{"id":40734,"date":"2017-09-22T12:28:26","date_gmt":"2017-09-22T16:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40734"},"modified":"2017-09-22T12:28:26","modified_gmt":"2017-09-22T16:28:26","slug":"overhaulout-part-5-the-story-of-james","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40734","title":{"rendered":"Overhaulout Part 5: The Story of James"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Fallout 3&#8217;s <\/em>James is a terrible main character&#8211;possibly because he wasn&#8217;t understood to be in some ways <em>the <\/em>main character. His actions, principles, and backstory solely drive the main quest right up until he dies. This week is about making all that count for something: making the player&#8217;s relationship with and study of James something useful and worthwhile.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lot we stand to improve, but these are my chief objectives:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>The story should provide a genuine mystery players feel they&#8217;re solving. <\/b>I don&#8217;t mean adding detective mechanics or even detective-lite sequences, like <em>Fallout 4 <\/em>dabbles in. When I say the story should be a &#8220;mystery,&#8221; I mean there should be a progression from unexplained but important event&#8211;&gt; disconnected facts that are but incomplete but intriguing&#8211;&gt; revelations that suggest possibilities &#8211;&gt; satisfying conclusion. That&#8217;s a pretty standard formula for hooking, motivating, and entertaining an audience presented with a question that needs answering, like, &#8220;Why did my dad just vanish?&#8221; Currently the story runs from unexplained but important event&#8211;&gt;directions to the end of the mystery&#8211;&gt;directions to the end of the mystery&#8211;&gt;the mystery unravels abruptly.<span class='snote' title='1'>Technically, by having your character&#8217;s birth take place in a location not available inside the vault, the game provides a subtle clue to the mystery of &#8220;what&#8217;s up with dad.&#8221; Which would be great, if it weren&#8217;t the only clue.<\/span>  That&#8217;s sort of mechanically functional, since a big part of the game is in journeying from place to place, but it&#8217;s also dull and doesn&#8217;t make efficient or memorable use of the setup.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Make more complete use of the characters and locations already employed by the story. <\/strong>If you cut Megaton from the main quest&#8217;s gameplay, that&#8217;d be a huge loss&#8212;it serves a lot of mechanical functionality. But from a story perspective, Megaton is totally dispensable. It doesn&#8217;t inform our understanding of James&#8217; character or our mission to find him in anything but the most perfunctory fashion: &#8220;he went that-a-way.&#8221; Let&#8217;s fix that.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to proceed through the locations of the main quest in order. For each location, I&#8217;ll do two related rewrites: one that makes a drastic alteration to the location&#8217;s history vis-a-vis its relationship with James, another that makes minor alterations to how the player finds it and what clues<span class='snote' title='2'>Again, not even clues in the sense that they functionally permit the mystery to be solved; just clues in the sense that they encourage the player to actually speculate about the information they&#8217;ve received.<\/span> are available there. In doing so I&#8217;m going to set a new rule for myself: in his life before Vault 101, James should have progressed from area to area in the same chronological order as the player. This not only makes it easier for the player to eventually connect the clues they&#8217;ve found and figure out what their father was up to, it suggests a sense of continuity between the main characters. By the time they meet James, they&#8217;ll have walked in his shoes: they&#8217;ll have seen what he&#8217;s seen and understand why he made his choices. This is important because before long, James will die, and the player will have to decide whether they&#8217;re going to follow in his footsteps or choose their own path.<\/p>\n<h2><!--more--> <strong>Megaton<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/f3k_14.png' width=100% alt='' title=''\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'><\/div><\/p>\n<p><strong>Decades Ago&#8230;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40391\">A glitchy source of stable water controlled by a tyrannical scientist-king, Megaton is carrot and stick to hundreds of laborers.