Overhaulout Part 7: Family Picnic
As we complete the Braun chamber [1], we run into one of my trickier objections to Fallout 3’s story design: the part where we’re actually reunited with our father comes off awkward and not especially satisfying. Partially this is for emotional reasons, since the story’s kept our attitude towards our father more or less in limbo since his inexplicable and extremely irresponsible departure from Vault 101, but more practically it is because what we really need is a sequence where we hash things out with dad and it doesn’t fit into the established meter of this section.
Even story-first players such as myself will get impatient if too much time is spent frozen in conversation limbo right after a sequence that’s overly scripted or linear. It’s bad design to jump straight from the Braun chamber into our heart-to-heart dialogue with our father; we need a little time to roam around and stretch our legs with some unscripted mechanical engagement. Besides, it would feel weird to have a serious talk in the Stanford prison vault…although given that it seems perfectly safe and clean, and how emotionally urgent this scene is, it also feels weird not to unless there’s actually a good reason.
Because you know what else feels weird? Busting your dad loose, trading a few perfunctory pleasantries, then agreeing to defer conversation until you’ve both silently trekked across the wasteland, punching animals and putting the Project Purity band back together.
What would be natural would be to catch up with your father as you exit together, but the engine can’t handle that and it wouldn’t feel right even if we found a workable compromise–for example, breaking the conversation up between “nodes” along our trip. Our story demands a face-to-face comfortable dialogue the logistics of the scene isn’t disposed to give us.
There has to be a better way.
It wouldn’t be such a big deal, only this scene is kind of the emotional highlight of the whole arc. If it’s a little bit janky, that’s more than a little bit of a problem. Here are my best immediate fixes:
I’ve made no secret about my dislike for James as portrayed in the main game. I think he’s shortsighted, impulsive, unwilling to take responsibility for his actions, and a thousand times more boring than any of these qualities suggest because the game won’t acknowledge them. Occasionally the player can say something like “That was really stupid, dad,” and he’ll say, “You’re right,” and then everyone involved will smooth over it. His most dangerous mistakes aren’t treated as consequences of who he is or the logical products of his principles; they’re basically on the level of forgetting to buy orange juice at the grocery store.
- Transition straight into another action beat. The player’s tripped the Vault’s security somehow and after only a few lines of dialogue, the player and father have to shoot their way out. Basically, remove the Vault itself as a safe quiet space for a conversation and we remove the player’s reasonable desire to have one there, even if it’s a little bit awkward.
- Once the players are outside the Vault in the wasteland, that’s clearly not the right place to have a heart-to-heart. However, James knows a good place nearby. We can take advantage of an already existing location (is that one fishing shack nearby? I forget) or posit our own—some wasteland diner selling dog meat and chips in discreet booths, maybe.
- Once the player reaches that place, and sits down with James, then they have their important discussion.
This conversation has to have some passion to it, even if the player isn’t interested in picking a fight. I want to give Liam Neeson something to do. This is where that voice acting money’s gonna come in, because this conversation’s going to have an uncomfortably high number of branching permutations.
The talk will always start the same way: dad, who’s clearly been rehearsing this on the way over, says something to the effect of: “I appreciate your help, but I really didn’t want you to come after me, and while I respect your choices I think it would be best if you returned home until…”
At which point the player gets to tell him, with optional degrees of sass: “You know I got kicked out, right?”[2]
He’s going to react with anger and outrage—“I can’t believe the overseer would do that, he’s insane, what kind of blah blah”—and the player will have their first real choice in the discussion.
On the one hand, they can challenge this reaction. Not because he’s wrong, but because the intensity and duration of his anger is clearly a defense mechanism excusing himself of wrongdoing. It’s the emotional logic of guilty people everywhere: if the Overseer’s actions were irrational, delusional, unethical, maniacal, then James is absolved of any responsibility for jeopardizing his child with such an irresponsible and miscommunicated escape. Players may point out to James that while the Overseer is a tyrant, he should have taken that into account when deciding to run away. James will not react gracefully to this point; he’ll overflow with excuses. It’s not my fault. I thought he was reasonable. You’re a grown adult, you can take care of yourself. There’s more lives at stake than mine and yours. In the face of these rationalizations and dodges player will have options to let off the heat, to hold firm, or to fire back. Stepping off will return the conversation to the middle, and the already tense and charged conversation will continue as normal. Holding firm will make it clear that for one reason or another, James is barely holding it together and will probably have a breakdown if he lets himself realize he’s at fault. Firing back will get very, very ugly.
