T w e n t y S i d e d

Warning: The Internet Absurdity Review Board has advised that the following video contains high levels of folly, foolishness, improbability, inanity, irrationality, jive, ludicrousness, nonsense, ridiculousness, silliness, and flapdoodle. Viewer discretion is advised.

Compare this DLC from Bethesda to the Old World Blues DLC from Obsidian, for Fallout 3 and New Vegas, respectively. OWB is longer, smarter, deeper, has a larger and more diverse environment, better and more interesting goodies, more characters, more dialog, more choice, more total plot threads, a more consistent tone, and is much less ham-fisted when it needs to railroad the player.

Both developers have a reputation for releasing hilariously broken games, but at least Obsidian has the good grace to not insult your intelligence before the game crashes to desktop.

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

Back in my review of Rage, I talked about editing dialog down to the essentials. Ideally your dialog should always be delivering characterization, exposition, foreshadowing, establishing of goals, illuminating relationships between characters, and expressing the characters worldview or ideology. You can’t do all of those things at the same time, but doing only one makes for really bland dialog. Consider our exchange with Midea:

Alright, we can talk now but we shouldn’t take too long. They saw you come in here, so they’ll come looking for you if you take too long.

This went from a writer to a directer to a voice actor, and nobody thought to tighten it up a little? How does she know what the guards have seen and how they’ll respond? (Considering that you can either sneak, murder, or walk here.)

This is not a character. This is an exposition device and a questgiver. She knows all the things that the writers want you to know and has all the goals the writers want you to have. She’s a living textbox.

Compare her to the guarded suspicion of Aradesh, the naive exuberance of Tandi, the dim-witted false swagger of Butch Harris, or the simple and direct idealism of Killian Darkwater. We have several introductory conversations with Midea where she doesn’t seem to have any urgent needs, or ideals, or goals. She’s just another bland plastic-faced NPC. Her personality boils down to “friendly”, because she’s on your side.

Yes, she becomes slightly less 1-dimensional later, but this is a really terrible introduction.

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

My favorite part of the episode is where we had to kill a guy to open a door to get a slave outfit so we could pretend to be a slave but the guy’s body vanished so we couldn’t open the door but it was okay because you can just jump the fence.

I’d forgotten this episode entirely. When we got to the bit where we were going to skip over the long march, I got excited thinking we were going to get a travel montage. I was very disappointed when it was a hard cut. Boo.

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

You know what would be great here? Seeing as how this is a Fallout game, we have a great opportunity to offer the player lot of different things to do. Maybe they can hack the simulation from the outside, without needing to go in. Maybe they could use lockpicking to reach the master controls. Maybe they could try to reach the core and cut the power, which would require them to fight a lot of tough robots. Maybe they could use the repair skill to bust Dad out of his relaxation pod. So many possibilities!

“But then the player would miss out on tranquility lane! We put so much work into that!”

Yeah, see. This game isn’t exactly starved for content. I think you can afford to miss a bit here and there if it means the player can make interesting choices.

“But they DO get choices! After getting stupidly trapped in the simulation, they can escape the stupid good way or the stupid evil way.”

Sigh.

And then after you escape the Matrix there’s yet ANOTHER instance of a conversation where someone asks you why you left vault 101, and you can’t answer it truthfully or sensibly. Arg.

For those of you keeping score at home: This is the second vault Dad has ruined.

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