All Over But the Crying – Fallout 4 Review Part 2

So my review of Fallout 4 may be a bit on the wordy side. I blame quarantine for that. But I’ll see if I can’t keep this from spilling into a part three. Wish me luck!

Now, I might be feeling my oats a bit, but if there’s anything I feel qualified on criticizing, it’s writing. It’s certainly the aspect I give the most attention and thought to. Even if it sometimes feels like I’m the only one.

So while there are numerous technical issues plaguing Fallout 4, and not just the ones I covered in part 1 of this review, I can generally overlook design shortcomings if it’s compensated for with strong writing.

But as is often the case, poor design choices can negatively impact the writing.

For whatever reason, Bethesda decided to utilize the much maligned “dialogue wheel.” I have spent way too many articles complaining about how this system doesn’t work so I’m not going to repeat it here. However, Bethesda certainly has taken the crown for the worst implementation. There isn’t an illusion of choice with this one. The options legitimately boiled down to three different versions of “Yes” and a “Maybe later.” That is until I loaded up a mod which replaced the awful two word options with the full response.

All rights and images for Fallout 4 belong to Bethesda Software and its corresponding whatever.

However, the spirit of the problem is still there. Run into a beggar in the street who wants your help and you couldn’t tell them to kick rocks. You could only tell them “Let me think about it” or three almost indistinguishable ways of agreeing to their demands. I can’t tell you why this was implemented. I can only assume the much requested voiced protagonist was the impetus and then the slow realization that it’s way too expensive to voice meaningful choice in a game sank in. Except, prior Bethesda games still gave some semblance of choice and, of course, New Vegas had much more impactful dialogue options with every other character being voiced other than the player.

But the writing doesn’t just suffer from the lack of choice. Your ability to approach conversations was cobbled because there was no skill system to incorporate into it. In prior games, if you had a certain threshold of aptitude in a skill, you would unlock dialogue options associated with that knowledge. So, when speaking to a village about shoring up their defences against a raider attack, if you were skilled in Explosives, you could recommend setting a minefield. But, once again, Fallout 4 has no skills so there was no way to customize how your character responds to a situation differently than your friend’s. Now, they could have used perks, but the chances of people having the right perks available given how niche they were now, I’m guessing dissuaded them from incorporating that option. Finally, their entire “speech” mini-game was giving very sparse opportunities for persuasion based entirely on your Charisma. These persuasion “checks” would be colour coded depending on the difficulty. How this difficulty was calculated… I have no idea. The line would be coloured yellow, orange or red for increasingly harder checks but how your Charisma changed that, I don’t know. I maxed out my Charisma fairly early because I wanted to play someone with charm. But also, I needed a high Charisma because I wanted to play around their settlement feature and several important perks for building were tied to that. For reasons.

And… sigh. That brings us to settlement building.

I liked settlement building. But I like building in games. When Derek and I played Terraria, it was me who spent all the time making our village look… well I won’t say pretty but I will say less like a giant mud square. I spent hours in Starbound collecting different materials and terrain from multiple worlds to create little outposts throughout the galaxy. And my Stardew crew can attest that I skip out on farming in order to make my cottage look as good as I can make it.

As such I downloaded a lot of mods (and I mean A LOT of mods) to improve the building capabilities of Fallout 4. And I would say I sunk the majority of my playtime in building little settlements. This is where my positive gameplay loop developed. I would found an outpost at a spot that looked interesting. Then I would scour the nearby area for materials and items to bring back to my fledgling build. There I would build homes, shops and defences for my settlers. I would establish supply lines between them. I would try and decorate the homes to reflect who lived there. I dutifully tended their (painfully generic) settlement quests. I rushed across the game world (because I was dumb and played on survival mode which disabled fast travel) to defend them from monster attacks.

And I enjoyed it. For a good half of the game, once my settlement got large enough or my interest waned, I would set out to the next site and sprout up a new hamlet. In this way, I completely avoided the game’s main quest. It wasn’t until I decided that I was tired of my current character and wanted to try a different build (ha! As if character builds exist in this game!) that I decided to focus on the story of Fallout 4.

This was a decision I immediately regretted.

See, one of the areas where Fallout 4 truly, severely suffers compared to its predecessors is its main story. It’s skeleton is inescapably recycled from Fallout 3. I was… accepting of the premise. Being the parent searching for a missing child has the potential for interesting divergence from a story where you’re the child searching for your missing parent. Except, any opportunity which Fallout 4’s basic premise establishes is squandered. Often in spectacular fashion. But I’m proficient in Bethesda’s games enough to know that, while it establishes a rather pressing need for you to follow the main story (your child is kidnapped at the ripe age of like… one) I knew there was no actual game mechanic reason to rush after him. In fact, I made the rather obvious observation that in all likelihood my child was already an adult.

Though this was hardly a huge leap of logic. The game presents you, the main character, as a person out of time. See, as you escaped the incoming nuclear arsenal, you’re ushered into the underground Vault with a select few others from your neighbourhood. The facility’s staff reassured you that everything is fine and you’ll be safe while they ushered you quickly through processing. A doctor led you down some tunnels to a room full of podlike chambers where you underwent “decontamination.” No explanation is given before you and your family are separated into different pods and you’re “processed.”

The game then makes it abundantly clear that these pods then freeze you.

If you weren’t familiar with the series, it may come as a shock that the stories take place after this all encompassing nuclear winter. Furthermore, the makers of these Vaults (Vault-Tec) are consistently portrayed as immoral scientists who never had any intention of building shelters to protect people from nuclear fallout. Every shelter is, instead, some highly amoral and exaggerated social experiment. When your pod eventually malfunctions and you stumble out into an abandoned decrepit facility, it’s made plain that your Vault was one running experiments on cryogenics.

And considering that Bethesda was insistent on creating a rather rigid background for your character, diverging strongly from their prior design philosophies, it is immensely frustrating that they never once capitalized on the story of a survivor displaced into the future. They had a perfect opportunity to both give a focused lens into the past of the Fallout series while also reframing a lot of the series tropes through a more critical individual. They do none of these.

As for my “big brain” prediction, given the use of the cryogenics chamber, it seemed pretty clear that your son was kidnapped years before your release. Partly because it was pretty telegraphed but largely the model they had for the child was pretty basic and I already knew that Bethesda doesn’t put children in their games. So I was hardly surprised when you came face to face with your “adult” child.

I was, however, surprised by how poorly the writing team handled it.

This should not come as a surprise but storytelling is the art of communication. And yet, having played through Fallout 4, it’s abundantly clear that Bethesda had nothing to say. This basic premise would at least suggest that the story of Fallout 4 would be focused on upbringing, familial bonds and kinship. Is this person whom you’ve had no hand in raising but is, nevertheless, biologically your child a recognizable member of your family? Or is he a stranger with your face (which would dovetail neatly into their Synthetics plotline)? How far will you go to avenge the loss of your family? What will you give up to save your family?

Fallout 4 asks you none of these questions. In fact, I pressed through the latter half of the game, trying to have a brief, private conversation with my son. The game never allows you to have it. Not even with the hamfisted “I’m dying of cancer… now find me a battery!” conversation occurred. Instead, it whisks you away on a long series of unrelated, uninteresting, irrelevant tasks that the writers try to use as a substitute for high stakes decisions. They throw you, needlessly, into conflict with the game’s four major factions. However, none of these conflicts make any sense because their characters don’t make sense.

And there’s almost a perverse glee which Bethesda takes in highlighting their own incompetence.

As it turns out, the game is ostensibly about Synthetics. If you read my review of the worst quest in computer gaming, you’ll see how frustrated I am by Bethesda’s own contradictions. In there, they could hardly keep what the concept of a “ghoul” in the Fallout universe is straight despite it being fairly well established in prior games. However, they completely fail to provide a coherent idea about what a Synthetic is in Fallout 4 which is more egregious because these were made wholly by Bethesda almost entirely for this game.

What we get is some poorly conceived homage to Bladerunner. Synthetics are the creation of the major villain of the game, The Institute, and are robots. Robots that look like people. Which are meant to serve as some sort of shocking technological advancement by a highly technical scientific community. And yet, the game already has advanced AI. Your robot butler from the very start is a highly developed personality machine. Fallout 3 had the President Eden AI heading its Covenant faction. New Vegas both had incidental AI with Yes Man and highly complex cybernetics with Mr. House. So artificial intelligence is hardly something noteworthy. At least it didn’t warrant all the attention which the people of Fallout 4 spent on it.

So then they try to shift the focus on the fact that Synthetics have surpassed the uncanny valley and look indistinguishably human. And yet, the game fails a fundamental question.

Why? Why did the Institute build these machines?

Ostensibly it was for a worker force but the Mr. Handy and Protectron robots are literally littered throughout the countryside. You trip over them the moment you leave the vault. They go into great detail about Synths being used to infiltrate communities by replacing people with a perfect simulacrum. But yet when you ask your son, who developed these machines, why they do that, he literally has no idea. He tries to blame the Railroad for creating these infiltrators accidentally when they try to liberate Synths from Institute control. But then he simply shrugs away the question of why the Institute is so insistent on making perfect replicants of humans in the first place.

But let’s divert for a second to the Railroad. They’re a faction that believe Synths are intelligent life which should be afforded the freedoms and right to life as any other individual. They are, by name alone, making oblique references to slavery and emancipation. But with the very first quest with this faction, their main contact brings up an important contradiction and immediately dismisses it.

