Being a raider is a lot of fun, even though I was dressed as an astronaut instead of wearing face paint and rusty spikes.Ībernathy Farm was next, with the goal not to kill everyone but force them to submit, to serve as a supply depot for my new raider camp. I won’t lie: it was damn fun and quite cathartic mowing down those corn-growers and stall-vendors, each of whom I spent hours of my precious time recruiting, dressing, and assigning horrible careers to.
With three raiders backing me up, we rolled through in a blaze of bullets and blood, chewing up the settlers I’d recruited and blasting down the defenses I’d built, until I’d re-conquered what was already mine. You can raid any settlement you please, but having long-ago tired of settlement building and tinkering, I launched my first attack on my main settlement at the drive-in theater. Establish a foothold by claiming a few settlements, then convince (verbally or violently) surrounding settlements to contribute to the raider effort with food and caps. Once you reclaim the entirety of the park, your right-hand raider will make a suggestion: why stop there? There’s an entire wasteland just begging to be conquered. Or, you just can kill them, as I did in one case because I enraged the guy by accidentally shooting the gorilla that raised him (fill in your own Harambe joke here), and in another case because the NPC in question wore a hat I thought would look better on my own head. There are a few diversions in these unclaimed sections of park: some NPCs already inhabit them along with the monsters, and you can try to befriend them and convince to live alongside your new raider chums. Your first 10 hours in Nuka-World will be spent endlessly shooting and little else, as each threat must be 100 percent neutralized before the surprisingly cautious raiders will move in.
There’s an area filled with ghouls, one patrolled by scores of angry robots, and another infested with giant subterranean worms that are essentially just reskinned molerats. One area is filled with a couple dozen Gatorclaws (they’re Deathclaws, but alligator-y), another is populated with Nukalurks (Mirelurks, but they live in rivers of soda, so that’s mildly different). Most of this both dull and extremely dangerous, as you must enter sections of the park and wipe out the scores of enemies living there. While Nuka-World is raider territory, they’ve only claimed a small portion of it, and it’s up to you to annex the rest of the park. Turns out, raider factions are just like everyone else in Fallout 4: heavily armed and armored but completely unwilling to lift a finger to solve their own problems when they can just make you do it for a pittance of caps. Initially you’re just an amusement for them, as you’re forced to run a trap-filled gauntlet while being mocked over a loudspeaker (has this ever worked out well for the taunter?) but if you survive-and I’m going to assume you will-you’re reluctantly hailed as the new raider Overboss, a position of both power and subservience.
After picking up a radio signal from Nuka-World, a massive and crumbling amusement park to the east of the original map, you arrive to discover it’s been taken over by three different factions of raiders. The not-so-great news: there’s hours of fairly routine business you have to attend to first. Fallout 4’s final DLC expansion does indeed let you become a raider, great news for those of us who had always wanted to join the filthiest, most blindly violent faction in the wasteland.