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.

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.