T w e n t y S i d e d
This is it. The big turning point of the game.
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Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Internet News is All Wrong
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
WHAT IS IT!?
Some actual points; Dr Li is super annoying, I went so far as to check on the Vault when she might not have plot armour so I could off her but sadly found out that she doesn’t lose the plot armour at any point. The big robot not being noticeable? I missed it too, the first time around at least.
I think, however, while it’s partially not being observant enough there is also the fact that it’s not… quite highlighted as well as it should be. I swear if this was a Valve game every single design element in the laboratory would be leading your eyes to the big honkin’ robot in the middle of it, there’d be subtle nuance with the lighting to get you looking at it and all sorts of stuff.
So a bit of developer failure too on that one, imo.
I was thinking the same thing, actually.
You don’t see the robot when you enter the area, and it looks as metallic as everything else in the base, there’s nothing it highlight it or separate it from the rest of the room, it just kinda blends in, so if you aren’t looking for it, it might as well be another of the hundreds of broken machines scattered around the big buildings of the wasteland.
It isn’t so much “metallic” as everything else, it’s just simply as brown/grey/smudge colored as everything else around it.
The best way to see it is to randomly use the terminal in front of it´s feet. It makes it speak (no one notices, of course). When hearing his deep, mechanic voice, you go “WHO THE HELL IS SPEAKING?” while looking around frenetically. Then you notice the big robot hidden in the center of the room.
Just finished watching the vid just now and I have to agree: Shamus, missing the robot was not in any way your fault, it was entirely Bethesda’s design FAIL.
As Kremlin noted above, if it were Valve, every design element in the room would have ensured you saw the robot. Not only saw, but understood it’s place in the world. You mention Valve’s observation about getting the player to look up; the point being that Valve accept this is a problem and go on to find ways to solve it.
Just in the few minutes from seeing the robot until now, this is what I came up with:
The robot should be in the center of the room, with a good amount of space between it and all four walls.
There shouldn’t be any supporting girders obscuring LOS to it from anywhere on the bottom floor.
For the sake of providing some believeable support for the robot while idle ( not that it should need any, if it’s supposed to be able to walk on its own ) it should be suspended from the shoulders only, by large clamps or cables descending from an overhead crane. The sort of rail-mounted crane used to move cargo containers.
Thinking of such a crane, the chamber could be depicted as having been originally ( pre-war ) a large comercial warehouse, hence the size and crane. It’s new purpose however takes on more of a monastic, temple like feel as befits the Brotherhood’s ( Canticle For Leibowitz ) quasi-religious view of technology.
The player should enter directly in front of the robot, from a comparitively small, low-ceilinged corridor. The contrast communicates the significance as well as size of the robot.
The floor, and basically everything in the bottom half of their view, should be dark and plain. The upper half of the room should contain more light. In fact, a nice touch continuing the warehouse-becomes-church motif would be to have small factory windows high up along the top edges of the side walls. These grubby panes don’t allow a view of the outside, but filter daylight down into the chamber a la stained glass.
The floor should be very dark and blank, sort of like the hangar floor in the death star. If as shiney as that, it would also help focus the players attention on the robot, which would be reflected on the floor in front of them.
Steam. It’s a cliche of scifi production design, but having steam vents slowly drift vapour into the room would allow the lower half of the player’s view to be further obscured by a thin layer of mist. The gentle exhalation of steam also gives the sense that the giant, though asleep, breathes with potent life soon to be unleashed.
For lighting, the back wall should be in shadow, while a spotlight suspended from the ceiling above and to the side of the player aims directly at the robot’s upper half, contrasting it against its background.
The spotlight is justified by having a worker standing on a small, fragile ( and unobtrusive ) catwalk, or even suspended in a harness at the robot’s chest, making final adjustments. This would give the player an immediate size comparison for the robot.
—–
All of this could be blocked out in low-res mapping in not much more time than it takes to type. Lighting and scale can be easily tested at that stage. Decoration comes later, and should remain minimal with the exception of the robot itself.
Bethesda failed utterly at everything that matters in terms of game development with this critical piece of environment design. I find it appalling that this game still recieved the hyperbolic praise it did.
I just wanted to say I find this post insightful and fascinating in its discussion of casual ways to draw attention in a 3d environment.
Pardon. You seem to have posted your level designer resume to my website. The address you’re looking for is:
Bethesda Softworks LLC
a ZeniMax Media company
1370 Piccard Drive, Suite 120
Rockville, MD 20850
Phone: (301) 926-8300
Fax: (301) 926-8010
Do hurry. They need your help.
No way on earth he’d get a job there after they read this. He obviously wouldn’t be able to develop games the Bethesda Way.
That was an amazing post and incredibly enjoyable to read. I wish I had something more substantive to say in response but seriously you covered everything I wished the laboratory would be and more in those paragraphs.
Now if you could only give the rest of the gameworld the same treatment and then go back in time to make Bethesda build it like that…
Forgive me, Shamus, if you already saw my comment in the last Spoiler Warning. This comment is a copy of that comment. I just don’t know if you saw it or not and I am curious how these things work. I have zero experience of running a blog-ey thing-ey myself.
Shamus, is there any way to see just the “new” comments since last visit? I like to read through the comments on some of these posts and finding the eight new ones when the count goes from 42 to 50 since my last visit can be a pain, and that's not even the worst example. Ever since this new nesting system of comments it's been a real pain to find the new ones to see if any conversation has been updated.
If the answer is no and there is no way to implement such a system of seeing new comments then I'd say keep it the way it is. The nesting is too convenient to take away for this minor issue.
RSS feed:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?feed=comments-rss2
Correc. No way to do it. (That I know about.)
If Shamus had a registration system, be it hosted on his site or through the integration with WordPress.com, it would be possible for anyone to access a list of new comments from their dashboard.
Thank you for posting this early enough today that I can conceivably watch it without cutting into work time.
No advert. We’re off to a good start here!
I’ll update this later on :P
EDIT: I really hated that part of the game, I was low on Stimpacks and the Enclave kept killing me D:
Its ridiculous how these guys are dumb,yet omniscient.No matter what you do,theyll all instantly know about it.I hate that concept so much.The worst thing about this is when someone says:”Ill send a word about you”,but then nothing happens.Is it so hard to include one npc to act as a messenger?
The worst part about the stompy robot for me was that you aren’t allowed to go sort out the enclave at “project absurdity” yourself.
I mean, by this point most PCs are going to be a one-man-army. Either that, or surely you can sneak past or something. So little choice.
That bit about Dr. Li’s schizophrenic attitude is one of the reasons I wish we could reduce the amount of voice-acting in games. It’s just so badly done, and reminds me of their problems in Oblivion when a beggar would shift from beggar-voice to noble-voice depending on what they were talking about. If you can’t do something well, you probably shouldn’t be doing it to that extent. Baldur’s Gate is the happy compromise point for me.
I’ve recently started a new game with the “FO3 Wanderers Edition” mod, and was pleasantly surprised at how much more interesting (and difficult) it makes the general game. It’s a shame that Bethesda didn’t have just a few of these ideas themselves. It’s the sort of thing that could easily have been DLC too, which would have been a much better choice than Anchorage for example.
Yeah, with Broken Steel by the time I get to see Clanky in action I’m fairly sure that in a 1-on-1 cage match I could shove the business end of my Heavy Incinerator into Clanky’s business end and turn him into a big pile of scrap. The problem is that giving the player choices would have meant that Bethesda wouldn’t be able to treat us, the players, to their AWESOME SPECTACLE OF AWESOMENESS — screw re-playability and choices, there’s a robot to see!
