Most people who know me well know that one of my favorite series of games ever is Fallout. I could go on and on about why I think that in its best iterations it tackles extremely human themes of war, self-destruction, and hope.

However, the Nuka-World DLC for Fallout 4 was NOT one of these iterations. Far Harbor got pretty close to being a perfect 5/5, and Fallout 4 as a whole is a solid 3/5. But Nuka-World? 1/5.

Many people have discussed the problems with Nuka-World before, so I will not repeat them. Moreover, for me, they fall into two big categories:

1. The entire premise and story are both terrible as an idea and terrible in execution.
2. Nuka-World as a place (and everyone in it) is SO. DAMN. BORING. AND. UNINSPIRED.

However, I think (as most things do) it had potential if a few key decisions had been made differently. In this blog post I will explore a little bit more of how I would have designed the Nuka-World DLC to be interesting.

To “challenge” myself in writing, I’ll keep the two main pillars of the DLC as they are:

1. The story must be set in a Nuka-World theme park.
2. The player must have the chance to become a raider boss.

Let’s go, boys and girls in the naughty list.

1. Nuka-Winterland

While Far Harbor was a mysterious, Lovecraftian-like island with its moody fog, deep forests, and coastal sailor-like ambiance, Nuka-World is just… boring and empty.

It is merely an uninspired piece of desolate land in the same color palette we’ve seen a thousand times, with some tacky park elements sprinkled on top. It’s so generic. So empty. (I hate empty open worlds. Give me small-but-rich over big-and-empty any day.)

So, my suggestion would be to change the setting a little: we rarely see snow or Christmas in Fallout. The reasons are obvious: first, the world canonically ended on 23 October 2077, which is a little bit too early for Christmas decorations (though there is an Easter egg in Fallout 4 where Diamond City is decorated).

Moreover, we don’t see snow because Fallout 1-2 and New Vegas were set in literal deserts. Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 would probably be a little boring if the ENTIRE game were set in snowy places.

But in a DLC, a snow-based setting could be a very nice blend of new, interesting, and pretty.

So, I suggest Nuka-World should have been set in “Nuka-Winterland” instead: a theme park Nuka-Cola created for its Christmas season. We could keep the theme-park quality of the entire thing but now add a lot of thematic elements.

1.1. General Features of the DLC

First, let’s get a few general ideas out of the way:

• The entire park is decorated for Christmas: snow, Christmas trees & lights, fake log cabins, gigantic candy canes, animatronic reindeer, etc.
• Blizzards can occur. At times, the player will have to take shelter, otherwise they will suffer damage from the cold.
• There’s a pre-war robotics & assembly facility where Nuka-Cola built animatronic elves, reindeer, and Santa robots for all its seasonal parks. The player can restore the factory to make defensive bots to protect Winterland (if the player chooses the “good” ending) OR A private robot army branded as “Nuka-Elves” for their raider empire.
• There is a horror-themed section of the park: “Nuka-Krampus’ Grotto” inhabited by ghouls dressed in tattered Krampus/fur costumes.

Moreover, I think it is important to remake the layout of the map a little. I am OK with the DLC’s main “Nuka-World” part, but the others (Dry Rock, Kiddie Kingdom, Safari, and Galactic Zone) are… meh. I would gladly replace one of them with “Santa’s Workshop,” another with the Nuka-Krampus zone, and combine the Power Plant with the Bottling Factory AND the Santa Robots facility into one area.

Finally, I would give a little more emphasis to the abandoned city of Bradberton (outside the park boundaries) for reasons I’ll explain later.

1.2. Santa Claus and his Mutants

We could have a part of the park with “Santa’s Workshop,” where a group of super mutants has taken over. Different from the rest of the super mutants in Fallout 4, they would not be automatically hostile.

They were initially led by mutants who still retained some intelligence despite the FEV and left the Boston area as refugees seeking a better place to live.

The original leaders are now dead, and the remaining super mutants have become a little too attached to the winter theme. They have convinced themselves that:

• They are Santa’s helpers. Their mutant boss dresses as “Santa,” and their job is to prepare “gifts” for the “good children.”
• “Good children” and “Bad children” are arbitrarily defined in wacky ways.
• The gifts range from bizarre junk to genuinely useful things (such as unique crafted weapons).
• The quests involving them would revolve around crossing names off the “naughty list.” The player should be able to help them non-lethally (negotiate peace) or push them into becoming an execution squad for your enemies (leaning into the raider path).
• In the quest, you could push the leader to be more benign and Santa-like, or to become “Krampus” (embracing a violent path of punishment).

