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A needlessly long essay about Fallout 3: The Pitt
a year ago
"I am James Ungentine KTLA, and I predict your future. These are the events that will change and illuminate your daily lives, except you aren't there yet! Future date 2025, KTLA predicts..."
I just finished playing through The Pitt, Fallout 3's second DLC, for my YouTube gameplay channel, and I have thoughts I'd like to talk about for a few paragraphs. I doubt I'll be contributing much insight to the discussion, but it's my journal and I can post whatever I like. So there. Also I wanted to clear the previous one off the page - that issue has hopefully now been sorted out.
Anyhoo, the plot of the DLC: the Lone Wanderer, protagonist of FO3, meets a shifty, shady guy named Wernher who tells them about a city of slaves living under the oppression of a warlord named Ashur and his gang of raiders. This city, the remains of Pittsburgh (hence the name), is not only the site of perhaps the only working steel mill left in the Wasteland, which the slaves are forced to keep running, but is also a breeding ground for a degenerative mutational plague that turns many of its victims into feral monsters called Trogs. But there's good news on that front: Ashur has recently discovered a potential cure for the disease, and some of the slaves have formulated a plan: steal this cure from under Ashur's nose and free the slaves. So that's where the player comes in: you disguise yourself as a slave to smuggle yourself into the Pitt, do a fetch quest, then indulge in a spot of gladiatorial combat to prove yourself worthy of an audience with Ashur. But when you do meet him, a few things become clear: 1: Ashur isn't just some moustache-twirling slavelord arsehole, but an intelligent man with grand visions of rebuilding the city as a bastion of civilisation and industry, 2: Wernher had previously attempted a coup against Ashur and failed, implying that his allegiance with the slaves is nothing more than an attempt to get back at Ashur, and 3: The "cure" is in fact Ashur's baby daughter Marie, born with a unique immunity to mutation that, properly researched, could lead to the hoped-for cure.
So here's where the plot's Big Moral Choice™ comes in: do you follow Wernher's plan to abduct a child and kill her parents in order to liberate the slaves, or do you accept Ashur's offer to kill Wernher instead and leave both Marie and the slaves where they are?
If you're anything like me, you're probably raising an eyebrow at this "moral quandary". Given the choice between freeing slaves and not freeing slaves, I would hope the right choice would be obvious. This is, I suspect, why Bethesda threw in the whole "abduct a child" part. After all, you can't really have a shades-of-grey morality decision when the choices are as black and white as a zebra crossing. And yes, orphaning a child is bad, don't get me wrong. But there's nothing in the game to indicate that Marie will be treated any worse by the freed slaves than she will by her mother, and also... well, slavery. The needs of the many 'n' all that.
About the only thing I can conceive of that might cast the "side with Ashur" option in a more positive option is the character of Ashur himself. As mentioned above, he's not the typical violent thug that most raiders in Fallout tend to be. He's an ex-Brotherhood of Steel Paladin who was left for dead when the BoS stormed through the Pitt a few decades earlier, slaughtering mutants and recovering technological goodies as they are wont to do. When he awoke and got his bearings, he recognised the potential of an operational steel mill and set to work building up his army of raiders and slavers so he could make use of it. When you talk to him, he expresses regret for all this, but believes it necessary for the sake of the greater good. He also insists on referring to the slaves as "workers" and claims that they can eventually earn their freedom.
However, the observable facts of Ashur's regime don't really match his noble ethos. None of his raider underlings seem to regard the slaves with any degree of sympathy, even the ones who are themselves former slaves, and only treat the player with any real respect once they prove themselves a useful worker or a capable fighter. All of them seem perfectly happy lording it over the slaves from their restored apartments and catwalks suspended over the filth and squalor the slaves live in. Ashur claims that he maintains discipline over his troops to keep them from abusing the slaves, but if this is the case, then it doesn't seem to be working: no-one other than him ever mentions it and the raiders still treat the slaves like dirt.. Ashur himself seems to have no actual engagement with things other than handing out orders and standing on a balcony to deliver grand speeches from time to time. He refers to himself once or twice as "Lord of the Pitt" without a hint of irony, and all in all seems perfectly content to lean into his image as a god-king.
