this-is-fallout

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FNV did this a lot. Specifically making it so that speech wasn’t the only dialogue skill check. My specific intent with this was to give the fallout 4 perks better uses, because enabling crafting is really boring. Gun nut in particular is such an inspired name for a perk that I feel like it shouldn’t be tossed.

I envisioned the perk to be nerdy and academic, there are other perks in the series that allow players to be threatening or scary. I think this perk would get you into as much trouble as it got you out of because talking about guns can be perceived as something really threatening. Bringing it up without being friendly or having high enough charisma - or taking some of the more threatening perks - will start fights.

Gun nut should have been a dialogue perk. Like, a lot of people will react differently to being asked about their guns, and talking about guns in the wastes is pretty useful, but it’s something that all sorts of people would react poorly to.

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I will largely always give the east coast supermutants the benefit of the doubt because I don’t agree with how Bethesda treats them so a lot of this is my own read of the situation.

We know that the Boston supermutants are the direct result of the institute. That process is traumatic and violent in a number of ways that are just left unexplored by Bethesda, but the most important fact about them is that they are abandoned after the tests are complete. Sure they are left in specific locations but as other blogs have suggested that’s likely because teleportation follows some inverse square law. The fact that there are super mutants at the MIT building is not because they are working for the institute but that they are just being left there.

This is also why I find the supermutant attack on diamond city so interesting, because there is the interpretation that the supermutants attacked diamond city, but the representation of supermutants in fallout 3/4 echos so many 1950s ideas about race that I can’t take it seriously. Supermutants are victims of crime against humanity. I think it’s far more likely that they learned to be at least defensive around humans because humans don’t react well to big green people.

This is also why I think a lot of supermutants occupy heavily radiated areas that aren’t the glowing sea. A lot of humans don’t want to salvage at scrap yards because radiation is one of those threats that are dangerous sure, but also really scary.

I’m slowly realizing that the Bethesda East coast fallout games actually do fully explain why their settings are still mostly anarchy. You’ve just gotta dig and do some thinking. Like I don’t think that’s me giving Bethesda too much credit. I think the mistakes and ideas of the past holding back the present and the impossibility of balancing the old ideas with the new ones is an ongoing underlying theme in a lot of their work and I still don’t like how dirty the settled areas are but the wider problems outside of the few safe towns are fairly well explained in a way that I think fallout 3 and 4 haters often overlook. In ways that I’ve overlooked before I actually took the time to talk to people in game and look at the full picture. It’s like. Almost subtlety? I mean it’s not subtle at all not even a little bit because this is Bethesda we’re talking about but it’s a Bethesda attempt at being subtle.

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Honestly I could see a fallout vault(s) where somebody at vault tec wanted to prove communism wouldn’t work by putting it and a capitalist vault in the same connected system with the same amount of resources only the overseer of the capitalist vault is tasked to sabotage the communist vault at every opportunity metatextually showing how communism historically only fails due to capitalist interference and how that even the “experiment” was rigged due to capitalisms hostility to cooperation. Only Todd Howard would never want to do actually anti capitalist messaging in a fallout game

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Gun nut should have been a dialogue perk. Like, a lot of people will react differently to being asked about their guns, and talking about guns in the wastes is pretty useful, but it’s something that all sorts of people would react poorly to.

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One part of north eastern culture that fo4 really misses is the “he might be an asshole but that’s my asshole” and “aye only I get to kill him” and I think that it’s not that the commonwealth would like defend the institute - they wouldn’t - But I think the minute men would tell the brotherhood to fuck off with guns.

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I think that bunker hill is a really cool idea, but I think it should start in shambles. I like to think that bunker hill didn’t just form at the bunker hill for no reason. Like I understand it’s important that it’s a signal, but you don’t just form at a monument like that because of the monument.

I think that reason is that it was a central location surrounded by a lot of large settlements that was close enough to the water for that to protect them from one side, but not enough for mirelurks to be a problem. Before you start you had 4 large farms and a major settlement to the north diamond city to the west good neighbor university point and Quincy all to the south. There are probably more that I’m forgetting.

And I think they are in a sore spot right now because everything but diamond city is on fire and the mutants are doing their level best to remedy that situation. And the barely any farm is doing enough while dealing with raiders to give bunker hill nearly enough food to trade. This is why I think that every settlement had to grow food.

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But it’s also what the core idea of the game is about. It’s what the minute men believe that we are stronger together. And having merchants that can also be our friends and have a much more tangible connection with the play feeds into that.

I think that corporate stores in America distance Americans from groceries as a place of community. Trade is communal. Trust means that trade doesn’t have to be for hard coin and sometimes currency is just as much what you do for the other as it is what you are willing to pay for it. “Value” isn’t something that you can capture with a number.

