T w e n t y S i d e d

Rutskarn has wisdom at the end. Christine is much better with all of her emoting conveyed via simple text. If they had tried to animate all of her movements it would have been expensive, time-consuming, glitchy, and we would have ignored it anyway because we’d be reading the text. (And we MUST have the text. These 3d models are nowhere near sophisticated or detailed enough to communicate only via pantomime.)

One of my laments with the original Fallout was that they never really leveraged that text window. See, the original Fallout had this little text field in the lower-left part of the screen:

One of my favorite moments in the game was when it narrated the bit about you seeing natural light for the first time in your life. It was an excellent line that set the mood and drove home the point about how sheltered your life had been before now. I also missed it completely on my first play-through, because my first five minutes with the game had taught me, “This window is for combat messages and can be safely ignored”.

I loved the idea of a narration window, and I was glad when it delivered a little dose of flavor text. Sadly, the window was too small, the font was too blocky, and 90% of the text that appeared in there was useless. We can argue about what elements make a game a “true” Fallout game. Mutants? Retro-future? The Brotherhood? We can go around on this all day, but I think everyone can agree that the one common feature shared by all games is the idea of a horribly obtuse and difficult interface.

Text is a powerful tool, and game designers pretty much abandoned it in the late 90’s. Once in a while we get a game like Amnesia: Dark Descent that gives us some text worth reading. (Which is not the same as giving us text that we’re obliged to read.) But as someone who has played more than his share of MMO games and makes a point of always reading the quest text, I’d say prose is a lost art when it comes to game design. So it was nice seeing them do something interesting with Christine here.

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 I’ve figured it out. Here is how to make an expansion pack for a Fallout game:

1. Make one new area motif. Now use it. Everywhere.
2. Make one new weapon. Make sure it’s way overpowered.
3. Make one new enemy model. Now use it. Everywhere. Make sure it’s crazy powerful so it can stand up to the overpowered weapon you added.
4. Take away all player inventory.
5. Take away all player choice.
6. Take away the looting & bartering mechanics.
7. Add one binary choice at the end, because then you can claim the DLC has “player choice”.

They don’t all follow this list, of course. But if you look at Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout, and Mothership Zeta, the pattern is there. Dead Money looks to be following that template as well. I don’t know. Haven’t played it myself. I watched Josh play Dead Money for 40 minutes this weekend. It looks better than the Fallout 3 DLC, but that’s a very, very small accomplishment.

I guess I’ll see how it turns out along with the rest of you.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S5E23: Elijah’s Interocitor”

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 the vault-boy images in this episode. For reference, here is the image for the bloody mess perk:

And here is the one they removed from Fallout 3 for “baby killer”:

(Or maybe it was child killer?)

My question is: What was “baby killer” for? Where would it appear in the interface? Was it a perk you could obtain? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. What would it give you? Plus 5% damage to kids? In the original game a note was added to your karma window if you killed a kid. (Which is why I always re-loaded the game if I killed one by accident.) There isn’t a karma window in these newer games. Although, a karma / reputation display would be nice. I’d like to see a run-down of what my reputation is in each town.

End of episode observation: A brand-new incredibly heavy gun for which we have no ammunition or skill points, and which is about as likely to cripple or kill the user as the enemy! Yay. At the end of this series I’d love to see how many total hours were spent scrolling through inventory screen because we’re overweight. You know, just before I kill myself.

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.