T w e n t y S i d e d

Let’s say you’re James.

You’ve decided to go back to the wasteland and fix the water purifier, risks be damned, but the transition from Vault sheets to wasteland streets is worse than you could have possibly imagined. Glowing water and feral dogs and scabrous humans leave you a physically and morally exhausted wreck. In the cynical days of adjustment you become certain you’ll never finish your great work, never reunite with your only child. You’ll be preyed on by a string of greedy wasteland pirates and parasites until all your efforts to help the world are forgotten to the dust of time.

And then you stumble onto Galaxy News Radio and everything changes. Here at last you’ve found another genuine altruist in the hellish melee. He welcomes you, a stranger, into his heavily-guarded studio for an interview where you end up asking all the questions. He is thoughtful, savvy, warm, and patient. When you leave, he broadcasts on his radio station:

So if you see James out there, you say hello. Be kind to our new brother, and show him that here on the outside, we always fight the good fight.

Then after a brief and embarrassing episode in a creepy vault you wander back to the station for a visit and an interview—hoping to give his audience a PSA about drinking water and trusting strange computer programs, perhaps—and after cracking a couple Nukas, Three Dog casually mentions:

“By the way, your kid says hello.”

“What?” You’re stupefied. “My child came here…and didn’t even ask where I’d gone?”

“That did come up. Kind of a whiny kid you’ve got, actually. All ‘wah wah, where’s my dad, where’s my dad.’ And I’m like, does the kid need a night light for pete’s sake?”

“Did you say where I’d gone?”

“I sort of did. I mean, I said I knew where you’d gone, and that I’d share that info…in exchange for just, like, a tiny errand.”

“What errand did you…”

“Steal a giant radio dish from super mutant infested territory. So, you know. A desperate teenager from a soft vault upbringing seemed like the ideal person for the job.”

“How?!”

“Okay, you got me. I just didn’t want to have to ask the paladins to do it.” He checks his calendar. “Come to think of it, all this was a couple months ago. If I had to guess, I’d say your kid really sucked at fighting the good fight.”

The world spins. Your forgotten, shallow breaths lap the open mic—a live feed of your pain and suffering to Three Dog’s many, many worshipers. Your only family just died trying to find you, and died for no reason at all–except a desperate need to find and reunite with you.

“Say,” says Three Dog brightly, “you doing anything right now? And do you know where the museum is?”

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Overhaulout Part 4.5: Dish and Dog”

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

Here’s a question for anyone who’s beaten Fallout 3: what role do super mutants, the most common and iconic enemy in the entire game, play in the main storyline?

Really take a minute. Spool through the mutant-laden story beats: the brawl outside GNR, the mission to the Museum of Technology, the cleansing of the purifier, the expedition to Vault 87. Really let it sink in how much time you spend trading shots with these geeks compared to, say, the Enclave: how much earlier you encounter them, how much more prominent they are, how much more of your resources they eat up.

Now ask yourself again: what role do they actually play in the story?

But we’ve summed it up, haven’t we? They exist. They exist again, again. They shoot and must be shot at. If you find-replaced super mutants with anything else at all, berserk killer robots or cold calculating mercenaries or a platoon of brainless body-snatching coral shrimp, the story wouldn’t really change much. Their agenda and origins and function are immaterial.

I don’t think it’s too fussily formalist to argue that your videogame’s earliest and most common enemies should have a stake in or relevance to the major conflict. I guess you could argue that they demonstrate the altruism of the Brotherhood of Steel by providing an opponent to be combated, but that is an extremely low bar. I’d argue it’s the basic function any antagonist at all would fulfill.

I don’t actually like this idea, and it’s outside the scope of my redesign anyway, but but for the sake of argument consider a Fallout 3 where the player and Brotherhood fought Enclave forces for the whole game. You arrive outside GNR and Enclave troops are trying to capture the radio station. Enclave troops destroy the radio dish to prevent GNR from broadcasting its alerts and organizing the Wasteland. Enclave troops have occupied the purifier searching for your father. Imagine a game, in other words, where the game’s actual antagonist is established as a threat before the midway point of the game. For all that you’d lose in enemy variety and the thrill of discovery and story nuance, isn’t it better to spend your time tangling with your family’s actual nemesis instead of a bunch of staggeringly irrelevant ogres?

There’s no way around it: before we go any further, we’re going to find something to do with our super mutants. Before I do, I’ll show my work and explain what I will and won’t change to get results.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Overhaulout Part 4: Mutations”

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