1.3. Raider Gangs

As mentioned before, since this DLC is the “play as a raider” expansion, we should keep it that way.

Frankly, I had no interest at all in playing as a raider here, so I just installed the Nuka-World Plus mod, took them all down as soon as I got into the park, and gave the entire thing to the Minutemen (spoiler: this is going to be important later).

I don’t think I have a strong opinion on the current raider gangs’ philosophies/styles. They don’t attract me but neither do they repulse me. Basically, they are divided into: the Operators (efficient mafia-style gang), the Pack (eccentric, animal-based?) and Disciples (cold blooded killers).

I don’t have anything against it per se, but if I had my way, I would change the raider mechanic. Instead of multiple raider gangs, you would have one single raider gang but multiple lieutenants, each pulling the gang toward a different aspect.

During the main quest, the player would choose which lieutenant to help. This would modify the gang’s nature and style. So by the end of the DLC, the player character could shape the gang with a few different characteristics, for example:

• A gang that favors chem use / producing chems for money / does both / does neither
• A gang that gains wealth by stealth / intimidation and racketeering / violence / or… trading… people.

Speaking of stealth thieves, a one-off idea would be that the “lieutenant” who favors this approach genuinely believes Santa Claus was the biggest thief of them all (patron saint of burglary: breaking into houses at night? Taking cookies? Moving stuff around? Yeah, that’s his guy).

We could also have the raiders mostly wear red clothes, so they become the “Redcoats” (in opposition to the Minutemen, hah).

The only problem with making the raiders too stylized is that it would look stupid if the player decided to actually become a raider and bring them back to the Commonwealth. So a balance would need to be struck here.

But overall, the idea is that siding with certain characters over others would let players customize the gang as they wished.

2. Storyline

Every good story explores a theme. EVERY. GOOD. STORY. Some explore multiple themes.

NNuka-World does not have a good story, and it has even less of a theme. The entire questline can be summed up as: “hey, wanna be a raider?” It starts and ends there.

This is mainly because Bethesda’s writers are piss-poor at making anything beyond shallow (cof-cof… EMIL), which is why the motto of their writing team is “Keep it simple, stupid” (which they sometimes appear to confuse with “keep it stupid.”)

With that said, how do we make the story of our Nuka-Winterland compelling?

Well, we explore the interpersonal drama of established characters and the themes of losing hope in the wasteland. Which is why this DLC should have been about…

2.1 The Minutemen

Yes, yes, I know. They are the laughingstock of the Fallout 4 factions. But the only reason they are so forgettable is because they are tasteless goody-two-shoes. They have absolutely no edge whatsoever, which makes them boring.

To quote Oscar Wilde: “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”

The Minutemen are tedious. Absurdly tedious.

The most the writers ever did for them was sprinkle some lore into terminals no one ever reads (Gabriel in Libertalia and Clint in Quincy).

This DLC could have been the writers’ chance to make something interesting out of them. So in my opinion, the entirety of the Nuka-Winterland DLC should have been about the “fallen” Minutemen of Nuka-World.

These “fallen” Minutemen would highlight the failings of the faction and could reflect the player character’s shift from the main storyline to the raider-like nature of Nuka-World (or, if the player chooses, they could help restore the Minutemen to power).

2.2. Nuka-Winterland Lore

In the original DLC lore, Nuka-World was a trading settlement that was invaded by a combination of raider gangs 1 year before the main story (2287).

I would change this a little. In our DLC lore, we could have a group of Minutemen leaving the Boston area around 2282 (before General Joe Becker died) to answer a distress call from Nuka-Winterland. They are led by Colonel Raymond Shaw (Ronnie Shaw’s older brother) and Captain Colter.

In Nuka-Winterland, they find more or less three settlements: the super mutants at Santa’s Workshop, the town of Bradberton, and a mostly ghoul trading settlement in Nuka-World itself. All these settlements are a powder keg of conflict with one another. And to make matters worse, the surrounding region is crawling with raiders.

Sometimes the mutants of Santa’s Workshop get loose and murder civilians or are killed by Minutemen. Sometimes ghouls from the trading outpost turn feral. Moreover, the human settlement of Bradberton is absolutely not composed of nice people. They take advantage of the Minutemen’s help in every way they can while giving nothing back. They gouge the prices of supplies, refuse to give them proper shelter, and so on and so forth.

