{"id":40518,"date":"2017-09-01T16:29:48","date_gmt":"2017-09-01T20:29:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40518"},"modified":"2017-09-08T01:04:46","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T05:04:46","slug":"overhallout-part-4-mutations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40518","title":{"rendered":"Overhaulout Part 4: Mutations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a question for anyone who’s beaten Fallout 3<\/em>: what role do super mutants, the most common and iconic enemy in the entire game, play in the main storyline?<\/p>\n

Really take a minute. Spool through the mutant-laden story beats: the brawl outside GNR, the mission to the Museum of Technology, the cleansing of the purifier, the expedition to Vault 87. Really let it sink in how much time you spend trading shots with these geeks compared to, say, the Enclave: how much earlier you encounter them, how much more prominent they are, how much more of your resources they eat up.<\/p>\n

Now ask yourself again: what role do they actually play in the story?<\/em><\/p>\n

But we’ve summed it up, haven’t we? They exist. They exist again, again. They shoot and must be shot at. If you find-replaced super mutants with anything else at all, berserk killer robots or cold calculating mercenaries or a platoon of brainless body-snatching coral shrimp, the story wouldn’t really change much. Their agenda and origins and function are immaterial.<\/p>\n

I don’t think it’s too fussily formalist to argue that your videogame’s earliest and most common enemies should have a stake in or relevance to the major conflict. I guess you could argue that they demonstrate the altruism of the Brotherhood of Steel by providing an opponent to be combated, but that is an extremely low bar. I’d argue it’s the basic function any antagonist at all would fulfill.<\/p>\n

I don’t actually like this idea, and it’s outside the scope of my redesign anyway, but but for the sake of argument consider a Fallout 3 <\/em>where the player and Brotherhood fought Enclave forces for the whole game<\/em>. You arrive outside GNR and Enclave troops are trying to capture the radio station. Enclave troops destroy the radio dish to prevent GNR from broadcasting its alerts and organizing the Wasteland. Enclave troops have occupied the purifier searching for your father. Imagine a game, in other words, where the game’s actual antagonist is established as a threat before the midway point of the game. For all that you’d lose in enemy variety and the thrill of discovery and story nuance, isn’t it better to spend your time tangling with your family’s actual nemesis instead of a bunch of staggeringly irrelevant ogres?<\/p>\n

There’s no way around it: before we go any further, we’re going to find something to do with our super mutants. Before I do, I’ll show my work and explain what I will and won’t change to get results.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
<\/div><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Bethesda MOBology<\/h2>\n

The reason super mutants are a story problem comes down to Bethesda’s valid but inflexible approach to enemy design.<\/p>\n

I’m sure the developers would offer a nuanced disagreement, but I’d argue that broadly, Bethesda isn’t interested in baking narrative into non-named opponents. In Obsidian’s version of Fallout<\/em>, the spiky human hostile raiding class are called “Fiends” and have a culture (anarchist transgressive tweaking), leadership structure (main leader in the heart of the territory, smaller warbosses chosen for their craziness and killing power scattered everywhere), territory (a gradient around their HQ, Vault 3) and goal (obtaining gear and cash to spend getting chems from the Great Khans). This kind of specificity can be called a “context-heavy” approach to enemies.<\/p>\n

In Bethesda’s Fallout 3,<\/em> the human <\/em>raiders are called “raiders.” They have no specific culture, structure, goals, or territory. They’re just MOBs. We can call this “context-light.”<\/p>\n

The advantage of context-heavy design is obvious; it provides more fertile ground for storytelling. The disadvantage is, you can’t really work outside that context. If a developer has a great idea for a dungeon full of raider-type enemies, they can’t use it unless they can fit it inside the region and story context of the Fiends. Bethesda’s context-light approach lets them treat enemies a little more generically, which empowers them to make the overworld however they think will be most enjoyable to the player. As much as I personally love Obsidian’s approach, I think this more liberating design standard plays some part in making Bethesda’s open worlds more favorably received in the gaming community. I do think it’s relevant to point out that Bethesda introduced a few specific raider factions in Fallout 4…except they’re super generic and noncommittal. I think it just represents Bethesda trying to eat its cake and have it too.<\/span><\/p>\n

