T w e n t y S i d e d
Yet another instance of this open world game oppressing you with its tyrannical railroad plot.
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Usually we feign annoyance for comic effect. This time I think the annoyance might have been a little bit genuine in a couple of places. Whoopsie.
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Trashing the Heap
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
Wow, that’s really weird seeing that big blue bar under the video with no white on it. creepy.
You were RIGHT AT Little Lamplight and you DIDN’T take child at heart?
They should have re-named that perk, “Skip Little Lamplight”.
That’s pretty much all it’s good for. The only other uses for it I found were with the little girl in Megaton, who’d hint that Creel had safe in their house, and when you first talk to Brian Wilkes you don’t have to listen to him jabber and whine as long.
It is thus pretty much useless, and yet I take it every time.
Skipping Little Lamplight is priceless.
Ever been to oasis? You can use that perk to get a free item that permanently raises your speech by ten. Well you could do the same thing with a hard speech check but still…
Really if there was ever need of modding. Removing kids’ plot armor is the thing everyone must get to play fallout 3 without flipping out and frothing at the mouth.
Kids should never get plot armor like this. Much less have them be THE INDESTRUCTIBLE DOOR in your way as well AND be annoying.
It’s like they had a meeting at Bathesda and decided to make plot armor kids this much annoying that people would be so outraged they’d demand kids never be given plot armor again.
You can make it to the door of Vault 87, but the only ways I know are by cheating or _lots_ of RadAway.
The Yao Guai tunnels are near Vault 87 to the south. You’ll find a surplus of them in that area. And the flying Yao Guai is reproducible. Wait for one to jump at you, VATS headshot, and it happens fairly often. It’s something about how the physics engine interprets what to do with the pouncing rag doll.
“If you fix those problems, oh and Dad’s death, those three problems… If you fix those _four_ problems…”
Amongst our chief problems are such elements as Dad’s death … I’ll just come in again.
Ooh. I hope we see Cuftbert in the head slaver’s suit. (I forget his name since I only ever see him once or twice a game.)
Eulogy Jones.
Even if you do make it to the door, it’s [INACCESSIBLE]
The RadAway thing is perfectly achievable, especially if you hotkey it. You can even hotkey armour, which is great, because it allows you to sneak in the buff/stealth suit and then power armour up instantly when the fighting starts.
I can’t imagine that we won’t see Cuthbert wearing Eulogy’s exploded pants.
I knew that it was inaccessible. I didn’t know you could do the crazy things with hotkeys. Of course, I played on XBOX, so I’ve missed all the fun of the PC version. (Hotkeys, Mods, etc.)
Funny. When Shamus was saying, “If they fix those two problems…if the fix those _three_ problems…” I had the feeling Shamus was channeling his inner Monty Python.
What does make 87 so radioactive anyway?I mean youve blown megaton recently,and when youve walked through there,you didnt get nearly as irradiated as you get at 87.
They didn’t actually go through Megaton though, they were at the former entrance.
They were 20 meters away from the epicentre of a recent nuclear explosion,and they got about 10 rads/second max.
And lets not forget that moira survived a direct explosion as well.
What can be said? That plot armor is strong stuff! It even protects those annoying little bastards in Lamplight from rockets to the face.
I wonder,is there any game(or any book,movie,whatever)out there that has the actual item called plot armour?
I suspect kingdom of loathing to have one,but am not sure.
Probably took an enhanced radiation warhead to the door like The Glow.
Except you can go into the Glow and not die instantly, if you try and walk to the entrance of 87 without rad-x you die pretty damn fast (about as fast as when you push the purifier button in vanilla fallout 3).
And how would the very center of the vault, at the heart of a cave system be hit by a bomb, but the rest left un-irradiated?
EDIT: Err, this is supposed to be a response to Valaqil’s post farther down. Oops.
I bet it was the little lamplighters.
For Bethesda, Mutation = Radiation. It’s the FEV and suite of materials that creates the Vault 87 Super Mutants that causes the lethal radiation outside Vault 87.
It’s just incredibly poorly explained.
Reason number one is the obvious one: It’s a quest limitation. They want you to go in the back way, through LL, so you must. What’s a Fallout-esque limitation? Radiation. So they chose that.
Reason two is the game reasoning: The Vault 87 Overseer mentions, on one of the terminals, that Vault 87 was hit directly with a nuclear weapon.
Yeah,I bet it was tzar bomba that got dropped on 87,because the one at megaton surely doesnt irradiate the area that much.And really,it couldve easily been avoided if the bomb at megaton was made stronger,so that when you enter the ruins it acts like 87 as well.
