Tag Archives: Fallout

The Kid in the Fridge

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.

The Most Lonesome Road

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Obsidian hates endings. I make this bold proclamation after going through the wonders of Neverwinter Nights 2, its expansion Mask of the Betrayer, Knights of the Old Republic II: the Sith Lords and–to a lesser degree–Alpha Protocol. Neverwinter ends with a rather lackluster battle followed by a super unsatisfying ending told through slides about how your noble and courageous party were all crushed by falling rocks in the evil baddies inevitably structurally unsound lair. Mask of the Betrayer’s start pulls a fast one by revealing that you didn’t actually die but are now part of some near immortal campaign against the Lord of Death’s wall of damned souls. You gather your allies, storm his city on an extradimensional plane and… stumble around the most barren municipality before the Lord of Death shows up, slaps your soul into your hands then sends you on your way with a pat on your bum. No one needs to go into detail about how rushed the Sith Lords was nor how its ending is bafflingly incoherent if you haven’t peered into the design documents to glimpse what was meant to be fashioned before the game was packaged and kicked out the door before it was done.

Alpha Protocol’s was probably the best of the bunch though its set battle pieces were rather ham-fisted given how reactive the rest of the narrative had been up to that point.

Accessed from http://fallout.bethsoft.com/eng/vault/diaries_diary15-9-20-11.php

Fallout: New Vegas, Lonesome Road and all other trademarks belong to Bethesda and Obsidian in equal turn.

Of course, Fallout: New Vegas continues Obsidians writhing hatred for closure. The battle for Hoover Dam is, much as Mask of the Betrayer, pretty lifeless and uninspired given all the work you’re tasked with leading up to it. I suppose a plane flies over at some point and fire bombs some suckers which is kind of fun.

What does this have to do with the downloadable content? Well, my prior reviews of New Vegas’ DLC had talked about how they were building up this personal, interwoven and persistent antagonist. Unlike the foes at Hoover Dam who basically sort of pop up at the last moment to be slapped around a little like eager puppets in a whack-a-mole distraction, the player has three separate stories constantly speaking of this mysterious Ulysses. In fact, Ulysses had been ghosting the player’s steps long before Obsidian even got around to creating these final four morsels to round out the remaining ideas of their long cancelled Van Buren. One of the first things the player learns is that the courier mission which saw them to the world’s shallowest grave wasn’t initially even meant to be performed by the player. It was Ulysses who passed on the simple task after seeing you were next in line for the position. This uncharacteristic action haunted me until Lonesome Road was finally released. Here, at last, would be a grand personal reveal that would carry far more weight than the detached foes of Caesar’s Legion and the New California Republic who are far more obsessed with water and power than some shmuck who spends his time running up and down mutated roads.

Needless to say, there was a lot of build up for this story and thus there exists no word which can properly describe the disappointment felt when Lonesome Road concluded and its ending slideshow rolled across my screen.

Now, most people complain that the primary problem with Lonesome Road is its incredible linearity. I take no issue with this. It seems clear to me that Lonesome Road was conceived as the ending for New Vegas which Obsidian had no time or manpower to create. Honestly, its title insinuates that there isn’t going to be much to this story. I was fully prepared for a long, narrow walk down an uncompromising path with only my will set against Ulysses. In my mind, this would be the culmination of a very specific technique of narrative development Obsidian has toyed with multiple times in the past. The Sith Lords is perhaps the most elegant execution. Your character is one of maybe a handful of individuals who have been cast from the Jedi Order. However, the exact details for this expulsion and the motivation for you to accept it are somewhat shaped by the players own decisions. A lot of it is smoke and mirrors, of course. Despite their interactivity, video games will never have the same sort of creative back and forth between designer and player as a tabletop role-playing game. There is a fascinating interplay between player and character knowledge in the game, however. The player learns things which the character knows while simultaneously making decisions often with only half the understanding. Based on those decisions, the character’s past motivations are determined. It takes a very specific view of role-playing. Instead of making the character, the player is taking on a specific role. This comes up again in Alpha Protocol. While the player has control over the motivations and reactions for Michael Thorton, they don’t create his entire back-story or personality.

Not actually Lonesome Road but my screenshots were pretty limited.

It had been my hope that Lonesome Road would take the same risks. Given how much Ulysses prattles about how your actions formed him just as severely as the world of Fallout was formed by the cataclysmic nuclear war, I anticipated personal revelations which would reshape my entire view of the New Vegas story proper.

