Hello again, readers! I was definitely taking a break for the holidays and NOT throwing a tantrum because last week’s article got deleted after a faulty publish. Absolutely not. Just taking some me time, because I am an independent fella. 

But, what do we have here? A dashing hero about to enter the dilapidated museum of patriotism to rescue a laser-cannon-wielding dude in a badass coat and his contemporaries from a horde of bloodthirsty leatherclad savages, using nothing but his wits, his fists, and his trusty canine companion? 

Why, that’s exactly what it looks like, because that’s what it is! 

Obviously, if you still haven’t picked up Fallout 4 yet, SPOILERS AHEAD! Enjoy, friends! 

Alicante began by kicking down the door of the History Museum of Freedom and Tricorn Hats or Whatever and assessing the situation – the situation being, regrettably, that there were raiders inside the museum and they had lots of guns. After being briefly turned to hamburger meat by a dozen double-barrel shotguns, Alicante managed to punch his way through the ne’er do wells to reach the refugees and their well-dressed leader, Preston Garvey. Preston is a member of the Minutemen, a proud coalition of people devoted to keeping the irradiated Boston Commonwealth safe and sound. They are revealed to have a long and colorful history of heroism and devotion to good. Heck, they’re so devoted to their image they made LASER MUSKETS.

Preston’s also the last living member after a number of massacres and double-crossings. Stay in school, kids! 

Alicante discovers from Preston and his techie associate that there are more raiders outside, and that there’s no way that they’re going away. So, you know, could you please grab the miniature nuclear reactor in the basement, plug it into the abandoned suit of power armor on the roof, and get rid of them using the intact minigun on the crashed helicopter up there? 

Oh, Preston. You’re a handsome man, a snappy dresser, and a good shot with a laser musket, but you are in no way bright. You’ve literally had everything you needed to save everyone here practically laid at your feet, and you need Alicante Costa to do it for you? No wonder your friends are dead. 

Before Alicante does that, he has a few words with the rest of Preston’s refugees, who have been travelling with him for some time. Besides the techie, who also figured out everything that Alicante needed to do but refused to do it himself, there was a couple and an old lady. 

The old lady can see the future and is addicted to drugs, which is cool. She drawls her Bwaaaaoston eeeeaaaccent like she’s half asleep, but, you know, that might be why she needs the drugs. 

There’s also an Asian couple present, Marcy and Jun long, with Jun suffering from depression after the death of his son while simultaneously trying to help his wife deal with the loss. His wife, Marcy, rather than being depressed, is just kind of an asshole to everybody no matter what they do. I’d seen her in a previous playthrough and knew that she never stops lashing out at people who are helping her, whether it’s the player character making a wasteland paradise around her or her husband asking if she wants to talk about their loss. I didn’t know how to fix it, but Alicante sure did. 

Tears appeared in Marcy’s eyes. She immediately apologized to everyone for being a dick under literal crisis circumstances, opened up to her husband so that they might begin the healing process together, and honored her son’s memory properly instead of reacting to his death by acting like an entitled prick for months. MONTHS. 

Anyway, Alicante eventually went up to the roof and strapped himself into the mechanically-assisted metal pants of power. He picked up the minigun, too, with more than a hint of disdain. As we have discussed before, guns are cowards’ weapons. But there’s a guy on the roof opposite the building shouting insults at Mr. Costa, so before he beats every raider in the vicinity to a boneless sack of skin using his new metal fists, he’s going to turn that guy to paste. And since he’s a gentleman, he will apologize sincerely while doing it. It’s a little more honorable if the gun weighs as much as an engine block, but hey, it’s still a death by bullets. 

So, once that unpleasantness is done, Alicante leaps down from the Museum of Eagles and Whitewashing and the metal music begins. Lookout, motherhuggers. Alicante Costa’s ready to make some pasta with your faces. 

Regrettably, that’s about when the Deathclaw comes out of the sewers to wreck everyone’s day. 

