Okay nevermind my Operation Anchorage review.
Coming back to it as an adult with a fully formed brain and an actual belief system, The Pitt is my least favourite FO3 expansion by a country mile.
In part because while the others are bad, The Pitt is both bad and actually offensive.
Fallout 3 already has problems with invoking the imagery and motifs of American Slavery - a very real thing that scarred entire generations for about three centuries, killed hundreds of thousands of very real people and ruined tons of very real countries - while attempting to be impartial and ~nonpolitical~.
Fallout 2 is a dogshit-ass game that I have little love for, but when it brought slavery into the equation it had the correct idea of not invoking the Civil Rights Movement and associated iconography.
Fallout 3 had no such wisdom, which means you use an "underground Railroad movement" to free uh... A white man. Hey fun fact, the black leader of the escaped slaves - Hannibal Hamlin - is white in his ending slide
The Pitt doubles down on this in the worst way possible: By trying to Both Sides slavery.
Let's just lay out Ishmael Ashur's whole deal, right?
Ashur is an insane but erudite ex-Brotherhood religious zealot who, upon seeing a city dominated by endless hordes of cannibalistic murder-rapist Raiders, decided it would be best if he built a manufacturing empire out of its corpse. This empire is built with slave labor. Lots and lots and lots of slave labor. Slave labor that, given Ashur buys from Fallout 3's slave labor, almost certainly includes children too. These slaves die at such a rapid pace that external slavers are struggling to fulfill the shipment quotas thanks the horrific meat treadmill Ashur runs.
This regime is enforced by a system of eugenics (wherein slaves aren't allowed to have children), propaganda (in which Ashur promises all this is a "temporary measure" and that slaves can "earn" their freedom in brutal gladiator battles) and a caste of ex-raiders who - despite Ashur's alleged reformation - are still murderous rapists that are far too eager to torture, kill or maim slaves.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand The Pitt wants you to consider him a valid choice against his opponent.
Wernher is a bit of a dick, he's blunt and to the point at all times. He doesn't really care about the slaves but is entirely willing to free them for his goals. All he asks of you is that you steal a baby.
"WHOA!" Said most of the gaming landscape and also all of FO3's writers. "Stealing a baby is fucked up. This is such a morally grey choice."
But to take The Pitt's main dilemma as a morally choice is to not at all interrogate the seting, which is a really embarassing thing to happen when you wrote it.
Let's just interrogate it right here, shall we? Fun teambuilding exercise.
The core conceit of this allegedly "morally grey choice" is that Marie, as a literal baby, is innocent of the sins of her parents and thus shouldn't be subject to harm as a means to punish them. This is fair on its own, but to take that at face value means either deliberately or incidentally having major blindspots.
First of all, despite Wernher declarig he doesn't give a shit about Marie's health, it's also stated more than a few times that Midea - her carer if you side with the slaves - is looking after her during the experiments... Experiments which also happen if you side with Ashur.
Secondly, The Pitt naturally doesn't bother depicting child slavery - ostensibly due to developer cowardice - even though it's abundantly clear that's a thing given the connection between Paradise Falls (a place that sells to The Pitt and has numerous child slaves) and The Pitt, plus The Pitt is infinitely larger than is depicted ingame. With that in mind, one has to ask: What makes Marie more entitled to safety than the child slaves that're almost certainly a part of Ashur's great 'empire'? Sure, she's a baby, but this machine has already trampled over the corpses of children.
Third, and perhaps the most impactful question: What happens to the children born of Ashur's slaves? I like this one because there's no answer that makes the slavers look good. If the children are enslaved, then there's the obvious caveat; they're enslaving children. If the children are free, then the slavers steal children from their parents to be indoctrinated as brutal, amoral raiders. How is it worse, then, to steal a baby away to relative safety? It may not be squeaky clean, but no liberation movement ever was and the opposition are hardly innocent angels.
Ashur's sole defence when confronted with his crimes is that this is a "temporary, necessary measure" on the road to "emancipation" for everyone, which... does not work. At all.
To buy into this is to believe that Ashur's Raiders, with all their brutality and slavery and their entire arsenal of systemic oppression, would relinquish total control over The Pitt and elevate the slaves to a position of equality.
I regularly lay into Bethesda Fallout for being overly cynical garbage written by people who're emotionally still 14, but in the case of The Pitt I feel that cynicism has dug a grave for the story pre-emptively. If you take Bethesda Fallout at face value, it encourages the player to view things cynically and bitterly. Why should The Pitt get an exception? Nothing about this DLC stokes optimism.
It feels like this DLC was made by and for people who think Malcolm X was bad because he advocated for violent resistance, or think that any social movement is only valid so long as it remains entirely peaceful, quiet and out of mind. The core dilemma just falls apart entirely if questioned or interrogated at all, so while it might appeal to people who say the words "thinking too hard" about people who take videogames even slightly seriously, it must be pure brain poison to people who actually use that wet sack of meat inside their skull.
In other, less kind words: This DLC sucks doodoo shit and the writers should find jobs working as janitors in a kitchen - not chefs, because they clearly can't cook shit.
