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Fallout Time in Fallout

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Lilura

RPG Codex Dragon Lady
Joined
Feb 13, 2013
Messages
5,274
Ah! You're here. Good. We've gotta problem. A big one. The controller chip for our water purification system has given up the ghost. We can't make another one, and the process is too complicated for a workaround system. Simply put, we're running out of drinking water. No water, no Vault. This is crucial to our survival, and frankly, I... I think you're the only hope we have. You need to go find us another controller chip. We estimate we have four to five months before the Vault runs out of water. We. Need. That. Chip. We marked your map with the location of another Vault. Not a bad place to start, I think. Look, just be safe, ok? - The Overseer of Vault 13.

time.jpg


Time in Fallout.

Excerpt 1:

We all feel time. Sometimes we feel like we don't have enough of it, especially as we grow older. On the other hand, some people feel bored and time becomes a massive burden to them. We often ask ourselves how we should spend our time, when we should really be asking ourselves how we can best use it.

Hah! I'm only mucking around. Those are pseudo-philosophical ramblings that are best left to real thinkers, such as the writers at InXile. So let's get on with Time in Fallout, shall we?

Excerpt 2:

The Hub is a necessary visit because it gives you two leads that pinpoint the location of the water chip, which turns out to be a vault under the ghoul-inhabited Necropolis. Interestingly, if you "fail" to visit Necropolis before 110 days have passed, Set and his ghouls will have been invaded and slaughtered by a super mutant force, and you will miss out on some quality content (though you will meet the super mutants, so not all is lost). This is a prime example of how the landscape of the Wasteland changes over time. It blew me away when I first discovered this time-based reactivity. Not just that, but I couldn't believe there was another way into the Military Base, all those leagues away. It was a complete campaign-changer. You don't see much of this in RPGs, past or present. This, as I said earlier, is one facet of Fallout's greatness. Remember, we're talking about 1997 here, when people knew how to make an RPG.

***

I couldn't find a proper Fallout thread. Feel free to move this to one if you like. Btw, I think the Codex should have a section for Interplay, pre-IE Black Isle and Troika RPGs, separate from the others.
 
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vivec

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Messages
1,149
Time in RPGs is such a rare occurrence. It is the de facto way of imposing C&C within quests and increase replayability. Unfortunately, underexploited because gamers are f'ing casuals.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
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Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
Time is all well and good, but there's another thing that has always bothered me about Fallout's time limit. You aren't given the option to not care about Vault 13. Either way the main quest ends up being the Master's super mutant army, so the water chip thing can be safely narratively skipped if the Vault Dweller finds a better use of their time. I know they've spent their entire life there, but psychopaths don't care about that. I don't actually remember where you find out about the mutant army, is it in the Necropolis? If it is (and you can't find about it in any other way), the water chip actually becomes a grand/glorified bread crumb quest. I would've given the option to even sell the vault into slavery, I see a PC hating them for forcing them to be their errand boy/girl and putting them in danger outside the vault.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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7,407
Time in RPGs is such a rare occurrence. It is the de facto way of imposing C&C within quests and increase replayability. Unfortunately, underexploited because gamers are f'ing casuals.

You're really obsessed with timed quests aren't you.
 

ilitarist

Learned
Illiterate Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 17, 2016
Messages
857
Time limits work fine when the game is all about telling stories - as RPGCodex seem to prefer its games.

It works OK in something like a Tyranny. You'd have to intentionally screw yourself to get over limit (and I heard it doesn't even work but I don't know if it's a joke) but it still gives you sense of urgency on your first time. Gives a context to a story, gives you something to fear. But most people want to get everything from the game at the same time as having a real choice, hence huge games like Skyrim where the choice is usually about killing dude or letting him go and exploration allows you to see 97.5% of content in a single playthrough - if you have aren't somehow bored by non-existent challenge on any difficulty level starting from level 40.

Games tend to be mini-hobbies nowadays rather than stories. And when they're stories a la Telltale - devs make sure you don't have any way to screw up so you don't ever feel bad about yourself.