For, he explains, the Railroad recognizes that Synths are intelligent machines and deserve freedom and yet they don’t know what that means for literally every single other robot clogging up the streets of Boston. Should they be liberating your robot butler? Should they be seeking emancipation for your computer console?

And just as cavalier as he recognizes the contradiction at the core philosophy of his faction, he dismisses and encourages you to continue on murdering all the Synths in the current dungeon you’re delving without a hint of remorse.

This is endemic with the writing in Fallout 4. Bethesda has no idea what their characters are doing. They have no concept of motivation for the people that populate their stories. As such, pretty much everyone you encounter will act irrationally, contradictory and ultimately capriciously simply to push forward a narrative with no direction. They fail a very basic component of writing. As an author myself, here’s a free bit of advice.

The first thing you should consider whenever you’re about to write a scene with characters is to understand their motivation. This isn’t to say that every character is meant to be entirely logical and reasonable. We know from life that isn’t the case. But everyone wants something. They may behave in ways that ultimately undermine their desires and goals but, from their perspective, they should be striving for those goals. And that’s the issue with Fallout 4.

And it should be getting old by now, but all they had to do was follow Obsidian’s example.

New Vegas has a pretty simple story. The complexity comes from the interaction of its primary factions struggling against each other. But their motivations are simple. All three major players in New Vegas want to control Hoover Dam. That’s it. From that simple desire, we get a rich web of political intrigue. Their reasons, of course, vary too but largely each seek the power produced by the dam to further their own goals. Mr. House wishes to establish an independent city state and can enforce its sovereignty through the power provided by the dam to energize an enormous legion of military grade robots. The New California Republic wishes to fold Nevada into its political sphere of influence and the power from the dam is integral in providing energy for local farmers and businesses to turn the area into a productive economic hub. Caesar recognizes the resources the dam would provide for his invading forces, giving them a large well of water and production to keep his conquering legions steamrolling through the desert.

And then we have Fallout 4. The Institute wants to build Synths… because? The Railroad wishes to free Synths because they’re smart. But not smart like other robots. Or maybe they are. But the Institute is evil for making Synths so we’re going to kill Synths to free Synths for freedom. But only the Synths that look human. And even then, only the Synths that look human and don’t shoot you in some specific quests. The others are whatever. The Brotherhood of Steel wants to kill Synths because they’re abominations. Why are they abominations? We don’t know. Because they said so. They aren’t pure humans. Now take your super soldier serum and cybernetic implants without question. And then there’s the Minutemen.

And I hate the Minutemen.

The Minutemen are literally a neighbourhood watch without a neighbourhood (because for some reason there’s only a single city in the game) that decided dressing up like literal 1700s colonists would make people take them more seriously. Or something. They’re arbitrarily against the Institute because the Institute kidnaps people. But it doesn’t. But maybe sometimes they do. We don’t know. They’re scary so go kill them.

I mean, we could assign motivations to these factions but we would be doing Bethesda’s work clearly after they had finished their product. The Brotherhood wants to establish a military presence in the area. Why? Dunno. The Institute, as it turns out, wants a new furnace and all this Synth stuff is literally irrelevant to what they’re bopping around doing and not integral to any of their initiatives and just a couple of scientists’ pet project. The Minutemen want to establish laws and order though they seemingly have no interest in governance so hope that by scattering isolated communities imperialistically about the land without any support or help will maybe lead to… something?

And how does this all tie back to the personal story of you and your lost child?

Well, it doesn’t. And each major beat of the main story makes less and less sense until the grand finale which hits with all the power and force of a leaky whoopee cushion. Then the game ends in the most generic, unsatisfying little video that tells you nothing of the journey you’ve taken all so that when the credits would roll, you’re snapped back to your character to just… continue putzing around, I suppose.

Because, really, putzing is the only thing that Bethesda does well.

I would be remiss, however, to drop this review of the game without mentioning the best part I came across. Aside from the settlement building, however.

Far Harbour is one of the DLC for Fallout 4 and is clearly the best thing the team accomplished on this project. Ironically, it’s set in a far off harbour detached from the events of the main story and yet it addresses some of the themes far better that the main narrative stoically avoids. It starts with you and your hard-boiled private detective robot sailing off to distant shores in search of a missing girl. There, however, you come across a strange natural phenomenon plaguing the island and three very different measures that its principal factions take to address it. It actually has a decent narrative structure and coherent motivations for its groups. It’s far from brilliant but given the exceedingly low bar that Fallout 4 sets, it stands head and shoulders above the rest of the product.

Here you have a simple conflict between the native fishermen of the island battling a fanatical religious order that has come to the island to safeguard and worship a deadly fog spreading across the land. This fog has forced the original inhabitants to the furthest shores as they cling to the salty rocks trying to keep to their old homesteads and way of life. Pressing them further and further to the edge are the Children of Atom. They see this radioactive fog as divine providence of their god and came to worship the blight. They take umbrage at both the fishermen’s rejection of their tenets and their attempts to repel the holy mist. Caught in the middle is a reclusive sanctuary for escaped Synthetics, headed by your robot companion’s brother and an early prototype, Dima.

Course, standard Bethesda silliness is present. You very quickly discover your missing girl holed up in Dima’s sanctuary where she has convinced herself that she’s a Synth and doesn’t want to return home. The only way you can convince her to do otherwise is to literally fix all the problems on the island. Why? Ostensibly because she’s compassionate? But largely the missing girl serves as a MacGuffin to get you to the action and is otherwise irrelevant to everything else that happens. Furthermore, the direction of the story is less than satisfying. There’s a number of dangling threads that could have been woven into something more interesting. For example, I would have liked an option to reconcile the Harbourmen and Children of Atom by convincing dissenters to strive for peace while replacing the warlike religious head of the Children with the prior, peace-seeking leader they had before your arrival. Some measure of diplomacy and politicking would have added a much needed higher layer to the themes and message. As such, it loses its moral by having a hilariously tone deaf solution for bringing the two factions together if you desperately want both to cohabitate the island.

The story could certainly have been strengthened into something good with greatly impactful decisions. However, considering the original product that this expansion emerged from, it’s hard to be too upset. At least it took some important baby steps. That it also had unique enemies, actually integrated action beats and somewhat developed personalities is enough to laud it for achieving… the basics of most other games. Far Harbour as a location is interesting too, with the rugged coastline offering a nice change from Boston’s muddy brown vistas. And overall, the boneheaded elements are kept to a minimum while maintaining some of the cute wit of the Fallout series. It achieves a unique story, some interesting characters and varied locals that suggests competency on the team. It’s perhaps the best DLC that Bethesda has done for Fallout.

It’s possibly the best Fallout Bethesda has done. Though I admit I’ve skipped some of their other little offerings here and there. It’s a pity that Far Harbour serves as the exception rather than the rule.

Overall, I can’t fault the people who panned the game when it originally released. Their concerns remain valid. And while its clear that Bethesda is listening, as evident by stripping the hilariously two dimensional morality of the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3 away, it still remains they have a long way to go if they want to stand amongst the best of the genre.

On the other hand, these things sell like gangbusters so maybe they don’t need to be critically successful.

The rest of us just get to weather their fallout.

Atom Bomb Baby – Fallout 4 Review Part 1

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Well, it’s the new year. Which means a half-hearted attempt at a new me. Out with the old and all that. Largely, this means I’m going to have a burst of blogging before falling off the waggon much to my sister-publisher’s disappointment! Because at the very least, I’m good at pattern recognition.

Typically, most people get to navel gazing during this transitional period. And that typically results in examining where we came from and analyzing what got us where we are. Granted, I’m not sure there’s much to be said about 2020 that isn’t still raw in people’s minds. As a year, it was a pretty large shock to the collective unconsciousness and we don’t really need lots of words devoted to how much a global pandemic sucks. So let’s just skip right to the point.

I was pretty busy during the lockdown with my writing and nephews. Crowded into a household meant that my personal time was whittled down to a minimum. And with most things closed, it’s not like I was popping out to see movies. And with the television dominated by children, I saw little that wasn’t Peppa Pig. There were few games which I was able to finish and almost no boardgames that I could enjoy with everyone bolted inside their homes.

Thus, I don’t have much to cover for a year in review.

However, if you’ve been following my sporadic posting, this review shouldn’t come as a surprise. Derek and I finally got around to tackling the much derided Fallout 4. And it was only five years after its release! How fresh!

As such, I’m likely to repeat myself a little here while I recontextualize the game. If you read my early rant on it, you can probably skip a few paragraphs.

Fallout 4 was the latest main entry for the series made by Bethesda Software. I make no effort to hide my love for Fallout New Vegas, which really got me into the old CRPG franchise. My first game was Bethesda’s own Fallout 3 after they scooped up the intellectual property through Interplay’s bankruptcy. Derek, however, had enjoyed the original two and was thoroughly repulsed by Bethesda’s massive overhaul of the game and its mechanics. I enjoyed it as I was a fan of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls games. And, while a bit reductive, there was something to the criticism of Fallout 3 being Elder Scrolls with guns.

