Usually the death of a hero in a role-playing game is formalized by a reboot screen, and the world around does not even suspect about it. The other option is much more terrible, when you are alive, healthy and clad in power armor, and your comrades-in-arms have already crossed your name off the list of personnel.
This is exactly how one of the most inconspicuous details works Fallout 4. After the Survivor disappears in the flash of a teleporter assembled in the basement of the Old North Church, Desdemona goes to the Underground slate and crosses out the agent’s codename. No funeral, no funeral speech.
The logic of the head of the Underground is ironclad. The molecular disintegrator from the quest “At the Molecular Level” is assembled on the knee according to the crooked drawings of the institute; upon startup, a tube falls out of the installation, and the signal interceptor itself, after a single use, turns into a pile of burnt-out trash. There is no feedback at all, no telemetry, there is only one evidence of success, and it must come back on its own.
A separate topic is personal trust in Technician Tom. A person who greets a newcomer with an offer to inject him with serum against blood drones does not have a reputation as a reliable engineer even among his own people. Dr. Carrington at this moment cannot stand it and yells at the entire headquarters:
There’s battery acid in your serum!
There is a second irony built into the same scene. The code name on the board is chosen by the player himself, and there are exactly six options: “Master”, “Professor”, “Sharp”, “Charming”, “Whisper” and “Wanderer”, and the latter goes only to those who allow Desdemona to come up with a call sign on her own. The callsign “Wanderer” remained in the game, but the song “The Wanderer” by Dion DiMucci from Diamond City Radio disappeared after the 2024 update, when Bethesda rebuilt the soundtrack for licensing reasons.
The chalk is erased in a second, and the two-hundred-year-old veteran in polished power armor returns the next day as if nothing had happened.
