T w e n t y S i d e d

The story so far: A water purifier that has no reason to exist was overloaded by a man to prevent it from falling into the hands of people trying to fix it and released radiation it shouldn't have, thus killing Colonel Autumn, who had no reason to be there. Then later we got through a village of children who fdso gah frrzlmpr blaaa huygggnl asdf;lj so we could enter vault 87 and recover a GECK, a device which would be better put to use in virtually any possible manner besides the one for which we had acquired it. Then Colonel Autumn, who shouldn't be alive, captured us with a flash grenade that shouldn't have worked and thrown by soldiers who had no way to reach us.

The true madness is that the plot is this mangled, despite the repeated railroading and plot hacks used by the writers. I can understand that a freeform or branching story can get pretty complex and possibly tangled. As someone who has run D&D games I know that no plan survives contact with the enemy. (Your players.) And I've had some gaps in my stories. But When the main plot is set in stone and the player has no power over it, there is no excuse for not simply writing something that makes sense. In most cases I'd pummel a game over things like pacing, characterization, maintaining tension and interest, and all of those other challenges that good writers must overcome. But here we're talking about basic coherence. We're talking about simply relaying a fixed set of events that don't contradict one another. For example: Don't have multiple characters come back from the dead without offering anything in the way of acknowledgment or explanation.

Still. Fallout 4, right? Who’s excited? You excited? I know I’m excited.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Since I played as a good character, I always cleaned out Paradise Falls. Because that’s what virtuous people do: They murder dozens of evil people and loot their corpses for money. While tripping on drugs. It’s how we make the world a better place.

I like how the slaves can just wander off once their owners are dead even though they have bomb-collars that oh who cares. It’s all written on drool-soaked construction paper and there’s no point in enumerating all its faults.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.