Video Game / America Rising 2

America Rising 2: Legacy of the Enclave is a Game Mod for Fallout 4. Created by modder Otellino, it's released on Nexus Labs on November 5, 2023.

As the Sole Survivor, you've found yourself in a world that is now foreign to you. Everything you once loved and held dear has been taken in the blink of an eye - replaced instead by a vile and twisted wasteland. What if you had a way to bring it all back? Is it all too good to be true? And it all begins with an automated emergency signal from a secret section of Vault 111, containing some peculiar VIPs.

A remake and remaster of America Rising: A Tale of the Enclave made over the course of five years, the mod introduces the Enclave to the Commonwealth as a full-fledged faction that's seamlessly integrated into the rest of the game. With a 24 quest main storyline, multiple new characters and locales, it's ultimately up to the player whether they can help build the Enclave up, or destroy it once and for all.

The mod can be found here.

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This Game Mod contains examples of:

• Affably Evil: Genocidal plans aside General Ward comes across as someone who's earned the respect of his troops, genuinely patriotic, and could otherwise be reasoned with, given enough persuasion.
• Anti-Villain: While the Enclave is still clearly an antagonistic faction, it can become this at best, depending on the Sole Survivor's choices and especially should Colonel Whitehill take command.
• Arch-Enemy: Much as before, the Brotherhood of Steel becomes the main threat faced by the Enclave, with skirmishes with between scouting parties gradually escalating into large-scale battles as the game progresses. And unlike the other factions, Violence is the Only Option.
• Believing Their Own Lies: The Enclave at its worst can come across as this. Its most hardline members have deluded themselves into believing that they're the USA's last best hope that they are oblivious to how warped their vision for America is and see nothing wrong with genociding wastelanders and even some of their own comrades in the name of "purity".
• Broken Pedestal: While Colonel Whitehill has personal disagreements with General Ward, she nonetheless respects and admires him. It's only when he proves committed to the FEV genocide plan, however, that she decides to stage her coup. If the Sole Survivor presses her, however, she admits that it still pains her to resort to killing him.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: If Colonel Whitehill's coup succeeds, it's made clear that she still wants Dr. Kane onboard, due to both her scientific expertise and the legitimacy she bestows by being a high-ranking Enclave member.
• The Coup:
  • One of the alternate options available to neutralize the Institute as the Enclave regardless of who takes command by the end. Namely, by covertly helping a rogue division head named Dr. Armstrong eliminate the other board directors to both isolate the Father/Shaun and assume de facto control over the Institute on the Enclave's behalf.
  • With the Sole Survivor's help, Colonel Whitehill can usurp command over the Enclave by taking out General Ward and much of his supporters in the leadership.
• Death or Glory Attack: Realizing that the Enclave's becoming too powerful even for it to stop, the Brotherhood of Steel rallies and seizes control over a Pre-War military launch site called Site Gamma, with the aim of firing a warhead at the oil rig of the coast of the Commonwealth. It's made clear, however, that the Brotherhood forces there including Paladin Danse and Elder Maxson himself intend to die to the last man.
• Defector from Decadence: If you side with General Ward and foil Whitehill's coup, she goes into hiding as a rogue agent and vows to stop the Enclave. Few if any, however, join her, effectively averting an Enemy Civil War.
• Dragon-in-Chief: After the Enclave's presence in the Commonwealth is formally established, Senator Matthews is made the interim figurehead. In practice, General Ward is very much the one calling the shots.
• Elite Mooks: The average Enclave soldier is a step above the average wastelander, whether they be wearing high-quality combat gear or Hellfire Power Armor.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Ruthlessly pragmatic as Colonel Whitehill may be she draws the line at massacring innocents with FEV. She also expresses concern that the FEV could affect Enclave troops that have spent long enough in the field.
  • The Enclave's leadership considers the Institute's seemingly gratuitous use (and exploitation) of synths as being reckless at best, and a catastrophe waiting to happen at worst.
• Expy: Colonel Whitehill, from her pragmatism and more grounded worldview to her potentially seizing power from her erstwhile superiors calls to mind a female version of Colonel Autumn.
• Fallout Shelter Fail: Vault 111's "government wing", despite being designed specifically to be sturdier than the actual Vault, suffered from failing water pipes due to aftershocks from the nuclear strikes. As a result, whole sections are either inaccessible due to flooding or rusting through. The Enclave cryopods the Sole Survivor finds are the only ones left.