As such, New Vegas brought back the traditional complexity and narrative focus that old school roleplaying players expected. I found New Vegas excelled at its world building and interesting character writing – Bethesda’s two biggest weaknesses. Bethesda is great at evoking the excitement of exploration with their games but their worlds are a bathtub of soap bubbles. Each little sphere is fun in its own right but there’s a clear demarcation between their little bursts of fun. A dungeon filled with flesh-eating monsters and poison will be literally next door to a village inhabited only by children. Yeah, the village is neat and cute. And certainly the dungeon is challenging and unique. But taken together, there’s no rhyme or reason for the two to cohabitat within proximity to one and another. On the flip side, New Vegas is criticized for having a world that’s really boring punctuated by small moments of interest. But… that’s kind of how the world works. There’s long stretches of road with civilization gathering and centralizing around important hubs of trade and civilization.

Or, put simply, take a walk outside of any Canadian city and you’ll enter into stretching fields of farmland or sparse woods. Cities are fun. Farms not so much. Whether you want constant amusement from your video games or a sense of verisimilitude is ultimately the decider for style you enjoy.

Now, Fallout 4 was in a weird position. Critically, Fallout 3 did better. Sales wise, I believe Fallout New Vegas edged into the lead. Fan reception? New Vegas took the cake. Furthermore, Bethesda and Obsidian are two very different developers with very different critical successes. I knew, with the announcement of Fallout 4, we were going to get something closer to Bethesda’s earlier output. I lowered my expectations to meet the reality of the product. This wasn’t going to be a good roleplaying game. But it should be a fun little exploration game.

I furthermore had the advantage of listening to the community’s reception over the last five years and it has been… rather chilly. Thus, Fallout 4 became a threat between Derek and I. Once a Game of the Year version released, I was going to punish him with the darn thing. But as time went on, I sort of bought into the ironic glee for the game and was starting to look forward to it.

And, to be quite honest, for the first half of my run, I was actually surprised. I liked it. Now it’s been years and years since I’ve played Fallout 3 but I could still feel the improvements to the company’s general output. Were there issues? Of course. I was almost immediately frustrated with the game during its intro. The concept of its beginning was legitimately good. Fallout 4 opens with you in a place that the series has never explored:

The past.

You and your spouse are getting ready on the morning of the apocalypse. You’re introduced to your family unit. You’re given the opportunity to customize your spouse and yourself. And the game applies its horrific patented melding technology to smush your two people to spawn a melded child for your happy couple. It’s the inverse of what the company did for its prior game wherein you created the child and it teased out two parents and their appearance from there. Your little family unit is then rounded out with a dotting robot butler and the whole package is complete.

Then you’re treated to an idyllic family morning just moments before the horror of the nuclear apocalypse rains down on your head. You’re saved at the last minute by a sudden enrollment into the local underground shelter, called Vaults, that promises to provide you the facility to ride out the worst of the devastation.

And it’s not very long before this wonderful setup starts to fall down around itself.

First, there are some technical issues I had with this beginning. Primary amongst them, is that Bethesda stripped out almost all of the series’ rules systems. For those not in the know, almost all roleplaying games rely upon a system made popular by Dungeons and Dragons that involves various skills, characteristics and special characteristics to make unique adventurers. Fallouts utilized the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system which, outside of renaming a number of the stats, really didn’t deviate too much from the old D&D ruleset. You had various skills meant to represent… well… your skills and these were ranked on a scale of 1 to 100. Your stats (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck) were on a 1 to 10 scale. Personalization came from deciding where your character’s strengths and weaknesses came from. Maybe you’d be a smart and strong athlete who relied on their brawn and smarts to compensate for a rather boorish attitude and the fact that the universe liked to kick the stuffing out of you with constant ill-fortune. Then you had to decide whether you wanted to use those wits and might of yours to sling heavy hammers to crush your opponents or lug around massive gatling guns to turn them into swiss cheese. Or maybe your smarts gave you the aptitude to hack computer terminals and robots while leaving you clueless on how to get through locked doors or the know-how to scrounge for food out in a world that no longer had stocked supermarkets.

It’s an immensely familiar system for anyone that has played any of the numerous roleplaying games out in the market. And I’m not adverse to creating new systems or exploring other mechanics. However, Fallout 4 completely guts this system and replaces it with… well… practically nothing. I learned, only after finishing the tutorial and progressing past the point of readjusting my character, that the system was entirely pared down to a “perk tree.” Your character was determined solely by a 7 by 10 table with abilities scattered haphazardly amongst them. Each one of your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats had ten levels. And largely these levels opened access to a (generally) five level perk. When you levelled up, you literally got a single “perk point” which could then be placed into your stat column or used to unlock/upgrade a previously purchased perk.

And that was it. During my time with the game, there was no indication that the game had an upper boundary on how levelled you could be. So, given enough time, literally every character you play is going to be the same. Furthermore, there was such a staggeringly poor explanation of what certain game mechanics did, that I just ignored some stats because I had no idea what a “crit meter” was and I was baffled by which weapons to use because there were only a few weapon perks now split by how fast the weapon shot. Is this laser rifle an automatic weapon or a rifle class weapon? I don’t know. It’s not like the game tells you. Granted, it’s not like it’s that important either since these perks literally just increased damage as the game now incorporated a standard point targeting shooter system.

Which, give me a second to explain.

Fallout 1 and 2 were proper isometric RPGs where your character and their party were third person sprites running across your screen. Combat was determined by a turned based system where you would select a target for your character to attack, the type of attack they would perform and then the system would do all the necessary calculations for whether you hit or not and how much damage you would do. Then the next character or enemy would take their turn. It was simulated dice rolls.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas shifted to a first person perspective that let you run around and point your gun. Yet it still used this older “dice rolling” system where your proficiency with your chosen weapons determined your chance to hit and the damage you did. Which, I confess, would be confusing for new players who aren’t used to CRPGs but maybe have a background in shooters. And there were certainly entertaining moments in New Vegas where you may point your sniper rifle at the whites of your enemy’s eyes only for you to squeeze the trigger and have your shot fly out at a ninety degree angle into the sky.

So the “gun play” was certainly criticized. Considering Bethesda is a roleplaying game company, the updated gunplay in Fallout 4 is fine. Granted, it kind of makes redundant the series’ one unique mechanic: the VATS system. In the original Fallout games, you could choose how you wanted to attack your opponent when swinging/shooting them. You were able to use your Vault-Assisted Targeting System to choose whether to hit their head, arms, torso or whatever in order to inflict certain negative statuses to your enemy. Cripple a leg and the opponent’s movement would be hobbled. Shoot out an eye to make their accuracy plummet. Or simply blow up the grenade in their hand before they can throw it. This system made the reticle shooting in Fallout 3 and New Vegas kind of… superfluous. The one important element was using the VATS system required depleting your action point bar which is how the game determined the number of actions you would have in the regular turn based system of old. Outside of VATS, your action points were used to sprint. So going into combat in New Vegas was juggling using your action points for positioning and shooting.

And yet, though Fallout 4 only made some small adjustments to the system, they really just gutted its usefulness.

So now in Fallout 4 when you aim your gun, your shot flies down the centre of the reticle like a normal shooter. Yet when you enter VATS, your accuracy is now entirely determined by your agility statistic. Furthermore, VATS still sucks up your action point bar. But, unlike the prior games, entering and using VATS no longer “freezes time.” See, in New Vegas, when you activated VATS, the combat paused so you could (oftentimes clumsily) scroll through the various targets and the different limbs you could target before committing to your shots. Now, there was some measure of danger because, after queuing up your attack, the game resumed in a cinematic exchange of gunfire between you and your opponents. So you could be exploded by a rocket while the camera is panning around you as though you’re the last action hero.

Because I like playing on high difficulties, I found the best use of the VATS system was to determine the position of enemies, especially ones that you may not notice. I would often pop into VATS to get a lay of the land before popping out of it to relocate to better cover (minimizing sightlines) before re-entering VATS to queue up my attacks against isolated individuals.

However, in Fallout 4, just simply activating VATS put the game into slow motion. So while you’re busy fighting with the interface to choose the right arm of the super mutant in front of you instead of the dumb mutant dog behind a pile of cars to his side, that super mutant is wailing on your face with his nail board until you’re a bloody, slow-motion pulp. Combine this with the fact that your accuracy is also going to take a massive plunge since it is only determined by a skill which otherwise has no gameplay application and there is really no reason for using the VATS system. Thus, you’re only going to use your action points for running around in combat. So your agility really is only important for unlocking requirements for a few perks here or there and nothing else.

Thus, I had to restart to sort out my character’s “upgrade path” and go through that intro again.

Then the game crashed and I had to go through it again.

And this is the real story of Fallout 4. For every improvement Bethesda made to the game, they inexplicably made other aspects worse. I think I mentioned in my prior rant on Fallout 4 that writing wise, the game was massively improved on its companions. But Fallout 3 had some of the most generic companions in the world so anything was an improvement. Yet, the rest of the writing became far worse. But this review has already sprawled on long enough.

You’ll have to wait for the exciting part two to hear my opinions on the story.

Smashwords Sale!

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It’s the end of the year! And I doubt anyone will be sad to see this year end. A quick update on my life. Things are going to be hectic and stressful going forward for the next while. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to update the blog. Hopefully sooner rather than later. It always seems that something comes up. I suppose that’s life.

