{"id":33305,"date":"2016-07-14T14:46:48","date_gmt":"2016-07-14T18:46:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33305"},"modified":"2016-07-14T22:20:52","modified_gmt":"2016-07-15T02:20:52","slug":"fallout-4-ep20-bye-kellog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33305","title":{"rendered":"Fallout 4 EP20: Bye Kellogg"},"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\/GM1WUgqcI_E\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=GM1WUgqcI_E'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>We talked about building magazine racks for the comic collection you can build in this game. This is the largest my library ever got:<\/p>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/fallout4_comics2.jpg' width=100% alt='Collected during a hardcore permadeath run. That&apos;s not as hard as it sounds, since I also have a mod to take the level restrictions off of perks.' title='Collected during a hardcore permadeath run. That&apos;s not as hard as it sounds, since I also have a mod to take the level restrictions off of perks.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>Collected during a hardcore permadeath run. That&apos;s not as hard as it sounds, since I also have a mod to take the level restrictions off of perks.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>The scene where you&#8217;re railroaded into picking a fight with Kellogg is a disaster. A farce. A sad mockery of every possible definition of &#8220;roleplaying game&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>So Bethesda gives us a voiced protagonist, but then refuses to give them a discernible personality. So we have a&#8230; voiced blank slate? Then they put us into a conversation with a character where THE OTHER PERSON is willing to make peace, but after weeks of dicking around punching radroaches and building shacks for Preston Garvey, our no-personality character is overcome with bloodlust. Our avatar insists on picking a fight while surrounded, after giving up the element of surprise. But it&#8217;s not enough that our character is an incoherent, tactically inept dipshit. We&#8217;re made to participate in this stupidity by initiating the fight from a four-options-but-only-one-choice dialog wheel.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some options that the player might want to consider if this were an actual roleplaying game:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Kellogg seems to know some stuff. He knows what happened to your kid. He might know where Shawn is. He knows the reason for the attack. He knows how reach \/ contact the Institute. Let&#8217;s continue the conversation and pump him for information by using things like dialog and speech skills and charisma.\n<li>If we brought some sort of hard-to-find proof that the Institute used this whole incident as a way to dispose of Kellogg, then he might be miffed enough to switch teams. Maybe he feels bad about what he did to us (and a lot of other people) and he&#8217;s looking for a path towards redemption?\n<li>Maybe we want to pump him for info, pretend to part on amicable terms, and then ambush him once we&#8217;re in a more advantageous position?\n<li>Maybe we conclude that he&#8217;s just a hired gun, and that &#8211; having become a hired gun ourselves &#8211; we decide to leave him alive.\n<li>Maybe we want to leave him alive in the hopes that he&#8217;ll call or visit his employer and we can tail him.\n<li>Maybe we don&#8217;t want to talk to him at all and want to sneak in through some secret way and backstab him.\n<li>Or maybe we want to stagger into the open, get surrounded, fail to ask any useful questions, and then pick a fight in the open while telegraphing our intentions before drawing a weapon.\n<\/ol>\n<p>I understand games can&#8217;t have limitless choice, but the only choice available to us is the most brazenly idiotic and unsatisfying possible. Here we have a roleplaying game that flies apart if you attempt to roleplay anything other than an INT:1 berserker thug. The game pretends to offer us choice to get our hopes up, and then dashes those hopes by forcing us to do the thing we&#8217;re least likely to want. If you&#8217;re only going to have one choice, then that choice should at least be sort of &#8220;most obvious road \/ path of least resistance&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>This game is diabolical in its misguided wrongness. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) We talked about building magazine racks for the comic collection you can build in this game. This is the largest my library ever got: The scene where you&#8217;re railroaded into picking a fight with Kellogg is a disaster. A farce. A sad mockery of every possible definition of &#8220;roleplaying game&#8221;. So Bethesda gives [&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-33305","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\/33305","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=33305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}