<\/a>  Scavengers, manufacturers, tradesmen and tradeswomen&#8212;all keep their heads down and follow the hydroking&#8217;s whims, believing his claims that without his maintenance secrets the machines will overload and the only stable source of clean water will vanish. The only people who really profit off his manipulations are the tyrant&#8217;s cronies, the ones with the resources or charm to get in his good graces and reap some of the rewards of hydromonopoly. Despite his unique medical knowledge, James is not one of these people. He tells himself that he stays in Megaton so he can provide for people the tyrant would otherwise extort or neglect. Secretly, he suspects he stays out of fear and complacency.<\/p>\n<p>One day, an engineer named Catherine comes to James in private asking him to treat her serious electrical burns. James feels elated, vindicated: he really is recognized as distinct from the tyrant&#8217;s system. He asks her how she got the burns, and because she trusts him she tells him: she was working on a way to permanently stabilize the purifier. This is what James has been waiting to hear. This is the dangerous and important praxis to knock him out of complacency. He uses his relatively trusted status to beg, borrow, or purchase obscure texts for Catherine to study. He studies with her and helps her run experiments. He learns basic engineering; then, more complex engineering. He spies for her. When the day comes, he stands watch while she makes her move.<\/p>\n<p>The purifier is liberated. The tyrant flees into the wasteland with his cronies, his work undone. Most of the labor force spreads out to find more productive scavenging or hunting, returning only for fresh supplies every day or two. Megaton becomes a destination for merchants and home for those who sell to merchants. James considers being one of these people, but Catherine convinces him that they&#8217;re fast becoming the capital&#8217;s premier experts on water purification. They have a duty to share that information. So they arm themselves and venture east.<\/p>\n<p>Most of Megaton&#8217;s old guard remember Catherine fondly and even make a junk statue of her in the style of the capital&#8217;s ruins. Only one of the men who lingered still holds a grudge: Catherine&#8217;s previous partner-in-treason, a man who&#8217;d supplied parts and taken risk for the operation because he believed they&#8217;d become the new tyrants. A cunning, enterprising young man named Colin Moriarty.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Modern Day<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>While the player is traveling to Megaton, they pass a patch of unusually bright flowers near Vault 101.<\/p>\n<p>Not many in Megaton were there when Catherine liberated the town, but everyone more or less knows the story and will happily tell it, pointing to the indistinct rusty junk-monument on the hill. Still, no-one recognized the &#8220;old fellow who spent thousands of caps on supplies and went off south&#8221;<span class='snote' title='3'>Wait a minute&#8230;caps? How did he have thousands of bottlecaps? You can ask, but no-one has a better answer than a shrug.<\/span> as the young doctor from twenty-five years ago.<\/p>\n<p>Moriarty <em>did <\/em>recognize your father, but when he finds out you&#8217;re the man&#8217;s offspring he&#8217;s by no means inclined to help either of you. He offers to sell you information for a heavy price; if you turn him down and come back later, he jacks it up. The only thing that gives him pleasure is the idea that the offspring of the people who screwed him over in the name of altruism is doing his dirty work in the name of naked, vicious greed. Give him his money, he&#8217;ll give you exactly one piece of information: &#8220;He asked about that damn radio station to the east.&#8221; He gloats that he&#8217;ll probably die trying to get there&#8212;that it&#8217;s a rat&#8217;s nest of super mutants not even the merchants are crazy enough to cut through.<\/p>\n<p>At the Catherine Monument, the player finds a single, bright flower.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>GNR<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/f3k_15.png' width=100% alt='' title=''\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'><\/div><\/p>\n<p><strong>Decades Ago&#8230;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Jacob and Catherine&#8217;s two-person humanitarian mission finds mixed results. Sometimes it&#8217;s all they can do to set up a crude water purifier for irradiated nomads; sometimes they&#8217;re chased off by feral robbers and raiders gone mad from radiation poisoning. Often enough, they&#8217;ll fix or install a system only to discover raiders have killed the owners and taken it over. Painfully admitting that they&#8217;re doing more harm than good with piecemeal efforts, James and Catherine set up a lab to work on a larger solution in the basement of a defunct radio station.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Modern Day<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>On the way to GNR, the player occasionally finds clusters of raiders around unusual water sources: seemingly normal water fountains, sinks, and pumps that give zero rads and have the prefix &#8220;Purified.