So don’t expect me to write a post like this for generic raiders. Let me be very clear: I wouldn’t bother “fixing” super mutants by making them tell stories if they weren’t such a big part of<\/em> the main story<\/em>. <\/em>You can have as many generic MOBs in shopping centers and skyscrapers and sewers as you want, but it’s silly to fill the main quest with antagonists that want nothing and relate to nobody. But I will keep Bethesda’s design principles in mind and not saddle super mutants with more baggage than their place in the game can bear.<\/p>\n

So I’ll ask first: what’s the very least we could do?<\/p>\n

Even if we wanted to make super mutants as generic as possible, we could at least plug some kind of arc into the game. We could layer a little context into the super mutant quests to create a sense of progression:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Super mutants are a huge long-term problem…\n
      \n
    1. …so you shoot a bunch of them, and…<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
    2. Super mutants are now angry and hunting you…\n
        \n
      1. …so you shoot a whole bunch of them, and…<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
      2. Super mutants are no longer a long-term problem.\n
          \n
        1. Yay!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          As it is, there’s no arc to super mutants at all. Super mutants you shoot in one quest aren’t just unconnected to the main narrative, they’re totally unconnected to the last group of super mutants you shot. <\/em>The “resolution” to the question of super mutants, telling the Elder where they come from after visiting Vault 87, is a skippable and abrupt afterthought with little emotional payoff.<\/p>\n

          The Vault 87 section might actually be the most frustrating part of Bethesda’s treatment. In explaining where super mutants come from, and making it something completely unrelated to the main storyline, it amounts to answering a question nobody (including the game!) really asked. It’s not a lot more than a hand-wave to lore nerds mad about super mutants on the East Coast, and I’m guessing that’s a small percentage of Bethesda’s playerbase and an even smaller percentage of Bethesda’s target audience.<\/p>\n

          You know what, enough dancing around. You ready for my solution to the super mutant problem?<\/p>\n

          <\/div>
          <\/div><\/p>\n

          My Solution to the Super Mutant Problem<\/h2>\n

          I’ll be honest: this answer is so obvious I spent literally an hour combing through wikis checking to make sure it wasn’t already in the game. If it somehow was, and I just missed it, and apparently everyone else <\/em>missed it, mention it in the comments. Also mention in the comments if this was already your headcanon, because I think that’s surprisingly likely.<\/p>\n

          You know what? How about I start by dispassionately relaying some plot points that already totally exist in the game.<\/p>\n

            \n
          • Deathclaws are berserk mutants created when living creatures are exposed to FEV.<\/li>\n
          • Super mutants are berserk mutants created when living creatures are exposed to FEV.<\/li>\n
          • The Enclave has been experimenting with mind-controlling Deathclaws to help them conquer the capital wasteland.<\/li>\n
          • …<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

            Yeah, that wasn’t hard, was it?<\/p>\n

            To be clear, what I’m proposing is that the Enclave is in some way using super mutants as agents of terror. I’m suggesting that many of them were deliberately bred, some of them are deliberately deployed, and all those deliberately employed can be stood down or destroyed by the Enclave with minimal effort (bomb collars, command phrases, designer viruses, etc). Until such time as the Enclave is prepared to commit to an invasion of the capital, super mutants prevents anyone else from establishing stable governments, armies, or infrastructure. Their naturally bloodthirsty rampages and tendency to infest large sections of the prewar city makes trade empires difficult, exploration and recovery of prewar resources too expensive to contemplate, and conquest of other regions too difficult—it’s hard to build an empire when you’re busy fighting off the barbarian hordes<\/del> cannibalistic mutant menace at home, on the march, and<\/em> at your destination. And then, when there’s something the Enclave really <\/em>wants, it’s time to arm and deploy the “leashed” mutants as terrifyingly effective deniable assets.<\/p>\n

