The Fallout antagonists have never really been all that deep. Even Caesar, who certainly thought of himself as a deep thinker, really wasn't much more than a raider king, if you look at all the mindless exterminations he brought down on the Mojave towns.
Or rather maybe I should say, there's room for more depth in fallout villains' stories. House and the NCR are already decent grey areas with pros and cons, but the Enclave, the Master, and to some degree Caesar, well, not so much.
Evil in both real life and fiction tends to tempt with money and power. The problem here is that the greatest goody-goody player character in the wasteland will eventually end up insanely rich and powerful anyway. Caesar and the Enclave could never bribe me with money. It's why Tenpenny, to me, was completely absurd from a story perspective. The town of Megaton was worth more to me, even as a evil lone wanderer, than a handful of caps that I'd be able to make a million times over even by staying completely good.
To stay on subject: The enclave can't really rule, because simply because there are always better options. The disagreement-prone human nature will ensure it, pretty much, that there will always be an alternative to genocide and dictatorship.
Just think about who you'd rather have in charge of YOUR life. The enclave(s) are probably are not your first choice above all others. The Fallout 3 Brotherhood would be far better masters, if I had to choose a master. Most people would know it, that the Enclave are uncaring asses compared to the competition.

I actually went away and thought about this topic.

The Enclave feel more like a horror story
Could you imagine the fear a normal, everyday working wastelander just doing what he needs to do to survive
Your worst situation is dealing with bandits, super-mutants and deathclaws

And then one day, you see a fleet of flying gunship fly overhead, an army of highly trained energy weapon wielding black heavily armoured bat-looking freaks march and fly past in droves.
And they are controlling deathclaws..
one of, if not the biggest baddest most lethal creature the world has ever seen is being controlled by this horrifically powerful new power.
And you'd know in that instant, (right before you're disintegrated by some impossibly powerful warrior with weapons so high tech it might as well be magic) that the BOS, the one hope for safety could never hope to defeat them.
That's true horror.



(ignore the part where a 17 year old kid can wipe them out tho. Lol)

@loneheart9

I agree. And that "mythology" is absolutely vital if they aim to act as a stabilizing force over a large territory with limited resources.

The thing is, much like Caesar, they didn't _need_ to be so brutal. The enclave, I think, new the war was coming and was ready for it. They could have had in place everything they needed to recreate a pre-war village, to use as an example of their greatness. Imagine a city in vegas that looked like a typical suburb with NEW, clean buildings in DC, backed by a system of secure, safe laws and power-armored guards. They could have then used the patriotic propaganda, etc, and people would have helped them re-found America in droves.
It wouldn't be hard to use fear to make people willingly turn on mutants without a genocidal poison or virus in the water or water.
That's the enclave I hope we see in some place like Chicago, in which case I'm willing to say that yeah maybe they could govern. They just need to chill the hell out.

@Sirdanest:

I see your point, surely, and that's why to me a more moderate person like Autumn is preferable. But your thinking works much better small scale. Sure, people would flock in droves to a model city in the DC area, but the DC area is not the USA. Brutality is necessary for the return to civilization to be viable in both a large scale (at least individual Commonwealths) and a reasonable amount of time. Sure, over time you can grow your little model village into a city and spread hate to get other humans to wipe out the mutants for you, but this is gonna take a LOT of time to affect anything larger than a small region.

@"Sirdanest"

Oh man.. Now I'm just picturing how that could be and personally I'm getting a very "teen dystopian novel" vibe from it
Because that's how I imagined Enclave to be, idolising old America, where everything must perfectly encapsulate middle-class suburban lifestyle or be destroyed.

Like "tranquillity lane" in FO3, the opening of FO4 crossed with some kind of hunger games setting.
It's sinister, but looks lovely.

Genuinely intact neighboor houses like Sanctuary, propaganda radio with no room at all for dissent, non-conformists or communists, with really powerful plasma defenses do deal with supermutants and such. That should have been the enclave, and it just might have worked.
There's no reason why a secret society with great power and wealth and preparation wouldn't have the ability to build A HOUSE. Nice, clean houses are primitive technology that existed long before electricity and are surely simpler than making a whole new kind of power armor in a wasteland.

If they mass-genocide all the mutants without any precision, what are they going to eat? What do they think a brahmin or a mutfruit is? The enclave just doesn't appear to have thought their plan through, for a group that was supposedly ready even before the war.

You know they had G.E.C.K. technology, right? The whole point is not rebuilding using resources that can compromise mankind's future.

The Enclave could govern the wasteland and its non-FEV infected citizens(excluding any xenophopic shut-ins of course). They were the descendants of America's pre-war government after all which means they would have the knowledge on construction, administration and such.

After they've rebuilt the necessary infrastructure to supply their armies, they would probably survey/attack China.

In my mind there was something very, very wrong with Autumn. Not only was it suicide to attack my lone wanderer but unnecessary. He was a kill-bot, in my mind, and cannot be trusted by anyone to do the right thing.
Now if it had actually been possible to get along with Autumn in certain situations, it would have changed everything. But it's absolutely impossible to get along with him, even when you're on his side.

