The Most Evil Choice Fallout Lets You Get Away With
Your karma doesn't even change.
The world of Fallout is a harsh one. You might have to kill, steal, and betray, and at the end of it all you only have a few caps to rub together. If the wildlife doesn’t get you, the populace will, and it’s easy to see why trust is rarer than a stable frame rate in The Wasteland.
Through your journeys as Lone Wanderers, Sole Survivors, couriers and more, you're witness to evil in many forms - and if you’re so inclined, some of this will come from your own hands. But there's one act of supreme enormity that trumps them all - and Fallout lets you get away with it.
General murder, theft, putting grenades into people's pockets: this sort of stuff is just par for the course so we’re gonna lump this all together in the tier one evil slot. You make a choice, you end a life or take an object and that’s it. The karma punishment is low and unless you fancy yourself a post nuclear Ted Bundy and eat people, it pales in comparison to what we're going to discuss.
The first thing that many people will think of as a true evil act in the series is detonating Megaton's bomb in Fallout 3, as it takes a special sort of a-hole to go through with it, especially given the reward: an apartment in a ghoul haters' hotel, one with a henchman who makes the Nazi from Indiana Jones look like a social butterfly. It’s a terrible act not only because you have many steps to get through in order to push the button, but you have to watch your choice unfold. The game recognises this as well, with the negative karma you reap being colossal. That said, it’s not able to harm the spirits of Moira who somehow survives the blast, bless her.
But maybe that’s not your style. Maybe you’re a kid killer - someone who took pleasure in Fallout 1 and 2 clearing out the little pickpockets with whatever weapons you could. After all, it’s survival of the fittest here, and anyone who tries to take from you is as good as dead. Sure, it’s pretty evil - they are just kids after all - but it’s not like the game punishes you much for these actions apart from sending bounty hunters after you. If you’re OK killing kids, then you’re gonna be OK taking that loot that these bounty hunters are practically bringing to you.
A much more evil child related decision comes up in the Fallout 3 DLC, The Pitt, in which you discover that a little baby, Marie, has developed a resistance to the virus that’s spreading throughout her city. In an effort to try and propagate a cure, you can steal the baby from her parents and hand her over to a researcher, who really couldn't give two brahmin-poops about her safety.
By handing over this baby, you’re giving a life willingly into potential suffering, trials and experimentation. However, if you look at it a different way, you’re offering up a chance to save thousands of others, so by all means, give up the little lady.
Surely then, the most evil action comes at the end of Nuka Cola World?
Basically, you become Big Boss Raider Boy and can begin taking over settlements; your settlements, converting them into Raider bases that pillage and kill in your name. Oh, and you get to tell Preston Garvey to do one, making it extra sweet. This is a massive step up from just killing and stealing, as it required thought and planning. What you're doing is stating clearly that you'll take from the world what you need, instead of letting society attempt to flourish under calmer means.
By choosing to invade peaceful settlements you are declaring war on the area. That is a choice that you can make, and it’s pretty damn evil.
However, what about an action that leads to the deaths of potentially thousands that you, as a player, simply don’t give a hoot about?
We're of course speaking about the time in Fallout 3’s Mothership Zeta, where you can fire a death ray at Earth. The DLC is considered canon within the Fallout universe, so theoretically if you did choose to set this off and allow the death ray to vaporise its supposed target, then you are indeed killing off more than the atmosphere.
The Fallout Wiki lists the impact point being near Algonquin National Park in Ontario, Canada, reaching out for 350 miles, also consuming Detroit in the process.
The explosion can be seen from space with the naked eye, giving you an impression of how large in scale it truly is. I’m not a scientist (my Intelligence is set to 2), but even I can say that’s a rather big bang. I did actually try and crunch the numbers, and if we were to go off of the mean population for just Ontario and Detroit, you’re looking at nearly 15 million people.
Even just one percent of them survived the Great War, that’s 1.5 million people who theoretically got slapped by your rogue zap.
And you know the best/worst part? You don’t even get a karma punishment for doing it.
You could argue that the Lone Wanderer is exempt from guilt because they didn’t know what they were doing, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that upon seeing it happen that they are so removed from feeling any guilt. This likely extinguished tens of thousands of lives and yet here we sit, not even contemplating its effects.
Surely this moral passivity is an indication that we are playing as a sociopath, that the act of saying “whoops” and shrugging is much worse than feeling any remorse?
This one act is like the game giving you an evil freebie; allowing you to wear a jacket of apathy rather than punish you for your choice.
And lest we forget: it was a choice.