I just assumed that it was hit with several nukes. Like twenty. At once.
“Sir, where do you want these bunker busters aimed, the top military strategic command center below the Pentagon with their rumored super robot weapon?”
“No… here. All of them.”
“One vault, but sir-”
“I lost my girlfriend to a ballplayer numbered 87. Now he WILL PAY!”
What, it makes sense as anything.
It actually makes sense for 87 to have been the target of a really high-powered groundburst, since it’s a FEV testing ground. The Glow got hit in the same way, although with a high-end regular groundburst instead of an extra-radioactive one, because it was the place where FEV was invented. Also, The Glow can easily kill someone in heavy armor chugging rad-away in only slightly longer than it takes to go underground and leave. Admittedly, because of the time difference, 87 must have been hit with a more radioactive one.
I’ve never not taken Child at Heart. I had no idea there was even a quest to go to paradise falls and rescue missing kids.
That is an awesome perk because you get the skip all the annoying dialog with most of the kids in the game.
It’s wierd that if you use child at heart none of the kids in the caves EVER mention that there are kids that got kidnapped by slavers. Even though my super good character would have felt compelled to go rescue them.
They wouldn’t have railroaded you into doing it if they thought anyone would want to do it.
I never knew that there were any quests to save people from the slavers, because I’ve never not just started killing the slavers on sight. Half the time I don’t even go through the dailogue when I meet the guy with the Mesmetron, I just see him and start shooting.
Is it wrong if I downloaded that mod that lets you kill children just to fire my Fat Man into Little Lamplight while laughing maniacally?
No.
It’s sane.
Don´t fall on it! That´s Bethesda´s secret plan for world domination: to make us hate children! However, they are so bad at everything that their secret plan sucks too.
I’m pretty sure you could argue it as justifiable homicide.
I don’t object to Bethesda giving children plot-armor. It’s a reasonable move.
MAKING DOORS THAT ARE MADE OUT OF PLOT-ARMORED CHILDREN IS.
My personal favorite moment will be in the next episode, probably. When I first got to the door into murder pass, Princess had a clipping error. She actually *WAS THE DOOR*
Then I had to go track down Maccreedy. I started punching him on the way to the door, he fled in terror whining about it but still pulled the switch for me. One of the few times I deviated from my “Lawful Stupid” alignment during that playthrough.
The worst part for me was that the lever is RIGHT THERE, but you aren’t allowed to use it. You have to get one of the children to pull the lever…
Everything about it is designed to grief the player, and in particular I think the intention was to piss off those who enjoyed Fallouts 1+2.
Yep. UNkillable cildren can work, but not of you make them plot-vital extortionist NPCs.
I think the fact that so many people hate Little Lamplight is fairly telling. It’s either the worst designed adventure game town ever, or the best — if, you know, your objective was to grief your own players.
I simply reloaded and retried the (30-odd %) speech check, over and over, until I finally got it. No way am I going to bossed around by a fat kid with a stupid hat.
I wish there was a way to solve this quest via evil means. Like, telling the slavers where´s that annoying town of children. But knowing Bethesda, I bet that once you got back there, you would find all the slavers dead in front of the door, and McAnnoying would still asking you about rescuing those kids.
While it’s not a solution to the quest, there is an unmarked quest at Paradise Falls to lure one of the children out of Little Lamplight and give her over to a slaver. So, at least they let you get a little bit of revenge.
“The Kid-Kidnapper.” Child at Heart makes it easier, and earns the Boogyman’s Hood as a reward.
Sadly, you’re kidnapping one of the only kids in there that isn’t incredibly annoying.
…which proabably makes it one of the only kids a slaver – or anyone really – would have any use for.
It makes you think that they only used patient saints who love children as playtesters…
… or no playtesters at all!
The bastards would make Ghandi consider the child killer perk.
“Whoa! Are you like… some kind of crazy person?”
Indeed!…
Best way to bookend an episode of Spoiler Warning ever, especially given his behavior just a few minutes before.
Randy is really, really bad at building his character. That is all.
95 points in sneak that he NEVER USES.
80 points in Melee, and he point-blanks enemies with energy weapons.
19 episodes in, and he still calls himself Josh.
Josh, that is.
I’ve always been bad with names. :(
But seriously, that’s what, like, ten perks into Intensive Training, and there are far more useful perks like Sniper, Commando and so on to be had? This game has an abundance of skill points and SPECIAL can be easily maxed out once you hit a high level and get Almost Perfect, plus the Bobbleheads. I guess as someone who has played Fallout 3 to death, it’s annoying to see someone making what I consider to be bad decisions.
