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anime tupac posted:Hey rope kid, I have a question about Honest Hearts if you've got the time. How did you want players to react to Daniel? I seem to remember you linking a clip from The Mission when this was discussed long ago (and btw that's a great choice for inspiration and I wish more game writers than you took cues from palme d'or winners) but I didn't feel like Daniel was a Father Gabriel character; he came across as kinda flippant toward the Zion natives' belief system ("Tribals are smart but... well, they're ignorant"). You said previously that you already knew most people would side with Joshua; I get that. I'm just curious if you wanted Daniel to come off as 100% reasonable, the peaceful alternative to Graham, or if you intended him to sound kinda lofty and distant. Joshua refuses to tell Follows-Chalk whether or not he should visit the outside world. He admits that the kid needs guidance, but he doesn't want to have too much control over Follows' life, because he thinks that's dangerous. Daniel, on the other hand, refuses to tell Waking Cloud that her husband is dead because he patronisingly assumes that she can't be trusted to keep it together. He's quite happy to have a total monopoly of control over her life, without ever questioning the fact that he's treating her like an idiot child in spite of her obvious intelligence and courage. It's all there in the parallel sidequests, man. Intentionally or not (I assume intentionally, because good writers, etc), I think Daniel consistently comes across as a mean-spirited, superior, sermonising little hypocrite.
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Aug 10, 2014 16:44
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Weighing up everything, I'd give 2 the edge over 1, but I'm not sure it should be forgiven for dropping the generally taut setting so cataclysmically and paving the way for, "So, guys, wouldn't it be cool if we just stick in the androids from Blade Runner? Blade Runner is sci-fi, right? So it'll fit right in."
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Aug 30, 2014 18:14
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LividLiquid posted:Where are there Replicants in Fallout 2? No, there aren't any. I'm just saying that 2's unstructured zaniness was sadly a precursor to some of Fallout 3's worst tone-deaf excesses. Heck, even the ridiculous 'people who think they're vampires' shtick was originally meant to be part of Van Buren. grobbo fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 18:45
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You know, I think my favourite moment of gameplay vs story bizarreness may come during I Put A Spell On You. Your character has, through guile and cunning, hidden out by the Camp McCarran radio tower, sneaked inside, cornered a spy, overcome him in a desperate struggle, and learnt of a bomb that's about to go off, killing God knows how many people... ...and your character jogs slowly and leisurely and in total silence through the airfield to stop it, while most likely listening to dreamy old-time hits on the radio. And possibly taking advantage of the absent monorail guards to swipe a few bottles of sarsparilla from the nearby vending machines. It's a lovely, thrilling little quest, but the climax really doesn't work in the engine. Especially when you then have to pop back into Hsu's office to tell him that you've shot one of his officers dead and disarmed a bomb and nobody seems to have noticed.
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Sep 7, 2014 18:23
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Pwnstar posted:The story and its themes in Honest Hearts is great but its more mellow and introspective than everything else so a lot of people don't like that because of the tonal difference. Well, and there's the gutted, basic-implentation main questline. For all of the quality writing work in Honest Hearts, The Adventure Of The Missing Lunchboxes and The Epic Quest To Pass A Repair Check On A Compass aren't going to go down as anyone's favourite NV moments.
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Sep 9, 2014 18:43
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My current weird bug involves certain characters using doors they probably shouldn't be using. So the two adorable kids with the mysterious 'toy' energy weapon in Freeside are now happily playing outside the gates where Fiends with real laser rifles are roaming. Stay there, kids. I'll be back for you when my Barter skill is high enough.
