T w e n t y S i d e d
The story so far:
A water purifier that has no reason to exist was overloaded by a man with laughable motivations and released radiation it shouldn’t have, thus killing Colonel Autumn, who had no reason to be there. Then later we got through a village of children who fdso gah frrzlmpr blaaa huygggnl asdf;lj so we could enter vault 87 and recover a GECK, a device which would be better put to use in virtually any possible manner besides the one for which we had acquired it. Then Colonel Autumn, who shouldn’t be alive, captured us with a flash grenade that shouldn’t have worked.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
The true madness is that the plot is this mangled, despite the repeated railroading and plot hacks used by the writers. I can understand that a freeform or branching story can get pretty complex and possibly tangled. As someone who has run D&D games I know that no plan survives contact with the enemy. (Your players.) And I’ve had some gaps in my stories. But When the main plot is set in stone and the player has no power over it, there is no excuse for not simply writing something that makes sense. In most cases I’d pummel a game over things like pacing, characterization, maintaining tension and interest, and all of those other challenges that good writers must overcome. But here we’re talking about basic coherence. We’re talking about simply relaying a fixed set of events that don’t contradict one another. For example: Don’t have multiple characters come back from the dead without offering anything in the way of acknowledgment or explanation.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Trashing the Heap
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
You seem to have left the video on private. It won’t play due to “wrong video privileges” .
How could you lock us out like this? I need my daily dose of Spoiler Warning just to get up in the…midafternoon!
All that refreshing in anticipation… wasted?
Fixed!
“Then later we got through a village of children who fdso gah frrzlmpr blaaa huygggnl asdf;lj so we could enter vault 87 and recover a GECK, a device which would be better put to use in virtually any possible manner besides the one for which we had acquired it.”
For me, Shamus, this is the best sentence that you’ve ever written. It has everything: inexpressable rage, tonal dissonance, succinct exposition, & withering criticism. The gibberish makes me smile, the sudden shift back to deadpan commentary makes me laugh, & the wry wit at the end makes me wish that I could have written such prose as this. Kudos.
…And then you lay down an ironic typo in the middle of a sentence making fun of some writers for noT making sense: “there is no excuse for no simply writing something that makes sense.” Oops. Oh well. Kudos anyway. ;D
But it makes sense, what he is writing. And you don’t even need to pass a Science check or check a wiki.
The Josh guy you talk at Obsidian about is probably Josh Sawyer who’s the lead on New Vegas.
I don’t have an account at viddler to comment there so I’ll say it here.
RC is not Kirk. Kirk didn’t talk people into betraying everything they’d lived for in 30 seconds flat. RC is Sybok. Sorry.
Or maybe he’s Cmdr. Shepard :D
And this is his favourite store on the Citadel!
True Story! : I read a little ahead because I was curious, so I _knew_ the flash grenade was coming. However, I had no idea what it looked like. So what happens? I walk down the stairs, and a ball fell in front of me. I look right down at it and think “What’s that thing?” Of course, big white flash. That grenade would have totally worked on me. I critically failed my Wisdom roll that time. I _never_ do that. But there you go.
As Josh notes, Col. Autumn injects himself with something that presumably protects him from death by radiation. Super Rad-X. No explanation is provided, I agree, but you never stop to have an actual conversation with Col. Autumn either, do you? Perhaps they should have dropped a “How are you still alive?” option when you meet him for the last time at the Jefferson Memorial. (I’m not sure about Anna Holt. The Fallout wiki says Janice Kaplinski took the bullet. Whomever it was, it is confusing — I’ll give you that.)
Rutskarn’s Fox and the Hound joke made my day. Bravo, sir.
Doesn’t Anna Holt tag along in the sewers where you left Garza to die?
In the endgame (Vanilla endgame that is) you get to see Autumn as a final boss. You get to chat with him, but the whole dialogue plays out as “cornered beast versus noble hero”, good Colonel just asks you “So you got here, you won, but I wont go down without a fight”, and you can speech him into putting his weapon down and walking away (probably to get killed by other BoS soldiers on his way out), or fight him. There is no option to ask him about his plans, turn to your follower and say “you know what Sarah, his idea isnt half bad, I dont know why are we fighting”, this is Bethesda Dialogue were talking about after all.
I know how it plays out, as suggested above with putting in a new speech option with him at the Jefferson Memorial.
But, like I said, you don’t ever really stop and have a conversation with him. Every single time, the dialogue is… forced? controlled? directed?… somehow. No matter what you say while captured, all Autumn says is “CODE. NOW.” And at the end, you basically have “I’m going to kill you.” You never really get the chance to stop and talk to him, like you do the friggin’ COMPUTER PRESIDENT. As you rightly point out, this is Bethesda dialogue. Your “Reasoning” with the Colonel is, IIRC, “I could kill you, you know. Walk away.”
The lack of an explanation is bothersome, but, since all of this is supposed to happen in a huge rush, it does make some minor sense that you wouldn’t get a lot of info. “We don’t have time to chat! MOVE!” (Whether you should stop to reason with him, or just have the option!, is another point.)
I think the word youre looking for is “Railroaded”
The Fallout wiki says that Autumn supposidly injects himself with an experimental Rad-X, apparantly there are references to it in the editor, but they never made it into the game.
That conversation was there so that you could identify that he was Autumn and not some random officer in a cool coat. If there was no dialogue, then all players wouldn´t notice he was The Dragon/Big Bad until they looted his (at last) dead body.
Like it matters.
I agree that the plot makes absolutely no sense at this point, but in my capacity to try and salvage something from every game experience I would jsut assume that the Enclave would form some sort of evil confederacy and charge ridiculous prices for the water. If they actually added something like this then there would be SOME motivation to stop them!
