Crooked Bee
(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
Side with Joshua.
It was too late to turn back now. Not with Joshua this determined, not with him this way. She kept on going in silent conformity. Being there to cover his back, being there to give him the aid he needed. Merely because she cared, merely because, as much as she did not want to admit it, she loved him.
"The Courier's involvement had tipped the scale, shifting the fragile balance of power."
"Demoralized by the Dead Horse and Sorrows attack the Courier and Joshua Graham led against them, the White Legs retreated to Great Salt Lake. Their days were numbered. Word soon reached the 80s tribe that the White Legs' spirit was broken, their war chief a dim shadow of his former self. By year's end, the 80s would overrun the White Legs' camps, scattering the tribe to the winds and claiming the Great Salt Lake for its own."
"The Sorrows fought beside Joshua Graham and the Dead Horses, eradicating the threat the White Legs posed to Zion. Seeing the Courier convince Joshua Graham to spare Salt-Upon-Wounds, the Sorrows learned that retribution could be tempered by mercy. Though he despaired at the Sorrows' loss of innocence, Daniel took some small consolation in the Courier's lesson, and prayed it would take root."
"Having helped eradicate the White Legs from Zion, the Dead Horses returned to Dead Horse Point in triumph. They remained neutral toward the Sorrows, but as years went on, there were periods of competitive friction, even violence, between the tribes. The New Canaanites - Daniel especially - intervened regularly as mediators, but found it difficult to reconcile the tribes' conflicts."
"The defeat of the White Legs in Zion marked a turning point in the fortunes of the Happy Trails Caravan Company. Every two months, the caravan met with the New Canaanites in Zion Valley to trade. Happy Trails soon returned to prosperity. The vigilance of the Sorrows and Dead Horses in defending southwestern Utah, initially startling to Happy Trails caravans, soon proved a blessing. The tribes united against the 80s, driving them back from Highway 50, and thus opening yet another trading route for Happy Trails caravans."
"Follows-Chalk took the Courier's words to heart and decided that he would behold the sights and sounds of distant lands with his own eyes and ears. After returning to Dead Horse Point, he quarreled with his family and other tribe members about his ambitions. One morning, they awoke to discover that Follows-Chalk had set off alone, westward, into the wilderness. He was never seen again."
"Waking Cloud was distraught when she learned of her husband's death, but took comfort from her tribe, and the compassion of the New Canaanites. She forgave Daniel for having concealed her husband's fate from her, and learned to accept his fate. When her grief faded, she took a husband from the Dead Horse tribe. At her bidding, he stayed close to home."
"The threat of the White Legs ended, Joshua Graham helped the Sorrows and Dead Horses tend to their fallen comrades and secure Zion. The Courier's words had stayed Joshua's wrath in his darkest hour, and in sparing Salt-Upon-Wounds, he was changed. While he continued to advocate militant opposition to the enemies of New Canaan, he sometimes showed quarter to those who crossed his family. Eventually this new spirit would diminish the myth of the Burned Man in distant lands - a small price for the peace it brought to Joshua Graham."
"For years after the defeat of the White Legs, Daniel did his best to minister to the Sorrows' spiritual needs. Try as he might, he could not hold back the tribe's increasing militancy and reverence of Joshua Graham. Demoralized, he returned to his family at Dead Horse Point. His failures haunted him for the rest of his days."
"And with that, the Courier walked out of the history of the tribes of Zion and back into the gathering storm of the Mojave Wasteland."
How big and how tired and how diseased can we allow it to become...before we press reset? Before we wipe the slate clean, and begin again? And how, exactly, do we go about that task?
Give this Sierra Madre casino a try. It's a turn-based casino based on casinos around 1950 AD.
http://www.new1000ad.com
Really when people make ridiculous arguments really no reason to argue with them. It's a free casino people want to try it they are welcome too.
http://www.new1000ad.com
Fuck you all you fucking maggots you all stalkers sheep need medicine you need psycho pills you are all so crazy I kill you all. All shall perish in flame and pestilence.
Try it, you might enjoy it!
http://www.new1000ad.com
grotsnik said:MCA, if you're reading this, this is exactly the sort of unwelcoming RPG attitude that Mike Laidlaw's always complaining about. How can I be sure what the consequences of my playing the audio tape would be? It just isn't clear enough. May I suggest a big icon with a furious-looking Super Mutant ripping off my head on it? Or better yet, just remove the option to play it! Instead, God can turn into Dog at certain pre-scripted moments as he fights against the oppression of the Templars and works his way up to the epic, shocking climax when he destroys....hurrrugugh....derppprrr....
