Overhaulout - Rewriting Fallout 3

[Jaesun]

Why waste any time on some boring person on the internet?

 

[Infinitron]

"week" he says.

Overhaulout Part Three: Time Bomb

Quick housekeeping note before we progress: these posts represent what I’d call a first draft of our revised Fallout 3 storyline. I’m jotting down notes for one-off revisions that I’ll share in the final post, but I also reserve the right to retcon lavishly as we go along. Dialogue is written for general effect, not for poetry, although I’m certainly trying to approximate the correct tone and content. Might I say again, at the risk of belaboring the point: actually writing a videogame is so much harder than what I’m doing in this series.

We’re coming to the first major multi-part quest of Fallout 3, “Following in his Footsteps.” Core design purpose: allow players pursuing the main quest to rapidly uncover the central hubs, conflicts, and NPCs. Secondary purposes: provide a sense of mounting mystery by drip-feeding information and “you just missed him” teases about your father, expose player to selected sidequests that create a huge (not to say inflated) sense of player empowerment. On all accounts, the finished product rates a very qualified success.

One problem is that by this point in the game the player is invested in one question: why did our father leave the Vault? Soon we’ll learn that he actually brought us into the Vault years ago, and the contrary question becomes equally enticing: why did he go there in the first place? Why was he even permitted inside? There’s no point in speculating. You don’t have the facts to do, so you can hardly be expected to get it right. It’s perfectly well to motivate the player by promising to answer these questions later over and over again until your father is discovered and all is revealed, but surely it would be more inspiring to dole out clues and little revelations more regularly. Even as early as the first town, we should be laying groundwork that will stir the mind for a first playhrough and ring like a bell every time thereafter.

But you know what else the game doesn’t foreshadow? Nearly everything, including the central hooks that come in without ceremony midway through. By the time the Enclave shows up to seize the water purifier, the player needs to have a very clear idea why this is a bad thing on both a personal and regional level. That the early portion of the game teaches neither especially well and in fact seems disinterested in either point is one of the storyline’s more arresting failures.

Megaton
SUPPLIES AHEAD

FRESH WATER, LIVE AMMO, INFORMATION

BOMB IS PERFECTLY SAFE

-Sign near Vault 101

We’re keeping Megaton.

That is to say that we are kicking our story off with a city that’s been built around a dubious atomic bomb by weary settlers and nuke-worshipping loonies. Just after arriving in town, the protagonist will have the choice to blow it up for some rich snobs in the Wasteland or help to keep the peace out of a sense of goodness and charity. We’re keeping these ideas intact because, as I hope I’ve made clear, our objective is not to question whether all of these big-picture E3-friendly ideas are good starting points for an interesting RPG; our job is to trust Bethesda’s brand of memorable high concept and make it work as best as we can on a narrative level.[1] Ideally, nuMegaton will be internally consistent, reinforce the game’s core theme just by existing, further the game’s current central mystery, and provide a more interesting version of the Big Choice to blow up an entire major settlement.

Our first order of business is to give nuMegaton a reason to be there, both in the sense that the town has a function of some kind (besides serving as a “trade hub,” despite the actual trade activity seeming sporadic and sedate) and in the sense that there’s some reason for people to have built absolutely anything around a goddamn bomb. “There was lots of scrap metal from the bomber carrying the nuke” doesn’t cut the mustard when the whole region is full of entire blown-out towns that haven’t been broken down for parts yet. Let’s say you were trying to get into Vault 101, as Megaton’s founding fathers nobly attempted, and ended up building a makeshift community to avoid perishing in a radiation storm or raider attack or something. Now, which site would serve as the foundation of your emergency shelter: a crater with an undetonated atom bomb and a single plane’s worth of metal in the center? Or the big still-standing schoolhouse up the road? There’s a lattice of overlapping excuses, none of which is individually very strong, which gives the player the very definite sense that Megaton is a plot point justified rather than crafted.

It’s not that I particularly noticed this didn’t make sense during my first playthrough. I’d go out on a limb and say most players didn’t observe or care about the contrivances, which is sort of an illustration of the problem. Players see a town built around a nuke and say, “Oh, cool. I get the gist.” The problems with the premise don’t come out because the premise is obviously superficial. There’s nothing in particular to connect to or think about, which means a better job can certainly be done.

My origin for nuMegaton goes like this:

Not far from the gates of 101, Vault-Tec had a small research and development campus cranking out security and quality-of-life innovations for their survival bunker slash ant farms. Among the features under development were an advanced water purification facility and a poorly-understood “anti-nuke” system. Naturally, when nuclear war began, every single one of these anti-nuke systems that can be detected on the old still-intact computer banks completely to keep the enemy bomber at bay or prevent the gigantic payload from flattening the main building. Except, funny thing: while the impact did a tremendous amount of damage to the main R&D thoroughfare, for some reason the nuke failed to go off. These days, Megaton’s more thoughtful residents are split between those who believe the nuke failing to blow was a fluke and those who credit an as-yet-undiscovered innovation of the ruins with suppressing the detonation. And then there are those super-crazies, the Children of Atom, who’ve spun this vague notion of a secret and inscrutable anti-apocalypse field into a religion that’s elevated Vault-Tec’s disaster readiness manual, signage, and graffiti into sets of rituals and sigils that make radiation harmless and stave off the end of the world. Anyway, nobody’s keen to try moving the old troublemaker. The bomb is rust-fused to the infrastructure, extremely heavy, and as best as anyone’s been able to tell the best way to blow it up would be to give it a sudden jerk.

So why do people live or trade there? A damn good reason, actually: the Vault-Tec water purification facility is the closest thing the whole Capital Wasteland has to a reliable supply of fresh water.