Sirdanest wrote:

In my mind there was something very, very wrong with Autumn.  Not only was it suicide to attack my lone wanderer but unnecessary.  He was a kill-bot, in my mind, and cannot be trusted by anyone to do the right thing.  
Now if it had actually been possible to get along with Autumn in certain situations, it would have changed everything.  But it's absolutely impossible to get along with him, even when you're on his side.

Yes there is. It's called an "Emil Pagliarulo".

Fallout 3 Brotherhood are less masters than guardians. They watch over the wastes and protect the people from threats. They offer no real governing beyond that. Lyon's strategy pre fallout 3 was pretty unpopular with a lot of his rank and file too (we can overhear soldiers in the citadel discussing thinking about joining the outcasts, and one guy goes around talking about how shitty the whole situation is). If not for the lone wanderer, it's likely Lyon's Brotherhood would collapse entirely, particularly when considering important factors like slow recruitment (since Gunny often complains that training locals to Brotherhood standards is incredibly difficult), high death rate battling the mutants, and the reemerging Enclave.

The LW was the one who located the Super Mutant's spawning area in Vault 87, and also the one who destroyed Raven Rock and saved project purity, then later destroyed Adam's AFB. Without LW, Lyon's brotherhood would most likely fall to civil war with the Outcasts due to more and more desertions, or the Enclave. Even with Liberty Prime, the Brotherhood couldn't save the Purifier, and without the LW, Dr Li would never get there to help activate Prime in the first place. While their resourceful, they lack a depth of personal or resources required to govern large territory in Fallout 3.

NCR and Legion are the only two factions in the post war world capable of maintaining large land masses to an acceptable degree, and the NCR is the only one with economic infrastructure to provide economic and social growth, things Caesar and the Brotherhood have no real interest in.

The Enclave don't care about ruling the Wastes. Their initial plan in Fallout 2, and by Eden in 3 was mass genocide. Supposedly colonel Autumn got cold feet, or realised that the plan failed before, and will fail again. But he wasn't interested in controlling the wastes in a sense that would benefit anyone. In his short time on Enclave Radio he tells people not to interfere with Enclave troops or they will be killed, and as commander of the Enclave, his forces murder civilians indiscriminately. It's likely what he wanted would be a military dictatorship, as opposed to a true republic, where the people would be ruled by the military command directly.

That said, I entirely disagree with your comments about a lack of depth in Fallout's villains. Either you haven't read between the lines, or didn't pay too much attention, but characters like the Master and Caesar are remarkably complex. They are ostensibly evil men, but who do what they do through purpose, both morally justifiable to a point within their own minds, and when examined closely, actually quite clever. Both actually have quite a similar goal: Eliminate the divide between all peoples. Caesar intended to do it through forcibly indoctrinating people into his new society, re-educating anyone young enough to learn, and killing those who aren't, breaking tribal identity down and forging it into a single entity. The Unity sought to accomplish the same, but does so through FEV, which is unbeknownst to him, fruitless, because Mutants are sterile. In both cases, each is a victim of their own narrative. Caesar convinced tribals he was the son of Mars, a God king among men, to take advantage of their superstitions, yet he (potentially) died of a brain tumor which could be easily removed, were it not for his civilisations shunning of technology. The Master is a creature blinded by his arrogance and genius, though exists in the hope that he is saving the world, and humanity by making them greater. When he realises how wrong he had been all this time, he loses that hope, and kills himself.

If that isn't depth, I don't know what it.

I haven't even touched on the Enclave and Institute yet, (and to an extent, the Brotherhood), but they too, are brimming with depth that you can't simply dismiss. I won't start now because I'll be here all night, but yeah, Fallout villains ain't lacking for depth my friends.

The villains do have depth as individual characters. If you're referring to my comment, then I was saying that their factions don't provide as much depth to the player as the others. If I recall, the legion quest is shorter than the others. The Master and the Enclave don't provide a faction quest line at all in the classics -- so Fallout 4 gets hate for its four main faction questlines, but,still, that's four competing choices compared to the original games' single faction (stop the master/enclave.) If it doesn't match up to NV... well, nothing does.

I mean, it'd be a pretty empty wasteland...

If they still any have satellites and air superiority, and some top agents in a cryo sleep for recruiting grunts much like the Frumentarius. It's completely possible. For all we know the west coast enclave and the DC enclave could have been break away factors, splinter cells are just to test resolve,in certain areas. There's a popular fan theory that the Enclave are in space in a space station which is a theory based upon facts.

There's also the Enclave in Chicago, which we know little about apart from what you learn from ed-e in lonesome road. As far as I'm having multiple super soldiers, we know they have cryosleep chambers because Fallout 4 featured them and are in a vault-tec bunker, Vault Tec is just a branch of them basically.

One could even theorize that courier 6 and the lone Wonder are enclave synths. I base this on a terminal archive you find in Fallout 4 that describes a new type of synths that happened to have a new ability and then goes on too explain VATS in Fallout 3 and NV to the letter. So using things like that to stabilize or destabilize local governments in the way they see fit. Then just basically wait for an opportunistic time.

