I love this! Its a shame the game never touches on these settlements in an epilogue.

Freedom guard, it was a pleasure getting to know you. Rest in peace.

Awesome! this should have been the actual ending to the game!

If you wish to modify this further, try making concept art as a slideshow for each event and the like, using the concept pics on the Internet. Makes it MUCH more cooler. _

Amazing

the tail of humanity will never come to a close,and survival itself is a war on its war...war never changes

I'm sure as hell that some of things you mention don't happen in one certain ending. The ending was probably a combination of all the endings you've done, right?

On another note, have you ever traveled with Amata? I have. You see, when you force the vault dwellers to leave, Amata does say she'll see you in the other side. Well, turns out, you find her around the bums cola factory being comfronted by three enclave soldiers. There, save her before she gets killed and after she tells you that she hates you for what you've done and how much you changed she asked if you can take her somewhere safe.

So, yeah. Try that.

Brilliant just brilliant

Now you see, you just don't find works like this at all on the Fallout section here on Fanfiction. This chapter...just wow.

First off my hat is off to you for finding the majority if not all of the side quests in the game. I'm still trying to find the side quests so I can't answer how well you've translated them but thanks to this story I'm going to have to return to the Wasteland to start searching for those quests.

I suppose if I had to make a suggestion I guess it would be to include a known love interest for the wanderer. I know it's not canon but the hopeless romantic in me suggested the idea. But when you see the end...it just makes all the endings fit perfectly. Everything in the game was accounted for but more importantly it felt like these were genuine endings written for the game and I could almost hear Ron Pearlman narrating as I read this story.

Once again, amazing job, I honestly can't give you enough praise for this chapter. I do hope to one day see DLC incorporated but if not, I'm fine with just this.

Always at the Author's Side,

The Real Sidekick

Here's a tip: When Dave is going through the ballot box, use stealth and take out all the ballots that support Dave and watch his face when either his wife or eldest son becomes the new president!

Dave leaves in disgust and heads to Old Olney, where he usually lasts three seconds against a Deathclaw.

Nice, I was disappointed in the lack of endings when I first beat Fallout 3 a few months after it came out and before any of the DLCs were finished. The entire time I was playing before the end I was telling everyone I knew of how awesome the game was. Then I got to the end and I started to tell people that if they actually like to play games to the end then they should play something else because the ending plot is weak and made no sense. Which is probably why Broken Steel ret-coned the ending.

In Bethesda's defense though, they were just sticking with the winning formula they do best. Which if you look at Oblivion and the many similarities between it and Fallout 3, they were just making a post apocalyptic Oblivion with guns and an established fan base. Still, it wouldn't have killed them to add some detail and lack of death in the original ending. As well as some logic.

I don't think Point Lookout would make much of a difference on any of your endings. It's a very dangerous place to go because of the way the local like to kill anything that moves and isn't deformed or running a vital store/moonshine still. Maybe the wanderer got the tribals to see things his way, but most likely not. You would know what I mean if you've ever tried to talk a zealot out of their ideas. Without the original boat captain, they won't trade with the outside world either. Your actions in Point Lookout, good or bad, don't affect the Capital Wasteland much in the long run.

The Pitt wasn't really thought out for the purposes of being a fallout game in my opinion. Not only is there suddenly a place that sells steel so that it's possible to maintain weapons and armor without having to take parts from other barely working things, there's also a potential cure for super mutants and ghouls. Or at least a vaccination for them. I don't know about the "evil" outcome for it though. I would totally see the Outcasts taking the place over once a cure was found and using it to keep up with Lyon's Brotherhood though.

On to the critique of your actual endings. I enjoy poking holes in other peoples logic so please don't be offended if I go into a super nit-picking mode. Because it's written and not said I tend to find more plot hole and logic errors than I usually would. I'm also usually a real stickler for keeping people in character and things like that. I'm not saying anything is really wrong with your endings, I'm just pointing things out that make me scratch my head.

If I'm not mistaken, when you destroy the Mobile Crawler you call down 3 simultaneous strikes at once. The Enclave were planing to hit the Citadel, Project Purity, Megaton, and Rivet City to get rid of most of the organizable resistance to it's forces. So, just in case they find another way to launch a strike like another terminal, the satellites are empty. Now I know they have really accurate space-death flinging technology now, but assuming they have to launch the missiles in a certain way so as to not be destroyed by the atmosphere, which would explain why you can't choose launch them at the other locations, it means that Gundam destroying bombs just hit and probably fried all the tech in a radius several miles wide. The brotherhood would have been pulling scrap out of the ruins except for any nice shielded bunkers that probably do exist there but would be covered in a base worth of rubble.

I always thought that just about all the towns you find in the wastes actually had more people than they showed. Like Megaton is already a place that houses 1,0 people or something like that. The more random people that don't get names, the more people that live there. One of my problems with the idea of the Capital Wasteland that Bethesda put forth is that they are apparently losing so many people daily to raiders, slavers, super mutants, and feral ghouls, yet this has supposedly been going on like this for years prior to your emergence from the vault. It only increased in intensity a few years ago. So where do all the new people come from?

