Bethesda Writer Accidentally Implies Fallout 4 Protag Is A War Criminal

thegamer.com:

Controversially, Fallout 4 makes it a little harder to build your own character. If you play as a woman, you were a lawyer before the bombs dropped. If you're a guy, you were part of the US military, fighting in the war against China. Either way, your character got married and had a son before the events of the game, and there's nothing you can do to change that.

Now, it turns out that there's even more to the male lead's backstory: he's a war criminal. That's at least according to a tweet from Fallout 4's lead writer, Emil Pagliarulo, who said that the male protagonist - often referred to by his default name, Nate - is actually the same soldier we see at the start of the first Fallout game. Y'know, the guy who's cackling away as his buddy executes a Canadian citizen.

For reference, I'll drop the original Fallout intro below. The part with the soldier in question appears around the 0:45 mark.

Despite the horrific implications of this reveal, Pagliarulo's wording seems pretty definitive. He even emphasizes that the characters are the "SAME. GUY.", seemingly eager to share this little tidbit with fans.

However, Pagliarulo walked back on this very quickly after many fans, understandably, took this to mean that they'd been playing as a war criminal the entire time.

Oof. I wanted to share what I thought was a cool Fallout tidbit without realizing how divisive it might be [...] Not every bit of Fallout info I share is automatically canon. Nate is NOT a war criminal!

He goes on to argue that this was actually headcanon all along, and just something that he kept in his mind while writing the game. Since it wasn't shared with the player, he doesn't consider it part of Nate's canon backstory. But this means that there's nothing stopping you from roleplaying a war criminal if you want to. Don't let Nate's calm demeanour at the start of Fallout 4 stop you from playing as an absolute monster.

Pagliarulo may have walked back his claims now, but the story has taken