The other initial reaction available to the player is the comfortable one: to echo their father’s anger at the Overseer. By bonding over mutual indignation, the player offers James solidarity, relief, and absolution. The player gives themselves the gift of bonding positively with one’s father at the expense of an honest emotional accounting. People make choices very much like this with their families every day.
After the confrontation there is a chance to make James justify his actions, either by simply asking him to explain himself or by demanding he return home for your sake (a request he’ll hotly refuse). James expresses how deep a depression he’d fallen into; how useless and helpless he felt, how he couldn’t shake the feeling that all he was doing was make himself and his family comfortable at the expense of increasing human misery in 101. His dreams became haunted with his wife, the player’s mother, and the heartbreaking feeling she’d died for nothing. He kept his past from the player out of an earnest but misplaced desire not to inflict the burden of his choices and sacrifices on them. He explains that no good can be done without sacrifice. He will ask for forgiveness.
If things go well, the player is asked to join him at Project Purity. If things don’t, the conversation will probably end decidedly prematurely. He will leave somberly, telling you (with barely concealed anger) to return once you’ve both had time to think things through, and the quest will be marked resolved. Then, some time later, a new quest will emerge: Confront your father.
NEXT: THE ENCLAVE ARRIVES
Overhaulout Part 8: Fixed and Broken
The brutal Enclave assault marks a point of critical transition for Fallout 3‘s story. This is the part where James ceases to be the de facto protagonist and passes his mantel of agency and primary story-driving responsibility onto the player. In other words, this is where your story should properly begin.
To pull this off, this scene should accomplish three goals:
Before we go giddily rewriting, an important question: to what extent does the game’s midpoint, as already written, succeed and fail at these goals?
- Bring closure and resolution to your father’s arc, and by extension your relationship with him
- Provide a brand-new motivation for the player (since the old driving force, centered directly around your dad’s choices, has become moot)
- Establish the villains for the final stretch
The James Story
Inarguably, James’ story ends when he sabotages his purifier to kill Colonel Autumn and prevent the Enclave from taking charge. Is that a proper ending to his story as written by Bethesda?
Well, let’s take stock of his decision to kill himself and endanger you so he can without prior communication or forethought sabotage his own life’s work to prevent it from…being finished, and then put to unstoppably altruistic use, by the wrong people? As heroic maneuvers go it’s a shortsighted, brash, incredibly damaging and ill-conceived gesture of self-indulgent pride that directly jeopardizes his workers, friends, and only remaining family. So yes; it’s the perfect ending to his story. This is exactly the sort of boneheaded melodrama that caused dozens of deaths in Vault 101, so it’s actually a completely appropriate note to go out on. The only problem is, the game refuses to acknowledge any of that. Ultimately this ending can’t work because James doesn’t work in general. His character as conceived is not in balance with his choices as written.
As for wrapping up the player’s relationship with James, there were two ways to approach that from a writing perspective. The first path is the painful and tragic: the player never really gets a chance to square things with James. In this version the Enclave takes away something the player probably wanted, which was closure with their father, and comes off as an even bigger and more loathsome jerky-jerk. The other path is that of the conscientious writer: wrap everything up so the act break is maximally tidy and the players go away satisfied.
I don’t really care for the game-as-written’s compromise between these two poles, which seems to be: the player’s relationship is resolved if they’ve made ethical choices (“I love you, son/daughter. I am proud. Let us hug.”) and unresolved and open-ended if they’ve made inconveniently barbaric ones (“You nuked a city? Let’s…uh, talk about that after I’m dead, I guess.”), which seems suspiciously like a concession towards keeping the story on rails when James is a saint and the player’s a cartoon supervillain. Whichever route you end up on, it’s hard to shake the sense of “This conversation doesn’t matter” permeating the dialogue.
