Fallout 4 EP33: Meanwhile, Explosions

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 19, 2016

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 88 comments


Link (YouTube)

I think this is a first for Spoiler Warning. Mumbles didn’t make it this week. Chris wandered off or got distracted. My computer crashed. This means we were down to a single commenter – brave Rutskarn – who could not himself see the the stream. For a brief moment, nobody was watching Josh. It’s a miracle the show survived.

When Rutskarn was talking about a game that he worked on, he was referring to Will Fight for Food, a game that seems to be constructed with the premise of “What if there was a roleplaying game where you could beat up NPCs that annoy you?”. I got some genuine laughs out of it, and the trailer is brilliant.

Also note the point at 5:50 where Rutskarn totally nails the rhythm and style of the typical Twilight Zone outro. He does this without preparing beforehand. He makes it up as he goes, and is able to get all the way through without pausing or breaking character. I occasionally imitate the writing styles of other people. Sometimes I even imagine I’m good at it. But I can’t do it live, without preparation, while also doing a vocal impression. So that was a humbling moment for me.

So that was the Silver Shroud quest. Maybe it was a great quest, maybe it was merely adequate, but most people seem to agree that it was one of the high points of Fallout 4.

 


From The Archives:
 

88 thoughts on “Fallout 4 EP33: Meanwhile, Explosions

  1. lucky7 says:

    Didn’t Chris disappear during another recording session?

    1. Humanoid says:

      It’s pretty obvious what happened, Mumbles was hungry.

      1. Ledel says:

        Say farewell to “Well-Marbled” Campster.

  2. lucky7 says:

    Now I’m imagining a postapocalyptic librarIan cukt using Super Mutants to “collect overdue books.”

    “THE MORE YOU ARE AWARE OF!”

    1. Flux Casey says:

      We’re gonna do this in every comment section, huh? … Okay!

      BUTTERFLY IN THE SKY… I WILL CRUSH IT!

      1. Philadelphus says:

        THE PEN HURT MORE THAN THE SWORD!

        1. MrGuy says:

          HALF OF THE BATTLE IS KNOWN!

          1. Ramsus says:

            THOSE WHO REPEAT HISTORY ARE FAILING CLASS!

            1. LCF says:

              THIS PLACE IS SILENT PLACE TO READ BOOKS! YOU MAKE NO NOISE OR YOU GET OUT!

    2. Henson says:

      I think UHF already made a ‘Conan the Librarian’ joke…

      1. Hector says:

        Don’t you know the Dewey Decimal System?!

        1. LCF says:

          SORT BOOKS LIKE YOU SORT ENEMY, WITH DEWEY DECIMATE SYSTEM!

  3. Phil says:

    A strange man who teleports around and instantly kills the targeted enemy, clearly Josh is the mysterious stranger.

    1. Lachlan the Mad says:

      Someone needs to mod the Mysterious Reginald into the game, who’d be like the Mysterious Stranger but with more bonnet and a monstrously overpowered Shishkebab.

      1. Austin says:

        That would get me back from New Vegas.

  4. Henson says:

    Okay, so I guess Bethesda never replaced their placeholder voiceover for the “if you quit, the bad guys win” line. We’re back to Oblivion here, folks.

    Also, I reeeeeallly wish you could speak as the Silver Shroud after rescuing Kent. Combined with his newfound disillusionment for the romance of crimefighting, it would do wonders to portray your character as someone who just doesn’t know when to stop.

    1. Raygereio says:

      You can in the Automatron DLC. Which is probably the main thing that made that DLC entertaining.

  5. Daniel England says:

    Now that we’ve finished The Silver Shroud quest, I’m curious; what was everyone’s favorite quest in Fallout 4? Which piece of Bethesda writing made you go: “Oh, this one quest is actually okay”? I’ve heard Far Harbor has some neat stuff, but since I’m kinda done with Bethesda for awhile, I’ve not checked it out.