Fuck, with the way they like to railroad the player into seeing ‘cool things’ I’m surprised blowing up Megaton wasn’t mandatory.
Honestly, I’m fairly sure for both Oblivion and Fallout releasing community made mods as DLC would have improved the games so much more over what the actual DLC did.
Wait… blowing up Megaton isn’t mandatory?
Oooooohhhhh sshhiiiii-
Actually Clanky would own you; his eye laser does 1000 direct hit damage, plus 200 AoE damage, and fires fast enough that he has a DPS of 4000, you can use cheats to give yourself the weapon and it instagibs every enemy in the game bar none. The only weapon in the game i know of that is more powerful is the Mysterious Stranger’s Magnum, which hits for 9000 damage.
Furthermore, i’m fairly sure he’s completely immune to all forms of damage; i started plonking MIRV shots into him once as a test, he ate somewhere in the realm of two-hundred mininukes fired shotgun style (i started using cheats after i ran out and he was still standing) and it didn’t even slow him down.
He did turn hostile and start trying to facelaser me though, so it’s possible if i’d kept going he might have died eventually.
The funny thing is, you actually can invade by yourself the Jefferson Memorial. You just need to go around the huge energy walls, but you can get it without doing much. Once inside, you´ll find exactly two guys inside, and no one else.
It probably made more sense earlier in development. Originally the Enclave was going to claim Rivet City, and displace the local population, so the robot was going to be used in storming that and shooting down vertibirds.
The endgame is classic Bethesda “we made this cool shit and are so proud of it, we want to make sure every player sees it, even if that player doesn’t”. Who needs role-playing when you have giant robots, right? Explosions!
Also, Bethesda probably did have similar ideas to what’s in Fallout Wanderer’s Edition, or at least a few people there did, but unfortunately that would make the game challenging and get away from the whole INSTANT GRATIFICATION model that they follow with all their games now.
Talking about companions:
What’s up with not “recruiting” Dogmeat?
Good point.
Although with Vault 87 coming up it might make more sense to wait and recruit him after the Raven Rock Sequence.
Further speaking of companions, Can you guys actually recruit Fawkes with your Karma level?
Nope: Fawkes requires positive Karma. Ovbious Reasons’ Karma is maxed out on evil at -1000.
Star Paladin Cross; the other super-follower, also requires positive Karma, so if you’re an evil character it’s actually somewhat of a bitch getting a really awesome follower, although there’s always the intensely overpowered Dogmeat.
Charon is pretty damned powerful with that shotgun of his… basically the same damage of a combat shotgun but way more range. Give him some power armor and he just chews through everything.
He is neutral, though, so he can be used by evil and good players, being the only wonder-option for evil doers. The only evil follower is that slave girl in slavertown, and I don´t think she´s any wonder.
Actually, there’s also someone in Megaton. But for obvious reasons he is currently unobtanable in this playthrough
Charon has no Karma requirement. Clover and Jericho are evil. Neutrals are Butch and RL-3. Good is Fawkes and Star Paladin Cross. Dogmeat has no Karma requirement.
Sorry, I said “neutral” as in that it´s not necesary to be either good or bad to recruit him, not that he needs a neutral karma.
Ah, the apex of stupidity. Its as cringeworthy as ever!
Enclave eyebot was probably used as a scout, a way to warn the player entering the sewers, that the enclave is in the area (for some reason).
I dont get the general idea of eyebots, they spout propaganda all day, but what is the point of it for the Enclave if they just shoot everyone on sight anyway?
Dr. Li was intended to be scared angry and confused during the escape.
The way she actualy comes off? Yeaaaaah…
An easy way to turn attention to the giant robot would be to connect him to some sparkling poles or cables spanning across the room, Doctor Frankenstein style.
At this point in game, I was really annoyed you cant utilise your repair skill or scientific expertise to repair Liberty Prime, get some xp and maybe a reward from Brotherhood.
The point of the eyebots is to scout, as you mentioned. They’re used to collect data and keep an eye on the Wasteland without needing to maintain a human presence. It’s only after the midgame that they decide to begin their “cleansing” operation and enter into the field. It’s clear from the camps you find that they don’t shoot on sight, but rather check to see if anyone is a pure, non-mutated human. Of course, most aren’t, and so they kill off almost everyone. You can justify the Enclave shooting the player on sight because a) he’s huge and armed and b) they know what the player looks like and that he/she is (according to the plot) working against them.
But why broadcast propaganda? Why bother with Eden’s little talk show (that none of the Wastelanders, save one, seem to give a crap about) if they dont care for relations with the locals? It must be obvious that pretty much everyone outside of Enclave is mutant scum at this point.
If the Enclave lulls the people of the Wasteland into a false sense of security, it’s all the easier to waltz in and take them. Hell, convince people it’s for their own good and some will even go willingly.
Besides, floating robots are a little conspicuous; propaganda for a clear (but shadowy) entity gives them an obvious purpose to outsiders, and establishes them as generally non-threatening. The Enclave effectively controls what people know about them, and since two-way conversation with the Enclave is hard to get, it eliminates the “asking too many questions” problem. Pretending the Eyebots are operated by another organisation like the Brotherhood wouldn’t work for long.
That is way too much hassle for not enough gain. They posess enough firepower to make anyone they come across do what they want. Eyebots attack hostiles, it should be reason enough not to shoot them down.
SPOILER HEAVY POST AHEAD
It’s actually fairly simple, I think it is reasonable to assume that eyebots, like all the other Enclave robots, are more aligned to Eden enclave than the Autumn Enclave. And Eden treats this whole presidency, propaganda, rebuilding America as it once was thing rather seriously. In short I think he actually treats that propaganda as an honest effort to “capture the hearts and minds of his fellow Americans”, you do have to remember that he’s not entirely right in his processor.
That could work, but the eyebots don´t summon any vertvird to your location until after you destroy them. Which enforces the idea they are just there for propaganda.
That conversation with Star Paladin Cross is exactly the one I tried to reference when I made my “James is a jerk” rant several episodes ago. I’m very happy to see her get blown up.
Then you did not know the man!
No one did, it seems.
Cross knew. It´s evident for the way she tells you she knew him better than his own son. The fact that she doesn´t tell you why or that you can´t ask proofs it!
If she says it, it must be true. Right? The player character only lived with him for 19 years, she obviously know more.
I find the testimony of all middle-aged women that knew the man to be highly suspect. It is clear James possessed a Charisma of at least 12, as well as the Sex Appeal Trait.
That would explain a lot of things, actually. From Li´s rejoining to Project Harakirity, to how he reached Rivet City without getting killed, (he flirted with the female raiders); to how he could get into the Vault (he flirted with the, probably female, overseer)…and maybe why Karma Dog liked him so much…
It is a bit strange how that charisma is somewhat absent when he speaks with the player though. I mean he is Liam Neeson sure but he is also a condescending tosser.
But yeah his charisma score is obviously higher than the intelligence at least ^^.
James has no interest in the player sexually, so his Sex Appeal trait works against him instead.
Under Bethesda’s version of SPECIAL, charisma has no bearing on any gameplay mechanics at all.
This is Jonas Venture all over again…
One of the places where Bethesda did good quest coding: This is how an escort quest _should_ be. If you tell Li and the others to “Stay Here”, then they wait until you get too far ahead, then they move to the next checkpoint and wait there. You don’t ever have to protect them if you’re clearing the area. You could have stealthed through there fairly easily.