Let’s cut straight to the rewrite. One way or another (either after helping with repairs or returning from the last unhappy argument for a final showdown), the player will end up speaking to father. Your father will be…not apologetic for what he’s dragged you through, exactly. He doesn’t seem ready to be that honest with himself yet. Instead he has a kind of confession, only a little defiant, even somewhat regretful: he can only ever do what he feels is right. Sometimes those choices hurt. Sometimes they means making sacrifices, or putting people in danger.
But he wishes…he wishes you didn’t have to get hurt.
He’s making progress in Project Purity. He still thinks he’ll need the GECK, sooner or later, but he’s almost got the project back to where it was. He’ll keep working on it. He understands if you don’t share his vision. He understands if you’d rather go home to Vault 101, and he’s sorry that you never can. What he wants is for you to be by his side while he finishes this project to help the wasteland forever.
But first, there’s something that belongs to you. In a maintenance tunnel that was previously locked is the grave of Catherine, your mother. He left a ring of hers there: a piece of silver twisted to look like flowing water. He’d been in too much pain to keep it when she passed, but in the long years since he’s regretted not passing it on to you. Now he’d like you to have it, and to remember who she was and what she stood for.
The player retrieves the ring. Vertibirds creep over the horizon. By the time the player arrives, the scene is in full swing:
The colonel confronts your father inside the booth, soldiers at either shoulder. James, was it? Very good that he dropped by. The cameras they’d installed showed everything. The purifier’s not finished, you say? Oh, no problem at all…it doesn’t have to be finished. The important part is that the primary and secondary reactors, the ones your father warned you were dangerous, have already been set up. Just one premature push of the “start” button will permanently soil the Potomac, force settlements across the Wasteland to deal with the Enclave for water, smooth the way for a peaceful occupation.
All James needs to do to accept a position as chief engineer in this new world order is…press the button. Rest assured, the position is unbelievably comfortable.
Your father’s voice shakes. At first he manages to speak evenly:
“Here we are again. Again. I’ve never met you, ah, colonel? But you know, I know you. Ever since the first toothless wasteland thug took my work, I’ve known you. I’ve harnessed the thing that’s rotting the guts of children, and I’ve beaten it into a miracle, but that’s no use to people like you, is it? You don’t want the miracles, you just want the plagues, the rains of frogs, the death of the firstborns! Is that what you want from me? You want a fucking weapon? (Dr. Li yells to him through the glass) You want me to push this fucking button? Well! Let’s push the fucking button!“
He slams his fist down on the console. The generator crackles, bursts—the booth glows green. The colonel collapses in an instant. Your father staggers, clearly ill, looks at you.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and dies.
Brand-New Motivation
So what is the player’s motivation for the second half of Fallout 3?
I want you to take a moment and decide for yourself what it is in the game as written. Be earnest; engage the game in good faith. Think about what happens in this act break and what you’re supposed to feel afterwards.
Now. Did you answer that the player’s motivation is to:
Tricky, isn’t it?
- Restore the purifier and cleanse the Wasteland, or:
- Avenge your father?
The second one seems like the much stronger emotional drive. You’ve just been through a massacre that among other targets, claimed the father you haven’t had much time to reconnect with. Avenging your father seems like the obvious drive.
At the same time…the man who killed your father is apparently dead. The man who planned the operation, the President, hasn’t really been explicitly connected to what happened yet and ultimately barely will be. Besides, your first act isn’t to declare war on the Enclave, it’s to try to fix the purifier…the one your father just irradiated, and that the Enclave also wants to fix…? And this is leaving aside the elephant in the room, which is that not all players are going to give a shit about dad or are even given a reason to (“He was just gonna lecture me for blowing up Megaton anyway, so whatever”). So revenge doesn’t really qualify as the main motivation.
So what about restoring the purifier? That works, but honestly—and laying aside the myriad reasons this goal doesn’t actually make sense as written—it’s not really emotionally sold to the player. The player watched dad die dramatically, but it wasn’t of thirst. The purifier only matters in an abstract sense, or if the player feels particularly motivated to finish dad’s great work while at the same time not closely examining the logistics of fixing it vs. keeping it out of enemy hands.
In the rewrite, we’re going to break this into two stages. While the emotional rawness is still in place, we’ll give the player the same temporary motivation the original draft does: survive. The player needs to escape the assault and get to safety.