Remember that we’re not going all the way to 30. We’re plowing through the game, not leveling up and then taking on the main quest like most people do. Taking stuff that pays off later won’t, in our case.
“Remember that we're not going all the way to 30. We're plowing through the game, not leveling up and then taking on the main quest like most people do. Taking stuff that pays off later won't, in our case.”
No, but actually playing to the strenghts of the character built and not complianing about the game when the guy playing is actually at fault…
I present “Complaining about the Gauss Rifle when the Energy Weapon skill was below 30” into evidence as People’s 1.
Also, while I wince every time he ignores Commando, he has made it clear that he wants as little to do with VATS as possible. Higher accuracy ratings for rifles doesn’t interest him.
I’m not really arguing his build so much as his playstyle that doesn’t support his build. He’s just making things harder than himself, although that may be on purpose for entertainment’s sake. Nothing like watching Josh pop open his inventory and eat an entire buffet in one sitting.
Actually, if I had to guess, I’d say Josh doesn’t have any real ‘strategy’ in leveling up, in the classical “character build” sense. The guys are really just plowing through the game. While I am sure there are things Josh could do to make his life easier, that is not really the point.
Besides, even if things are more difficult for Josh than they could be, its also quite entertaining to listen to him rant as he bulldozes his way along. So more difficult is more fun to listen to. :)
Best ending yet on this – a kid saying to Josh: “Whoa! Are you like… some kind of crazy person?”
Edit: Tizzy beat me to the punch.
Grr, invulnerable wooden doors.
Also I guess I’ll just throw in a comment and say that Paradise Falls is just one more nail in the coffin. I just can’t believe people sat down, had a meeting, and decided that a forced quest through a town of annoying children would be a good thing to have in their game… not to mention as the transition into the endgame.
They did it for the lulz. Certainly for them, it is funny as a circus to read our complains about the place.
It seems like this was Bethesda pulling from the Van Buren plotline.
I always thought it was a reference to the tribe of kids in Beyond Thunderdome. Fallout 1 and 2 were heavily inspired by the Road Warrior. Maybe Bethesda thought having the third game reference the third film was logical?
Come to think of it, the problems which plague Beyond Thunderdome, rather closely resemble the problems with Fallout 3. I mean they both have annoying invulnerable children, nonsensical plotlines, silly uninteresting villains with no real motivations, mediocre acting for most of the characters.* At least Beyond Thunderdome LOOKED cool…
*Actually I think Fallout 3 wins for acting, Malcolm McDowell is one hell of a better villain than *shiver* Tina Turner. He doesn’t sing the opening theme either.
“We Don’t Need Another Hero” is actually one of my favourite songs. Ironically, I suppose.
It’s not a bad song in and of itself, I just hate Tina Turner. She’s like a reincarnation of Billie Holiday, but for the 1980’s.
I love the 80s, and Tina Turner’s role in the 80s. Stop maligning my childhood!
My apologies, thrice blessed Speaker of Truth. :)
If it’s any consolation, my native ’90s rank far lower than the ’80s on my “Sliding Scale of Decade Greatness”(TM)(C)(R)(etc). There was too much bubblegum pop, and Xtreme!-ness, and not enough Indiana Jones. Plus the one new Star Wars film we got completely blows. And I’d swap Clinton and/or Bush Sr. for Reagan any day.
On the other hand, however, I’d rather grit my teeth through a brainless Britney Spears song than endure the likes of Vanilla Ice, Prince, or Michael Jackson. I mean, dear Lord, what were you all thinking; how did those people ever get so popular?
I guess I reloaded the speech check to get in because I don’t remember going to kill slavers.
Oh, and Shamus, if you want a hudless screen easily, just go into the options, game settings, and just turn the HUD opaqueness all the way down.
Probably a bit late for this… but I felt like I should share.
Wow. That is a stunningly annoying kid.
Knowing they send their elders away makes the whole “invincible assholes” bit more bearable. Sure, you can’t kill the children, but you just know you’re going to eventually kill the unholy Corn God they all worship, and really, what better way is there to get revenge than by destroying their whole basis of existence?
There is corn in this post-apocalyptic world, isn’t there?
No, just mushrooms.
…Are there at least rows of mushrooms? That something could walk behind?
Nope, there’s a few small clumps, but nothing bigger than a cockroach is gonna hide behind them.