Peter said:Does it succeed at the whole survival horror thing? I mean, I can see that's it's very atmospheric, but the vanilla game can be too, and that doesn't make it a horror game.
As it says at the outset, Dead Money's a brutal, vicious adventure that puts the player in a bad situation, and it was designed to scare the hell out of Fallout players - although it didn't, in my opinion. The Survival and tension aspects ended up trumping that, which is fine, since survival's a subset of fear in my book.
We didn't set out to make Dead Money a Survival experience - we set out to make a Horror game that put Survival second. In terms of horror, I don't feel we succeeded, although it was a conscious effort to try and shake things up a bit with the enemies you faced to scare the player, definitely. The enemies are not only tough (which is easy to do with numbers, so I don't feel that's a real challenge), but also intended to be unpredictable when they fall, so you couldn't always count on shooting an enemy until they fall as being a guarantee that you're safe. The original hope was that the enemies couldn't simply be headshotted continuously - this is a selfish reason, as I get tired of watching people play like that non-stop (it doesn't feel like they're experimenting with limb-targeting tactics, despite the array of weapons), although the non-headshotting tactical diversion didn't turn out that way (it's just as easy to decapitate a head as a limb with the right blasts).
So why did we choose survival? Well, the question of Survival sums up questions I've had about Fallout as its timeline advances... the post-wasteland's gotten more civilized as the decades since the nuclear war have gone on, and when I was scripting Dead Money's layout, one thing that kept coming up was that I missed the desperate "Road Warrior" feeling when I hit the wastes. I miss being in a situation where I'm scrounging for every last bullet, water's precious, and I have to fight tooth and nail for any edge I can get. That goes double for the environment, I want it to be terrifying and be something you're constantly fighting against, Vault 34-style. I confess, there's been times I wish someone would drop more nuclear warheads on the Fallout world if only to bring parts of it back to its roots, so I wanted to create an area in the Wasteland that felt just as desperate as you'd expect a post-holocaust environment to be.
So the Sierra Madre and its surrounding Villa were designed as a reminder that some sections of the wastes are still scary, hazardous places where few can tread and survive, and while NCR may tame parts of the Mojave, there are other parts they can never hope to settle and claim as their own, and that's just the way I want it.
Regardless, we were shooting for a Horror experience with Dead Money. As for what we tried to do with Horror, to make the game scary, we tried to do two things - one, have enemies you couldn't headshot and required a different approach (holograms, toxic cloud), and worse, they could headshot you if you weren't careful (bomb collars + radios). My experience with most horror games is that the enemies become scarier when you can't kill the adversaries (which most role-players will try and do if the enemy has any number of hit points or any measurable way to hurt them, no matter how small). So what am I happy about, even if the final result ended up veering from the intention, is watching YouTube playthrough videos where folks (1) start panicking when they hear beeping (exactly the experience we wanted), and (2) seeing players take a step back, figure out the puzzle, and then study the environment to solve it (again, what we wanted).
As for Horror: Things get scarier and tense when you can't escape, no one's coming to help you, and your resources are limited, and Dead Money was built around this. Watching the YouTube playthrough footage where players started re-appreciating chems and Stimpaks made me happy - these things are miracles of medicine, and they should be viewed as such and appreciated for that in the world of Fallout. One issue I've always had with Fallout is it's really easy to amass a lot of chems and stims, so much so you lose the sense of wonder and relief when you get these items, and I feel situations like in Dead Money can give you a new appreciation for food, crafting (we put a higher priority on crafting and supplies to make crafting worth more in the DLC), unconventional water sources, and the joy at finding an otherwise common chem in the Mojave takes on a new level of preciousness when you're in hostile territory. One YouTube video showed someone finding Buffout - and to hear them say, "thank god" and hear genuine appreciation for finding something so rare is exactly the kind of value I want people to attach to these items... usually people seem to care less when they find Buffout, but it all depends on the environment context. I want players to attach value to them again rather than, "oh, more Buffout." It's BUFFOUT. It's a STIMPAK. Your character should be OVERJOYED to find these things, each and every time.
Crazy Loon said:Actually, wouldn't allowing the players to accurately pin point the effects of their actions, turn the game into too mechanical? I think when unintentional consequences and repercussions are done properly, they are very interesting. As long as such decision making, in this case playing the tape, doesn't fatally ends your character, I think it's perfectly fine.
Eh, you silly Brits and your unwholesome rain addiction...Still, visually it's a step up from the vanilla game. The mornings tend to be overcast and grey, with patchy rain, which makes a nice change.