{"id":34837,"date":"2016-10-06T20:05:28","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T00:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=34837"},"modified":"2016-10-06T20:17:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T00:17:00","slug":"fallout-4-ep44-gorillaz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=34837","title":{"rendered":"Fallout 4 EP44: Gorillaz"},"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\/-A4v3qSN0Ag\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-A4v3qSN0Ag'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Why does <em>Fallout 4 <\/em>have a pre-war protagonist? It&#8217;s very expensive in terms of story resources and offers nothing but a weak twist.<\/p>\n<p>Our character is different from <em>everyone else <\/em>in this game&#8217;s world. Shaun was an infant for a few months of your timeline, and ghouls have creaky memories of the before-times, but we are the only person on Earth to have closed our eyes on the pre-war world and opened them on a Boschian nightmare. This premise is a big deal. Every conversation and scenario is loaded with the understanding that we are from a different time, a comfortable time&#8211;a time that almost made sense. Upkeep on this idea is paid by repeatedly bringing it up, and when it isn&#8217;t paid there&#8217;s awkward and conspicuous holes in conversations. I&#8217;d say <em>Fallout 4 <\/em>pays upkeep about half the time.<\/p>\n<p>The payoff on all this ought to be that we have some unique perspective on the game&#8217;s central conflict. That&#8217;s usually why games have bother with elaborate outsider origins for protagonists. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=32124\">Tidus is the perfect antidote to Spira&#8217;s dogma because he comes from a time before people compromised.<\/a> In <em>Alpha Protocol, <\/em>there&#8217;s a very long tutorial area to establish that you&#8217;re a promising agent who&#8217;s been burned by his country&#8211;which does pay off, because the idea that you&#8217;re a hunted rogue agent adds drama and intrigue to scenarios. The protagonist of <em>Far Cry 2 <\/em>is a foreign mercenary because it means none of the factions who deal with you bother with ideological pretense. <em>This guy&#8217;s only motivated to kill by self interest, so why pretend we&#8217;re different?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In <em>Fallout 4<\/em>, we&#8217;re from the pre-war era because&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->&#8230;we can approach the conflict as an outsider? That&#8217;s important, sure&#8211;so how do we approach the conflict differently than, I don&#8217;t know, a settler from irradiated Delaware? Or a tribal from the mutant talking gator kingdoms of Louisiana? Or a diplomat from Mega Kansas? Or, hell, how about just another damn vault dweller? Did we really need to load the story with all this baggage to establish that we&#8217;re new here and don&#8217;t know all the factions and monsters? Factions and monsters, by the way, that can be set up in about six seconds of the ten-minute intro?<\/p>\n<p>Was it so we could have the very convoluted and specific detail that the leader of one of the factions is our son? Because that&#8217;s another expensive detail that doesn&#8217;t do a damn thing for the story. Is there even a single scene besides our reunion that&#8217;s made appreciably more tense or dramatic by our special relationship with Father? From what I&#8217;ve seen&#8211;and I haven&#8217;t seen everything&#8211;it doesn&#8217;t seem to have occurred to the developers that this twist should have a point.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, let&#8217;s say <em>Fallout 4 <\/em>was a well-told story. What would the payoff for this twist even look like? How would <em>I&#8217;m your son, but I don&#8217;t remember you or really care that much apparently <\/em>set up a satisfying conclusion? Is the game even willing to tell that story, or is it too excited to move onto its big faction battles?<\/p>\n<p>So what <em>do<\/em> we get out of being a pre-war protagonist? Let&#8217;s say Vault 111 was just another vault, we&#8217;re just another vault-grown contemporary reject, and Father&#8217;s just another boring antagonist\/faction leader. We&#8217;d immediately ditch a ton of baggage and expensive unique assets&#8230;.and we&#8217;d lose, what?<\/p>\n<p>This game is such a mess. I don&#8217;t know about Shamus and the rest of the crew, but I actually prefer <em>Fallout 3<\/em>&#8216;s narrative. It was convoluted, but at least it had some sense of vitality and central purpose. This thing&#8217;s like spreading a pat of butter over a rubber exercise ball. You&#8217;re scraping it so thin you might as well not put any on at all, and&#8211;actually, <em>why the fuck are you spreading <\/em><em>butter on this?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) Why does Fallout 4 have a pre-war protagonist? It&#8217;s very expensive in terms of story resources and offers nothing but a weak twist. Our character is different from everyone else in this game&#8217;s world. Shaun was an infant for a few months of your timeline, and ghouls have creaky memories of the before-times, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34837","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\/34837","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\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}