{"id":33204,"date":"2016-07-08T18:20:09","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T22:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33204"},"modified":"2016-07-09T04:21:37","modified_gmt":"2016-07-09T08:21:37","slug":"fallout-4-ep18-good-job-dumbass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33204","title":{"rendered":"Fallout 4 EP18: Good Job, Dumbass"},"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\/EkTwf_Y9K-4\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=EkTwf_Y9K-4'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>This is the <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/XanatosGambit\">Xanatos Gambit<\/a> (a trope) that Rutskarn referenced in this episode. I love the notion that having Dogmeat follow a trail of months(?) old cigar butts and bloody rags<span class='snote' title='1'>Does Kellog somehow not own any stimpacks? Dude, sell the NUKE LAUNCHER you leave out for intruders and buy some stimpacks!&#8221;<\/span> was all part of someone&#8217;s convoluted plan.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>This is a story about the world after the apocalypse. Which means the setting needs to be about the new order that arises. (Fallout 1, Fallout New Vegas.)\n<li>But if you don&#8217;t want to devise or imagine a new society, then this should be about the last humans fighting for survival in a dying world. (Mad Max Fury Road.)\n<li>But if you&#8217;re not going to do either of those, then don&#8217;t set the world 200 years after the cataclysm, because people can&#8217;t &#8220;scavenge&#8221; for 2 years, much less 20. And the idea that people could scavenge for two HUNDRED years? That&#8217;s a joke with no punchline.\n<li>But if you do that for some reason, then downplay it as much as you can. For example, don&#8217;t have the main plot turn on a character who has a rare and particular BRAND of TOBACCO that he likes to smoke, because brands (and brand loyalty) are things that only arise in complex societies. And tobacco doesn&#8217;t grow in the north. How is this supposed to work? How could this be &#8220;his brand&#8221;? Is he the only one who <strong>loots<\/strong> this stuff from ruins!? Did he drag a shipping container of cigars with him when he began his years-long trek eastward, and we just happen to meet him when he&#8217;s down to his very last box? (Which he left behind in Diamond City anyway.)\n<li>But if you DO have a character that smokes a rare brand of cigars, then maybe show that he hoards and treasures them as a rare pleasure. Which means he wouldn&#8217;t smoke three of them in a single hike and he wouldn&#8217;t leave a trail of them 80% unsmoked.\n<li>Also don&#8217;t give him the same name as the most famous brand of breakfast cereal. It&#8217;s like naming your bad guy &#8220;Ron McDonald&#8221; or &#8220;John Pepsi&#8221;. It creates strange, joke-y associations that undercut the menacing tone you&#8217;re trying to present.\n<li>But if you&#8217;re going to do all of that, then at least have the decency to make the world lighthearted, silly, playful, or goofy. Whatever you do, don&#8217;t mix this nonsense with a self-serious &#8220;They stole my baby and murdered my spouse in front of me!&#8221; plot.\n<li>If you  don&#8217;t have the basic wisdom to do that, then maybe storytelling isn&#8217;t for you. Focus on your mechanics. Keep your story simple. Limit the number of factions, don&#8217;t try to do any plot twists, and don&#8217;t have too many moving parts. Don&#8217;t break the flow of the game with too many cutscenes, keep dialog short, and don&#8217;t ever trap the player in all-dialog story sections where they have no access to the core mechanics. Dialog and exposition scenes normally cost a fortune to produce, and in a mechanics-focused game it can only frustrate them.\n<\/ol>\n<p>It is breathtaking the lengths this writer will go to in order to do the wrongest thing possible. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) This is the Xanatos Gambit (a trope) that Rutskarn referenced in this episode. I love the notion that having Dogmeat follow a trail of months(?) old cigar butts and bloody ragsDoes Kellog somehow not own any stimpacks? Dude, sell the NUKE LAUNCHER you leave out for intruders and buy some stimpacks!&#8221; was all [&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":[33],"class_list":["post-33204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-fallout"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33204","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=33204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}