I’d just like to say, I recently got the GOTY edition for £15, mostly because of Spoiler Warning. However, I’ve modded it with “Fallout 3 Wanderers Edition”, which is possibly the best thing I could have ever done.
More weapons and armour, the junk you find is actually useful, the old Fallout weapons are in there, reading books has been changed to give you perks, and so much more.
It’s made the game actually worth putting the hours in for me. The combat in particular is vastly improved.
Basically, whoever recommended it on one of these earlier threads: I thank you!
FWE is indeed an excellent mod, I second the recommendation. Don’t leave the Vault without it.
That would likely be me or Audacity, yeah it’s a good mod. If the games starts locking up on you, though, use the shader disable ESP.
Shader disable ESP solves the locks ups? Damn. Wish I knew that before I unnistalled the game for the eleventh time.
I did have the lock-up problem, but I altered a whole bunch of stuff like refresh rates and altered my video codec to ignore fallout 3 executable files. Now I don’t have those problems, although it occasionally crashes, but that seems to only happen after a few hours or more, so it’s fine really.
That might just be Fallout 3 anyway. Mine did that even without mods.
The game used to bsod freeze up my entire rig to the point of reset, Ive done a whole bunch of different stuff, but playing in windowed mod seemed to turn freeze ups into ctds, if not solve them entirely. Im running FWE and a bunch of other mods now, it still crashes about every 90 minutes or so.
That’s normal at least for fallout 3, windowed mode solves it. Basically if I recall correctly, it’s an issue in how the shaders are called that sends the renderer into a null state and thus locks the game. The increase in the amount of shaders called by FWE exacerbates the issue.
To paraphrase the hacker who made the crash prevention system for Oblivion, “It’s completely astounding how incompetent Bethesda’s programmers are, most of the crashes I’m hacking out of it are from easily fixable null pointer exceptions which could have been fixed in less than five minutes had anyone had the access to the code and the will to do it.” Shortly thereafter he gave up and left modding. He still managed to fix 60 percent of the crashes in Oblivion in six months.
I´m sure that one was a ragequit for the reasons he mentioned.
Its almost like Lamplight was made entirely to justify the useless perk.
Stealth is dependent on lighting conditions (or lack thereof), and the game apparently enterprets the flaming sword as a light source.
Yao Guai werent in original fallouts, but I believe NCR flag featured a two headed bear, which probably served as an inspiration.
Military bot is the only enemy that is more vulnerable to chest-shots than to headshots.
The kids are fucking retarded. I wonder if you can Mez them all and sell them into slavery. Hmmmmmmmm……
Also the blog wont allow me to edit my comment for some reason. What I wanted to add is:
A thing I hated in Paradise Falls is that you cant get into the city by shooting the guard in the face. I mean these are the slavers, I thought thats how bad guys do, they play it rough. But not only does the whole city turn on you, you cant even wait out 3 days because the game treats Paradise Falls as a dungeon instead of a city and every slaver in the game will be hostile towards you, forever, if you take out one bloody gate guard who thinks too much of himself.
The terrible thing about Little Lamplight is that they could have avoided the player´s rage if they just made McStupidy a friendly guy instead of a rotting teenager jerk trapped in the body of a boy.
About where they get more children: My take is that the FEV from the vault filtered to the caverns, and the kids became a rare mutant fungus-things. They release spores and new children raise from those after some time. So Yeah…
My reaction to the “where do babies come from” raises more problems with the whole “how to they get the mungos to leave” issue.
Much of the population will conceivably be born from pregnancies that occur with the 14-16 year old girls and their counterparts.
And then they have to leave. And abandon their own babies.
It would make more sense to me if we got some sense of reciprocity, where the mungos in big town have a custom of raising their kids to about 3 or 4 before dropping them off in Little Lamplight to have something resembling a happy childhood.
Setting the “Ewwwww this horrible” aspect for a moment, I wonder what age, anatomically speaking, is required for an average male to start producing semen capable of conception. Also, Im not sure children would be able to exile their parents due to psychological connections and all that.
And the only sex ed they might have comes from the fifties…
You are making this too complex. It´s a Bethesda game, people! Child-fungi is our best option.
That, or maybe the aliens from Mothership Zeta are involved.
Depends on the onset of puberty, which can range from 14yo to 4yo at extremes. From a mans first wet dream to when his sperm is fertile is around 3 months, the average age of fertility is 12, while it can appear as early as 8. It really depends on the person in question. Ah, pre-med, why is it that I remember the strangest things from you?
Plus, it’s After the Apocalypse, so fertility’d better kickstart earlier.