This doesn’t happen. Instead, Obsidian has fabricated some complicated scenario which ravages a place simply called The Divide. I can’t help but taste wasted potential across the entire length of the story. To me, Obsidian wanted to tell this kind of story but they simply didn’t know how. Maybe the build up had proved too much, I can not say. However, the themes–as limited as they are–on the Lonesome Road all explore the stripping away of the superficial differences between Caesar’s Legion and the NCR. Here, both serve as enemies as the endless red dust storms and radiation have reduced both to near mindless ghouls who work together insofar as to destroy any intruders into this ruined sanctuary. Ulysses is unabashed in denouncing you for creating this particular wasteland. You as both the player and character are equally baffled by this judgement. It does the story no justice that most of it is told through Ulysses’ discarded journals which require discovering. Ulysses himself is far too obtuse and poetic to communicate anything and unlike the other DLC there is no supporting cast to offer further clarification. The only friendly entity is a copy of the robot ED-E who only beeps (and only beeps about some stupid children’s show because it’s far more important to detail a robot’s background than the protagonist’s).

Through the rambling, it seems the player made a delivery to a town on the Divide which somehow started up because the courier made frequent passes through the Divide while doing deliveries. It’s hard to gauge a chronology partly because there’s so few points of reference and partly because Ulysses prefers the sound of his own voice over making sense. I can’t help but feel some of the vagueness is in part because it was so hard trying to wiggle Lonesome Road’s story into the greater New Vegas whole. At some point it was a major focus in the fight between the NCR and the Legion even though no one talks about the Legion penetrating that far into NCR territory (or even that the Divide was that necessary of a supply line). Another major problem is that the player determines the Courier’s age, so it seems really strange if you’re playing a young Courier how they could have possibly been employed long enough to discover, chart and ultimately lead enough people to the Divide for a town to grow up before the Courier ultimately delivers a package which brings about its end.

This mysterious package, it turns out, is the activation code for the numerous nuclear warheads scattered throughout the Divide. Apparently, in the Old World, the Divide was a major military outpost with hundreds of nuclear armaments pointed towards China. Ulysses’ plan is to return to this location and launch the warheads at both the NCR and Legion–since he sees them as one and the same. He requires your presence for some sense of poetic justice, I think. From what I can gather, he was in the Divide when the Courier unintentionally delivered the package that tore it apart so he was one of a few “sane” survivors. The Courier, somehow, delivered the activation orders and pissed off before the explosions since there is at no point any response that indicates the character’s knowledge differs from the player’s. And the player certainly doesn’t know anything about this place before stepping in it.

Real bad-asses don’t look at explosions.

Ultimately, it’s a jumbled mess. Even as I try to write this review, I can’t recall the content very well. Unlike the last three, there’s very little that’s memorable about a journey which should have been the crowning achievement for the entire game. I know I was grossly disappointed with how slap-shod all the prior references to Ulysses ended up becoming. His meddling in Honest Hearts, Dead Money and Old World Blues turns out to be incredibly incidental. His plan is haphazard and carelessly thrown together. The player is offered a choice at the end of the road–whether to bomb the NCR or Legion (or both or none)–though there isn’t any truly compelling reason given to do either. Ulysses’ desire is framed as villainous though it’s not justified nearly as well as any of the other antagonists. One of the highlights of New Vegas, for me, is how understandable Caesar is when you sit down with him. Sure, he’s a slaving, misogynistic asshole hellbent on a megalomaniac conquest spree but at least you can understand how he got where he was. Likewise, Elijah’s obsession is well established and explained so when you hunt him down and see the extremes he’s gone to you know how he got to the end of his road. Both offer far more compelling antagonists than Ulysses and neither had as much time devoted to them.

Lonesome Road is simply yet another disappointing ending in a long series of disappointing endings. Perhaps its best accomplishment is its visual design which does convey a sense of tragic destruction near wiped clean from the greater Fallout universe with the passage of time. You look over the Divide and get a sense of what the world would have been just after the bombs fell. Standing atop the ruined overpasses running through a city seared of its identity, there’s an awesome horror at the massive sense of loss and destruction. The best way to enjoy the Lonesome Road is probably by walking it alone, turning off Ulysses’ prattle in your ears and ED-E’s chirping by your side. A solitary stroll down a path the Fallout world has tread again and again across a land thrice devastated. With wind whistling through empty concrete windows like souls bemoaning from the abyss, you can’t help but truly think, “War. War never changes.”

