Fallout X: Back after those messages

[Mechalich]

Its *fine* to have a main quest thats effectively a touelr guide. But why insist on a chronological sequence of events for plot progression? Why do you HAVE to free Valentine first before you stumble on Kellogg?

It probably has a lot to do with how they used the Fort Hagan event to trip the 'Brotherhood Arrives' flag, which, once tripped, altered a whole lot of NPC behavior across the map. There's some programming burden involved in something like that and it may have been significantly easier to insure other quests were cleared first.

That's one of the tricks to open-world games, anything that changes the state of the world is extremely complicated to put in place. It's one of the reasons why those kinds of decisions in Bethesda games are more common in sub-map DLCs, which involve fewer locations, fewer NPCs, and just fewer things to manage.

[Cikomyr2]

It probably has a lot to do with how they used the Fort Hagan event to trip the 'Brotherhood Arrives' flag, which, once tripped, altered a whole lot of NPC behavior across the map. There's some programming burden involved in something like that and it may have been significantly easier to insure other quests were cleared first.

That's one of the tricks to open-world games, anything that changes the state of the world is extremely complicated to put in place. It's one of the reasons why those kinds of decisions in Bethesda games are more common in sub-map DLCs, which involve fewer locations, fewer NPCs, and just fewer things to manage.

Ill have to push back on the idea that the arrival of the brotherhood changes anything of consequence in the Commonwealth. Two locations now have armored soldiers patrolling them (police station and airport) and now Vertibirds are a somewhat-likely encounter that can trigger.

Beside a few random backdrop conversation, nothing changes at all in the Commonwealth. Nobody gives a ****. No settlement comments on the matter. It doesnt change anything for any story or any quest the fact that the Brotherhood arrives.

[veti]

I have never not known Bethesda to not be super linear. All of the quest lines are mostly extremely linear tracks run parallel. The closest examples to them not being in my memory (started with Oblivion, never played Daggerfall or Morrowind) are "select which order you want to do the local guild quests before the real plot starts" and in Skyrim the, and I think entirely accidental, sequence break of you being able to do the civil war line of your choice before the dragon kidnapping.

Morrowind was the counter-example that set my expectations high. That was a superbly nonlinear game. (It was also 20 years ago, of course.)

One indicator of how flexible a game is - that is to say, how rigidly it insists on you doing the main quest in the prescribed order - is how quickly it can be speedrun. For Morrowind, the record is well under 5 minutes, even without glitches. For Oblivion, the (glitchless) record is > 20 min, and for Skyrim it's over an hour.

Fallout 3 can be run in about 15 minutes, but for Fallout 4 the record is close to 90 minutes.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Of course, all that wraps back around to the writers using the wrong plot device for the game. You're a father/mother who saw their spouse shot and baby kidnapped. You have precisely one goal: to find and rescue your kid. That kind of takes priority over everything in any sane mind.

This immediate urgency is completely at odds with the open-world sandbox gameplay cycle of FO4, who expects you to wander off the beaten path to find the hundreds of little side-quests along the way. This at least in part is what makes the linear main questline so painful. If you figure out where Kellogg is, there is zero reason to look up some kidnapped synth, you've got to put that bastard down and rescue your son. Being forced to just feels... unnecessarily roundabout.

Contrast with New Vegas where, in your hunt for Benny (a less immediate concern, given you've already been shown to be outgunned and outmatched and it's just revenge and the chip instead of your own flesh and blood on the line), if you can get past the Cazadores north of Goodsprings, avoid the Deathclaws, skirt that town with all the raiders in it, dodge the fire geckos (or kill them, they aren't that difficult and are worth good xp), dodge the raiders north of New Vegas, you can hit up Camp McCarren and from there get to New Vegas. And the game lets you do that. It doesn't tell you that you absolutely must go back to NOVAC to pick up information about Benny, it doesn't tell you that you have to go to Primm, your robo-cowboy 'friend' just greets you and invites you in to the Lucky 38 and lets you proceed in the main quest without a care in the world about how you got there.

One of my mods, however, seems to be substantially increasing the health of some vanilla mobs up to the hundreds(plural). Don't know if this is Dead Money or not, but that's my current suspect. Kind of a pain in the ass, because it means burning through a lot more ammo than I normally would. I mean, I could just install Signature Weapon and be done with it, but I've been using that one a bit much lately and wanted something less OP.

[factotum]

I've said it before, I think the biggest problem there is that they put you on the railroad tracks pretty much right from the start--Concord is about the only place you can obviously go after leaving Sanctuary Hills, and you find a psychic there (which alone has to be the most ridiculous plot device ever, but we'll ignore it for now) who directs you to Diamond City. If you'd actually had to do some questing to get people to like you enough to direct you there, or some investigation to find out what to do, it would have balanced things out better.