    I haven’t done very many quests, but I did like the one where you talk to a bunch of schoolkids in a vault about life in the wasteland. You can be blunt about the horrors you’ve seen, or you can glamorize the violence, or you can kinda talk around the violence. I thought it was pretty neat.

    1. lucky7 says:

      …the kid in the refrigerator. It was completely awful, but I was laughing the whole way through making up dialogue about the idiots coming and going over 200 years and ignoring the poor guy.

      That, and I had Fables’ interpretation of Pinnochio in the back of my head.

    2. I liked Vault 81 pretty well. The whole thing is a sort of riff on just how horrible Vault-Tec really is–here’s this Vault full of ordinary people and it turns out they’re only alive because the Vault-Tec scientists who were sent to use them as guinea pigs to develop horrific diseases decided to pretty much commit suicide in order to prevent this from happening. It’s like a section pulled out of a completely different game and played completely straight. Does it match the rest of the game? No. But as its own thing it’s pretty neat.

      There are actually a fair number of little moments of coolness scattered all over the game, they just have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

    3. Jokerman says:

      I can only remember really liking Silver Shroud, Nick’s companion quest, Cabot house, and the one where you you deathclaw eggs back in there nest and the death claw doesn’t attack you.

      I love this game, but only for the gameplay, none of the quests live long in the memory for me, which is weird for a Fallout game, i could easily name plenty of quests from the other games… but didn’t like the gameplay.

      1. That Deathclaw sidequest was legitimately the only time I’ve been scared in Fallout 4. :P

      2. Yurika Grant says:

        Ugh, Cabot House. Zeta took a big enough dump on the franchise, but Cabot House took it to a whole new level.

    4. Blunderbuss09 says:

      Nick’s quest ‘A Long Time Coming’ hands down. It’s not perfect, sure, but it’s such excellent character writing that Nick has become one of my favorite characters ever. It made me want to romance a decades old robot Dick Tracey.

      Runners up:

      A House Divided – it was nice to see a faction actually react to you suddenly becoming their herald and they acted in the most in-character way for the Institute. Plus you actually had a variety of options to deal with the situation, one of them darkly funny.

      Here There Be Monsters – It has the same problem as the kid in the fridge – Captain Zao should be insane from isolation – but I goddamn love Chinese ghouls and it’s nice to finally meet one that fought in the war.

      Cabot House – Since there’s a quest chain that delves deeper into the mystery of the family it was really intriguing. The ending moral choice was between good and evil but at least the evil choice had benefits and, in a certain way, a certain amount of justice.

  6. Rod Serling would be proud of that. :D

    1. Echo Tango says:

      It was so good I was expecting the stinger sound effect at the end! :)

  7. Gruhunchously says:

    You running up and killing Kent in front of his captors sounds exactly like the sort of thing that any other Fallout game would anticipate and account for.

  8. Re: Josh’s comment on saving Kent.

    Josh, maybe there’s a speech option to save Kent by ditching the Silver Shroud persona, but keeping it doesn’t doom Kent. You just need the perks/skills to take the ghoul out before he kills Kent. It took me some work, but I used all the Shroud options and saved Kent.

    1. Sleeping Dragon says:

      Oh good, I was pretty sure I did this as well and was wondering if I glitched it or it got patched since.

    2. Jokerman says:

      Yeah, i took all of the silver shroud dialogues and still saved him pretty easily with my sniper rifle.

    3. 4th Dimension says:

      In my playthrough Kent is DEAD. He is DEAD because when I finally got around to doing the Shroud quest I was lvl 20+ and enemies have become the damage sponges. Still using a sniper rifle and lot of drugs I was able to snipe Sinjin, BUT as soon as you hit him Avery off to the side will shoot Kent. If you try to kill her first, Sinjin kills Kent. Soo I guess it’s doable if you are prepared or at the right level but it’s faaaaaaarrr from the expected result.

      1. GloatingSwine says:

        If you pass all of the persuade checks they’ll ignore Kent and only attack you.

