Fallout 3 Quests Analyzed

After going over some good points of Fallout 3, Shamus Young analyzes two separate quests, The Power of the Atom and Tenpenny Tower. He bashes the writing in both of them, as well as criticizing the structure. On Tenpenny Tower (spoilers):

I chose to defend the misguided people of Tenpenny and take out Roy, which was an evil act in the eyes of the game. The guy on the radio – the conscience of the game – even called me a (scumbag) and said I (butchered) ghouls. Apparently killing a man contemplating mass murder made me a. racist?

This isn’t just a badly written quest. This is reprehensible. According to the moral compass offered by the in-game karma system (and, one assumes, the game designers) being a rich bigot (where (rich) is simply a label the game hangs on characters without context, and (bigot) is a charge that may or may not be fair, based on how dangerous regular ghouls are to people) is worse than mass murder and theft. The people of Tenpenny weren’t oppressing Roy by taking anything from him. They were just refusing to do business with him. And since he’s clearly a bloodthirsty madman, they kind of have a point.

This is not the only quest that presumes to help us understand deep concepts like (racism is bad). Elsewhere in the game is a den of very polite Vampires – humans that drink human blood to survive. They balk at being called (cannibals). (Right, you’re not simple cannibals, you’re wasteful cannibals.) They seek (understanding), from the player, despite the fact that their survival depends on a steady supply of victims to keep them alive. Once again the right/wrong karma arrow points sideways, and it’s wrong to kill them, but right to convince a nearby village to supply them with blood in exchange for being left alone. I guess it’s okay to hold a village hostage and enslave them if you’re very polite and claim to be misunderstood.