Though I must say I think Fallout 4 Survival Mode is a nice idea for achieving the same feel of urgency in a not railroaded way. Haven't played it and heard that it has some issues, and the game in general is not the great, but forcing user to lose progress in case of lodaing is, I think, a superior way of achieving similar effect compared to plain time limit.
 

Karellen

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
327
I think it's fine to have a time limit in the game, but the issue is that once you introduce a limit, you've created a strategic concern, and traditional RPGs don't really offer the tools and systems needed to allow interesting and informed strategic choices. So, in Fallout, the time time is by and large a vague, distant threat, and the game system doesn't really make it explicit in a mechanical sense - the player has hardly any meaningful ways to affect how long traveling takes, for instance, and the game doesn't really offer any way to plan out how long a trip will take anyway. To offset this, the time limit is very forgiving. It's kind of telling that I have no idea how many days it takes to travel between Vault 13 and the Hub, for instance, and never really had any genuine reason to care.

In contrast, FTL has a time limit and no one complains about it, and this is because the game also makes it very explicit how the Rebel fleet spreads with every jump and what the player can do to slow it down, to the effect that the player can plan his route to take that into account. What's more, since the game is broken into multiple sectors with their own mini-timers, the player very quickly learns to manage time and squeeze the most out of every sector. The time limit doesn't detract from the game because, in a very real sense, dealing with the time limit is the game.

Basically, if you're going to have a meaningful time limit in the game, one way or another you'd have to design the entire game around it. That's what FTL does and hardly any typical RPGs do. Honestly, I'm not sure it's even feasible to do that in a traditional RPG with a static world and fixed encounters; FTL obviously works because the game world is randomised, so the player has to strategise anew every time instead of being able to rely on previously gained information about the game world. If the world is predetermined, people will just start to figure out optimal sequences to maximise the amount of content they get, to the effect that the game loses the sense of freedom it tries to build - basically, more often than not it'll just clash with the experience the game tries to produce. So unless a game's really going to go all out on it, I think it's probably best not to have time limits at all.
 

Carrion

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Lost in Necropolis
I think it's fine to have a time limit in the game, but the issue is that once you introduce a limit, you've created a strategic concern, and traditional RPGs don't really offer the tools and systems needed to allow interesting and informed strategic choices. So, in Fallout, the time time is by and large a vague, distant threat, and the game system doesn't really make it explicit in a mechanical sense - the player has hardly any meaningful ways to affect how long traveling takes, for instance, and the game doesn't really offer any way to plan out how long a trip will take anyway. To offset this, the time limit is very forgiving. It's kind of telling that I have no idea how many days it takes to travel between Vault 13 and the Hub, for instance, and never really had any genuine reason to care.
In FO's case it's not really important how long the time limit is, because its mere existence already makes a difference. When playing the game for the first time, you don't know how close you are to your goal. It makes you think about where to travel next and focus on the main quest at all times, and on top of that it discourages you from using the usual RPG exploits like resting after every battle to regain full health.

One reason the time limit works particularly well in FO is how the time flows: the two main time sinks are travelling and resting, but in gameplay time flows so slowly that you can spend that extra hour exploring the Hub without worries. You never feel like you have to rush through content and are always allowed to take your time talking to people, doing side quests and so on. Another reason is the game's structure, as you're never outright told where to find the water chip but instead have to follow clues like a detective, which means that it's often better to exhaust all possible options in your current location before taking that long and possibly useless trip across the desert. Despite its mechanical simplicity the time limit manages to add a meaningful strategic layer to the game, and it really affects your decision-making in a positive way.

Of course, time limits work only in certain types of games. In Daggerfall they work very well, but in Morrowind they'd probably be just annoying if every quest (or even just the main quest) had them.
 
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Messages
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Time limits do not work well in static games, that is games where the content is created by the developers before the game is shipped. Such games have limited amount of content. Time limits make the player feel stressed and rushed because they feel like they are missing out on limited content, which ruins the quality of the experience. You can't talk to NPCs or read dialogue or explore the same way as you would without the time limit, because in the back of your head you are always thinking about your deadline. There was a reason Black Isle eventually removed the time limit in Fallout 1.