        1. guy says:

          If you go full Shroud everyone but Sinjin screams in terror and runs for their lives, making it considerably easier to shoot just him.

      2. yd says:

        It’s possible to save him through fighting – I did it with no speech checks, lots of drugs, VATS, and Blitz. It took about 30 tries.

        I simply didn’t have any other option – any ending where he died violated my story’s canon.

        Kind of like the Malik story-line in DE:HR. There wasn’t a story to continue if I didn’t succeed.

  9. IFS says:

    Every time I see Josh attacking someone named “so and so’s gang” I have the immediate thought of ‘wow their gang consists of this one guy?’ It just seems like a really weird choice to have that as the name for that enemy. Why not just call them gang member or gangster? Or even go the extra mile (by which I mean put in the bare minimum effort) and give a proper name to the gang and use that to name the members of it.

    1. Ciennas says:

      Or even flesh out the factions they do have named.

      But this is Fallout 3 reheated, with the monumentally stupid main quest target shifted elsewhere. Not even the Capitol Brotherhood mention Project Purity or the Enclave.

      So lets do their job for them again.

      GUNNERS: would have been interesting as a foil to the Minutemen. It also would have been neat for someone other than the loading screens to mention or acknowledge their existence.*

      Maybe you want to help people, but want payment for services rendered? It would roll counter to the pure altruism the Minutemen have, and could bring up interesting moral quanderies, say maybe the Gunners ARE better at defending people, but are also more ruthless about it? Maybe they rule towns like dicks? And then you could shift Macready to be the equivalent of Garvey.

      Hell, maybe have the battle at Concord feature them instead of generic raiders, like they comment about doing back in Quincy. Then you could choose to help one or the other early on. That’d make them a lot like a mix of Talon and Powder Ganger.

      (Or make it a Melee a trois, where it starts as canon but then Gunners make up the reinforcements that attract the Deathclaw.)

      But no, they’re just as inexplicable and poorly inplemented as Talon Company.

      SUPER MUTANTS: Maybe explain their awful behaviours partly because FEV (That is, the Bethesda Strain.) But maybe justify it by saying where the Institute would readily get stock of test subjects that literally no one would miss: Raiders. Since Raiders are almost universally just weaker Super Mutants in behavior: cannibalism, sadism, and other general forms of dickishness. Maybe have the occasional friendlier mutant that was pulled from a dead caravan or village massacre, like University Point.

      Having them be ex raiders and gunners would explain how they held on to the gist of basic tactics, and what exactly is the deal with the dumbass suiciders. One group even drops a note with written orders, implying a base.

      And since one of the main themes this game has is subverting the built up expectations, reveal that their IS a leader: not the Master or an expy, maybe a well intentioned Fawkes like mutant or a villainous ex Raider with delusions of a fiefdom.

      Also, them revealing a magical FEV cure is just dumb. Maybe they could have made it a cure for the implied enhanced aggression? Then you could have had Super Mutant Settlers, how awesome would that have been?

      RAIDERS: Since the Institute is implied to be kill and replacing people for the purposes of sabotage control and intel, maybe occassionally USE that and implant a synth raider or two? Have them holding an Institute Directives Holotape, explaining why they’re out there?

      THE INSTITUTE: These guys NEED a goal. The stated goal and actions they take are counter to each other. Like University Point- the Institute massacres a settlement because….? They found SOMETHING, but refuse to elaborate. Nor can you ask Shaun what the fuck. I’d love to be able to convince them to try again with helping topside, pointing out how all their little interdepartmental intrigues have made the Commonwealth wildly more unstable than it had been.

      Maybe they could open a hospital and revive that cyborg research they were doing a decade ago. And stop being dicks to/explain WHY they’re not sapient synths.

      Maybe explain that Shaun has been upfront, but either through negligence or overzealousness have allowed one of the more assholish groups a lot more free reign than they should have.

