I really like the way this DLC handles faith in general. It's something messy, conflicting, deeply related to the people interpreting it, and yet it's still treated with sincerity and is shown to be a legitimately redemptive force just as much as it allows unearned clemency and hides developmental backslides. It works nicely with the themes of forgiveness and lost innocence.
It is annoying that it entirely secularizes the faith of the natives, though. I'd much have preferred a wider cosmology (especially because syncretization is such a major emphasis of their culture), but this DLC's scope of writing is pretty tight and I understand the mindset that led them to have everything tie back to the relationships between Canaanites and the people who are inexorably affected by their tendrils of imperialism. That's also why I always get a little annoyed at it being boiled down to "lol white savior" when the entire point is more about how it is impossible to take back that first contact - Joshua Graham is unambiguously, textually, the worst thing that ever happened to the Dead Legs or the Sorrows. The petty feud of a Hegelian LARPer causes real, appreciable harm that is delegated into comforting obscurity, and this largely-pointless conflict harms people well outside its scope. Daniel and Joshua can never actually find the peace they crave, only shades of it that still haunt their dreams. Every action they take here is a supplicative effort to spare their egos from fully reckoning with the ruin they singlehandedly brought these people.
The problem is that this DLC does not give remotely enough voices to the natives because of its tightdeadlines scope and that because it's a Choices Matter Roleplaying Game the PC has more sway than any individual voice, and this taints a good deal of its genuinely deep worldbuilding, character writing, and thematics. They have no real agency in the plot and the entire "innocence lost" angle mostly serves to infantilize. I don't think it's ill-intended, inasmuch as it's a victim of just being a DLC and thusly lacking the scope needed to tackle it three-dimensionally and being trapped in the structure of the base game, and I'll fully admit a good deal of this is cope when I know that Josh Sawyer has politics that are resoundly anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonialist.
As much as it complicates its main narrative, the DLC's tight focus works to its benefit gameplay-wise. It does not overstay its welcome and is a pure, concentrated hit of Bethesda Dopamine that I sorely desired after Starfield's fast travel-heavy UX nightmare left me in the cold. There's always something cool to look at and something useful to find (if you're in hardcore mode, at least), and the Survivalist's logs is a very large part of why I love this genre. The .45 pistols are so fucking cool (and kinda so fucking busted) that they singlehandedly justify the DLC's existence.
At one point Daniel tells the player off: "Throughout our history, we have called many places Zion. This valley is full of God's beauty, but it's just a place. Zion is more than this."
I grew up in this part of the country. I used to believe what the Caananites believed. I can't ever go back there, even though those red rocks and blue skies are so comforting to me that these crude Gamebryo replications make me long so much that I ache. I can't ever commit to what guides these men, knowing what it's done to my family.
Even if he's allowed to stick to his morals, though, he can't help it. Even as he builds new lives for himself and those he loves, this place'll haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. Turning your back on Zion always leaves you emptier.
It is annoying that it entirely secularizes the faith of the natives, though. I'd much have preferred a wider cosmology (especially because syncretization is such a major emphasis of their culture), but this DLC's scope of writing is pretty tight and I understand the mindset that led them to have everything tie back to the relationships between Canaanites and the people who are inexorably affected by their tendrils of imperialism. That's also why I always get a little annoyed at it being boiled down to "lol white savior" when the entire point is more about how it is impossible to take back that first contact - Joshua Graham is unambiguously, textually, the worst thing that ever happened to the Dead Legs or the Sorrows. The petty feud of a Hegelian LARPer causes real, appreciable harm that is delegated into comforting obscurity, and this largely-pointless conflict harms people well outside its scope. Daniel and Joshua can never actually find the peace they crave, only shades of it that still haunt their dreams. Every action they take here is a supplicative effort to spare their egos from fully reckoning with the ruin they singlehandedly brought these people.
The problem is that this DLC does not give remotely enough voices to the natives because of its tight
As much as it complicates its main narrative, the DLC's tight focus works to its benefit gameplay-wise. It does not overstay its welcome and is a pure, concentrated hit of Bethesda Dopamine that I sorely desired after Starfield's fast travel-heavy UX nightmare left me in the cold. There's always something cool to look at and something useful to find (if you're in hardcore mode, at least), and the Survivalist's logs is a very large part of why I love this genre. The .45 pistols are so fucking cool (and kinda so fucking busted) that they singlehandedly justify the DLC's existence.
At one point Daniel tells the player off: "Throughout our history, we have called many places Zion. This valley is full of God's beauty, but it's just a place. Zion is more than this."
I grew up in this part of the country. I used to believe what the Caananites believed. I can't ever go back there, even though those red rocks and blue skies are so comforting to me that these crude Gamebryo replications make me long so much that I ache. I can't ever commit to what guides these men, knowing what it's done to my family.
Even if he's allowed to stick to his morals, though, he can't help it. Even as he builds new lives for himself and those he loves, this place'll haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. Turning your back on Zion always leaves you emptier.