Then the second stage will begin. Dr. Li will exposit where the project currently stands: it’s badly, badly broken. The main generator and secondary generators were both whammied but good. Dr. Li mourns your father, and has some angry words to say about his rash sacrifice, but she has to admit he’s done a thorough job of sabotaging the purifier: at this point only GECK-level technology will fix the thing to the point where it can purify the Potomac OR poison it like the Enclave wanted to. In other words, it’s stable: stably worthless to either party.
Of course, as long as you could find a GECK…it could be very, very useful.
New motivation: opportunity.
NEXT WEEK: #3, ESTABLISHING THE VILLAINS
Overhaulout Part 9: Confréries Sans Frontières
Why are the Brotherhood of Steel in this story? Frankly, what good are they?
Here at the halfway marker the player is well stocked with goals, enemies, and resources James was murdered by the Enclave. Project Purity is both stalled and in enemy hands. Before the end of the game the player will need to find the GECK, escape the Enclave’s clutches when captured, and mount an assault to reclaim the monument and purify the wasteland. None of that requires the Brotherhood unless we say it does. Do we really need to introduce a unique location and dozens of NPCs if all we need to say to the player is, “Go find a GECK, it’s in this part of the map somewhere?” Is the idea of fighting through all the Enclave’s soldiers and singlehandedly reclaiming the monument more unrealistic than, say, fighting one’s way alone out of Raven Rock? Or wiping out small armies of Super Mutants? Or any of the other absurd battles the player’s obliged to win without backup? At best you can argue that you need an armed force like the Brotherhood to hold Project Purity after you’ve taken it…but why would you need them to? I mean, in the original draft, why do you need to occupy the monument once you’ve successfully purified all of the water in the wasteland? Isn’t a desperate lone-wolf attack to fix the device, press the button, and who knows if you’ll make it out alive more exciting anyway? Wouldn’t that give your likely sacrifice a greater sense of heft and dramatic inevitability?
In the game as written, the primary effect of the Brotherhood is to dilute the player’s agency and responsibility. They do nothing to justify this and oblige other tremendous expenses on the part of the artists, writers, scripters, and voice actors. But I can’t cut them out; that’s not the kind of lemonade we’re making here. Instead I will ask myself:
What good could the Brotherhood be?The obvious prerequisite to that question is, what are the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3? They possess these primary characteristics:
- The Brotherhood is altruistic, noble, and concerned primarily with crusade against evil.
- Yes, I know. Doesn’t matter. Resurrecting Black Isle’s murdered canon is not one of the goals of my series.
- The Brotherhood is a source of advanced technology.
- And power armor training at a roughly level-appropriate interval. Don’t try to tell me the whole faction justifies this one mechanic.
- The Brotherhood is a military organization with aspects of a government.
- Which distinguishes them from the Enclave, which is a.) the opposite and b.) for some reason outrageously evil.
Proceeding only from this description, they’re a pretty dubious addition to our story. Assuming the player’s a good guy, this is a story about overthrowing tyrants and handing the Wasteland the means to its own self-empowerment. Now we’re making players pursue that goal through allegiance with a paternal techno-stratocracy? Besides the fact that the Enclave happens to currently be mean and the Brotherhood happens to be led by an infallible saint, what meaningfully differentiates the Enclave from the Brotherhood? Isn’t either one a good or bad administration away from becoming the other? If so, how can you trust them as your allies and ask them to occupy your father’s work with murderous robots and elite armored forces?
This distinction is a crucial one to establish; otherwise we’re on some shaking thematic ground. More than anything else, we need to emphasize the Brotherhood’s nonviolent interests in the Wasteland. Make it clear that their “good fight” against mutants represents the necessary front lines of a scientific aid organization, a sort of Engineers Without Borders that’s forced to pack miniguns. Ideally we should sprinkle some of their public works projects (successful and otherwise) throughout the Wasteland: little fountains or medical droids or power generators or hydroponics facilities that may or may not have been co-opted by scabby raiders. Since these projects are not tools of conquest, we learn that at the very least the Brotherhood is not leveraging all its resources towards self-empowerment, which puts them pretty obviously about the Enclave or just about any other government. It becomes easier to face the idea that we’re leaning on them for help.