New Year, Old World

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‘Tis a bright and new year and what better way to start if off than with the age old tradition of retreading the works and achievements of yesteryear! Why, I couldn’t possibly imagine a better method of looking bright-eyed into our glorious horizon than staring straight behind at the road we just tread. Come with me on this fantastic journey as I go over the entertainment which I explored in glorious 2014 but had not got around to discussing.

I had, on a previous entry, espoused my love for Fallout: New Vegas and explained in subtle, vague terms how it was so much better than that derivative drivel Fallout 3. I looked at its first two DLC–Dead Money and Honest Hearts respectively–with a lick and a promise that I would cover the final two when I got around to them. Good new! I finished! Bad news. You get to hear about it.

Old World Blues was the third DLC released and is generally considered the best of the bunch. I can not refute this statement. In my prior post, I detailed how I enjoyed the ideas behind Honest Hearts and Dead Money even if the execution left a little something to be desired. They were, at the end of the day, an interesting look at the world going to hell. Dead Money revolved around the obsessive need of a billionaire eccentric desperate to keep himself and his little piece of earth from the consuming fires and destruction of nuclear devastation. He had, unfortunately, latched his sail to a sinking ship and when he discovered that the woman whom he would craft an entire world for meant to betray him, he turned his marvelous bomb shelter into an inescapable tomb. There was a very obvious and pulsing vein of greed running the entire course of the DLC and the little addition of personal player greed was a neat touch on an otherwise clunky and straightforward corridor experience. Honest Hearts, however, revolved around a dead and broken man’s devotion to redemption. Joshua Graham hoped to expunge the sins he committed in designing and raising the murderous Caesar’s Legion with the small defence and rescue of the Sorrows tribe from the villainous White Legs. The current running beneath the petty tribal dispute and the one between the last Mormons on Earth was the story of the Survivor and how his personal struggle following the fall of the nuclear bombs had irrevocably changed him as it had the world around him. He, too, hoped to keep the woman of his life alive through his recordings and memories, ultimately falling in the final years of his life with only the scattered memoirs to be unearthed by the player in the most remote caverns dotting the Grand Canyon.

Old World Blues is about talking robots.

Accessed from http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Old_World_Blues_(add-on)

Old World Blues and Fallout belongs to Obsidian Entertainment and Bethesda Studios in various legal ways beyond mortal ken. They are not mine.

Franchises are a curious thing. They, more often than not, live long past their creators and what they come to mean is often quite different than what was previously intended. Ask ten fans what Fallout is and you’re apt to get ten different answers. The first two DLC explore some rather personal and grim outcomes of total nuclear devastation. However, Fallout has never been entirely dark and emotional. There’s a bold splash of zany anachronism and otherness. It is slapped right on the front of the cover as a cheerful cartoon of Vault Boy often stands smiling and winking over a blazing mushroom cloud. It is the lingering fifties Americana wrapped about golden age science fiction devices which work through vacuum tubes and prayer than honest science. Turn on the radio and you won’t hear some futuristic sounds befitting a world struggling to rebuild in the year 2281 but the glorious melodies of Roy Brown, Danny Kaye with the Andrews Sisters, The Ink Spots and the Kay Kyser Orchestra. Mad Max-esque punk raiders and cannibalistic tribes are just as much Fallout as brains in a jar and red rocket laser weaponry.

Old World Blues is devouted to that last aspect. Once installed, the player is enticed to head towards Nipton’s Drive-In Theatre to enjoy the Midnight Feature which turns out to be a rather perplexed eye dancing across a faded screen projected from a fallen satellite. Whereas Dead Money you’re lured by the sultry tones of Vera Keyes, inquisitiveness is the only trait which gets the player to touch the satellite before they’re whisked away to the reclusive and secretive Big Mountain research centre. Here, the scientists of bygone America were sequestered in order to develop and prototype weapons necessary to win the war against filthy, Communist China. Part of their development included a holographic fence which served as a shield to shelter from radiation and bombs. Of course, the one thing the scientists didn’t develop against was the simple passage of time and the player is greeted by five floating tri-monitors eerily displaying a pair of eyes and an unmoving mouth as though that were all which is necessary to interface with biological specimens. The Think Tank of Big Mountain conquered death by simply shoving their brains in jars and hoping for the best. While they live on–in a sense–they lost any sort of connection to their humanity or sanity and devoted themselves to the noble and pure pursuit of science for science!