I checked the Garza options. You have the two speech alternatives, give him stimpacks, or kill him. If you don’t have the stimpacks, the only way to continue without killing him is to go find stimpacks and return to Li. I don’t think you can change your mind once you convince Li to leave him behind, but you can delay the decision until you find stims.
So, let me see if I have this right. Garza is in critical condition. There’s no way he’ll survive the two-minute walk to safety. Your only recourse is to spend twenty minutes scrambling around looking for medical supplies.
Also, you can have the hilarious combination that Josh ended up taking, where Doctor Li adamantly refused to try and treat him with some Buffout, but went along pretty easily with just leaving him to die. Amazing.
According to the Fallout Wiki notes on the character:
“You mean you had them on you the whole time?!”
Also interesting:
coupled with:
“You killed my mother, you bitch!”
This scene comes dangerously close to good writing with Dr. Li leaving two persons to die of cardiac trouble in the vicinity of the protagonist.
I’ve noticed this game seems to express a strong anti-drugs message, even when taking drugs will prevent death. Just say no, kids!
I wonder what happens if you don´t get any stimpack and can´t pass any speech check. Maybe you end up leaving them behind while you go search for a stimpack in the wasteland? That would certainly make a hilarious adventure.
According to the wiki, you can just kill him. I suspect this would annoy Dr. Li, but what doesn’t?
It really annoys her. That’s why whenever I play an even slightly morally ambiguous character Garza gets medicine applied straight from my shotgun, plasma rifle, sledgehammer or whatever else might be handy.
I’m gonna be the nit-picky bastard who brings up the original games, and calls bullshit on the whole Garza bit.
If he has a heart condition, Stim-Paks are the LAST thing the man needs; why? Well, in Fallout 2 you can recruit a companion, a middle aged mechanic/trader named Vic, and Vic has a heart condition. This heart condition prevents him from safely using Super Stim-Paks or too many regular Stim-Paks. If he does, because of his weak heart, he WILL DIE OF CARDIAC ARREST! Giving Garza five Stim-Paks when he’s about to have a heart attack should kill him outright!
Yes, but Fallout 3 works in Bethesda´s Utopia Universe Rules(TM). Stimpacks are magic thingies you use to heal yourself. You don´t inject them on you, you drink them, or you apply them directly to the wound.
Otherwise, It Makes No Sense.
Wasn’t that Cassidy?
I know that if you give Cassidy any Psycho, Buffout or Jet, he A SPLODE.
But then Super-Stimpaks are a bit wild… You can use one to assassinate a particular personage of note, and it deals a thousand points of damage.
“But then Super-Stimpaks are a bit wild… You can use one to assassinate a particular personage of note, and it deals a thousand points of damage.”
Super-Stims would heal, but after like 2 minutes would also do damage in return. But they only do like 9 points, so you divide the enemies health by 9 and apply that many Super-Stims rounded up.
It was Cassidy who had the heart condition. Drugs would kill him, as would super stimpaks, but using ordinary stimpaks would just make him say that he hopes they don’t hurt him, no matter how many you pumped into him. He’s also the reason why most of my male FO2 characters are called Butch.
I was thinking as I watched the video, when you see the first Enclave vertibird, is there anything that stops you pulling out a minigun and wasting it? After all, miniguns are just small anti-air guns, that’s what they’re for, and they do it pretty well(wait for them to land and disembark, you get the armour and weapons essentially for free). I assume that chicken wire fence is bulletproof, though.
You can shoot the soldiers coming out of the vertibird through the chicken wire, but it makes no difference whatsoever.
No, it’s not buletproof – I’ve successfully fired on several of the Enclave as they ran out. Never been able to destroy the vertibird, but that’s mainly because I was trying to intercept the soldiers instead.
On my playthrough, I managed to whip out my sniper rifle and peg the officer right in the head. The other soldiers didn’t even stop. That was the last time I expected reasonable out of the game.
That’s how that scene goes in pretty much all my playthroughs, sadly.
Wait, They didn’t kill the officer in the video, but he’s nowhere to be found. Shouldn’t he be with Autumn as a second in command or something?
*Facepalm* Yes, it was Cassidy not Vic. I don’t know what I was thinking. Interesting to know that regular stims don’t hurt him. I heard his line about them and assumed I couldn’t give him too many. I ended up conserving the tribal healing powders just for him. That little tid-bit should make my current playthrough a little easier.
Ah,but those are west side stimpack,and these are east side stimpacks,and therefore work completely differently.
So I made a point here before realizing somebody had beat me to it. I don’t see a way to delete this post entirely and so now all of you are stuck with a longer post than my original post explaining why my original post is no longer here. Unless Shamus simply deletes this post of course. It that case you may never be aware that it ever existed. A bit creepy, huh?
Unless someone replies to your post.Unless unless Shamus deletes both your post and the reply to your post as well.But then no one may ever know that both the post and the reply existed.Even creepier.
The part I hated the most about the “locked in place for the conversation” was that I had Malcolm Macdowell blasting in my ears at the time, talking about how great project purity was, and I couldn’t turn him off so I could hear them.
This is indeed annoying, there is another rather exposition heavy scene later where I couldn’t hear anything because that god awful “mighty mighty man” song shouted over everything. The whole thing is pretty stupid since they could’ve placed it in a conversation and these problems wouldn’t exist. Also it wouldn’t feel quite as interruptive.
Shamus it’s not your fault that you missed the robot…that room is horrible designed. The robot should be facing you as you enter the room for the first time. It should be the FIRST thing you see. and you should probably enter the room from around the robot’s waist-height as opposed to head height that you can take it all in. They never give you a single excuse to look in that robot’s direction where it isn’t completely obscured by steel girders.
What I would have done if I was the level designer is to put a guy with a welder on the scaffolding working on the robot. The shower of sparks would draw the player’s eye. Of course this will never happen in a bethesda game because it would require a new character animation as well as particle effects, neither of which they have any knowledge of.
Ha! I only just scrolled down to your post, after having laid out my own level design above. Hadn’t thought of sparks, but did suggest the ‘guy still working on big war machine thingy’ cliche. Great minds think alike etc. ;)
Had those supposed super mutant imposters killed the scientists and simply taken their outfits in a crack job to infiltrate rivet city?
Is it just me, or did anyone else have absolutely horrid fps for that video? I tried watching on more than one PC, and I never got out of the single digit FPS on either…
It’s just you.
I’m having no issues with the video. Have you tried in a different browser?
He’s not the only one. The FPS on this video is so bad I can’t even watch it. I’ve had no problems with the videos in the past, and in fact usually have less problems with viddler then youtube.
I’m assuming that they just encoded this video with higher quality settings, and it’s killing my poor old machine.
Sure, I’m replacing this machine in a couple weeks, but it’s still annoying.
Good Lord, Josh! It’s like a weird kind of reverse kleptomania — obviously there were better places to plant a live grenade in someone’s pocket than deep inside power-armour territory?
This could only end in tears…
Truth be told, I´d pay to see that done again.
You know about the little slider bar at the bottom of the video, right?
What little slid…OHHHHHH!
I take paypal!
http://oddlyspecific.com/2010/07/01/funny-signs-in-case-of/
I’m disappointed. Nowhere does it say to collect bottlecaps to use as currency.
After Broken Steel, are you planning on doing any more DLC?
Because I really, really want to see you guys go through Mothership Zeta.
While I’d like to see them utterly rip it to shreds, I feel like it’d be just another Anchorage and thus quite boring for most people.
