War Never Changes and Neither Do My Priorities

Outside of Nintendo, I maintain a short list of franchises I actually care about. Mass Effect, despite that ending. The Elder Scrolls, specifically not the MMO version, never the MMO version. And Fallout. Especially Fallout. Always Fallout.

Everything else can disappear. Grand Theft Auto V was a beautiful technical achievement that I played like a film I couldn’t quite follow. Bloodborne is on a list of games I’ll get to when I have time, which means never. The Witcher 3 is there too, waiting patiently behind the first two entries I still haven’t finished. None of these feel like emergencies. None of them make me want to rearrange my life.

Fallout does this thing where it drops you into a world that has already ended and says: here, wander. Everything is broken and irradiated and someone has spray-painted something funny on a collapsed wall and there’s a faction of people who worship nuclear bombs as religious objects and there’s a deathclaw around the next corner and you can choose, at any moment, to be a hero or a monster or somewhere in the morally interesting middle. After an actual nuclear war. With period-appropriate music through a tin speaker in a destroyed diner.

I fell in love with that premise in Fallout 3 and I have not recovered. The announcement of Fallout 4 landed like news I’d been waiting for without quite knowing how long I’d been waiting. Bethesda put up the teaser site. The Vault Boy appeared. The Pip-Boy. The wasteland. The familiar green tint of a world that ended and kept going anyway.

I’m buying a new computer. Specifically for this. That’s where I am right now.