      Ultimately, they could have even cribbed Skyrim’s peace conference idea- decide who lives and who dies, instead of forcing it, and making us murder at least one faction.**

      They’d have to alter their ending scenario, but they still would be able to have a climactic gunfight- just have raiders and Gunners and SuperMutants converge on the peace conference, baying for eighty years of bad blood. Hell, maybe some other minor factions.

      (New Vegas got away with this with the Legion because it was clear the Legion were monstrous and awful- three fourths of the endings involve curbstomping them because it is obviously needful at this point.)

      Sorry that this is so wordy-I’ve been tinkering with fixes for the writing because it screams of needing another run through. Just little things.

      *Leaving stuff unexplained about a current living faction unless you read a text log, bad. Leaving it in a random load screen tip? Shamefully bad.

      **How hard would it have been to implement an eight state ending? A simple check for which factions are still alive after the climax would have been cool.

      1. Pax says:

        I would’ve liked to have seen the Institute have something like the Mt. Weather set up from The 100. I don’t want to spoil anything, because it’s good stuff, so I’ll tag it.
        Basically, make the Super Mutants guard dogs for the Institute like the Reapers are for Mt. Weather on the show. They protect secret entrances to the Institute, chase anyone away, and anytime they’re kidnapping people, they’re actually handing them over to the Institute to experiment on/make more Super Mutants out of. You can make a whole ecology between the Institute, the Super Mutants, and the raiders this way.

        As an aside, I was infuriated when I read Maxson biography on the Prydwen. Not for the usual reasons, but because he gained his fame defeating a Super Mutant in the Capitol Wasteland named Shepard who was uniting them mutants into an army. That’s exactly the kind of presence Fallout 3 and 4 needed to help the Super Mutant faction, as well as a plot I want to play!

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          ME NAME SHEPHERD AND THIS ME BEST LIKE STORE IN WASTELAND!

        2. Ciennas says:

          That does sound like it’d be cool. Instead they make the super mutants just another obstacle between you and the end of the game instead of being a part of the game world’s unfolding story. If they had him as a midgame boss in Fallout 3, it would have done a lot to fix some of the basic setting problems

          Also, your suggestion would have been cool too. We’ve seen Super Mutants as zombies plenty: that is, a source of unwilling transformation. It would have been cool to see an actual volunteer force of them. Lot of potential literally untapped even in Fallout 1&2.

      2. Blunderbuss09 says:

        I thought the same thing about Talon Company and the Gunners. They’re mercenaries which is a perfectly valid career in the wasteland; you’re commonly called a ‘mercenary type’ if you do jobs for people and if you have fighting skills then why not hire them out? Or even if they were running an oppressive protection racket would it still be justified if they really kept people safe?

        But all the Gunners do is shoot people on sight. So how to people hire them? How do people trust them to do a job? (It also makes MacCready look like a real asshole instead of a kinda-shitty-but-still-decent guy.) I was initially interested in how they were organized and had a certain degree of professionalism but they’re just well-equipped raiders. Being an legit mercenary band like Reilly’s Rangers would have been cool especially if you could join them or do work for them. Even better would be them having a leader (maybe a pre-war ghoul that served in the army for an extra foil) that was enforcing his own well-meaning method of making the wasteland better and justifies his actions with good results.

        And like you said they’d be a great foil for the Minutemen. Instead of shooting some ghouls and earning their devotion, you’d have to convince settlements to move away from a sketchy-but-efficient Gunners to the more debatable safety but community building Minutemen.

        As for the supermutants I would have liked that their trauma of being guinea pigs for the Institute to fuel their paranoia and anger. Humans hurt them and synths look like humans. To their simple logic it therefore makes sense that all humans are threats to them. (And managing to convince some of them to attack the Institute would have been some great schadenfreude.) It takes them back to the tragic victims they were in Fallout 1 and 2; they’re being hurt just like the humans and synths.

