You’ve finally finished! All the quests you wanted to do are done. All of the items you wanted to get have been obtained…so now what? Do you just leave? Turn off the game and move on just like that? What if you’re not done? What if you want to come back and play again? You have to be ready for that right? Future-you won’t know where you left off or where everything is. No, it’s not enough to just leave and move on. Preparations must be made!

I noticed something peculiar when I finally finished Fallout 4 over the holiday season. Even though I was happy to have finished the game and ready to move on, I found myself being drawn back to it. I couldn’t really tell why at first, it was just a weird feeling of having unfinished business. While I did indeed have some unfinished business it was the sort that wasn’t really possible to finish (never was able to find that right leg). The feeling remained nonetheless though. I found my head filled with the questions above, and I concluded that I just wouldn’t be able to move on until I’d left the game in a state that I could just hop back into at some point in the future. So instead of immediately moving on, I set about getting ready for my eventual return (even though I had no real intention at the time).

At first it was just about making things accessible. I completely revamped my storage system and poured everything into my workshop at Sanctury Hills. I gathered all of my power armor in one place. I sold or broke down all of the weapons, armor, and items I didn’t need. “Okay, that should be enough right?”, I thought. Well, it turns out the answer was “NOPE!”. My mainstay weapons had to be completely upgraded. That Power Armor needed to be fully customized, painted, and given a dedicated space. That space needed to be turned into a workshop/living quarters to make sense. Sanctuary Hills needed to have tougher defenses to ward off raiders. That bobble-head stand in the corner needed ALL the bobble-heads before it could be displayed properly! Finally, that Power Armor space needed its own defenses, giant copper lions, and a fountain! I even went so far as to assign all the Sanctuary settlers to beds and tasks, something I had no intention of doing at all before this! However, at long last the it was ready. Everything was in its proper place, was upgraded, accessible, and spiffed up. It’s too bad I won’t be making use of it anytime soon.

The funny thing is that this isn’t the first time I’ve felt the need to leave a game in a certain state before leaving it. I had to have my house a certain way in Skyrim before moving on, and I had to have my fortress set a certain way before leaving Dragon Age: Inquisition. The stupid thing in all this? I don’t think I’ve returned to play any of those files yet! Yet that’s how it has to be. If there’s even a chance I might come back and play a file for dlc or something, I always have to leave it a certain way before moving onto another game. Hopefully Fallout won’t follow the pattern of the others and end up remaining unplayed indefinitely. :D

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Do you have any end-game habits? Anything you find yourself doing over and over in similar games even if it doesn’t do all that much to impact your experience?

(image captured by Hatm0nster)