The Minutemen do their best, but after a while their cohesion starts to disintegrate fast. Some winters become harsher (canonically, the winter of 2286 was brutal in the Fallout RPG “Winter of Atom”, so maybe we could say that the winters around that decade were getting colder) and the Minutemen begin to die with no replenishment. Resources are few and the soldiers are getting restless.

Raymond Shaw gets mortally sick and becomes unable to lead, and now the remaining leaders try to keep order. However, some Minutemen start to commit crimes. Sometimes a small group steals supplies. Then some start organizing “killing squads” to hit mutants or ghouls. Some begin to enforce protection rackets.

The Minutemen leadership begins to truly crack. Some call for harsh punishment of the accused Minutemen; others want to be lenient given their situation. Some favor recruiting locals (who may not share the ideological justice of the Minutemen), while others argue they should leave the region entirely.

In 2284, things come to a head when a massacre occurs among the ghouls of Nuka-World, carried out by the inhabitants of Bradberton and the Minutemen. The details are not clear on how it started, but soon the ghoul trading settlement is mostly wiped out. At this point, Colonel Shaw is already dead.

This breaks the Minutemen. Some Minutemen start trials and executions. Some are exiled. A large group led by Captain Colter decides to pack up and leave, while a few under choose to stay.

The group that decides to stay stops being the Minutemen in spirit and becomes basic muscle-for-hire for the trading caravans. I would call this faction the Broken. Here, we could joke and have the traders mockingly call them “Minutemen” in the sense that they are paid by the minute to protect the caravans: the minute you stop paying, they stop caring. This group of Minutemen is cynical and lost and no longer cares about protecting people, only about providing their services to get food for another day.

In 2285, things change, however: a new Overboss has united the raiders in the region, and they come in and massacre and enslave the town of Bradberton and any remaining ghoul survivors from the trading settlement. This is the raider-dominated Nuka-Winterland the main character would see in 2287.

However, here is the twist: a considerable part of the raiders in this group are ex-Minutemen (Libertalia style, I know). Some became junkies after their trauma, others started raiding just to survive. These Minutemen are the Fallen. Together with the other raiders they picked up in the surrounding region, they make up the raider gangs of Nuka-World.

I think this is a neat idea that would add some big interpersonal drama and could explore core themes of redemption and punishment.

Thus, in 2287 when the DLC starts, the player character finds: Nuka-World taken over by raiders (for 2 years now instead of 1), the mutants of Santa’s Workshop, some ghouls scattered throughout the park and mostly in Krampus’ Grotto, and the abandoned town of Bradberton.

The raiders have enslaved the traders, and the Minutemen remnants (the Broken) now work as caravan guards, protecting their routes in exchange for payment.

2.3. Shaw, Colter, Gage and Winters

One phrase I like to repeat whenever I’m writing anything is William Faulkner’s: “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” So, who are the characters in our DLC and what is their conflict?

Colonel Raymond Shaw — who led the expedition of the Minutemen to Nuka-Winterland — is a tragic failed hero. Being Ronnie Shaw’s brother, he would probably have been in the Minutemen at least before 2240 (before General McGann died). This would make him a 40+ year-old veteran of the Minutemen.

However, he never became a General. And this would probably eat him alive. He saw his beloved organization start to falter and crack, and the other Minutemen always elected leaders who failed to keep cohesion. His expedition to Nuka-Winterland is both a chance to try to make things right and the desperate gamble of a man who knows his time is running out.

The reason he insists on staying in Nuka-Winterland even though things are not going their way is his desperate need to make his entire life matter for something. He is desperate to do one last good deed in a world he sees going from bad to worse.

And he fails. Miserably.

Captain Colter was one of his senior officers. However, he was never meant to be there. He was a rising star in the ranks of the Minutemen, close to General Becker and being groomed for command. General Becker advised him not to go and to stay in Boston, but Colter was motivated to help people in the most practical way possible, instead of staying in Boston and tending to administrative duties.

Colter gets injured in a battle in Nuka-Winterland and, in order to survive, starts taking chems. While recovering, he hears news of Joe Becker’s death and the fracturing of the Minutemen in Boston. It weighs heavily on him, knowing that had he stayed, this might not have occurred.

At the same time, Colonel Shaw’s health starts to decline and all the other Minutemen officers are more focused on advancing their own factions instead of working in unity. Colter’s chem addiction worsens and he starts to develop serious violent, cynical, and bipolar traits. He becomes the leader of the faction that decides to leave in 2284. However, on the way back, he loses all hope of ever returning to the Commonwealth as a Minuteman (given that the Minutemen are basically gone at this point) and his group is captured by raiders.