At any rate, some quick news! Smashwords is having a sale and everything must go! Or something! I’ve put all my books on Smashwords at a great discount. That is to say, for most my stuff, it’s free! So if you’re interested in it, go check it out. Or, if you’ve already purchased a hardcopy through Amazon, go check it out anyway. Smashwords is specifically for digital copies of my books. And each purchase (even free) raises the books profile on their promotional pages. So you can nab some free stuff and more people can see about these terrific little novels!

I’ve included the links below:

Clockwork Caterpillar

Synthetic Landscapes Volume 1

Cinderborn

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

Gib Diretide

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Happy Holidays to all my gorgeous readers. And Happy Holidays to you too, Derek.

It’s been quite a year; I think we can all agree on that. November was particularly hectic for me. Partly because of Nano. Partly because of a pandemic. Partly for other reasons. I’m exhausted and needed a little recovery. Now I’m back into editing the third novel in the Red Sabre series. Though, I’ve been speaking to Kait, and we have some lovely ideas for the new year. Hopefully something will shake out for that.

Anyway, I want to get a couple of blog posts out before we wrap up 2020, put a little bow on it then shove the entire year in the attic and forget about the whole darn thing until we die and someone has to clear our junk out. They won’t necessarily be the most exciting blog posts but hey, at least I’m fulfilling my duties in writing them.

This one is actually going to be about Dota 2 content. So if you’re disinterested in all that jazz, feel free to pop back later in the month.

However, I wanted to discuss Valve’s most recent event because it has been rather interesting and I’ve been tossing some words around in my head about it. And where else am I going to share my useless thoughts on a little seasonal game mode in a free-to-play computer game that’s pretty niche in terms of computer games?

So, Dota 2 has been around for quite some time. Not only is it a sequel (of a mod) but it “officially” released in 2013 after a few years in closed beta. And while I wasn’t the first through the door, I have been enjoying the game as it’s passed through its many iterations. Now, it’s a Valve game, which is to say it’s really well made but took its time. For those who don’t know, Valve has an atypical corporate structure that encourages collaborative and self-directed work amongst its employees. While great for moral, it certainly leads to products that don’t follow your typical development arc from other companies.

Accessed from https://i2.wp.com/paradoxalnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/WhatsApp-Image-2020-10-29-at-16.14.53.jpeg?w=1172&ssl=1 — Diretide and all associated whatnots belong to Valve

First, the enthusiasm for a game just about to release is off the charts. When Dota 2 was finalizing its beta cycle and approaching it’s grand opening, there were so many updates, communiques and tools released that it was positively staggering. For instance, to celebrate Halloween in 2012 (yes, before official release), Valve wanted to showcase their own modding tools in the game by releasing a fun event mode called Diretide. Dota 2 is a game of five versus five players running around and trying to be the first team to destroy the other’s base. In Diretide, bases were removed and instead players had little candy stashes. Players ran around the map trying to collect the most candy – either through stealing it off the corpses of neutral creatures or from the corpses of their enemies before they could deliver their candy back to their team’s bucket. And, of course, you could steal it from your enemy’s bucket as well.

All the while, players were hunted by Roshan. Roshan is a giant monster that normally sits in the middle of a Dota 2 map passively awaiting for a team to come and kill him for a unique item and lots of experience. The Diretide mode was billed as a sort of “Roshan Revenge” where now he stomped across the map demanding candy from teams. Those that failed to deliver were pummeled to death at the end of his enormous claws.

After two ten minute rounds, players then came together to fight the much stronger Roshan. I believe he was even stronger depending on how much candy teams accumulated. But it was a peculiar moment of cooperation at the end of a grueling duel between two opposing teams.

It was cute for a festive event especially for a game that hadn’t received official release yet. Bizarrely, however, it was a cult hit. I remember discussing the mode with my old team after it concluded. While we appreciated the break in the regular Dota 2 format, we largely stuck with the mode for one simple reason: free hats.

I still think the enduring popularity of Diretide rode solely on the fact that the game mode was very, very, very, very generous in its rewards. Winning a round provided the victorious team with a free cosmetic. Prior to Diretide, the only way to get these were to either buy them from the marketplace or the store. I’m not even certain raising your profile rank dropped items yet at this time. Thus, people threw themselves with avarice upon the mode, yelling and screaming at teammates that may have cost them the chance of getting the precious new chapeau. Not only that, but at twenty minute long matches with a very difficult fight at the end, the mode wasn’t really relaxing even though it had ostensibly ripped out most of Dota 2’s regular strategic elements. As a test of what the game could do, it was cute. But even at the time, people were quick to point out the structural issues.

However, when 2013 rolled around, the community became rabid when there was no sign of Diretide in sight.

It was perhaps one of the most ridiculous things I had ever witnessed online. The community forums were spammed in all discussion threads with “Gib Diretide” as the players demanded the return of the mode. The fevered pitch at which their anguished cries reached extended well beyond the Steam forums or subreddits. Players began to “review bomb” Dota 2 on review sites. They would submit mass single ranking reports to drive the game’s community ranking into the toilet. Not because they thought the base game was bad. Only because they felt this was the only way for Valve to “hear them.”

Perhaps the most ridiculous display was when a whole brigand of players showed up on Volvo’s Facebook page to spam the endless “Gib Diretide” demands on their social media website. Needless to say, Volvo was confused why they were being inundated with these messages. Especially since the only connection between Valve and Volvo is literally just the misspelling of two vowels.

As I said, it was the lowest I’ve seen an Internet community stoop. Was I disappointed that Diretide didn’t return the next year and there was no word of a replacement? Sure. But I’ll honestly say the only reason I wanted the mode was for the free items. Valve cobbled together a playable version of the event mode, which was probably harder to do than it would typically seem since somewhere along the line between beta and release they had changed the game’s engine. The new version of Diretide had no item drops. While I didn’t engage with it outside of a few novelty matches, I got the distinct impression that people were thoroughly unhappy with it. I felt that was the peak example that no one actually cared for the damn mode, they just wanted easy, free hats.

After 2013, Diretide thankfully never showed its face again. Every Halloween there would be some cheeky “Gib Diretide” call but thankfully these were restricted back to the Dota 2 online communities and usually in sad threads that longed for some idealized version of a game mode that never existed.

Seven years later, and there weren’t even any more mewlings for the damn thing.

And yet, Valve went ahead and released Diretide this year.

I want to add a little context in that the annual Dota 2 grand tournament, The International, was cancelled due to the pandemic. Valve still released the compendium for the tournament, however, generating a lot of money from sales for a tournament that still hasn’t occurred. With that compendium, however, we got an excellent new event mode called Aghanim’s Labyrinth. Kait and I played this quite a lot as it was a cooperative four person romp through a rather complex rogue-like dungeon. It was excellently crafted, with a ton of new voice lines, a unique boss and quite a lot of challenging rooms. Outside of the characters, there is very little that connects it to a normal Dota 2 game. Unfortunately, it released a little late in the compendium’s run and ended when The International would have ended had it gone through.

But it demonstrated just how far Valve had come in creating custom games.

And then, out of nowhere, they drop a little trailer for Diretide 2020. I don’t know who is in charge of doing the animations for these new trailers at Valve but they are fantastic.

While seven years is quite a long time for a return of a mode, I must say the wait was well worth it. Diretide 2020 is a culmination of all that Valve has learned in custom game mode design. It looks fantastic, with a custom ink cell shading that visually sets it apart. And I can’t say how much Valve has fixed this mode. Kait and I get drawn back to Dota 2 for the International hype and then usually finish off the year enjoying the game before forgetting it until the next grand tournament rolls around. However, Diretide has been incredible for us.

For one, it’s a silly little mode. This is still a competitive 5 versus 5 mode. However, rounds are only five minutes long! And it’s a best of five so are often much shorter than the twenty minute slog of the original version. Furthermore, there’s no big fight at the end with Roshan. This is strictly you playing the game mode to win the candy rush. And speaking of the mode…

Valve created a completely new map for the game. And it is fantastic. I can finally see the appeal of Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm game. HotS wanted to set itself apart from the other Dota 2 like games by having a variety of maps with unique objectives scattered about them. In Diretide 2020, you’re still trying to collect more candy than your enemy. However, there are only two lanes that circle around Roshan’s cell. At the top and bottom of the maps are spots were scarecrows spawn three times a round. These scarecrows drop ten candies and a neutral item for whoever kills them. Three secret shops mean that you can keep on the playing field to fight it out without having to retreat back to your base to heal. And your neutral creeps spawn around two candy wells – one in each lane. These are like towers in the regular game however they don’t attack and when destroyed also drop ten candy from their owner’s bucket to the enemy team. The candy wells are guarded by a strong, tethered monster allied with the team that offers some mild defence for your base.

And quite literally every change Valve made has turned Diretide into a frantic, brawling, violent romp over Halloween candies. Roshan still pursues teams while demanding candy tributes though he can’t be fought off. And his tithe increases the more ahead you get from your opponents. Fail to feed Roshan and he’ll kill his tributary while cursing the rest of the team with a wasting disease that will constantly sap your hero’s health until it expires. Kait and I have been playing this mode exclusively and, honestly, we’d probably be playing it even if it didn’t have item drops.

But it also has hats.

