T w e n t y S i d e d
Number of vaults ruined by Dad thus far: 2
From The Archives:
Wolfenstein II
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Could Have Been Great
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
I think you mean episode #13. Feel free to delete comment later.
On my last playthrough I collected mini-nukes. By the time I finished I had over 150, and the MIRV. I feel I should have, at that point, been able to utterly demolish that vault, but of course the glass on the simulations is nuke proof with a melting point of a billion trillion degrees or something.
I’d also finished Mothership Zeta so disintegrating that particular section of wasteland was in fact an option for me.
Of course I was also playing an infiltrator and had 100% science skill with 10 INT. Could I seriously not hack into his pod, usurp the admin controls and free them? it’s literally impossible for me to be any better at using computers than I was. And there were no verbal failsafes like the ones I had used to reprogram every robot I came across?
None of these would even have merited new dialogue.
That said, it’s still one of the more interesting and novel quests in the game.
Also: Dad didn’t even comment on you butchering everyone and saying you enjoyed it?
In fairness, you were the best you could be in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with no formal education or training. The systems here were designed by the brightest and best of the pre-war world. At the very least they would have several years of college education on you.
Ostensibly, so does your father, and look how that turned out. Besides, you do have formal education, courtesy of the vault. Just forget all the parts about how the overseer is god, and you’re fine.
Braun transformed him into a dog, probably with the same degree of intelligence and all. Which means, he just changed his appereance!
I don’t get the ending of Mothership Zeta.
Spoilers ahead:
You destroy all the power sources on the deathray so that the captain doesn’t nuke your whole planet from orbit….but at the end when you have to fight another alien mothership it’s suddenly working just fine again? How does that work?
The same way they made Autumn survive the radiation bath, I guess.
That’s something I was certainly wondering about. My only explanation is that you have the orbital death ray and the main batteries running in parallel, and you only disabled the orbital one. Of course this is never explained in-game, it could well just be a plot hole.
A plothole? In Fallout 3?! Never!
Baldurdash!
Maybe, but I’m pretty sure in the ending you see the alien mothership firing ITS main gun at you…the big dish looking one on the bottom of the ship that also hit the planet. Clearly it was aimable to fire out into space, and the little icons you see representing each ship on the mothership’s HUD shows the death ray at the bottom of the ship.
It’s possible there are some other armaments that YOUR ship is using, but the other alien ship is firing its main death ray at you.
Basically it’s a plot hole though, one which could have been extremely easily patched just by showing or talking about a second set of ship-to-ship weaponry.
So Fallout 3 is a game where you – while playing as a 10-year old – can club a woman to death with a rolling pin and blame it on someone else, ruining a marriage in the process. The alternative sollution to this quest is you convincing a woman her husband is a cross dresser.
I don’t care what anyone says, that alone makes this game awesome!
…Except the actual implementation of that, admittedly awesome, concept, was rather underwhelming. It’s slightly less interesting than watching paint dry on growing grass, but the real killer was the horrible music that looped over and over.
I don’t care what you say; it’s still awesome! ;)
Gotta side with Ray here. Any game in which all this works can’t be all bad.
Seeing this episode, paired with the comments on how you can’t ask Dad why he didn’t see that the overseer was insane, a question occurred to me –
Can you even tell Dad that the Vault 101 folks tried to kill you?
I don’t recall that option, so maybe dear old Dad doesn’t know you had to leave and really thinks you were a crazy fool to leave the place..
That’s what annoys me, this video shows two options when he asks why you leave.
“You didn’t say goodbye” and “I don’t need the vault”…
You can´t tell him. And there lays The Great Mistake of Bethesda (besides all the stupidity, I mean). You remember why the player has to flee the vault. They wanted to get to you and probably torture you until…uh…you told them something? Actually, why the heck the overseer wanted to know why dad left? Was that what he wanted?
Whatever. The whole “they wanted to kill you” still stands. It´s the reason they, the writers, thought. And then they forgot all about it. If the overseer wouldn´t have sent the guards to kill you, then you would still be in the vault, like Daddy wanted. But you can´t tell him you left because of the radroach invasion (that HE caused) or because the overseer finally went nuts. Nope, you can only say “I wanted to be with you daddy! Because you are such a good daddy! Please don´t leave me ever ever again!”.
There´s also my own personal theory in that the writers didn´t forgot about it:
Gorilla Writer: “Hey, we can´t add the player´s line of “The overseer wanted to kill me!” It makes evident that James made a mistake, and that´s impossible, for he is perfect according to our script! What can we do? Change the whole beginning would be a lot of trouble! Our pixels won´t be so shiny if we change the actual plot!”
Chimpanzee Writer: “Hey, if the player can´t say it, it never happened!”
Gorilla Writer: “Ohhh…you are so smart!”
If you surrender your weapons to the Overseer, he turns around and starts attacking you.
Amata still blames you for his death.
“You remember why the player has to flee the vault. They wanted to get to you and probably torture you until…uh…you told them something? Actually, why the heck the overseer wanted to know why dad left? Was that what he wanted?”
In one of the factories, the Red Racer one I think, you can access the Surgeon’s notes on a computer and find out that the person in charge of his mad mind control project was Almadovar (same last name as the Overseer). He took his kid into a Vault to hide and escape the reprecussions of abandoning the project, the comment was along the lines of “get in the Vault and seal the door behind him forever”. The implications being he was desperately afraid of whomever he and the Surgeon worked for, which I think was the Enclave. Or maybe the Institute.