Actually 200 years after the fall, it would have likely stabilized at a lower age. Fertility in woman actually has much lower recorded numbers. With girls conceiving children sometimes as young as 5 at the lowest recorded. Most of them coming from relatively low population areas, I don’t think I’ve ever seen studies about this, but it’s possible there are some. The question is one you’d ask a geneticist not a plastic surgeon. It’s possible that stress and societal conditions would cause a deviation. But that would only happen, in the case of the game, if people went out of their way to raise breeders or use children as such. I don’t think Bethesda has the balls to partake in something like that.
I’ll have to go digging for a study on this, it’s piqued my curiosity.
But wouldn’t the overall rate of fertility be really low, for both men and women, since prolonged low-level radiation exposure usually leads to infertility? I’d also expect a far higher level of birth defects.
Dont forget poor nutrition, lack of a proper water source, hygiene…
To Auda, according to fallout 1 and 2 the majority of survivors were from the vaults, those who weren’t were either ghouls or dead. Add in that the latent radiation would have settled to completely safe levels after about 30 years. So it you’d probably get mutants for the first generation of survivors that weren’t in a vault, but after that those guy’s kids would have been weeded out.
To Someone, factors such as those would actually hasten fertile age. Our body’s are really built to sustain population. Lack of resources would actually hasten maturation, if only by necessity. Note that most of the youngest mothers recorded pre-2002, are from third world countries which have a low amount of resources and poor hygiene. :)
so they’re space orks?
No. Orks are too cool. And this kids don´t want More Dakka.
Not only that, if they were Orks, combat would have been an option. Certainly from the point of view of the Orks, combat would have been the first, last, only, and above all most enjoyable option!
Interacting with Orkz is the only time when it is acceptible, in an open world RPG, to give the player only one possible way to move forward (Open Fire.)
Even in some circumstances, you can side with them though, really in WH40K the only open fire immediately races are nids and necron. Ork’s, they’ll generally announce intention via shooting at you first. If they don’t open fire, you can pretty much be certain if you have a pocket full of teef you can get out of the situation. Hell Rogue Traders can have free orks join their crews. Necron you won’t be able to reason with, nids you won’t want to reason with.
They’re actually right – Yao Guai (yÄo guà i or 妖怪) is traditional Mandarin for “monster” or “devil”.
Ah, I know that from the Japanese form youkai. So that’s how it’s pronounced in Mandarin, huh?
Really? I actually assumed the pun the whole time.
You know, after Three Dog says “Don’t feed the Yao Guai” I thought they were just hanging a lampshade on it.
Not that it can’t be both.
“Chief amongst the many problems that need to be fixed, are … Never mind, I’ll come in again.”
not to be too off topic, but i’m trying to imagine Yahtzee (someone who openly says he hates children with a passion) playing this part of the game. Like i dunno which of you guys have kids, I know you do shamus (not sure about josh or rutskarn) but you guys have children (i assume you love) and this part makes you hate children. I want to see how someone who hates kids takes this part.
also josh i think you made the right decision. I mean blowing up megaton, kidnapping, shooting the botherhood, killing people in a computer programmed hell, those were murky ethically at best. Trying to blow up little lamplight is the best thing to do.
Did you watch his review of Fallout 3? I think he addresses this, e=with rather more vehemence than usual.
Just watched it, he didn’t.
Huh, I thought it was Yahtzee that did that rant, maybe it was Spoony.
The original kids at little lamplight came from a school trip, and the reason why they hate adults is because the ones that were on the trip with them and either went into the vault or ran away, (i can’t remember) basically to them they were abandoned by the adults.
And i think children just find there way there? If I remember correctly you can escort the kid from the town with the fire breathing ants to little lamplight?
So…they need adventureres to escort the new populace to their home? How come it is a secret place that way?
Also, the reason they propose undermines all the Vault-Tek project. Why bother making vaults if making caves is essentially the same? A bunch of kids survived 200 years inside one; imagine a bunch of adults! But of course, Bethesda thinks that Adults = Dumb (I guess Bethesda people think they are children too?) and Kids = Plot Armor, so according to them the adults would have died horribly.
Spoiler for Vault 87
The Vault was the poorer option by far: 87 appears to be the main source of the Super Mutants which plague the rest of the capital wasteland. As in, it was likely meant as a testing facility for the F.E.V.