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Sep 17, 2014 07:34
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Hedgehog Pie posted:What I find funny about these "intelligent" lines is not only that they're often just stating the bleeding obvious, but also that the person you're speaking to will then regard you as the next Stephen Hawking. "Wow, you're a smart one!" I say this without vitriol, but Bethesda are very peculiar about reactivity, and their tactics make far less sense than some of the RPG studios that simply don't bother. It's not that they won't include it in their game - it's just that they can't seem to pick their moments to acknowledge the player's stats and choices wisely or intuitively. And so we end up with headpatting that makes very little sense, the natural conclusion of which is the endlessly chattering, utterly omniscient guards in Skyrim. "OH, SO YOU'RE HIGHLY SKILLED AT WEAPONS-CRAFTING, ARE YOU?" Just a pretty bizarre thing to spend money on, all that voice acting to so little gain. grobbo fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jan 2, 2015 |
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Jan 2, 2015 19:26
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:I've found most people tend to think a game is really good based on little touches like this. Personally, I find it to be pretty impressive. I get really excited when games react to things I do. I guess I'm the target audience for this. I didn't mean that I think background reactivity is bad. It isn't; it's brilliant, and we need more of it. But Bethesda don't really seem to know when to implement it, and they often waste their time and energy on the strangest possible instances. Having random guards constantly bark out a laundry list of observations like, 'Don't try anything around me, sneak-thief,' or 'Psst. Hail Sithis,' is peculiar because it's so isolated from the rest of the (largely unreactive) game, and it makes zero sense within the gameworld. How do these guards all know so much about my skills and choices? Why doesn't anyone *else* seem to know about my skills and choices? Why do the guards all play dumb when I try to actually talk to them about their bewildering omniscience? Why is it that the next time I show up in town, the same guard has completely forgotten he was angrily accusing me of being a sneak-thief last time around and is now chummily asking me to craft some armour for him? Why isn't the blacksmith commenting on my renowned armour-crafting skills, instead of these anonymous assholes? It's reactivity, sure, but without any underlying common sense or logic to it, and it's so insistently shallow and mechanical that it ends up making the world feel less alive rather than more alive. One of the great things about the faction system in NV is that it makes background reactivity feel logical and specific. As you hang around a faction more often, doing quests for them and gaining approval, their random barks become friendlier. NPCs stop muttering threateningly about outsiders and start greeting you as one of their own. That's much more intuitive than the Skyrim system, and it's much more effective in making you feel as if you're living amongst real people instead of CONDITIONAL_MET_BOTs.
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Jan 3, 2015 19:08
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Fuzz1138 posted:I honestly don't understand how people can actually let feelings and morality keep them from experiencing so many parts of the game, especially with how many times I've heard people in this thread say they've tried to side with the Legion but just couldn't condone it and switched sides. I guess it might just be that the Legion are convincingly monstrous enough that the player gets a little chemical kick of righteous feeling for choosing to blast them all away every time, which basically overrides the positive feeling of finding a new location or completing a new questline. For much the same reason, I can never bring myself to torment Dak'kon or Morte in PS:T, no matter how many times I play it - it just feels too *satisfying* to do the right thing. And I just don't get jaded with doing it. It may lead to a bit of very occasional performative piety online ("I don't know how you can ever side with those MONSTERS. What about their civic policy?"), but it's a tribute to the quality of the storytelling, and in particular that fantastic Nipton introduction.
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Jan 12, 2015 08:34
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prometheusbound2 posted:Themes? Not about overcoming evil? In a video game? What? Riddley Walker. Now that's something I'd like to see in video game form. +1 to Puppeteering.