As the townsfolk will be happy to explain, normal Vault water purifiers (like the one you grow up with) will make septic water drinkable, but they won’t scrub away all the radiation “natural” Wasteland water is infested with. That’s where Megaton’s rusty, busted, half-finished facility comes in. It might break down constantly, take a lot of labor to keep running, occasionally mangle a worker, and require the constant attention of irreplaceable experts, but god damn if it doesn’t make water mostly rad-free. For a while the place was run by a tyrant scientist-king who was the only man who could make the thing work; then a woman who worked there figured out how it ticked, and she told everyone else, and now there’s a statue of her in the square and people don’t talk about the tyrant-king anymore. Settlers and traders come from miles around, sometimes daily, to fill their jugs and waterskins. Plenty of people hang around to sell things to them and the facility’s workers, enduring the constant if low-grade threat the bomb poses, figuring it’s better to suckle at the slightly menacing teat of the facility than sit around a scabby flat sipping cloudy mugs of bone-hurting juice.

With this setup we’re providing some key story-critical info to the player:

1. Fresh water is scarce. Not “oh no the purifier’s annoying to fix sometimes” scarce, but terrifyingly rare. The wonky busted prototype purifier is such a valuable asset that it singlehandedly created a trading hub next to a live atomic bomb. (See how useful that slightly silly high concept can be?)
2. Control of the means to create fresh water equals political control over a region.
3. A woman figured out some important things about purifying water, then vanished somewhere. Huh. (This will click a little later on.)

Full disclosure: I don’t feel much need to rewrite the actual Moriarty part of “Following in his Footsteps.” It accomplishes two of my major objectives: it demonstrates a case of the resource-strong victimizing the weak while making the player feel more invested in the world and story by allowing them to make granular, interesting short-term choices. Seriously, check the wiki: there’s more divergent paths and options in this one stage of this first quest than there is basically the rest of the main storyline combined. Off the top of my head, I’d only make two changes: firstly, I’d amend what I seem to recall is explicit language on Moriarty’s part that the best way to get the money to pay him is to go “kill” his runaway employee Silver, which I think is needlessly nefarious; I think it’s more impactful if he just legitimately doesn’t give a shit what happens to her as long as he gets his money. Secondly, I’d make it a little bit harder to hack the terminal if you want to bypass him entirely. Seriously, the password’s in a cabinet? Way to make every other way through the quest seem like an embarrassing waste of time.

Since I’m not rewriting that part, let’s instead take a crack at the real star of Megaton.

Mr. Burke’s Modest Proposal
Let’s get this out of the way: as it is, the quest to blow up Megaton makes no goddamn sense. It’s so fractally bizarre that it’s hard to know where to begin. Why are the people in Tenpenny Towers “wealthy?” Barring any real arable land to work, aristocrats would almost have to be merchants…so why on Earth would they blow up the one solitary trade hub in the area? Because it “spoils Mr. Tenpenny’s view?” I see why a writer thought that could work; certainly it’s not impossible to sell audiences on a villain callous enough to murder hundreds for aesthetic reasons. But that’s such an unexpected motivation that it naturally prompts the player to become curious about the characters and setting involved, and since all are very loosely sketched, no actual scrutiny is borne. The only real way to get through it is not to think about it.

So let’s leverage our newly-fleshed-out Megaton and add some dimension to this quest.

After you enter the saloon, you’re called over to a lonesome corner by a mysterious fellow, Mr. Burke. He’s heard from his ears around town that you just arrived, apparently from a Vault. You therefore represent exactly what he needs: an outsider with plausible connections to Vault-Tec and none whatsoever to the locals or outlying settlements. He offers to buy you a drink, then confidently launches into his pitch:

He represents a Mr. Tenpenny, the leader of a syndicate of water merchants who ship not-so-radioactive water at a tremendous markup from various reservoirs and holdings across the eastern seaboard. While the syndicate has historically done extremely well, making all of them so fabulously wealthy they can afford to maintain a fully-appointed luxury apartment building, the successful revolution of Megaton’s water purification facility has crimped local business dangerously. Megaton represents a local, well-fortified threat to the syndicate’s interests. Proposals to take it over were ultimately rejected, as the atomic bomb was considered too much of a liability to make the facility worth trying to seize. After all, “What good is a resource if you can’t hold it tightly in your fist?”

So the answer is simple: blow it up, along with the purification facility, and allow the syndicate to once again monopolize water in the region. That’s where you come in.

As an outsider from the Vault, you are to claim to town officials that you know how nukes work due to your Vault education—something they had long theorized, incorrectly, might be the case. The sheriff will allow you to approach once you promise to help disable the bomb. As Burke would have it, this is when you would set the detonator, briskly depart, and destroy Megaton.

Your reward would be tremendous. You get a huge one-time payment, for one thing. You’ll also get a safe residence with ample access to resources. Finally, and not insignificantly, you’ll have just made instant friends with a lot of rich powerful people who are about to be the richest and most powerful people in the whole region. Gradually it becomes clear why Burke is being so brazen: it doesn’t occur to him, being a child of the wasteland, that anyone would be stupid enough to turn down such a self-evidently cushy opportunity. As a good-aligned player helps the Sheriff bring Burke to justice, the question must present itself: how desperate are these people after all?

 

[PlanHex]

Hey, this is actually ramping up to be pretty good. And sorta on time too.

I just wish I didn't get PTSD flashbacks to how horrible Fallout 3 was in every sentence.

 

[Nutria]

Megaton was when I lost any faith I had in the writers. It was an obvious ripoff of the post-apocalyptic cult worshiping an atomic bomb in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. But while in that movie they were trying to say something about peoples' attitudes toward mutually assured destruction in the 1970s, in Fallout 3 there's no point to it. Someone just saw that movie and decided "oh, that's so weird and quirky" and tossed it into the game whether it made any sense or not.

Also, fuck Bethesda for making city that's like an Escher drawing. There's no landmarks or visual cues to tell you where the hell you are. I wasted far too much of my life getting lost in Megaton.

 

[YES!]

Honestly, if the mechanics are all shit what difference does the writing make? This game needs a completely overhauled mechanics mod far more than any rewrite mod.