Back to tour narrative: the player is taken into the Citadel with all the other project survivors. There’s no lengthy scene with Li and Lyons hashing things out; it’s straight off to a holding cell to be interrogated personally about the Project’s status and the intervention of the Enclave. If the player’s mouthy or uncooperative, no special action is taken, although it’s implied that Dr. Li already talked quite a bit. Eventually the interrogation gives a sense of what the Brotherhood believes: the Enclave are evil scum motivated more by desire for power and control than a sesne of what’s good for humanity. The Wasteland needs another source of clean water. Your father’s project, even if in enemy hands, is the best dog in that fight. Also, it probably sucks.
That’s the important subtle detail: the Brotherhood of Steel, who have not even taken a crack at the monument in all these years, don’t actually know how the purifier is supposed to work and are actually pretty sure it can’t. In other words, they don’t really believe the project can purify all the water in the Wasteland. Why would they? But even if it’s going to end up a glorified de-radifying water cooler, that’s a net good that at the very least should not be in Enclave hands. They tell the player that if they ever discover the proper components to fix it up, they’ll help evict the Enclave, free of charge.
Partially, this restructuring of ideas and faction purpose is to validate our parents as awesome geniuses who can’t even be anticipated, let alone equaled, by the scientists who replace them in the story. Partially this reframing preserves the sense of the player being the one with desire and agency, rather than a pack of wrinkly BoS questgivers who step in smoothly to fill in for James, who is dead[/anchor voice]. Whenever possible, though, conversations with Brotherhood workers should highlight their thematic role: they as a faction symbolize The Helpers. First and foremost they’re not a crack military force or de facto government, but a collection of people who spend their lives trying to make things right for complete strangers. They swap stories not just about duels with killer mutants, but about harvests failed, settlers massacred, injustices suffered, towns laid low by preventable disease. They should agonize about failures and nurse the scars of defeat, physical and emotional. Each is tormented by demons of effort squandered or people not saved. The Brotherhood should represent altruism at its most sincere, personal, and consuming. Among other things, as the final choice between charity and enterprise draws closer, their obvious strain and misery and mixed feelings should lead the player to wonder:
Is this kind of sacrifice really what I want for myself?
NEXT WEEK: LITTLE LAMPL—AW, CRAP
Overhaulout Part 10: Bury My Heart at Little Lamplight
When I started this series, I said I was keeping all the major story beats. All the major characters. All the major locations. Every mile of Bethesda’s extensive worldmap and groundwork. Even if I don’t like it, even if I can’t stand it, even if remembering it exists makes my teeth itch. Yes, in fact: even Little Lamplight.
I’ve talked before about how Bethesda can’t be trusted with immortal NPCs. Not because it’s some objective sin of game design, because it really isn’t, but because nobody in the company knows how to write for NPCs that have privileges the player character lacks. If you create NPCs that relentlessly taunt and belittle the player, there should be a way to serve them comeuppance. If there isn’t, there should be a way to ignore them. If one can’t, they should be basically immaterial to the player’s success or failure in the game. If they aren’t, that feeling of all-too-familiar disempowerment at the hands of an unassailable bully better be what the game is about, heart, soul and center. It’s an appropriate emotion to convey in a game about the horrors of tyranny or man’s inhumanity to man. Slipping it in like a pinch of sand in your triple-decker victory sandwich is just bad writing.
Sure, the bullying dorkuses of Little Lamplight aren’t really sinister. I was myself only moderately bullied in elementary school, but I have trouble imagining even the most tender souls are genuinely reduced to tears by Mayor MacReady or his snotty authoritarian goombas. I would characterize them as “annoying.” You know what, though? “Annoying” is bad enough. “Annoyed” is not an emotional goal of Fallout 3 and I will aggressively roll my eyes at anyone who argues otherwise. We can do better.
So how do we fix Little Lamplight? As in all things, by identifying the intended purpose and the core problems.
Intended purpose:
Not an incredibly strong start. So, besides the fact that LL’s existence is weakly justified, what are the problems?
- Check another box from the “wacky high-concept brainstorm wall,” which it pains me to say Bethesda loves more than the company loves internal logic or a logical story structure. “Sure, this cool thing might be a complete dead end that seems to exist purely for its own sake, but it sure did make journalists chuckle and say ‘huh’ at E3!”
- Provide another set of quests to pad out the main story (or skip if you have the right perk, which is sort of neat).
