T w e n t y S i d e d

WARING: This episode contains violence, drug use, kink, kink-shaming, marriage, bicycle kicking firearms, Bethesda dialog, baseball bat journalism, and allusions to that one episode where Rutskarn read us the Wikipedia entry on hemipenes. This episode may be harmful to children, pregnant women, and everyone else.

Maybe I need to apologize for this episode? But I kind of feel like this episode needs to apologize to ME? In any case, something has gone wrong, somewhere, and it’s probably Josh’s fault.

Also, why was that vault door closed / how did they manipulate it without a Pip boy?

EDIT: Wow guys. I just realized: When Reginald died, do you know where the last save was? If you re-watch the episode, it was in the closet with the yellow drug container, which is the exact moment when Josh claimed he’d “become a god”. The game KNOWS. It punished him for his hubris!

I’d be okay with that, except we wound up getting punished along with him.

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.

I think Fallout 4 wouldn’t be nearly so infuriating if the dialog didn’t keep making promises that the writer never intended to keep. It makes it sound like wall-painter guy has stories to tell, but he’s just a nonsense fetch quest. You meet a big bad guy who wants to talk, but the conversation is dumb and pointless because my character isn’t allowed to ask any interesting questions. You meet people with pre-war memories, or strange backstories, or in odd situations, which makes it seem like they’re designed specifically to deliver exposition and stories. But no. It’s just another bland NPC who wants to give you caps to kill a bunch of crap.

In most games, the designer will use a story to hook you into doing a quest. In this game I kept doing quests, hoping to find a story somewhere.

I was usually disappointed.

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.

How do I get into Diamond City? Charm my way past the gate guards? Sneak in through the sewer? Bribe my way in? Lockpick the back entrance? Wear a guard disguise and walk in? Make friends with a resident and enter the city as their guest? Pay a sketchy half-crazed ghoul with a persecution complex to build a bomb to blow a hole in the wall? Hack a terminal to make a bot go haywire and create a distraction? Get hired as a caravan guard and enter with the rest of the group when they reach the city?

Oh, sorry. Those are things you’d put in a Fallout game like New Vegas or the 2D Fallouts. But THIS is a Bethesda game, which means the only way in is through a nonsensical, scripted, non-branching, completely banal dialog / cutscene where the rules are made up and your choices don’t matter.

The Fallout 4 developers could’ve tried to put some light roleplaying into their alleged roleplaying game and handled entering Diamond City the way Obsidian handled entering New Vegas. But instead they just copied the same sophomoric approach they used for entering the Citadel back in Fallout 3: A stilted, awkwardly framed dialog that can’t decide if it wants to be cinema or interactive so it decides to split the difference and fail at both.

Having the four-choice “I have no idea what I’m about to say” dialog wheel is directly at odds with their idiotic no-choice plot. And both of those ideas are at odds with the concept of “roleplaying game”. And none of this is helped by their fully voiced pre-war protagonist who never seems interested or curious about the world around them or about connecting with people who have pre-war memories to find out what’s happened in the last 210 yearsSpoiler: Nothing. Nothing has happened. After the bombs fell, people crawled out the the rubble and then sat around shooting each other until you showed up with the plot..

It’s not that the various designers weren’t on the same page, it’s like they were deliberately working against one another.

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.