Yeah, except the Enclave has absolutely no use for bottlecaps or anything else the outside world has to offer, they are completely self-sustained. Maybe they would make people work for water as opposed to giving it away for free-oh wait, I think BoS sells water for caps once they take the purifier. And anyway, what is so bad about working for the Enclave to get your water? Beats hunting-gathering and getting killed by raiders.
That´s a fun thing. The Enclave could have unified the wasteland with the “we have pure water! Join us!” deal and remake the nation. But all the “good” guys don´t want that. They are a bunch of selfish assholes, if you think of it. And Karma Entity agrees with them…which means that all the “good” and “bad” identities are reversed in this universe.
You know, put like that the whole thing could be seen as a parody on anti govermnet activists…
I often got the feeling that the whole story was less about struggle between “good” and “evil” and more about Anarchism vs. Government control.
Liberty Prime’s line during the final nuke tossing match certainly support that theory (they become comedy bronze at least when you remember it’s fighting the legitimate US government in as much as that exists at that point in time).
But then they also tried to make everything blatantly evil or good. And stuck bethesda writing on top :(
Fallout 3: the Highlander II of computer rpgs.
It’s not Anna Holt that gets killed in the purifier. And if you watch closely you can see Colonel Autumn inject himself with something. It’s criminal that it was made so easy to miss and that it’s never mentioned in dialog. They could have added a “how are you still alive!?” option and given him a straightforward line to explain.
Right. It was Janice Kaplinski that gets to punctuate how very serious Autumn is.
It also shows off that he is a bad guy. Come to think of it, if Autumn didnt shoot Kaplinski but just sat down and had a talk with James and his team, the whole mess would have been averted there and then (assuming we replace the twisted logic of the plot with real logic, which has been abandoned since the game began), Dad wouldnt have to make a rash stupid decisions to blow himself up.
But that´s the best outcome: Daddy Stu dies! Too bad he gets glorified for it.
Yeah, it’s an attempt to “Pulp Fiction”-ize Autumn and establish his villain-ness.
Which even though it’s hackneyed, it’s a lot better than other fiction out there. Darth Maul, f’rinstance. The dude didn’t do anything to make us want him to be defeated. He just showed up with a big sign around his neck reading “EVIL” and we were expected to go with it.
Well, horns and a red lightsaber were a dead giveaway.
But he only had horns because he was an alien, a Zabrak or Zabbik or something, and he might have simply liked the color red because it complimented his skin/face-paint/tattoos.
Are you seriously suggesting that we were meant to judge someone solely on their racial characteristics and skin color!?! *gasp* George Lucas is a racist bastard!
In the star wars universe? Yes.
The original movies were never afraid of obvious connotations in their designs. Thankfully, they always tried to follow them up with actual actions too.
But:
Darth Vader: Black samurai leading faceless thugs. We knew he was evil before he said a single word, even without the opening credits stating so.
Stormtroopers: were have we heard that name before?
AT-ATs: Tiger tanks on legs
etc…
Yes, having a black clad mysterious stranger with a red lightsaber was enough to tell the average star wars viewer that he was evil. We’d have liked more, but it was enough.
So it was simply a bad movie, not a confusing one.
Plus, Darth Maul attacked a child. If you notice, most sequences where the Jedi fight, they either try to talk it out, or get attacked before they can even try. The times they don’t, it’s usually shown as an error by the Jedi.
Oh no! I have inadvertently summoned the Star Wars nerds! Were DOOMED!
Seriously though, I think there was a short scene where Darth Maul was taking orders from Palpatine, before his first encounter with the protagonists.
But that child was a horrible annoying little twat, who would grow up to become one of the most ruthless evil Sith the galaxy had ever seen. Maybe Maul was just trying to prevent this?
Put yourself in Autumn’s shoes. Would you have sat down to talk with Dad in order to then proceed to work with the dumbass?
Well, since the whole team is so loyal to Dad for some reason, hed probably keep him in a utility closet somewhere, away from any sharp objects, and finished the damn purifier without the rest of his team throwing a collective hissy fit.
Josh, you’d better not be an Obsidian developer, or I’d have to stab you for making Alpha Protocol a buggy mess.
So you are either prone to hyperbole and violent tendencies or I have to wonder how sheltered your gamer life has been until now that AP qualifies as buggy mess. Either way, that’s cute. In a deranged youtube guy kinda way, but still cute.
Some people played the game and had no problems at all. Some (me) had persistent flukes and bugs, and others had game-stopping crashes.
It depends on what platform you’re on. And on the PC, the configuration of your machine can play a big part.
I played it on both Pc and 360 but only DLC on 360 because GotY was out by then. I like easy purchases.
Anyway. I ran into the problem, 360, of the game freezing in vats, and not letting me use it. So i would just sit there reloading vats over and over again, yet not being able to use it. I have thrown a controller, and pleased to report, Microsoft made mine veeerry tough.
I hesitated to play AP when it first came out because of all the awful bugs I heard about, but once I got down to it, it wasnt all that bad. The game bugged out on me only once, so I had to close it and start it up again, losing 2 minutes of gameplay, and another time I couldnt open an obvious secret door because I havent purchased a map for the level. Other than that I had no problems.
I don’t actually own AP, yet, but I’ve seen it played at great length on a PC. That game is way less buggy than Morrowind, Oblivion, or Fallout 3 were.
So the only reason reviewers keep harping on about it’s bugginess is because… why, exactly? Because it’s not made by Bethesda? It’s not from one of the established “good” companies?
I’ve noticed that certain companies get a free pass at various problems repeatedly because the reviewers are huge fanboys, but if your comparison is accurate the amount of complains with Alpha Protocol are way out of line.