Eh, perhaps… But I found them ripping Anchorage to shreds entertaining.
Ah well, a man can hope. And dream.
Well, by the time they’ve finished BS and do Mothership Zeta, Cuthbert will be a monster. All they need to do is take along Vengeance and a couple of gatling lasers and they can minimise the repetitive shooty bits.
As someone who has never played any Fallout(Grand Old Games F1 and F2 say they don’t work on Win 7, and my comp can’t run F3), could someone explain to me why the Enclave is considered Evil? Wanting to rule the wasteland isn’t good, but any government would basically have to be an improvement over the current situation.
The Enclave wasnt present in FO1 afaik, it really started in FO2, so as to not spoil anything you might not want spoiled,
they were a shadowy organisation which came into play late in the game, where you discovered they were behind the failing of water chip and abduction of vault 13 and god knows what else in other vaults, and found out their ultimate goal was to flood the world with “Forced Evolutionary Virus” (FEV), killing every living organism that suffered any mutations, which happened to include everything and everyone except the enclave citizens, cause they were gene purity fascists, and yes it was shoddily writtenso they really were bad guys in FO2.In FO3 they are evil because they were evil in FO2 and apparently everyone in FO3 played FO2. Within the story, they are considered evil because they crossed Dad (asking him to cooperate, I guess Dad was a bit of an Anarchist) and started shooting up the place, ultimately president Eden wanted to put FEV virus into water to make it deadly to everyone but enclave citizens, however, his second-in-command general Autumn refused to play along and split from Eden, deciding to give out normal pure water at his own discretion, which is bad, because I guess guys that dress in black scary armor cant possibly do anything good.
So there you have it. Something that doesnt make a lot of sense, and then something that hardly makes ANY sense, Enclave is funny that way.
Actually, that’s kind of disappointing, now that I think about it. Bethesda could have made a genuinely difficult ethical decision with a little more thought; If they where to abandon their Brotherhood superheros and instead make them idealistic, but incapable of perfecting Purity in a reasonable time line, and alternatively making the Enclave capable of rapidly fixing Purity, but again providing water at their discretion, it would make a genuinely difficult decision within the mechanics of the Bethesda-Fallout universe. Something similar to The Pitt’s decision, but with wider consequences.
Of course, it ends up a moot point, because in Broken Steel we still have those goddamn beggars, but now they give the excuse that the brotherhood is being selective in whom they provide “aqua pura” from their effectively infinite goddamn water supply to.
Given that the only reason we’re fighting the enclave is because they would be selective on who to give the water to, it raises the further question of why the hell are we bothering when it’s the same outcome? and why get the brotherhood involved at all, aside from their useful guns and power armor?
I agree, a moral dilemma would have been very interesting, but it would require actually good writing. God knows, we cant have our bad guys have more characterisation and motive than those of a Scooby Doo villain.
At the end of the day, Lyons Brotherhood takes over the purifier and controls the water supply, but its cool, they are the good guys.
The problem isn’t good writing the problem is that this choice would have consequences beyond the karma meter and consequences costs money.
The problem is they used monkeys. They probably left them loose on a room full of typewriters, waited them to die of starvation, and then used whatever they wrote in their rampage around the room.
The fools! When will they learn that chimps give far better results?
That and feeding them obviously.
Chimps are just monkeys with attitude. And don’t you give me any of that “apes are not monkeys” nonsense either!
Actually the cause of the waterchip failure in FO1 was a special encounter in FO2 in which you go back in time and actually break it.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_2_special_encounters#A_Guardian_Portal
Frankly I’m wondering how I remember that given I’ve never gotten that special encounter.
The Enclave are generally obsessed with ‘genetic purity’ and ‘real humans’. For instance, in Fallout 3,
they plan to use Project Purity to spread a modified version of the FEV virus, which would pretty much kill everything that’s even slightly mutated.They had a similar plan in Fallout 2, I believe.EDIT: ‘Damnit. Someone beat me to it.’
Frankly their motivation doesnt make that much sense. In Fallout 2 I just attributed it to their leaders (same people who may have caused the themonuclear apocalypse) being delusional and completely insane, general Ripper style.
In a post-apocalypse setting, delusional and completely insane strike me as especially appropriate and perfectly valid motivations for the bad guys. It’s certainly better than attempting – but failing – to have motivations that make sense. Sometimes, I wish writers went more often for the obvious solution.
The difference is, as stated before, that in Fallout 3 all the Enclave humans decide to slap Eden in the face and become traitors, so we could deduct that they didn´t want to do anything more than monopolize the water. There´s also the fact that Eden, when asked by the player of why use him/her instead of Autumn, Eden responses something along “I can´t trust him. But I can trust a man/woman who I have never seen before and who has killed dozen, or maybe more, of my men.”
well it’s not like eden is especially smart I mean if you ask him to kill himself he does. It’s not some clever comment either it’s basically stating “you should kill yourself” and he does because… you’re charismatic, I guess. This makes even less sense since
Eden is a computer and really shouldn’t be affected by Charisma.Or the Science skill check option! “Stop getting ideas above your station, you silly machine, and do what I tell you to do.”
On the Enclave=Evil, I suppose BoS may be aware of the Enclave’s previous plot and could be mistrustful, however pretty much everyone else, Li and Dad included are completely oblvious. Hell, if what Lyons said amounts to all of his knowledge (they want to destroy in the guise of brining order) than pretty much nobody but the Enclave even knows about the modified FEV.
ARGHHH! CAN’T! FIGURE! OUT! STUPID! SPOILER! TAGS!
Putting aside that charisma indeed shouldn’t play much effect here and instead it should be intelligence these options are not entirely without reason. Eden is basically following a faulty line of dogmatic reasoning resulting from operating in circumstances that he was not designed for. I’d go so far as to say that bringing these faults to light (effectively resulting in his “death”) isn’t so much stupid as it is cliché in stories dealing with hostile/faulty AIs.
Im not sure BoS people should even be aware of FEV plans. Its not like Chosen One stopped by his brotherhood pals on the way back from the oil rig to drop some exposition.
Use strike tags to cover up spoilers.
The opening cutscene of Fallout 2 is the Enclave opening a vault, a family coming out, and a man in Enclave power armour firing on them with a minigun. Your first encounter with the Enclave is a random-ish encounter where the final boss and two henchmen with miniguns are ordering a man to join them. He says he’d rather die, so the henchman oblige.
FO3 tries to emulate this demonstration of evil sometimes, with the Enclave occasionaly fighting ghouls, or having a man with a flamer incinerating ghoul bodies, but yeah, the whole genocide thing is sorted-of skipped over.
Now, I may be wearing rose-tinted goggles on this one, but I remember Enclave being gradually introduced to you. When you were playing for the first time, the intro didnt make much sense and Horrigan encounter was also pretty mysterious. You occasionally caught glimpses of men in black armour here and there, but for the most part Enclave remained an unknown power until the late game. You took a stroll through Navarro, walked around on the oil rig, chatting up people and finding out the truth about the nature of the organisation.
In FO3 Enclave is also introduced halfway through the main plot, but without much detail. The game just slaps you across the face with them expecting you to consider them the bad guys, either because they were the bad guys in FO2 or because everyone says they are the bad guys and they wear scary black armor.