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Jan 20, 2015 08:29
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Funnily enough, though, typing this reminded me somewhat of Honest Hearts, and how so many people in this thread responded negatively to what Daniel was trying to accomplish. To an extent, of course, Daniel is hopelessly naive, and is overly dismissive of the Sorrows' beliefs and needs, treating them like children. And yet, to an extent, he's right. The typical response by your average wastelander, and especially the Courier, is violent. The typical character in New Vegas sees enemies not much differently from the way we, the players, see them-entities that exist only to be killed, who aren't really human regardless of how they look or talk. For us, of course, this is correct (It is a video game after all), but it's easy to forget that the targets you randomly gun down are, at least ostensibly, representative of real human beings, with goals, aspirations, dreams. We respond with violence so much that violence becomes the default response, and talk of killing groups we don't agree with become commonplace-sure, kill the Brotherhood of Steel! Kill the Boomers! Wipe out the NCR, or the Great Khans, or the White Legs, they're assholes! They're not real people! And of course they aren't, and since it's a game it's difficult to respond non-violently to certain groups such as Raiders, the Powder Gangers, the Fiends, etc. But for other groups, just like in real life, don't have to respond with violence when someone threatens you. You can take the moral approach, treating your enemies with kindness to the best extent that the game allows, and work with them to create a better society. Bitter enemies like the NCR and Brotherhood of Steel can be made allies, and all but the most hostile factions of the wasteland can be turned to good works. Yet, the average player isn't going to try and accomplish all of this. They're going to respond with violence, because the wasteland and the game train them to respond with violence. The Boomers are massacred. The Brotherhood is wiped out, and innocent children are (Presumably) killed en-masse when the bunker explodes. Much of the potential for creating a better Mojave is destroyed when the player reacts violently or selfishly, and this is the kind of destructive behavior that Daniels sees and fears will be implanted in the Sorrows, one of the few entities in the wasteland who don't automatically react with violence. Sure, his goal is naive, and likely doomed to failure when some other group attacks the Sorrows, but you have to admit that if nothing else, Daniel is one of the only people in the wasteland who sees the constant violence and destruction and is disgusted by it, and to an extent, he's absolutely right. He may be paternalistic and naive, but you can't deny that his goal of trying to react non-violently to the threat of the White Legs is absolutely unique and should be considered in the face of the player's own actions. If that makes sense. I don't know if I agree about the 'average player'. I'd be surprised if the majority of players ended up wiping out the Great Khans, or the Boomers, despite their ostensibly being fearsome raiders - just because they act like human beings in-game, and can be reasoned with and learned from. And actually, that's a more interesting and involved process than blowing yet another bunch of heads off. In general, the Fallout games are actually quite brilliant at programming the player into trying diplomacy first, despite the power to kill anyone or everyone at will. In HH it just isn't a possibility (the White Legs really are just a bunch of near-identical spawns that jump on you in the wilderness every so often), and although I very much enjoyed it, I think it does end up committing to a few big authorial contrivances in its efforts to make Daniel reasonable or right. For instance, I don't think it rings true that the Sorrows can be hopelessly transformed into a warlike tribe by a single night of unified violence, but the loss of their ancestral home and personal guardian deity has no more negative effect on them than, as the endslides say, 'difficulty' adjusting. Or that we don't need to consider the White Legs a threat to anyone post-evacuation, since they don't know how to hunt and end up dying out very soon (this despite their visible mastery of ambush, trapping, poison, flaming gas-fuelled BBQ blades...). I dunno. I've pretty much consistently played through New Vegas as a reasonable quasi-pacifist, but whenever I side with Daniel, I feel completely dissatisfied. It just doesn't seem like a rational choice to make, with all the information to hand...which makes it feel like a bit of a cheat when the endslides pop up to confirm that, yes, it was.
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Feb 22, 2015 10:52
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Anime Schoolgirl posted:
If they do keep pushing their weirdly straight-laced android homage to the advanced cyberpunk of Blade Runner in this 1950s retro Mad Science / Mad Max setting, I'm not sure we'll be able to honestly claim they've gained any understanding of how to write for their own property.
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Jun 4, 2015 08:36
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Republican Vampire posted:To be fair, the first two games had as much to do with Blade Runner as Flash Gordon in terms of aesthetics and crunchy setting bits, and getting back to that might be cool. But they'd have to follow through in terms of tone and stuff. Well, the western motif was there from the moment you team up with the sheriff to face down Gizmo in a shootout for the town, but yeah, I definitely agree - the series is an odd and evolving blend of influences, and that's why it's so hard to pin down the 'right' tone (and why discussions of this kind often devolve into 'but it's meant to be wacky! Who cares? Fallout 2 had a ghost!'). And that's why the series has always benefitted from having caretakers to keep things from drifting too far off track - people who are willing to say the sensible, boring things like, 'The talking animals were dumb. Never again.' Or 'Actually, the Deathclaw is meant to be a mutated chameleon, so maybe we should come up with a new, more appropriate monster for this region and climate.' Or 'Maybe a Lovecraft-themed dungeon with an interdimensional portal is straying too far from our overall aesthetic, guys.' Fallout should be wacky, but it also needs to be disciplined in its wackiness, and I'm not convinced Bethesda think the same way.