&#8221; Visually, the only common feature of these sources is that they&#8217;re engraved with a big fat &#8220;J + C.&#8221; One of these raider groups attempts to sell the water to the player at an extortionately high rate, explaining just how rare pure water is. If the player refuses, the raiders turn violent.<\/p>\n<p>Three Dog doesn&#8217;t really know why your father came: James was too cagey to discuss who he really was or where he was going. Three Dog does mention your father spent a lot of time &#8220;with the old computers in the basement.&#8221; All of said computers have been wiped&#8211;and very recently&#8211;except for one corrupted terminal that displays fragments of research notes about &#8220;mass water purification,&#8221; references to a person named Catherine, &#8220;the problem of raiders co-opting water,&#8221; and finally a potential ally: &#8220;Doctor Li, if the merchants are to be believed.&#8221; This is less of a clue than the lead doing Three Dog&#8217;s quest will create, but to a diligent player it might just connect to a mention of a Dr. Li from a random trader earlier.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Rivet City<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/f3k_11.png' width=100% alt='' title=''\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'><\/div><\/p>\n<p>James and Catherine finally meet up with a genius radiation expert named Dr. Li. The three young idealists hatch a plan to create the ultimate purifier. Not just a resource to fight over; free water for everyone, forever. An end to so much of the tyranny and madness and death and violence that plagues the wasteland. When it becomes too vast, their project moves from Rivet City to the nearby memorial. The work tirelessly, fueled by their collective brilliance and many early breakthroughs. When setbacks inevitably come it&#8217;s that much more painful.<\/p>\n<p>At first the project merely stalls. Then it bites back. Radiation leaks kill one of the scientists they&#8217;d hired to work on the project. A tank fails catastrophically and nearly detonates, ruining irreplaceable pre-war tech. Benefactors from Rivet City pull their funding. But still they labor on&#8211;until one bleak morning when Dr. Li discovers a heretofore unforseen problem.<\/p>\n<p>The plant certainly could purify huge batches of water&#8211;but with only a little tweaking, and actually far less engineering, it could just as easily purify reservoir quantities of water while exacerbating the contamination elsewhere. She presents this to James and Catherine as merely something to watch out for, but they&#8217;re horrified: they know better than anyone that for a certain kind of tyrant, this would be not a bug but a feature, a way to extort subjects and customers while literally killing off the competition. Dr. Li accepts their judgment and suggests scaling back to a more conventional yet high-grade purification system, but your parents&#8217; spirits drop.<\/p>\n<p>Then, far too late, the next bombshell drops: the &#8220;pure&#8221; water they&#8217;d created from their early successes had a contaminant. Easy to eliminate, if you know it&#8217;s there. Unhealthy, but not individually fatal unless the afflicted is under severe physical duress.<\/p>\n<p>Two weeks later Catherine dies in childbirth.<\/p>\n<p>More scientists leave the project. The usual supply drop doesn&#8217;t come. Super mutants are seen roving the area, killing and marauding. James is a father now. He&#8217;s heard rumors that there&#8217;s problems with the water chip at Vault 101, that robots are roving the wasteland offering desperate sums for a fix or a replacement.<\/p>\n<p>James swallows his pride.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Rivet City, Modern Day<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Dr. Li reveals the practical elements of the mystery: that your parents were wasteland-roving water radicals who eventually tried, and failed, to give the Wasteland the gift of health and stability. What she doesn&#8217;t is the whole story, including exactly why he left. That part James will have to explain in person.<\/p>\n<p><strong>NEXT WEEK: PROJECT PURITY, THAT VAULT WITH THE CREEPY KID, AND WHY I HAVEN&#8217;T INTRODUCED THE ENCLAVE YET<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fallout 3&#8217;s James is a terrible main character&#8211;possibly because he wasn&#8217;t understood to be in some ways the main character. His actions, principles, and backstory solely drive the main quest right up until he dies. This week is about making all that count for something: making the player&#8217;s relationship with and study of James something [&hellip;]<\/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-40734","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\/40734","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=40734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}