{"id":41417,"date":"2018-01-05T12:23:36","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T17:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=41417"},"modified":"2018-01-05T18:54:54","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T23:54:54","slug":"overhaulout-part-11-the-ugly-factory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=41417","title":{"rendered":"Overhaulout Part 11: The Ugly Factory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The internet quakes with hatred for Little Lamplight, but besides a few dismissive complaints about flashbang logistics I&#8217;ve not heard anyone talk about Vault 87. This leads me to a small and admittedly contestable digression about how modern <em>Fallout<\/em> games are discussed by their fanbases. My survey methodology consists of Reading Too Many Internet Comments, so feel free to rebut with your own and be sure to include an appropriately scornful reaction gif.<\/p>\n<p>By now I think I&#8217;ve read an equal amount of straightforwardly fannish discussions of <em>Fallout 3 <\/em>and <em>New Vegas. <\/em>I&#8217;m excluding here discussions about which one is better, or fun conversations co-opted into a dominance battle by salty <em>New Vegas<\/em> fans, or even nuanced goods-and-bads critical shakedowns. Basically, I&#8217;m just talking about low-key conversations where someone brings up either game and it sets off a chain of people complimenting it. Said positive discussions about <em>Fallout 3 <\/em>focus around two subjects:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The extemporaneous experience of playing the game (&#8220;I loved just roaming the Wasteland, dog at my side, gun in my hand, picking my nose, full bowl of cereal, she hadn&#8217;t left me yet, exploring ruins&#8230;&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>A dozen or so &#8220;hit&#8221; quests, character, or locations (&#8220;Remember the Vault with the Garys? Moira? Megaton? Paradise Falls? North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe?&#8221;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Whereas the New Vegas conversations focus far less on the extemporaneous experience, but cover a much larger area of the written and planned content, to the point where I can&#8217;t say confidently that I&#8217;ve never read a discussion of almost <em>any<\/em> quest or character.<\/p>\n<p>Assuming you buy any of my ad hoc sampling salad, you&#8217;ve got two faction-coded inferences to choose from: &#8220;A lot of <em>Fallout 3<\/em>&#8216;s content isn&#8217;t very interesting&#8221; and &#8220;Obsidian&#8217;s bad at creating an experience that transcends its content.&#8221; I&#8217;d actually hedge somewhere in the middle, but for obvious reasons that first idea&#8217;s more relevant to this project, and I&#8217;ll follow it up with this one:<\/p>\n<p>Nobody talks positively about Vault 87 because it&#8217;s nowhere near as good or interesting as it should be.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not saying most people didn&#8217;t like it. I&#8217;m saying it left, at best, a very faintly positive impression, and considering this is the part of the game where we a.) get the GECK b.) find out where <del>babies<\/del> Super Mutants come from c.) meet one of the game&#8217;s better companions and d.) are captured by the Enclave in a let&#8217;s say <em>unexpected <\/em>twist that kicks off the whole last chapter, it&#8217;s telling that none of this gets brought up except by way of grousing about the latter part.<\/p>\n<p>So how do we fix this section?<\/p>\n<p>What if I told you we already have?<\/p>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/f3k_12.png' width=100% alt='' title=''\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'><\/div><\/p>\n<h2>Problem 1: Nobody Cares Where the Super Mutants are Coming From<\/h2>\n<p>Because the origin of the super mutants wasn&#8217;t a mystery, at least not in any functional or classical sense. It&#8217;s something the player didn&#8217;t know, but it&#8217;s not something they had much call to think about or pursue before stumbling into this section. The reaction is &#8220;Oh, huh,&#8221; when it probably should be, &#8220;Of course!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>99% of players had no substantive experience with the first games and therefore didn&#8217;t think of super mutants as being much different from brahmin or radscorpions. The small percentage of players who knew and cared that there shouldn&#8217;t be FEV mutants on the East Coast weren&#8217;t waiting around for a big reveal any more than they were waiting to find out where the roasted iguanas and scorpions were coming from. A mystery based on an esoteric inconsistency which passes for a groanworthy IMDB goof doesn&#8217;t really satisfy anybody.<\/p>\n<p>A classical mystery has three components<span class='snote' title='1'><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Anus\">Source<\/a>.<\/span>: a question that the setting establishes to be baffling, a series of clues that may lead a keen investigator to the truth, and a reveal that connects these clues together. We&#8217;re pretty much 1 for 3, and it&#8217;s the last one, which in isolation leaves by far the least impact on an audience. You can raise questions you never answer, but it&#8217;s pointless to answer questions nobody asked.<\/p>\n<p>Besides that, there&#8217;s no actual payoff to finding the mutant spawning grounds. Super mutants are treated like a nuisance by most of the game&#8217;s communities, and the few that seem afraid of them never wish: &#8220;Boy, if only someone figured out where these were coming from!&#8221; Which is just as well, because as this game would have it there basically <em>is <\/em>no point to finding out where they come from. You can&#8217;t directly do anything to meaningfully slow down super mutant production, which, considering we&#8217;re very near what&#8217;s supposed to be the end of this videogame, seems pointlessly fussy.