The Enclave are the supposed remnants of the United States government and military-industrial complex, whose leaders kept themselves safe from the nuclear war on-board the last remaining oil rig in the world. In Fallout 2, the Enclave emerges in much the same way they do in Fallout 3, albeit more gradually. Their intent, originally, was to move to another planet after the war, and the Vaults were purposely designed with small flaws in order to test how people would respond to imperfect conditions during space travel.
The plan for space travel ended up failing, however, and so they decided instead to retake the remains of America. Finding that it was genetically impure and largely hostile, they used some samples of the old Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV) found at Mariposa Military Base. FEV was an old pre-war project whose goal was to create super soldiers, which ultimately resulted in the Super Mutants. FEV had leaked into the atmosphere of the Wasteland, so the Encalve used samples to develop a new version, which would eradicate all mutated life. This new plan ultimately failed when the Chosen One (Fallout 2 player character) destroyed the Enclave base.
I’m not sure about the complaints people have about the Enclave. While they’re a little on the silly side with the whole genetic purity thing, they are a considerable size and serve as reasonable villains with understandable motives. Black Isle did a very god job retconning them into the Fallout continuity, by explaining certain events in Fallout 1 as having been caused by the Enclave. Their in-game representation could have been better (the replica Oval Office is just silly), but at least they are plausible.
To get to Bethesda’s involvement… well, Fallout 3 needed a villain, and while the Enclave was mostly destroyed in Fallout 2, I guess Bethesda liked the idea of having insane politicians or something? And they were already part of the Fallout continuity, so why come up with a new villain? I imagine a big part of it was also that they’d figure they’d get a lot of love from old Fallout fans, since frankly, the Enclave is probably one of the only things Fallout 3 shares with the original games. I actually sort of like the setup. Maybe not the Enclave, but an old AI who wants to rebuild the country from a distance is a neat idea and could have worked a lot better if the Enclave weren’t shoehorned in.
As for the Enclave’s actions in Fallout 3… well, they do a mediocre job of showing up early on. In fact, aside from Three Dog, the Eyebots, and the easy-to-miss loyalist you find in Megaton, there’s absolutely nothing you hear about the Enclave or anything to suggest they’re a threat. Bethesda assumes that all players think Project Purity is great and noble and awesome and that everyone involved with it is a saint, so therefore they also assume that killing your dad and “making it personal” is enough motivation to make players care. And if that doesn’t do it, then the big scary-looking masks and self-important attitude are supposed to do it for you, I guess.
Of course, for anyone with even half an ounce of sense, it’s all a bunch of fucking nonsense. Bethesda assumed way too much and, for all their pretensions of open-endedness, they had absolutely no fucking forethought in letting the player come to their own conclusions and opinions about the players in the story. The Enclave are evil because Bethesda wanted them to be evil, just as James and the Brotherhood of Steel are good because the game says they are.
Bethesda utterly failed to provide genuine reasons for players to believe any of that stuff, and so as a result the story comes across as forced. The invincible NPCs, plot-locked doors and player-disabling cutscenes aren’t causes, but symptoms of a story which is desperate to work against all odds. Of all the things Bethesda did wrong with Fallout 3, this might have been the worst: they created a world and a style of gameplay that revolve around player choice, and then created a story where choice did not even enter into the writing process. Combined with Bethesda’s utter ineptitude at selling anything as genuine, Fallout 3 was destined to be a confused mess.
This.
I find it ironic that mindless copying of fallout symbols was one of the reasons Bethesda failed to copy fallout spirit.
Just three things to add:
Firt, the minor one: There´s also a terminal in Greyditch, about an Enclave escapee from Navarro. He speaks something about that, and that he crossed half teh country fleeing from them with his family, and then mentions they came to the west anyway.
Second: I´ll summon Krellen´s First Law of Fallout 3 Similarities: any resemblances this game has with the originals is there to point out that It Is Totally Fallout, man!
I wonder if we could do a list of all The Things Fallout this game has that shout out that it really really is a fallout game.
I like lists.
1) Power Armor
2) SPECIAL
3) Perks
4) Laser and plasma weapons
5) Vaults
6) The Enclave
7) The Brotherhood of Steel
8) Ghouls
9) Radscorpions
10) Mole rats
11) A wasteland
12) The Pip-boy
13) Vault Boy
14) An opening narration by Ron Perlman
15) “War… war never changes.”
16) An introduction featuring music by The Ink Spots
I’m sure there’s a few more.
Let´s expand!
17) Nuka-Cola
18) Super-Mutants
19) Deathclaws
20) Harold
21) Water issues
22) FEV
23) Robobrains
24) Sentient Super Computers
Don’t want to hog, but a couple more:
25) A city of ghouls with a death-related name
26) A ramshackle town made out of junk found early in the game
27) A walled-off, well-defended, technologically advanced settlement
28) Insane cultists
29) The Regulators (partial excuse due to holding a different role in the game world than in Fallout 1)
30) Performance-enhancing drugs with withdrawl symptoms
31) Merchant caravans
32) Skill books
This is fun!
I love you guys.
We should maybe put a rule of only one mention per person, and that person can post again until two more people have. Otherwise we´ll end up mentioning everything all by ourselves. Though that means we will quickly become very forum game-y…
33) Dogmeat.
You should arguably stick with the truly disfunctional and pointless ripoffs from original games, nothing wrong with Radscorpions, but whatever.
34) A ghoul jet chemist
35) Violence and GORE
36) Rampant slavery
37) Children
38) Raiders
39) GECK
40) Hookers
41) Random Encounters
42) Companions
Expanding on some earlier ones:
43) Stimpacks.
44) Jet.
45) ’50’s-future’ atmosphere.
46) One companion from an otherwise mindless and evil race who is, like, totally intelligent and noble!
47) A delusional ‘leader’ figure who’s a jerk.
48) Whom you can talk to death, if you want.
With regard to the delusional leader thing, something that bugged me about Fallout 1: if the super-mutants hadn’t all been sterile and thus doomed to eventual extinction when the FEV vats finally ran dry, what would actually have been wrong with the Master’s plan, other than that there’s a certain element of chance to each person surviving the process? The super-mutants that retained their intelligence, like the Lieutenant, very evidently *were* better suited to surviving and building a new civilisation in a radioactive hellscape than regular humans. It was virtually unheard of back then, of course, but there are RPGs today that actually do let you join the “bad guy” and keep playing. Of course, the endings of Fallout 1 really weren’t thought out all that well, including perhaps the most ridiculous scripting mistake in history: if you obliterate Mariposa but then go talk to the Master and agree to join him, you’re still treated to the standard game-over cutscene of you being dipped in FEV *IN MARIPOSA.* Which would be ridiculous even if you hadn’t destroyed it, because you never survive the process and the game always ends, even though you’re a non-irradiated vault dweller and thus are supposed to be virtually guaranteed to survive the process and become a super-smart super-mutant! If it weren’t for the sterility thing, what would be the downside?
A few more:
49) A vault that is home of super mutants.
50) A radiated place that everyone think visiting means certain death.
51) Bhramin.
52) Boss of an evil faction who is also a genetic purist.
53) “Different” endingsBWAHAHAHA! Sorry, I couldn´t resist myself.
Damnit, I can’t believe I forgot the most important one:
54) The colour brown.
Ok first I’d like to say that I agree with almost everything you said and while I liked Fallout 3 a bit at least I can’t say that it was anything but a failure.