 

[sser]

Too many adverbs.

 

[Infinitron]

Overhallout Part 4: Mutations

Here’s a question for anyone who’s beaten Fallout 3: what role do super mutants, the most common and iconic enemy in the entire game, play in the main storyline?

Really take a minute. Spool through the mutant-laden story beats: the brawl outside GNR, the mission to the Museum of Technology, the cleansing of the purifier, the expedition to Vault 87. Really let it sink in how much time you spend trading shots with these geeks compared to, say, the Enclave: how much earlier you encounter them, how much more prominent they are, how much more of your resources they eat up.

Now ask yourself again: what role do they actually play in the story?

But we’ve summed it up, haven’t we? They exist. They exist again, again. They shoot and must be shot at. If you find-replaced super mutants with anything else at all, berserk killer robots or cold calculating mercenaries or a platoon of brainless body-snatching coral shrimp, the story wouldn’t really change much. Their agenda and origins and function are immaterial.

I don’t think it’s too fussily formalist to argue that your videogame’s earliest and most common enemies should have a stake in or relevance to the major conflict. I guess you could argue that they demonstrate the altruism of the Brotherhood of Steel by providing an opponent to be combated, but that is an extremely low bar. I’d argue it’s the basic function any antagonist at all would fulfill.

I don’t actually like this idea, and it’s outside the scope of my redesign anyway, but but for the sake of argument consider a Fallout 3 where the player and Brotherhood fought Enclave forces for the whole game. You arrive outside GNR and Enclave troops are trying to capture the radio station. Enclave troops destroy the radio dish to prevent GNR from broadcasting its alerts and organizing the Wasteland. Enclave troops have occupied the purifier searching for your father. Imagine a game, in other words, where the game’s actual antagonist is established as a threat before the midway point of the game. For all that you’d lose in enemy variety and the thrill of discovery and story nuance, isn’t it better to spend your time tangling with your family’s actual nemesis instead of a bunch of staggeringly irrelevant ogres?

There’s no way around it: before we go any further, we’re going to find something to do with our super mutants. Before I do, I’ll show my work and explain what I will and won’t change to get results.

Bethesda MOBology
The reason super mutants are a story problem comes down to Bethesda’s valid but inflexible approach to enemy design.

I’m sure the developers would offer a nuanced disagreement, but I’d argue that broadly, Bethesda isn’t interested in baking narrative into non-named opponents. In Obsidian’s version of Fallout, the spiky human hostile raiding class are called “Fiends” and have a culture (anarchist transgressive tweaking), leadership structure (main leader in the heart of the territory, smaller warbosses chosen for their craziness and killing power scattered everywhere), territory (a gradient around their HQ, Vault 3) and goal (obtaining gear and cash to spend getting chems from the Great Khans). This kind of specificity can be called a “context-heavy” approach to enemies.

In Bethesda’s Fallout 3, the human raiders are called “raiders.” They have no specific culture, structure, goals, or territory. They’re just MOBs. We can call this “context-light.”

The advantage of context-heavy design is obvious; it provides more fertile ground for storytelling. The disadvantage is, you can’t really work outside that context. If a developer has a great idea for a dungeon full of raider-type enemies, they can’t use it unless they can fit it inside the region and story context of the Fiends. Bethesda’s context-light approach lets them treat enemies a little more generically, which empowers them to make the overworld however they think will be most enjoyable to the player. As much as I personally love Obsidian’s approach, I think this more liberating design standard plays some part in making Bethesda’s open worlds more favorably received in the gaming community. [1]

So don’t expect me to write a post like this for generic raiders. Let me be very clear: I wouldn’t bother “fixing” super mutants by making them tell stories if they weren’t such a big part of the main story. You can have as many generic MOBs in shopping centers and skyscrapers and sewers as you want, but it’s silly to fill the main quest with antagonists that want nothing and relate to nobody. But I will keep Bethesda’s design principles in mind and not saddle super mutants with more baggage than their place in the game can bear.

So I’ll ask first: what’s the very least we could do?

Even if we wanted to make super mutants as generic as possible, we could at least plug some kind of arc into the game. We could layer a little context into the super mutant quests to create a sense of progression:

1. Super mutants are a huge long-term problem…
   1. …so you shoot a bunch of them, and…
2. Super mutants are now angry and hunting you…
   1. …so you shoot a whole bunch of them, and…
3. Super mutants are no longer a long-term problem.
   1. Yay!

As it is, there’s no arc to super mutants at all. Super mutants you shoot in one quest aren’t just unconnected to the main narrative, they’re totally unconnected to the last group of super mutants you shot. The “resolution” to the question of super mutants, telling the Elder where they come from after visiting Vault 87, is a skippable and abrupt afterthought with little emotional payoff.

The Vault 87 section might actually be the most frustrating part of Bethesda’s treatment. In explaining where super mutants come from, and making it something completely unrelated to the main storyline, it amounts to answering a question nobody (including the game!) really asked. It’s not a lot more than a hand-wave to lore nerds mad about super mutants on the East Coast, and I’m guessing that’s a small percentage of Bethesda’s playerbase and an even smaller percentage of Bethesda’s target audience.

You know what, enough dancing around. You ready for my solution to the super mutant problem?

My Solution to the Super Mutant Problem
I’ll be honest: this answer is so obvious I spent literally an hour combing through wikis checking to make sure it wasn’t already in the game. If it somehow was, and I just missed it, and apparently everyone else missed it, mention it in the comments. Also mention in the comments if this was already your headcanon, because I think that’s surprisingly likely.

You know what? How about I start by dispassionately relaying some plot points that already totally exist in the game.

• Deathclaws are berserk mutants created when living creatures are exposed to FEV.
• Super mutants are berserk mutants created when living creatures are exposed to FEV.
• The Enclave has been experimenting with mind-controlling Deathclaws to help them conquer the capital wasteland.
• …

Yeah, that wasn’t hard, was it?