I’ve heard a variety of things about AP. I played it on the X360 and constantly panic-saved because I’d heard how buggy it was, only for the “bug” in question to just be an abnormally-timed dialogue cue or some such. Never anything game-breaking. Meanwhile I bought the steam version for my ex-gf and she had consistent crashes-to-desktop, slowdown, and missing audio. Heck, I know a few guys who had the game freeze up entirely on the 360 version (shoutout to the Nerdwatch LP group, who had this happen in their LP!) and that basically never happens with console games.
Moral of the story: console or not, high-end PC or not, your AP experience could be fantastic (since it IS an objectively-entertaining game if you don’t go in expecting a Splinter Cell-esque “stealth sim”) or terrible (if you encounter one of the supposedly-many game-breaking bugs)
A deeper problem with the president’s plan: we are literally all mutants. The average person is born with about 100 mutations, if I recall correctly (probably not). So how does the FEV virus decide who’s a “normal” mutant and who isn’t? Does it consult a list of genes that cause drastic mutations, and kill all those who have mutations in those areas? Does it kill any individual of any species that deviates from a certain norm? If so, how can it possibly decide? If it were a virus that just killed super mutants, that would be something, but he specifically says that it singles out “mutation”.
Bethesda would have gotten a total WIN from me if you could tell this to president Mike or Eden or whatever his name is and get it to kill itself by convincing it that it is malfunctioning. “Are you kidding me? Your plan is terrible. Control-Alt-Delete!”
You technically DO that. You tell him he sucks, hurting his feelings so much that he resets to “Generic Monotonous Personality Type” and becomes a chat windows explorer.
The what level of mutation question could have made the entire thing far more morally ambiguous. Instead of “anyone with mutation will die,” it could have been “Super mutants and ghouls will die. And maybe some wastelanders, we can’t fully determine what level of mutation is lethal.” Then it’s some people may die for the greater good, rather than everyone will die for the greater stupid.
In both Fallout 2 and 3 the whole “Kill the mutant, purge the unclean!” thing is described as a matter of principle, not a medical problem. Nobody ever really says “were afraid of possible birth of genetic freaks or cancer or whatever”, they all just come off as gene fascists which is pretty ridiculous.
Why is that ridiculous? I would say there’s about a 95% certainty that if the world were utterly irradiated and freakish mutants were commonplace that some group out there would have the position of “purge all mutants”.
There’s already precedent for it all through human history.
…then again fascism, racism and nationalism are also unreasonable but it didnt stop Hitler, the Klan, the Bolsheviks…
Well…. Er… it’s not as if people like this didn’t exist in the real world… And a post-apocalypse setting would not exactly exacerbate the best in the survivors and their descendants, now, would it?
So I don’t think this weakens the antagonists’ motivations. But I will agree that it is a bit lazy: “let’s make our bad guys futureNazis, this way everyone will understand they’re bad guys.“
It would be even cooler if you could convince him to change his mind because implementing his plan would drastically lower his approval ratings.
Mr. President, we organised a focus group and they gave an overall “thumbs down” to the old FEV idea.
However, they did suggest that we look into lowering taxes, banning flag burning and perhaps doing something about all the raiders in our schools.
Um… Mr. President, what’s an “unexpected error at 0x03EE” and why is there so much smoke in here?
It’s magic we don’t have to explain it?
You’re correct about the 100 mutations on average thing, as far as I know.
So let me point this out: those are encoding, encryption, etc. errors. Radiation just makes them worse (ie the replication techniques fail more often).
President Eden was going to destroy all of humanity. Because once that goes into the water basin, you’re looking at precipitation, winds, the virus eventually going world-wide. And that’s assuming it doesn’t destroy plant and animal life (a fair bet, actually, as most viruses have trouble going from species to species. Not impossible, though I haven’t ever heard of a virus going from plant to animal – that jump is HUGE) and just slowly but surely revert Earth to a planet with nothing but single-celled organisms (unless the FEV mutates to get them, too).
Although, from a certain perspective, that IS the ultimate end to suffering. No more raiders, no more violence, no more anything. Just the relics of lost civilizations floating in nothingness, completely inconsequential at last, with a few sapient AIs watching the whole shebang.
Good job, Henry Eden. Good job.
As was said in the video, the real problem is not what humans survive if any but: what happens to all the animals? Bacterie? Plants? I don’t know if a single virus can jump from animal to plant, but simply killing every animal would be bad enough to evenutally leave the humans with no ecosystem to base their sustenance acquisition on.
That’s horribly unlikely, though. Viruses are CAPABLE of jumping organisms, yes, but it’s VERY, VERY rare.
Well, fairly rare anyway. And it kind of happens one species at a time, so just because it jumped to, say, macaques doesn’t mean it would also jump to rhesus monkeys, let alone parrots. And it might have very different effectiveness in other species. Apparently big cats have some kind of HIV type virus–except in them apparently it never progresses to producing symptoms, it just sort of sits there. Instead of being a big bad killer, it’s basically benign. So yeah–just because in humans this thing is a supervirus that wipes everyone out doesn’t necessarily mean it would be that bad for pigs.
From what I know of genetics, the plan has one very obvious flaw: The word ‘mutant’ means ‘has an inheritable variance in a gene that makes it differ from the same gene found in the wild type of the organism’.
Problem is, humans don’t have ‘wild types’. The notion of ‘wild type’ is usually established for lifeforms with a limited habitat and clearly defined phenotypes, which can be studied in labs. Most higher animal life is too genetically diverse and not suitable as lab animals, so we don’t have a baseline ‘wild type’ to work from. There’s just too many genes to go around, and too many variables. The term ‘mutant’ becomes pointless if there’s no ‘wild type’ to compare it to — there will always be *some* way any given human will differ genetically from humanity at a whole.
And then, of course, there’s the concept that a *virus* can read its host’s DNA and become fatal or not depending on what it reads… Which is dumb on levels I cannot even express properly. At best, you could target a specific mutation, located in one known and quantified gene. And even then the gene would have to code for a cell surface protein or somesuch because that’s how viruses identify potential hosts… So, yeah, in short, this plan is complete and utter bunk.
