T w e n t y S i d e d

Quick housekeeping note before we progress: these posts represent what I’d call a first draft of our revised Fallout 3 storyline. I’m jotting down notes for one-off revisions that I’ll share in the final post, but I also reserve the right to retcon lavishly as we go along. Dialogue is written for general effect, not for poetry, although I’m certainly trying to approximate the correct tone and content. Might I say again, at the risk of belaboring the point: actually writing a videogame is so much harder than what I’m doing in this series.

We’re coming to the first major multi-part quest of Fallout 3, “Following in his Footsteps.” Core design purpose: allow players pursuing the main quest to rapidly uncover the central hubs, conflicts, and NPCs. Secondary purposes: provide a sense of mounting mystery by drip-feeding information and “you just missed him” teases about your father, expose player to selected sidequests that create a huge (not to say inflated) sense of player empowerment. On all accounts, the finished product rates a very qualified success.

One problem is that by this point in the game the player is invested in one question: why did our father leave the Vault? Soon we’ll learn that he actually brought us into the Vault years ago, and the contrary question becomes equally enticing: why did he go there in the first place? Why was he even permitted inside? There’s no point in speculating. You don’t have the facts to do, so you can hardly be expected to get it right. It’s perfectly well to motivate the player by promising to answer these questions later over and over again until your father is discovered and all is revealed, but surely it would be more inspiring to dole out clues and little revelations more regularly. Even as early as the first town, we should be laying groundwork that will stir the mind for a first playhrough and ring like a bell every time thereafter.

But you know what else the game doesn’t foreshadow? Nearly everything, including the central hooks that come in without ceremony midway through. By the time the Enclave shows up to seize the water purifier, the player needs to have a very clear idea why this is a bad thing on both a personal and regional level. That the early portion of the game teaches neither especially well and in fact seems disinterested in either point is one of the storyline’s more arresting failures.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Overhaulout Part 3: Time Bomb”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

Last week I made the argument that Fallout 3 could have had much more interesting and effective writing while still appealing to its desired audience. One criticism I received was that New Vegas received a lukewarm reception from some of the most ardent F3 fans—and what was New Vegas, if not Fallout 3 written more interestingly and effectively?

Well, quite a lot. Let me be as explicit as possible: in this exercise, I am not trying to write New Vegas. That was a game that didn’t appeal to F3‘s broader audience simply because it had no interest in pursuing Bethesda’s design sensibilities. Obsidian wanted a morally-ambiguous political meditation explored through a basically linear zigzag through its curated gameworld. Bethesda wanted a tightly-linear main storyline with a baroque good-versus-evil narrative that serves as a tour guide to an otherwise totally open gameworld full of little disconnected vignettes to explore. There was no reason either game had to be written well or poorly based solely on development goals. You can argue that Obsidian’s priorities attract a better class of writer, or that Bethesda settled on the approach it did for want of strong narrative designers, but I’d argue success or failure in either case is hardly baked in at the conceptual stage.

If we’re taking one Obsidian-y action item on board, it’s the idea that a story’s conflicts should all reflect its theme. Last week we settled on a major theme to explore: it is good for the powerful to give strength to the weak. This week we’re going to mix in a theme to accompany, complicate, and inform this idea: there’s no free lunch. Whenever we feel tempted to boil a conflict down to “Should you give bread to the hungry because you want to be a good guy or just jack up the prices for evil karma points,” we can complicate the choice to a greater or lesser extent by asking something like: “If you give that bread away, how will you get everyone more bread?” In an Obsidian kind of game, we’d be asking that question constantly; the intense dilemmas would be half the point. In this Bethesda-style game there’s no reason to put that much pressure on the player, who’d probably rather make a straightforward choice and get on with the story and exploration, but being able to at least point to that tension and acknowledge the existence of scarcity will go a long way towards making characters and factions more interesting.

Speaking of “making characters more interesting,” I think it’s time we had a serious talk about the main character of Fallout 3. That would be James, aka Liam Neeson.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Overhaulout Part Two: Wasted”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.