The Idea

We could go on and on about our thoughts regarding Fallout 4, but if you're a fan of Fallout New Vegas, there's a relatively good chance you agree. Calling Fallout 4 a bad game isn't quite as accurate as calling Fallout 4 a bad Fallout game. The game's story is extremely linear, barely an RPG, frustrating, and with a world that feels like the Great War was only yesterday instead of 200 years ago. Some parts of Fallout 4 are genuinely fun, but the game is just a shadow of its predecessor.

This could be ignored and wouldn't be an issue that much when playing Fallout New Vegas, but when you play Fallout 3 via Tale of Two Wastelands, you're faced with a conundrum. Fallout 3's main quest is even worse than Fallout 4's when it comes to creativity and choice, though we still like playing TTW, treating the content of Fallout 3 as an expansion to the amazing Fallout New Vegas. The conundrum comes in when, on top of all that, you consider, what is the point of me helping the Brotherhood of Steel and the Capital Wasteland?

If you want to be a good person, helping the reformed and nice Brotherhood is your only de facto option in Fallout 3. But you know that, if you played Fallout 4, the East Coast chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel becomes fascist. They aren't the good guys anymore. That kinda breaks our immersion, to be honest. If you fail to remove the fact Fallout 4 exists from your mind, there's no way to be a good person in Fallout 3 when you know ahead of time that you're only furthering a future fascist Brotherhood into existence, and you're unable to do anything about that. Until now.

The Installation

Tale of Two Wastelands is required, with all of the DLC. This mod is a plugin that comes with a video file. Install it like you would with any other mod in your Data folder or with a mod manager. We aren't aware of any compatibility concerns. If there are, please let us know.

However, this mod has a requirement for reasons that will become clear if you watch the video or read below in the Execution section. This mod requires a single file from the Killable Children mod. The easiest way to install what you need is to just download the main file from that mod, but ONLY install the meshes folder! Finishing the quest the "main" way is impossible if you don't do this.

The Execution

So, how do you prevent Fallout 4 from happening? If you play through the main quest in Fallout 3, early on, you will encounter a time capsule sent from the future if you're observant. It elaborates on the far future of the Fallout Universe, explaining how Fallout 4 was just the beginning of a decline in the Fallout franchise. They directly tell you a specific method of fixing the future; they tell you to kill young Arthur Maxson before his fascist takeover. It's kind of like the philosophical debate about killing baby Hitler via time travel, just a different degree of fascist this time around.

This adds a level of complexity to the way you might play Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas to a lesser extent. If you play the game helping the Brotherhood, you may immediately be a hero and good person, but it is at the expense of future generations. If you do the horrible deed of killing a child, you spare future generations. Some philosophers think choosing to kill or not to kill in this scenario based on possibilities of the future are futile, since the future is conceivably infinite, thereby any good or bad you do will be outweighed eventually by things outside your control. However, by giving you an exact detail of the future you're preventing, we think this makes the scenario a lot more like the Trolley Problem thought experiment, where you know for a fact that you can save more lives by actively killing someone.

You're given enough information about the future though that other actions you make can and will have an effect upon it. You might be tempted to seek these out as alternatives to killing the child. Doing so can lead to better futures, or far worse ones. In fact, success is higher if multiple solutions are attempted. How will you know the outcome? A second time capsule from the altered timeline will appear later in your journey, when you're doing the main quest for Fallout New Vegas. Due to the way quantum stuff and timelines work, interacting with that capsule will give you a final verdict on whether you changed the world.

There's not a huge reward. You'll get a Perk. The reward is supposed to be the sense of accomplishment and knowing the future. We want the present to still very much matter to your character, but you can at least rest safe knowing you tried to make a better future. And that's the thing, even if you utterly failed, at least you tried. Instead of just playing Fallout 3 to fight over the Water Purifier that everyone could agree should be turned on, you play Fallout 3 with an added level of subtext about how your actions will ripple into the future. Dismissing Fallout 4 is no longer necessary, and knowing the future is now part of the game itself.

The Alternatives

So, killing Arthur Maxson is one way to prevent the future from coming to pass, but what are your other options to change the future? Here's a warning though. Many of the options require doing some things that in the present moment may seem unjustified, immoral, and really messed up, and you may have to do multiple options. We'll break them down for you below. However, part of the fun is not knowing how your actions may ripple, so we advise you to not spoil the fun unless you really just can't help yourself. No judgement, we get it.

Option 1: Kill Arthur Maxson

Option 2: Cripple the Brotherhood of Steel

Option 3: Assist the Brotherhood's enemies

Option 4: Prevent the Sonic Invasion

Option 5: Ensure an Institute alumni comes to power

Option 6: Clean the slate

Option 7: F*ck sh*t up


The Challenge

Since the threat in the future is the Brotherhood's fascist regime, it is clear we are making the assumption that the Brotherhood was the faction that was most likely to blow up the Institute in Fallout 4. Given they were a militaristic and fascist regime dedicated specifically to doing that to genocide Synths, we feel that assumption is likely to be correct. We were honestly kinda baffled that the Railroad or Minutemen would even want to do that, but whatever.

You may also notice we unabashedly condemn fascism.            

In the spirit of that explanation, we added a little challenge to the game called Antifascism. It basically just tracks how many fascist people you kill throughout the course of your adventure. However, fascism is kinda a specific thing. So we decided to broaden the scope of this challenge to be "fascists, authoritarians, and slavers". All three of those words have specific meanings, but there is a lot of overlap between them. We like to think of this challenge as an add-on to the Karma system to make it more useful. Instead of just differentiating between people that are "good" or "bad" with no further explanation, this challenge essentially identifies people as "bad" based on their actions or ideologies, i.e. reasons.