Recognizing that the only reason people played the original Diretide was for hats, Valve has a candy counter for rewards in playing Dota during the Diretide season. These rewards, smartly, apply to both regular Dota 2 matches and Diretide which allows those who are only interested in the hats to keep playing regular Dota while us pub stars stick with our stupid game mode. That was sorely needed and kudos to Valve for recognizing that. Everyone gains candy points for playing a match, regardless of winning or losing (also very smart to reduce toxicity from players). The bulk of your points are rewarded for how long the game goes. So five round, close matches will give more though short three round matches means you have time to queue up for another game so it balances out. There’s a single “First Win of the Day” bonus and then there’s very small bonuses for accomplishing certain things within the mode itself. These are worth two points and given for First Blood, First Scarecrow, First Candy Steal and the like. They’re nice to pursue but since a three round match gives everyone 9 points, we’re not talking about really vital goals to pursue.

Once your reward candy counter reaches 100, you are gifted a random item from a staggeringly large list of items. These include discontinued chests which I never expected to see since I don’t spend any more money on this game outside of International Compendiums. There’s also Diretide exclusive items and two chests that you can get this season too. One is just a normal item chest. These have spooky outfits for about nine of the heroes (and I was lucky enough to get two of these to drop and I didn’t even get the pudge set out of them too!). There’s a second Diretide chest which requires a paid key to open, reminiscent of the old Team Fortress 2 crate system. These chests can be sold on the market and include a lot more items from ambient sets, immortals to immortal sets worth several hundred dollars on the steam marketplace. Anything you want from these can also be sold on the marketplace so needless to say I haven’t opened any of these “money chests.” There are some ghostly item effects that drop as well, seasonally limited to the fall and can be applied to certain heroes and couriers.

I’ve been very happy being able to farm this mode to get new goodies. And I can’t imagine that Valve hasn’t made a bundle off these sale chests considering I’ve made around seven dollars on my own from people’s enthusiasm. There were some bugs and balance issues when this first dropped. Given that Dota 2 has over a hundred heroes with an enormous skill pool, certain heroes were considerably better than others. Valve had the foresight to allow each player a single ban at the start of the match and released a number of patches to the game mode post launch to bring certain heroes in line as well. I’ve enjoyed the evolving “meta-game” around the picks and bans of Diretide as well as finding my own list of heroes who everyone ignores at their peril.

Which is to say, Snapfire is OP. Wraithking as well. I think I lost maybe three times over the entire run with those two.

So, yeah, this has been an incredible surprise from Valve and I just wanted to share some positivity over a well constructed and launched custom game mode in Dota 2.

Gib Diretide indeed.

NaNoWriMo Prep #3

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Well, here we are at the final NaNoWriMo prep before the actual NaNoWriMo! So anything else I do after this is all going to be my own personal secrets! Ahahaha.

But let’s recap where we left off. I had decided on an urban fantasy genre, though whether that’s from a horror or mystery angle is yet to be determined. My last entry I settled on basing a character on a friend of mine who I haven’t used as a model yet. Today, I will be hammering out some more details.

Having focused on a model for my character, I now need to establish what that character is. Now, I’m not going to say what is or is not based on the real world model. It’ll just start doing a rough character sketch. I’ve talked before about character sketches for my stories. These let me get a good grasp of their personality. They usually form as a short story about a pivotal moment in their life. Here, it will mostly be a stream of consciousness of my thoughts.

But before I begin that, I need to lay out a few more of my thoughts.

Accessed from http://www.wga.hu/index1.html — Oriental Writer Cutting His Pen by Benjamin Gerritsz Cuyp (1640).

I’m thinking this story is going to have at least two major characters. In my early musings I wanted to have some non-authority associated individuals looking into a mystery. I had an early vision of a mystery lovers club that meets to discuss unsolved cases and try to apply their love of mystery novels in solving those cases. I then thought this would be a cute way to start a mystery by having a person appeal to them for help in doing something (leaning towards a missing persons case). I’m leaning towards a young character who has joined this club because they’re smitten with a girl that attends and wants to get in their good graces. This will tie in to some of my other character’s design.

First, I’m leaning towards a young father. I mentioned before that I like taking the mundane and making things extraordinary from there and what could be more mundane than parenting? There’s feeding, napping, diaper changes and bathing. Sure, it’s a rewarding and exciting experience. But let’s be honest with ourselves, we really don’t care to hear about stranger’s struggles about waking up at 2 am to give their child a bottle. I think I’m also going to make him a single father. With the aforementioned missing person’s case, I’m leaning towards the mother having “left” one night, possibly without warning. The story could then pick up this personal tragedy if the mother was roped into the events of the novel in some level. It will also force the character to continue down whatever road unwinds before them.

Alright, we have a single father. What else really defines a person? Well, their occupation. This ties back to the earlier paragraph as I decided this person will be a teacher. However, I don’t see a teacher attending a mystery appreciation club even if he is looking to get back into the dating pool. And I would like to write some scenes of him trying to go on dates while dodging the fact that he’s a father and worried someone else’s kid will turn off dating prospects. So I will need some tie with this character and the young paramour. The easiest solution, to me, would to make him the teacher of the other. I can worry about the details of how that plays out for later.

Lastly, I want some personality quirks for my character. While I have a rather sombre backstory, I’d actually like to contrast that with a sun disposition and childlike wonder for the world. I recall how amused I was when in Japan and seeing all the adults obsessed with Pokemon Go. And while I’m not going to lean into some other intellectual property, even if there’s no chance of infringement, I do like the idea of him preoccupying himself with chasing down digital “pokemon” or whatnot while weird things are happening. I’m also tempted to wrap this phone game into the greater story and it got me thinking.

Way back in university I came up with… well… I don’t even know what to call it. I was working on a project with Derek to make something and ended up making all this complicated lore for supernatural entities, different realms of reality and a whole slew of other stuff. It never really materialized into anything, however. But while thinking about this character and musing of a Pokemon alternative, I recalled this concept. Loosely titled Plemora, it would make an excellent game and if the game itself ties into the urban fantasy, would cover a whole lot of groundwork that I won’t have to do later.

A brief rundown of the Plemora was that our world was simply one layer of a multilayered existence. Entities from a higher layer had a tendency for coming down into ours to avoid conflicts there. Oftentimes this led to them being hunted and, given the physics of the world, they might be chased into lower layers of ours. It was a weird blend of things like Planescape and White Wolf roleplaying and I certainly have no interest in trying to make this story an introduction to that mess. However, it certainly works perfectly for a stupid mobile game my teacher can obsess over and since it dealt with demons… well… let’s just say that I have some ideas to consider in regards to my paranormal portion. Whether I will have sympathetic, intelligent demons that pass for human like… alright I don’t watch or read a lot of urban fantasy but that’s what I imagine Supernatural or that tv show about Satan were like. Alternatively, I can make them more mindless and beastlike in the vein of Stranger Things or Lovecraft Country.

And I likely won’t make a decision until I’m halfway through November anyway!

NaNoWriMo Prep #2

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With NaNoWriMo fast approaching, it seems I should get a few more words out about what I’m doing to prepare for it.

Last time I discussed my NaNoWriMo prep, it was to hone in on a genre that I wanted to explore. As I mentioned, the November novel is my chance to try new tones, genres, voices and styles. Since I don’t do a lot of present day fiction, the urban fantasy genre seemed like a good little niche to poke and prod. It’s adjacent to my regular writing enough that it could be relevant to my stories while being different enough to exercise those creative muscles.

Now, the nice thing about prep is that nothing is set in stone. Things can and, generally do, change. I’m still planning on doing an urban fantasy but my original idea for characters is slowly changing while I consider my option. And speaking of characters, that brings me to my next step of prep.

In my writing, I love to focus on characters. Motivations. Histories. Relationships. Philosophies and ideals. These heady psychological concepts let me put my education to some us but generally help to shape the different people that drive the story. Of course, there is no telling what characters will pop up in the plot, especially since I hardly plan any of my first drafts. But what I will focus on is the main character. And I have several tricks for creating them.

My go-to development method is simply take someone I know and use them as a template for my writing. My friends and family are sprinkled throughout my writing in various forms. Granted, we’re all multi-faceted individuals. Our personalities are not a weekend shopping list of traits but an ever changing kaleidoscope of ofttimes contradictory and inconsistent behaviours and beliefs. That is to say, while I base my characters on people I know they are hardly ever recognizable as the people I know. Generally, I’ll focus on one portion of their personality and design around there.

Take my sister for example.

There are numerous moments where I have based a character on my sister. The most obvious is… well… her D&D character in my short stories. Those stories, written in a somewhat generic fantasy setting, took moments of our lives and recast them as though they were Dungeons and Dragons inspired adventures. As such, Kait’s character (inconspicuously called Kait) was a small town teacher who had a fondness for hikes and rocks. So this fantasy Kait was classed as a ranger and, taking inspiration from the source, was a ranger who had a knack for getting lost and possessed little sense of direction. Furthermore, she loved collecting things and carrying around a large backpack filled to the brim with the random junk she’d find on their adventures.

I like to contrast this lighthearted, clumsy ranger with Therese from my Thyre story. Both had the same inspiration and yet I feel the characters are more different than they are similar. Therese of Thyre’s fame may have shared a love of reading and books but she was a standoffish woman with a cold, controlling attitude especially towards those she felt were foolish or below her own intellectual capabilities. Her prickly exterior naturally led her to having few friends and associates but despite that she had a complicated relationship with her cousin. Her domineering attitude provided an anchor of sorts to his free spirit even if her acerbic wit often manifested in barbed banter between these two seemingly close relatives.