To protect his men, he becomes a raider himself and rises through the ranks, eventually becoming the Overboss.

Finally, we have Porter Gage. I would keep his personality as-is. He is a mean bastard who has no problem raiding people. But I would change his backstory.

For me, Gage would be one of the inhabitants of Bradberton, a mechanic type whose hidden ruthlessness in surviving is as sharp as his technical skills. Remember: our version of Bradberton is a city full of bad people who take advantage of each other. Which is why, when they are killed and raiders take over, the ghouls and super mutants don’t seem all that bothered by it.

As Gage sees the city start to fall apart and ignore his advice, he decides to book it together with the Minutemen. He is far more ruthless and detached from violence than Colter is.

Which is why he plots to kill Colter and make someone else take over. A devious bastard, is he not?

Thus, in my DLC, the reasons why Colter never expanded from Nuka-World to the Commonwealth are less because “Colter got lazy” and more because our Captain Colter is a broken, violent man strung out on chems who, deep down, regrets all his decisions so far and would rather die in Nuka-Winterland than become the thing he hates in Boston.

If you haven’t noticed, there are some big parallels between my version of Colter and Gage and Preston and Sturges. In this DLC I would explore a twisted version of the Preston–Sturges dynamic: a truly broken Minuteman with a skilled man at his ear.

In our DLC, I wouldn’t have the player kill Colter right at the start. Rather, they would defeat and severely injure Colter and capture him. The decision to kill (or not) Colter could be made later in the storyline. But even if Colter lives, it’s less of a mercy, as he is now a destitute, broken man.

Finally, one character I would add is Lieutenant Winters (the name can be changed). He would be one of the junior officers of the Minutemen during the events that led to their downfall, and is now the “leader” of the Broken Minutemen who takes care of caravan protection. As muscle-for-hire, he still works for the raiders in bringing caravans from the Commonwealth, but he is despondent about everything that has happened and has no hope of changing it. If the player chooses to go down the Minutemen path in this DLC, he would be the NPC taking charge at the end.

The other NPCs (Sierra, Oswald, the raider leaders) could stay more or less as they are.

2.5. Cait (and a little bit of Strong)

Taking inspiration from Far Harbor again, I think one of the reasons people like that DLC so much is because it fits Nick Valentine’s character so well. It fits what he does (he is a detective investigating a mystery) and who he is (a man trying to find his past).

The fact that this was an outlier rather than a common occurrence shows how abysmally lacking some game writers are.

With that said, who fits our DLC the best? Cait.

Cait is both a broken character who is not entirely a good person, but not entirely a bad one either. She may even want to get better but doesn’t know how.

She is the perfect fit for a DLC where you can choose between the futile hope of things getting better or giving in to a bad world.

Cait’s canonical backstory says that her parents physically and verbally abused her before selling her off as a slave on her 18th birthday. One thing the canon does not establish directly is where she was born…

Well, guess where there is a city full of terrible people in a region full of raiders and slavers? Yeah, Bradberton.

In the lore of our DLC, Cait could have been born in the outskirts of Bradberton, and she has never looked back since. Well, that is, until we take her to Nuka-Winterland.

Now, I won’t spend much time detailing how Cait would interact with this storyline. There is a truly endless list of combinations. What I will do, however, is give some ideas for adding layers of tragedy to Cait — namely: her past relationship with Porter Gage and her brother.

In my mind, one rich idea to explore would be that young Cait looked up to Gage. Perhaps he was the only nice person to her in her childhood. Perhaps he gave her shelter when she first escaped her family’s home. Maybe, for her, he was “Uncle Gage.”

And now, adult Cait comes back and finds Gage as the main architect of a ruthless gang of raiders. That’s would hurt for both of them, right? For Cait, the one good person in her childhood is now a slaver. For Gage, the one person who ever believed there was good in him now sees the monster he became.

And one major character I would add is a younger brother. Perhaps someone who suffered as much as she did in their youth. In our version, the DLC would not start with the player stumbling upon the Nuka-World radio and Harvey, but rather Cait telling the player that she has a brother, and that she recently received news that he is alive and needs help.

She loves her brother enough to throw herself back into her place of trauma to help him. But it’s a trap… and the DLC starts.

In my storyline, her brother would be an aspiring raider, but a pretty bad one at that — a sympathetic fool trying to act tough in a world of killers. He doesn’t know it, but he is very close to being killed by the other raiders. Some raider discovered he had a sister and decided to secretly radio her in order to bait her and kill them both.