[LibraryOgre]

I've said it before, I think the biggest problem there is that they put you on the railroad tracks pretty much right from the start--Concord is about the only place you can obviously go after leaving Sanctuary Hills, and you find a psychic there (which alone has to be the most ridiculous plot device ever, but we'll ignore it for now) who directs you to Diamond City. If you'd actually had to do some questing to get people to like you enough to direct you there, or some investigation to find out what to do, it would have balanced things out better.

Psychics are at least well-established in Fallout lore, dating back to Fallout 2, at least (Fallout 1 did have a fortune teller, too), so encountering one isn't unreasonable.

I've said it before... the ideal would have been that you get to Kellog almost immediately (to my mind, he's hanging around Diamond City; not "stumble on him leaving" early, but soon enough), after meeting the Minutemen and getting their schtick, and he sends you one to the Institute, where you meet Shaun, and get that mystery unraveled. You're then put to the question of who you support, Minutemen or Institute, with the later option to slip to the Brotherhood or the Railroad (who can be played alongside the Minutemen without much trouble, or alongside the Brotherhood with a little more). Main quests can still be largely identical (q.v. Morrowind's Blood Moon, where all of the Blood Moon quests were the same, just on behalf of different people, and with "get the McGuffin" v "keep them from getting the McGuffin" goals).

Doing THAT releases some of the urge to speedrun, while giving you a chance to engage with the game.

[Grim Portent]

Psychics are at least well-established in Fallout lore, dating back to Fallout 2, at least (Fallout 1 did have a fortune teller, too), so encountering one isn't unreasonable.

Wasn't the Master psychic as well? Which puts overt psychic stuff into FO1. Plus he had a few people with various forms of psychic powers in his base, which I think were supposed to be a very rare result of FEV exposure.

Pre-post edit; Did a quick check, and there was Wiggum, Gideon, Lucy and Moore. One pyrokinetic, one electrokinetic, one telepath/photokinetic and one telekinetic/photokinetic.

Despite having psychic powers they were considered failed experiments and needed psychic nullifiers to cope with their powers. Granted neither they or the master had prophecy type powers, but such powers appeared in a side character in New Vegas well before Mama Murphy was ever a thing.

[Rater202]

There's also the established existence throughout the franchise of beings that are monstrous or possess strange powers but that predates the great war and aren't government projects and so most likely are not related to rads of FEV.

And the occasionally overtly supernatural stuff. Psychics. aliens, and Moth Men can all be kinda fudged into a rational psychic context but then we get ghosts and Lovecraftian stuff.

..I'm curious about what's up with the Wendigoes in 76. It's speculated that FEV exposure causes some kind of mutation in the process of goulification but there are several wendigoes where that's not plausible and every wendigo with a confirmed human identity is known to have participated in cannibalism for some reason or another.

[DigoDragon]

..I'm curious about what's up with the Wendigoes in 76. It's speculated that FEV exposure causes some kind of mutation in the process of goulification but there are several wendigoes where that's not plausible and every wendigo with a confirmed human identity is known to have participated in cannibalism for some reason or another.

Sounds like they read up on their Native American lore. Cannibalism is what creates those creatures in all the stories I've read.

[Rater202]

Sounds like they read up on their Native American lore. Cannibalism is what creates those creatures in all the stories I've read.

Yeah, but West Virginia ain't exactly Wendigo country.

Are they implying that something supernatural is going on or is it just some unexplained mutagen?

[Grim Portent]

Why not both?

Psychics and mutation are entwined in Fallout. Cabot was given psychic powers and immortality by the Zetan artifact, the Lovecraftian entities are linked to ghouls in some fashion, the Master was granted psychic powers through FEV.

There could be a legit magical force that created some Wendigos, and a more mundane persistent mutagen that comes from them that creates more.

[Cikomyr2]

I dont mind supernatural stuff in fallout. Its a Post Apocalyptic Weird West setting. It can have alien and psychics and mutants and knights it they want.

I care about the game's story structure. And insisting on a numbered breadcrumb trail that you *have* to follow in the exact order they want under threat of just plain locking plot progression is annoying.

Why not focus on a series of storybreadcrumbs that you ***can*** stumble onto and sequence break, but they happen to point to the next in the chain as well as the previous in the chain as well, and you just need to checkmark all those crumbs for the next Plot Thing to happen.

[Spore]

Its like of Skyrim forbidden your access to the college of magic before you reached that point in the main story.

I mean Skyrim has a dragon flying overhead in the intro, but the game triggers dragon attacks only after you have spoken to the Jarl. So yes, modern Bethesda games are very much "you are intended to visit x, y and z in that order. And I get the gripes with the sentiment.

