The Enclave

 The last, best hope

The political landscape of an openworld RPG is, ideally, a murky and muddy plane with no clear heroes or villains. These are games established on the core principal of feeding creativity and ingenuity, afterall, so it would only makes sense that the creators put effort into ensuring that players don't feel goaded into doing this certain path because these are the good guys and those are the bad guys, you want factions and circumstances that whittle down to nuance and context, where players agonize over each choice and decision with the weight of it's consequences leaning on every breath. Fallout has both flirted with this level of complexity and pulled back at least once or twice in every entry. And somehow despite itself, there's always been a clear bad guy, from the Master and his Supermutant army from Fallout 1 to the destructive wave of the deadly scorched in Fallout 76 to the Legion of Fallout New Vegas and the Institute in Fallout 4. But is there any one group that feels like the absolute apex of villainy? A single reoccurring foe who's presence hangs over much of the franchise like the long wings of a stalking hawk? (Apart from China) Well of course, and it would have to be The Enclave.

There are actually two major post apocalyptic factions in the Fallout wasteland that spawned from the remnants of the US military after the Great War, and both seem almost diametrically opposed to one another whenever they've met in the past. The Brotherhood of Steel came from grunts stationed at the Mariposa military base when the bombs went off; The Enclave were born from the top officials in the military and government who has spent the last few decades quietly turning America into a xenophobic military dictatorship prior to The End of the World. The Enclave were technically a pre-war cabal of agents ruling the heights of government from the shadows towards their own vision of doing whatever it takes to 'preserve America'. Make any parallels to real-world conspiracy theories here that you feel are appropriate, I have a feeling such conclusions are encouraged.

When the resource wars against China started to boil over to inevitable world wide devastation, The Enclave foresaw this end and put measures in place to preserve their personnel in both a custom order congressional Fallout bunker curtsey of connections in Vault-Tec, and a off-shore presidential oil rig. Of course, there are likely countless installations such as these scattered across America we've yet to learn about; for example Fallout 76 revealed that there was an entire test-Vault (51) which was under direct control of an Enclave AI, slowly whittling down all the residents through barbaric battle royale free-for-alls. When the ashes of Nuclear Winter started to clear, the Enclave uncoiled from their slumber in order to spread their talon-reach across the wasteland and 'restore America'. 

Before Fallout 4, The Enclave were acknowledged to be the most technologically superior post-war faction in the wastes. Boasting plasma weaponry, power armour and even functioning V-TOL Vertibirds to fly their troops in and out of the field in organised strikes. The Brotherhood also had their own reserve Power Armour which they lorded about in, but theirs was scavenged from Pre-War installations and thus carries the bulk and wear pre-war machinery. The Enclave invented their very own series of Advanced Power Amour after the war using their superior resources, and specifically designed their series of armours to provide superiority over anything that fledging tribes and scatterings of survived society could muster together to oppose them. And what did the Enclave do with this veneer of authority and dominance, along with their anonymity? Simply, they took to kidnapping folks.

President Dick Richardson and Vice President Daniel Bird, adopting meaningless titles from a dead office, led The Enclave to establish themselves in military bases across the West Coast. They hammered home the fact that 'America is back' by trying to cleanse the wasteland of the mutant threat which had infected it, a symptom of their despotic delusion that their standards needed to be enforced upon the wastes in order to save what was left of the world. Thus began the kidnapping and experimentation. Taking recovered samples of The Master's FEV virus and trying to understand it with human test subjects and a complete lack of basic scientific testing principals. Their goal was to create and release a culling virus in order to eliminate those susceptible to mutation, to ensure the purity of the unirradiated human genome. Real 'genocidal' energy coming from those guys, as you can tell.

Of course that was only the plan during their first appearance in the franchise. Everytime the Enclave's presence has wafted into the series is has preceded a megalomaniacal plan to commit some homicidal act 'for the good of America'. And whilst many of their goals might unintentionally align with that other band of power armoured weirdoes, the Brotherhood of Steel, they've gone to all out war against each other over those similarities. Whilst the Brotherhood want to covet technology in order to keep it out of the hands of wastelanders who would abuse it, the Enclave want that same tech in order to exert it's strength over those wastelanders. One sees themselves as scolding parents, the other as domineering parents. Different sides of the same coin, distinguished by both factions' respective perception of their own moral superiority.

At this current point in the series, the Enclave have had many of their key facilities shut down by the various heroes of the franchise, usually through explosive means. Despite the moral aligning of the player, we always end up blowing up Enclave bases, exemplifying and justifying this faction's de facto position as the one enemy of all to everyone in the series. The first Fallout game to truly let us side with the Enclave will also be the first game to have a drastically restructured main narrative dependent on the choices of the player. So we'll certainly have to be on the look out for the Fallout game with the ambition to go that route and push the 'actions have consequences' of the franchise to and beyond its current limits.

Aside from the Institute, the Enclave represents the pinnacle of technology in the wasteland, which makes them a suitably incomparable foe for any a Fallout narrative to weaponise. With Far Harbour's DLC for Fallout 4 making a slight reference to them, it's safe to say their time in the series hasn't ended just yet and we'll likely see a resurgence come Fallout 5 in the far future. My personal dream would be if we saw not just the Enclave return, but maybe hear tell of their counterpart across the world in the post-apocalyptic remains of China, because you know there just has to be one. And then we'd be able to see all the manners in which the Chinese illuminati is comparable but also fundamentally different to what the Enclave has put together, as always has been in the case in the Fallout lore for some reason. Until then, The Enclave will serve the franchise as the bogey-man in the closet always ready to pounce upon the unsuspecting wastes with their next hairbrained scheme of mutant-poisonous drinking water or weaponised Deathclaws.