At least that’s what I remember. I haven’t been in there this playthrough and I have a disturbing temdency to erase old saved games…
That´s actually quite a good bit of backstory. I´m surprised!
It´s a shame you must learn it from exploring a completely unrelated dungeon.
Agreed. I actually missed that one!
As for the tutorial: The best solution is to let Amata keep her gun.
That comparison was insulting to both Gorilas and Chimps.
And that doesn’t change – those are the two options you’re given every single time somebody asks you about why you left the vault. “I wanted to go find my daddy” or “to hell with that place, it was just cramping my style”. There is no dailogue option afforded to you that even alludes to the fact that the guards had been ordered to shoot you on sight.
This is because you’re a staunch mo-fo. There’s too much testosterone driven masculine pride in you. You were driven out, but the pain is too great to bear telling anyone that you were actually driven away. So you do the next best thing, and lie about it. Daddy left you, so why the hell should you confide in him. At least, that’s my take.
That opens some Unfortunate Implications if the character happens to be female.
Have you seen the face options for female characters? There’s no “low testosterone” setting, only “butch” and “crossdresser”
I suppose you can’t open his pod and pop a grenade in his pocket because he designed his pod to never open, and locked the safeties on, or something. Why you can’t use all those knives and bombs and plasma rifles in your pocket to turn out the lights, so to speak, isn’t clear, and would’ve provided aa fairly easily-implemented whole new dimension of choice to this situation – do you let Braun go on tormenting these people, do you kill the vault residents and leave Braun to exist alone until the hardware breaks down, or do you kill the people, and then put Braun out of his misery?
For all that, it’s still one of the least badly-written sequences in the game. Even though the only choice you really make in this quest is where you draw the line when it comes to doing what a crazy person tells you to do, they at least cover most of the plot holes and logical inconsistencies with some easily-available information, and give a little something to the people who have fond memories of the Dark Brotherhood quests from Oblivion.
They don´t cover anything. Unless by “covering” you mean “They don´t let you try anything else that one would try before jumping to the pod”.
The reason you can´t open the pods is simple, yes, and doesn´t need mention. Occupied pods are probably sealed, to avoid contamination, radiation, or whatever. But there´s nothing to indicate they are explosive-proof. What are they made of? Antiexplosidium? And what about hacking? “Braun was a genious!” is another thing the game throws at us in various occasions, so we could argue his systems are “unhackeable”…but the fact that the failsafe mechanism is in an unguarded house inside the simulation suggests otherwise.
Note that when I said the plot holes had been “covered” I meant “with a thin easily-disturbed sheet”. They at least make a few excuses as to why you have to make this absurdly binary choice, which is more than can be said for most of the other situations in this game. Things like the pods being indestructable is something you can sort of ignore in a game like this, when nothing else in the entire game can be visually broken, but failing to include the option of sabotaging or destroying the simulation from the outside is something that does stick out quite badly.
Also, given that he’s been living in the simulation with people who’s minds he’s free to influence as he likes for 200 years, locking the big computer panel of cybergodhood with a whimsical musical game in a house he’s conditioned the other residents to stay away from seems like a fairly understandable move. Y’know, for a psychopath.
I do agree that, in a scenario on the main plotline, revolving around a computer simulation, the fact that there is nothing you can hack feels awkward. Something like giving Braun’s pod terminal a Very Hard skill check and including an option to pull the plug seems like it would’ve been pretty simple to add, although it probably would’ve conflicted what is apparently Bethesda’s MO when it comes to Fallout 3: thinking of a cool choice for a player to make (e.g. “what if the player had to decide between letting people be tormented, but immortal, or killing them permanently”) and then finding ways to restrict the player into choosing between the options Bethesda wants them to have.
Old Lady Dithers is not Neo. You are Neo. She’s the Oracle. ( I can’t believe Bethesda didn’t include a spoon reference.)
The Pint Size Slasher is mentioned in a newspaper article on one of the loading screens. The Pint Size Slasher mask works much better on a female character.
By this point the main quest really starts to annoy me so I always use the fail safe, not because it’s the “good” option, but because it lets me get through the tedium faster. On later playthroughs I don’t even stop to talk to Betty, I just go straight to the abandoned house and play simon.
The whole thing is a reference to “I have no mouth and I must scream”, not Matrix.
It also bears some similarity to Phil Dick’s 1960s novels The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik.
So this episode´s name should have been “I have no brain and I must write a plot” to reference the writers ineptitude.
EDIT: Just read Rutskarn´s take on the alternative title below and it´s just awesome.
I wouldn’t give the writers that much credit as to go to Philip K. Dick as a source. I think it’s more like a rip-off of the Star Trek Voyager episode, The Thaw. They even have stasis/VR pods in that one.
I will say that I think Voyager’s writing was about at the same level of bad as F3, but at least in Fallout I get to shoot stuff and I liked the setting more.
This theme seems to be common, judging by the number of references.
The Vault adds the lead designer mentioning a Twilight Zone episode called “It’s a good life”, where a boy tortures a small town with his godlike powers, and forces people to think happy thoughts regardless. I have only seen the Simpsons version…
Haven’t you ever seen it?! Go out and find it on YouTube or something. It stars Billy Mumy as an evil-looking Opie-type and gives sci-fi one of the best phrases ever: “I’m going to wish you into the cornfield.”