The only slightly redeeming part of this DLC is the Steel Ingot collectathon; a treasure hunt where you can scavenge up to 100 ingots in a map that's relatively well designed and may be the only cell in FO3 with any real thought in it. It's not very long if you, like me, have memorized the route, but the area it takes place in is relatively atmospheric and also conveniently disconnected from the overall conflict.
That the only good part is entirely detached from the rest of the DLC should be all the review you need, honestly.
Coming back to it as an adult with a fully formed brain and an actual belief system, The Pitt is my least favourite FO3 expansion by a country mile.
In part because while the others are bad, The Pitt is both bad and actually offensive.
Fallout 3 already has problems with invoking the imagery and motifs of American Slavery - a very real thing that scarred entire generations for about three centuries, killed hundreds of thousands of very real people and ruined tons of very real countries - while attempting to be impartial and ~nonpolitical~.
Fallout 2 is a dogshit-ass game that I have little love for, but when it brought slavery into the equation it had the correct idea of not invoking the Civil Rights Movement and associated iconography.
Fallout 3 had no such wisdom, which means you use an "underground Railroad movement" to free uh... A white man. Hey fun fact, the black leader of the escaped slaves - Hannibal Hamlin - is white in his ending slide
The Pitt doubles down on this in the worst way possible: By trying to Both Sides slavery.
Let's just lay out Ishmael Ashur's whole deal, right?
Ashur is an insane but erudite ex-Brotherhood religious zealot who, upon seeing a city dominated by endless hordes of cannibalistic murder-rapist Raiders, decided it would be best if he built a manufacturing empire out of its corpse. This empire is built with slave labor. Lots and lots and lots of slave labor. Slave labor that, given Ashur buys from Fallout 3's slave labor, almost certainly includes children too. These slaves die at such a rapid pace that external slavers are struggling to fulfill the shipment quotas thanks the horrific meat treadmill Ashur runs.
This regime is enforced by a system of eugenics (wherein slaves aren't allowed to have children), propaganda (in which Ashur promises all this is a "temporary measure" and that slaves can "earn" their freedom in brutal gladiator battles) and a caste of ex-raiders who - despite Ashur's alleged reformation - are still murderous rapists that are far too eager to torture, kill or maim slaves.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand The Pitt wants you to consider him a valid choice against his opponent.
Wernher is a bit of a dick, he's blunt and to the point at all times. He doesn't really care about the slaves but is entirely willing to free them for his goals. All he asks of you is that you steal a baby.
"WHOA!" Said most of the gaming landscape and also all of FO3's writers. "Stealing a baby is fucked up. This is such a morally grey choice."
But to take The Pitt's main dilemma as a morally choice is to not at all interrogate the seting, which is a really embarassing thing to happen when you wrote it.
Let's just interrogate it right here, shall we? Fun teambuilding exercise.
The core conceit of this allegedly "morally grey choice" is that Marie, as a literal baby, is innocent of the sins of her parents and thus shouldn't be subject to harm as a means to punish them. This is fair on its own, but to take that at face value means either deliberately or incidentally having major blindspots.
First of all, despite Wernher declarig he doesn't give a shit about Marie's health, it's also stated more than a few times that Midea - her carer if you side with the slaves - is looking after her during the experiments... Experiments which also happen if you side with Ashur.
Secondly, The Pitt naturally doesn't bother depicting child slavery - ostensibly due to developer cowardice - even though it's abundantly clear that's a thing given the connection between Paradise Falls (a place that sells to The Pitt and has numerous child slaves) and The Pitt, plus The Pitt is infinitely larger than is depicted ingame. With that in mind, one has to ask: What makes Marie more entitled to safety than the child slaves that're almost certainly a part of Ashur's great 'empire'? Sure, she's a baby, but this machine has already trampled over the corpses of children.
Third, and perhaps the most impactful question: What happens to the children born of Ashur's slaves? I like this one because there's no answer that makes the slavers look good. If the children are enslaved, then there's the obvious caveat; they're enslaving children. If the children are free, then the slavers steal children from their parents to be indoctrinated as brutal, amoral raiders. How is it worse, then, to steal a baby away to relative safety? It may not be squeaky clean, but no liberation movement ever was and the opposition are hardly innocent angels.
Ashur's sole defence when confronted with his crimes is that this is a "temporary, necessary measure" on the road to "emancipation" for everyone, which... does not work. At all.
To buy into this is to believe that Ashur's Raiders, with all their brutality and slavery and their entire arsenal of systemic oppression, would relinquish total control over The Pitt and elevate the slaves to a position of equality.
I regularly lay into Bethesda Fallout for being overly cynical garbage written by people who're emotionally still 14, but in the case of The Pitt I feel that cynicism has dug a grave for the story pre-emptively. If you take Bethesda Fallout at face value, it encourages the player to view things cynically and bitterly. Why should The Pitt get an exception? Nothing about this DLC stokes optimism.
It feels like this DLC was made by and for people who think Malcolm X was bad because he advocated for violent resistance, or think that any social movement is only valid so long as it remains entirely peaceful, quiet and out of mind. The core dilemma just falls apart entirely if questioned or interrogated at all, so while it might appeal to people who say the words "thinking too hard" about people who take videogames even slightly seriously, it must be pure brain poison to people who actually use that wet sack of meat inside their skull.