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve already supplied most of what&#8217;s missing. In the fight for GNR the Brotherhood introduced a two-pronged mystery regarding the super mutants: a.) they seem to come from nowhere and breed endlessly, which is strange, and b.) they&#8217;re weirdly accurate in hitting the most vulnerable and consequential targets in efforts to rebuild the Wasteland. We present clues as (at various times and places) players see mutants either hitting enemies of the Enclave or occupying territories just before or after the Enclave swoops in (as in Project Purity, which in our version sneakily implies Enclave and mutants were cohabitating there at some point). Finally, we have the payoff : by the evidence of terminals, exhibits, Enclave folding chairs, and finally a reveal on the final level of the Vault, players learn that <em>rage-filled but mind-controllable <\/em><em>Super Mutants are being bred by the Encalve using a combination of leftover FEV virus and radiation from a modified GECK<\/em> system<span class='snote' title='2'>Because the GECK is a suitcase full of magical technology, remember? As I said in the very beginning: I am not here to save the True Lore, I&#8217;m here to work with what we&#8217;ve got.<\/span>. The Enclave has used them to disrupt and destabilize the Wasteland so that no other civilizations or support systems take root, ensuring a lack of military rivals, resistance networks, or alternative means of survival for a vast soon-to-be-suborned population. The final stage of their plan? Figure out how to poison the already-radioactive waterways and drive whole communities, begging, to Enclave manufacturing centers. Little hidden note on a terminal: this has included buying out water merchants and <em>staking a huge sum of caps for someone to blow up the biggest source of purified water, Megaton.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Oh yeah, and there should be a big fat button that says &#8220;no new super mutants&#8221; which blows up an important doohickey. You don&#8217;t even have to make it do something to the gameworld right now. There&#8217;s plenty of super mutants out there, after all. Just, like, add a five-second card to the end slideshow saying &#8220;Ya done kilt the super mutants and everyone danced joyfully.&#8221; The game does already let you tattle to Elder Lyons, but that comes off as an afterthought and is, I&#8217;d argue, much less satisfying than doing it yourself.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, hopefully our big reveal has left at least a few players stunned and disoriented. Now, let&#8217;s talk about the worst part of this section, which is where it leaves players stunned and disoriented.<\/p>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/f3k_8.png' width=100% alt='' title=''\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'><\/div><\/p>\n<h2>Problem 2: Bangnabbit<\/h2>\n<p>The Enclave captures the player in a cutscene. I&#8217;ll allow it, but as this scene plays out in the published game there are several significant problems<\/p>\n<p>Firstly: flashbangs are a weapon that doesn&#8217;t exist in the main game and which the player has no access to, factors which any good GM knows will spike the horseshit-o-meter of any self-respecting player. It&#8217;s an even weirder choice because flashbangs exist in <em>other <\/em>videogames, so the player knows <em>a <\/em>set of rules, which is that flashbangs are <strong><em>not insurmountable<\/em><\/strong>. If this were <em>Counter-Strike<\/em> there&#8217;d be a thousand ways to deal with a flashbang or see it coming, which means the <em>Counter-Strike<\/em> player wearing power armor who gets stunned and subdued through inch-thick steel plate is left pulling a face at the screen. If we were really going to go with Unbeatable Nonlethal Cutscene Weapon, it probably would have been better to invent some kind of Super Turbo Capture Beam&#8211;or, I don&#8217;t know, some kind of<em> Mesmetron.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Lastly, this is stupid because sooner or later the player&#8217;s going to realize the Enclave had no method of getting into Vault 87. Or, and this is <del>almost<\/del> much worse, they had an <em>unspecified and probably unsatisfying <\/em>way, like a magic anti-radiation pill that&#8217;s never seen again or a secret tunnel or a bunch of unpaid interns hopping off a Vertibird with extra-thick radiation suits and an armful of stun grenades. When you get past the lukewarm &#8220;Oh no! I&#8217;ve been rumbled&#8221; reaction this entire sequence was contrived for, nothing about how the Enclave found and followed the player to steal their prize feels earned or fair. If this were the tabletop, players would be scowling on their way out the door and blow your phone up at 3AM with sudden fiercely-pointed questions. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you can invent a justification in the intervening week: <em>they&#8217;re still gonna be mad.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Guess what? We&#8217;ve already fixed this too. The player came up to this level and found out the Enclave runs the facility, so when they get to the <em>elevator that goes back to the main area<\/em>, and <em>knockout gas filters in as the intercom barks instructions for apprehension<\/em>, they&#8217;ll smack their heads. &#8220;Oh, of course! This is an Enclave facility!&#8221; By the time they knew this it was already too late, so they won&#8217;t feel they were railroaded into making a bad decision by the main plot and a fine line is struck between &#8220;player is captured in a cutscene,&#8221; &#8220;capture does not come out of nowhere and is properly foreshadowed,&#8221; and &#8220;player was allowed to act logically and sensibly.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>NEXT TIME: RAVIN&#8217; FAWKES AND RAVEN ROCKS<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The internet quakes with hatred for Little Lamplight, but besides a few dismissive complaints about flashbang logistics I&#8217;ve not heard anyone talk about Vault 87. This leads me to a small and admittedly contestable digression about how modern Fallout games are discussed by their fanbases. My survey methodology consists of Reading Too Many Internet Comments, [&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-41417","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\/41417","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=41417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}