That said there was one thing I do disagree with you though
“Bethesda's utter ineptitude at selling anything as genuine”
This I just can’t agree with. Have we forgotten Morrowind already? The world of Morrowind was as real as any game world that I have ever enjoyed (yes I have played FO1 and Planescape they were good but not as strong in world building IMO). They really knew how to tell the story from only the players perspective with every book in the world told from the perspective of the fictional author and everyone thinking that they were the good guys. Fo3 shows not the incompetence of Bethesda but their decay. They were once among the greatest, now they are at best decent :/
Indeed, Morrowind had interesting world and plot. Sure it still had plenty of holes (you can check Rutskarn’s Morrowind LP for a few examples), but at least they were relatively small, not the size of a jumbo jet.
The issue being that most of the people who worked on Morrowind are no longer employed at BS and haven’t been since they started working on Oblivion (hence the issues with that game and Fallout3).
In fact I remeber reading the met the devs interviews for F3 and for most it was the first game they ever worked on.
Besides Morrowind is 8 years old. BS more than proved their poor game design with their more recent “efforts”
I didn’t know that actually, I thought it was voice acting and modern graphics making player choice too expensive and the “dumbing down” for the consoles that were to blame. This actually explains a lot like how the books in Oblivion weren’t up to par (some were good but none quite like the “sermons of vivec”).
Also I’ve read most of Rutskarns LP (stopped because it became so cumbersome to navigate around the stuff I didn’t care about like dwarf fortress and because more school work) and I don’t think it shows that many plot holes. It’s a funny LP but it mostly mocks the anarchy of it all (like fighting cliff racers naked) and standard RPG tropes (like how there are no inhabitants that are not merchants). Sure there are some plot holes along the lines of “why don’t you do it yourself” or “why give covert espionage missions to new recruits” or “why give fetch quests to people who already did said espionage” but there are few that are that major. But yeah there are some head scratchers though it’s all saved by the quality of the world building.
Sorry about that I got lost in nostalgia ^^. Did the people who worked on Morrowind work on the earlier games in the series? I haven’t played those but maybe it’s worth checking out?
I have no idea what happened to most of them (I imagine most just moved on to various other developers).
I think the problem happened once Jerry Bruckhiemer became one of the major owners of the company and Todd Howard who was I think in the marketing department took over the actual development department.
You can get Arena and Daggerfall for free now from the Elder Scrolls site.
http://www.elderscrolls.com/downloads/downloads_games.htm
“Sorry about that I got lost in nostalgia ^^. Did the people who worked on Morrowind work on the earlier games in the series? I haven't played those but maybe it's worth checking out?”
Yes. Arena and Daggerfall were by the same people.
Beware though, neither Arena nor Daggerfall were quite as good as Morrowind. Morrowind was a pinnacle and you know what happens when you reach the peak?
It’s all downhill from there.
Shamus; I don’t know if you still play Fallout 3 and are still looking for a better needs mod, but I recently found this one:
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11418
It’s pretty much the best and well polished needs mod I’ve seen so far. It’s best if you combine it with something like FWE or Triage that makes healing a bit trickier.
Point in game design: Don’t give the illusion of choice (like mobility without being able to open doors) in set-pieces with hostile characters, less they think they can solve the problem like everything else in the world and destroy your preciously fragile railroad through judicious firepower application.
And also, if you must railroad, try to at least make the plot make sense and the reasons for it believable so the players don’t feel like they’re being force-fed with the story. It just leaves a bad taste in everybody’s mouth. Though I suppose some might be just glad to get rid of Dad.
Otherwise, make sure to put two roads on either side of the railroad, an make sport cars ram through them at full speed, so that the player don´t see any reason to leave the railroad. Then add a couple of train coming to the player in opposite directions, and let hilarity ensue!
Otherwise known as “obvious landmines”… of course, Josh would simply disarm them in order to shove them down somebody’s pants later on…
That´s why you use sport cars instead of mines!
Extra bonus; in Fallout 3 those same cars also detonate with a miniature mushroom cloud when they hit you!
Now I want to see what would happen if two trains collided in FO3.
Insert Michael Bay joke here.
Figure it’d be like that fun trip down memory lane in the credits where Megaton gets it.
Normally I wouldn’t call ‘good times’ for a decision path that means killing a lot of people, but the people, of *everywhere* that was available in the Capital Wasteland, went with ‘live by a leaky nuclear bomb’. So…. good times, good times.
You guys really think I wouldn’t be able to find a way to shove a sports-car in someone’s pocket and make it explode?
You can do it Josh!We believe in you!
Well, since FO3 pickpocketing is based on value, not size or weight, and nobody wants the cars in FO3, it should be easy. The hard part is getting one in your inventory.
I tought the hard part was making them not-explode in your pockets.
EDIT: Pressed the wrong “reply to this”. Duh!
For that matter, don’t make it so damn obvious at the expense of the fiction. Case in point, your water filtration system has both an airlock and a “fry the people in the control room” setting.
Why the hell is there the probability of different atmospheric pressure or composition or something in a water purifier?
The only explanation for the radiation I can think of is the purifier, when functional stores the extracted rads in huge tanks and when overloaded they get vented into the control room. Why this happens, or why the tanks are full if no water has been filtered I cannot say.
Yeah, it makes sense to have some radiation stored wherever the machine dumps it in the purification process, and even if it didnt purify anything yet, there is still all that 200 year old residue Dad could have used. Now, why he has specific “suicide radiation spike” code is a different question altogether. I think James just starts up the purifier as Autumn tells him, knowing that starting it now would result in a deadly radiation spike. Still, it was his call.
I think a bigger plot hole is why Autumn is still with the Enclave after that event, and indeed, why he even manages to get out without any negative consequences. Fallout 2 and 3 teach us that even relatively brief exposure to large amounts of radiation can cause obvious mutations like extra digits and changes to regenerative capabilities. Even if he used a Rad-X or whatever right before the incident, and it was enough to save him from death, he still would have had contracted enough rads to get a mutation of some sort, especially considering that he would have been stuck inside the chamber for at least several minutes. And, we know that the Enclave are genetic puritans. If one of theirs was even at risk of being contaminated, they would either kill that individual, or use that individual for experimentation to study the effects of radiation. The fact that Autumn isn’t just alive later in the game, but apparently uncontaminated and still in his old rank, is practically inexcusable and totally insulting to the intelligence of the players, not to mention the Fallout canon.
In short, this case study teaches us:
1) Don’t introduce rules about the universe and then break them so your story works.
2) Don’t introduce plot-critical items without providing any explanation for it.
3) Don’t have characters or organisations do things that are contrary to their established virtues and ideals, unless it is made clear that this is contrary (by say, having a character comment on it, an internal struggle regarding the decision, etc.).
4) Bethesda can’t fucking do anything right.
Autumn Got Better.
Perhaps possibility of a mutation is what drove him to object against the originaly planned FEV contamination and start his little coup. Its hard to speculate though, as everything regarding this installment of Enclave is badly written.
He does that little animation there before he falls which looks like he’s injecting something into his arm, which sort of explains it. Maybe. Though what the hell kind of serum would work to save you just from being fried by all that radiation, that’s what I’d like to know. It’s not like the RadAway cures any problems beyond the radcount. Or could an excessive amount of Rad-X really help?
And for that matter, why can’t we find any of this when we get to Raven Rock? if this stuff’s so powerful, why isn’t there crates full of it? Does Autumn keep it all on him? It’s not like there’s any on his body if you kill him at the end. What was he even planning to do then? Ask you to activate it before it explodes? He never asks you that, and the explosion would certainly have killed him.