        And the Institute. Uughh. I thought the cyborg-to-synth route would end with an ‘ultimate lifeform’ àœbermensch artificial human that would rebirth humanity or even do a darker version of the GECK that would renew the wasteland but consume everything in its path. Nope. They just want more power to keep diddling around with science that doesn’t really accomplish anything. If they really could change the world for the better but at a steep cost then it would be a difficult decision to join them or not. Surely the few thousand lives in the Commonwealth is a small price to pay to create a better world for the next generation, right? To a character who has seen the world as it used to be, and could be again within their lifetime, that’s a hell of a moral quandary.

        1. Ciennas says:

          Damn skippy that would have been a moral quandary. Too bad that the end product is so…. afraid of actually establishing anything.

          Sigh. They want and do play up environmental story telling, but forget to establish the present.

          Again, could these guys just swallow their pride and hire Chris Avelone and company as consultants? And then listen to them?

  10. Wide And Nerdy® says:

    I liked the aliens. It was the one really fun thing about the Fallout 3 experience. Granted, its better in FNV where I first encountered them in a way that is very similar to Fallout 1. I had no idea aliens were part of the setting and it was just randomly out there. As I approached they started firing and I laughed. Of course aliens would do that, this is Fallout New Vegas, the people here can’t be trusted.

    1. The Rocketeer says:

      Or, as it was put in the New Vegas season, “These guys know something about Reginald that the rest of the galaxy hasn’t quite figured out yet.”

    2. Ciennas says:

      I hated them. They felt…. out of place… in a game about how people doomed themselves by letting psychotics rule them with direct access to nukes.

      Blaming the aliens for it (Which Bethesda implied.) Makes for a dramatic tonal shift.

      It also automatically makes the world smaller.

      On top of that, it diminishes and completely undercuts the rest of the story.

      And the worst part is, I already have an awesome series I can go shoot at aliens in. I’ve got Halo, XCOM, and Mass Effect just off the top of my head if I want to shoot guns at aliens.

      I am less good for Fallout stye games, especially like this.

      This is also why I hate the Cabot house mission line. With all the occultic nonsense that Bethesda seems determined to wedge in their (because they have NO OTHER series where supernatural references woud be welcome or not out of place,) the alien stories and all the tropes they entail? Ugh. That is soo not why I’m playing Fallout.

      Maybe they could do something interesting with it, but they’d have to have a very deft hand.

      Maybe they could just skip the aliens, stick with mad and rogue science as the source of space wizardry, and then hire obsidian to write a cool campaign for all their game mechanics to mesh well with.

      1. Somebody says:

        Whether you hate the Aliens or not, we all have to admit one thing….

        They were better handled in NV

  11. SoranMBane says:

    In New Vegas you can meet a man who is strongly implied to be the son of the Mysterious Stranger. Your only meaningful interaction with him is to get him a job at the Tops, and then you can watch him play his guitar there every night.

    Or I guess you could just quicksave and then keep killing him in VATS until his own dad shows up to finish him off. That’s definitely an option.

    1. SKD says:

      I never got that vibe from him. Truthfully the only vibe I got from him was as a reference to Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue”.

      1. TheLerps says:

        I mean, he talks about how his mother always described his father as “mysterious” and a “stranger” and he holds the Mysterious Magnum, which plays the Mysterious Stranger riff whenever you draw it. That’s about as straightforward as it gets.

        1. SKD says:

          Never saw him use the Magnum and his name is Sue. I wouldn’t put it past Obsidian to reference both in one character. Without the gun in the equation there is nothing that really pegs out as Mysterious Stranger related. The continent is largely wasteland with more than a fair share of wanderers who could blow in and out of town never leaving a name to remember them by….

          1. Sebastian says:

            But the gun IS in the equation, so…

            1. Somebody says:

              I love The Mysterious Strangers songs. Sawyer has a good singing voice.