To add more problems regarding Bigtown and Little Lamplight: If you can suppress your bile long enough to engage in conversation with the little shitbags, you’ll note that they actually have a decent track record of fighting off anything that threatens LL, and are understandably confident in their abilities. But the instant they turn 16 they become pathetic, whiny wastes of life; and a punching bag for literally every other presence in the wastes. The Bigtowners need your help to do things which the Lamplighters can do when you speak to them in their caverns.
At least that´s consistent with their plot armor…
That’s another thing. If Vault 87 is the source of the super mutants, why are they at their most numerous in the DC Mall? Shouldn’t the area around 87 be a fortress, absolutely swarming with them?
And what’s more, they can only make more by dragging people in and dipping them in the FEV vats. Yet the area outside 87 would kill any human they dragged there. That means they have to go through Little Lamplight the same way you do in order to bring humans in alive so they can be turned. WHICH MAKES NO GODDAMN SENSE.
For that matter, Why were there no captives in Vault 87? Not even any ghouls. In fact, why were there no FEV vats?
I think the supermutants hang out in heavily irradiated areas, cause I guess they dont need FEV to make more mutes now, just radiation. I remember I read it somewhere, just cant recall where.
Its actually kind of an unresolved plot point, everybody says that mutants seem to be attracted by something in DC, but it never goes anywhere, you never learn the truth.
Super mutes in Vault 87 are…yeah. Apparently they have been dragging humans there to turn them into ghouls for quite some time now, except they have a village of conspiciously uneaten children between them and the only point of surface access, a village which they allegedly cannot pass and which was there for 200 years. Its either a sinister conspiracy or another thing nobody thought to adress.
And FEV is gas now, you can see it in the test chambers/holding cells in the vault.
Oh my… there it is! The reason that Little Lamplight can still survive! The supermutants and the kids have a comercial treaty: in exchange for a few subjects a month, the supermutants don´t wipe them out. And if my theory that this children are fungi, then it all makes sense! Really, it does…!
That…makes a lot of sense.It explains why they aren’t dead, where they got the guns from (including the Wazer Wifle), the extremely diverse clothing (I highly doubt that all came from the same trip), the dogs (plenty of scavengers have them) and more.
I mean, kids aren’t going to be much use for dipping, plus the fact they’re still alive means nobody expects it to be the place the super mutants come from. The kids get supplied with food, ‘recruits’, dogs, weapons and various other items, and when they reach 16 they get sent to big town where the mutants can grab them and take them back for dipping. As long as they’re unconscious and the others don’t see/recognize them, none of the kids mind.
The super mutants basically have a self-farming ‘crop’ of candidates, and the kids get to not die.
The children don’t even have to be fungi!
(They live off fungi, sure. And that fungi is possibly soylent green, so make of that what you will).
That is far too clever for a Bethesda super mutant. None of them, not even Fawkes and Uncle Leo are capable of speaking without screaming each word. Compare ‘Lou’ in Fallout 1, who was erudite, and perfectly capable of formulating such a plan.
The DC mutants can’t even string a complete sentence together.
Actually, the mutants are looking for more FEV in the DC ruins. You can hear them talk about it (“green stuff”), IIRC. I don’t know if there’s any FEV left in the DC, however.
That could have been easily solved, too, simply by eliminating the 100 rad/sec thing and replacing it with a Supermutant literally every 10 feet. Make them too thick to walk through, let alone fight through, and you get the same effect with less wallbangerness.
“Too think to fight through” isn’t really an option in a game with the Fat Man, sadly.
And Rad-X plus a radiation suit is enough to walk to the door through the radiation now. Besides, if we’re going to imagine Fallout 3 made by a competent company, might as well assume they’d have something better than an inaccessible door once you get through the wall of flesh.
Adding another entrance to the vault wouldnt be all that hard, except for the fact that some players might miss the super cool backbitersville developers put so much effort in.
Worse, actually. I spoke to almost all the little kids. The adults didn’t leave. From what I can tell, the original kids killed them, and dumped their bodies in the lake. The fungus the kids have lived off since started growing in said lake shortly after. The kid in charge of food production mentions that the fungus grows best when they toss lots of strange meat into the water. Strange meat = human flesh in fallout, for those who don’t know. So essentially, these kids are all second-tier cannibals of sorts, living off a man-eating fungus that started growing after their predecessors committed mass murder of all the adults in the cave. It’s pretty morbid, and makes the fact that you can’t wipe this town off the face of the earth all the more infuriating.
I think he hid it well, but I do think I detected a slight note of irritation in Josh’s voice concerning the kids.
The complete black and white morality in Little Lamplight is perhaps the most infuriating thing I have ever experienced. Why oh, why DON’T THEY GIVE US MORE OPTIONS?!
