T w e n t y S i d e d

This episode touches on the New Vegas vs. Fallout 3 debate, which isn’t really a debate at all. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

The Fallout 3 story was infantile, the characters were paper-thin, and the setting made no sense, but it was a pretty good open-world funhouse ride of murder and mayhem. In contrast, New Vegas was an actual roleplaying game, where your character could make decisions, meet characters that had their own motivations and reasons to exist, and interact with factions built around ideas. The game set a mood, told a number of stories, and and gave you a great deal of agency. On the downside, the “roam around and find a dungeon full of monsters with a treasure chest at the end” thing was kind of gone. The game was more focused on the main story and less interested in freelance mayhem.

The moment you exit the vault in Fallout 3 you can strike out on your own, looking for adventure. Try that with New Vegas and you’ll probably meet something that will kill you in two hits. There’s not a lot out there to discover through roaming. It’s best to stick to the intended path, because that’s where the content is.

I hate how this is always framed as an either / or kind of deal. The argument always begins with a premise with you can’t please one group of fans without alienating the other. As if adding one vibrant, coherent character to the game requires you to cut two dungeons somewhere else. As if coming up with a discernible theme and a proper motivation for the main character means you have to shrink the world map. As if giving us agency in the story means the game feel needs to be shitty and the weapons need to be unbalanced.

But Fallout 3 fans don’t hate good stories and New Vegas Fans don’t hate viscerally satisfying combat. Just because you prefer one doesn’t mean you scorn the other, and we could all be winners if we could get both things in the same game. And I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to ask for. You could fix the story-based problems of Fallout 4 without spending any extra moneyWell, a better writer might cost more than a poor writer, but the difference between the two is trivial when considered in context of the whole budget.. The game doesn’t need more dialog. It doesn’t need more cutscenes. It doesn’t need more characters. It just requires that the existing dialog and cutscenes fit into some kind of coherent whole. That’s not “easy”, but it’s also not an unreasonable thing to expect when a company is spending this much money on a AAA game.

Sadly, I imagine the problems have less to do with budget and more to do with company culture. And I have no idea how you fix that.

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.

200 years of mowing down feral Ghouls and there are still feral Ghouls left. 200 years of scavenging and there’s stuff valuable stuff in every box. 200 years of scavving for food and there’s still prewar food left. 200 years of living in ruins and nobody’s swept the floor or cleaned out this obviously N-Day skeleton. 200 years of constant raiding, warring, and territory dispute-ing, and there are still parked cars that can go nuclear from a single stray bullet. 200 years and people are still using bottlecaps as currency. 200 years and there are still unopened bottles of Nuka-Cola, even though they’re delicious, full of sugar, and their lid is made of literally money. 200 years of constant gunfire and there are still millions of bullets left. 200 years and none of these village-sized communities has grown large enough to form governments or tried to form some kind of coherent society. 200 years and nobody looted any of these sets of power armor or fusion cores. 200 years and there is still a bin of unspoiled, un-eaten melons in the Super Duper Mart, which is somehow both thoroughly looted yet still ripe with valuables and filled with feral ghouls. 200 years and there are still intact prewar comic books, clothing, radios, couches, light bulbs, life-saving medicine, cigarettes, produce, magnetic tapes, working terminals, un-hacked terminals, un-scavenged robots, un-cracked safes, un-detonated mines, and un-picked locks. 200 years of Gamebryo Engine games and nobody’s fixed the bug where the game stalls forever at a loading screen. 200 years of me bitching about these same ridiculous problems and yet somehow people still read my blog.

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.

The synth paranoia is great for illustrating the frustrations with the dialog system. The game creates a conversation seemingly engineered to make you curious about some piece of information, and then it gives you several dialog prompts that pointedly refuse to let you ask about it. It’s an interesting way to camouflage the holes in the story: You can sort of imagine there’s this grand tale of paranoia and treachery going on around you, if only your idiot character had the wit to ask about it. It sweeps all of the problems with the story into one location.

Why do you think your brother is a synth? How common are synths? How long has this been going on? When I kill synths, I always find synth parts on their body… can you detect that stuff? Do you even know ab out it? Have you ever conclusively proven someone is a synth? How do you know the Institute is behind all this. Given how they operate, how does anyone know the Institute exists in the first place?

In this conversation (the one in this episode, I mean) a whole community is working on this psych profile test supposedly designed to detect synths because they’re too subtle to detect by other means. But then elsewhere you’ll find people who are willing to murder loved ones over suspicion of being a synth. And they’re right! Which would be fine, except you’re not allowed to ask them what tipped them off.

On one hand, it’s better than Fallout 3. In Fallout 3, the plot told you water was a problem but the characters in the story never gave any sign that this was the case. At least in Fallout 4, when the game claims synths are a problem the behavior of the characters supports this premise. It’s still a dumb story about nothing where nobody ever has a coherent goal or motivation, but at least the writer has mastered the art of putting the premise of the story into the actual story. And as much as I rant about the game, I really do appreciate it. It would be so much worse if you spent the whole game fighting against a synth invasion that was never depicted.

Shaun who?

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.