  12. Ledel says:

    The whole “Companion wants to tell you their life story” bit happened to me after I fast traveled to the super market. Curie wanted to talk to me, and I enjoyed talking with her (at least when the moment is right). Yet I hear “Hey can we talk?” while looking at a Behemoth 10 feet in front of me.

    1. Ninety-Three says:

      I did MacReady’s quest just to get his amazing companion perk, then promptly dumped him in some random settlement. Every time I went back there he’d try to pull me into a conversation about his life story, and every time I’d walk past him to the crafting bench before fast traveling away. The really funny part is that the monologue he was trying to spew at me opened with something to the effect of “Sorry for dumping my whole life’s story on you”.

  13. Ledel says:

    So, why aren’t there any Silver Shroud comic books for this game? I’ve spent close to 100 hours over several play throughs, and I’ve yet to see even 1. Just have them replace “guns and ammo” or whatever comic book gave bonuses to guns/automatic weapons.

    It’s not like you can read through the entirety of every book you come across and it would break some kind of canon they have going.

    1. The Rocketeer says:

      There are, and there aren’t; there are no Silver Shroud comics per se, but the character is one of the Unstoppables team of crossover heroes. Hence, every Unstoppables comic features the Shroud on the cover, except the issue that features only Manta-Man.

      1. Thomas Lines says:

        That’s a fine high level of nerdery you have reached, comic book facts for in-game comics

        1. MichaelGC says:

          Well, I think a real Unstoppables nerd would know that the cover of Unstoppables #5 does not strictly feature the Silver Shroud, because of course at the time the real Silver Shroud had been captured and imprisoned by Ux-Ron, and thus the Shroudesque figure featured on the cover is actually the Shroud’s doppelgänger robot clone who eventually turned on his creator, helped to rescue his original, and went on to fight crime under the pseudonym of ‘The Cesium Cerecloth’ until finally meeting his comeuppance in issue [continues ad nauseum]

          1. Ledel says:

            “Hail Manticore”

            1. Ciennas says:

              I heard that Grant Moore’s classic the NightGuards, set in an alternate 1999 where Robco- sorry, Atomco Robotics- successfully managed to avert the resource war and the ramifications therein only because he couldn’t get the rights to the Untouchables, so he used a bunch of expies instead.

              Nightengale was oddly reminescent of the Shroud, right? Especially the way he threw that dude down an elevator shaft?

  14. Daemian Lucifer says:

    So this quest where the best gimmick is “talk like the silver shroud” punishes you for talking like the silver shroud?

    This time Ill say this without joking:Why do people think this was a good quest?

    1. The Rocketeer says:

      Because a man dying in a desert will drink a camel’s piss to hang on.

    2. PizzaRollExpert says:

      That’s a bit unfair. The game gives you a fun thing to do, but punishes you for over-indulging in it.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        A game that rewards you for overindulging in shooting punishes you for overindulgence in talking and roleplaying?And this is classified as an rpg why again?

        1. Raygereio says:

          Oh no! How dare this RPG make the player’s decisions have consequences![/not serious]

          Look, you’ve been shitting on this quest for a while now. Thing is: No one actually thinks this is a well designed or written quest. Okay, maybe those weirdos who were sad when Dad comitted suicide for no discernable reason in FO3. But no sane person at least.
          What makes people remember this quest fondly is “Speak as Shroud”. It just comes completely out of left field when you first play the game and the lines and VA work for them are wonderfully silly. You could tell they had some fun with this. When you play – unless your last name is McFunhater – you find yourself wanting to proceed just to find out what the next “Speak as Shroud” option is going to be.

          It looks aweful here because between Josh’s playstyle and them having anywhere between 3 to 5 people talking constantly, Spoiler Warning’s setup is kind of bad at presenting a game. Especially dialogue heavy content. So the only fun bit of the quest is stripped away and you’re left with the basic stuff “Go from point A to point B, shooting duds on the way. Arrive at point B, talk to dude, maybe shoot dude afterwards” that is the core of 99.99% of the quests in this game.
          And while FO4’s gameplay is decent enough that shooting dudes is sort of fun. Watching it eventually becomes boring.