And now, the decisions of the player in this DLC would shape who Cait and her brother become. He can: rise through the ranks of the raiders and become ruthless, leave and start wandering the Commonwealth, die, or become a Minuteman to protect Nuka-Winterland.

Dramatic enough?

Now, if I had development time, I would also give Strong a bone as a companion here and give him interactions in the quests with the supermutants. He could see christmas and try to understand the “kindness” of humanity.

Moreover, Santa Claus likes milk. AND STRONG WANTS THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS.

2.6 Possible endings

In keeping with Fallout tradition, I’d have the DLC end in three broad “routes,” each with variations based on your choices. Roughly:

1. You embrace being a raider Overboss.
2. You help Lieutenant Winters regain his sense of justice and restore the Minutemen.
3. You refuse to pick a side, help Cait’s brother, and walk away.

On top of that, each major NPC and faction gets an epilogue that reflects what you did throughout the DLC.

If the player sides with the raiders, you take Colter’s place and rule Nuka-Winterland. The raiders you end up commanding depend entirely on which lieutenants you empowered. Maybe you turned them into a stealthy gang of burglars. Maybe you pushed them into becoming a brutal slaver syndicate. Maybe something in-between.

Colter can be killed or kept alive, but either way he’s a ruined man. Winters can stay a hollow mercenary guarding caravans, can be pushed into outright cynicism (becoming a raider-aligned security chief), or can be pulled toward justice — but since you’re still a raider, he’s bitter that he can’t stop you, and hates himself for it.

Gage stays as second-in-command if you let him, or he has to be killed (he would never tolerate being sidelined).

The robots can be reprogrammed to help the raiders. The super mutants either become isolationist or your personal hit squad.

Cait’s ending depends almost entirely on her brother. If he lives, she can tolerate you choosing the raider path. If he dies, she sinks into a very dark place.

However, if you decide to side with the Minutemen, you help Winters regain his sense of justice and reform the Minutemen to retake Nuka-Winterland. This shouldn’t be a “rah-rah good guys” ending but rather a story of redemption. Depending on how you handled things earlier, the new Nuka-Minutemen may be merciful, strict, or practically authoritarian. Fallout has always been good when “good” comes at a cost, and this ending follows that spirit.

Colter’s fate is either a mercy kill or a tragic, pitiful survival. Gage either walks away furious or dies by your hand. The robots defend settlements, and Santa’s mutants can either be left alone or turned into a functional trading outpost.

If Cait’s brother survives this route, it gives her (and the region) a glimpse of hope that things can be better. If he dies, it will be a bittersweet victory.

3. Why this fits Fallout’s themes

Look, I know it sounds harsh, but Fallout today has been flanderized to the point of becoming a satire of itself. The DLC being set in a goofy theme park without any thematic resonance or exploration of humanity is an unintentional satire of what Fallout has become: a post-apocalypse theme park where the player can cause all the destruction they want without consequence.

Fallout has always been at its best when it remembers that the wasteland isn’t really about wacky 50s Americana, but about people trying (and often failing) to live with what war already did to them (painted over an absurdist canvas of retro-futuristic kitschy 50s Americana).

At its core, Nuka-World should have asked why people become raiders, and every gameplay and story decision should have reflected that. My version of Nuka-Winterland tries to do exactly that. It’s about the interpersonal drama of people who broke in this desolate world: Shaw, Colter, Winters, Gage. Is it possible to even be a “good guy” in an impossible situation?

This is why the moral ambiguity in the Minutemen storyline should be pushed to the maximum. Every major path should force you to think what “justice” even means after the bombs, and no answer should ever feel truly satisfying.

The player, of course, can ignore all of this and go full evil raider. But that is also part of the answer to why people become monsters: because it’s easy, because it’s fun, because it frees you from the moral shackles that once held society together. In a world where might-makes-right, one monstrous leader simply replaces the next. Colter, the player, Gage. What can (innocent) men do against such reckless hate?

And finally, I think the aesthetic choices of Christmas make a much more interesting scenario than the barren Nuka-World we got. A snowy, frozen park gives us a chance to keep the “theme park” idea while actually echoing Fallout’s satirical style. Nuka-Winterland is a kitschy corporate fantasy made by people who never truly understood what Christmas was about, now overtaken by people who misunderstand it even more. I think it would comment on Fallout’s weaponized nostalgia through the very act of depicting Nuka-Winterland’s weaponized nostalgia.

This region is frozen at the moment of annihilation. Nothing ever changed for them. Humanity continued to be as terrible as it was before the war.

Because war… war never changes.