Fallout4: War Never Changes Quest Walkthrough

Intro

It starts with a bathroom mirror, a bit of steam, and a face that you are about to spend the next hundred hours looking at.

Most of us rush through the introduction of Fallout 4 to get to the power armor and the base building, treating the prologue as nothing more than a glorified tutorial.

But if you actually slow down and look, really look, at the details in Sanctuary Hills on that fateful Saturday morning, you realize that this quest isn’t just about learning how to move the camera.

It is a masterclass in tragedy, designed to make you fall in love with a world that is already dead. You are walking through a graveyard that hasn’t been buried yet, sipping coffee in a kitchen that will be a pile of radioactive ash in less than twenty minutes.

The War Never Changes quest is the most critical emotional anchor in the entire franchise, and if you don’t pay attention to the silence before the siren, you will never truly understand the noise that follows.

The Mirror and the Morning Routine

The quest begins in the most mundane way possible: staring at your own reflection. This character creation screen is iconic not just for its mechanics, but for its context.

You are a suburbanite with a family, a law degree (or a military record), and a robotic butler named Codsworth who is desperately trying to keep the house clean.

As you sculpt your nose and jawline, you are listening to the ambient sounds of a pre-war America that we rarely get to see, the hum of the refrigerator, the chatter of the news anchor on the television, and the crying of your infant son, Shaun.

It is crucial to interact with everything here. Spin the mobile above the crib, check the Nuka-Cola in the fridge, and listen to the dialogue between the husband and wife. The game is aggressively selling you the American Dream specifically so it hurts more when they tear it away.

The arrival of the Vault-Tec Rep at your door is the pivot point. This nervous, trench-coated salesman is the only reason you survive.

Assigning your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats here feels like filling out tax forms, but it is actually the moment your fate is sealed on the list for Vault 111.

The Siren and The Sprint

The atmosphere shifts instantly when Codsworth calls you to the living room. The news anchor’s voice cracks, reporting nuclear detonations in New York and Pennsylvania. This is where the game mechanics shift from Sims simulator to survival horror.

The run to the vault is scripted chaos, but it is beautifully orchestrated. As you sprint down the street, you see the panic of your neighbors, people you just waved to being turned away by soldiers in T-60 Power Armor. This is your first glimpse of the military might of the Fallout universe, and it is terrifyingly ineffective against the coming storm.

The checkpoint at the top of the hill is a scene of pure desperation. You are waived through because of that paperwork you filled out five minutes ago, while others are held back at gunpoint. The moment you step onto the elevator platform and the bomb drops over Boston is perhaps the most cinematic visual in the series.

The shockwave races toward you, the elevator gears grind, and you descend into the earth just milliseconds before the fire consumes the world you just built.

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The Big Deep Freeze

Once inside Vault 111, the tone shifts from chaotic to sterile and eerie. You are stripped of your pre-war clothes and handed a blue-and-yellow jumpsuit, the uniform of the franchise.

The Vault-Tec staff are unsettlingly calm, guiding you into “decontamination pods” that any veteran player knows are actually cryo-stasis chambers. This is the part of the quest where the narrative plays its cruelest trick.

You are skipping time. You enter the pod, the ice takes over, and you drift into a suspended animation. The “quest” technically continues while you are frozen.

You are briefly woken up some unknown amount of time later to witness a mercenary (Kellogg) and Institute scientists opening your spouse’s pod. You are forced to watch, helpless and trapped behind glass, as they kidnap Shaun and murder your partner. This specific scene is the fuel for the entire main plot.

It transforms the Sole Survivor from a confused victim into a vengeful parent. You drift back into sleep, the trauma locked in with you.

Awakening and the Escape

When you wake up for the second time, the vault is silent. The staff are dead, skeletons litter the floor, and the only living things are giant, mutated Radroaches.

This is your combat tutorial, but it’s also an environmental storytelling showcase. As you fight your way out with a baton and eventually the iconic 10mm Pistol, you should read the terminals.

They reveal a horrific story of the Vault staff realizing they were trapped, the supplies running out, and a mutiny that led to everyone’s death.

You pick up the Pip-Boy 3000 Mark IV from a skeleton near the exit, a grim inheritance and use it to plug into the door controls. The sound of the massive gear-shaped door rolling open and the hiss of depressurization signal the end of the quest. As you ride the elevator up, the blinding white light of the surface fades into the grey, dead landscape of the Commonwealth.

You step off the platform, and the quest “War Never Changes” completes, leaving you alone in a world that has changed forever, armed with nothing but a pistol and a promise to find your son.