Part of that involved an experiment which destroyed most of Big Mountain and no one ever feels the need to expand further on that incident.

To Old World Blues credits, the Think Tank and their villainous colleague Mobius are well written. You get a sense of their character from their mad ramblings–a brief window into the peoples lives before time and science! stole any shred of individuality away from them. Ostensibly, you are left in Big Mountain to solve the puzzling puzzle of your brain being absent from your body (along with your heart and spine) as per regulation for all guests to Big Mountain. You are outfitted with cybernetic replacements, as are all lobotomites, but you exhibit the curious propensity for speech and thought despite lacking the traditionally required elements for such behaviour. As such, the Think Tank see as a sort of saviour–or at the very least a useful anomaly–capable of aiding their otherwise unarmed and unhelpful robotic forms against the unending tide of robo-scorpions Mobius unleashes on his erstwhile coworkers.

Of course, in order to properly assault Mobius in his ruined bunker to the north you must gather the three great MacGuffins scattered throughout the complex. It’s a rudimentary plot device meant to encourage the player out of the Dome and into the various laboratories around spacious Big Mountain. Old World Blues is less on linear narrative and more on Valve’s environmental telling. Most of the player’s understanding and learning of the complexes history is discovered from poking in every nook and cranny of the crumbling place. Here, too, is the ever persistent allusions to Ulysses and ‘the Grand Plan’ to be revealed in Lonesome Road but they are more in vein with Honest Hearts where it’s a rudimentary connection at best. There’s a bit more explanation for Christine Royce and what actually happened here to cause Dead Money to transpire but nothing of true note is discovered other than Ulysses supposedly learning something “important” from the Think Tank which they can’t remember or can’t be bothered to remember. For the most part, the narrative is well executed in this manner. It pulls on the sense of discovery and exploration which I enjoyed in Honest Hearts and some of the revelations tie back to the New Vegas proper like the origins of the dreaded Cazadores.

My biggest issue with Old World Blues, however, is that it is safe. There’s really nothing deeper beneath it. When you confront Mobius, the floating brain isn’t some madman with some gloriously thematic reasons for his nefarious actions. He’s just a rambling old brain addicted to Mentats and barely keeping his thoughts together. He realized that after their “immortality” the Think Tank lost all sense of their humanity and, should they ever get the motivation to expand beyond their protective bubble, they would turn into tyrannical science! tyrants far too willing to enslave and destroy the wider world outside to keep bodies fueling their ever more demented experiments. Thus, he reasoned that if there were a persistent threat upon their lives they would be more than happy to squirrel up in the basement of the Dome. Mobius didn’t so much steal your brain as rescue it from the plumbing and is more than happy to give it back–assuming you can convince your brain to come back with you.

Old World Blues most interesting moment is a dialogue challenge to convince your brain to join you on your grand, stupid adventures. It’s an interesting climax for a story, especially given how reactive it is to some of your prior exploits. It also is the perfect highlight of the absurd experience of Big Mountain though there is a cursory confrontation with the Think Tank where you can convince them to be good people if you’ve fulfilled the prerequisite Sunday Morning Special morality lessons for each of them. Or you can shoot them in the face. They really don’t have much in the way of defences even on very hard. And you’re apt to be armed to the teeth with barking mini-guns or singing sonic emitters.

Which I applaud the design for Big Mountain in that one regard. Unlike the past two DLC, Old World Blues is more amicable to wider character builds. There are energy guns, conventional weaponry and melee items with which to defend yourself. It’s–ultimately–the inverse of the prior DLC. The execution and design is top notch but the themes and motifs underlying it are rather shallow and uninteresting. Its light-hearted (to Fallout’s degree) and the characters are entertaining so the writing remains consistent. I couldn’t help but shake that I was treading through cut content, however. There was a feeling that Big Mountain was more a museum than a laboratory which preserved all the ideas and locations which simply couldn’t make it to the final release. It doesn’t help that loading up New Vegas’ map shows a conspicuous large ‘crater’ in the northern corner which could very easily once hold the saucer remains of Big Mountain. And much like Dead Money, there’s an alternative ending depending on potential decisions to make in this space. It’s impossible to go through the area and not think “what if this were part of the original experience and it was integrated into the final act.” If, much like Dead Money, you could participate in the battle for Hoover Dam with crazed robots and lobotomites along with hologram fighters and a rust death cloud, I feel like the “gather your allies” story of New Vegas would have been all the richer.