Also, why is there never a working farm/food processing factory? Are we really supposed to assume that over 200 years of scavengers later, the wasteland still has potato crisps? I'd always thought that some of those plants had been fired back up by industrious people that supply the wastes with semi-edible, slightly irradiated food. Possibly based in the Mid-west. The food rant and the population rant kinda go together but I didn't want a super paragraph to extra kill your eyes more than they are.

The growth of Canterbury Commons is odd too. Even without a super mutant threat, it's just people that run caravans that live there. They pay for some protection for their loved ones while they travel, but it's not like it's strategically positioned to be a bustling trade center. It's a place to put up your feet between routes where you know you can find like minded people.

I'm actually wondering if Vault 87 is where they take humans to be dipped. It would make sense that they have or had vats of it there, but I always thought from the few intelligible comments from super mutant speeches that they are either running out or already have run out. And now they comb the D.C. ruins to find more, or better yet, they're looking for a comatose master figure that doesn't realize it's calling them. Either way, a lack of a massive path of destruction between the vault and D.C. tells me that either they're relatively docile until they get to D.C., or they've already found more vats in the ruins and can make more mutants in more than one place. It's not really a hole in your logic, it's just something to chew on if you ever decide to revise and add the endings for the other DLCs.

The Citadel didn't have a problem with people joining up originally. It was that the missions they sent you on were so deadly to the average wastelander that it was essentially a death sentence to sign up. I sincerely doubt that 20 years of that kind of reputation would be wiped away from people minds just because of a few victories. Notice that Three Dog tells people to help out the Brotherhood if they see them with ammo or something, but doesn't mention enlistment. He fights the "good fight" which he explains is him trying to make sure people don't die. I think if you find Elder Lyons' personal journals that he's even a little sad because of all the deaths in the brotherhood, to the point where he's considering stepping down and letting Sarah lead.

Raven's Rock is also not really a place you expect to find anything worthwhile left either. In a time when the favored motto was "Better dead than red," it seems very likely that even civilian top secret research bunkers would be outfitted with self-destruct devices designed to ensure that an invading army would have to take years to get damaged data and research. There's also a problem with modifying a strain of FEV to kill only super mutants and not all the humans that are infected with the passive strain of it, which most wastelanders are. The Brotherhood, Enclave, vaults, and places like Point Lookout are really the only non-infected populations you can find for the most part.

Other than the Pitt being a good place for them to make a home in after they cure mutation, the Outcast ending is pretty good. The only thing I have to point out for that one is that they can't get any reinforcements. They refuse to recruit from outside their own ranks and since Lyons didn't come to the Capital Wastes to start a new civilization, they sent Lyons there to grab some tech and head back, blasting anything that looks mutated or tries to stop him, unless they start to have kids there, they almost don't ever get anyone new. I'm sure they could make exceptions, they just refuse to.

With the loss of Paradise Falls, there just isn't a major slaver bastion in the Wastes. I'm sure as long as the Pitt exists (you haven't stopped Ashur in the Pitt) there will be a profitable place for even a few slaves. I don't know who Ashur is selling the steel to, but it isn't the Brotherhood.

The Regulator's aren't a household name in the wastes currently because they're a secret society. Becoming well know is kinda not their intent. It's a lot harder to bring down someone when they know you're coming for them because all regulators seem to have a dress code.

Rivet City and Megaton both have limited capacity. Megaton could expand into Springfield yes, but it's very unprotected against anything that feels like attacking at the moment. It's why the city is overcrowded now and not expanding into the buildings there except for a few exceptions. Rivet City doesn't seem to have as much a problem with overcrowding, but I'm thinking that maybe that's where a lot of the corpses you find all over come from.

Braun in Vault 112 was already borderline insane when you meet him. Killing off his last anchor on sanity would have drove him over the edge in a short time. He's stuck there alone, but instead of being bored, he would become insane. He's probably been bored already for most of the time he's been in there.

Anyways, that is my list of things that don't quite fit into your endings there. Most of it is just technical junk though. Fallout 3 isn't exactly real science so it doesn't matter one way or another I guess. If you decide to do more, remember that regular good karma and neutral would have multiple possible endings in it's territories and cities. Also, think about adding Old Olney, the power plant. Assuming the Brotherhood didn't forget how to make another Tesla coil for the plant, it's possible that the wasteland could have power again from it. It would take effort, and the Citadel would be the first to reap any benefits, but they could build up a second outpost there.

Sigh, why do I have to be so verbose? I'm running out of characters so I should stop. It was a good read, I enjoyed it.

When Bethsheda mentioned about Fallout 3 having so many different endings like the first two, I got excited but then I got pissed when they got cheap about how it ended, they "technically" did give us an ending on how our actions affected the Capital wasteland but never got into pure detail on how our actions affected of those we meet. Thank you for posting this story up.

P.S- Some of us FO2 fans still wonder what happened to Marcus (Super Mutant Town Sheriff of Broken Hills) Some say he died in the wild, others say it was the Brotherhood (Western) who was resposible, while I like to say he found his place of peace after wondering the wasteland for so long and encounter the LW.

Thanks for posting this! I was thinking of writing something like this but I don't have the time to do so. Please think about writing another one for the bad and neutral endings. Thanks again!