          1. MichaelGC says:

            There was this exchange back in Episode 18 – I think this original starting point is perhaps why the question has repeatedly come up since:

            A The Silver Shroud stuff is one of the best quests I’ve ever had in any game.
            B Everybody loves Silver Shroud too, like, everybody.
            C That is true.
            D Isn’t it the main plot?

            Doesn’t matter who said what, although E would be Campster, who hasn’t played it. And certainly these positions have attenuated somewhat as we’ve gone along. But we’re not talking about sad insane weirdos! Four of the five hosts spoke of it in resoundingly positive terms, and that’s 100% of the ones who had played it.

            (And, to be clear, I’m not trying to ‘gotcha’ the hosts who may have changed, shifted or developed their thinking – or not! :D – since their initial throwaway summations. I’m just querying the notion that no sane person could think it a well designed and/or written quest.)

            1. Daemian Lucifer says:

              But we're not talking about sad insane weirdos!

              You forget that one of them is Josh.

              1. Josh says:

                Actually I’m a very happy insane weirdo.

          2. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Look, you've been shitting on this quest for a while now.

            For the last two episodes is a while now?

            Anyway,when they started this quest,I did say that the voice and the lines are funny and fun.I stand by that.But the thing is,thats just a small grain of the rest of what you are doing here,which is just you going around doing the same shooting as in 99% of the rest of this game.And to introduce said fun thing here,only to punish you for wanting to explore it more is shitty design.Especially if its at the end of the quest.I called that shitty design in far better games than this one(human revolution comes to mind).

            And no,the shooting in this game is not fun.Its serviceable at most.Granted,being serviceable puts it above the rest of the mechanics in this game,but thats still a pretty low bar.

            1. evileeyore says:

              And with it being hailed as the “Best Quest in F4” means that in F5 all quests will be one-note quests that do exactly the same thing: Boring linear shooter quests with a bit of goofy dialogue or a goofy situation to make it “fun and interesting”.

              And that’s why The Silver Shroud quest sucks.

    3. yd says:

      It’s been half a year since I played the quest, so I might be misremembering.

      I liked it because I liked Kent. The quest is absurd and it makes no sense to indulge in (Shaun!). But Kent was a cool guy and I felt empathy for him. The quest is “good” (compared to others), because you actually see a bit of a character arc, and you feel like your choices have some real consequences. It also is one of the two quests I remember that involved Hancock, and he’s a lot of fun, too.

      In retrospect, Good Neighbor seems to have stolen all the best writers on the entire game. Pretty much all of the characters (outside of Nick) that I enjoyed interacting with came from there.

  15. Da Mage says:

    I was exploring the Institute the other day and finally I came across an explanation for the whole synth thing in an audio log…..and it just comes down to them wanting to control the various settlements and power gone mad. It also covers what happened in the Diamond city massacre and the first attempt at the Institute forming a government.

    WTF? Why is this not a front and center explanation, and instead it’s hidden in audio logs.

    1. Ciennas says:

      They did something like this in Skyrim, too.

      In the main quest you have to sneak through the Nazi Elves embassy, and the local ‘ambassador’ has a dossier written in her own hand about how she basically tricked Ulfric into starting a rebellion against the empire, and how much they benefit from dragging it out.

      What do you do with this Nirn shattering revelation? Show it to Ulfric as soon as you are able? Wait for the peace conference and bring it up while supreme ambassador bitch face is in attendance without her guards? Bring it to the local Imperial garrison where it will likely be ignored? Take it to a Jarl and have them bring it to Ulfric by proxy?

      Sit on this vital information and tell no one?

      Guess which option is the only option, and remember that they made all the real antagonists unkillable.

      In other words, welcome to current Bethesda, where not even their own flagship is inmune to this kind of thing.