As such, Old World Blues exists in the New Vegas world much as it does here: an optional place plucked from time and sheltered in its own little sphere waiting to be poked, prodded, probed and ultimately abandoned.

War Never Changes – Fallout and the Monomyth

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War, war never changes.

Except when it does.

It’s a bit of a slow news day so I thought I’d spend today discussing something that I love. Followers of this blog will surely know that both Derek and myself are avid fans of role-playing games. They’re a remarkable mode for gaming and storytelling, often harking back to a time of pulp science fiction and fantasy when stories were meant to tickle the sense of wonder and excitement in its readership. Derek has made comment on how early Dungeons and Dragons, as envisioned by Gary Gygax himself, was focused on fantastical scenarios and peoples that placed the player in a traditional hero’s role.

This set-up is considered rather rudimentary as time goes on, the material reaches a greater audience and tastes mature for more complex narratives. This bleeds down into story designs as the classic hero’s journey is forced to adapt and change to its creator’s desires and fans demands. Fantasy and science fiction, perhaps more than any other genres, have a long history of tapping into the primordial hero’s journey and it is no surprise that games derived from that material share prominent elements of its design.

Speaking of pulp, you can’t get more Frank Frazetta than this.

And while there may be some contention and criticism of Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” that spawned the idea of a generalized Hero’s Journey, there is some use in its structure. The journey, as envisioned in its most simplistic form, begins with an unremarkable member of a tribe receiving a call to adventure. This typically represents some dire need to the community that necessitates the hero venturing forth from his known world into the unknown often receiving advice and assistance from mentors and supernatural entities in order to descend into a transformative period characterized by trials and challenges that culminate with the death of the hero as he knowns himself only to be reborn and return with whatever plot device he was sent to retrieve in the first place.

Thus, Campbell envisioned the standard format for mythology and you can see the basic structure in many common tales from The Hobbit to the original Star Wars. For today, I want to focus on a single video game series in particular.

Fallout was created by the now defunct Interplay Entertainment and is set in a post-apocalyptic 23rd century retrofuturistic world. The visual design of the series is characterized by 1950 cold war Americana which plays upon the period’s hopefulness for the potential of technological improvements to our lives combined with the paranoia of global nuclear holocaust caused by the same technology. The first game follows the protagonist from Vault 13: underground nuclear holdouts built to shelter society from the impending fallout of global war. For generations these people have lived underground, waiting patiently for the devastation from the war to clear so they can emerge and begin rebuilding society. Unfortunately, your Vault’s water supply begins to break down and the protagonist is selected to head out into the wasteland to find a replacement before his community dies from dehydration.

Now, I never played the first game and only the first hours of the second but I did read up on their stories. As you can begin to see, Fallout 1 begins with the classic hero’s journey setup. However, one interesting thing about Science Fiction is that, more often than Fantasy, while the stories draw on the monomyth the structure and themes are more often to be criticized and undermined. In Fallout, after the player successfully discovers a replacement water chip for the Vault and saves the world from a mutant army and its master set on global domination, he is denied returning to his home. The Overseer is fearful that the journey has changed the hero too much and worries that his experiences would destabilize the community so he exiles him in order to maintain order.

I’m fairly certain all these pictures belong to the Fallout IP. I don’t know what that means in terms of ownership, however.

Fallout 2 begins much the same. Years after the first, you discover that the protagonist of the first game created a primitive village called Arroyo. At the start of the game, the village is undergoing the worst recorded drought in memory and the village elder recruits the protagonist – the direct descendant of the first game – to search out a Garden of Eden Creation Kit in order to terraform the earth and make it more bountiful. Once again we have unremarkable tribe member being called forth by fate and circumstance to venture from home to rescue his community. And much like the first game, this structure is subverted when your entire village is kidnapped while you are away. Course, this story ends a little more traditionally with the protagonist helping his people.