As for the raiders themselves... well, there's not much to say. They seem to be the same violent thugs that they are in the main game, differentiated only by the fact that they're under orders not to shoot you. None of them express any doubt or regret over their literally elevated position, and don't even make the effort to draw the veil of euphemism over the whole business as Ashur does with his insistence on the term "workers". Even the fact that a handful of them were once slaves themselves doesn't seem to elicit any sympathy or solidarity from them. Having earned their freedom, they seem quite content to kick back and enjoy their new role, and everyone they left behind is just shit outta luck.
The "earned the freedom" part also deserves elaboration here, I think. Ashur touts this repeatedly in his dialogue, making quite a big deal about how "workers" can one day prove themselves worthy of a better life. Judging by the events of the DLC, the only way a slave can earn their freedom is by fighting for it in gladiatorial combat: shoved into a smallish pit with whatever weapons they happen to have on them with a handful of other hopefuls and several barrels of radioactive gunk to fight to the death. The winner gets a shot of anti-radiation drugs and a chance to fight a couple more rounds against nastier opponents, and the losers probably just get dumped in the river. In the end though, one thing is clear: a slave can only become free by proving themselves to be an effective killer. This is, by all indications, the only way a slave can become free, and suggests a distinct hierarchy at play in Ashur's realm: you're either a slave, a raider, a target, or dead.
But enough about the raiders, eh? What's there to say to say about the slaves? Well, they're unpaid labourers forced to work by their oppressive masters, and needless to say they're not exactly happy about it. They have slightly more dimension than the raiders, with the addition of characters such as a snitch who benefits from tattling on other slaves' resistance efforts and one slave who has accepted their lot in life thanks to an old philosophy book he found and had read to him, but other than the major players in the story the slaves aren't much more developed than the raiders. They're forced to work, live in abject squalor, and don't want to do either anymore.
Wernher himself is the main driving force behind the slave revolt, but from the start it's shown that he's not exactly invested in the cause of freedom. Part one of his plan involves getting you a slave disguise so you'll blend in, so he directs you to a nearby slaver camp to find one. If you bring up the possibility of freeing the slaves while you're at it, Wernher's response is an impatient "Whatever!" and an insistence that you keep your objective in mind. It eventually becomes apparent that Wernher only became a slave after trying to overthrow Ashur and usurp his rule, and the plan to kidnap Ashur's daughter and thus liberate the slaves was his idea from the start. He regards this more questionable act without remorse; in his own words: "If you aren't getting your hands dirty, you aren't making a difference". But by all indications that I can see, the primary difference that he wants to make is for Ashur to be brought down, and freeing his slaves is ultimately just a means to that end.
So that's the moral battlefield as the story presents it: do you side with an intelligent visionary who uses brutal methods in the pursuit of order, or a shifty, under-handed mercenary who foments revolution for the sake of revenge?
Once you complete the mission, nothing much changes either way. Even if you take down Ashur and his raiders, the slaves keep slaving away. If they have any long-term plans other than just carrying as before without having an army of raiders breathing down their necks, there's no real indication of them. If you don't declare yourself the new Lord of the Pitt when talking to him, then Wernher implies that he's planning to take charge of things, but there's nothing to suggest what his reign might be like. In the end, what happens next seems to be up to player interpretation.
In my mind though, despite Bethesda's attempts to paint the morality of the situation in shades of grey, it's a straightforward black-and-white choice. Ashur may be perfectly polite and civil in conversation and he talks a big game about what he's trying to accomplish, but th fact of the matter is that he's built an oppressive slave city with his law enforced by brutal thugs. He and his cronies live in relative luxury in partly restored towers with all the booze, drugs, and scavenged food they can eat, while the people doing most of the actual work live in filthy conditions, subsisting on food that the game literally calls "slop", with no access to medicine or any kind of comfort, and the only ways out for them are either to kill, to die, or to succumb to the plague and mutate into a trog. He can talk all he likes about "earning freedom" and building a new city, but there's none of that vision or nobility in the world he has actually built.
As for Wernher, he's a self-serving weasel who will gladly resort to questionable actions to get what he wants, but he does lead the slaves to freedom. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons is, in my view, a damn sight better than doing the wrong things for the right reason. And even if he intends to become just as much an autocrat as Ashur, will he even be able to manage it? By the end of the story he's surrounded by a city of former slaves who have just cast off the shackles of one man's oppression... what would make Wernher's shackles any less cast-off-able? Without Ashur's army at his back, any powerplay by Wernher, should he choose to make any, could be stopped with one judiciously applied Auto-Axe.
