T w e n t y S i d e d

I feel the need to apologize beforehand for this one. Somewhere in the middle of talking about tits and theorizing about what it would be like to have sex with various Star Wars characters, we got sidetracked and briefly discussed Fallout 4.

Like I said in the episode: I liked the “critical” system in this game. I like having attacks in the tradition of a Final Fantasy limit break, where you can save up a big attack for that special someone. My only gripe is that it shouldn’t be called critical.

Okay, “critical attack” is a valid term for it in the sense that it’s roughly synonymous with “severe attack”. But the term critical has come to mean “random multiplier applied to attacks at random intervals”, and I don’t think that’s something you should mess with. I mean, a ledger of goods in a warehouse is called an “inventory”, but if you hit the inventory button in a game and got a ledger of stuff you don’t don’t have on your person, it’s just going to confuse and annoy people.

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.

We talked about building magazine racks for the comic collection you can build in this game. This is the largest my library ever got:

The scene where you’re railroaded into picking a fight with Kellogg is a disaster. A farce. A sad mockery of every possible definition of “roleplaying game”.

So Bethesda gives us a voiced protagonist, but then refuses to give them a discernible personality. So we have a… voiced blank slate? Then they put us into a conversation with a character where THE OTHER PERSON is willing to make peace, but after weeks of dicking around punching radroaches and building shacks for Preston Garvey, our no-personality character is overcome with bloodlust. Our avatar insists on picking a fight while surrounded, after giving up the element of surprise. But it’s not enough that our character is an incoherent, tactically inept dipshit. We’re made to participate in this stupidity by initiating the fight from a four-options-but-only-one-choice dialog wheel.

Here are some options that the player might want to consider if this were an actual roleplaying game:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 4 EP20: Bye Kellogg”

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.

So how would you improve the story of Fallout 4 if you w-

Take the project away from Bethesda and give it to literally anyone else. Even David Cage.

No, let’s assume Bethesda stays the developer. How could they make the story less frust-

Remove it. Just dump the story. They don’t know how to write. It’s the worst thing they do and it constantly gets in the way of the parts of the game that work. Just remove the entire plot and replace it with something simple and easy to ignore.

No. The point of the exercise is to talk about how Bethesda could have retained the story focus but made it much better.

Choose a completely different plot, themes, and premise from the outset.

Er. No, I mean assuming Bethesda decided to go with THIS plot, how could it be improved?

This is a really shitty and frustrating hypothetical world, you know that?

JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION!

Okay then…

Father could have been given reasons for doing the things he did. This would mean he’d need to be given proper, comprehensible motivations for those actions. That would mean designing a character with a discernible personality. Then you’d need to express all of that through his dialog. Then you would need to allow the player to engage with those ideas through roleplaying.

The question of “How could this quest / idea be improved?” is irresistible. I don’t know how the rest of you play the game, but I’m constantly trying to re-write this thing in my head. The mistakes are so plentiful and so seemingly obvious.

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.