Raven rock didn’t seem to have any type of screening facilities to detect mutation so if he had perhaps gotten an utterly benign mutation such as say, immunity to radiation (helping to explain how he could stay in there so long) then they might not have picked it up. And we know he was suspicious of Eden so he had his own motives to stay with the Enclave even if he was genetically “impure”.
Not that that’s explained or supported anywhere at all mind you. Naturally him using advanced Rad-X isn’t either.
Wouldn’t we assume that the purpose of the airlock was to prevent the “radiation” from entering the control room?
So the purifier irradiates the entire building except for the control room? Because the purifier’s pipes are separate from the control room, so it’s not like that would have had any point either aside from trapping the user in a small donut shaped room as long as the thing was active.
Regardless, even if that made sense, the airlock is open until the enclave arrive. The control room is already full of background radiation level air and it gets sealed in when the Enclave get there in order to stop you from breaking the plot.
Well, after watching this LP I got the urge to play FO1 again, only to discover that he’s developed a crush on the BSOD, and wants to see her as often as he can.
So, I was wondering, has anyone ever done, or tried to do, a full on Fallout 3 to Fallout 1 conversion mod?
I’d love to play something like that.
I doubt it, it would likely require years of work.
There is a mod inspired by some of FO1’s towns and quest hubs
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8219
Never tried it myself, but it sounds tempting
There are also a few mods adding the original weaponry, but nothing past that.
I doubt it, it would likely require years of work.
I agree, mostly because the GECK crashes like a meteorite.
Ugh. Just play Fallout, Fallout 3 only tarnishes the original. Grab yourself sfall from No Mutants Allowed, it should let you play on modern operating systems (it renders using updated versions of DirectX).
Shamus, you are now an example on TVTropes.
But yeah, they should have at least put more lights in that room.
an example of what, don’t keep us in suspense man, link us!
Failed A Spot Check.
Since he asked for a link:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FailedASpotCheck
Under “web original”.
(Warning! Link to TVTropes. Don’t blame me when you suddenly find yourself 5 hours later in time)
Yeah, I think that the whole TV tropes thing wasting away your life is just silly.
In fact, I’m going to time myself.
Start: Time – 7:14 AM
And here we go!
End: Time – 10:36 AM
I stand corrected.
Hey, did Josh just strike the 200 radiation mark for Moira just as the video ended?
He’s done that a couple times over now. Josh only really takes care of his radiation when it becomes dangerous, I think, or when he’s just binging on healing items and drugs and clicks on Rad-Away by mistake. And every time the 200-mark is hit, that quest reminder pops up.
Moira herself and her asinine (if well-rewarding) quest are long forgotten, consigned to linger in Underworld for the duration of this LP. As it should be.
Why the hate? Moira is easily the best written character in the game. Given that’s not saying much but she brings some much needed levity and she actually seems rather human, sure she gets a bit annoying at times but so does most real people ^^.
For me its that awful voice of hers. Its like she is talking to a toddler, “Awww, my snuggwy-wuggwy wasteland wonderer! Auntie Moira will give you a shiny new toy if you do something for her.”. Ugh.
Moira Brown is a character who is essentially designed, straight-up, to grief the players. She’s more or less a big “screw you” to anyone who wants to take Fallout seriously… as if the rest of the game isn’t bad enough already.
I can see your point in that she does make things less serious but personally I think that’s why she’s such a good character.
Having a character that contrasts with the overall feel (well intended feel anyway, Fo3 never felt especially grim to me but whatever) of a game can often add to that atmosphere. I’d like to use Majora’s Mask as an example here. By having characters that are on the goofy side like Tingle or the Deku king the darker parts of the story seem all the darker. The end of the game where
you see the deku butler grieve his lost sonwouldn’t be nearly as strong in a game that just had a really dark world with depressing characters.Moderation is key of course and I think everyone has their own sweet spot when it comes to the level of accepted goofiness in a serious story but I don’t think Moira was an inherently bad idea nor a screw you to the more serious crowd. The failing of the character IMO isn’t because she was a bad character it’s just that the story she is supposed to contrast never felt that dark to begin with.
Ha! That´s why I play in spanish! The voices are much less unnerving. You still get the “teenager with a voice of a 40 year old man” though.
Moira makes no sense. Anyone as airheaded as her should not have survived more than two months after turning adult (and losing child-status invincibility).
It probably would take all of ten seconds to convice her that Deathclaws just want to be hugged, or something. She runs off to hug a Deathclaw, I stay behind and loot everything in her house that’s not nailed down.
Her bodyguard leaves too?
Moira survives because she’s a ghoul. Even before you nuke Megaton. For unknown reasons she doesn’t have the typical ghoul appearance and voice, so she doesn’t realize it. That’s why she sends you out on insane research missions. She doesn’t realize they’d be fatal to most non-ghouls.
Exactly. She makes several “awe shucks, I know this won’t explode and kill everything like the last time” type comments, so you know she’s survived a few serious beyond fatal accidents.
That’s… wow, if that’s true, it dóes explain almost everything and goes a long way towards redeeming her.
Still doesn’t explain how she survived a point blank nuke, though. Ghouls are as sensitive to high-powered explosion blastwaves as anything else.
on my current play through, while searching for Rivet City, i encountered Garza at that Mutant Encampment nearby (with the hostage) attacking super mutants with his bare hands!
luckily he didn’t survive that one and wasn’t an issue in the Taft Tunnel :D
on the Eyebot front, aren’t they also used by The Enclave to scout / patrol? they have that little laser and their (quite damaging!) explosion will certainly alert nearby Enclave to your location…
Josh’s maniacal solutions to solving plot holes makes me giggle every time. This section of the game totally pissed me off even when I wasn’t totally hateful towards Fallout 3, and you guys reminded me of all the downright stupid shit they have to do just to make their story work.
Doctor Li’s “I’m not moving from this spot until he has his medicine”- If they had only added an option of “Okay, have fun standing there.”, it would have been awesome…
That’d rock. You just need to add that dialogue, and another to open up the Citadel and explain what happened to the BoS. Great mod.
There needs to be a massive dialogue addition overhaul to add in all those options, even if they weren’t fully voiced, quests like this need options like that.
True, but most of the quest structure is already there. Since you’re just adding other options without voice-acting, there’s less of the structural work to be done and more working out what needs to be said and doing the grunt work. Granted, creating dialogue in the GECK is like pulling teeth, but it’s by no means impossible.
The lazy way would be a couple of lines with Dr Li, a couple with Bael that open up the gate and maybe send some BoS down the tunnel, and one or two with Lyons, and have no-one else react differently considering you left a bunch of pacifists in the sewers to fend for themselves.
I just couldn’t help hearing “James is dead!” over and over again.. and then my mind went to Cuthbert standing around somewhere, brooding, and yelling “My parents are deeeeeeaaaad!”
I think the combination of Reginald’s facial hair and the bonnet renders brooding impossible.
Woah, woah, woah, hold the eff up! The big Dad/Eden confrontation takes place behind a transparent window. This means one of two things:
1. You can shoot through it with the Metal Blaster, but the Enclave with their matter-based plasma weapons can’t.
2. it’s fully opaque to the business frequencies of laser weapons, meaning you should cut it up and use it to supplement your armour.
Your laser weapons apparantly fire red light and the visible spectrum goes through it undistorted. I wish just once that games would create laser weapons that behaved realistically and could fire through glass, even if they refracted, reflected or split or were absorbed by glasses of certain colours. Oh man, I could just imagine solving puzzles or trickshooting by firing it through massive fibreoptics. This game needs making.