For future reference, speed-runners use a havok physics exploit to hold a piece of armour under their feet and jump off of it to get over the wall and into the citadel and cut straight to grabbing the GECK. Dad can rot.
Awesome! I want a set of instructions to do that!
I never tried it myself, but this video shows it, starting at four minutes in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RiwiAlAQNI&feature=related
It seems you have to keep the gear underneath you and in your crosshairs, but I haven’t got FO3 installed to try it.
I prefer the good option, but the evil path through Tranquility Lane is so much funnier. I also think that it’s one of the places in the game with the most options for completing each section. (Sadly.) You can be kinda creative in killing the old woman. (Chandelier, Skate, Robot, Oven) This is the one place in the game that I saved/reloaded several times on the initial playthrough because I wanted to see each option without waiting to play the game again.
I think the “Good option” made sense. You don’t _know_ Braun is bad until you enter the simulation. You can’t, or wouldn’t, kill any of the other participants. In character — I know, I know — you don’t have a reason to target him. (I do agree that you should be able to open your father’s pod.) Once you’re inside the simulation, the only way to stop his sick experiments is to relieve him of subjects. The only part that confused me is why he doesn’t keep you in there forever. You’d think that he would try to keep his last subject in the simulation as punishment.
If you read the failsafe documentation, you learn that, once activated, the administrator loses all his “administrative powers”, except for being plot-tagged.
You have a point in there. You don´t know Braun is nuts until you get in. However, once you get out, there´s nothing to stop you from putting a mini nuke in his pod, or hacking his system to transfer administration rights, or if you are still inside, you should be able to barter your dad (and maybe the other subjects) for new slaves. Oh, wait, there IS something preventing you from doing all that: the writers.
Okay, sure. You, and everyone who talks about killing him after the fact, are absolutely right. I was simply focusing on pre-simulation. I write my comment as I watch the video and they were discussing that a bit earlier, so I thought about it more on that end of things. If you have the desire to do it, killing him, even if only through “hacking” his pod, should be possible.
And, not to minimize your points, the writers are bad and don’t give us decent choices … yadda yadda yadda. (Same stuff we’re seeing throughout the game.)
But when I’m playing a sociopath, I’m not going to, in-character, hop into a simulation I KNOW will be controlled by someone else, nice or not. I want Braun’s gig, dammit! Further, the fact that you can’t, y’know, do any RECON and see what’s going on before you jump into Griefer Street is classic railroading.
There´s a subtle hint in the monitors. You can see there that the heart beats are quite high. But there´s nothing you can do except going kamikaze into the pod.
And another thing – Shamus brought this up in the video partially:
How is the ‘good karma’ option -good- in any way?
You have got husks of people that are stuck in a perpetual virtual universe. If you die there, no biggie, you live & respawn sometime later (as you can tell by the fact that after you exit while doing the ‘evil’ way, their monitor systems by the pods show their stress levels and heart rates normal). Life in general is, for the most part, pretty good – a resort here, an idyllic ’50s American Dream’ setting there, and judging by Brown’s computer records, each settings lasts for a good few decades before the swap. So on your ‘evil’ solution, you temporarily incapacitate them, and they live and on the whole, things are as they were.
On the other hand, if you use the failsafe, then it’s ‘safeties off’, and all who die in the sim die for certain. How is that better in any way? You are not really setting them free from the evil Doctor, you are plainly killing them – especially as the people themselves in the sim do not mind living it (except old lady Dithers, that is). Not to mention that by releasing the failsafe protocol infantrymen, the residents die due to stress (again, terminals by the pods), while the pint-sized slashing thing leaves their stress levels overall normal – so the failsafe way is more traumatic for the folks.
Well, the place looks like idyllic 50s neighbourhood but keep in mind that Braun has been torturing and killing them in various ways for 200 years. Sure there is memory wipe and the whole thing is kinda dodgy but they still feel pain. The failsafe is less of a jailbreak and more of a mercy kill.
As Someone said above me, the thing is seen as a mercy kill. The real problem, for me, is not if it´s THE good option, but that it is the ONLY option, besides being a serial killer. You can´t even try to aproach the problem from other angle (I mentioned some other ways this quest could have gone with in the last episode´s comments), so you are stuck with the “Euthanize or condemn them to hell!”. It´s a shame, because such an option could have had a great emotional effect on the player if they just let you explore other options before arriving at the fatal conclusion: there´s no other way out. However, the way it is delivered right to your throat, kills any potential tension.
Ditto everything acronix wrote. +1. I wholeheartedly agree that should have been the approach, or at least available.
Directly to the point, though, I give you a fate worse than death. (Warning: TV Tropes behind that link. Proceed at your own risk. I’m now trapped, just for searching for that.) I really think being (mentally) tortured for hundreds of years would be worse than just dying. Did you ever find his log in the failsafe house? Troublesome logs there.
I always thought it was a shame that the game wont let you kill James.
The dialogue could be hilarious.
– Thanks son, I thought Id never get out of there
– Dont thank me just yet daddy, I only let you out so I could personally decorate the walls with contents of your stupid STUPID head. Now hold still will ya? That gatling laser is a bitch to aim.