To be clear, what I’m proposing is that the Enclave is in some way using super mutants as agents of terror. I’m suggesting that many of them were deliberately bred, some of them are deliberately deployed, and all those deliberately employed can be stood down or destroyed by the Enclave with minimal effort (bomb collars, command phrases, designer viruses, etc). Until such time as the Enclave is prepared to commit to an invasion of the capital, super mutants prevents anyone else from establishing stable governments, armies, or infrastructure. Their naturally bloodthirsty rampages and tendency to infest large sections of the prewar city makes trade empires difficult, exploration and recovery of prewar resources too expensive to contemplate, and conquest of other regions too difficult—it’s hard to build an empire when you’re busy fighting off the barbarian hordes cannibalistic mutant menace at home, on the march, and at your destination. And then, when there’s something the Enclave really wants, it’s time to arm and deploy the “leashed” mutants as terrifyingly effective deniable assets.

It’s sort of ridiculous how little needs to be added to turn super mutants into the secret weapon of the Enclave. The game has super mutants attack GNR’s radio dish because “they like shooting things,” attack GNR headquarters because “they like attacking things,” and occupy the water purifier because “they wanted to, we guess.” Kind of funny how all the pointless, random actions of the super mutants just happens to damage the player’s interests and drive the Enclave’s, huh? All we’d have to do is add one line saying “The Enclave did it” and we’d have answered more questions than we raised.

Especially if we find a way to pop or at least foreshadow the reveal of this before the tilt where our father’s killed, this actually does a lot of necessary work raising the Enclave’s profile as villains. I mean, sure, one evil officer shooting a scientists and putting your dad on the spot is bad enough to make you want to beat them, but that’s not as objectively loathsome as a faction who will let thousands die in horrible Black-Forest-fairy-tale agony just to create the ideal conditions for a power grab. Super mutants are boogeymen. They create so much grief on a daily basis that it takes all of the resources of what should be the capital’s main source of order, stability, and renewed infrastructure, the Brotherhood of Steel, just to keep them from destroying everything. How terrifying and sickening and meaningful would it be to find that all of this was done with the Enclave’s consent, and some of it was deliberately undertaken with armed, groomed, or even mind-controlled platoons?

It also makes the stakes of the Enclave’s dramatic appearance much clearer. It’s not really clear in the original game what the Enclave’s sudden appearance and attack on the purifier represents on a grander scale. Is that all they want? Is it the first step or closer to the end goal? How committed are they, actually? These answers exist, sort of, but you have to spend a long time fighting the Enclave to really get a full understanding of them.

By connecting the super mutant presence to the Enclave’s grander designs, we’ll be able to better reveal to the player what Bethesda intended: that the water purifier is not the first step nor the last one, but the lynchpin that’s so important it’s worth escalating from propaganda and destabilization to an open full-scale military action.

The Battle for GNR
I barely have to rewrite any of this actual section to fit my new hook. The exciting shish-boom-pop E3-friendly setpiece where you kill the behemoth with the Fat Man can still happen. In fact, you could say I’m not adding something so much as removing it: I’m deliberately lessening the sense of confident understanding the paladins convey. In my draft the talent super mutants have for being a pain in the ass will be seen not as natural, but darkly absurd. How do such apparently brainless and disorganized creatures create so much chaos? How is it that their random attacks always seem to come at the worst possible times for the paladins, GNR, and surrounding settlements? Where do they come from, anyway? Some of the younger paladins will be curious, but the veterans will have transcended curiosity to resigned acceptance:

God rolls the dice, and he loves super mutants, and he sure hates us.

They’re clearly fatigued and exasperated that they have all this technology and all these resources to create a new society, and they can’t so much as set up a power generator without a bunch of super mutants pissing all over it.

I should have been an engineer. I should have been building, connecting people. Instead I’ve spent my whole life in this fucking tin suit shooting at freaks who don’t care if they live or die. I’ve lost my friends and my shoulder cartilage and most of my hearing, and just when things finally started to get better…it got worse.

Thanks to the super mutants.

NEXT WEEK: THREE-DOG AND DOCTOR LI

 

[Infinitron]

Overhaulout Part 4.5: Dish and Dog

Let’s say you’re James.

You’ve decided to go back to the wasteland and fix the water purifier, risks be damned, but the transition from Vault sheets to wasteland streets is worse than you could have possibly imagined. Glowing water and feral dogs and scabrous humans leave you a physically and morally exhausted wreck. In the cynical days of adjustment you become certain you’ll never finish your great work, never reunite with your only child. You’ll be preyed on by a string of greedy wasteland pirates and parasites until all your efforts to help the world are forgotten to the dust of time.

And then you stumble onto Galaxy News Radio and everything changes. Here at last you’ve found another genuine altruist in the hellish melee. He welcomes you, a stranger, into his heavily-guarded studio for an interview where you end up asking all the questions. He is thoughtful, savvy, warm, and patient. When you leave, he broadcasts on his radio station:

So if you see James out there, you say hello. Be kind to our new brother, and show him that here on the outside, we always fight the good fight.

Then after a brief and embarrassing episode in a creepy vault you wander back to the station for a visit and an interview—hoping to give his audience a PSA about drinking water and trusting strange computer programs, perhaps—and after cracking a couple Nukas, Three Dog casually mentions:

“By the way, your kid says hello.”

“What?” You’re stupefied. “My child came here…and didn’t even ask where I’d gone?”

“That did come up. Kind of a whiny kid you’ve got, actually. All ‘wah wah, where’s my dad, where’s my dad.’ And I’m like, does the kid need a night light for pete’s sake?”

“Did you say where I’d gone?”

“I sort of did. I mean, I said I knew where you’d gone, and that I’d share that info…in exchange for just, like, a tiny errand.”

