{"id":32528,"date":"2016-06-03T15:02:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T19:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=32528"},"modified":"2016-06-03T16:23:34","modified_gmt":"2016-06-03T20:23:34","slug":"fallout-4-ep3-sturges-tell-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=32528","title":{"rendered":"Fallout 4 EP3: Sturges? Tell Him."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/y5BO2TZZpFg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=y5BO2TZZpFg'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>(Sorry about the janky framerate in these episodes. We have three more coming that were recorded in the same session. But the following week we&#8217;ll have this smoothed out. I find it&#8217;s actually easier if you watch the show at 1.25 speed. For whatever reason, that makes the jagged frames less annoying.)<\/p>\n<p>Preston Garvey is a disaster of a character. He&#8217;s designed to be &#8220;safe&#8221;. He&#8217;s friendly, welcoming, and inoffensive. The problem is that:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><strong>He&#8217;s thematically wrong for Fallout<\/strong>, which is supposed to be a world gone mad. The big movers and shakers in the world should be <a href=\"http:\/\/fallout.wikia.com\/wiki\/Master\">insane<\/a>, or <a href=\"http:\/\/fallout.wikia.com\/wiki\/Loxley\">quirky<\/a>, or <a href=\"http:\/\/fallout.wikia.com\/wiki\/Gizmo\">disgusting<\/a>, or <a href=\"http:\/\/fallout.wikia.com\/wiki\/Harold\">haunted by some past trauma<\/a>, or <a href=\"http:\/\/fallout.wikia.com\/wiki\/Butch_Harris\">not too bright<\/a>. This is a game about monsters and robots and power armor and 200 year old deviled eggs. The only normal people should be <a href=\"http:\/\/fallout.wikia.com\/wiki\/Tandi\">peasants<\/a>, and even those should be used sparingly.<\/p>\n<p><strong>His visual character design is making promises the character can&#8217;t keep.<\/strong> In a world of people wearing 50&#8217;s styled rags, he&#8217;s dressed as a soldier from the American revolution. He&#8217;s got a laser cannon duct-taped to the top of an ancient musket. We meet him as he&#8217;s holding off waves of psychotic raiders. He looks like a crazy, interesting, unpredictable character. And yet when we talk to him, he&#8217;s actually the most conventional and &#8220;normal&#8221; person in the entire game.<\/p>\n<p><strong>His dialog is repetitive and boring.<\/strong> He&#8217;s the most direct and obvious source of quests in the early game. He&#8217;s the first major character you meet, and he has a lot of quests for you to do. And they&#8217;re all the same thing: Go to location X and kill Y. He doesn&#8217;t have cool stories to tell about the places he&#8217;s sending you to. He doesn&#8217;t have cool stories about himself. He doesn&#8217;t have a running joke, or a hobby, or a hang-up. He doesn&#8217;t deliver any exposition. It&#8217;s just the same few lines of dialog, again and again.<\/p>\n<p><strong>He&#8217;s actually an annoying asshole and the game doesn&#8217;t seem to notice.<\/strong> He makes you general of the Minutemen, and claims you&#8217;re in charge. But he continues to order you around. That&#8217;s a <strong>wonderful<\/strong> hook for a crazy character, but the game refuses to do anything with it. If you stick to the main quest of trying to rescue your kid, then eventually you&#8217;ll get to the point where you need the help of Sturges help to build a teleporter. You (the &#8220;general&#8221;) have to <strong>ask<\/strong> Preston for help. <\/p>\n<p>And then he says no! <\/p>\n<p>He says no because &#8220;we have more important things to worry about&#8221;. Note that at the time, Sturges is wandering around YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD that YOU FIXED UP, doing jack shit. So Preston concludes that rescuing your child isn&#8217;t a priority, because he needs you to go out and continue to do <em>his job<\/em> for him while he and his friends lounge around this town <em>you built<\/em>. <\/p>\n<p>This writer was so enamored of the idea of telling a dramatic story that they gave the main character a voice and built the whole thing on top of both a child-rescue AND an avenging-a-dead-spouse story. And then we come to this conversation, which ought to be an <em>explosion<\/em> of drama. This should be the moment where you and Preston become unable to reconcile your divergent goals: Your quest for murder and rescue vs. his alleged concern for the Commonwealth. This ought to be an abrupt  end to your friendship. Or maybe a turning point for your own character where you decide to put aside your family for the good of everyone. Or a chance for a series of difficult speech checks. Or a face-heel turn for Preston. Something. <em>Anything.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>But the writer doesn&#8217;t seem to notice that this conversation ought to end in a gunfight. Instead, it&#8217;s just a generic &#8220;you can&#8217;t progress on that quest line until you do this other one&#8221;. Your character can&#8217;t call him out on <em>any<\/em> of this. Your character is never allowed to notice what a bastard Preston is, because the writer didn&#8217;t notice, because Preston isn&#8217;t a character. He&#8217;s a boring quest dispenser. <\/p>\n<p><strong>He doesn&#8217;t even have an arc!<\/strong> And no, &#8220;I almost gave up on the Minutemen but then you helped me and now we&#8217;re a success!&#8221; is not an arc. It&#8217;s an event that might <em>fuel<\/em> an arc. <\/p>\n<p>Also, it appears Bethesda&#8217;s conversation \/ cutscene engine isn&#8217;t able to handle conversations more complex than the player speaking to one NPC. The three-person conversations always go horribly wrong. I understand that figuring out camera angles and lighting in an unpredictable environment is a hard problem to solve, but can&#8217;t we at least   get the <em>subtitles<\/em> to work?<\/p>\n<p>Like I said earlier: There are a lot of things to like in this game, but almost none of them happen in the first hour. Bethesda placed more importance on making a good E3 demo than a good story intro, and it shows. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) (Sorry about the janky framerate in these episodes. We have three more coming that were recorded in the same session. But the following week we&#8217;ll have this smoothed out. I find it&#8217;s actually easier if you watch the show at 1.25 speed. For whatever reason, that makes the jagged frames less annoying.) Preston [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}