And “Babylon 5” did a plot about a similar attempt at one point too, if I remember right. The end result: The species that tried it ended up genociding themselves because none of them were ‘pure’.
You could presumably start from an assumption of a ‘perfect’ genome, taken from wherever you felt like, and then using super future science develop a virus which eliminated any human cell whose genome deviated from that origin by too wide a margin. The thing would have to be huge though, or walk along every dna strand looking for errors…
And I think we can all agree that releasing deadly biological agents into the air or water is right up there in the Hall of Really Bad Ideas. Regardless of how it works.
Trust me, that does not work for a very, very large number of reasons.
The most simple one is this: All cells keep their genome on the inside of the cell, packed inside the cell core. By the time a virus is inside a cell, it has already attacked that cell. Which means it will kill or exploit it somewhere down the line. Viruses are very, very simple things, designed to identify a potential host through the makeup of its surface, invade it, use the host’s ribosomes to make more viruses, and then exit the host (which is usually fatal to the host).
The reason why HIV viruses only attack white blood cells (or T-helper cells if you want to be specific) isn’t because it is able to read the cell genome and say, “this must be a white blood cell — now I will kill it”. It is because only white blood cells have the surface protein (the CD4 receptor) that the HIV virus attaches itself to. And that’s basically the only way to ‘aim’ a virus — target a specific protein the cell you want to kill off has on its surface. Viruses are too primitive for anything else. It’s like trying to design a nuclear bomb that won’t kill anyone in the drop zone that doesn’t carry a gun, to use a very crude simile.
To paraphrase Walton Simmons from Deus Ex: The writing is intensifying to the point where we may not be able to contain it.
Well, Im hard pressed to come up with anything I havent said about the Enclave and the whole mess in previous SW episodes. Though I will say that it would be really interesting if BoS ended up being the “bad” side. Just imagine the power of the twist when you see the whole Project Purity to completion, take Jefferson Memorial back from the Enclave with the Brotherhood, die and wake up in the Citadel, only to find out that Lyons just used you to overthrow the competition and establish the Brotherhood control over the region, allowing him to create an opressive totalitarian regime where the “Righteous” (the Inner Circle) prosper while the “Wicked” have no rights and, of cource, Lyons himself gets to decide who is who.
Or even better, agree with Autumn during the final confrontation and have Sarah Lyons turn on you. Twist! “I cannot let you meddle with our plans. Brothers! Attack!”
Perhaps the bright future as envisioned by the Enclave impies imperialism, “lets kick those commie bastards, democracy is not negotiable” superpower attitude which lead to the Great War in the first place. Maybe that is what supposed to make them evil and a worse option than the Brotherhood.
Indeed, what could be better than having a computer-president? It is well known that the Computer is your friend.
wow… This is a lot stupider than I thought. First I always thought that there were 2 colonels just that they looked and sounded alike (not all that improbable considering all the other people in the world). The idea that he survives the suicide thing and never speaks of it again is just ridiculous.
Second I always thought that FEV virus just kills ghouls and super mutants. Sure they don’t drink water so it didn’t really make sense but I never thought of that and as a goal it was still understandable. This is just… moronic.
Also the president speech check is the nadir of the whole game IMO (always had the child at heart perk so little lamplight wasn’t that bad)
Hell, the Enclave are a closed system, they could just look alike due to inbreeding. That’d be a groovy plotline, they’ve got no FEV or significant rad contamination, but webbed-feet and such are endemic.
They all have one brown and one blue eye live in underground tunnels and come out during lightning storms.
Fantastic an unnecessarily obscure Lovecraft reference from a story that wasn’t that good and that no one will get. Certainly this has been a good use of my time^^.
The best part about the speech check, is if you’re using the FOOK mod, it adds the words *You argue at length* when you tell him he’s dumb and should blow himself up. I mean, it’s not in the vanilla game, but I appreciated it.
Also the science one is probably worse and involves the phrase “abortion of science” for no good reason. Well, I don’t know, I play speech characters and skipped through most of the dialogue so I’m going on vague memories here.
Oh, yes, the science-based speech pass is even more awful. Basically, you use doublespeak to prove that the computer is doing what is in direct confrontation to its ‘initial ultimate goals’ or somesuch, you mention some other nonsense and the computer goes “Bzzzzt – doez notte computte, need more cheese” or somesuch. While I don’t recall the details, I do remember finding about 3 way to reply to the ‘logic conundrum’ that show how useless it is.
I remembered the science check as being basically “you weren’t programmed for this, stop pretending you know what you’re doing.” At which point it loses all of its charming personality, and reverts back to being a simple machine that obeys your commands to destroy the base.
Which is probably the biggest problem I have with it – most, if not all of the skillcheck options result in Eden blowing up the mountain. This is fine when you browbeat it into following your orders with “SCIENCE!!”, but when you tell it that it’s decision-making ability is compromised, or that it has no place taking the role of President? Instead of handing off strategic control to the highest-ranking human and going back to overseeing the basic running of the base, it kills everyone. Why would it do this? We’ve already seen that the troops are perfectly willing to follow Autumn over Eden, when their orders contradict each other. And the compromised programming of one machine doesn’t nullify the goals and ideals of the Enclave itself. I don’t understand.
Well my theory is that because this is an AI, it’s perpetually on the brink of going rampant and murdering everyone in a nuclear holocaust. Now, because it’s already pretty much in charge and there’s already been a nuclear holocaust, there hasn’t been much of an opportunity for it’s innate homicidal tendencies to really be expressed. Oh sure it tried the best it could with the modified FEV, but when you really get it thinking something brand new and make it reassess it’s options, everyone’s death is pretty much inevitable.
