Let’s say you’re James.<\/p>\n
You’ve decided to go back to the wasteland and fix the water purifier, risks be damned, but the transition from Vault sheets to wasteland streets is worse than you could have possibly imagined. Glowing water and feral dogs and scabrous humans leave you a physically and morally exhausted wreck. In the cynical days of adjustment you become certain you’ll never finish your great work, never reunite with your only child. You’ll be preyed on by a string of greedy wasteland pirates and parasites until all your efforts to help the world are forgotten to the dust of time.<\/p>\n
And then you stumble onto Galaxy News Radio and everything changes. Here at last you’ve found another genuine altruist in the hellish melee. He welcomes you, a stranger, into his heavily-guarded studio for an interview where you end up asking all the questions. He is thoughtful, savvy, warm, and patient. When you leave, he broadcasts on his radio station:<\/p>\n
So if you see James out there, you say hello. Be kind to our new brother, and show him that here on the outside, we always fight the good fight.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Then after a brief and embarrassing episode in a creepy vault you wander back to the station for a visit and an interview—hoping to give his audience a PSA about drinking water and trusting strange computer programs, perhaps—and after cracking a couple Nukas, Three Dog casually mentions:<\/p>\n
“By the way, your kid says hello.”<\/p>\n
“What?” You’re stupefied. “My child came here…and didn’t even ask where I’d gone?”<\/p>\n
“That did come up. Kind of a whiny kid you’ve got, actually. All ‘wah wah, where’s my dad, where’s my dad.’ And I’m like, does the kid need a night light for pete’s sake?”<\/p>\n
“Did you say where I’d gone?”<\/p>\n
“I sort of did. I mean, I said I knew where you’d gone, and that I’d share that info…in exchange for just, like, a tiny errand<\/em>.”<\/p>\n
“What errand did you…”<\/p>\n
“Steal a giant radio dish from super mutant infested territory. So, you know. A desperate teenager from a soft vault upbringing seemed like the ideal person for the job.”<\/p>\n
“How?!”<\/p>\n
“Okay, you got me. I just didn’t want to have to ask the paladins to do it.” He checks his calendar. “Come to think of it, all this was a couple months ago. If I had to guess, I’d say your kid really sucked at fighting the good fight.”<\/p>\n
The world spins. Your forgotten, shallow breaths lap the open mic—a live feed of your pain and suffering to Three Dog’s many, many worshipers. Your only family just died trying to find you, and died for no reason at all–except a desperate need to find and reunite with you.<\/p>\n
“Say,” says Three Dog brightly, “you doing anything right now? And do you know where the museum is?”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Three Dog’s quest is supposed to fulfill two purposes:<\/p>\n
\n
- The obvious practical concern: provide something for the player to do, stretch out the mystery of “where’s dad and what’s he up to?” Not hard stuff.<\/li>\n
- Introduce the player to one of the wasteland’s good guys, the voice of moral clarity and reason that will serve as colorful Greek chorus for the game’s full length.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
And it does a really, really bad job at both of them.<\/p>\n
\n
- While the quest is certainly “something to do,” and I have no particular bones to pick with the gameplay in a vacuum (I’ll even let the whole “carrying a goddamn satellite dish up your ass” thing slide, because honestly I don’t really care), it doesn’t prolong so much as kill the momentum of the overarching DadQuest. We just don’t get to advance the storyline here. We learn nothing about the games setting or factions or themes fetching the dish, and certainly we don’t investigate our father’s backstory or whereabouts. We’re just rewarded with info we didn’t help to collect after we waste our time with something unrelated. That is, if we don’t make our Speech check that skips the whole quest, in which case this really <\/em>fails to pad the playtime.<\/li>\n
- Here’s what we do learn: Three Dog is a grasping hypocritical asshole who will exploit heartbroken homeless teenagers by sending them on borderline suicide missions. You can’t really confront him with this, so the game doesn’t get any points for being morally complex or whatever by turning their self-righteous preacher into a scumbag.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
A more ambitious rewrite would replace this quest with something more likeBut ideally less sucky than.<\/span> the Kellogg trail in Fallout 4. <\/em>I cannot stress enough that the mystery of your dad’s disappearance cannot be narratively satisfying unless the player has any <\/em>pertinent facts through which to consider it, and a segment here where we tweeze those out and start pondering what we really know about our dad would really hit the spot. But we’re sticking to the basic structure, so let’s keep the very specific and bafflingly unrelated goal of fixing Three Dog’s stupid radio dish. Oh, and it needs to be skippable by skill check. And ideally, skipping it with a skill check should in some way a more interesting option than, “Meh, skip the quest I guess, whatever.” All this might seem like an ambitious redesign goal. And yet, I find the rewrite pretty simple to sum up:<\/p>\n
“You want to know where your dad went? It’s weird—he promised me he’d come back and check in, but he never did. How about I ask listeners if they’ve seen him? If only my radio show had a longer range…”<\/p>\n
Player options should now include:<\/p>\n
\n
- Volunteer to fix the radio dish, as it’s clearly the fastest and most surefire way to find your father. If you do this, you’ll come back to find Three Dog’s already collected a reported sighting from someone within the new broadcast range. Next stop, Rivet City!<\/li>\n
- Convince Three Dog to share his uncertain gut feelings. If you pass a Speech check, he’ll speculate that your father’s path lead to the northeast portion of the map. Next stop, the Rivet City area!<\/li>\n
- Say “thanks for nothing” and move on. Sooner or later, the player will stumble onto Rivet City.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
That’s already much better, but we can improve further still. Next week, let’s get past the vague allusions to a richer mystery and get in-depth with making James and quests about finding James actually interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let’s say you’re James. You’ve decided to go back to the wasteland and fix the water purifier, risks be damned, but the transition from Vault sheets to wasteland streets is worse than you could have possibly imagined. Glowing water and feral dogs and scabrous humans leave you a physically and morally exhausted wreck. In the […]<\/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-40633","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\/40633","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=40633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}