Where time limits would work very well is procedural games. When the content is procedurally generated and is essentially limitless, you don't have to be stressed out about missing stuff. You can just focus on the timed thing, and if that causes you to miss some content, that's not a big deal, because you will find a ton of other content anyway. It's similar how Aragorn wouldn't worry about missing some forest quest while being in the Fellowship, because the dynamic world would always create new forest quests. This is very different from static games.
 

Kalasanty11

Learned
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May 1, 2014
Messages
154
I like the way time worked in Invisible Inc for example. There is no time limit per se, but if you took your sweet ass time alarm levels got raised, each one introducing new obstacle, which could lead to disaster. Of course, nothing stopped you from finishing missions on highest level of alert, but it was a very hard thing to pull off.
I think that's the interesting way to implement time meters - to make game increasingly harder over time, not just as a simple succeed/fail condition.
 

Revenant

Guest
After reading that quote in the OP, I realized Crispy talks exactly like the Overseer from Fallout.
 

oldmanpaco

Master of Siestas
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I remember the first game i played with a time limit. Thought they were bluffing but holy shit Arth was dead.
 

YM2612

Barely Literate
Joined
Mar 19, 2017
Messages
3
Timed quests require support in terms of presentation and mechanics. FO's water quest wouldn't work without the structured journey that guides your exploration; there's a narrative, with characters and factions and lore. Procedurally generated quests or missions with a timer can work but the experience is totally different from FO, which was innovative and engrossing though far from perfect. I think the positive effect is due to the timed quest deriving from the nature of an elaborate plot instead of just being an aspect of gameplay mechanics (as opposed to something like radiant AI quests where it's more of a bullet point feature than anything that seems to enliven or connect storyline/characters and plot related tasks). Timers for the sake of timers seems like more of an open worldy, resource management, emergent gameplay kind of thing, but on the other hand it is always kind of ridiculous when questgivers never seem to care how much time passes as the player grinds. I like the suggestions of timers changing quests instead of just failing them but again it's all about the structure.
 

Baron Dupek

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Jul 23, 2013
Messages
1,870,765
Time limits in old games were okay when getting more than one game at time to play was only for lucky rich people.
But time limits in these days, with massive Steam backlogs? Nope - said the PC Master Race crowd...
 
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Ah! You're here. Good. We've gotta problem. A big one. The controller chip for our water purification system has given up the ghost. We can't make another one, and the process is too complicated for a workaround system. Simply put, we're running out of drinking water. No water, no Vault. This is crucial to our survival, and frankly, I... I think you're the only hope we have. You need to go find us another controller chip. We estimate we have four to five months before the Vault runs out of water. We. Need. That. Chip. We marked your map with the location of another Vault. Not a bad place to start, I think. Look, just be safe, ok? - The Overseer of Vault 13.
*snip*
"Now we'll all die". I dreaded those words with petrified indignation until day 217 when I died. That's when I reloaded a savegame and found out Lothander was bugged. I was able to get the cure. But damn it hurt getting there.

I did get the waterchip back in time, I think. It was late though. Lot of rushing.

Another good example of this is Star Control 2. The Uraquan annihilate everything after X time. They wiped the floor with me. I was going to do a second game, but it felt like writing and following my own walkthrough.

Lesson? Time puts extra pressure on you. It's harder to play your own way because wasted time can mean failure. The irony is I like deep challenging games. Yet I like to play them loosely--with less direction. Time gameplay tends to restrict what you can do. The fact it can end also forces you to manage your savegames longterm, in case you f*** your save. In my case, in BG1 I had to have a save which was older than the killing time of the poison. In Fallout, I don't remember having any old saves. It didn't matter in Fallout's case.

The whole sarevok/doppleganger thing was unsettling. Still bothers me.
I don't think BG1 or Fallout are my preferred sort of game/rpg. I like sandbox/simulator/combat/survival RPGs more, like Realms of Arkania or Darklands or Daggerfall or JA2 or Balrum or even Starflight. BG1 and Fallout seem more focused on plot/characters and consequences tied to those things. So if you ignore the plot/characters too much, you'll be resorting to savegame acrobatics.