What about all the teenage angst schtick that you never had a chance to release on his absent-daddy ass? Admittedly it lacks some oomph when you threaten to run away because you’ve already come all that way and survived after slaughtering everyone in your path but still.
If you tell him “Sorry dad, I´m not going with you” he points out exactly that..
If you want to be smooth about it, you can listen to BettyBraun’s whistling and play that code with the random junk objects. It’s probably slower that way, but cooler.
I liked the contrast between Tranquility Lane and the military simulation. The latter provided you with direct neural inputs, Matrix-style. This one has two TV:s, one in front and one behind you. Maybe they’re supposed to transmit the data in some hypnotic TV-trance.
Actually, if you had activated the Chinese Invasion Failsafe you would have then seen all the residents magically brought back to life and outside getting slaughtered by the Chinese.
Edit: Also someone needs to say it. The pint-sized slasher mask makes you look like you’ve decided to put a gigantic novelty condom on your head and painted a face on it.
What are you talking abo- oh my god it’s true.
Oh for the love of… Now I can’t unsee that, thanks.
I really dont get the logic in all the sci fi virtual realities.Why would you make your virtual reality be lethal by default,and then add a safety system?The only place where Ive seen it done well was in surrogates,where everyone was baffled when someone managed to kill someone for real through their surrogate.Those things were actually non lethal by default,and it took quite some effort to make the machine actually kill the user.
Indeed. It’s like having the airbag on your car by factory default being set to actually launch a gigantic spike through your chest, with perhaps somewhere and option to enable the failsafe systems so it’ll be an airbag. It’s one of those things that always annoyed me.
The only explanation for it that I actually am on board with is that the virtual reality simulation aspect is so deep that your concious mind can’t differentiate between the two, so when you die in the simulation the body reacts like it’s real because it’s so immersed in it. Where it’s more of an unintended side-effect that’s unavoidable.
What sort of nutjob would design a ‘kill the user’ feature into anything? EVER?
Please mind that is also highly improbable. Your brain can’t react to inflict damage on you that it thinks it is suffering. It can release histamines to fight damage and some other more complex stuff i don’t really know, it can somehow cause and arrhythmia but still you can’t die from stress even because when the brain feels too much pain it either releases massive doses of painkillers in the brain or it shuts down the conscious mind so you are in a sort of coma until you stop feeling the hurt.
The entire “if you die in simulation you die for real” bit is just an excuse by the writers to make the simulation matter somehow.
http://r33b.net/
(No, I’m not sure exactly HOW this is a valid counter-point but there you go.)
It´s for DRAMA! Or something.
Actually, from what I understood, it was nonlethal, and the Chinese Invasion was installed…for some reason. I don’t remember now. I think the reason they called it a failsafe was because Bethesda doesn’t know what the word means, really.
The reason is that Braun asked for it. Why? Because he is a genious, and genious do stuff that no one but they can comprehend, obviously!
I think Bethesda creates a link between smart and crazy here. See, we’re constantly told that Dad is very smart, but we’ve also dragged to light ample evidence that he suffers from some sort of self-centered, egoism driven disorder. Now Braun, we’re told, is that much smarter than Dad, as he did most of the works behind the vaults, the G.E.C.K. and the VR that the military can use to create those amazing combat simulations ;) therefore it stands for reason that his also contains that much more crazy. I don’t know about doc Li but considering she’s supposed to be not quite as smart as Dad maybe her crazy just doesn’t show so much.
Moira, the Mechanist!, Pinkerton… the examples go on, I’m sure.
You can work around this (not that I’ve ever seen it done) by saying that the simulation is not designed to be lethal. Simply, the programmers did not anticipate the amount of biological feedback that is experienced under extreme emotional stress. In other words, a literal Killer Poke.
Yeah,but then you have hings like startrek:A room for holograms,that can animate some stuff out of pure light,and others out of tangible forcefields.And every single program in startrek has bullets and phasers animated as tangible things able to kill you.Why?Why would you deliberately make things designed only to kill,able to kill the users?And its hardcoded in all the programs,not just some of them.
Also,I might buy that its possible to make your brain stop your heart,or lungs,or some other organs,but those are controlled by a completely other parts of the brain than that youd want to fool into believing the simulation is real.Meaning,youd need to access other parts of the brain,and I seriously doubt youd be able to do that by chance.
Y’know, I don’t know why I never thought of this, but how much easier do you suppose it is to make a truly realistic simulation if you aren’t just beaming signals to the brain, butare also wired to secondary systems (respiratory, glandular, musculature, digestive, etc)? Everyone has this version of VR in their heads where it’s just a big computer beaming telepathy waves in the back of your head, but then you have two things to simulate–sensory output from the outside world, as well as all the signals your body throws up in response to the input. For example, if you get hypothermia, extremities start to shut down, you start to shiver, etc.
Now, you could “simulate” all of that, tell you brain that you’re shivering, but I imagine that would be intensive and VERY much dependent on the individual. I know some people that get a backache when they shiver, while I just get all twitchy. I also never shiver, unless I am wet. If I started reacting to cold differently, that would break immersion for me.
There are a lot more subtle and varied responses to stimuli like this, and they would all need to be accurate and individually coded–and every time they’re off, they break immersion. To me, it’s much eaiser to have a climate-controlled pod where you crank down the temp than to try and code this. This means you could very well freeze someone to death, if you didn’t have a set cap on the power of the AC.