Anyway, that's what I think of Fallout 3's second DLC. I guess this 14-year-old bit of Bethesda's lacklustre writing just got up my nose a bit. Thanks for reading!
Anyhoo, the plot of the DLC: the Lone Wanderer, protagonist of FO3, meets a shifty, shady guy named Wernher who tells them about a city of slaves living under the oppression of a warlord named Ashur and his gang of raiders. This city, the remains of Pittsburgh (hence the name), is not only the site of perhaps the only working steel mill left in the Wasteland, which the slaves are forced to keep running, but is also a breeding ground for a degenerative mutational plague that turns many of its victims into feral monsters called Trogs. But there's good news on that front: Ashur has recently discovered a potential cure for the disease, and some of the slaves have formulated a plan: steal this cure from under Ashur's nose and free the slaves. So that's where the player comes in: you disguise yourself as a slave to smuggle yourself into the Pitt, do a fetch quest, then indulge in a spot of gladiatorial combat to prove yourself worthy of an audience with Ashur. But when you do meet him, a few things become clear: 1: Ashur isn't just some moustache-twirling slavelord arsehole, but an intelligent man with grand visions of rebuilding the city as a bastion of civilisation and industry, 2: Wernher had previously attempted a coup against Ashur and failed, implying that his allegiance with the slaves is nothing more than an attempt to get back at Ashur, and 3: The "cure" is in fact Ashur's baby daughter Marie, born with a unique immunity to mutation that, properly researched, could lead to the hoped-for cure.
So here's where the plot's Big Moral Choice™ comes in: do you follow Wernher's plan to abduct a child and kill her parents in order to liberate the slaves, or do you accept Ashur's offer to kill Wernher instead and leave both Marie and the slaves where they are?
If you're anything like me, you're probably raising an eyebrow at this "moral quandary". Given the choice between freeing slaves and not freeing slaves, I would hope the right choice would be obvious. This is, I suspect, why Bethesda threw in the whole "abduct a child" part. After all, you can't really have a shades-of-grey morality decision when the choices are as black and white as a zebra crossing. And yes, orphaning a child is bad, don't get me wrong. But there's nothing in the game to indicate that Marie will be treated any worse by the freed slaves than she will by her mother, and also... well, slavery. The needs of the many 'n' all that.
About the only thing I can conceive of that might cast the "side with Ashur" option in a more positive option is the character of Ashur himself. As mentioned above, he's not the typical violent thug that most raiders in Fallout tend to be. He's an ex-Brotherhood of Steel Paladin who was left for dead when the BoS stormed through the Pitt a few decades earlier, slaughtering mutants and recovering technological goodies as they are wont to do. When he awoke and got his bearings, he recognised the potential of an operational steel mill and set to work building up his army of raiders and slavers so he could make use of it. When you talk to him, he expresses regret for all this, but believes it necessary for the sake of the greater good. He also insists on referring to the slaves as "workers" and claims that they can eventually earn their freedom.
However, the observable facts of Ashur's regime don't really match his noble ethos. None of his raider underlings seem to regard the slaves with any degree of sympathy, even the ones who are themselves former slaves, and only treat the player with any real respect once they prove themselves a useful worker or a capable fighter. All of them seem perfectly happy lording it over the slaves from their restored apartments and catwalks suspended over the filth and squalor the slaves live in. Ashur claims that he maintains discipline over his troops to keep them from abusing the slaves, but if this is the case, then it doesn't seem to be working: no-one other than him ever mentions it and the raiders still treat the slaves like dirt.. Ashur himself seems to have no actual engagement with things other than handing out orders and standing on a balcony to deliver grand speeches from time to time. He refers to himself once or twice as "Lord of the Pitt" without a hint of irony, and all in all seems perfectly content to lean into his image as a god-king.
As for the raiders themselves... well, there's not much to say. They seem to be the same violent thugs that they are in the main game, differentiated only by the fact that they're under orders not to shoot you. None of them express any doubt or regret over their literally elevated position, and don't even make the effort to draw the veil of euphemism over the whole business as Ashur does with his insistence on the term "workers". Even the fact that a handful of them were once slaves themselves doesn't seem to elicit any sympathy or solidarity from them. Having earned their freedom, they seem quite content to kick back and enjoy their new role, and everyone they left behind is just shit outta luck.
