T w e n t y S i d e d

Spoiler Warning Gentlemen’s^* Drinking Game of Foolishness

^* Women may also participate, but for thematic reasons they should do so while wearing a fake mustache, beard, or top hat. Note that women are not encouraged to participate, because literally nobody is encouraged to participate, because this is less a “game”, as is it a very stupid, time-consuming, and expensive way to kill yourself.

Take a drink whenever:

1. Either you encounter a situation where the dialog option says “No,” but the character says “Yes”, OR you encounter a dialog where all choices are obviously the same damn thing.
2. They should have kept this innovation from New Vegas.
3. Hey, guys, remember Shaun?
4. Doing something smart breaks a quest.
5. Josh shoots an ally, companion, or otherwise friendly person on accident.
6. NPC we want to kill on purpose is invulnerable.
7. Josh picks a trait or upgrades a stat because, “Fuck it, everything else is locked”.
8. “In the original Fallout”. (Any reference to Fallout 1 or 2 counts.)
9. Reginald dies.
10. VATS causes something nonsensical to happen.
11. Control confusion: The game trolls Josh by confusing or changing the purpose of spacebar / Escape / E / Tab. Or Josh confuses melee / grenade / reload / use.

Please don’t play this game. We’re trying to grow our audience and we’ve heard that killing you with binge drinking is apparently counter-productive to that goal? Turns out that if we hadn’t killed all those people during the Fallout 3 season we’d be more popular than Pewdiepie by now.

ALSO: Josh and I (and maybe some other guests, we’re still hammering out the details) will be streaming E3, which begins this Sunday. The schedule is here. Sunday has both E3 and Bethesda events, which begin at 1PM pacific time USA. Like always, this is meant to be loose and casual. If you’re looking for hard-hitting coverage and news, we’re probably not the best people to follow. If you want to hang out and see live, unfiltered reactions to things, then I’ll see you there.

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 standoff with Trudy is a perfect example of how this game initially seems like it’s trying to be a Fallout-style RPG. You get several dialog checks. The events seem to hint that you’ve stumbled into the middle of a story. If you’re familiar with Bethesda or (better yet) BioWare games, then you’ll probably imagine there’s all sorts of details you’re missing out on.

But once you play through it, you realize it was all a facade. Your dialog checks don’t really matter. Trudy offers you 100 caps to help out, but if you just roll in and gun down Wolfgang without talking to anyone she’ll give you 100 caps anyway. There are a bunch of little cul-de-sac dialog options, but most of them just change which pair of people you gun down and how many caps you get for doing so. Trudy doesn’t have a story to tell. Her son Patrick doesn’t even get a proper dialog. You don’t learn the history between these two groups and it’s not used to characterize your fish-out-of-water protagonist or establish the setting around you.

The moment Wolfgang is dead, the story is over. For the rest of the game, Trudy opens every conversation like Wolfgang just died a few minutes ago. Patrick huddles in the corner recovering from Jet addiction, forever.

This game is cotton candy. It might look big and substantial, but the moment you try to bite down on anything it just vanishes. This game is often pretending to have something to say. Synths! Technology! Freedom! For my first few hours with the game, I always assumed I was picking the wrong dialog choices, and that there was something deeper or more interesting just around the corner or on the road less traveled. But the moment you play through a conversation twice, the spell is broken. Not only is the other road just as shallow as the first, it usually leads to the exact same place for the exact same reward.

Oh, I can choose to murder a shopkeeper and her son, or some thug. What a profound moral dilemma. Thanks Bethesda.

What’s worse, this choice is completely a no-brainer. Wolfgang offers an unknown quantity of money. Trudy offers a clear 100. Trudy runs a general goods shop and even sells a couple of rare / unique items, and Wolfgang just sells chems. Much of this game involves liquidating large piles of loot, a process which is throttled by your access to shopkeepers who all have valuable goods and cash. And Trudy is the only reliable and convenient shopkeeper for the first several hours of the gameThe other shop is Carla, but she roams around and isn’t always near a fast-travel point.. There is no reason, in-character or out of character, to side with Wolfgang unless you’re just trying to play your alignment as Chaotic Stupid.

EDIT: Should this be titled, “SHAUN!”? I dunno. Whatever. Close enough.

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.

It seems like everyone has a different story about how the Deathclaw encounter went wrong because the game designer expected the player to read their mind (or the script?) and know what they were supposed to do to make the scene work. Everyone has it turn kind of shitty and underwhelming in a different way. I imagine it worked best on people like me, who watched the E3 demo and knew what they were “supposed” to do. It’s an awful, contrived, muddled scene that somehow manages to be both hand-hold-y and vague.

I think Rutskarn is right, in that the next most obvious thing to shave off the experience to make it more “mainstream” is to get rid of carry weights. I’ve heard a lot of players express an interest in exactly this. They assume their goal is to pick an area clean. But you can’t carry everything at once. So you fill yourself to capacity, fast-travel to your base, store all the items, fast-travel back, and repeat. If you’re playing this way then clearly the fast-travel is just a bunch of useless loading screens and busywork.

But getting rid of carry weights would lead to a slippery slope of “streamlining”:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 4 EP4: First Deathclaw in Space”

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.