One element that I would love to see in fallout is dynamic relationships. Like sure this is definitely something that can or should be limited to select characters, but like. I have personally built really good relationships with several store owners. Real “I know a guy energy” and I think that fallout would benefit a lot from introducing the ability for venders to have personalities and preferences. And then doing things for them builds a relationship with them.

Like one of the venders in diamond city - Solomon chemicare - has this one quest you can do where you have to go out and acquire some ferns for his chems. This quest leads you to a small flooded town with several dead bounty hunters who had the misfortune of running into ghouls trying to fufill Solomon’s order. Solomon will reward you pretty well for doing this quest, but I want more. This quest should create the beginning of a relationship between him and the player where he can rely on us to get something while he can get us chems.

Like in real life if you have a good relationship with your grocer you ask for specific items or if they can save a specific part of an item.

[this-is-fallout]

One element that I would love to see in fallout is dynamic relationships. Like sure this is definitely something that can or should be limited to select characters, but like. I have personally built really good relationships with several store owners. Real “I know a guy energy” and I think that fallout would benefit a lot from introducing the ability for venders to have personalities and preferences. And then doing things for them builds a relationship with them.

Like one of the venders in diamond city - Solomon chemicare - has this one quest you can do where you have to go out and acquire some ferns for his chems. This quest leads you to a small flooded town with several dead bounty hunters who had the misfortune of running into ghouls trying to fufill Solomon’s order. Solomon will reward you pretty well for doing this quest, but I want more. This quest should create the beginning of a relationship between him and the player where he can rely on us to get something while he can get us chems.

Like in real life if you have a good relationship with your grocer you ask for specific items or if they can save a specific part of an item.

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I have a difficult time figuring out why people hate the railroad in fallout 4 so much

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Looking up what Danse Fallout 4 likes because I’m trying to get in his power armor in this run and apparently he likes violence.

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If you wanna get red string cork board conspiracy theory about the Fallout universe how about the fact that the song Take Me Home, Country Roads exists in that universe apparently.

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I’m slowly realizing that the Bethesda East coast fallout games actually do fully explain why their settings are still mostly anarchy. You’ve just gotta dig and do some thinking. Like I don’t think that’s me giving Bethesda too much credit. I think the mistakes and ideas of the past holding back the present and the impossibility of balancing the old ideas with the new ones is an ongoing underlying theme in a lot of their work and I still don’t like how dirty the settled areas are but the wider problems outside of the few safe towns are fairly well explained in a way that I think fallout 3 and 4 haters often overlook. In ways that I’ve overlooked before I actually took the time to talk to people in game and look at the full picture. It’s like. Almost subtlety? I mean it’s not subtle at all not even a little bit because this is Bethesda we’re talking about but it’s a Bethesda attempt at being subtle.

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It’s fucked that fallout 4 didn’t have a scene where you have to ride from Quincy to concord saying “the gunners are coming” or “the brotherhood is coming”

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I think the thing with Bethesda games that make me frustrated in a way that I don’t know how to describe, is the way that they have a time system that you can’t interact with any more than waiting.

Like, in the elderscolls series, they have a whole bundle of months, but nothing changes between them. Not the weather, not what NPCs say to you, and what things are intractable. I have thousands of hours in these games and i still can’t tell you the months or the eras or any of it l, because it doesn’t matter and that disappoints me.

In fallout 4, Boston, has some pretty intense weather and this should likewise be represented in game. Even without the snow and the cold in winter and late spring, rad storms that blow up from the glowing sea feel like some random number generator wished them into existence instead of a actual weather pattern, that you could see the storm front approach. I mean it’s a storm that showers you in rads, you’d think it would be something people would plan around. Hell, they would have weather stations. Sure that would take people, but diamond city would have the means and the motivation to predict and forecast storms. Same with good neighbor and just about any settlement worth their weight in salt.

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Isn’t it kind of weird how in fallout 4 all the “locations are super close to each other?

Like, finch farm is literally not even a five minute walk between from both, some super fucked up raiders and a deployment of gunners and they make no comment about it. Or the fact that there are three <technically two> farms that might as well be connected together for a super farm but aren’t. I’d understand if there was a greater distance between the two, but it’s literally right there.

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The minute men don’t really make sense in their story. Like, they are basically like, “hey we should form separate militias that we can call on to help defend our homes. And then when they fall all of the militias that formed just like disband? That’s not how they work Like yeah you can stop coming to the aid of a near by settlement, but you still have to protect your home?

In the larger settlements, that would probably be like three or four companies worth of men, and given the population density of the surrounding areas, even smaller settlements having a single company would mean that the player would have run into a lot of former minutemen. I just don’t buy the idea that the militia that formed the backbone of the minute men just disappear.