you have to be fucking kidding me
Just a reminder that Bethesda actually thought this was an acceptable way to end a story.
me: hey fawkes can you walk five feet into this room and type 3 numbers on a keyboard for me? since i saved your life and all?
my best friend fawkes: tbh dude i could but it’d be cooler if you just fucking died
It just struck me this game’s like a decade old now, so for the uninitiated, to the best of my recollection: the final room’s dilemna is to fix a water purifier there’s a chamber with SUPER LETHAL radiation that needs to be entered so someone can input some password on a numberpad to fix it. You can either go in yourself and die or send in the girl who came with you and have her die, and since at launch there was no postgame and the game simply cuts to the an ending cinematic and credits after this decision either way without the appropriate DLC (and when you do get the DLC it retcons that you somehow survive either way), it doesn’t really matter except whether you care about the narrator calling you a coward or not in the photo reel at the end.
BUT, and I swear this must have been like a last minute addition that the writer’s completely forgot they’d written themselves into a corner with because they’d already decided on a STELLAR ending. One of the few travelling companions in this game, in fact perhaps the only one you gain directly from the main quest, a mere hour or two before this final room, is Fawkes. He’s got 2 important character traits: Friendly, which is odd for a supermutant in the bethesda canon, and Immune to Death By Radiation, a trait that is not only common to supermutants, but DEMONSTRATED in the quest just before this one. Like an hour ago of gameplay, there was an irradiated room you couldn’t enter to get this macguffin you need, so after some pleasantries, the solution to this puzzle is to have your new friend Fawkes go in and grab it for you effortlessly. It is in fact the only solution to that puzzle, it is the one plot-critical thing that Fawkes is notable for.
So your options, to review: sacrifice yourself, or sacrifice another human. Or ask Fawkes to do it so no one has to die, and have him tell you in the most pretentious way to go fuck off and die in the radiation room, buddy.