For those not familiar with Deathclaws, they’re basically twelve foot tall lizards that are strong as oxen, fast as tigers, and durable as bears. And naturally, part of the facelift that Fallout 4 got for being brought into the modern age was making the damn things scarier. 

In case I haven’t made the image clear enough, here’s a .gif of someone from the internet fighting the thing in more or less the same way that Alicante did: 

At last, the beast fell, but not after taking half of Alicante’s ammo with it. After the Deathclaw died, Alicante knelt over the noble creature’s body to give a solemn vigil, and another apology for not having given it the hand-to-hand fight to the death that it deserved. Then, he remembered that there were still like three raiders shooting at him, dropped the minigun, and beat the everloving crap out of them. 

When Alicante went back inside, he found Preston and his gang getting ready to head out. Alicante pointed them to Sanctuary Hills, his old neighborhood, and they prepared to get going. But not before Psychic Grandma Drugs gave Alicante a recommendation to go to Diamond City to get a lead on his son, and then snorted some coke to give him a mysterious prophecy. 

Alicante followed them back, and, under Preston’s directions, set up Sanctuary as a livable space with food, water, shelter, and (somehow), a few automated sentry guns made out of spare computer parts and rusty scrap metal. 

Preston the Terminally Leaderless then satisfied his need to pass off his duties to others by appointing Alicante Costa the new general of the Commonwealth Minutemen, with all the privileges and responsibilities that the position entails. As we have discussed before, the Minutemen currently number at a whopping two, so there are no privileges and half a million responsibilities. Way to go, bucko. 

But, he tells Alicante about a group of settlers to the east that are having trouble – apparently, they used to belong to the Minutemen before the fall and might be happy to rejoin under their protective wing. Why not go see about those raiders giving them trouble from their base at Corvega Assembly Plant? Why, sure, Preston! What the heck could go wrong? 

And that concludes this installment! Yeah, it was short, but I need to get back in the swing of things! Just started two jobs, hoo dilly. 

That being said, there is definitely one thing that I want to discuss in terms of Fallout 4: the radiant quests. Radiant quests are essentially an unending stream of tasks procedurally generated by the game to give the player something to do even after they’ve finished the game. In this case, the most common source of radiant quests in Fallout 4 come from Preston Freaking Gravey, High Lord of Someone Else Will Do It. 

Now, let’s not mince words: The Minutemen in the game are totally boned when you first find them. But, as one plays the game, one will find that the Minutemen can become a pretty effective – if ragtag – fighting force. You can call them into battle using smoke grenades, establish supply lines for their bases, and even secure them a legitimate base of operations with a working citywide radio transmission. Sounds like they’d be able to help if, say, four zombies were harassing a settlement, right? Sounds like they wouldn’t have to rely on the player character, their general, to run every possible errand under the sun for them, right? RIGHT??

WRONG. 

Bethesda games, and many roleplaying games in general, have a lot of difficulty with giving the player power. The Elder Scrolls games, for example, like to make you the head of the Fighter’s Guild, or the Grand Poobah of the Assassin’s Guild, or Head Nerd of the Mage’s College, but what does that normally do? Diddly buckets. You’ve still got to do the quests, you’ve still got to take orders from people handing out stuff that they need done, and nobody competent ever steps in to do one or two things that need doing.

Now, there are a few exceptions throughout the global library of gaming. Always will be. But the core tenet of RPG gaming is essentially that in order to do things, the player needs to be told by people to do it. There are always cases where something happens and the directive, such as the quest, is given by the narrative rather than a character (like, for example, SAVE YOUR SON vs. HELP US GATHER DOG EYES), and this dynamic really interferes with the sense of accomplishment that FINALLY being the boss, FINALLY clawing your way to the top from the bottom, can give. Why can’t there be satisfying content after you make General, or Guild Leader, or President? Why can’t your underlings do the crappy fetch quests that you did while you were an underling? Something tells me that the universal answer is a half-hearted shrug and muttering about a lack of resources, which I’m fine with, but dang. 

I’m boss, man. I wanna feel like it.