The "earned the freedom" part also deserves elaboration here, I think. Ashur touts this repeatedly in his dialogue, making quite a big deal about how "workers" can one day prove themselves worthy of a better life. Judging by the events of the DLC, the only way a slave can earn their freedom is by fighting for it in gladiatorial combat: shoved into a smallish pit with whatever weapons they happen to have on them with a handful of other hopefuls and several barrels of radioactive gunk to fight to the death. The winner gets a shot of anti-radiation drugs and a chance to fight a couple more rounds against nastier opponents, and the losers probably just get dumped in the river. In the end though, one thing is clear: a slave can only become free by proving themselves to be an effective killer. This is, by all indications, the only way a slave can become free, and suggests a distinct hierarchy at play in Ashur's realm: you're either a slave, a raider, a target, or dead.
But enough about the raiders, eh? What's there to say to say about the slaves? Well, they're unpaid labourers forced to work by their oppressive masters, and needless to say they're not exactly happy about it. They have slightly more dimension than the raiders, with the addition of characters such as a snitch who benefits from tattling on other slaves' resistance efforts and one slave who has accepted their lot in life thanks to an old philosophy book he found and had read to him, but other than the major players in the story the slaves aren't much more developed than the raiders. They're forced to work, live in abject squalor, and don't want to do either anymore.
Wernher himself is the main driving force behind the slave revolt, but from the start it's shown that he's not exactly invested in the cause of freedom. Part one of his plan involves getting you a slave disguise so you'll blend in, so he directs you to a nearby slaver camp to find one. If you bring up the possibility of freeing the slaves while you're at it, Wernher's response is an impatient "Whatever!" and an insistence that you keep your objective in mind. It eventually becomes apparent that Wernher only became a slave after trying to overthrow Ashur and usurp his rule, and the plan to kidnap Ashur's daughter and thus liberate the slaves was his idea from the start. He regards this more questionable act without remorse; in his own words: "If you aren't getting your hands dirty, you aren't making a difference". But by all indications that I can see, the primary difference that he wants to make is for Ashur to be brought down, and freeing his slaves is ultimately just a means to that end.
So that's the moral battlefield as the story presents it: do you side with an intelligent visionary who uses brutal methods in the pursuit of order, or a shifty, under-handed mercenary who foments revolution for the sake of revenge?
Once you complete the mission, nothing much changes either way. Even if you take down Ashur and his raiders, the slaves keep slaving away. If they have any long-term plans other than just carrying as before without having an army of raiders breathing down their necks, there's no real indication of them. If you don't declare yourself the new Lord of the Pitt when talking to him, then Wernher implies that he's planning to take charge of things, but there's nothing to suggest what his reign might be like. In the end, what happens next seems to be up to player interpretation.
In my mind though, despite Bethesda's attempts to paint the morality of the situation in shades of grey, it's a straightforward black-and-white choice. Ashur may be perfectly polite and civil in conversation and he talks a big game about what he's trying to accomplish, but th fact of the matter is that he's built an oppressive slave city with his law enforced by brutal thugs. He and his cronies live in relative luxury in partly restored towers with all the booze, drugs, and scavenged food they can eat, while the people doing most of the actual work live in filthy conditions, subsisting on food that the game literally calls "slop", with no access to medicine or any kind of comfort, and the only ways out for them are either to kill, to die, or to succumb to the plague and mutate into a trog. He can talk all he likes about "earning freedom" and building a new city, but there's none of that vision or nobility in the world he has actually built.
As for Wernher, he's a self-serving weasel who will gladly resort to questionable actions to get what he wants, but he does lead the slaves to freedom. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons is, in my view, a damn sight better than doing the wrong things for the right reason. And even if he intends to become just as much an autocrat as Ashur, will he even be able to manage it? By the end of the story he's surrounded by a city of former slaves who have just cast off the shackles of one man's oppression... what would make Wernher's shackles any less cast-off-able? Without Ashur's army at his back, any powerplay by Wernher, should he choose to make any, could be stopped with one judiciously applied Auto-Axe.
Anyway, that's what I think of Fallout 3's second DLC. I guess this 14-year-old bit of Bethesda's lacklustre writing just got up my nose a bit. Thanks for reading!