Of course, none of this fits at all with the pods in the Vault, because there would be no way to preserve bodies for 200 years if you’re subjecting them to external stimuli. But it’s at least a reasonable argument for a safety switch.
Welcome to Griefer Street! Population: You!
I really like how no apologist could POSSIBLY interpret the answers he gives as responding to “the best of his ability”. Braun seems like the type to play his game honestly (as messed up as his game is). But no, he can’t just say (even though it’d be better for him), “Your Dad’s in here with you, he’s not in a form you’ll recognize, to free him you have to keep playing”.
Your crucial mistake was not naming this episode, “I Have No Dad And I Must Scream.”
Then the sequel could be, “Now I Have My Dad And I Must Whine.”
They ought to have sub-titled the entire game ‘A Boy and his
DogDad’ with the option to share an unconventional meal with your pa.“Well, I’d certainly say she had marvelous judgment, Albert, if not particularly good taste.”
This is easily the best reference I’ve seen today.
The very first time I played through this simulation I was basically a good character, but I went along with Betty because I didn’t think I had much of a choice.
I can confirm, though, that you can go through the whole thing, kill everybody as the pint sized slasher and still go turn on the chinese invasion. It just revives everyone and then murders them again, this time permanently.
I’m not sure if it works if you actually go and talk to betty after killing everyone and already have a door opened. Probably, though. Bethesda’s scripting isn’t that sophisticated.
There are a lot of amusing ways to do the various quests betty gives you though.
Making timmy cry: Hit him with the rolling pin or kill one of his parents. There’s also a military school pamphlet in their house that you can give him.
Breaking up the Rockwell marriage: Rutskarn hit on my favorite one. Beat Martha to death with a rolling pin and blame it on Mrs. Rockwell.
Kill Mrs. Henderson: I’d never noticed the rollerskate before, but you can also rig her oven to explode, drop the chandelier on her head or program the Mister Gutsy to kill her, but Rutskarn is right…Mr. Gutsy takes FOREVER to do the job.
Anyone know if that firehydrant actually does anything? It looks like it can be activated, but I’ve never tried to use it for anything. I wonder if that’s another amusing way to kill people, or just a bit of scenery.
It can heal you, but that’s about it.
You can get hurt in there? How?
Ok, am I the only one who noticed that the voiceovers cut out a couple times in the video? Or was I just imagining it?
Alright. I’ve put up with this until now, but this is getting ridiculous. I’m not going to comment on Anchorage, as while you went on at great length about how painful it was, it was a pretty damn boring piece of DLC that simply wasn’t Fallout.
No, I’m sick of you and the Project Purity thing. First things first – purifying the river is a monumentally dumb idea. Trying to get radiation out of a river, without containing the water away from the highly irradiated soil around it is fairly pointless, and removing radiation from a river is a stupid move, since the stuff is going to mix rapidly, and you couldn’t hope to filter that effectively.
Putting aside the practical difficulties, I beg of you to stop going on that purifying water is easy, that they don’t need it, and that only a hundred idiots will use it.
Are you really suggesting that after 200 years of apocalypse, with no education, and certainly no common tools to allow for the purification of water, that the average Wastelander could purify their own water?
Having a clean water supply is one of the single most important factors in creating a thriving society. For millennia man has lived by rivers, lakes and bodies of water. It allows for drinking, hygiene and cooking. In the literal Wasteland, fresh water really would be a starting point for a new settlement, and a first step towards rebuilding.
Lastly, yes. Humanity. Again, are you really suggesting that the Wasteland has these invisible borders? Word would spread far of a source of free, clean water without a doubt. And to these people, who have nothing, setting up a new community on the basis of clean water (something which I think needs further emphasis – in Third World countries, they have no clean water. Horrible diseases are carried in tainted water, look at cholera. Or diarrhea.) would be a step towards rebuilding their world. Their people have spent 200 years like this, and I think you could probably forgive them for thinking that they could be helping humanity by helping most of the goddamn USA.
Besides – they don’t know what has happened to the rest of the world. They don’t know, for certain, that there are any other survivors on Earth. This may be all they have, and I’m sick of you snarking at people, who are meant to have lived in the bloody Wasteland, and talking about how pointless their clean water is.
Purifying water is easy when you have directed energy weapons. Plasma rifles can vaporise about eight people on one charge, so a single MFC holds enough energy to boil a few thousand litres of water. If they can make Megaton, they can make a distillery. All they need are two large vats, some piping, some sheet metal to make it airtight and some MFCs/SECs/Plasma Grenades. Boil the water in one vat(e.g. by chucking a plasma grenade in), the steam leaves all the fallout behind and travels through the piping, condensing in the second as pure water.
“Are you really suggesting that after 200 years of apocalypse, with no education, and certainly no common tools to allow for the purification of water, that the average Wastelander could purify their own water?”
Yes.
Also next time you make an argument based in a certain setting, don’t selectively ignore the facts of that setting as it’s convenient to your argument — not that Bethesda did much better when writing the plot. No education? Really now? Even ignoring the whole of the West Coast, I’m just perplexed as to how fairly average wastelanders keep robots and settlements with electricity running and yet are unable to purify any quantity of water.
Not to mention there´s an insane ammount of scientists and doctors around. Also, let´s not forget that the Brotherhood keeps knowledge of pre-war technology (and if we are to follow Fallout 1&2, then they also made and improved it), so at least they should have the education/technical basis to do so. And because Bethesda converted them into loladins with the mission of saving people, they have a reason to share their l33t pre-war knowledge.