Now, is my sister this cold cousin? Of course not. Nor would she hopelessly be lost in a forest or feel unnecessary compulsion to squirrel away every little bit of coloured string or shiny rock she tripped over. That’s the fun of using real people as templates. Especially those that you are close to. You know how they would react in a multitude of situations so you have a start for your fictional individual that is both real and grounded. But more than that, you can practice the ever enjoyable “what if” scenarios. What if Kait could speak to animals and follow the spirits of wanderlust? And how would that change her? What would stay the same?

Of course, these were early stories where I was a novice at character creation. I will admit that as time goes on I’ve relied less and less on real world templates and have developed my characters wholesale from my imagination. However, now and then, I’ll still pluck the technique if I’m in need of a quick side character that I don’t want to spend a lot of time developing. Or, as is the case here, if I need inspiration where I have no initial spark of creativity.

It was over the weekend when I was attending the first birthday of a friend’s child that I realized I have never written a character based on him. I’m not sure how that happened but as I was struck by that revelation, it did get me thinking. Now, I certainly don’t have any full ideas yet. However, I have a template for a character and oftentimes that’s all I need. What part of his personality will fuel my story? I don’t know. But that’s the fun of writing for me. It’s a practice of exploration and knowing who leads the adventure, even if I don’t know how they’ll lead, is often enough for the first outing.

There is one other element of my writing that I’ll be porting over to this November novel. I quite enjoy playing with expectation. In particular, I have fun turning the mundane into the exciting and the exciting into the mundane. For example, my Red Sabre novels follow a band of rail pirates. Yet though it sounds like a colourful life (and it is!) I also like to think how the day-to-day activities of their lives would exhibit. I don’t place the events of a Red Sabre novel around the height of their explosive adventures. Instead, their adventures grow out from typical problems whether that be finding food, employment, repairs or simply a place to relax after long days of travel. I like buttressing the grand vistas of a new world and the excitement of a gunfight with a glimpse into the actual work it takes to get there.

Likewise, I enjoy playing with things in the inverse. Several of my stories follow rather boring people doing boring things with their lives. That is until everything is upended up the extraordinary. My Middle School Can’t Be This Haunted and Never Ever After are probably the best examples of these janitors turned main attractions. Sophie Caroll in Never Ever After is a girl who works at a laundromat. Her favourite thing in the world is a trashy B-tier television show. She has no skills. She has no great friends. She mostly is spinning her wheels until her life ends. That is, of course, until a school of fish burst from one of her washing machines and a talking red panda convinces her to tumble through a modern wardrobe into a world of crazy creatures and landscapes.

So a young, new father puttering away with his job is definitely something I will play with. And I think this pairs well with the urban fantasy genre. Course, now I have to consider what actually makes my urban fantastical and decide whether I want to take this story more into a mystery or a horror direction. Considering that really I have a likely audience of one for this project, however, I’m more apt to make this a mystery. Plus, it will give me more mystery writing practice.

And, at the end of the day, this is largely practice.

The Kid in the Fridge

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Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you are pleasantly full of turkey, turnip and appreciation for the wonderful things we have in these interesting times. I was fortunate to see some of my family bubble for the festivities and acknowledge the luck and fortune that I was able to spend it with them when others are still isolated or separated. With any luck, next year we’ll look back on just how crazy 2020 was.

So, I was going to do several blog posts detailing my preparation for NaNoWriMo but I have a different course to take today. I’ve been slowly chipping away at Fallout 4 with Derek and, because I like to be on the cutting edge of discussion, have decided to dedicate today’s blog to this five year old video game. Bare with me, this will be a rant.

I readily admit that I have a complicated relationship with Bethesda’s products. On the one hand, I haven’t played anything like their open world games and there is a unique niche in which they occupy. Bethesda crafts very interesting worlds to explore. I won’t necessarily say good. I won’t necessarily say skilled. But the maps and locations they fill their little game worlds do provide a sense of wonder and exploration I have yet to find in any other place. It’s certainly a love/hate relationship, mind you. Perhaps, it is the closest I’ve come to feeling legitimately ambivalent towards something.

You see, for everything that Bethesda does right, I always find two things that are frustratingly done wrong. I applaud, however, the commitment to changing formulas and trying new things even as they pump out franchise sequels year after year. However, if there’s one area I feel you can squeak away with flogging an intellectual property, it is perhaps best in the fantasy genre.

Bethesda is best known for their Elder Scrolls games. These are Dungeons and Dragons inspired fantasy jaunts through a bizarre fantasy land of their own creation which thankfully has cleaved itself from the traditional Tolkien mould. Sure, they have elves and orcs but there’s a lot quite different about the Elder Scrolls that makes each foray into a different section of Tamriel rather exciting. I started way back with Daggerfall which was both mind blowing for its freedom and also frustrating for its obtuseness. Granted, I was a kid when I played that game so I certainly had a hard time following even simple instructions and this was back in the day when design sensibilities didn’t include mini-maps, compasses, glowing faerie lines or what-have-you to lead the player by the hand to the next set piece. I absolutely adored Daggerfall and all its weird peculiarities even if I could not tell you a single portion of its story. I think I beat it on one of my numerous games. Probably playing the weird cat-people race because I was apparently a furry in my younger years. But I’ll be damned if I could tell you anything about it.

But I can tell you all my personal stories. I can tell you about the time I was an infamous burglar – climbing, jumping and somersaulting through the streets of Daggerfall’s cities stealing from wizards and merchants alike. I remember a character being infected with lycanthropy and worrying when the full moon approached and wondering where I would wake up next hoping I was not surrounded by the bodies of innocent farmers. And I can recall joining the mage’s guild, crafting my own spells and teleporting vast distances before dying at the hands of some horrific otherworldly demon. In those days, story didn’t mean much when I could simply tell my own.

As such, Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim were all enjoyable experiences. Sure, it was nice that their narratives improved somewhat. However, I went into these games knowing they would be sandboxes for playing around in a fantasy world doing mundane things like property management and farming. It’s like Stardew Valley but every now and then a dragon shows up randomly to kill your horse. In theory, Bethesda Fallouts should be no different. It’s not like I was wedded to that series prior to its acquisition by Bethesda. I think I tried Fallout 2 when I was little but played very little of it. My first true exposure was Fallout 3 and yet, somehow, I came away feeling a little less enthused than if I had just played a Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls game.

Perhaps it is the setting of Fallout that sets it apart. Yes, it takes in an alternative retro-future where the United States fell into some fevered reality of a 1950’s vision of what the world would look like in 2077. But it’s also post-apocalyptic so you’re not actually living in this strange chrome and bulbous robot future. You’re picking through its wastes. I’m not sure what it is about this world but I find it more interesting on the surface and, consequently, more apt to being pulled apart. Perhaps it’s the lack of wizards.

Accessed from http://conceptartworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Fallout-4-concept-art-IN-02.jpg — Fallout 4 and all associated images and what not belong to Bethesda Softworks. Which, I suppose, now means it belongs to Microsoft.

I mean, fantasy as a genre flies by a lot given that it’s working in a world where people can wave their hands and a person turns into a toad. And certainly Fallout has never been a serious setting. New Vegas, my favourite of the franchise, has an entire area populated by talking video screens terrified of robot scorpions. But there’s a difference in tone that Bethesda seems to keep fumbling. And it’s not helped that it feels like they try and push their Fallout narratives more seriously than their Elder Scrolls.

For example, both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 hinge on a very personal connection the player has to the narrative. In both, they have a missing family member. In Fallout 3 it was Liam Neeson. And who wouldn’t want to be related to Liam Neeson? In Fallout 4 it is your actual son. So they design the game so your stakes are immediate and visceral. It applies a certain amount of incentive to picking through the canyons of discarded toasters as you search for your loved ones. Yet, Bethesda’s open world is less a world and more an amusement park. I’ve complained about this before, but there’s an incongruity in needing to find your father/son and constantly being pulled and distracted to ride each ghoster coaster you pass along the way.

Unfortunately, Bethesda’s writing just does not hold up when it’s meant to carry you through the experience. I will say there are some improvements. I’m certainly not done Fallout 4 so can’t really say how it’ll eventually shake out. I think their companions are a lot better. They are a lot more developed, probably getting up there to the worst of the New Vegas or old BioWare level of companion writing. Which is a huge improvement over their prior try where Fallout 3’s standout companion was the dog. And I think technically the Elder Scrolls games have companions but really they’re just AI decoys to pull monsters off as you scramble back and fire your spells.

However, I want to highlight where Bethesda’s writing still lags behind by committing far more words to analyzing a side quest than the quest has in itself. The titular Child in the fridge quest is easily the worst quest in the game. I’m tempted to say it’s one of the worst quests I’ve seen. And I found it absolutely baffling to stumble across it in this game that has at least tried to improve in the company’s prior deficiencies.

But first, some background. Child in the fridge is a quest that you stumble across randomly while poking around the ruins of south Boston. I received a muffled cry for help and a load knocking. Looking nearby, I found a fridge which, when approached, you could engage in conversation. Apparently, according to the fridge, a child crawled inside in order to escape the bombs but has become locked in due to there being no latch. You are requested to shoot the door off to free them.