- …that’s it.
Now we’re getting somewhere. First we’ll fix our identified problems; then we’ll create new, better, more ambitious goals.
- The kids as written are jaw-shatteringly obnoxious. If you’ve played the game, you need no examples. If you haven’t, no one example will suffice. Trust me, they’re real shit-kids.
- Appointing the Lamplighters sole guardians of the pass creates an ugly plot hole[1] which I’ll get into in a later post.
- Considering that their role in the story is literally to be gatekeepers, they’re insulting unqualified. They prevent the player from passing with a short plywood wall and a handful of armed children. To earn a way through the gate without the right skills or perk, the player has to assault a fortified base of murderous slavers. Even if you present the reasonable conceit that harming the kids is off the table, how hard would it really be to bulldoze through with power armor? And given that the kids don’t know they’re invincible, why would they stand their ground and shoot at you instead of running for the hills? It’s asinine. The mind reels from the idea that these kids actually get to dictate terms to you just because they’ve got a shitty barricade and the protection of youth.
Problem solutions:
Updated goals:
- Forget the kids playing gatekeeper. “We’ll let you progress in the main quest if you do us a favor” is a frustrating chestnut of RPGs anyhow and rarely holds up to scrutiny. How about instead, the player arrives to discover and thwart a raid currently in progress, and (after witnessing the vulnerability of the settlement and having their heartstrings plucked by the plight of the poor beleaguered kids hanging on by their fingernails) finds out that in an earlier gambit, the members of Little Lamplight who know how to hotwire the vault door have been snatched up. The player’s cleared to pass on through the town, but there’s nothing to pass on to because the vault door won’t budge without the right passed-on-for-generations steps known only to the absentees. Now the player has a choice: they can rescue the children and get the information directly, or they can negotiate with or befriend the Paradise Falls slavers to gain access the information without saving anyone.
- Like I said, I’ll get to the plot hole later.
- Simplest fix so far: don’t make the children a flock of cocky shitbirds. Make them defiant, proud, brave, but don’t make them pointlessly antagonistic. I can buy that a settlement of children can fend for themselves and demonstrate the grit they need to keep predators at bay, but there’s a tremendous difference between standing one’s ground and savagely mocking potential enemies. One of these two attitudes is associated with survival in desperate, brutal, dog-eat-dog situations. The other is associated with getting one’s ass kicked.
So that’s our Little Lamplight. We’re past the worst of it now; time to bring this story to its satisfying final act.
- Pad the main story with quest content and a choice that reflects the tension between helping others at great risk and taking advantage of weakness. We do this by presenting a pretty straightforward choice: the player can either take great risks to get some information and rescue the innocent, or exploit the fear and helplessness of the captured children to get the info out of them under false pretenses or intimidation. Either way, a resounding and full-throated commitment to the player’s established principles…unless the player just buys the kids and sets them free, choosing neither to confront evil nor to profit from it and deferring “choosing a side” for a little longer.
- Check another box on the “wacky high-concept brainstorm wall” in a way that tells an active story about what’s currently happening in the world. If you come across a settlement of children, that’s…cool, I guess? If you come across a settlement of children that is currently locked in a war of attrition with slavers and fighting to save its own existence, that’s a just a location that can show up in a story, that is a story. That tells us something about Little Lamplight’s role in the world. That makes the lol-crazy concept of an entire village of youthful innocents facing the dangers of a hungry wasteland directly speak to the central themes of the story by acknowledging: the weak are always in peril of being devoured by the strong and evil, and can be saved only if the strong and good give their strength willingly.
NEXT TIME: GETTING THE GECK AND GETTING CAPTURED
Overhaulout Part 11: The Ugly Factory
The internet quakes with hatred for Little Lamplight, but besides a few dismissive complaints about flashbang logistics I’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, so feel free to rebut with your own and be sure to include an appropriately scornful reaction gif.
By now I think I’ve read an equal amount of straightforwardly fannish discussions of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. I’m excluding here discussions about which one is better, or fun conversations co-opted into a dominance battle by salty New Vegas fans, or even nuanced goods-and-bads critical shakedowns. Basically, I’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 Fallout 3 focus around two subjects:
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’t say confidently that I’ve never read a discussion of almost any quest or character.