  16. Daemian Lucifer says:

    For a brief moment, nobody was watching Josh.

    So he disappeared?Is he schrodingers lets player?

    1. Warclam says:

      No, no, Shamus means it in the sense of a naughty dog. Nobody was watching Josh, he might have done anything. The show probably only survived because he forgot Rutskarn couldn’t see the stream.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        In the sense of naughty dog?So when no one looks at him,Josh makes the last of us?

  17. Daemian Lucifer says:

    And people say this game is not a real rpg.But look,your companion can hate you so much that he leaves your party and attacks you,just like in baldurs gate.See,this game is exactly like old school rpgs.

  18. MichaelGC says:

    Lots of laughs in this episode – I don’t recall literally laughing out loud quite so much in quite a while. What set me off initially was Josh saying, “Campster, say something witty about this part of the videogame.” There’s a brief pause, and then the next thing you hear is a Raider Scavver (with a voice not a million aural miles from Campster’s) screaming:

    Just DIE!

    On Rutskarn’s question – I don’t think it is too much to ask, but it may turn out that he has to write it.

    Anyway, you did a great job holding things together this week, and you should know that if it ever gets to the stage where it’s just Josh silently scrolling inventory, I’ll still be watching, and I won’t be alone.

    1. BruceR says:

      Wait… You mean that *wasn’t* Campster?

  19. Naota says:

    Two little tidbits about Will Fight For Food you guys might enjoy: The part of the game Rutskarn references was one of the most changed (and later debugged) sections in the entire library of scripts. It used to feature some kind of cockamamie XML logic engine to judge your acting choices from when Ian first scripted WFFF, that later became a “swallowing your pride”/”taking the piss” binary where the higher number of the two among your replies won out, with notably high extremes on either side getting more polarized endings.

    That trailer, on the other hand, I edited start to finish in basically one take after I was sent Ruts’ fantastic voiceover, and only went back once or twice to tighten up the timing of the visuals. I don’t think anything has ever come together that fast or easily before or since.

    1. MichaelGC says:

      That guy gets me everytime! Screw that guy.

    2. Grudgeal says:

      And a fantastic trailer it is. You both deserve praise for it.

      “Fight the university chancellor! Take his powers.

  20. Raygereio says:

    Here’s a question for anyone who played the game: Who used the pipboy app? And thought it was actually useful, instead of being a gimmick you abandon after a few minutes.

    1. SKD says:

      It was useless in my experience. Neat gimmick but as something which requires you to take your eyes off the screen it added nothing to my gameplay experience.

  21. Steve C says:

    “But I can't do it live, without preparation, while also doing a vocal impression.”

    You nailed StrongSad last week. Granted Campster ‘wrote’ that for you, still you were on point.

  22. baseless_research says:

    So Rutskarn, I have to ask, if you start a new new vegas playthrough, what does that entail? Do you go through all the quests as initially presented (primm, sunny smiles, Nipton, …), do you ignore all of them, do them but skip all dialogue, toggle god mode and cut through deathclaw country … ?

    also shamus, there is one particular library token dispenser thingie that’s got useful stuff – it’s also inside a raider camp that will respawn after an ingame week or two so utility is … limited

  23. Yurika Grant says:

    When Rutskarn mentions the Mysterious Stranger and how explaining him would ruin everything, Obsidian basically handled this by NOT explaining him, rather they added a fun little easter egg of background by having his SON looking for him.

    Go talk to the Lonesome Drifter sometime ;)

  24. When I heard the leave/join sound for the voicechat I got this evil idea. If Josh is able to individually assign join/leave sounds to people!
    I was thinking that Rutskarn could have this for join and this for leave for example.

    *snicker*

    On second thought, it might drive Josh nuts after a while.

  25. Philadelphus says:

    Meanwhile, explosions.

    Happy Explosion Day, Gorgeous!

Thanks for joining the discussion. Be nice, don't post angry, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*

You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

Leave a Reply to Ciennas Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.