Just a single one of these hojillion energy cells or fission batteries that float around the game could power a vapor compression distiller long enough to purify thousands of gallons of water. Surely one of the science books floating around has a basic diagrom of how one works. They’re not very complicated.
All you need in order to purify water is a FIRE for christ’s sake. Boil water, capture steam, condense it back into clean water.
I actually do think that Project Purity is an OK idea, though…purifying millions of gallons instantaneously is a HUGE deal for building a large city, which is what people need to do in order to rebuild.
That goes beyond just basic survival water which should be trivial with the technology floating around the Fallout universe…now we’re talking about city-level sanitation and water purification capable of supporting a population of millions.
200 years after nuclear bombs exploded radiation should really not be as big an issue as it is. There’s probably far less than 1% of the original radiation still remaining.
The Enclave and the Brotherhood came from the west coast, so they should be smart enough to deduct that there may be some other people somewhere else, even if they don´t know where exactly.
Project Purity’s purpose isn’t actually to purify the entire Potomac River, which is indeed a monumentally stupid idea, it’s to purify all the water in the Potomac Basin (The pool of water in front of the Jefferson Memorial). Granted, they really could’ve done a better job at getting that across, I remember it was hidden deep within a dialouge choice or a Terminal or something…
Still, that’s a stuid idea, the closest place to the Memorial is Rivet City, and there’s a firmly established Super Mutant camp between the two, so water transport would be tricky at best.
At no point did Shames & Co said purifying water is a waste of time. They ridiculed Dad’s “brilliant idea” of suplying pure water in the most ridiculous manner possible.
Why bother purifying the entire basin, when you can just install a pump that leads to a purifying plant and put up a sign saying “Get your free, clean water here!”.
Secondly Fallout isn’t based on real world science, it’s based on what people in the 50’s thought a nuclear wasteland would be like. So let’s assume purifying water is actually difficult and you need some magic technology for it.
This technology exists and works, Dad said so in his notes and it’s obvious given the fact that not only can your personal robot churn out 7 bottles of pure water a week, communities like Megaton or River City exist and are filled with people that look healthy, can work and aren’t dying of thirst or horrible diseases. Unless these people are eating rad-away and stimpacks for breakfast, they already have clean water.
So who doesn’t at this point? The raiders and super mutants? Wonderfull idea dad, not only will your stupid idea destroy the existing enviroment that has adapted to the radiation and thus likely cause food shortages, you’re giving water the wasteland equivalent of pirates and thus continue to make the wasteland a “safer” place.
I’m so proud of you dad…
Edit: this was in response to Octorok, not Dodds. I fail at Internet.
I posted that when I was pretty tired, and I didn’t mean to come off as hostile, which upon rereading I may have done.
Your points are in fact all valid. However, these communities that are getting on fine are doing so through the powerful magic of game convenience.
Running on the game’s idea that the water is so irradiated that a bath longer than 10 minutes will kill you, there is no way that these large settlements could comfortably function.
Rivet City has the equipment to purify water mechanically, and is on a river. I’d say that’s fair enough, but Megaton has no supply of water. It has a water processing plant, that could well be purifying water, but there’s no water. No caravans bring water to Megaton, and there’s no water source nearby, or that any Megaton settlers even visit. With the exception of that puddle in the middle, but that’d be drunk in a day or two.
Beyond Megaton it gets sillier. Little Lamplight, The Republic of Dave, Paradise Falls etc. They all function quite well, despite the fact that they produce no clean water of their own, and never seem to trade with Rivet City or Megaton.
Taking this kind of information at face value is of course pointless. This is a videogame – if we only had four settlements of humans (Rivet City, Megaton, The Citadel and Raven Rock) in the Wasteland, it’d be a much more dull and uninteresting place.
The same goes for your robot. Sure, the technology seems to exist, but nobody else in the game ever actually does anything about it.
It’s hard to apply logic to these kind of situations, especially since it’s not even a logical situation.
I was merely contesting Shamus’ rather continuous ridicule of your father for trying to produce clean water, and making it available to everybody. It would be much easier in a plant, but that doesn’t really allow for certain factors like : The number of people who would want water. It’d be huge. The amounts of water required, and its storage. You can’t just produce bottled water, and you can’t possibly have an efficient system to fill up different sized containers, and there’s a good chance they’d run out of bottles/buckets/barrels etc.
Your post didn’t come across as hostile to me. You’re just complaining about something that isn’t there. Again; Shamus & Co aren’t ridiculing the idea of producing clean water. They’re ridiculing the way dear dad is aproaching this.
Okay, let’s say we now have turned the entire basin into clean water. Now what? How will this benefit mankind? How will we transport this water to the people that aren’t living next to the basin? You will need a way to transport this water to the people that wisely aren’t living next to the basin that’s located next to the mall which is invested with super-mutants, talon comapany merc and raiders, all of which shoot at anyone. Why not combine that with a purifying plant that could have been build with the existing technology.
What will mankind eat now that the mirelurkers and all other fauna that has adapted to radioactivity and can no longer handle a radioactive-free enviroment is dying? Why don’t we use that magical genesis device – the GECK – and create furtile farmland in this dead wasteland instead of wasting it in a project that will only benefit a small number of people, while this project could have helped so many more.