You know Dogmeat from Red Rocket station, but you need Kellogg to remember to just ask the dog to look for him? It is weird. If your quest objective were to find some of Kellogg's belongings so the dog can pick up the scent (which is still stupid because it's a dog, and not a canine navigational system, pinpointing a location of a moving target) or in the reverse having a detective doing actual detective work instead of going "well you got a dog, so let's tell it to find Kellogg", it would be swell.

Also in a not so serious tangent:
Am I the only one weirded out by the primary antagonist being called Kellogg? It is apparently a normal American name, but the first thing I am reminded of is corn flakes, and I have yet to find a way to kill Kellogg by throwing Sugar Bombs at him. Wasn't there a "scrap launcher" weapon in Fallout or am I phantasizing again?

[Triaxx]

There is. It's called the Junk Jet in Fallout 4.

[factotum]

The whole thing with the scent trail leading to Kellogg really makes no sense, yes, because a scent trail like that only lasts a few days. So we're expected to believe that, no matter how long it takes you to arrive in Diamond City, Kellogg left for Fort Hagen only a short time before you got there. Now, given that Father is deliberately intending you to kill Kellogg I suppose that can be explained by him sending X6-88 to fetch synth-Shaun when he knows you're getting close to your objective, but then that requires Father to have perfect knowledge of where you are and what you're doing at all times, which he shows no sign of having!

Mind you, it does at least say *some* good things about Bethesda's attention to detail that they still have the scent quest happen as normal even if you never met Dogmeat at Red Rocket--I think Nick Valentine just calls him with a whistle in that case.

[DigoDragon]

Yeah, but West Virginia ain't exactly Wendigo country.

Maybe not now, but after the great war many people might have resorted to cannibalism due to food scarcity.

Also in a not so serious tangent:
Am I the only one weirded out by the primary antagonist being called Kellogg?

The man was against coffee and tea because of their caffeine content, and taking away my morning beverage would be very antagonizing in my opinion. :3

[Rater202]

Maybe not now, but after the great war many people might have resorted to cannibalism due to food scarcity.

No, I mean, the Wendigo Myth is found among native peoples who are found in East Coast Canada, the Great Lakes Region of the United states and Canada, and the Great Plains reason of the United sates.

Not Appalachia.

The Moth Man and the Sheep Squatch, the two cryptids in 76 that are confirmed to predate the Great War and not be a product of FEV, Radiation, or experiments, are both native to the Region.

So if the Wendigoes are "real" Wendigos, IE, people turned into monsters by being possessed by malicious spirits after they thought desperation or depravity committed the act of cannibalism, they're in the wrong place.

The game seems to imply that the first Wendigo in Appalachia was the result of normal ghoulification combined with FEV exposure, which scans with the fact that Wendigos seem to have some accord with Feral Ghouls. He as the leader of a cannibal raider gang...

...But several other Wendigos wouldn't have been exposed to FEV. One wouldn't have been exposed to either.

All the wendigoes with confirmed human identities were known have eaten human flesh for some reason... But, you know, cannibals have been a thing for the entire franchise, sometimes even including the player character. Where ahve they been all this time if it was just cannibalism?

[Cikomyr2]

Maybe not now, but after the great war many people might have resorted to cannibalism due to food scarcity.




The man was against coffee and tea because of their caffeine content, and taking away my morning beverage would be very antagonizing in my opinion. :3

The original Kellogg was an all-around evangelist ******* who was on a moral crusade against masturbation and race mixing. So its not like casting a villain with his name does any disservice to the original.

[DigoDragon]

So if the Wendigoes are "real" Wendigos, IE, people turned into monsters by being possessed by malicious spirits after they thought desperation or depravity committed the act of cannibalism, they're in the wrong place.

Perhaps they're migratory?

I don't know if the legends specify these creatures only are found in specific places, just that they were told by people in specific places. But whatever is plaguing West Virginia is pretty close to one if it's not that. Could be an unrelated mutation that happens to look similar enough and the scans weren't written well? Or maybe an old government bio experiment that was forgotten that worked like fev? It's probably not something that'll get a satisfying explanation.

[tyckspoon]

...But several other Wendigos wouldn't have been exposed to FEV. One wouldn't have been exposed to either.

All the wendigoes with confirmed human identities were known have eaten human flesh for some reason... But, you know, cannibals have been a thing for the entire franchise, sometimes even including the player character. Where ahve they been all this time if it was just cannibalism?

It's an FEV/Magical Radiation-modified prion disease, clearly. Like Kuru or Creutzfeldt-Jakob. Wendigos haven't happened in other places because the particular strain that causes it is a regional oddity.

(NB: This is in no way actual Fallout canon or lore that I am aware of. It is offered as a somewhat tongue in cheek possible explanation that is at least not impossible to happen in the Fallout idiom.)

[Grim Portent]

There are a few mundane explanations, the simplest being a property of the people in the area that turns those who eat their flesh into wendigos. As tyckspoon says, a mutant prion disease type of thing. So anyone who eats someone in the area risks eating the mutant flesh that turns them into wendigos.