I mean, some weeks ago I was coming back home from the subway and two 10-12 year old kids were in the subway. Judging from their attitude I pretty much assumed they were there without tickets, and because I exit at the end of the line I was pretty much proven right.
Once I got near the toll passage there were the two kids that had run ahead, awaiting for someone to exit with their ticket just so that they could ‘hug’ them from behind and pass after them. I went to the passage and there went the two kids after me…
By the way, did I mention this was the day when I went to the wake of the late Portuguese Nobel Winner and I was really not in a good mood?
I basically advanced as soon as the passage opened, turned around, put my hand on the chest of the one right behind me, flicked my wrist towards him and he stumbled backwards into his companion and beyond the range of the sensor, the door closing right in their surprised faces.
Why do I tell this? Because those damn kids had the same exact expression that those kids in Little Lamplight. The same smug face as if everything belong to them, and there is nothing more that I would like than just pull him down by the wrist and give him a good pat on the head to make sure he is awake.
And then I would lecture him and if he tried to be smart I would slap him before knocking that door down with a kick…
Kids are cruel and petty and stupid most of the times, and they’re perhaps the nº1 NPCs that should never exist in a game if you cannot kill them.
Anyone else wanna offer a copy of ‘Lord of the Flies’ to everyone at Bethesda?
Hold your horses, the writing staff is yet to finish “The Little Engine That Could”.
Are you saying they can read?
nah give them the crappy movie. maybe their writing would improve.
“The complete black and white morality in Little Lamplight is perhaps the most infuriating thing I have ever experienced. Why oh, why DON'T THEY GIVE US MORE OPTIONS?!”
Black and white?
I’m sorry sir, but I do not see a black, nor a white. I see two rails of metal atop a line of wooden ties. I see no choice. I see only one path. If I squint hard enough, I can see the possibility of another route which might be a shortcut, but I do not see a true divergence. There is no choice. There is no Black, no White. There is only the path ahead, and Bethesda’s cruel whip behind me.
I see no choice. And the only color I see in this world is Brown.
How poetic. And true, most of the time they at least give you TWO options.
Which are: Karma Trinity way, and the one that makes it hit you in the head with the Karma Stick.
The really, really sad part about Little Lamplight is that it doesn’t even take a lot of editing to make it just plain better. A little justification here and a little character re-writing there is really all it would take.
For instance, here’s what I thought up (in, like, half an hour, walking home from shopping):
Instead of being a town in a dank cave with plywood doors, make Little Lamplight something like an isolated part of Vault 87 that’s still working. Instead of a plywood door that looks like I could stumble through it, have the player greeted by some form of Vault-tec blast door; maybe with some sort of window and intercom system for Mayor McFatKid to talk through. Put in a decent robot-based security system, and bam: you’ve explained how a bunch of kids could ever be able to defend such a settlement for long.
As for justification: Throw in some plot about Vault 87 being used to test child psychology, or something, and make it clear that the security system is programmed to only accept orders from human beings between the ages of 6 and 16. And hey, now the older kids being forced out makes some sense! Throw in some food replicators or hydroponic farms or something, and the food issues are solved as well.
And on the plus side, an approach like this gives you much more options for the player character to work with:
– You can still do the quest for Mayor Jerkkid from Hatefulstein, if you’re so inclined.
– Similarly, there’s the Speech check and Child at Heart entryways.
– If the player character keeps being a jerk, have Mayor Insult McFatjoke sic the robot security on him. Player beats the robots; mayor is so frightened / impressed that he lets the player in to avoid any more violence.
– Player can hack the security system; mayor lets player in after promising he’ll fix it. (bonus: add ‘Lie’ option, then lead slavers back to kids!)
– Probably some more options, too.
So, yeah. The setpiece itself is entirely salvageable. I just really wonder if anyone at Bethesda actually played through this part prior to release.
It´s pretty much like Matrix Vault. It could have worked, but they had to make a better backstory, and monkey writers aren´t cheap!
– Probably some more options, too.
Hack the security system so that the robots exterminate the kids. Even if you want them to retain their plot armor, this would be enough to have them run away screaming, leaving the door conveniently open…
BTW, you can’t kill kids, but you can sell them to slavers? Talk about providing the minimum protection possible!