            It’s sort of ridiculous how little needs to be added to turn super mutants into the secret weapon of the Enclave. The game has super mutants attack GNR’s radio dish because “they like shooting things,” attack GNR headquarters because “they like attacking things,” and occupy the water purifier because “they wanted to, we guess.” Kind of funny how all the pointless, random actions of the super mutants just happens to damage the player’s interests and drive the Enclave’s, huh? All we’d have to do is add one line saying “The Enclave did it” and we’d have answered more questions than we raised.<\/p>\n

            Especially if we find a way to pop or at least foreshadow the reveal of this before the tilt where our father’s killed, this actually does a lot of necessary work raising the Enclave’s profile as villains. I mean, sure, one evil officer shooting a scientists and putting your dad on the spot is bad enough to make you want to beat them, but that’s not as objectively loathsome as a faction who will let thousands die in horrible Black-Forest-fairy-tale agony just to create the ideal conditions for a power grab. Super mutants are boogeymen<\/em>. They create so much grief on a daily basis that it takes all of the resources of what should be the capital’s main source of order, stability, and renewed infrastructure, the Brotherhood of Steel, just to keep them from destroying everything. How terrifying and sickening and meaningful would it be to find that all of this was done with the Enclave’s consent, and some of it was deliberately undertaken with armed, groomed, or even mind-controlled platoons?<\/p>\n

            It also makes the stakes of the Enclave’s dramatic appearance much clearer. It’s not really clear in the original game what the Enclave’s sudden appearance and attack on the purifier represents on a grander scale. Is that all they want? Is it the first step or closer to the end goal? How committed are they, actually? These answers exist, sort of, but you have to spend a long time fighting the Enclave to really get a full understanding of them.<\/p>\n

            By connecting the super mutant presence to the Enclave’s grander designs, we’ll be able to better reveal to the player what Bethesda intended: that the water purifier is not the first step nor the last one, but the lynchpin that’s so important it’s worth escalating from propaganda and destabilization to an open full-scale military action.<\/p>\n

            The Battle for GNR<\/h2>\n

            I barely have to rewrite any of this actual section to fit my new hook. The exciting shish-boom-pop E3-friendly setpiece where you kill the behemoth with the Fat Man can still happen. In fact, you could say I’m not adding something so much as removing it: I’m deliberately lessening the sense of confident understanding the paladins convey. In my draft the talent super mutants have for being a pain in the ass will be seen not as natural, but darkly absurd. How do such apparently brainless and disorganized creatures create so much chaos? How is it that their random attacks always seem to come at the worst possible times for the paladins, GNR, and surrounding settlements? Where do they come from, anyway? Some of the younger paladins will be curious, but the veterans will have transcended curiosity to resigned acceptance:<\/p>\n

            God rolls the dice, and he loves super mutants, and he sure hates us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

            They’re clearly fatigued and exasperated that they have all this technology and all these resources to create a new society, and they can’t so much as set up a power generator without a bunch of super mutants pissing all over it.<\/p>\n

            I should have been an engineer. I should have been building, connecting people. Instead I’ve spent my whole life in this fucking tin suit shooting at freaks who don’t care if they live or die. I’ve lost my friends and my shoulder cartilage and most of my hearing, and just when things finally started to get better…it got worse.<\/p>\n

            Thanks to the super mutants.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

            NEXT WEEK: THREE-DOG AND DOCTOR LI<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

            Here’s a question for anyone who’s beaten Fallout 3: what role do super mutants, the most common and iconic enemy in the entire game, play in the main storyline? Really take a minute. Spool through the mutant-laden story beats: the brawl outside GNR, the mission to the Museum of Technology, the cleansing of the purifier, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40518","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=40518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}