For each his own. I still respect anybody who would take a BG game over something with less story. At least in the case of BG or Planscape, these're still deep games. Sometimes they're anally deep. I like that. A lot of gamers prefer lighter games. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that. Is a person who plays golf on the weekends a worse person than somebody who plays it professionally? No. It's teh same for us gamers. Some of us are enthusiasts or extreme gamers. We're different and definitely not better people.
 
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Lacrymas

Arcane
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Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
Earth 2150 has an interesting "time limit". You have to collect a set amount of resources so you can leave the planet, but you have to do it in a certain amount of missions or the planet destroys itself. It's kinda hard to see the last missions though, because you can collect them before those.
 
Joined
Jan 4, 2014
Messages
795
I think it's fine to have a time limit in the game, but the issue is that once you introduce a limit, you've created a strategic concern, and traditional RPGs don't really offer the tools and systems needed to allow interesting and informed strategic choices. So, in Fallout, the time time is by and large a vague, distant threat, and the game system doesn't really make it explicit in a mechanical sense - the player has hardly any meaningful ways to affect how long traveling takes, for instance, and the game doesn't really offer any way to plan out how long a trip will take anyway. To offset this, the time limit is very forgiving. It's kind of telling that I have no idea how many days it takes to travel between Vault 13 and the Hub, for instance, and never really had any genuine reason to care.

In contrast, FTL has a time limit and no one complains about it, and this is because the game also makes it very explicit how the Rebel fleet spreads with every jump and what the player can do to slow it down, to the effect that the player can plan his route to take that into account. What's more, since the game is broken into multiple sectors with their own mini-timers, the player very quickly learns to manage time and squeeze the most out of every sector. The time limit doesn't detract from the game because, in a very real sense, dealing with the time limit is the game.

Basically, if you're going to have a meaningful time limit in the game, one way or another you'd have to design the entire game around it. That's what FTL does and hardly any typical RPGs do. Honestly, I'm not sure it's even feasible to do that in a traditional RPG with a static world and fixed encounters; FTL obviously works because the game world is randomised, so the player has to strategise anew every time instead of being able to rely on previously gained information about the game world. If the world is predetermined, people will just start to figure out optimal sequences to maximise the amount of content they get, to the effect that the game loses the sense of freedom it tries to build - basically, more often than not it'll just clash with the experience the game tries to produce. So unless a game's really going to go all out on it, I think it's probably best not to have time limits at all.
Don't forget FTL games are relatively short. In the dozen times I've played it, the games were in one sitting. It's a lot like strategy games. In many strategy games it's time-based because you'll either get killled or you'll win--all in one sitting.

So why does time work in FTL or strategy games and not so well in BG1 or Fallout--in my opinion? Two main reasons. The first is investment. The more time I invest in a RPG, the harder a time limit will hurt. Time limits are like deaths and possibly worse. It's similar in MMORPGs, whereby permanent death isn't popular because you lose your character, it's just much less severe in single player games because of savegames. So you spend many hours gaining something? It shouldn't be a surprise losing it will hurt, even with savegames. The second reason is I often play RPGs for a different reason than I play a strategy game. I play them for the open world. It's to forge my own destiny. I don't like to be herded by a time limit in those cases. I usually don't like to be herded by plot either and usually time limits are tied to plot.

I can accept timed events or "limits" in open world games. In X2: The Threat, the Khaak start randomly appearing after X time. They attack ships nearby and generally are a welcome change in scenery. This is a much safer way to implement time in a game--unlike Star Control 2 where you're abruptly greeted with game over. I liked the idea and I actually intended on modding it, so there'd be increasingly large waves of Khaak ships to defend against. Why did I want it that way? Because the game gets boring in the late stages. Players make mods to make it challenging again. One of the mods made the pirates create fleets and attack other races, including the player. Making the Khaak more powerful over time was just my way of making it a challenge. Making it so the waves would get increasingly powerful was my way of attempting to create unlimited growing threat. I never finished the mod by a long shot. However, games becoming too easy in the late stages is a common problem.
 
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Mozg

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Oct 20, 2015
Messages
2,033
Time is all well and good, but there's another thing that has always bothered me about Fallout's time limit. You aren't given the option to not care about Vault 13.