As for where everyone gets their water right now. Isn’t it obvious? Moisture farms, located just beyond the border of where you can go in the gameworld. A blond guy delivers the water in a landspeeder. You just always barely miss him. ;)
On a more serious note. I disagree that this is game convenience, it’s more like bad setting design. The main plot is about the importance of clean water, yet at no point in the game do you feel like that this is an actual issue in the world of Fallout 3. There are the beggars outside of Megaton and River City that desperatly need pure water, but other then that I can’t come up with a single example of someone that needs water or is suffering from the effect of drinking contaminated water.
It’s true. The “We need water!” is a really good hook for a Fallout plot. It’s just that this was executed so poorly. Fallout 3 undermines its own plot at every turn. Our problem isn’t with the concept, but the execution.
Ah. Well, I’ve ended up debating entirely separate points, but I was under the impression that you were attacking Dad’s goal entirely, as well as his methods.
My apologies.
The thing about the beggars is probably the best example. I actually agree with you – these beggars need water. Why? They never die if you don’t give them any. They never seem to want food either, only clean water, which they don’t need.
The game itself explains the GECK poorly. All the player knows is that the GECK can “bring life”, and that if they use it, it will purify the water.
The game does a terrible job of getting across any laws of the GECK. How does it work? Can it be used more than once? Why go to all this trouble to acquire something to purify a limited supply of water, and how? Will the GECK remove the dirt from the water itself, or will it make Project Purity work? It’s a decidedly shoddy MacGuffin. The idea that a magical briefcase “just can” make the Wasteland an Oasis, and that these were issued to random Vaults is fairly absurd.
That´s because it´s just there as a way to say “You see? The GECK! What do you mean it´s not Fallout?”.
In fact, Bethesda crapped all over the Fallout canon. For no aparent reason, really. Instead of using that information as a base for world building, they used it to make cheap cameos and references. It´s like they thought that Fallout is anything that has a 50´s post-nuclear setting, the Brotherhood, the water chips and vaults, ignoring all the backstory. The only thing they remembered sort of right was Harold.
Actually, if you don’t give the beggars water for a long enough period of time, they do end up dying.
They’ll also die if you give them FEV-infected Aqua Pura.
I have never given one of those beggars any of my water, nor have I ever seen one die. I didn’t even know that was possible, and this is coming from someone who has sunk a number of hours into so many playthroughs of this game, you wouldn’t believe me if I disclosed the figures.
Or maybe I just never noticed them. You’ve got me all unsure now! I’m going to have to boot up one of my old characters and find one of these guys.
In any case. They still never eat or sleep, and I bet they live longer without water than should be possible.
Did something happen to your voice, Shamus? You sound different somehow…
One of you guys, I’m not sure who, hinted at it but I’m still going to point it out. This is like the third or so time that we hear the same “water of life” “your mother wanted” “it was your mother’s dream” “the miracle of clean water” reiterated. On some level I am almost willing to accept that you can actually skip, miss or bypass some of these conversations but I am rather suspicious that for some reason Bethesda thinks that repeating “your mother’s dying wish” over and over will make it more convincing and have you actually sympathise with the whole thing make it touching and stuff…
The dead mother! A character who I know only two things about: Dad tried to feel her up while she was working and she sounded like a bit of a lush after giving birth to me. “Oh.. oh hoho. Very strapping, James.” Jesus the way she says it, I know birth and what have you, but honestly this is ALL I know about the character.
I hate it when movies do this too, throw some character into the grinder and expect the audience to give them damn. I mean I saw more of my father and all I wanted to do was punch him in the shins with my powerfist.
Agreed. The writers failed miserably at this. The player´s mother is never mentioned (except in one line, back at the start). If they had given Daddy Stu a bunch of lines in which he spoke of her before he had the neurotic attack, the player would have a better base to “care” about “it was your mother wish!”. It works as a motivation for James, but not for the player. She dies at the beginning, and that´s it. She was not a person, you see. She was an engine. An engine the writers made up to give James a reason to get obsessed with the water purifier.
Oh, as a matter of fact you can drag Mom into a number of conversations. There is the one you absolutely cannot skip during the walking tutorial (it’s there so that they’re 100% sure that the player has seen that bible quote at least once). Then you can mention the topic when talking with Dad before you take the GOAT. Then doc Li, then Dad when you find him… I’m not 100% sure but I think some other people on the Project Purity team can also mention her, though they generally have nothing interesting to say so most people just ignore them.
The thing is, far as I can tell, these conversations generally go like “your mom was friendly, nice, hard working and altogether perfect” and then add something along the lines “oh, and she wanted pure water” which was apparently the single most important feature of her character. Now, all the praise is not entirely unreasonable considering they’re talking to her son, who has never seen her, and she’s dead, so this really isn’t the best time to drag any dirt into the light but I could seriously care more about Mom if she wasn’t made into a flat, one dimensional characters who can be basically described with “super good cause we say so… oh, and she wanted pure water for everyone”.
As a matter of fact the same applies to Dad, if he was only given some depth, if he was apologetic about the fact he constantly keeps abandoning people, but no, The writers just constantly try to force that he’s Good through dull repetition. In fact, Karma Dog can’t shake a stick at him, abandoning people all his life (the PP team, you, the Vault 101 dwellers to whom he was a doctor) he scolds you if you show any signs of self interest. On a related note, if you leave those people in the pods for Braun to toy with, of which Dad is perfectly aware since he was next to “Betty” through the whole thing does he say “but before we leave I have to end this monstrosity” and does something like hack around or sabotage the reactor (let’s work with Bethesda here that killing those people is a good thing)? Nope.