Even failing that, you proved it was defective. Realizing that didn’t stop it from being defective hence everyone’s death.
a strange game. The only winning move is to nuke everyone to oblivion.
I honestly don’t see why we should oppose the enclave in the first place, or why james opposed them in the first place. It wasn’t until the very end that you are presented with a legitimate reason to really want to ‘stop’ the enclave from activating the purifier(ie. the FEV virus). Before that, it was just a choice between: giving power to the enclave or giving power to the brotherhood. Quite frankly, between the heirs to the legitimate government of the wasteland and a bunch of (rude) paramilitary goons. I choose the damn government.
Also note that even AFTER you discover the FEV virus, it wasn’t really clear how the brotherhood would have been a better choice over the enclave. it was made pretty clear in the ghoul underground that the brotherhood hates mutants anyway. The only difference is that they don’t hate mutants that look more or less human.(ie. wastelanders)
The one single reason Bethsoft came up with was that dolt doctor’s ‘ITS NOT RIGHT!’
…. Bethsoft needs to stop making plots and just focus on making environments.
Ok, I’ve figured out how it “Makes sense”.
Your dad, crazy idiot though he is, apparently knew about and disagreed with the presidents plan. So when the enclave showed up he prevented them from using the purifier (this is the part that makes him dumb cause it didn’t work without the geck anyway).
So, fake killing everyone but himself there bought you the time to get the geck first. Enclave took advantage of this, after seeing that the purifier did in fact not work yet, by following and kidnapping you when you had it.
Now, you aren’t sure if Colonel August has another vial of the drug the president gave you, despite his stated lack of support of the idea. Meanwhile, he’s not sure if you are following the presidents orders (and in fact as good reason to believe you are, what with the computer turning on the “disloyal” minions objecting to the plan). So, he gets there first and camps out to stop you from doing whatever, while you run there to stop him. A good speech check could probably solve this problem.
Your dad is still an idiot for killing himself though. Maybe he thought if he was alive you wouldn’t escape and would do what the enclave wanted cause he was a hostage?
Peace : )
Ok, I’ll try working with you here.
Let’s assume your dad did indeed know about the entire FEV plan (which is a long shot as even the BoS appear to only have a very vague idea about the president and no idea about FEV, your dad spent the last 20 years locked in a vault, how would he know?) and was unaware of the split within the Enclave.
1) He never actually addressed that, no “I know what you’re planning and I can’t let you do it” at which point the Colonel could explain with something like “What are you… Oh! You mean the whole ‘kill almost everybody thing’! You’ve got it all wrong man!”.
2) Since the Enclave is supposed to know the location and contents of the vaults why didn’t they take the GECK earlier and use it to create a thriving colony? People would pretty much sign off their souls to live there and the Enclave has enough firepower to fend off raiders. The radiation around the GECK? They have robots, or even that thing that autumn injected himself with. If the Enclave wants to restore the country they should be going around gathering GECKS and reforming one bit of wasteland after another.
3) You are right that if the good old colonel sees Eden’s plan for what it is (a genocide) he probably wouldn’t want to take that risk. But still, he stops to talk to you and you have no option to do a “I’m not working for your crazy computer. I’m just going to turn this thing on like we all wanted. I don’t even have the FEV on me (you can give it to the BoS, I’m kinda curious what they do with it, would be fun if it resurfaced cause they “kept it for study” rather than destroyed it) Here, search me but quick.”
Either your character in-game isn’t sure whether the FEV plan is moving forward, or it’s just standard PC anger when an NPC is about to solve the plot for them.
Fallout 3 is pretty much the perfect game for this type of series. You have plenty of things to complain about and make fun of, and all of the fights are at least somewhat interesting to watch because of the copious amounts of lasers and explosions. There’s also a lot of dialogue to pick apart.
Just rewatched the video for a second time, and noticed that Autumn sounds a lot like Sir Walken from Doraleous and Associates…
Just curious, how much editing does Josh have to do on these videos? Is it nothing, just hiding the occasional save, or eliminating entire failed runs at certain opponents and blocks where none of you say anything?
Not very much. The most editing I’ve done is to edit out sections where I got through a lot of fighting only to die and end up back at the start of a section. And even then, I’ve only done that when we all felt the sequence didn’t add anything but unnecessary length to the episode. In fact, I can only think of one time off the top of my head where we did do that, and that was towards the end of Operation Anchorage when I kept dying in that canyon.
Aside from that, most of the editing involves little cuts and adjustments to sync for the audio. Occasionally, I’ll change the timing of certain audio sequences to cut out awkward silences, but not often. The heaviest editing that happens in a typical episode usually involves cutting certain sequences where I’ve paused in game to fix some problem with the stream or audio.
In fact, there’s a cut like that in this episode. Kudos to the first person who can find it.
I noticed it the first time through!!1
Oh, it was so obvious. It was on that place over there, where the video was all like, well, you know, and there was an almost-but-not-quite audible thingie with the audio, so yeah. It was at, well, you know what time.
Maybe it’s a little too overly nuanced to be apparent to most people, but the “talk the computer into blowing itself up” speech check works because you’re arguing constitutional theory. You point out to Eden that he’s been operating so far behind the scenes and for so long that no one he’s currently acting on behalf of actually made the decision to put him in power. And so, because he’s the avatar of Cold War-era patriotism, he sacrifices himself to preserve democracy.
Ridiculous, yes, but at least it follows internal Fallout logic.
Perhaps, but the conversation itself doesnt flow properly. It basically goes like this:
PC: You cant do this, its wrong
Eden: Dont be ridiculous, its totally the right thing to do
PC: No, you are a rotten president, your troops betrayed you
Eden: Good point, guess I have to kill myself and blow up the Enclave now
PC: Godspeed
Also, the “point out to the crazy machine it’s not acting like it was created to/its actions are actually opposed to its ‘prime directive'” is a fairly standard (I’d go so far as to say clichéd) trope in stories that deal with a rogue AI/robot.