There's nothing wrong with making characterization like, "I don't give a shit about the vault" outside of the scope of the game. If you scrap your starting settler and warrior in Civilization on the premise that hunter-gathering is a superior way of life to agrarianism, you lose. There's no game where you can't say the scope could be wider.

Given that as a premise, I think making not finding the water chip a simple loss condition is a fine enough way of forcing the PC to be someone that gives a shit about the vault. It has a lot of advantages compared to something where you're basically just looking for plot advancement buttons to push. You don't lose if you don't give a shit about whatever in, like... Neverwinter Nights 2, but nothing can happen until you follow the plot.

I think it's fine to have a time limit in the game, but the issue is that once you introduce a limit, you've created a strategic concern, and traditional RPGs don't really offer the tools and systems needed to allow interesting and informed strategic choices. So, in Fallout, the time time is by and large a vague, distant threat, and the game system doesn't really make it explicit in a mechanical sense - the player has hardly any meaningful ways to affect how long traveling takes, for instance, and the game doesn't really offer any way to plan out how long a trip will take anyway. To offset this, the time limit is very forgiving. It's kind of telling that I have no idea how many days it takes to travel between Vault 13 and the Hub, for instance, and never really had any genuine reason to care.

I bet you didn't wander aimlessly to remove fog-of-war from the map, repeat caravan missions ad infinitum, fail to pay attention to "So... heard anything about a water chip?" questions in dialog to get leads, etc. A lot of dealing with the time limit in Fallout is a leap of faith (and, if you know enough about videogames, the stuff that you know a developer *wouldn't* do to arbitrarily fuck you) but it forecloses a lot of worthless shit instantly.
 
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Lacrymas

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Messages
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Pathfinder: Wrath
There's nothing wrong with making characterization like, "I don't give a shit about the vault" outside of the scope of the game. If you scrap your starting settler and warrior in Civilization on the premise that hunter-gathering is a superior way of life to agrarianism, you lose. There's no game where you can't say the scope could be wider.

What you are saying is directly tied to Civ's preconceived notions of "winning". The win conditions are very ...American, it's either through military conquest, technological advancement or cultural superiority. You can't win by eliminating world hunger, total nuclear deprolifiration, 100% education rate or similar things. The same with Fallout, the preconceived notion that the Vault Dweller would care about Vault 13, but that doesn't gel with the player's intentions nor is it critical to the plot. You can safely sell the vault into slavery without ever finding the chip and the Master's mutant army would still be the main threat.
 

Karellen

Arcane
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Jan 3, 2012
Messages
327
I think it's fine to have a time limit in the game, but the issue is that once you introduce a limit, you've created a strategic concern, and traditional RPGs don't really offer the tools and systems needed to allow interesting and informed strategic choices. So, in Fallout, the time time is by and large a vague, distant threat, and the game system doesn't really make it explicit in a mechanical sense - the player has hardly any meaningful ways to affect how long traveling takes, for instance, and the game doesn't really offer any way to plan out how long a trip will take anyway. To offset this, the time limit is very forgiving. It's kind of telling that I have no idea how many days it takes to travel between Vault 13 and the Hub, for instance, and never really had any genuine reason to care.

I bet you didn't wander aimlessly to remove fog-of-war from the map, repeat caravan missions ad infinitum, fail to pay attention to "So... heard anything about a water chip?" questions in dialog to get leads, etc. A lot of dealing with the time limit in Fallout is a leap of faith (and, if you know enough about videogames, the stuff that you know a developer *wouldn't* do to arbitrarily fuck you) but it forecloses a lot of worthless shit instantly.

That's actually an interesting point. I'm pretty sure there's a post somewhere on this forum where I've praised Fallout for this very thing - the mere idea of a time limit, lenient as it is in reality, suggests that the player should prioritise the main quest, but what's more, it implies a kind of developer intent that this is the way the game ought to be played, and that the player doesn't really miss out on anything by doing so. I certainly felt a lot more comfortable skipping quests than I usually do in CRPGs the first time I played Fallout, which is probably a large reason I like Fallout so much. I remember well how impressed I was that you could have a random encounter with friendly NPCs you could ask directions from - it's one of those almost simulationist touches that modern RPGs don't have anymore. Ultimately, I think the main criticism I have for Fallout's approach in this regard is that it only really works once, whereas the time limit in a game like FTL still feels pressing on subsequent playthroughs.

