I don't feel like explaining why, but, come on. You know.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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Fallout 3 tracks for a couple reasons. I was gonna object to it, because for me the canon ending is when you activate the water purifier and clean the Potomac river, giving free clean water to the Wasteland. However, the evil ending is to add the Enclave's FEV (Forced Evolution Virus) to the purifier, which kills any mutant, ghoul, mutated creature, and a lot of humans who have invisible impurities. The Enclave is basically the ultra conservatives.
There is also a slaver faction you can join. You will need to enslave (or kill) their first target, a sniper called Arkansas, in order to get in, and there's an achievement tied into doing so (collecting all the Bobbleheads, the slaver leader has the one that increases your bartering skill or charisma, I forget which, and you can freely take it and any of them without offending anyone). Getting past Arkansas in any way is also tied to a major side quest, so you'll want to deal with him one way or another. (You can also just run through the area he's sniping, but you also have to watch out for landmines.) Anyway, once you enslave all four of the people they want you to, the leader tells you he has a very particular client and he wants the youngest girl you can find. You find her in a town where turning 12 (or 13?) means you're exiled, so it's a town of children. The youngest girl is called Bumble, and she trusts you immediately. It's implied that the client is a Trump/Epstein type but it's never spelled out, and a few fans deny that's what's going on (e.g. "maybe they want her small hands to work on electronics") but the whole thing feels extremely perverted.
The game also deals with themes of racism and bigotry, mostly to non-feral ghouls (people affected by radiation and mutated). There's a quest where you find an apartment tower besieged by non-feral ghouls who just want a safe place to stay, but the people inside don't want ghouls as neighbors, so they hire you to kill all the ghouls. If you do so, the wasteland's talk radio DJ, Three Dog, will hound you about it for the rest of the game. The alternative is to disable security and let the ghouls take the place by force. This will also get you on Three Dog's shit list (as it should). There's a way to broker a peace by appealing to the merchants of the faction, and this seems like a good ending... until the ghouls just kill the residents anyway, and guess who Three Dog blames for it. Yep, you're the asshole no matter what you do, unless you ignore the quest entirely. (You will need to go in for one of those bobbleheads, though. One of the merchants has one.) Fun fact, also related to this place. The first town you come to, Megaton, has an undetonated atomic bomb in the middle of town. An emissary of the leader of the human/merchant faction wants you to detonate the bomb. This gives you a penthouse in their tower. He also has a quest where he wants you to assassinate several non-feral ghouls, but to satisfy him, you have to shoot them in the head.
If you're a conservative, there's a lot to love about Fallout 3.
It's still one of my favourite games, as a progressive.
It is really telling that the Fallout 3 interpretation of the Enclave is so popular amongst fans that they keep clamouring for more of it.
Because there weren’t Enclave in New Vegas or 4? And they’re the worst villain so I guess we want more Enclave?
I don’t really care either way.
Of course I’m aware the first two games exist, but turn based strategy isn’t my bag. I played a little of both when they were new, but I couldn’t get into them. Not for a lack of trying though.
erm akshually Arcade Gannon and other characters have a quest tying into the Enclave
What I mean is there's a worrying amount of Enclave fanboys in the larger Fallout fandoms. Like, one of the more popular quest mods for Fallout 4 is one that allows you to rebuild the Enclave.
And the vision of the Enclave they've glommed onto is specifically the Fallout 3 portrayal.
Weird. I never played that. Though I didn't play every Fallout 4 mod. I heard about a Creation Club one where you got Enclave power armour, but I don't think that's the same thing. I was mainly waiting for Sim Settlements to get updated. Now that it is, I no longer have a gaming PC. My Mac can run Fallout 4 quite well, but the biggest hiccup is that we have to disable gore. Something about the way dismemberment works, it gets the translation engine (WINE or whatever) all messed up. I haven't tried running it without disabling dismemberment. That, a mouse fix, and a sound fix is about all it takes. I did the first part, got to Concord without any issues, but called it a day at that point.
I can't really speculate on what I don't know about, but I would guess wanting the Enclave in Fallout 4 is push-back from Bethesda making you play nice for so long. Nuka-World let you be a bastard, sort of, but it wasn't well thought out. They looked at the data Microsoft gave them on Fallout 3 achievements and decided most people wanted to play good based on that, so they took out most of the evil options. They were genuinely surprised by the backlash by people who wanted to play the bad guy. Even I, a chaotic good type player, wanted the raider gangs more fleshed out, and with the player able to work for them. There's a terminal in, I think it's the Corvega plant, maybe there's one in that town Garvey's group were based out of, to the southeast, near the player (DLC) vault, it talks about the various raider factions and their leaders, but that idea was never fleshed out. It would have been cool if taking out leaders weakened the factions (much like how the Xbox 360 game Crackdown worked) but it was never that deep. Anyway, I guess people just wanted an evil option.
I get running an evil play through of an RPG (my favourite pathfinder WOTR mythic is lich because of how well done a villainous route it is).
But imho, BoS and Institute already exist as evil options, so I think there's something a bit deeper with people going through so much effort to bring the most explicitly fascist group in Fallout (although its a close race with the Legion) as a player faction.