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Jun 4, 2015 09:08
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#JustUlyssesChat I didn't hugely like Lonesome Road's writing either, but for me the confusion lies in Avellone's attempt to talk through Ulysses about the setting. He's said in interviews that he wanted to pick at the stagnation of Fallout: the increasingly over-familiar setting elements and the rise of civilised factions like the NCR that threaten to overwhelm the lore, versus the appeal of being a wasteland scavenger who's primarily picking their way through dangerous ruins looking for ammo. Should we nuke Fallout, in other words, to set back the clock and start again? All of which is reflected in the gameplay and the dialogue, but it's just too much of a big debate for Ulysses to carry alone - especially when he also needs to set up a personal antagonism and history with the Courier, and act as an exposition device for the Divide, and to fill in his own backstory with Caesar. And so he ends up coming across as rambling and pretentious. And actually, nobody seems to have realised that Dead Money had exactly the same underlying debate in its gameplay and in Elijah (with some fun digs at modern game design to boot - Robco trash!) with his plan to bring 'quiet' back to the Mojave. But I think Ulysses' view of the Courier is very much in line with everything else in New Vegas - and in the Fallout series as a whole. He explicitly doesn't herald you as some kind of superman ('clumsy', I think he says?); it's your role that makes you important. In Honest Hearts, wandering strangers enter the life of a tribe and change it utterly (reflected in you, in Joshua and Daniel, in the Survivalist, in Caesar himself). In Old World Blues and Dead Money, scavengers enter a slumbering pre-war hideaway, 'wake it up', and change everything. In New Vegas, as vast factions rumble slowly towards each other, a single courier runs back and forth between the battle lines, changing everything. In most video games, the NPCs just stand still and wait for you to solve their problems. But in Fallout, that's more justified than most; Ulysses' point is that in the wasteland, where settlements are often still isolated and surrounded by dangers, the biggest catalyst for change (good or bad) isn't necessarily the strongest leader, or the wisest thinker, but the man or woman who can travel farthest, who's seen many different places along the way - and who inevitably carries a message along with them, intended or not.
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Dec 11, 2015 08:51
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I mean, reason #131 why Dead Money is great is that it shows you its working. Elijah mutters occasionally about the laziness of Pip-Boy quest markers and extols the virtues of a 'slate swept clean', during which you're taken to a back-to-basics experience of scrambling about in deadly ruins, avoiding traps and amped-up radiation clouds and hostile opponents while stumbling onto hidden caches and using skills to get by (meanwhile, the design of the ruins means that your Pip-Boy map is effectively useless). It doesn't just sermonise at you via Elijah, it backs up its ideas with an argument made in varied forms of gameplay. If you can accept that it even half-succeeds in that, it's done its job. Reason #131 why Lonesome Road *isn't* so great is that its version of let's-take-Fallout-back-to-basics...isn't actually back to basics at all. Instead, it's dominated by an overwrought and overwritten central character, an onslaught of high-powered enemies, wall-to-wall-nukes, and a few fussy poster-clicking/bomb-exploding tasks in the background. It's too cluttered for its own premise to work.
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Oct 23, 2017 09:54
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amigolupus posted:Daniel...kind of whines at you that you shouldn't fight and has no real stand out moments. But the tribesfolk in this danger-infested wasteland are innocents! *Follows-Chalk guns down foes* Not those tribesfolk, they're already corrupted by violence, even though they're portrayed as perfectly fine and decent people in all your interactions with them. But this other allied tribe 40 feet away have managed to largely avoid violence up to this point, and live in a state of prelapsarian bli- *midwife gorily punches off someone's head* But what will you do when they kill someone who doesn't deserve to die? *Enemies are portrayed as basically feral, relentless and pitiless in every quest* Daniel's hypocrisy feels very deliberate in some ways (he wants to keep the Sorrows in a state of innocence while lying to them, he wants to drag them out of Zion without even realising that their belief system is built around the local caves) but yeah, in other ways his point of view just comes across as too carefully contrived, and working against other clearly stated points of the narrative, to work.