Another option is that it's something only a handful of people are genetically susceptible to, and the genes that allow the transformation also make them more likely to engage in cannibalism in various situations. So in their case it's not strictly necessary to eat human flesh to transform, just to be exposed to an unknown mutagen, but cannibalism is more likely to have been performed by someone who turned into a wendigo than normal.


Or maybe the US government found some magical stuff and brought it to Appalachia for study for potential military or mutagenic applications. Something like the lovecraftian artifacts associated with the Dunwich Borers company. Their efforts attracted the attention of... whatever the entity is behind the Obelisk, Kremvh's Tooth and the Krivbeknih and it caused some ghouls to turn into wendigos rather than normal ghouls.

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Ogre: Let's leave off discussing the real-world Kellogg; it's a tangent, and gets close to some no-nos.

[LibraryOgre]

Also recall that, by the time of the Great War, Canada was part of the United States... you might have had a fair amount of migration south as a result.

[Cikomyr2]

Also recall that, by the time of the Great War, Canada was part of the United States... you might have had a fair amount of migration south as a result.

{{Scrubbed}}

There was literally images of canadians prisoners being gunned down in the street in Fallout 1. It was a brutal and tyrannical occupation in the name of FREEDOM

[LibraryOgre]

There was literally images of canadians prisoners being gunned down in the street in Fallout 1. It was a brutal and tyrannical occupation in the name of FREEDOM

I'd forgotten about those. However, it also means that Canadians might not have moved, but been moved off resource-bearing land.

[Grim Portent]

Given what we know about the actions of the Fallout universe USA, Canadians could have been shipped to military facilities and private laboratories for experiments the same way as captured chinese combatants and chinese-americans.

If there was something about the wendigo that made it unique to the populations that believe(d) in it in real life it's not beyond the pale that it was spread around by captives being transported all over the place, or that the wendigos are all descended in some fashion from such peoples as a result of normal movement and intermarriage in the decades prior to the war.


Could also be the case that the Wendigo is just a rare form of ghoul, unique to cannibals who've turned, and it was named by someone familiar with the myth and the name stuck. Like how Yao Guai were named by chinese POWs and yet everyone calls them that despite them just being tumour-bears.

[Mechalich]

Could also be the case that the Wendigo is just a rare form of ghoul, unique to cannibals who've turned, and it was named by someone familiar with the myth and the name stuck. Like how Yaoi Guai were named by chinese POWs and yet everyone calls them that despite them just being tumour-bears.

In-universe the 'Tales from the West Virginia Hills' radio drama contains references to the Wendigos along with other cryptids in pre-war materials. It's possible the series used the term Wendigo and that name was adopted by the survivors who encountered this form of specialized cannibalism-linked ghoul.

[Spore]

Do you feel it tired world building then, that the Mirelurk is not considered a Kelpie or similar mythical creature? Or do you assume people approached this in a German fashion: "It lurks in the mires, it is a mirelurk."

And besides, while most stuff in Fallout has a science corporation as an explanation, there is still the odd reference to Lovecraftian horrors and/or straight up magic, including ghosts. But then again, there could be a link in the following interpretation of Lovecraft that fits the games' tone on that stance.

the Krivbekneh is a Cthulhu mythos reference. This is important due to the real world backstory of Lovecraft's writings.

Lovecraft enjoyed works of horror, but as an ardent atheist, he despised the supernatural elements - ghosts, spirits of the dead, etc etc. He wrote the Cthulhu mythos as his response to this - his Elder Gods are not supernatural entities - just incredibly powerful and ancient natural forces in the universe , a universe that is utterly uncaring about humanity's existence.

There is no magic in Lovecrafts world, only science so impossibly advanced, we cannot hope to comprehend it (consider the Mi-Go of Yuggoth, and their ability to transcend time, move people's consciousness to other points in time and occupy their brain, etc).

So, technically, no, even the Krivebeknih (as a reference to the Cthulhu mythos) is not magic, it's just a relic of impossibly advanced alien forces that appear evil to us, in the face of their complete disregard for human existence.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/falloutlore...lout_universe/

[Beleriphon]

Also in a not so serious tangent:
Am I the only one weirded out by the primary antagonist being called Kellogg? It is apparently a normal American name, but the first thing I am reminded of is corn flakes, and I have yet to find a way to kill Kellogg by throwing Sugar Bombs at him. Wasn't there a "scrap launcher" weapon in Fallout or am I phantasizing again?

Junk jet. And it can shoot just about anything, including boxes of cereal.

[DigoDragon]

Junk jet. And it can shoot just about anything, including boxes of cereal.

When it was the Rock-it Launcher in Fallout 3, I used to collect teddy bears for ammo. Smacked the stuffing out of those raiders. XD