• Fantastic Racism: The Enclave's leadership, especially General Ward, still espouse and propagate a purist doctrine, which sees all wastelanders as no longer human in any way. It's little wonder they see no problem with committing genocide through FEV.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: General Ward and the other VIPs from Vault 111 are this, being awakened centuries after they were supposed to be extracted.
• Foil: General Ward and Colonel Whitehill are this to each other in more ways than one.
  • General Ward, similarly to the Sole Survivor, is from before the Great War and despite being out of commission for two centuries is willing to retake the wasteland by any means necessary. He thus represents the hubris and fervor of not only Pre-War America, but also the Enclave at its peak.
  • Colonel Whitehill, meanwhile, was born and raised within the Enclave. Yet not only did she come of age long after the fall of the original Oil Rig, but had survived the retreat from DC. Thus, though representing what the Enclave has become by the present, she also represents its potential future.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Enclave can go from a motley handful of awakened cryo-sleepers and scattered stragglers to the most dangerous faction in the Commonwealth.
• Going Native: Lampshaded by Colonel Whitehill. Unlike Enclave members who've either been in cryopods or have had limited interaction with the outside world, she and other soldiers out in the field for prolonged periods of time have been exposed to enough background pollutants that they're technically no longer "pure."
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Enclave forces in the Commonwealth answer to an unseen "High Command", implied to be the extant Chicago branch following the loss of Raven Rock and Adams AFB.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The entrance leading to the secret "government wing" of Vault 111 was disguised as an unfinished construction site before the Great War, which by the time you find it, has been converted into a raider camp.
• Just Think of the Potential!: Dr. Kane defends her FEV research as being too valuable to destroy, something that Colonel Whitehill begrudgingly acknowledges.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Colonel Whitehill, while still seeing herself as a dutiful and committed American patriot, is much more willing to question authority and even defy orders if it means advancing the Enclave's cause.
• Last Villain Stand: A posthumous case, but it's revealed while clearing out the oil rig of feral ghouls that the Enclave garrison originally stationed there had gone down fighting almost to the last man. The only ones left, meanwhile are ghoulified soldiers who you could either kill for "impurity" or honorably send to exile in Goodneighbor.
• Les Collaborateurs: One option for bolstering the Enclave involves encouraging wastelanders to join voluntarily. Dr. Armstrong offering himself as a willing one gives the Enclave the option to assume control over the Institute rather than killing everyone in it outright.
• A Lighter Shade of Grey: Colonel Whitehill may be ruthlessly pragmatic and an advocate for martial law, but she believes such measures necessary to ensure the long-term survival of the Enclave (and thus America's survival). She's also genuinely disgusted with the notion of killing wastelanders and even fellow Enclave soldiers like herself due to not being deemed "pure".
• Mad Scientist: Dr. Kane, a high-ranking scientist who's awakened alongside General Ward, is a seemingly sedate example of this trope, having previously been a leading figure in American chemicals research. She's also one of the major figures behind the creation of the Forced Evolutionary Virus and actively devises new strains of FEV once she gets the opportunity to do so.
• Mauve Shirt: Among the ones awakened in Vault 111's "government wing" are a couple of US military personnel meant to serve as part of General Ward's staff. One of them will even direct the Sole Survivor's attention to the Boston apartment his girlfriend was staying in back in 2077 while on route to destroy the Institute if they reject Dr. Armstrong's offer, and somberly wonders whether her end was quick.
• Mirror Character: Well, Mirror Factions. The Enclave and the Brotherhood have become this in the wake of the Brotherhood's harsher tone in the base game and the Enclave's softening in the mod. Both sides are technologically advanced pseudo-states run primarily by military personnel who rely on small squads of power-armored soldiers mobilized via Vertibirds and who are very concerned by the presence of mutants and synths. The differences are either aesthetic (religious knights vs Pre-War military) or minute (the Brotherhood is primarily concerned with synths, the Enclave is primarily concerned with mutants. Both sides agree that both are a threat to pure humans.)
• My Country, Right or Wrong:
  • General Ward is a villainous case. He sees himself as a genuine patriot and will do anything to bring America back. He's even willing to go through with FEV-induced genocide if it means doing exactly that.
  • Potentially, the Sole Survivor, whether they follow General Ward or Colonel Whitehill, just by siding with and joining the Enclave.
• Mythology Gag: The Enclave forces in the Commonwealth set up shop on an oil rig not too unlike the one off the Californian coast.
• No Campaign for the Wicked: Averted. The mod allows you to not only follow a fully-fleshed out Enclave path, with different endings depending on your actions and who takes command in the end.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Colonel Whitehill, compared to her erstwhile superiors, is much more practical and willing to make compromises, if it means advancing the Enclave's cause, saving more of her men's lives, and bringing order to the wasteland. Apart from ethical reasons, she's the only leading member to point out how going through with FEV-induced genocide will not only unite the Commonwealth (or what's left of it) around the Brotherhood, but will also kill off a sizable portion of the Enclave, given how many survivors (herself included) have been exposed to wasteland radiation to the point of being "impure".
  • General Ward, despite his own fervor and warped idealism, is shown to reasonable, at least to some extent, if only to minimize casualties and raise the odds of victory. This is coincidentally how he could be persuaded to go along with Dr. Armstrong's plans for the Institute if he stays in charge.
• Propaganda Machine: Enclave Radio can be revived, spreading patriotic propaganda across the Commonwealth. Doing so, however, will immediately draw the attention of the Brotherhood of Steel, if it hadn't already.
• Press Start to Game Over: It's possible to lock yourself out of the Enclave's questline entirely from the get-go by choosing to either shut down the Vault 111 cryopods or kill the VIPs upon waking them.
• Putting the Band Back Together: A villainous version. Many of the early quests involve the Sole Survivor helping General Ward rendezvousing with surviving Enclave remnants scattered about since the events of Fallout 3 and Broken Steel.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: A major reason why Institute director Dr. Armstrong reaches out to the Enclave, believing that his peers are wasting generations' worth of knowledge on what he considers glorified vanity projects. Should his plan succeed, the Institute's brought under Enclave oversight and put into pursing more "practical" applications.
• Shocking Defeat Legacy: The Enclave's defeat in the Capital Wasteland not only left some deep scars in Colonel Whitehill, but also laid the seeds of her simmering distrust towards her superiors' hardline "purist" doctrine as being the best solution for restoring America.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: General Ward and the other Vault 111 VIPs were meant to be extracted by an Enclave task force within a few years from the Great War at most. They never expected to awaken over two centuries after the fact, and require the Sole Survivor's help to get their bearings.
• Updated Re Release: The mod is a heavily expanded version of the original America Rising, with many of the same plot points and characters. In addition to being fully integrated into the main game itself, it also includes new endings specific to the Enclave.
• Underwater Base: The oil rig off the coast of the Commonwealth is revealed to have more extensive production facilities beneath the surface alongside other amenities, allowing the Enclave to house more personnel and generally be self-sufficient. Justified give that it's meant to be an Atlantic backup for the Poseidon Oil Rig.
• Vestigial Empire: As far as the ones in the Commonwealth are concerned, they're all that remains of the Enclave along the Atlantic Seaboard. The oil rig contingents which rendezvous with General Ward, meanwhile, are revealed to be what's left of the Enclave forces in and around the Capital Wasteland after the Lone Wanderer destroyed their mobile base crawler.
• We ARE Struggling Together: While General Ward and the Enclave generally present an image of unity, it becomes clear that there are simmering tensions beneath the surface, especially over conflicting visions of what "rebuilding America" means. You could eventually choose to side with either General Ward or Colonel Whitehill.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • General Ward seems to genuinely believe in his rhetoric of rebuilding America from the chaos left by the Great War. Even if that involves a copious amount of FEV and a lot of people in the wasteland dead.
  • Colonel Whitehill wants what's best for the Enclave and is pragmatic with both expanding and enforcing its rule in the Commonwealth. While she's open to the idea of using FEV as a more direct weapon to help minimize troop casualties, she is against committing genocide on civilians and anyone deemed "impure", including herself.