Lucy MacLean and Cooper Howard are on their way to Sin City in the season 2 trailer of Amazon’s adaptation of the Fallout series, and the big question is how, exactly, they’re going to get there. If the show follows the format of the games, chances are good we might see Deathclaws early on in the season.
Deathclaws, enormous, ochre-colored lizards, might as well be Fallout’s signature enemy. Since 1997, Deathclaws have been positioned as the toughest encounter the games have to offer. If you saw one in Fallout 1, you probably didn’t make it out alive — even if you were packing Power Armor. By the time Fallout 4 rolled around, Bethesda’s version of the post-apocalyptic dinosaur became a more common sight than it was in the earlier games. In the Commonwealth, the setting for Fallout 4, players end up fighting their first Deathclaw in the story within the first hour. Still, no one is thrilled to come across a Deathclaw — especially if you’re exploring the more irradiated parts of the map, where help and resources are scarce. In Fallout New Vegas, players typically find Deathclaws in tough quarry sections that present long, elaborate dungeons with great loot.
Technically, Obsidian’s vision of the wasteland is an open-world game where fans can pursue whatever path they’d like. The player begins in humble Goodsprings, where they might observe a direct path to the casinos of New Vegas up to the north. This is a trick, and a nasty one at that.
Seemingly everyone finds out the hard way that, despite its genre, Obsidian fully intends for the player to pursue the game in a specific order. Characters will warn players of the horrors that await them up north. The main quest prompts the player to head to Primm, a small resort town to the south of Goodsprings. It’s also known as the poor man’s version of New Vegas. You can’t blame a fan for looking at their options and scoffing at the prospect of going anywhere but the place the game is named after. I mean, it’s right there. Bright lights and everything.
But if fans try and beeline their way through the Mojave wasteland, they’ll come across two major obstacles up north. The first acts as a warning shot: there are a handful of Cazadores lying in wait before an incline. They might be small insects, but Cazadores are also some of the worst enemies the game has to offer. Many people won’t make it past this point, and if they do, they’ll probably use every bullet and Stimpak in their arsenal to do it. At this point, a sense of relief might wash over players. Maybe there’s some confusion over why, exactly, the game is so incredibly difficult this early on.
What they don’t know is that what comes next is way worse.
Should players defeat the Cazadores and climb over the hill that they protect, they’ll find themselves face to face with a small legion of monsters who will tear their faces out with a single swing. What makes this Deathclaw encounter particularly shocking is that early on in the game, the player probably has little to their name but a measly pea shooter. From experience, though, this reality isn’t enough to fully dissuade players from giving the Deathclaw encounter a try. The odds might be stacked against you, but what if you make it out alive? Forget about sunk costs. Maybe you’ll backtrack and rob the Goodsprings general store for every bobble they’ve got in stock for the fight. Maybe you just run in, Rambo-style. Whatever the case, fighting the Deathclaws north of Goodsprings is outright considered a “rite of passage” by veterans who suffered an early death.
“I’m at level 1,” one hapless player remarked online twelve years ago. “This is terrifying, I’m running away. Anyone got any ideas as to why this has happened?”
The ordeal might ruffle your feathers, but if you’re lucky, you can just reload into an early save where disaster hasn’t struck. If the ghost of Todd Howard has smited you, though, you’ll get stuck in hell instead.
“Once lost a save because I didn’t know I aggroed a Deathclaw and saved [after], only to be stuck because I kept dying without being able to escape,” one Redditor recalls of the early Deathclaw encounter. It’s during this exchange that some particularly unfortuante players discover that Deathclaws are one of the few creatures in the game who can open doors.
“It followed me into the saloon (god knows how) so I just ran and left it there.. screw goodsprings,” wrote the level one player.
Some fans do make it to the other side, if they’re sneaky enough to avoid fighting the Deathclaws directly. Most players, though, will get wrecked, learn their lesson, and come back when they’re stronger. Hilariously, the encounter is tough even when you’re sporting a decently-leveled character. It’s like Obsidian really didn’t want you to go there or something. Stubborn players like me will have a go at it more than once, convinced that this time will be different.
In retrospect, it was probably a smart design decision. Players might be frustrated that they have to wait before they can get to New Vegas, but it also builds anticipation. The Deathclaw structure also ensures that players pace their way through the game and see what else the Mojave Wasteland has to offer. Fallout shines brightest in its side-quests, when the player is exploring the areas off the beaten path from the main strip.
As for the show, the trailer for season 2 might end with a Deathclaw, but there’s a decent chance fans won’t have to wait long to see them in action. So far, the show is a love letter to the games that’s constantly brimming with references to its source material. Many of these nods are deep cuts that are direct shout-outs to the way people play the games, or particularities inherent to video game programming. Think, for example, how the show depicts the actual hacking puzzle players do on computers, or the way the snake oil salesman runs away from Lucy as if he’s possessed, just like NPCs do in the games. The show’s slapstick sense of humor and penchant for violence would lend itself well to an early Deathclaw encounter that goes south, literally.
Already, there’s reason to believe that the show might be structured similarly to the games. The trailer for season 2 features much of the New Vegas strip, but those segments largely appear to be flashbacks. Lucy and Cooper are initially shown looking out to New Vegas up north, in the distance. The next time we see the duo together in the trailer, they’re in Novac, which lies south of Goodsprings and is one of the early areas that most players explore once they’ve learned their lesson up north.
When the Deathclaw is shown in the trailer, it’s dark, and you can’t make out much. But critically, we see Lucy and Cooper run away from the Deathclaw and head toward this building:
And that, my friends, is the Goodsprings saloon. Let’s hope that Lucy and Cooper have an easier time than players do during this fight. But if they don’t, hey, that’s a perfect excuse to bring in the services of Goodsprings’ Doc Mitchell.