I will take a small moment to sidebar an important conversation. I mentioned earlier that Bethesda is always trying new things with their game. This time they adopted the dreaded “conversation wheel” made popular (undeservedly) by BioWare with their Mass Effect game and has since seen widespread application. It is easily the worst system I have seen adopted into the RPG genre and significantly reduces player roleplaying opportunity. Granted, any video game is going to naturally be constrained by choices that the programmers write into it unlike a tabletop game that adjusts to your choices on the fly. However, the dialogue wheel shatters the flimsy illusion of choice in games by taking things one step further and obfuscating your choice by reducing responses to two or three words. Many times those words aren’t even found in the response and can be quite misleading to what you’re going to say. I would say this system was a natural consequence of having a fully voiced character. Nut after installing a mod that simply lists the full responses in a menu, I can honestly say that it is bad just to be annoying. I hope that it gets dropped in future releases.

Anyway, once you shoot the door, a child tumbles out and looks up at you. The child is hairless and covered in scars – identifying them as a “ghoul.” In the Fallout universe, excessive exposure to radiation can transform some people into a wrinkly, unaging mass. There’s some manner of secondary themes surrounding ghouls and their discrimination at the hands of “normal” survivors in the world. Part of it stems from the fact that, many ghouls that live for an extended period of time start to lose any semblance of higher cognitive functioning. They revert into a more genre typical “ghoul” that is a mindless monster trying to kill anything that comes near it.

So, this child who claims to have escaped the nuclear holocaust by crawling into a fridge could very well be telling the truth. However, there’s one rub. The nuclear war that destroyed the world happened 200 years ago. This is a salient point to the narrative since the main character also survived the war by being cryogenically frozen in a lab. The protagonist’s time displacement is an important detail in the narrative. Well, as important as any details are in a Bethesda game. The protagonist barely survived this lengthy internment even as all the other subjects perished in their cryo-pods. How a child in a fridge survived 200 years, presumably without oxygen and most definitely without food, is a wonder. However, things get even more bizarre.

See, the child wants to go home and see his parents. He asks you to escort him. In Fallout 4’s wonderful dialogue system your options are literally “Yes, of course” or “No but maybe later.” Regardless, you walk maybe twenty feet before a mercenary named Bullet comes up to you and asks to buy the ghoul child from you. That’s it. No explanation why he wants to buy the ghoul. No reason for why he’s literally standing several yards from the fridge in the first place. And certainly no reason why he’s low-balling the offer for the child either. This “moment” represents really the only choice in the entire quest chain. You can hand the kid over for a measly 250 bottle caps or tell Bullet to pound sand. Taking the latter, I then had to escort the ghoul kid carefully around the nearby ruins of Quincy so as to avoid an entire stronghold of mercenaries before arriving him at home.

Which comes to another problem. Not only did this child survive for 200 years in a fridge. But they were stuck in this fridge, literally on the side of the road, right beside a settlement that is explicitly looking for people like him to purchase into… possibly slavery? Maybe a circus sideshow, it’s hard to say. Bullet certainly wouldn’t.

How was it possible that this kid locked in a fridge went unnoticed for so long? Once again without food, water and likely oxygen?

And yet, strangely enough, when you arrive at his former house, you find his mother and father patiently waiting in the hollowed our ruins of a rotting two story building wearing their Sunday bests and acting like literally nothing was different. Granted they too are ghouls and both actually have the “twelve packs a day” smoker’s voice unlike the child. But it seems highly suspect when they cry out that they thought their kid was dead. Well, no shit. It’s been two hundred years and apparently you couldn’t leave your empty house to walk twenty minutes down the road to find him in a fridge.

At this point, Bullet arrives to restate his desire to purchase the child. I guess he doesn’t care for adult ghouls. Also, Momma and Poppa Fridge offered you the exact 250 dollars for returning their child. So outside of being pointlessly cruel, you have no reason to hand Icecube over to the two bit ringmaster. A short firefight later and congratulations, your quest is done!

That’s it. That’s the entire thing. It is… maybe ten minutes long and that’s because I took a wide circle around Quincy. So, not only is there really only one choice, and a shallow one at that, in this quest. It’s all over a meager amount of money and some good feels. Normally, this sort of thing wouldn’t annoying me. However, the game’s other minor quests are at least a little more involved. I mean, there’s one where you’re literally asked to go and mix paint to decorate a wall that has at least one more step involved.

But it isn’t just the brevity of the quest that irks me. I can get over a minor, throwaway task. Obviously, or I wouldn’t play video games. No, what really grabs my lion by the tail is the fact that it’s so… insipid. It’s so stupid. There was really no time put into this miniature story. The entire tale is “mercenary bad. family good. fridge thick.” And yet, there’s not a single step in this three step dance that follows any internal logic. I know that pointing out plotholes is out of fashion in these times, but there was zero effort or thought put into this chain. And I can’t even say that the effort in writing matches the effort in production. I mean, all these awful lines of dialogue had to be voiced by four separate actors. And sure the sequence is quick to program but it probably took several weeks or possibly months for it to see full implementation (granted accounting for the voice acting delay). And yet, I have to wonder over the reason for it.

I can’t imagine anyone buying a kid surviving locked in a fridge for 200 years beside a busy road. I don’t care how much radiation magic you throw at it to justify it. And then having the parents magically survive all this time without even looking for the child is even crazier. And Fallout 4 actually has some decent set pieces so I know they can write something bombastic at the very least. It’s not so much laziness that gets me as there’s a fair bit of work involved in creating video games. No, it’s the thoughtlessness that sticks out more than ever. You could have literally replaced the kid with a dog stuck in a bear trap or whatever and told the same exact story while keeping it rooted within the setting. We’ve already seen enough raiders with dogs to know they want them as pets. It stuck in a trap would give the necessary impression that you stumbled across the creature by happenstance and not include this ludicrous timeframe. And you can even save some money by not getting a child voice actor to sound off on some really bland lines.

You do lose those sweet references to Indiana Jones and Ladybug, Ladybug but considering that New Vegas already did it better, I’m not sure that’s worth it.

And then, of course, there’s some really weird implications which I can one hundred percent say Bethesda did not consider when they wrote this quest. First, not only does turning into a ghoul extend one’s life for an indefinite amount of time (certainly a point that comes up often in Fallout games) but it also halts all manner of aging. Icecube has been a child for 200 years. Two hundred years of isolation in a fridge, never growing, never interacting with anyone. Stuck forever in this perpetual nightmare of cramped darkness. Icecube has spent over two hundred times his non-ghoul life not knowing anything more than a five by three foot space. How he isn’t blinded the moment that door comes flying off must certainly be more radiation magic. But it also means that, barring being eaten by a bear, Icecube is going to exist in perpetuity as an approximately nine year old kid. Assuming he doesn’t go feral like the hordes of ghouls you murder throughout the game.

But there’s even more. Icecube is the only ghoul child that you encounter. Which does leave one wondering why there aren’t more. It’s not even a matter of programing – the developers created a model for Icecube – so they specifically chose not to have feral ghoul children anywhere else. There are no ghoul children with any of the mentally stable ghouls. There are none spawning with the ferals in dungeons. Prior games explained this by saying ghouls are infertile so they aren’t making any more. They left what happens to a child exposed to excessive amounts of radiation to the imagination. Perhaps a kid does turn into a ghoul but continues to grow. Perhaps children simply cannot survive that amount of radiation poisoning.

Now, however, Bethesda has no excuse. They have a single ghoul child. The fact there aren’t more falls into the standard Bethesda writing excuse of “Don’t think too much about it, we certainly didn’t.” And I get that children are a touchy subject in open world games. Having a game allow you to kill children is basically a non-starter in this day and age.

Dying Light has left the conversation

But Bethesda normally skirts it by having a handful of immortal children immune to all damage. They normally get around pesky programming issues by making a number of people unkillable regardless of what happens. Which, you know, I get. This is not a tabletop game, some concessions are expected in this creative contract between storyteller and audience. However, why then bring attention to so many incongruities on a bloody sidequest which easily sidesteps all these issues by just using a damn dog?

This is classic Bethesda. Here’s a simple story that is too simple to be enjoyable and yet somehow manages to contradict so much about all their other stories that it detracts exponentially from the whole. And there’s no excuse for this. It’s not due to low effort because a lot of effort went into making it happen. It’s not due to not knowing better because they have contradictory statements elsewhere in their own worlds. It just simply exists. Right there. Like a buffet table laden with succulent homemade meals and a single plate of mouldy cheese swarming with flies and maggots.

And simply put, no matter how nice that dessert is next to it, you can’t keep the flies from flying over and crawling all across it.

NaNoWriMo Prep #1

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So, with today being the first day of October, Kait actually suggested that I do a little series of blog posts detailing my preparation I do for NaNoWriMo.

For those who don’t know what Nano is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. I was made aware of this auspicious occasion many years back when Derek introduced me to the concept. He actually wanted to participate one year and, having failed in prior attempts, thought bringing in a friend would be the motivation to take him across the finish line.

It wasn’t.

Feature Image — The Clockwork Caterpillar started off as a National Novel Writing Month project. How far we’ve come!

