#rochequest

[rad-roche]

i am so strong and so brave and didn't even scream hugely

[rad-roche]

james i'm just trying to enjoy my drink

[rad-roche]

i thought it would be fun to boot up and actually play the game, since i've been so busy on my Bit That Got Out Of Hand, and in mere seconds it went completely south

at this point, my hud started floating away and tormenting low resolution valentine

you may notice that it's his left hand that's damaged. it turned out that was a side effect of a mod i'd been using. i crafted a fix in the chemistry lab and applied it...

the good news is, the hand looks great

you may be able to see the bad news

[rad-roche]

oh NOW we're cooking with gas

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hey cass huddle up. girl's night. what the fuck are you talking about

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man the lighting in the vault is great

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i was playing fallout the other day and shot out a deathclaw's head. it exploded, but the game bugged out and it kept charging me. i went from perfectly reasonable human being playing a video game to 'WORLD'S WACKIEST SOUND EFFECTS ALBUM 3 - TRACK 15 - WOMAN SHRIEKING FOR LIFE' in two whole seconds

[rad-roche]

feel kind of bad for longfellow because he gets muscled out of his own dlc. i like longfellow, i like the cut of his ornery jib, but his job is to be 'slightly sour oldguy deadwife' and he's competing with the oldest, deadwifiest companion in the whole game, the one the game encourages you to take and has a bunch of character development wrapped up in you taking him. moment of silence for old longfellow he never had a chance

[rad-roche]

i'm making a failed romance check supercut for the benefit of my friends and this happened

[rad-roche]

i'm replaying far harbor (my opinion of it hasn't changed it's still leagues better than messing around in boston) and i'm making a point not to be so precious passing charisma checks to advance. i'm reloading saves to poke around alternative quest outcomes, that sort of thing, and it just makes me like DiMA even more. if you skip snooping on the terminal or listening in on the gang's fifth argument that day you confront him over his extremely suspicious behaviour he just shrugs if you fail the charisma check. gloria is like what's this i'm hearing about everybody on the island dying in nuclear hellfire and he looks at her like

i don't know, what ARE you hearing about everybody dying in nuclear hellfire.

[rad-roche]

i think part of the reason far harbor Hits Different is that its presentation and writing come across as a lot more confident compared to most of what you see in boston. quest resolution in the commonwealth feels, for lack of a better term, sort of 'video gamey'. airship full of extremists! christ, blow it up! underground facility full of evil scientists! christ, blow it up!

it's little things. like the conversation that recontextualizes the mariner being behind a speech check a little ways into getting to know her, compared to her outright saying 'i feel the need to reinforce the hull because i am terminally ill' out the gate. and it isn't something you can 'fix'. she confides that she's dying and all you can really do is go well, that sucks. because it does! but you're just somebody who arrived on a boat, you can't do anything about it. the fact that the island is full of struggling, miserable people and there's no way to 'beat' the Fog. you can't, it's a force of nature and it's been around a lot longer than you. all you can do is take the time to get to know, and show kindness to, the people living under it. you can get a 'good' ending where everybody plays nice, but doing so empowers a serial murderer who has no qualms with meddling in other people's lives. and even if you go okay, i think the payoff is worth it, how long is that peace going to last really? is it worth the gamble? is 'gambling' at all with this idea sick?

your protagonist, no matter who they are in the commonwealth (leader of an extremely advanced scientific facility, general, some kind of swaggering giga-chad) effectively gets 'demoted' to a gumshoe, but doing that lets them interact with a world as a citizen of it, not as a kind of writing black hole where everything has to go their way. the island sets up a bunch of circumstances that let you feel uneasy and, instead of rushing in to alleviate that fear with an affirmation or a big cool gun, sets it down on the table and makes you look at it. far harbor gives you a bunch of hard, messy questions and, crucially, doesn't answer any. why should it? life certainly doesn't

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was reminded of when i finally got pc mods up and running but i don't know what the hell i'm doing so it was all stuff like this

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i'm decorating a house and every time i go into the basement nick is blair witching me

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since i'm an artist and using cc in any game is limiting compared to 'whatever i can imagine' i made peace with the fact that ingame glori isn't going to be 1:1 or quite how i envision her. but saying that, i don't think i did a bad job! i'm especially proud of her burn scars and how textured they look. you can do really fun things with the facepaint options if you get creative

[rad-roche]

the eagle eyed among you might notice that this place seems a little radioactive