And then the people from Bigtown could send their kids to live in Little Lamplight to protect them from the raider and supermutant threats they have to endure (and they don’t move to Megaton or Rivet City because they’re distrustful of wastelanders, having been brought up in Little Lamplight). Bigtown could have a couple of robot defenders as well, so it’s not *just* a hole in the ground, and they have a modicum of survivability against normal wasteland trash (supermutants notwithstanding). They would even be naturally tight-lipped about it since they’d want to protect the livelihood of their friends and family, and the robots could serve as a hook leading to Little Lamplight for whatever reason (which would be more compelling than the Brotherhood saying, “go here”).
See how easy that was?
It makes Bethesda’s “Blargh, here are some chil’rens” choice all the more baffling.
one more thing. is there an invisible wall there? honestly i never gone all the way through fallout usually me and friends just dicked around. so i’ve never done this quest before. But is there an invisible wall above and around that makeshift wall? If not can you not just jump the wall give the kid the finger and be on your way?
You can´t jump over it, since there isn´t any piece of scenery to help you. And you can´t raise your arms to grap the top, neither.
I didn’t even know there was a quest there. I always have high enough speech by the point to pass…and if I don’t I just re-load. I always thought the speech check was just one of those “here’s a speech options for more bonus xp because” ones. So I’m glad you didn’t try to skip it because now I get to see what horrible tedium I skipped on accident.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5846
That is a mod that allows you to blow the gate to Little Lamplight open. Use it to save your sanity. If you’re playing a good character; don’t use a mod that removes the essential tag from children and interpret your character beating the little shits into unconsciousness with a police baton as ‘corrective punishment’.
As for me, I cheerfully accepted and swallowed all the lousy dialogue and the poorly executed (to put it mildly) main plot up to the point where I stood before the gate to Little Lamplight. I’m not ashamed to say that I finally snapped and promptly downloaded the GECK to make a mod for myself that not only removed the essential tags from the children, but also changed their names to that of Bethesda employees.
Good times where had…
Considering your character, your alignment, and your constant need to eat, I’m surprised you haven’t taken cannibalism as a perk.
Cannibalism doesn’t heal you enough and takes a long time, more than drinking from a water fountain. They’re trying to keep the episodes visually interesting.
Then they clearly haven’t seen this yet. (spoilers)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itB2RIgBwSA&feature=related
(make sure you watch till the end)
Mungo only pawn in game of life.
I think I had a comment get eaten by my browser – but this is the cruelest version of what TvTropes calls the Competenece Zone I’ve ever seen (kids = aces, slightly older kids = pathetic wastrels waiting to be enslaved).
Does any of the ‘wide open world’ sidequests railroad you quite as hard as the main plot insists?
You know, evoking tvtropes, even without linking to it, is frowned upon in some venues… Because TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life
Dang, I’ve done it now!
I was at least making them work for it a little.
What’s funny is I’ve never made it out of the second paragraph to any link in TV Tropes. I find the site boring to no end. Perhaps because I barely watch TV? Not really sure. All I know is I never found the appeal in the site.
There are only a bunch of quests I can think of that you can resolve either the good way or the bad way. One would be Tenpenny´s, in which doing it the bad way is quite different from doing it the good way (one requires shooting; the other speech checks). And then there´s the Harold quest, in which both work quite the same (except the extra evil way in which you just skip the whole dungeon); and then there´s one involving escaped slaves (you can turn them to the slavers, or kill the slavers). And that´s it, I think.
The restant quests are quite simple “Go there, Shoot this, Grab that, Come back” ones.
Well there’s the Survival Guide, you can crush Moira’s dreams, or help her. The android hunt, can fool Zimmer, help him or kill him. You can find a place for Brian in Those! or sell him to slavers. The superhero/villain fight, not strictly good/bad, but can choose which one to confront, or both. Stealing Independence, can bring the real declaration or make a forgery (again not really good/bad). Oh, and the Power of the Atom, that one’s quite prominent.
I always thought that the evil way was to burn Harold.
Is it my imagination or is making pure water easier for Godfrey than recharging its humor emitter ray?
It’s easier to remove rads from the water than Bethesda’s bad dialogue from the humor.
Yes it is!
Actually, it explains it easily.
Kids were stuck in caverns. Kids make own society. Leader lies to other ones that Big town is a paradise so kids want to go.
Mutants at the same time kidnap children and throw them into Little town so the place is populated.
They do this so they have a “farm” called Big town.
W…T…F…?
I’m sitting waiting for the pre-episode advert to finish, looking at something else meanwhile, and realise there’s something wrong when the Spoiler Warning theme doesn’t kick in. So I come back to this tab to see what’s up…
It is sitting, stuck in an infinite loop, waiting for me to click on the advert.
AAAUUUGGGHHH!!!!