little twist. That it can only be figured out in retrospect doesn’t disturb me at all. A world like Fallout should have unexpected consequences to doing the right thing. Especially doing the right thing in such a way as to leave a gun-toting asshole ( he was quite willing to kill everybody before moving in as well, not just the bigots ) in a position of power.
No, that one works for me and works well. [/spoiler]
Actually, it was more that the game quest designers made a very blatant insistance that letting Roy in to massacre the inhabitants of Tenpeny Towers which bothered me. I wouldn’t have minded the issue except that the game declares that it’s OK for you to let Roy in and not do anything while he massacres people, but that it’s evil to whack the psycho bastard. I can’t claim that whacking Tenpenny is actually evil, given how ridiculously monstrous he is (the Megaton Bomb quest :rolleyes: ), but have to be careful when you start a Morality/Light or Darkside/Karma system. In the long run, it’s not a huge deal, but it’s kind of like having a thorn in your boot that you can’t quite remove. Painful and unavoidable no matter how much you try to ignore it.
The Tenpenny vs Ghouls situation doesn’t bother me as much as the Arefu/Family situation. If you spend some time talking to the residents of Tenpenny Towers, you realize how bigoted the spoiled Towers inhabitants are. With the Arefu/Family quest, it sort of makes sense that the positive karma solution is to make peace, but not that killing the family brings negative karma. The quest is also easily broken if you don’t do things juuust right.
As for the interview about the ending, the designer may not have been in a position to promise a patch fix. Yeah, it seems like it would be a relatively simple solution, but it’s coding that has to be planned, implemented, tested, announced, and released. That’s people that have to be paid, time taken away from other planned projects, and I’d be surprised if a developer had the authority to do that. I do think they should fix it in a patch, I’m just saying it doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t say “Oh yeah, we’ll rush out a patch for that right away.” At least he admitted they kind of got caught with their pants down on that one. Hopefully he’ll go bug his boss to allow them to put a fix out.
Actually, not really. All but one are at least willing to admit a ghoul*, and they may be snobby, but that hardly merits a massacre.
*Considering that Bethesda introduced feral axe killer ghouls roaming the world, this is not totally unreasonable, particularly since they never explain the difference.
Haven’t tried this myself yet but there’s reported to be another way:Whack Tenpenny first, preferably on behalf of Mr. Crowley, then Phillips won’t have a reason to clear the tower.
Sure it does I’m playing an evil character, and I think I’ve depopulated half the towns I’ve visited so far. It really doesn’t take much to push me over the edge 
BTW there are at least a couple spots in the game (I think Gob in Megaton and someone at the Museum of History) where someone explains the creation of ghouls, and throws in an aside about why some of them go feral. Granted, it’s more of a “something mysterious that we still don’t understand” sort of thing, but it is there. Or are you talking about something else?
Ah, no, that’s pretty much what I was talking about. They exdplain what ghouls are, just not how/why they go axe crazy. Which, frankly, would make me pretty damn nervous if I was living next door to one.