We researched the NPCs throughout Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas with a few questions in mind. Do you enslave people to be beneath you and treated like cattle or wish to do so (slaver)? Do you exert power and authority into a strict class hierarchy to subjugate people or wish to do so (authoritarian)? Do you exert authoritarianism while also appealing to racial, patriarchal, or otherwise prejudicial superiority and nationalism or wish to do so (fascist)? Do you do a combination of the three? If so, we identified the NPC and put them into the challenge list. Note that people simply being "bad" or "raiders" do not qualify. This list is not just immoral people trying to survive. It's something else entirely.

Please note that we are not encouraging anyone to simply kill fascists, authoritarians, and slavers en masse via this mod. Many characters on the list can be dealt with in a nonviolent or at least non-murder way. The goal is not to complete the challenge. In fact, doing so would be incredibly difficult if not impossible. The challenge basically functions as a way to identify "Hey, that person you just killed, they were a sociopath, just FYI". No judgement is made on the circumstances of the killing, just the NPCs themselves. Most importantly, if you believe these people represent an existential threat to the continued lives of innocent wastelanders (even if not in the direct present moment), this challenge gives you an actual recourse. Some NPCs don't have a peaceful, diplomatic option. This challenge does give you the option of killing them, whether or not the Karma system approves.

Any NPCs that were marked essential and un-killable that are on the list have been changed to be killable. This can break quests if you kill them before doing the quests, but we are going to assume you're intelligent players that can hold any desires for murder until after completing the relevant quests. We should also note that Yes Man, Mister House, Button Gwinnett, Professor Calvert, and John Henry Eden had to have special exceptions made for them in the scripting that makes them not uptick the challenge. They have their own challenges that are set to trigger during quests or only once for those that are capable of dying more than once.

List of Fascists, Authoritarians, and Slavers


The New California Patch

We've also included an optional patch that accounts for the addition of FNC! The patch requires Star the Wandering Courier, as well as Fallout New California. Your load order doesn't matter, as long as you meet all plugins' requirements, i.e. load NewCalifornia.esm before the patches, etc.

This patch changes a few things in the mod. First of all, it moves the time capsule to be found along the New California main quest instead of the Fallout 3 one. In addition, it adds a new option for changing the future!

Option 8: Unify the wasteland


List of New Fascists, Authoritarians, and Slavers added by FNC


The Results

As mentioned above, you can find out the new, altered future upon interacting with the second time capsule in New Vegas. Depending on your actions, there are dozens of outcomes in the form of text documents sent backwards in time to fill you in on the results of your actions. Again, it's not very glamorous, but it'll be great for those who love to read. The results are broken up into a few sections. Here are all of the possible outcomes:

Future of the Brotherhood

Future of the Institute

Future of the Wasteland

Future of the Big MT

Future of the Annihilation


The Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why is Killable Children required?
A:  This mod includes a moral decision over killing a child. Not all children, just one specific child. However, it turns out that Bethesda actually locked the inability to kill children not in the game plugins but in the meshes themselves! Wow, the lengths they went to! Anyway, you need the fixed meshes made by that mod to be able to complete the quest the "main" way.

Q: Where are the time capsules?
A:  The original one is found below the ramp to Rivet City. The alternate timeline one is found in a ruined building near Mick and Ralph's in Freeside. If you're using the FNC patch, the first time capsule will instead be outside the Black Bear Lodge.

Q: What are the various futures I can get when doing the quest?
A:  We might release a comprehensive list, but as of right now, you'll have to find out. Suffice to say, either humanity will survive the invasion, stalemate with it, or die. But there are many ways in which that manifest and what kinds of societies exist.

Q: Can you at least give some tips on getting a good outcome?
A:  Sure. Make sure you address the Brotherhood in some direct way, via one of the first three options. On top of that, it always helps to do option 4 with the Sonic Invasion.

Q: The intro video is bad.
A:  That's not a question. We're not professional voice actors, but we did the best we could. The graphics are minimal, because we only have so much time to dedicate to these mods. So please understand that we did what we could.

Q:  Why is your vision of Fallout's future so bleak? It's not very plausible.
A:  If you agree that Fallout 4 was a bad omen for Bethesda's ownership of the Fallout IP, further proven by Fallout 76, maybe you can understand having a bleak view of Fallout 5 and beyond. It's also worth mentioning that the Brotherhood WILL be in every Fallout game Bethesda ever makes, and therefore they will be present in the future of the Fallout Universe.

Q: Why is there no mention of Fallout 76?
A:  Fallout 76 is often considered a game that's even worse than Fallout 4, but it has the benefit of being of such incredibly little consequence to the series, being a prequel in the middle of nowhere. It's basically a modern Fallout Tactics, and so preventing it isn't really as necessary as Bethesda's sequel to Fallout 3 (that basically ignored Fallout New Vegas's existence).

Q: What if I destroyed the Brotherhood in Fallout 4?
A:  It's possible to play Fallout 4 in a way that sorta minimizes the disastrous future, but even then a diplomatic option is impossible. The story basically assumes the destruction of the Institute. Given the little amount of choice in that game, this mod envisions a future bothered very little by any choices the Sole Survivor may have made.

Q: Why are you calling people fascist? That's mean!
A:  Merriam-Webster's definition of fascism is "a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition." Any group that acts so, or any person who aspires to become so, is fascist.

Q: How can we support you?
A:  If you like what we do, please consider listing to our podcast, Game Theorem. We have episodes both on Fallout and fascism!