Likewise, when Interplay went under and Bethesda scooped up the rights to Fallout to make the third installment, we return once again to the monomyth structure. You are a child of a very prominent scientist in a Vault near Washington D.C. Fallout 3 was interesting in that the prologue was spent with you growing up in the Vault before reaching young adulthood to discover that your father has disappeared one night and the Overseer for the Vault has gone mad from this abandonment and sent security after you. Here, we see the undermining of the monomyth pretty quickly as you’re chased out from your community and you spend a majority of your time searching for your father and answers for why you were exiled.

While the Hero’s Journey concept was very influential in guiding some creator’s like George Lucas with Star Wars, there is no denying that the idea has some flaws. First amongst them is the gross generalization of so many rich and varied stories into very stripped components as to lose their flavour. But the monomyth further promotes almost anti-populist ideals as, inevitably, the hero upon return is elected into a social elite and his myth is performed as justification for the standing of the current ruling class. More than anything, the Fallout series challenges to this structure undermine the authority of the leadership. In the first game, the Overseer’s “reward” for the hero’s work and loyalty is exile. In the second game, the primary antagonist is the President of the United States who is determined to unleash a virus that will kill all mutated organisms in America to restore a level of purity that his community can rule (and they must test this virus on your people first to make sure it works). In Fallout 3, not only are you chased out by the Overseer who is paranoid that you and your father are seeking to destabilize his rule, but you also learn that all Vaults were designed as cruel social experiments wherein humanity’s survival was pushed aside in order to test scenarios like some vaults being composed of all men or the outcome of calculated system failures on community morale and cohesiveness. Almost universally, authority is portrayed as cruel, paranoid, manipulative or just downright ineffective. And this isn’t even touching on the fact that the setting itself already underwent a global nuclear war – the very definition of a worldwide failure of leadership in the modern era.

Unless I put the keywords Fallout and the monomyth right beside each other, Google gets angry.

This theme reached its height of complexity with Fallout: New Vegas. Now, players were cast as a free agent – a courier with a simple task of delivering an innocuous chip to one of the few surviving cities to not be devastated by nuclear bombardment. New Vegas is the surviving area of Las Vegas still powered by the functioning Hoover Dam and run by the excessively reclusive Mr. House. Only, things aren’t peaceful in the Mojave Desert as both the NCR and Caesar’s Legion are waging a bloody war with one another over the area and its resources. For the first time, players were no longer tied to a Vault beginning and the cruel failures of the past governing regimes. You would expect this liberation from the monomyth set-up to perhaps avoid criticism of authority. However, as you begin to explore the Mojave Desert and interact with the three major factions, you start coming across criticism of each group. NCR is seen as a bloated and corrupted bureaucratic nightmare where the prosperity and wellbeing of its citizens is pushed aside to pursue individual greed and narrow-sighted victory against their enemy at any cost. Caesar’s Legion is a brutal amalgamation of the various wasteland tribes seeking order through a very strict application of the ancient Roman army standard complete with cultural assimilation, slavery and unyielding military hierarchy. Mr. House is just plain crazy (as well as an iron handed manipulator who forces obedience to his reformations through business contracts enforced at the end of an army of unwavering robots).

I don’t think it comes as any surprise that the most popular ending is the one that eschews all factions and strives for a liberated New Vegas.

In this way, the Fallout series has used the mythical Hero’s Journey as a form of social criticism of authority. It’s a brilliant use of the format, taking the natural benefit of the early stages to introduce the players to the Fallout world by establishing a rather peaceful sense of normal (either in the Vault or a small village). Then, by natural exploration of the elements of the monomyth, the developers examine the moral authority of rulers and questions whether people in charge truly deserve the encompassing power that they wield. More often than not, it’s the smaller communities that eschew these more centralized governments that are the most idyllic. Goodsprings in New Vegas is a functioning community with no clear rulership and a pleasant and satisfied people. Rivet city in Fallout 3 follows in the same lines, relying on co-operation between its scientists and military for safety and well-being. Arroyo in Fallout 2 had an elder but its governing structure was nowhere near as striated as the Vaults.

When I first started playing the Fallout games, I thought it’s little tagline about war was cute if a little shortsighted. Surely, on its surface, war has changed as the battle being fought between Caesar’s Legion and NCR is certainly nowhere near the level as the war that brought about the end of civilization. But then, when you sit back and examine the motives for these wars, you find that it’s all the same. The smaller communities like Goodsprings and Arroyo never initiate these wars. All these conflicts are fueled by power hungry leaderships striving for more than what is necessary.

And in that sense, Ron Perlman is right: War never changes.