- The extemporaneous experience of playing the game (“I loved just roaming the Wasteland, dog at my side, gun in my hand, picking my nose, full bowl of cereal, she hadn’t left me yet, exploring ruins…”)
- A dozen or so “hit” quests, character, or locations (“Remember the Vault with the Garys? Moira? Megaton? Paradise Falls? North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe?”)
Assuming you buy any of my ad hoc sampling salad, you’ve got two faction-coded inferences to choose from: “A lot of Fallout 3‘s content isn’t very interesting” and “Obsidian’s bad at creating an experience that transcends its content.” I’d actually hedge somewhere in the middle, but for obvious reasons that first idea’s more relevant to this project, and I’ll follow it up with this one:
Nobody talks positively about Vault 87 because it’s nowhere near as good or interesting as it should be.
I’m not saying most people didn’t like it. I’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 babies Super Mutants come from c.) meet one of the game’s better companions and d.) are captured by the Enclave in a let’s say unexpected twist that kicks off the whole last chapter, it’s telling that none of this gets brought up except by way of grousing about the latter part.
So how do we fix this section?
What if I told you we already have?
Problem 1: Nobody Cares Where the Super Mutants are Coming From
Because the origin of the super mutants wasn’t a mystery, at least not in any functional or classical sense. It’s something the player didn’t know, but it’s not something they had much call to think about or pursue before stumbling into this section. The reaction is “Oh, huh,” when it probably should be, “Of course!”
99% of players had no substantive experience with the first games and therefore didn’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’t be FEV mutants on the West Coast weren’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’t really satisfy anybody.
A classical mystery has three components[1]: 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’re pretty much 1 for 3, and it’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’s pointless to answer questions nobody asked.
Besides that, there’s no actual payoff to finding the mutant spawning grounds. Super mutants are treated like a nuisance by most of the game’s communities, and the few that seem afraid of them never wish: “Boy, if only someone figured out where these were coming from!” Which is just as well, because as this game would have it there basically is no point to finding out where they come from. You can’t do anything to meaningfully slow down super mutant production, which, considering we’re very near what’s supposed to be the end of this videogame, seems pointlessly fussy.
We’ve already supplied most of what’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’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 rage-filled but mind-controllable Super Mutants are being bred by the Encalve using a combination of leftover FEV virus and radiation from a modified GECK system[2]. 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 staking a huge sum of caps for someone to blow up the biggest source of purified water, Megaton.
Oh yeah, and there should be a big fat button that says “no new super mutants” which blows up an important doohickey. You don’t even have to make it do something to the gameworld right now. There’s plenty of super mutants out there, after all. Just, like, add a five-second card to the end slideshow saying “Ya done kilt the super mutants and everyone danced joyfully.”
Anyway, hopefully our big reveal has left at least a few players stunned and disoriented. Now, let’s talk about the worst part of this section, which is where it leaves players stunned and disoriented.
Problem 2: Bangnabbit
The Enclave captures the player in a cutscene. I’ll allow it, but as this scene plays out in the published game there are several significant problems
Firstly: flashbangs are a weapon that doesn’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’s an even weirder choice because flashbangs exist in other videogames, so the player knows a set of rules, which is that flashbangs are not insurmountable. If this were Counter-Strike there’d be a thousand ways to deal with a flashbang or see it coming, which means the Counter-Strike 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–or, I don’t know, some kind of Mesmetron.
Lastly, this is stupid because sooner or later the player’s going to realize the Enclave had no method of getting into Vault 87. Or, and this is almost much worse, they had an unspecified and probably unsatisfying way, like a magic anti-radiation pill that’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 “Oh no! I’ve been rumbled” 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’t matter if you can invent a justification in the intervening week: they’re still gonna be mad.
Guess what? We’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 elevator that goes back to the main area, and knockout gas filters in as the intercom barks instructions for apprehension, they’ll smack their heads. “Oh, of course! This is an Enclave facility!” By the time they knew this it was already too late, so they won’t feel they were railroaded into making a bad decision by the main plot and a fine line is struck between “player is captured in a cutscene,” “capture does not come out of nowhere and is properly foreshadowed,” and “player was allowed to act logically and sensibly.”
NEXT TIME: RAVIN’ FAWKES AND RAVEN ROCKS