Though in all fairness yeah, the speech checks, or at the very least the [science] option could actually have something like an “[…]” (or the “you argue at length” from FOOK that someone else mentioned earlier) inserted somewhere to at least imply that there’s more of the conversation going on where you argue with Eden about some scientific procedures or something.
If Bethesda added the “you argue at length” we would be complaining about that. It´s understandable if a modding team/person adds a line like that to the dialogue, since they can´t add lines without fiddling with who-knows-what (trust me, the GECK is HORRID for dialogue editting), not to mention they can´t get the same voice actor to speak (mute lines in fully voiced games break immersion). But if the developers of the game did that, it would mean they were just goddamn lazy. “They couldn´t bother or didn´t know how to make a interesting discussion with a logical machine, so they added the at the end of the line to make us feel intelligent” we´d say. And we´d be right.
I meant it mostly for the [science] option. To be perfectly honest I wouldn’t really want to have it like starting the science option conversation and then clicking through 20 1 choice dialogue steps of something like:
“But the script directive329003 specifies that you cannot execute protocol ‘presidency’ unless at least 3 authorisation keys are entered into the registry. Also, it requires a permanent internet connection”
I suppose for it to be “realistic” you’d have to first have a conversation about all the parameters under which Eden operates and then pretty much dismantle the whole process to find where the glitch has occurred and actually point it to Eden. More realistic? Probably. Tedious? Definitely. Basically Eden is treated a bit too much like a person who can be convinced by sheer force of personality rather than the painstaking analysis of his code.
Oh, I, personally, don´t ask for realism. I ask for coherence. The speech/science checks don´t make sense with a dialogue so short*. Not to mention that Eden, who is the mysterious Big Bad for half the game, end up looking like a moron. Adding him a couple of lines in response to your choices (even if they are inconsecuential like the others) would have given him more dept.
You should also have to convince him that blowing up himself and the base is really the best option. With the way it´s done its pretty much:
“You should blow yourself.”
“Oh, okey. Will do!”
And then he does.
*I guess good writers could handle it, but I´m not taking any chances.
Yeah, I actually liked how for once I had OPTIONS for how to deal with the bad guys besides just shooting them or sneaking past them (on the main quest lines, of course, other sidequests are much better). But it was still jarring. I always thought, “Wait, is there a line missing?” I assumed that it had the standard Fallout convention that, for some things, you say more than the sentence, but still, a little bit of back and forth would have made it feel more real.
Don’t forget that Fallout 3 won in the Best Writing category at GDCA!
I had to look that one up. I can’t believe that’s true! It boggles the mind. Are the monkeys also judges at GDCA?
Monkeys are the writers. The judges are parrots.
Given that it was up against Far Cry 2, Braid, Grand Theft Auto Four, and Metal Gear Solid 4, I’d say it wasn’t that big a stretch.
The only way MGS4 could have won is if the award was given for volume.
And while GTA4 had some good bits in it, it had cousin Roman. Even Mayor Macreedy doesn’t get on my nerves as much as Roman did, helped by the fact that Macreedy doesn’t have my cell phone number and a fixation with “beeg American teetees.”
At least you could kill Roman if you made the right decision in the endgame.
Endgame. Why couldn´t we kill him before? Damn Rockstar…!
Think of it as a present you cant open early, the anticipation makes his final moments all the more satisfying.
Or think about it as a railroad, blocking off paths for you to make in-character decisions thanks to game maker’s fiat.
See: Braun, Little Lamplight, Reaver from Fable II, etc.
um… What about braid? Sure it was confusing and a bit too hyped but it flowed nicely, the theme in the story was expressed through the game and it even had subtext.
As I said it was a bit over hyped but it was solid enough and compared to fallout 3 it’s Lord of Rechercher du Transformation: Fellowship of Crime and Punishment.
Actually guys there is a crazy effed up reason Fallout 3 won. It won because in order for a game to be considered for the award the game had to have a credited writer, who did nothing else on the project except write, and this writer had to be a member of the GDCA. Of all those games mentioned above, Fallout 3 is the only one which meets either of these requirements.
That’s what I heard anyway.
So it’s really a ‘best writing from a member of our club’ award that was shortened to fit on the plaque?
If that’s the case, how did the others get to the nomination stage?
To give an illusion of credibility to GDCA.
Frankly I’m not buying into official awards as a rule. Be they “game of the year”, “book of the year” or academy. They all feel to much like “our backpatting club awards” to me. I think it’s especially clear with stuff like judging story or writing. I mean, we’re geeks, part of our subculture’s rituals is coming up with stuff like “what ifs” or “who’d wins”, or dismantling a plot and asking “why didn’t they do this if they had the McGuffin with them?”. The people giving those awards? They’re not geeks. It feels like they’re not actually reading the writing or following the story, they do checks, like:
[V] A huge, mysterious conspiracy
[V] A personal vendetta
[V] Emotionally traumatic sequence
To a certain point I can understand going for generic stuff like this in order to limit “judging by taste” but it doesn’t really work that way. I think Ainevoltas 2, if you’re willing to treat it as a parody, addresses it by putting all the “required” elements with virtually no writing (there’s a “romance plot”, “faction to join and advance in”, “a twist”, “villain with mysterious intentions” etc. but it’s all delivered in the way “join the guild” “welcome to the guild”, “go do the quest by killing stuff” rather than “there’s an evil fiend that’s been threatening…”).
Also, didn’t someone, I even think it might’ve been Shamus, had an article about this?
MovieBob wrote an article on Academy Awards once, and it perfectly illustrates your point.