“What errand did you…”

“Steal a giant radio dish from super mutant infested territory. So, you know. A desperate teenager from a soft vault upbringing seemed like the ideal person for the job.”

“How?!”

“Okay, you got me. I just didn’t want to have to ask the paladins to do it.” He checks his calendar. “Come to think of it, all this was a couple months ago. If I had to guess, I’d say your kid really sucked at fighting the good fight.”

The world spins. Your forgotten, shallow breaths lap the open mic—a live feed of your pain and suffering to Three Dog’s many, many worshipers. Your only family just died trying to find you, and died for no reason at all–except a desperate need to find and reunite with you.

“Say,” says Three Dog brightly, “you doing anything right now? And do you know where the museum is?”

Three Dog’s quest is supposed to fulfill two purposes:

1. The obvious practical concern: provide something for the player to do, stretch out the mystery of “where’s dad and what’s he up to?” Not hard stuff.
2. Introduce the player to one of the wasteland’s good guys, the voice of moral clarity and reason that will serve as colorful Greek chorus for the game’s full length.

And it does a really, really bad job at both of them.

1. While the quest is certainly “something to do,” and I have no particular bones to pick with the gameplay in a vacuum (I’ll even let the whole “carrying a goddamn satellite dish up your ass” thing slide, because honestly I don’t really care), it doesn’t prolong so much as kill the momentum of the overarching DadQuest. We just don’t get to advance the storyline here. We learn nothing about the games setting or factions or themes fetching the dish, and certainly we don’t investigate our father’s backstory or whereabouts. We’re just rewarded with info we didn’t help to collect after we waste our time with something unrelated. That is, if we don’t make our Speech check that skips the whole quest, in which case this really fails to pad the playtime.
2. Here’s what we do learn: Three Dog is a grasping hypocritical asshole who will exploit heartbroken homeless teenagers by sending them on borderline suicide missions. You can’t really confront him with this, so the game doesn’t get any points for being morally complex or whatever by turning their self-righteous preacher into a scumbag.

A more ambitious rewrite would replace this quest with something more like the Kellogg trail in Fallout 4. I cannot stress enough that the mystery of your dad’s disappearance cannot be narratively satisfying unless the player has any pertinent facts through which to consider it, and a segment here where we tweeze those out and start pondering what we really know about our dad would really hit the spot. But we’re sticking to the basic structure, so let’s keep the very specific and bafflingly unrelated goal of fixing Three Dog’s stupid radio dish. Oh, and it needs to be skippable by skill check. And ideally, skipping it with a skill check should in some way a more interesting option than, “Meh, skip the quest I guess, whatever.” All this might seem like an ambitious redesign goal. And yet, I find the rewrite pretty simple to sum up:

“You want to know where your dad went? It’s weird—he promised me he’d come back and check in, but he never did. How about I ask listeners if they’ve seen him? If only my radio show had a longer range…”

Player options should now include:

• Volunteer to fix the radio dish, as it’s clearly the fastest and most surefire way to find your father. If you do this, you’ll come back to find Three Dog’s already collected a reported sighting from someone within the new broadcast range. Next stop, Rivet City!
• Convince Three Dog to share his uncertain gut feelings. If you pass a Speech check, he’ll speculate that your father’s path lead to the northeast portion of the map. Next stop, the Rivet City area!
• Say “thanks for nothing” and move on. Sooner or later, the player will stumble onto Rivet City.

That’s already much better, but we can improve further still. Next week, let’s get past the vague allusions to a richer mystery and get in-depth with making James and quests about finding James actually interesting.

 

[Psyckosama]

Came up with this years ago. Might be of use to you.

Spoiler

I've been thinking about Talon Company and how little there is on them. Right now they're just the Generic Evil Guys, but there is no explanation as to who they are, how they came about, and where they got access to all this Military hardware. My idea is maybe it might be a good idea to fix that. Here's a possible history.

200 years ago, an elite company of the 101st Airborn division, cycled back home from the war to rest, recover, and train replacements was on maneuvers in the mountains of West Virginia. When the bombs fell, the unit was cut off from command and lacking ordered, heroically made best speed for the Capitol. They found the immediate area around the city to be virtually uninhabitable due to radiation, but found the country side around the city to be mostly intact.

Unwilling to abandon their nations capitol, they hunkered down in the shattered remains of Fort Bannister, and when the level of the societal breakdown became apparent they decided to intervene. With the government and Army gone, they renamed themselves "Talon Company" after their unit nickname and started enacting a harsh martial law in order to keep some level of order. They brutally suppressed the raiders, suppressed the Super Mutants threat, and terrorized the Zombie Menace. When the slavers of Paradise Falls proved too difficult to hunt down and too entrenched to destroy in any form of frontal assault, they came to a mutually beneficial agreement that put limits on the slaver's behavior. This proved to be one of the first of many little capitulation that slowly changed them from a harsh but fair peacekeeping force to the brutal and self-serving Talon Company of today.

For over 100 years they were one of the strongest factions vying for control of the Capitol Wasteland. They were cruel, harsh, and self-serving, but still far superior to the Raiders and Super Mutants. They were the feudal lords of the Capitol Wasteland, slowly pushing deeper into the city as the Radiation faded, eventually claiming the Pentagon as their palace as they formulated plans to cement their control of the region. When the Brotherhood arrived from the West, they were at the height of their power, and while very hands off rulers, they extracted protection money from the wasteland communities... for protection from the wastes and from them.

When the Brotherhood arrived, Talon Company welcomed them with open arms. While they had managed to salvage a number of suits over the years, they lacked the technical expertise to maintain the durable but fussy power armor suits. In the brotherhood, they saw fellow decedents of the US Army who'd risen above the Wastes. Natural allies who if convinced to join them would give them a a cadre of power armored warriors and technicians that would allow them to finally cement their dominance over the Capitol Wasteland and beyond.