Having said that, I think another reason why this works to a substantial degree in Fallout has to do with the particularities of Fallout game mechanics, in particular the random skill checks, which (for better or worse) means that the player can skill spam or, failing that, save scum his way through most situations. In most RPGs, experience is the most valuable resource because you can never have enough of it, and the higher your level is, the easier you qualify for skill checks which let you solve other quests the way you want, and thereby get even more XP. This creates a situation where players are incentivised to prioritise side content. For better or worse, though, Fallout is one of the RPGs in which experience matters the least - if anything, the equipment you find often has a lot more impact - so the pressure to do as much stuff as possible isn't really there, which honestly does wonders for the roleplaying aspect of the game.

There's nothing wrong with making characterization like, "I don't give a shit about the vault" outside of the scope of the game. If you scrap your starting settler and warrior in Civilization on the premise that hunter-gathering is a superior way of life to agrarianism, you lose. There's no game where you can't say the scope could be wider.

What you are saying is directly tied to Civ's preconceived notions of "winning". The win conditions are very ...American, it's either through military conquest, technological advancement or cultural superiority. You can't win by eliminating world hunger, total nuclear deprolifiration, 100% education rate or similar things. The same with Fallout, the preconceived notion that the Vault Dweller would care about Vault 13, but that doesn't gel with the player's intentions nor is it critical to the plot. You can safely sell the vault into slavery without ever finding the chip and the Master's mutant army would still be the main threat.

Somehow this line of thought really rubs me the wrong way. I think that Fallout has one of the more appealing initial plot hooks in CRPGs, and I'm perfectly fine with the game being built around that hook, since it allows the writing to be just that much more distinctive and coherent. I think Fallout, in particular, would lose a lot of its appeal if it was just another open world game revolving around the player doing whatever. But even if that wasn't the case, I think that as a general principle it's a detriment to RPG storytelling that they have to present their main quests in such terms that any character, no matter how selfish and sociopathic, would be compelled to finish them. One of the more serious flaws of T:ToN, in my opinion, is that it did just this - instead of the personal mystery that drove the narrative of the original Torment, the player's motivation has to do with a generic threat to the player - "do this or eventually die". For me, accepting the central premise of the game is part of the buy-in, and I think it's a good tradeoff to lose some of that RPGish "freedom to pursue whatever goals you want (as long as you whack some guy at the end)" thing if, in exchange, it makes the game less generic.
 
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Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
Somehow this line of thought really rubs me the wrong way. I think that Fallout has one of the more appealing initial plot hooks in CRPGs, and I'm perfectly fine with the game being built around that hook, since it allows the writing to be just that much more distinctive and coherent. I think Fallout, in particular, would lose a lot of its appeal if it was just another open world game revolving around the player doing whatever. But even if that wasn't the case, I think that as a general principle it's a detriment to RPG storytelling that they have to present their main quests in such terms that any character, no matter how selfish and sociopathic, would be compelled to finish them. One of the more serious flaws of T:ToN, in my opinion, is that it did just this - instead of the personal mystery that drove the narrative of the original Torment, the player's motivation has to do with a generic threat to the player - "do this or eventually die". For me, accepting the central premise of the game is part of the buy-in, and I think it's a good tradeoff to lose some of that RPGish "freedom to pursue whatever goals you want (as long as you whack some guy at the end)" thing if, in exchange, it makes the game less generic.

It can still be framed with the water chip in mind. The game begins with the overseer tasking you to find the water chip. That's normal and it would be a way to not cater to the player in an obvious way. After that there could've been an option to sell the vault into slavery or the game not ending after the time limit.
 

Master

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 19, 2016
Messages
1,160
I dont know where i read how back in the day, when Fallout came out someone complained about the time limit and one of the devs said "the game has to end bro" or something to that effect. Man, what a rockstar attitude that is. Dont know if its true but it would be cool.
 

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