However, it got me into the process. So, the gist behind National Novel Writing Month is to get people writing. You have a full month to get 50,000 words to paper, word document, reed scrolls, human skin or whatever other material you like to use. And if there is one thing I learned from Felicia, in order to hone your craft you must constantly be practicing. So, I have found a lot of success and use for the NaNo competition. First, I have beaten it for… well… a number of years running now. And I certainly can feel the difference in my writing if, for nothing else, the 1,666 words a day limit is no longer daunting. I can still recall struggling until the late hours of the morning trying to hit my word count. Now, NaNo is more of a little vacation. If… vacationing was still work but just less stressful.

See, I like to use my November writing month to take on a project that’s less serious. These are my experimental stories. Ideas that are a little outside of my comfort zone. They’re genres I haven’t attempted. They’re concepts that may not be really great. Since you never truly know if something is going to work until you give it a go. And, just sometimes, it yields value.

See, the first Red Sabre story was a NaNo project. And you can see how well that turned out by checking out my second Red Sabre novel, out today! Get it on Amazon, Kobo, Kindle and whatnot!

But I’ve also written other things that will never see the light of day. Like my zombie/Japanese/anime story which shall remain unnamed and never fully explained. I’ve also written silly super hero tales, murder mysteries, subversive classic fantasy and much more. It doesn’t really matter. It’s practice and mashing up genres is a great way to fertilize the creative grounds of one’s imagination.

And that gets to my first step of preparation: figuring out what on earth I’m going to write.

This sounds a little grander than it actually is. I’m a “panster” type writer so I really don’t have much of a plan when I start. But I do have an idea. My first step is to find that one kernel from which everything is going to grow. Sometimes, it is after a conversation with Kait about story starters or ideas. Sometimes it’s a strange dream. Sometimes it’s because I’ve read something grossly disappointing and I’d like to take my own stab at it.

But what if you don’t have an initial starting idea? Whenever I get a flash of inspiration, I try to write that idea down and let it germinate in the back of my mind. Well, this year (like some prior years), I don’t really have anything germinating. I’ve got a couple of projects on the go but none of them are really NaNo material.

Besides, this can give me something to blog about. So, how do you create a story idea?

Focus on something that interests you. You are your first audience. If you, as the writer, have no motivation for the story then it’s going to be nigh impossible to finish. So, my first starting place would be asking myself one important question:

What kind of story do I want to tell?

There’s a plethora of genres out there. And just because you specialize in one doesn’t mean that you can’t explore others. Even if nothing else interests you, there’s a lot of subgenres that you can plumb. So, do I want to write a Sci-Fi story? Do I want to try something a little different? Honestly, the language of Red Sabre can get a bit ponderous and I do enjoy being able to throw myself fully into modern diction. So I would like to do something either modern or futuristic. I don’t want to do a horror story so I can cross that option right out.

Now I know Kait is on a bit of an urban fantasy kick, so that could be fun. I’ve never read an urban fantasy to completion. I’m not really interested in doing an emotionally heavy, character driven story. This is NaNo after all. So the other big modern genre is mystery. I have taken a stab at a mystery story. The result was… mediocre. So there’s certainly room to grow there. However, there’s also futuristic mystery. And considering the only thing I’ve enjoyed about the few super hero movies I’ve seen recently is the detective element, it is a consideration.

Alternatively, speculative fiction is all about commenting on modern issues by recontextualizing problems to examine them in a different light. It would be remiss to ignore the recent conversation about the glorification of police officers and the lack of scrutiny on their procedures to simply write yet another stock standard crime drama. On the other hand, writing a mystery that does not have the main character as a police officer could be interesting. It’s a fairly large trope in mystery and best highlighted by the Maltese Falcon.

Also, by setting the principle investigator as a non-civil servant can broaden the type of mystery I could explore. I’ve gone on some rants about how Lovecraftian fiction does not fit well outside of its time period. But what sort of otherworldly mystery could be done in a modern setting?

Yes, I think I may look at doing an urban fantasy mystery novel. Now that I’ve prepared my genre, it’s time to start considering general ideas and characters!

Cinderella is Dead – Book Review

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I was debating the merits of writing a reflection on the book: Cinderella is Dead. As I neither love nor hate the book, there is not a lot I have to talk about. So, instead I am going to reflect on the reactions of other readers.

But first, Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron features 16-year old Sophia living in a very restrictive world post-Cinderella. Sophia is not excited to attend the mandatory ball, where matches are made as she is more interested in princesses than princes.

I liked that our lead protagonist was female, coloured and a lesbian. I liked that the book really questioned the arc of fairy tales. Sophia’s world treats the Cinderella story like scripture, which brings forth so many problems. And really, it is always important to question what you read and the common ideas held by society. I also liked that Cinderella was real, 200 years dead, but still a member of this world. I didn’t love that the target audience was young adults. The writing was really geared towards a younger reader, which simply does not interest me at present.

And that pretty much sums up my perspective on this book. I would give Cinderella is Dead 3.5 out of 5 stars. It was solid, but not super amazing.

Then I did some research to see what other people thought. Reviewer A loved the book – 5 out of 5 stars. Reviewer B hated the book – 1 out of 5 stars.

I would agree with Reviewer A, Sophia was candid, straightforward and determined. These were great qualities in pushing the story forward. She knew what she wanted and she sought to change the world around her rather than break under the expectations of others. And yes, the King was a terrifying villain. He was not only evil, but inspired his followers to be just like him. This was striking considering the state of our world at present. A morally corrupt leader will draw out the worst in his people.

While I think Reviewer A gushed overly about the story, they did pull out some good highlights. In contrast Reviewer B seems to have been ridiculously harsh. Reviewer B thought Sophia had no empathy or sense of the world around her, concluding that the main character was entirely selfish. While I will concede Sophia is far from a complex character, I don’t think it was blind-selfishness that had her standing up for herself. The world in this book was harshly patriarchal. It was extreme in the way women had zero control in their lives. And Sophia was a counter to that. She was determined not to give in to the expectations of others. In a longer narrative, you might have been able to look at more shades of grey, but I think the message of standing up for yourself and your neighbors against tyranny is too important to dismiss as selfish. It wasn’t just that Sophia wanted to marry another girl, it was that she wanted to have control in her life. She wanted a world, where married women were not abused and cruelly discarded. Where daughters were treated with respect and given agency in their own futures.

Reviewer B did bring up at least one dumb moment, where the characters act stupidly. The book is not perfect, I will admit that. And there are some questionable actions by the key characters, personally the whole seeing the future moment seemed irrelevant. However, overall, I don’t think it deserved the level of hate.

In the end, I maintain my rating of 3.5 stars. A good book with diversity at the forefront. I am just past the young adult (tween) age group.

Life Updates!

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Cinderborn Cover — Just a reminder that Cinderborn is out and ready to order! Check it out on Amazon, Kobo or Smashwords!

Hi everyone!

So it’s been awhile and unfortunately I have nothing exciting to share. However, I have been successfully shamed by my sister to at least put some sort of communication on the blog about what is going on. So here I am.

I don’t think I need to remind everyone how crazy a year this has been. It’s not everyday that you go through a pandemic, though being in one now it certainly feels like it. And while there’s never a really good time for a pandemic, this one struck at a particularly turbulent point in my life. At the start of the year, I was going through some rather large life events. First, I got married (yay!) but then I was getting ready to move to another country for my partner’s work. We were going through the process of renting our place, packing our things, selling off what we could and then the border closed. Oops.

So I’ve moved back in with my sister thinking the border closure would last a few weeks or perhaps a month. The closest reference point we had for this kind of event was SARS and that ended up being fairly well contained and low impact. During this time, however, my brother was stuck working from home (like the rest of us) and arranged with my family to take over his child rearing duties since daycares were no longer operating. So for the next six months, I became a full time nanny.

It was nice spending the time really getting to know and help grow my nephews. I also got that first early taste of parenting and… phew, it’s a lot of work. As all parents know, some things must be sacrificed upon the altar of time in order to give children the attention and care they need. However, I was still plugging away at my writing which brings me to the next point.

I’m pleased to say that I’m working away on my second draft for the third Red Sabre novel. The working project name is Drops of the Moon but don’t get excited since that name can easily change. Certainly Cinderborn went through five or so different names before its launch. Drops of the Moon will be a daring adventure through the mountains as Felicity and her crew try to navigate the complicated politics of the Ruan Yu Ren while fending off the vicious attacks of the Ashfoot Confederacy. I’m excited to be exploring more of the western seaboard of Felicity’s world where philosophy, spiritualism and magick and blend together in an intoxicating mix. Hopefully that goes well.

I’ve also been receiving lots of… we’ll call it encouragement, to finish a little project that I wrote last year. Some of you may not know my writing schedule but I have two big project months: April and November. These are set aside specifically to create new narratives outside of the regular editing and revision process. November in particular tends to be when I try things a little more experimental and, as such, those projects generally don’t see the light of day. However, some early readers have been very excited over a mystery that I penned and would like to see it cleaned up. So that’s been added to my plate.

I have also been considering the future of this blog and how I want to continue contributing to it. I haven’t really settled on anything yet, hence my long silence. So if you have anything you’d like to see, please sound off in the comments! I appreciate all the feedback I get from you lovely people.

I also have a couple of other writing projects kicking around in various stages. These may or may not make their way into the public sphere so I’m hesitant to comment on them further. At any rate, I’m still alive and chugging along.

Stay safe! Stay healthy!