Elder Lyons on the other hand saw them as an abomination to everything he considered just. They were in business with slavers, they brutally suppressed the people of the wasteland, and they looked out only for themselves. Under the influence of one of Talon Company's rival groups, the Regulators, they decided to act. He bid his time, let them accept him into their fold, then stabbed them in the heart, capturing the Citadel and crushing the core of their forces with his superior arms and armor.

Unfortunately, with Talon Company broken the Raiders were free to reestablish themselves, the Slavers could throw off their age old limitations, and the Super Mutant population absolutely, soared locking the Brotherhood in a constant battle with the reborn menace while the remains of Talon Company retreated to their old redoubt of Fort Bannister to lick their wounds.

 

[Infinitron]

Overhaulout Part 5: The Story of James

Fallout 3’s James is a terrible main character–possibly because he wasn’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’s relationship with and study of James something useful and worthwhile.

There’s a lot we stand to improve, but these are my chief objectives:

• The story should provide a genuine mystery players feel they’re solving. I don’t mean adding detective mechanics or even detective-lite sequences, like Fallout 4 dabbles in. When I say the story should be a “mystery,” I mean there should be a progression from unexplained but important event–> disconnected facts that are but incomplete but intriguing–> revelations that suggest possibilities –> satisfying conclusion. That’s a pretty standard formula for hooking, motivating, and entertaining an audience presented with a question that needs answering, like, “Why did my dad just vanish?” Currently the story runs from unexplained but important event–>directions to the end of the mystery–>directions to the end of the mystery–>the mystery unravels abruptly.[1] That’s sort of mechanically functional, since a big part of the game is in journeying from place to place, but it’s also dull and doesn’t make efficient or memorable use of the setup.
• Make more complete use of the characters and locations already employed by the story. If you cut Megaton from the main quest’s gameplay, that’d be a huge loss—it serves a lot of mechanical functionality. But from a story perspective, Megaton is totally dispensable. It doesn’t inform our understanding of James’ character or our mission to find him in anything but the most perfunctory fashion: “he went that-a-way.” Let’s fix that.

I’m going to proceed through the locations of the main quest in order. For each location, I’ll do two related rewrites: one that makes a drastic alteration to the location’s history vis-a-vis its relationship with James, another that makes minor alterations to how the player finds it and what clues[2] are available there. In doing so I’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’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’ll have walked in his shoes: they’ll have seen what he’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’re going to follow in his footsteps or choose their own path.

Megaton

Decades Ago…

A glitchy source of stable water controlled by a tyrannical scientist-king, Megaton is carrot and stick to hundreds of laborers. Scavengers, manufacturers, tradesmen and tradeswomen—all keep their heads down and follow the hydroking’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’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.

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’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.

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’re fast becoming the capital’s premier experts on water purification. They have a duty to share that information. So they arm themselves and venture east.

Most of Megaton’s old guard remember Catherine fondly and even make a junk statue of her in the style of the capital’s ruins. Only one of the men who lingered still holds a grudge: Catherine’s previous partner-in-treason, a man who’d supplied parts and taken risk for the operation because he believed they’d become the new tyrants. A cunning, enterprising young man named Colin Moriarty.

Modern Day

While the player is traveling to Megaton, they pass a patch of unusually bright flowers near Vault 101.

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 “old fellow who spent thousands of caps on supplies and went off south”[3] as the young doctor from twenty-five years ago.

Moriarty did recognize your father, but when he finds out you’re the man’s offspring he’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’ll give you exactly one piece of information: “He asked about that damn radio station to the east.” He gloats that he’ll probably die trying to get there—that it’s a rat’s nest of super mutants not even the merchants are crazy enough to cut through.

At the Catherine Monument, the player finds a single, bright flower.

GNR

Decades Ago…

Jacob and Catherine’s two-person humanitarian mission finds mixed results. Sometimes it’s all they can do to set up a crude water purifier for irradiated nomads; sometimes they’re chased off by feral robbers and raiders gone mad from radiation poisoning. Often enough, they’ll fix or install a system only to discover raiders have killed the owners and taken it over. Painfully admitting that they’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.

Modern Day

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 “Purified.” Visually, the only common feature of these sources is that they’re engraved with a big fat “J + C.” 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.

Three Dog doesn’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 “with the old computers in the basement.” All of said computers have been wiped–and very recently–except for one corrupted terminal that displays fragments of research notes about “mass water purification,” references to a person named Catherine, “the problem of raiders co-opting water,” and finally a potential ally: “Doctor Li, if the merchants are to be believed.” This is less of a clue than the lead doing Three Dog’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.

Rivet City

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’s that much more painful.

At first the project merely stalls. Then it bites back. Radiation leaks kill one of the scientists they’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–until one bleak morning when Dr. Li discovers a heretofore unforseen problem.

The plant certainly could purify huge batches of water–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’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’ spirits drop.

Then, far too late, the next bombshell drops: the “pure” water they’d created from their early successes had a contaminant. Easy to eliminate, if you know it’s there. Unhealthy, but not individually fatal unless the afflicted is under severe physical duress.

Two weeks later Catherine dies in childbirth.

More scientists leave the project. The usual supply drop doesn’t come. Super mutants are seen roving the area, killing and marauding. James is a father now. He’s heard rumors that there’s problems with the water chip at Vault 101, that robots are roving the wasteland offering desperate sums for a fix or a replacement.

James swallows his pride.

Rivet City, Modern Day

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’t is the whole story, including exactly why he left. That part James will have to explain in person.

NEXT WEEK: PROJECT PURITY, THAT VAULT WITH THE CREEPY KID, AND WHY I HAVEN’T INTRODUCED THE ENCLAVE YET

 

[Gerrard]

Who's paying you for this, Infinitron?

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

As far I like F3 as a postapocaliptic popamole exploration game, I don't get what's the fucking point about tryng to rewrite it's shitty story. It's dead horse, go play Van buren AKA New vegas ffs.

