What the acclaimed sci-fi game has in common with Highlander 2
With the release of its third and final downloadable content (DLC) pack Broken Steel Bethesda Softworks’ post-nuclear behemoth Fallout 3 is set to follow in the footsteps of another famous violent franchise: Highlander . Blades beheadings and powers gained from killing a lot of people are certainly parts of both series but the newest similarity is in how they get around their awful awful writing.
Like Highlander 2 before it Fallout 3 ’s ending has been derided as a collection of plot holes and lazy writing. Where Christopher Lambert found out that his Immortals were actually hover-pad riding aliens you the player found out that your radiation-immune pals wouldn’t do you a quick favour to both spare your life and save humanity. As it turns out in the future everyone’s a jerk. And your anti-radiation suits and meds that work in every other situation? Inexplicably worthless. The game ignored all of the rules it established for Fallout 3’s world to force you into a suicide scenario at the end.
So just as the third Highlander film killed off Lambert and wiped the slate clean for whatever superstar Adrian Paul is doing now Broken Steel the new DLC will allow players to continue their adventures despite their character’s unavoidable death at the end of Fallout 3.
Like the Highlander series what you’ll have to do for the satisfaction of ignoring the past’s blemishes is fork over the price of the new chapter. In so doing you’ll be taking part in the proud tradition of the “ret-con” a retroactive change in continuity. It’s shoddy lazy writing to make up for shoddier lazier writing.
Of course as games like Bioshock and the previous incarnations of Fallout have shown good writing doesn’t need to be an afterthought. Though there’s no doubt Broken Steel will sell gamers should rightly ask themselves why they have to spend their hard-earned money on a better ending to a game they’ve already bought. After all there are probably still some copies of the Highlander movies kicking around somewhere and they’re certainly not buying themselves.