So yes given time and the possible resources they could have, and my knowledge on them if the enclave played it's cards right in time they could retake the wasteland.

I'd like to believe that each Enclave location has a different purpose. The oil rig was clearly dedicated to wiping out life all over the world. In DC, they were doing propaganda with the radio -- the radio implied that they cared at least a little about building a government for/with the wasteland, something that the west Enclave didn't care about. Maybe Chicago is actually involved in the actual business of genuinely building a settlement worthy of people who were preparing for this for 200 years.

I'd kill for a good Enclave storyline or even just a ambiguous "yeah we still kinda exist, we just do our own thing now" Enclave

The BoS got their own splinter group with the outcasts who where meant to be the "bad" guys the Enclave should get that too.
I feel that would be a more practical and probable outcome.
Like in NV, arcade and his family still where Enclave, they settled in as normal people but still had access to the true fearsome might and war machines of the Enclave, there is obvious friction amongst the ranks about what their role is, what they stand for now that their command is destroyed god knows how many times over. (oil rig, raven rock, the mobile rocket platform thing and not including all the officers the Lone Wanderer would have killed out in the fields)
They are probably a complete mess.

Maybe there is loads of secret Enclave bases abandoned and the soldiers that once guarded them just gave up, went outside and locked the doors behind them.
Maybe a handful of them got angry, took the armour and weapons and went to hunt down the BoS

God, there's so much that Bethesda could have done with it.

loneheart9 wrote:

I'd kill for a good Enclave storyline or even just a ambiguous "yeah we still kinda exist, we just do our own thing now" Enclave

The BoS got their own splinter group with the outcasts who where meant to be the "bad" guys the Enclave should get that too.
I feel that would be a more practical and probable outcome.
Like in NV, arcade and his family still where Enclave, they settled in as normal people but still had access to the true fearsome might and war machines of the Enclave, there is obvious friction amongst the ranks about what their role is, what they stand for now that their command is destroyed god knows how many times over. (oil rig, raven rock, the mobile rocket platform thing and not including all the officers the Lone Wanderer would have killed out in the fields)
They are probably a complete mess.

Maybe there is loads of secret Enclave bases abandoned and the soldiers that once guarded them just gave up, went outside and locked the doors behind them.
Maybe a handful of them got angry, took the armour and weapons and went to hunt down the BoS

God, there's so much that Bethesda could have done with it.

YES PLEASE!

@SeleukosNikator Yeah that pretty much sums it up really good. But like you said this type of writing is something almost unobtainable from Bethesda games these's days. So much potential just forgotten about and ignored.

@loneheart9 While yes you could be scared of them. There is not much to be scared of when you realize they are there to protect you. Shouldn't really be scared when that same faction is offering water and rebuilding civilization in front of their very eyes.

@IRORIEH A very well structured argument I must say. While true the individuals themselves have a backstory the factions to an extent do not. Though the Enclave had different ideas on the West Coast those ideas are not reflected on the East Coast to the point in which they follow through with it. Eden thought it was the way but it can be proved wrong by the LW for a number of different reasons. Autumn on the other hand did not care for those plans and instead saw the Enclaves survival through the purifier. But yes it does seem feasible that Autumn wanted something along the lines of a dictatorship would it really be that bad considering the alternative is as you mentioned a doomed to fail BOS and a wasteland filled with mutants? Its also possible Autumn is loyal to the Enclave and see's his way as the only way for the Enclave to persevere considering the alternatives have failed.

@Sirdanest Cool little theory but the Enclave worked as one following a specific goal. Its just the Enclave tried different strategies at different times to take back territory. Who knows now though maybe the Enclave in Chicago have changed. That or they've been wiped out by the BOS.

@loneheart9 Yeah that would be an interesting change for them as what. Bethesda always make the Enclave look like the bad guys but really what their trying to do at least in Fallout 3 is far from that. Would of been cool if we could of seen more from the Enclave in Fallout 4. Maybe not like a huge faction but like a bunker or a companion. Like you said so much Bethesda could of done, I just hope next time they do more with it.

This is the site I was thinking of. The "enclave in space" is from Van Buren. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/History_of_the_Enclave


The original enclave that went to the oil rig to hide from the war are the only ones we've seen so far. A theoretical Chicago enclave is almost certainly cut off and possibly unaware of how crazy the original enclave has become. At least, I hope so, since more crazy genocide would be disappointing:


"with the eventual goal of retaking the continental United States and wiping out communism forever. Other members of the Enclave retreated to remote locations in other parts of the world, but when the bombs began to fly, they lost communications with the main group."

I'm skeptical that their pre-war plans were to wipe out everything, or even all mutants, since they pretty much created FEV, and Frank Horrigan, possibly the most powerful living npc in the fallout universe (until the player killed him of course) was probably a mutant who would have died had they unleashed their plan. Crazy, I am telling you. The president had probably just gone batshit.