 

[pippin]

Talking about the Super Mutant "problem" in fo3, makes me actually wonder if using the Super Mutants as a thing in the FO game and lore was a mistake. It's probably the most corny and childish element of Fallout 1, or at least as a main plot device level, and not in a very good way. Then again, what kind of threat could be represented by raiders, who are basically junkies? Enclave is the better enemy, but even in FO2 they are almost a cartoon (and their boss is a mandatory fight, going against FO1's design logics).

I wish they could have come up with a better concept. Humans are boring, yes, but in a way they give you more opportunities than super mutants imo.

 

[Magnificate]

The focus on water as a scarce resource is appealing. I can definitely see mashing these ideas with Fallout 1 and 2. Imagine, we've got the Vault Dweller who goes out to find the water chip and there are two competing factions in the wastelands. Megaton with it's ramshackle, but well established water purifier and newly-emerged Vault 8 with it's high-tech but low-capability solutions. First part is about securing the water chip thus adding Vault 13 as the third potential source of pure water. The second part is about the conflict between Megaton and Vault 8, with four main endings being: Vault 13 stays in isolation and the war is destructive to both sides OR Megaton-Vault 13 alliance stomps Vault 8 OR both Vaults stomp Megaton OR the Megaton-Vault 8 coalition lead by the Vault Dweller ransacks Vault 13. I'd so play that!

 

[Infinitron]

Talking about the Super Mutant "problem" in fo3, makes me actually wonder if using the Super Mutants as a thing in the FO game and lore was a mistake. It's probably the most corny and childish element of Fallout 1, or at least as a main plot device level, and not in a very good way.

It's a good example of how fans often extract things out of a game (or any other piece of fiction) that are more highbrow than what that game is ostensibly about to the plain eye. The main plot of Fallout is about defeating an army of orc-like supermutants. Fallout: New Vegas is the game that's about what hardcore fans think Fallout is about.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Amusingly, some of the hardcore fans dislike NV for being too wacky (LOL ROMANS). There was this thread where a guy was really insistent about how wastelanders should be trapping the securitrons in holes to salvage the scrap metal, as if the Fallout world was ever in such a sorry state that people would seriously consider pissing off killer robots that mostly leave them alone just for some junk to sell.

I feel kind of dumb for not making the "mind-controlled supermutants" connection before. It would make the plot of Fo3 make a lot more sense all of a sudden. I did understand what the writers intended with the water purifier bit (it's about securing the location, not a race to see who presses the button first), but I'm curious to see what this guy will say about that.

 

[Infinitron]

Overhaulout Part 6: Purity of Purpose

The player’s found Dr. Li and discovered that James stopped by for a brief visit. By now they should realize he was trying to give the wasteland a supply of free, pure water, and they’ve seen repeated confirmations of his reason why: if water is allowed to remain a resource possessed by individual parties, it inevitably becomes a tool of control. James was chastised by his experiences trying to work with individual communities and will never forget the pain and bloodshed he inadvertently caused.

But there’s a lot that hasn’t come into focus about James: his present motivations and feelings, for example, which are ultimately what are responsible for the player’s predicament. Finding him will bring closure to this act both practically and emotionally. As Dr. Li explains, the only problem is:

He said he needed to review our old power generators! Of course I told him the site had been infested with super mutants since we left, that there weren’t any ghosts in that building worth dying for, but he never listens.

I told him not to come back. I don’t need to sit up here in my chair waiting to see if he’ll live or die. I’m sorry to say it, but I buried his bones a long time ago.

A move in the dark
The player is told that James probably used one of the old access tunnels to the facility. They’re “well hidden,” and Dr. Li knows no-one has used them in decades. It’s recommended the player take the same route to avoid having to fight or sneak through the dangerous main entrance.

Unfortunately, as the player comes within a few blocks of the secret tunnel, there’s a loud nuke-style earth-shaking explosion. The player reaches the quest marker to find a caved-in building.

This creates an element of mystery, to say nothing of paranoia. James makes his way through a secret tunnel and a few days later, it’s blown to pieces? Was James caught? Who would have the knowledge and intent and munitions to perform that kind of detonation? The player discovers that they have an enemy they haven’t seen, who hasn’t seen them, but who has already acted against their family’s interests.


Notes from Project Purity
Once the player is actually cleaning house in Project Purity, they’re going to be finding signs of reasonably recent habitation.[1] The computers contain two kinds of notes: those dated about twenty years ago and those dated a few years ago. The two different kinds of notes hit on varying topics:

20 YEARS AGO:

• “This might be promising! EDIT: Didn’t work.”
• “James and Catherine are having second thoughts. Dr. Li wants to proceed or scale down.”
• “Those super mutants are NOT going away and we keep having to shoot them and this feels like a bad trend.”

~5 YEARS AGO:

• “This might be promising! EDIT: What were they even trying to do here?”
• “These Wasteland ‘genius’ inventors can’t document a project to save their lives. We’re completely lost.”
• “We’ll revisit it with our A team after they finish up their project. Mean time, keep an eye on the place. Anyone tries to get in or out, make a note of it.”
• “What happened to my crate full of electronic parts? I needed that. Did one of those mouth-breathers take it? Oh, never mind.”

The player can find a gore bag stuffed with electronic parts. By this point, shrewd players should be wondering how someone managed to conduct research here while it was infested with super mutants. Whoever it was, it seems likely they were also responsible for blowing up your dad’s secret tunnel.

In the center of the purifier the player finds notes from James planning to break into a nearby Vault. “Our generators are sufficient! I have to take the risk. If Braun really is still alive, he may be the only man who can help us.”

That Creepy Vault
The only change we’re going to make to Vault 112 is the backstory. It’s productive for our story and our theme for us to discuss the idea that power can turn the well-intentioned into tyrants.

