Broken Steel: Fixing the Frontier
With Broken Steel, Fallout 3 takes a new, great turn into Western territory.
5/27/2009 6:09 PM | 4 Comments | Page 2 of 2
Yet in the background, water is flowing into the Wasteland. The visual effect on the landscape is not tremendous. But the effect it has on the Washington, D.C. ruins, as a storytelling environment, is immense. Everywhere you go there will be evidence that things are changing. Water brings life, but in the Wasteland it also brings trouble.
He cares not for your water. He wants blood, and meat. Bloody meat.
Westerns are about human nature, not six-shooters and hats. The ugly side of human nature drives three side quests introduced in
Broken Steel. With a new, easily stolen resource come new con artists and bandits. Raids on water caravans deprive towns of much-needed clean water. A ghoul irradiates clean water and sells it to other radiation-mutated citizens as a cure-all. An old woman near Megaton (assuming it still exists in your version of the Wasteland) builds a mad religion that carries the light of "Atom's Gift" through so-called Holy Water.
Those three mini-stories are all as close to core Western setups as you'll find. They add a new sort of strife to the environment. There's a specific product we can all identify with, and the possession of it, or lack thereof, now defines people. If I had to ask for something more than a simple action Western to really make the genre come alive in gaming, I'd want scenarios with conflict between politics and industry and character. That begins right here.
In addition to the quests you'll find nearly a dozen incidental encounters, all of which serve to underscore the ways in which water may or may not be the source of humanity's salvation.
Also not concerned with water: new, more dangerous ghouls.
The Brotherhood of Steel, which controls the purification system, can't figure out how to distribute its new resource. It finds that manpower, already stretched to the breaking point by the endgame of the campaign against the Enclave, is not up to the task of bringing water to the people. Mercs fight over caravans transporting the so-called "Aqua Pura." Entrepreneurs find ways to scan folks out of free-flowing, crystalline health. Bandits use the promise of free water to ambush unwary Wastelanders. Behind the action there are beleaguered bureaucrats like Scribe Bigsley, the Brotherhood of Steel cleric who has the sad job of making sure clean water flows everywhere.
So elements of the three larger side quests are echoed across the Wasteland. Everywhere you go there is a new layer of concern and strife. Water caravans, or their remains, are everywhere. Fallout begins to feel even less like a specifically post-apocalyptic landscape and more like a spaghetti Western. It's a place where everything is accentuated: fear, desire, desperation and change. It's an unexpectedly beautiful place to be.
