Yeah, I always thought it would have been better if Liberty Prime was a boss encounter
There's no satire in the big robot saying Patriotism while doing Cool™ things
Fallout 3 is really one of the most atrociously-written games ever. Your character has little to no actual agency throughout the story and this comes to a head at the end. The entire climax is you walking behind a mega-cool giant robot and watching it kill everything in sight. You are fighting a conflict between two factions over the right to flip a switch - both sides want to turn on Project Purity, but are fighting over who gets to do it, for no reason. In fact, your character is arguably the bad guy because Colonel Autumn explicitly rejected President Eden's genocidal designs with the anti-FEV virus and launched his own coup, your character might have accepted Eden's proposal to put the genocidal virus in the water supply. The final dilemma is an extremely stupid one over which character goes inside an irradiated room to commit suicide to push a button, while you potentially have a companion standing next to you who is immune to radiation; a proto-Mass Effect 3 ending controversy that provoked enough backlash the developers literally had to make and release a DLC explicitly retconning that ending.
EDIT: Also the entire conflict is doubly pointless because apparently by Fallout 4 the Brotherhood have pretty much adopted the genocidal Enclave worldview anyways
Too bad Van Buren was canceled.
Didn't it basically end up becoming New Vegas? Like all the major plot points and character are there, it just changed shape a fair bit between the initial drafts and when they were finally realized much later.
Also a much smaller scope because of engine limitations.
I feel like they almost had something going with Liberty Prime, like how he'll say "Better dead than red" after the apocalypse has happened.
The book chute in Old World Blues feels like a better vehicle for satire of red scare paranoia.
Citizen! Did you know that Communists have an organ behind their eyes that converts salt water into fresh? Or, wait... is that penguins?
Maybe that's what happens when someone gets a headache while reading theory, the organ is growing
There's always going to be some level of dissonance with games.
It takes place in a post apocalyptic world but the game also has to be fun. I think that on its own has a bad message to send.
I think he could have worked a bit better if he just broke down a lot. All this bravado and he just helps for a bit before falling apart.
I kind of like it when you hack him in the Institute questline he'll call the BoS airship a communist vehicle before blowing it up. Hell, he calls the Enclave, the literal decedents of the ruling class, communists in 3.
He works well on some levels but bad on others.
I think he could have worked a bit better if he just broke down a lot.
Liberty Prime was completely destroyed the literal second it faced even basic combined arms tactics in the form of a glorified artillery strike.
But yes, the fact that Gamers can go "wow cool nationalism robot" is evidence that even satire as hamfisted as Liberty Prime is too subtle and open to interpretation, and that it needed to go further in establishing that Liberty Prime was a terrible boondoggle of a project and that all its lines are the ravings of fascist madmen.
works well on some levels but bad on others.
That's basically the Bethesda Fallout games in a nutshell
They're actually perfect but you are entitled to your own opinion :quokka-smile:
Maybe after he kills the Enclave he can turn on the player. I just find the irony of a prewar super weapon killing remnants of the former US government to be too delicious to pass up.
Proof Bethesda doesn't understand fallout. Even the stuff they created.