We will establish, in the virtual terminal containing Braun’s histories, that the simulated reality network of Vault 112 was in no way falsely advertised or conceived. It was in fact a post-war paradise created out of explicit goodwill: Braun wanted to provide an eternally novel and deprivation-free environment where his residents would live forever without pain. All citizens would retain their memories, forms, and personalities entirely. Unsure whether people would adapt well to this new world, knowing he’d be unable to leave it and make changes, he provided himself admin abilities that would let him restructure his environment and moderate residents.

As the early days unfolded, Braun exercised his powers only in a measured, structured, and rigorously transparent way. He positioned himself as the local judge and lawkeeper: after all, not everyone adapted well to the sudden freedom and anarchy of a simulation. Many of the problems that arose from this experimental civilization were bizarre and unprecedented. Braun had to make a lot of snap judgments, some of which came off as arbitrary, all of which antagonized somebody. People began to bear grudges against him, and since there was no other power source to appeal to, those grudges festered. Braun’s paradise quickly took on a painfully sour character, and his self-image as benign monarch began to droop. Months of being the “bad guy” every time he had to fix a problem ate at him. He considered a jury system, but for some reason he found himself uneasy with the idea of ceding his administrative powers to the uninformed and potentially biased views of his fellow citizens. So he kept on the way he always had, but the guilt began to fester.

Eventually he realized for his own sanity he couldn’t internalize every complaint made against him. In fact—he gradually came to understand—the trick was to consider arguments against his decisions strictly rationally, without letting his emotions come into it. Living up to this idea produced mixed results: he was sleeping a little better, and finding himself less constantly troubled, but the more detached he seemed to grow from the consequences of his judgments—the less sympathetic and contrite he sounded—the more demanding and infuriated his constituents became. He set down hard rules on how long he’d listen to appeals. They were not observed. When people refused to leave, ultimately he’d suspend their voices or teleport them away a short distance.

Now they were furious. Not just some of them, not just half of them, all of them—even the ones he’d come to see as reasonable! They called unanimously for his authority to be removed. Braun burned, because what was he supposed to do? Go into seclusion? Give them all administrative power and watch the chaos unfold? He certainly couldn’t give them power over him, couldn’t safely relinquish his own, not now that they all irrationally hated him. And they very obviously still needed someone taking care of them.

That was it, though, wasn’t it? The problem was they couldn’t bear that idea. They couldn’t yield themselves to administration. There was no way for them to be happy in this simulation knowing there was an all-powerful being ultimately calling the shots for them. Clearly, he’d made a mistake. It’d be so much easier if they should forget their old lives, forget the artifice—forget that Braun controlled everything around them.

So he wiped their memories and reconfigured their forms to match the environment, and the relief was instant. In an moment they blended perfectly with Braun’s fabricated world. Nobody asked him to meddle, nobody noticed when he had. He was free to make any well-intentioned changes he wanted with nobody yelling at him—with nobody even noticing. He would walk among them calmly, righting wrongs without a hiccup. People would misbehave and he’d reverse it. Then they’d misbehave again and he’d reverse it again. Then they’d misbehave and he’d reverse it again. After a long while, this repetition did grow irritating. He realized that from a practical perspective, it’d be a lot easier to simulate the learning of a lesson and remove the source of each misbehavior.

So he made little tinkering improvements. He “fixed” personality disorders. He trimmed aggression, vice, inconsiderateness, jealousies, disagreements. He made loves requited, disagreements end amicably. This happened so gradually that it took years for the obvious realization to sink in: the people in his simulation weren’t anything like who they used to be anymore. They were things he’d made. They were his projects.

Well…that was fair enough, wasn’t it? The real people would have died years ago without him. In a way, it was fitting and natural they should “die” and evolve, smoothly and without trauma, into his custom-designed virtual companions. Maybe he should feel guilty. He felt as though he should, but…what if he didn’t? Who could possibly judge him anymore?

He should have felt desperately lonely. Fact was, he’d felt lonely for decades.

More than anything, he was growing bored.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

What's the purity of your purpose Infinitron?

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

I remember back before launch and during my play I had made the link between Enclave and Super Mutants, and thought that Enclave using the Super Mutants to kill their enemies and them arrive all "hey guys praise us we're the cavalry" and fix the problem was the plot of the game.

The reality was... disappointing.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

Enclavo recreating the FEV to achieve it's objective of activating a water purificator (The same reason because the fight in a war against a faction whose ideals has nothing to do with giving free water to the world) that impregnates the water with a "virus" to eliminate the FEV and all the mutants creatures of wasteland that mutated because it is a pinnacle in the history of videogames with excellent writing

Someday I will check if the legend is true or not by talking with the current USA president and asking him to kill himself because yes.

 

[Infinitron]

Enclavo recreating the FEV to achieve it's objective of activating a water purificator that impregnates the water with a "virus" to eliminate the FEV

This rewrite is riding heavily on the ideas suggested by the motivation of the Enclave's Colonel Autumn, who wanted to take over the water purifier rather than poison it, in order to exert control over the wasteland. Maybe it'll even change Eden's plan, we'll see.

 

[Sykar]

Bethesda games are the only product where the fucking consumers willingly and happily fix all the faults themselves. This is reaching GNU/Car levels of absurd.

Do not worry, the new "Workshop" will make it so that you can buy this mod for only 19.99 dollars! Support the modders!
Oh wait..

Honestly, if the mechanics are all shit what difference does the writing make? This game needs a completely overhauled mechanics mod far more than any rewrite mod.

This game and Fallout 4 need to be deleted and forgotten from the annals of gaming history.

 

[Iznaliu]

This game and Fallout 4 need to be deleted and forgotten from the annals of gaming history.

Given that Fallout 4 is Bethesda's best-selling game of all time, that is unlikely to happen.

 

[Sykar]

This game and Fallout 4 need to be deleted and forgotten from the annals of gaming history.

Given that Fallout 4 is Bethesda's best-selling game of all time, that is unlikely to happen.

Do I look like I give a shit about Bethesderp?

 

[Jimmious]

This project seems like a perfect way to make the people running it suicidal