In other, less kind words: This DLC sucks doodoo shit and the writers should find jobs working as janitors in a kitchen - not chefs, because they clearly can't cook shit.
The only slightly redeeming part of this DLC is the Steel Ingot collectathon; a treasure hunt where you can scavenge up to 100 ingots in a map that's relatively well designed and may be the only cell in FO3 with any real thought in it. It's not very long if you, like me, have memorized the route, but the area it takes place in is relatively atmospheric and also conveniently disconnected from the overall conflict.
That the only good part is entirely detached from the rest of the DLC should be all the review you need, honestly.
10 Comments
@Raivin Yeah it's just miserable. Reminds me of Bioware writing.
@MiraMiraOTW hold on, it was awhile since I've played a Bioware game, which ones you're talking about in particular?
@Raivin Dragon Age 2 does this exact thing, just spread out over 60 hours as opposed to an hour.
@MiraMiraOTW oh right, I literally thought of it the exact moment you wrote it, lol
''Ending literal slavery VS Stealing one (1) baby'' being posed as a genuine moral decision in equal level is such a shock to the fucking system that just makes me realize how disconnected I'm still am to this franchise's stories and now I'm contemplating if it's even worth it to try out Fallout 3. Like, you can't make that shit up, what the actual fuck where they even thinking
You know, something ive noticed about these types of games that love to depict slavery is that they always conjure images of American slavery despite the fact that slavery as a practice has existed forever, for every type of person on every continent. Like here, it sounds like the main villian (?) is trying to build an empire, which requires manual labor. The first thing that would come to my mind is the subordination of say, the Egyptians to build the pyramids or captives of the Romans working ore mines for coin minting, both of which were different institutions but idk every time some White Guy wants to write about slavery its always underground railroad stuff except White. If youre gonna talk about slavery you cant be stupid about it, obviously, but there is a way to implement it into your work without appropriating the very recent and tangible suffering of black people, specifically.
Great review though! It was very concise and I love how you led us through like, thought experiments showing us why the writing is awful and doesnt hold up instead of just being like "this sux cause its racist", which is true, but the way you wrote it is really engaging ^_^
Great review though! It was very concise and I love how you led us through like, thought experiments showing us why the writing is awful and doesnt hold up instead of just being like "this sux cause its racist", which is true, but the way you wrote it is really engaging ^_^
@DeemonAndGames Amen, fuck it.
@moschidae Thank you! [ramble incoming]
A pretty common thread with Bethesda Fallout is that the writers, Emil Pagliarulo especially, aren't really capable of examining themes or ideas through any other lense besides a middle-class American one and even then they tend to just depict things rather than examine them - as we found out in this review lmao.
You go over to NV and the developers are taking inspiration from the forced mass-migration of ethnic groups under Feudal caste systems across Europe and then using that to compare + contrast the NCR (who're kinda doing the same thing) and the Legion, and then you come back to Fallout 3 and they're so bad at taking any ideas from the rest of human existence that they can't go any further than "cages of black people with collars on" and "you access The Pitt via a Railroad".
But that would require Bethesda to care about people/cultures/countries that aren't North America.
@moschidae Thank you! [ramble incoming]
A pretty common thread with Bethesda Fallout is that the writers, Emil Pagliarulo especially, aren't really capable of examining themes or ideas through any other lense besides a middle-class American one and even then they tend to just depict things rather than examine them - as we found out in this review lmao.
You go over to NV and the developers are taking inspiration from the forced mass-migration of ethnic groups under Feudal caste systems across Europe and then using that to compare + contrast the NCR (who're kinda doing the same thing) and the Legion, and then you come back to Fallout 3 and they're so bad at taking any ideas from the rest of human existence that they can't go any further than "cages of black people with collars on" and "you access The Pitt via a Railroad".
But that would require Bethesda to care about people/cultures/countries that aren't North America.
"you access the Pitt via a Railroad" sounds like something David Cage would write. Actually, this entire dlc seems veryyy Detroit Become Human lol. I didnt know Bethesda was so troubled before I read your review honestly, I've only ever heard good things about Fallout 2. The only Fallout game ive heard shit about was 4 and that one weird bunker game (Fallout 76? 69? whatever) but man, I wish more people talked about this kind of stuff in their reviews. I feel like its so common to be goaded into playing a game and then its just kinda like... this. Thank u for spreading the word so Id never have to see this first hand, im pretty sure if i played this id throw up :salute:
@moschidae I keep it on the downlow but I'm a veryyyyyyyyyyyy disgruntled Fallout fan who was one of the first to publicly and loudly hate Fallout 3 and that's kinda continued into everything to come out of Fallout besides NV.
Bethesda are a veryyyyyyyyyyy bad company.
Bethesda are a veryyyyyyyyyyy bad company.
Raivin
21 days ago
Giving despicable people redeeming qualities aka "but it's just temporary measure" and villianizing victims is a HORRID way to make a morally ambigous decision.