Then you could break the glass you find and attach pieces of it to other objects, or stack various colors to create desired effects. I’m liking this idea.
The glass makes slightly more sense if you assume whatever makes the lasers deadly gets reflected or absorbed. Then you could argue that letting the color get through would just be a cruel joke on the player and it’s therefore better to not do that.
Ah, but do they just fire red light, or do they also fire the infra-red and microwave stuff just beyond that? Those are what I’d imagine are the damage-dealing, business frequencies. After all, if it was the red, visible light that did the damage, stealth armour would have +100% resistance against lasers. The sheer variety you could work into laser weapons and cloaking technologies would make for an awesome game.
This is true. I mean, usually you can’t see the beam anyway so there must be something else there agitating the air particles and making them glow. They could stop it and just project a red flashlight texture like a large laser pointer to indicate that.
Stealth armour could be an interesting mechanic in such a game, like a futuristic quickdraw scenario where you have to turn it off to fire, making you vulnerable to the other guy who has to do the same. Whoever fires first will lose so you’d have to find ways to distract or otherwise cripple your opponent. That or invisible kung fu. But that’s digressing pretty far from the original intention. Maybe you could just say stealth armour was the reason you never see your character’s legs in the game?
Now I seriously want to play this. I mean, I have no idea how I’d even start if I had to make it. I could probably do it in 2D, but like it to be an FPS, perhaps using the Unreal Dev Kit or something. though it wouldn’t be impossible to program in source. Again I’d have no idea how to even start with that.
I was thinking that cloaking fields would be immune to only some laser frequencies, so that you’d have to gather intel to determine what the enemy might have. Say there are five main types of laser weapons, a cloak suit might be immune to one of them, or give small resistance to all, or something in between. Suits with high resists across the board would have larger weight and energy costs.
I like the idea of invisible kung fu, maybe they have powerdraining gloves, so that ninja squads might be used to weaken enemy armour. Laser swords might have lower energy costs, and maybe lower energy signatures. I’d assume detection would work on something like heat produced from machinery, gravity sensors, and some kind of distortion units. This would mean that, ironically, heavily and comprehensively cloaked units would stand out due their distortion fields and mass, whereas a non-cloaked HtH unit would be undetectable until it was in line-of-sight. Might be an idea to have spot-check potential split between technological scans and eyeballing/hearing, with penalties to one for too much focus on the other.
Thinking about it, this sounds perfect for an X-Com-style SRPG, researching different weapons and armours and using squads(e.g. for combining beams. This would somewhat simplify the possibilities for puzzles, but it would also make it possible to prototype with a tabletop version without losing the general feel, or at least showing the concept has legs before turning it into a 3D game. I might have to try writing one up.
Another thought: regarding quickdraw, another possibility would be to choose how much you cloak, like letting you just cloak around your centre-of-mass(say, your torso, thighs and biceps), reducing your power consumption/distortion signature, letting you fire at will and making you a harder target to hit effectively, but making you always weak to aimed shots on your limbs and weapon. Full cloaks make you always invisible and resistant to relevant weapons, at the cost of a higher pc/ds and having to do the quickdraw. Possibly an accuracy penalty too, since vision out of a cloak shouldn’t be 20/20 and full ninja can never have too many costs.
Depending on how the stealth armor actually works, it wouldn’t necessarily protect much from the lasers. For example, maybe some sensors absorb and analyze the incoming light and on the other side corresponding emitters replicate the light. Then the laser would probably just overheat the sensors and punch through the armor, and the emitters would (maybe) give off a weak pulse.
It does sound like a fun game mechanic though, so maybe the light actually gets transmitted to the other side through some optical fibers or something. That could allow laser immunity. Still, allowing some damage from some uncertain wavelengths to cloaked people is useful. Imagine when someone spots a cloaked enemy with sensors and tries to shoot him with the wrong laser, only to burn his buddy behind the enemy… Fun.
For that matter, burning out the sensors should leave an uncloaked patch of suit that you could shoot for extra damage, and would help give their location away
I was thinking more of the Star Trek-style bubble cloaks that magically bend light around them. Actually reproducing the light coming from the other side is very difficult: what light you should be seeing varies depending on what angle you’re looking at.
In the brainstorming I did overnight, I thought 5 frequencies of offensive laser, the visible spectrum, infra red and ultra violet would make for a good set of options.
Enemy positions/bases would have sensors based on mass detection(least accurate, mostly useful for detecting large, moving objects or that there’s somebody, somewhere), energy signature(higher powered cloaks and weapons use more energy and show up better, can pinpoint to a single room) and distortion field detectors(cloaks that protect against more frequencies distort more space and actually show up better, signal can be strong enough to guide fire). Besides that, they’d have their eyeballs and occasionally infra-red and UV sensors. Knowing what the enemy has would be half the battle.
The slightly less magical idea of using sensors or fibre optics to reproduce or reroute light(I’ll call this active camoflage) would have a lower energy signature and no distortion field, but they’d have less camoflage value due to the angle problems and would have the problems resisting energy weapons you mentioned. They could possibly be used by advanced teams taking out the more advanced sensors, allowing more advanced troops to come in and take the base, or to field a larger force by saving on equipment.
Another thing that could be used would be laser tripwires. Using a hex-based playing field(allows for more creative puzzles, but does unfortunately make shooting round corners dodgy), prisms that bend beams to 60 or 120 degree angles could be used to divert these tripwires around the room to allow troops through, then remove the prisms and no-ones any the wiser. Or the sensor is sensitive enough to detect the drop in power from being routed around, which leads to huge amounts of fun creating false positives with smoke and other diversions. A properly calibrated laser could also be used to make the signal continuous, but you’d have to have the right frequency.
Shit, I might have to learn how to program so I can make this. Maybe there’s a TBS game that supports crazy amounts of modding out there…
Sounds good, though I can’t wait for a 1st person, real-time version. I’m thinking the sensor version wouldn’t necessarily have a weaker camouflage, but it would lag a noticeable amount. So movement could expose you when your background changes, even when it’s somebody else running past you. Maybe it wouldn’t work at all at high speeds, like our Chinese Stealth Armor here. The enemy could also expose you by making their walls change from black to white and back, and at some optimum frequency your suit is always different color from the walls (but this trick hinders the detection of other types of cloaks).
Well, you’ve got to make the 2D version before you can sell out and make the cover-based FPS ;) I’d personally start with a 2D version just to keep puzzle logic manageable, but then my 3D visualisation skills aren’t all that great.
The thing about active camoflage is the same problem as painted camoflage: someone looking at the back of your head from a high angle needs to see it as the same colour as the floor, from a low angle, the ceiling, from level, the wall behind it. In a world with active camoflage, all of these would be different colours.
You probably don’t even need to actively change the wall colour in real time: coloured lamps would leave a man-shaped shadow behind you, unless your back had a bright enough emitter to give away your position to anyone looking at you from the back. Hell, you’d get a noticeable shimmer from a distinctly patterned wall. I just love the idea of military bases having zigzags, pinstripes and polka dots to help spot hostiles in active camoflage.
This is why stealth fields are so popular, they’re magic, we don’t have to explain anything we don’t want to.
Oh, come on! You passed up a perfectly fine plasma rifle! That’s an awesome weapon and you just passed it up. If not just to show people’s face melting.
Anyway, now that you brought companions up, I think you should pick Charon. He’s the most awesome companion, really. Give him a metal armor or power armor and some shaded lenses glasses and he is the epitome of awesome, not to mention he’s probably the one closest to Josh’s mindset.