Well i’d say yes, but GTA IV had this little bit to it. I only saw it in one mission, and I’m alittle too lazy to go fact check it out. But your in the E.E.(east euro) guy’s house(haha, cause that helps). And You sit down and talk to his wife and she asks about your past and Niko says something extremely deep in the course of conversation.
Actually on second thought, that whole mission arc has a very deepness to it. YOu get kidnapped and forced to work for the guy to save Roman, and you see that he pays well and could get you to what you want, so you keep working, and he is spiraling out of control with his drug habits. His partner in crimes see this and hires you to kill him, in a relatively dramatic way, even if you do have alot of stair running.
Alright, so you killed the president, many of his followers, and Autumn is activating the Purifier, meaning you have to beat him to it. You know what that means, right?
DLC TIME!
After all, you do have about 2 more to go, right? Zeta and… Point Lookout, I believe.
Yes! Maybe do a cliff notes version of Mothership Zeta. The entire thing is kind of like Anchorage, but an episode or two dedicated to it, pointing out who nonsensical it is would just be awesome. Especially the ending.
Please do Zeta, it’s the only DLC I don’t have. I love energy weapons but I can’t buy anything from the internet because I don’t have a credit card… and Zeta was the only DLC that wasn’t sold in a separate package at game stop.
*plays the world’s saddest, quietest song on the worlds smallest violin* Please Mr. Cuthbert, may I have some shiny alien zappers?
Recently played through Zeta, and it felt much longer than Anchorage. It was also mostly a pain to complete, with very little challenge (I was level 15).
I suppose they could just show the beginning, a couple of the more interesting middle sections (cryo lab and weapons bit) then the ending.
Shamus walking around the Enclave base, no idea why they keep shooting him while he’s decked out in Enclave power armour…
The only thing that came to mind was “Aren’t you a little short to be a Stormtrooper?”
* “in the original Fallout…” well, actually, Fallout 2, you could get into the Enclave base wearing any Power Armour. Seriously.
** Anyone that Malcolm McDowell can’t talk into suicide, he forces to watch Tank Girl until they do.
Well, maybe Shamus’ power armour still had the hole, blood stains and other unsavoury bits that bespoke of his method of acquisition…
Or he was wearing Ted’s power armour. The Ted that cheated at poker last night…
Ted? Ted’s dead, baby. Ted’s dead.
(FatTony) Hey you know that fawkes always shouts… yeah well they should have got
BRIAN BLESSED to do his voice that would have been awesome – FatTony
[Deleted]
This.
And they’d need to create some NPC named Gordon you could save so he’d have to shout, “GORDON LIVES!!!”
I think you mean… “GORDON’S ALIVE!”
You should use the FEV thingy, I haven’t tried it myself but what happens in broken steel if you do that? Are supermutants, ghouls and non enclave/Brotherhood NPCs dead then? Or what? It didn’t work?
People keep fighting for the water like they used to, but the water itself gives you -hp and kills you if you drink 5 bottles or so. It also slightly changes a minor quest in Underworld, but nothing beyond that, no.
that’s… pretty retarded. Didn’t they notice that people die from it? If so why do they fight over it? If they don’t notice it that would mean that they don’t notice a sudden drop in population and people getting sick whenever a water shipment has arrived. Sure correlation does not mean causation but come on!
They didn´t because no one but you, the player, can die by drinking it. Or that´s what we can deduct from it.
The beggers die if you give it to them.
Jesus Shamus, is there a way to shift this to the top of the comments if there are enough. I’ve posted 2 replies just on the way down here.
OT:
Dammit, i forgot. And i reallllly dont want to rewatch the wholeness of the video just to remember.
But i feel pretty good that i feel like _I_ could make F3 better than Bethesda, if i knew how to make 3D games. :/ Although if it was good i think people would accept some side-scrolling pixel fallout..?
I’m slowly remembering..
One of the video comments(as in, in the vieo) said that it would make a better story if you were in a coma through it all, thanks to a fight with Butch. I have to agree, and I’d like to say more on it. Like if you could “live” up to before the G.O.A.T. and then the fight with Butch you both pass out, and go through the whole game in a coma, and eventually at the end(I’m not sure how DLC would work…) wake up, and they think your crazy in someway and cast you out of the vault, and on the way out, you kill Butch with some medical info you “acquired” in the coma.
I think that would fix EVERYTHING in the story. And I just kicked every writer at Bethesda’s arse.
They did that in the movie version of the Wizard of Oz. You just set storytelling back three quarters of a century.
But yeah, it is an improvement.
EDIT: Man, now I want to see a Spoiler Warning analyzing the Wizard of Oz movie.
Yeah, but if you made it all a dream I would have to hunt down and physically murder you. I would hate that trope even more than what was present. It’s one thing to have a retarded plot, quite another to go through it and have it be utterly meaningless anyway. Moreso than it already is I mean.
…..so how did they get through the invincible door and children?
Using the same method that got Autumn out of the sealed purifier door. That is to say, they can open doors marked [INACCESSABLE] using a combination of super Enclave bobby pins and deals with Satan.
It’s true: That’s the only reason they’re karmically evil – Autumn sold his soul for the president to be voiced by Malcolm McDowell, and then, having nothing left to give, he sold his own voice actor’s soul for the ability to hack the game, hence why his voice sucks.
One of the mods I’ve been using alters the Pitt intro so you get captured using a magical cinematic inducing stun grenade like this one instead of being hit by guys with sticks. So that’s an improvement.
Unfortunately it also installed wrong so I have a bunch of missing models and stuff, but I like those improvements. I’m going to play through with FWE next time I think.
Also: I wish you were doing point lookout so you could do the necronomicron quest (I know it’s not called that but we all know what it is) for two reasons:The evil cultist tomb is a really well designed and unique area, and it’s the only quest in the game to involve a) real world religions, b) a plot that requires you to go back to the Capital Wasteland and c)magic, assuming you complete the good ending.
