T w e n t y S i d e d

This is the Xanatos Gambit (a trope) that Rutskarn referenced in this episode. I love the notion that having Dogmeat follow a trail of months(?) old cigar butts and bloody ragsDoes Kellog somehow not own any stimpacks? Dude, sell the NUKE LAUNCHER you leave out for intruders and buy some stimpacks!” was all part of someone’s convoluted plan.

1. This is a story about the world after the apocalypse. Which means the setting needs to be about the new order that arises. (Fallout 1, Fallout New Vegas.)
2. But if you don’t want to devise or imagine a new society, then this should be about the last humans fighting for survival in a dying world. (Mad Max Fury Road.)
3. But if you’re not going to do either of those, then don’t set the world 200 years after the cataclysm, because people can’t “scavenge” for 2 years, much less 20. And the idea that people could scavenge for two HUNDRED years? That’s a joke with no punchline.
4. But if you do that for some reason, then downplay it as much as you can. For example, don’t have the main plot turn on a character who has a rare and particular BRAND of TOBACCO that he likes to smoke, because brands (and brand loyalty) are things that only arise in complex societies. And tobacco doesn’t grow in the north. How is this supposed to work? How could this be “his brand”? Is he the only one who loots this stuff from ruins!? Did he drag a shipping container of cigars with him when he began his years-long trek eastward, and we just happen to meet him when he’s down to his very last box? (Which he left behind in Diamond City anyway.)
5. But if you DO have a character that smokes a rare brand of cigars, then maybe show that he hoards and treasures them as a rare pleasure. Which means he wouldn’t smoke three of them in a single hike and he wouldn’t leave a trail of them 80% unsmoked.
6. Also don’t give him the same name as the most famous brand of breakfast cereal. It’s like naming your bad guy “Ron McDonald” or “John Pepsi”. It creates strange, joke-y associations that undercut the menacing tone you’re trying to present.
7. But if you’re going to do all of that, then at least have the decency to make the world lighthearted, silly, playful, or goofy. Whatever you do, don’t mix this nonsense with a self-serious “They stole my baby and murdered my spouse in front of me!” plot.
8. If you don’t have the basic wisdom to do that, then maybe storytelling isn’t for you. Focus on your mechanics. Keep your story simple. Limit the number of factions, don’t try to do any plot twists, and don’t have too many moving parts. Don’t break the flow of the game with too many cutscenes, keep dialog short, and don’t ever trap the player in all-dialog story sections where they have no access to the core mechanics. Dialog and exposition scenes normally cost a fortune to produce, and in a mechanics-focused game it can only frustrate them.

It is breathtaking the lengths this writer will go to in order to do the wrongest thing possible.

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 the hunt to find Kellog is broken. But it’s broken in a REALLY ANNOYING WAY, which is that it has various contradictory excuses sprinkled around the world, and taken in isolation they seem to address one fault or another. So you point out plot hole A, but then an apologist claims this is explained by excuse B. But then you point out that excuse B doesn’t make sense because of contradiction C, and then someone ELSE points out that C is maybe justified by theory D. This seems to solve the problem, until you realize that D doesn’t work with B, and thus you end up arguing in circles forever. Most importantly, there never comes a time where you can map out what happened and why. You’re forever concocting and dismissing theories.

This is annoying if – like me – one of your coping mechanisms for plot holes is to simply document them. But the complexity of the brokenness makes such a task impossible. Every excuse is supported by broken excuses which are supported by broken excuses, leading out into this endless fractal of stupidity and frustration. It’s like the Mandelbrot set, but for bad ideas instead of numbers.

So to get anywhere in this analysis, we need to spoil the big twist of the game. That’s not bad, since the twist is both obvious and nonsensical. Here goes:

Shaun is now 80 years old.

This is OBVIOUS, because the game showed you being re-frozen after the kidnapping. Most players realize RIGHT AWAY that some probably-significant interval of time has passed. But then your character is stupidly railroaded into looking for a “baby”, despite the fact that they really ought to know better. And even if they don’t, the PLAYER knows better and thus we get frustrated waiting for our character to catch up to what we already know. This can work if the writer has a strong pre-built protagonist like Geralt or Adam Jensen, but even then it requires a fine touch to avoid annoying the player. But in a game with a quasi-blank-slate protagonist like this one, having our avatar spend most of the game oblivious to something we figured out in the first five minutes is pretty much the kiss of death for tension, immersion, and roleplaying. Instead of working to unravel a mystery, we spend the entire running time waiting for our character to pull their head out of their ass so we can get on with things.

This is also NONSENSE, because everything else in the gameworld contradicts this. And here is where we get caught arguing in circles:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 4 EP17: Cereal Killer”

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.