Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for one of Fallout 4’s Diamond City side quests.
This is a warning to everyone who hasn’t spent significant time in Massachusetts: this article is going to seem dumb. Those who aren’t from the Greater Boston area might not realize the moral conundrum at the center of Fallout 4‘s Painting the Town quest, which you can activate in Diamond City by talking to Abbot. Basically, Painting the City tasks you with giving the Green Monster, one of the most iconic stadium features in professional sports history, a fresh coat of paint. Now most of you might think that any decision surrounding Fenway Park’s most famous feature wouldn’t really be that important, but when you grow up watching and rooting for the Red Sox, the chance to do something bad to the Green Monster feels like sacrilege.
Here’s a little bit of background for you. I’ve had no trouble walking up to my former allies, shooting them in the face and then eating their corpses, so typical video game morality doesn’t necessarily apply to a weirdo like me. After taking that into account, consider the fact that watching the 2004 Red Sox beat the Yankees in the ALCS after being down 0-3 is perhaps my fondest sports memory. Sure, 24-year-old Matt thinks that baseball isn’t entertaining enough to dedicate hours of my time to, but there’s definitely some lapsed love for the Sox. Now that that personal history with both Fallout 4 and Fenway Park is out of the way, it’s time to get to exactly what makes the decision at the heart of Painting the Town so rough for a Bostonian who loves video game chaos.
After heading over to a nearby hardware store and mixing blue and yellow paint to give the Monster a fresh coat, you have the option to take more of the unused paint with you. In my case, this meant winding up with a bit more blue paint than I needed. After going to the wall to finish off this pretty standard quest, the option to paint the Green Monster either green or blue appeared in the center of the screen. Are you kidding me? The choice might as well have been, “Stick to your roots or be a silly video game buffoon.” These are two polar opposites that tugged their hardest to get me to go in their respective directions. Yes, it’s fun to watch the Commonwealth burn even more than it has, but at the same time, how can you not respect your hometown baseball team’s sanctity?
In the end, the choice was clear: keep the wall green, which ended up being the option that garnered some extra caps. The moral of the story here is simple: maybe that stupid decision you thought would be a waste of your valuable gaming time is actually a bizarre conundrum for some other player.