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Oct 24, 2017 09:50
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It's a minor detail all things considered, but the cyclops Chris Parnell in the TV show trailer is weird as hell in a way that I can't quite let go of because 1) I don't think that has any possible inspiration in the fiction, old or new (the only non-ghoul non-super-mutant mutants would be psykers that I can think of...?) 2) If the creators wanted a grotesque-but-friendly mutant who acts like a regular human being, then that's the comedic niche ghouls have always filled 3) If 'normal' humans also carry tangible physical mutations, that interferes with the role of ghouls and super mutants in the setting, surely? 4) Having a comic actor show up for a cameo as a monobrowed cyclops feels a bit...naff parody / Your Highness, when everything else is polished and high-budget?
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Dec 4, 2023 23:25
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watho posted:i feel so dumb for the longest time i just assumed he was a ghoul who ended up with a tree in his head which is obviously really dumb in retrospect In fairness to you, Chris Taylor and Tim Cain could never quite agree on how to make total sense of Harold's backstory and appearance vs how we come to understand ghouls in the series, because none of it really adds up. (I think there's quotes where Taylor calls him a 'ghoul, but a special ghoul', Cain calls him 'somewhere between a ghoul and a mutant...') If Harold wasn't so memorable I think we'd probably all have taken it as an completely understandable growing-pains lore screw-up rather than something that needs debate. Everyone politely forgot Loxley existed, we could have done it again.
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Dec 5, 2023 09:46
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It's old ground at this point and not worth kvetching over again, but it's still remarkable to me that Bethesda purchased the rights to a franchise that clearly draws on a wealth of material such as Mad Max, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and A Boy And His Dog, and for two games in a row their only original ideas have been 'what if Blade Runner was all text and no subtext' and 'let's do a foggy Lovecraftian seaside town for a bit'.
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Mar 12, 2024 17:31
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Wolfsheim posted:By contrast the lowest point of New Vegas is....way too many radios near the end of Dead Money? That one Honest Hearts sidequest where you slowly lure a baby bighorner back to its mother using bananas, maybe? I'm firmly in the camp of 'my beautiful child Dead Money did nothing wrong and its detractors have all the grace and decorum of a reversing dump-truck', but I think the low point for me hits right after you dash, jump, and dive past all the radios, escaping by the skin of your teeth...and then immediately ahead you see about five different holograms standing around in a little labyrinth waiting for you to wearily try and engage with the sneak mechanic one last time / get repeatedly lasered to death. Thankfully it's over quickly enough and the fun starts up again in the vault. On a repeat play - and huge credit to all the NV DLCs that I'll happily go back to them time and time again - I think OWB's endless holotape scavenger hunt and Honest Hearts' long jog across the map into Three Marys are what start to feel like real slogs, although the latter is just the difficulty of portraying an epic battle in open-world format. grobbo fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Mar 12, 2024 |
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Mar 12, 2024 20:35
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Wolfsheim posted:Sinclair, a minor figure from a DLC few played and fewer liked I understand the co-lead writer binged through the entire game series as research, so the fact that he apparently came away from all that with a memory of and affection for Dead Money specifically is - let's be very clear - a triumph of the human spirit and a lone voice of sanity in a mad world
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Apr 14, 2024 09:10
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MonsieurChoc posted:Garth Marengi's Fallout. He whisked off her reinforced leather armour in one movement, wild like an enraged shark. His bulky totem beating a seductive rhythm. Benny's body felt like it was burning, even though the room was properly air-conditioned. They tried all the positions - on top, doggy, and normal. Exhausted, they collapsed onto the recently extended sofa-bed. Then, she shot him with a silenced .22 pistol.
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Apr 15, 2024 16:52
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