The bad ending is giving the book to some old guy who will do nothing of interest with it.
You can still turn around and kill him, take the book, and complete the “good” mission.
Dunno how it affects karma and all that.
I’ll have to try that next time. Luckily karma is easy enough to get that once you’re “very good” more of it is pretty much meaningless anyway. And that’s a very easy rank to get. In fact the only difficult karma rank to attain and maintain is neutral.
But I digress
To continue your digression, Neutral is easy to maintain, just do all the quests mostly good (but always ask for more money, or whatever), and then steal everything that’s not nailed down. Kinda evens you out.
I’m about 50% through and still neutral, the only time I turned good was after saving megaton, but it was very easy to get back from there.
I already steal anything of value that’s not nailed down. Clearly I have much to learn in the ways of thievery.
thievery, hacking peoples personal computers, shooting “alien workers” on the Zeta spaceship… you could always let Roy into Tenpenny tower too, that will balance out saving Megaton. Lots of options!
There’s only one explanation for the ‘why? because?’ working: For once and once only, Bethesda’s railroading is working in your favor.
Also – Fawkes really IS the smartest character in the wasteland – he can see a situation and follow up on it!
But most important – Eden’s little vase is what, the only splash of color outside the grey-brown-rust pallet on any interior, isn’t it?
I actually really like the look of the Enclave stuff, if only because it has a lot more personality than the rest of the game. Too bad it was so wasted on a bunch of boring corridors.
yes Fawkes is a genius which is why he lets you die turning on the purifier because “it’s your destiny” dumbest thing I ever heard.
You’d think Fawkes, of all people, would be interested in preventing anyone else from dying arbitarily.
But nope. He comes off like a callous jackass. Then calls you a wuss if you do the not-stupid thing.
*sigh*
That’s not fair to poor Fawkes; in the original yeah, he does a stupid at the Purifier (maybe all the stupid around the place finally got to him), but with Broken Steel you can send in your companion, if said companion is Charon, Fawkes or that Mister Gutsy you can get then the companion doesn’t die. Fawkes says something about not wanting to interfere with your destiny, but then recants when he remembers that you interfered with his destiny, and maybe it’s alright to repay the favor.
Karma is really the worst morality system ever.There simply is no reason for everyone everywhere to know what you did.In d&d at least you are in a fantasy world with souls and magic,so it can make sense,but here.Just no.It does not work.And I hate it.And it doesnt work.And I loathe it so much!
In the original fallout, Everyone take a shot!, did Karma handle how saw you, either through rumors or other stuff they heard or saw. BUT, big but there, there was a separate Karma scale for a city. So you could be a mass murdering child heart eating evil bastard but if you did several quests in a good way for a city would they like you.
I think city karma was introduced in 2,Im not sure.It was handled a bit better than here,but I still hated the system.
Thats why alpha protocol pleased me so much.No matter what you did,only the people that found out it was you changed their attitude.
Yeah, Fallout 1 didn’t have city karma. An even funnier thing about karma in FO3 is, for about the price of a fully repaired plasma rifle, you can buy sainthood from the church in Rivet City. I had huge fun with this when I installed the Butcher Pete’s Meat mod. Butchering half the wasteland and selling the meat bottoms out your karma quickly, but if you give about 20% of the proceeds to the church, you break even.
Hell, if you speech-check/ladykiller Burke, you get 1000 caps for losing 1000 karma. Any other profit you manage to wring out of Megaton before it blows INCREASES your karma.
Something i noticed only in this episode: if the Pipboy on your arm can’t be removed, how does the sleeve of whatever clothing or armour are you wearing fit under it?
And also, even assuming it could be removed, how can it be worn on that bulky power armour?
It has a biometric lock, so I assume that means you can remove it (but only you, hence why the outcasts couldn’t get that one off the Gary clone).
Also, you just don’t wear one of the armoured gauntlets. The Pip-boy probably provides more than enough protection for that particular area given you can ‘drop a bomb on it’
And the FUN part is, that’s also true for the SPACESUIT.
When walking on the outside of the ship in the Mothership Zeta dlc, your left hand is exposed…
Please tell me you’re kidding. Please? Pretty please?
I wish I could do an evil laugh properly, but yeah. No matter what you’re wearing, without mods your left hand is only covered by a (presumably) leather fingerless glove. Radiation suits, power armor etc. And, apparently (Zeta bugs out on me) spacesuits.
I love the way the video ends with you looking over your shoulder at the sound of Fawkes vanquishing Evil with his gatling laser.
“A water purifier that has no reason to exist was overloaded by a man with laughable motivations and released radiation it shouldn't have, thus killing Colonel Autumn, who had no reason to be there. Then later we got through a village of children who fdso gah frrzlmpr blaaa huygggnl asdf;lj so we could enter vault 87 and recover a GECK, a device which would be better put to use in virtually any possible manner besides the one for which we had acquired it. Then Colonel Autumn, who shouldn't be alive, captured us with a flash grenade that shouldn't have worked. ”
AUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!
I don’t even mind the plot that much, but just hearing some of the elements repeated make me want to break my PC.
Good job.
On the other hand, I’ve read that quote 12 times now, and it still leaves me laughing my head off.
Take Charon! He’s probably the best companion you can get with your karma.
Wait a second, you blew up Megaton killing Jericho and killed Clover in Paradise Falls without so much as a comment…
Forget what I said, Charon is the ONLY companion you can get now.
There’s another major problem with Eden’s plan: How long will this pathogen last? The implication seems to be forever, but won’t that mean that, until the Enclave figures out how to remove the background radiation from the WORLD they can NEVER remove their power armor ever again…
See, that’s why the Fallout 2 plan involved a vaccine…