The players CAN figure out where a character is on the morality gauge and it makes them so much more human and convincing when we see them actually struggling with their decisions or doing some plain old human things. As an example, a few personal holotapes could have justified Dad’s decision to drop the Project so much better, something about how he had conflicts with other scientists over security and safety, something about how he actually broke his rules to save you. But no, since Dad is perfect than his decision to leave for two decades was the most logical and best one that could have been made under the circumstances, and all those other scientists who wanted to stay were dumb and selfish. The game in fact reinforces this by giving us the line of reasoning: had James not been into the vault he would not have learned about the GECK and, as such, project purity could not have been finished, and this is all just to show that “Dad did the right thing”, does he even actually apologize to Li? Or you? Or other scientists?
Ok, I’m ranting by now so I’m just going to stop.
Everything they’ve done thus far can be skipped by having you walk straight to Vault 112 and getting in the simulation. The problem is that it’s done horribly, worse than the usual writing in that there isn’t even any dialogue for it. Tranquility lane plays as though you intended to go in, you can ask Braun about your Dad, and Dad just assumes you know everything you’re meant to and everyone talks about the Project like it’s common knowledge. It also has the problem of your character looking like a complete tool for getting in the simulation in the first place.
I reckon the whole “Your Mother’s Project” thing is to try and get you to make the connection on some useful information for the endgame. Well, the vanilla endgame at least…
It´s pretty much like the Navarro Run in Fallout 2, though I think you can´t say anything like “Have you seen those flying things that took my village?” before that actually happens.
Yep, I did that. Had me totally baffled, as I’d just stumbled into Vault 112 by accident.
I’ve come to a conclusion, about Jame’s attitude regarding Project Purity is that it wasn’t actually his idea.
It was Catherine’s.
James only went along with it, at first, because he wanted to get with her, or was already with her and mostly humoring her. He saw the project as a conundrum, a problem to solve rather than something that would truly “make things better!”
Also, the various communities out in the wasteland don’t seem to be suffering too much without non-irradiated water, so it’s less a practical necessity and more an idealistic dream.
Which is why James was so willing to drop everything for 18 years.
And I think his continued work on Project Purity while in 101 was simply because the inability to get it to work on a large scale bothered him, not because he believed what his wife had. If you notice, he always refers to it as “Your mother’s dream” not “our” dream.
As to why he left 101? He found out about the G.E.C.K. and when your character turned 18, decided he didn’t need to be around to watch over you, and left to solve the Project Purity problem and, incidentally, fulfill his dead wife’s dream.
As for how careless he seems to be, I imagine that James is a bit of an “absentminded genius.” He simply didn’t consider the implications of leaving 101, either the radroaches or the Overseer’s reaction. Nor does he think about what it means to Rivet City by having Dr. Li and her entire science team drop everything they’re doing and head over to the Project. He also doesn’t consider the ramifications of sacrificing himself to temporarily keep Project Purity away from the Enclave.
Of course, Bethesda could have actually tried to write him that way, instead of a Gary Stu character.
“Of course, Bethesda could have actually tried to write him that way, instead of a Gary Stu character.”
That would have been genius. Too bad.
Not really. They tried to write an absentminded genius, Lesko.
And Lesko was an irritating idiot of a scientist who killed 5 people and didnt break a sweat.
And he is still good. Killing him results in bad karma. However, he has an advantage over Daddy Stu, and it´s that the player can confront him with a couple of lines about the kid he left alone up there and the disaster he caused (or just the first, I don´t remember correctly, I´m afraid). He then answers with the “It was for SCIENCE!” because turing giant ants that have been like this for at least 80 years (remember Fallout 2) is not going to affect the ecological balance, no sir.
Confronted to him, we have Daddy Stu, who the player can never ever confront him with his stupid decitions. It´s like the writers almost knew what they were doing, and decided to be stupid anyways.
Grrrr. If you shout into the mic, you yell at the viewers!
Some of us are wearing headphones! x.x
I had no problems with the volume and headphones in this episode.
As for purifying the basin:
The Mirelurk thing irritates me because it causes yet another reminder of how Bethesda thinks in great detail and then drops them half way:
If you are going to have actual examples, outside the purifier, of sick Mirelurks and a single BoS Paladin “mercykilling” them, either make them a finite number (not just respawn forever) or make the Paladin Essential.
I hate the fact that this single BoS guy is shooting them as they come, and eventually gets killed since they come at him every 5 minutes or so, and nobody notices! The scribe or someone else has ordered him to take care of the ‘lurks, but nobody cares if he can handle it by himself, and nobody cares if he dies (nobody retrieves the body, or replaces him, or anything).
I wonder why this top secret Enclave funded VR/social experiment is in black and white and the Army funded basic training VR/recruitment propaganda is in color.
Edit: Maybe Vault 112 was built to test the long term effects of staring at a black and white TV. After all, it’s vital information for the Enclave’s space program’s entertainment division.
I always assumed it was because Braun wanted it that way. If you watch as you go into the pod, you’re in color for just a moment and then the saturation is turned down quickly to black and white.