Dreams

Ozrat

Ozrat

Antediluvian as Feck
Orderite
I was thinking about Fallout 2 and those dreams you would get of your favorite Arroyo druggie. Maybe they could be expanded. Yes, I know that this isn't really game-play itself and probably purely visual eyecandy, so don't be overly-critical here.

What if there were more dream sequences throughout Fallout 3? And not just standard ones either. Some dreams could depend on where you are, what your karma is, and what you've done lately. Perhaps even some rare and entertaining dreams. Suppose, for instance, you went to Vault City and did all of the First Citizens chores and odd-jobs perfectly. But then when you ask her for more than a day pass, she bans you from Vault City. The character/player would be mad for a while and just live with it. About a week later in gametime you get a dream of smacking her up. It would be a form of reward for not just reloading or doing something perfectly. I think it adds a little more depth to your character's actions.

Another idea is to make some dreams interactive. Perhaps you'd be dreaming about finding some dinosaurs running around in a vault or something odd like that. You could control your character and (s)he'd have dream-like qualities like invincibility or only using 1 AP per shot. They'd be something like the special random encouners. This way you could still have all of the magic stuff like fire-breathing geckos in the game by putting them in the dreams and keeping the settings of the game as pure as possible.

So what do you think? Yes, or should I keep dreaming?
 
I keep having this horrible dream that Interpay is making a FPS shooter out of Fallout. Some nights I wake up all sweaty and my shorts are all sticky. In the morning I'm glad that its just a dream.
 
Hmm, I think your body is malfunctioning. My shorts are usually sticky after I wake up from a great dream! Are you familiar with the concept of nocturnal emisions?

Back to seriousness. Anybody have any other comments?
 
dreams are a good way to develop the story.
interacktiv dreames are a god tol to, can be enoying some times.
(i just got max oain and the dream/ilusions levels was dam enoying)
and in a 2d game like fallout it can bue hard to make dreams look "dreamy" enoght
(so lets make fallout3 a 3d shoter(that was a joke dont ban me))
 
Cool Idea!

Awesome idea!

Then, FO3 could not only claim to be a game involving a nuclear wasteland, vacuum tubes and super mutants, but a game including a nuclear wasteland, vacuum tubes, super mutants and dreams where you slay rampaging dinosaurs in a Vault! It's brilliant! As long as Interplay doesn't somehow add it to a FO console game. :)
 
I thought the dreams in Fallout 2 were farfetched and it seems that its the general opinion that it didn't truly fit into the setting. I mean Fallout 1 had psychic powers but that was more of a 50's pulp science fiction vibe. But a tribal shaman sending dreams as a reminder of how the village is dying was farfetched. In Fallout 1, Vault 13 simply sent you a message via PipBoy. Sure, the tribal village probably didn't something as hightech but you get the felling that the developers hodgepodged the entire dream thing.

As for dreams as a reward, I dunno. That might seem like an Easter Egg with your example with the First Citizen in Vault City. There would be little relevance otherwise if your character just fell asleep one day and take you through a cinematic in which he goes on a mindless rampage.
 
They don't really fit into the sci-fi era of depiction and don't really seem to be the style. As used in Fo2, they were somewhat passable, leaning a bit on "not really". To use them again would make psychic abilities far too common, as if FOT didn't piss on that enough with the Beastlords shit.

There's a reason why The Master and others had such abilities, and when you make things far too common, it makes their impact quite a bit more watered down.

For example, the .223 pistol. There was ONE in Fallout 1, because it was a one-of-a-kind item. There were countless instances of the same weapon in Fo2, along with many other "tweaked" and derived guns that removed the impact of those the setting relied on.
 
I agree that the idea is quite good, but the dreams thing doesn't really fit in fallout IMO.
 
I think a lot of this depends on which way you want to go.

If you want to stick this towards more hard core post-apocalytic sci-fi, then ok the dreams can probably go unless you have some sci-fi basis.

But on the other hand if you want more or of a horror feel to this (and I am not talking supernatural horror- but just creeping, weird, disturbing horror) than I think the dreams work, but need to be reconsidered. They could add a certain surreal aspect to the game.

I agree with Gunslinger. Having dreams sent by dream wave is kind of cheesy.

However, I am not sure if I agree with Rosh either. 1950s was a time in which people were thinking about things like mind control, mental telepathy, ESP, dream interpretation. The Forbidden Planet-a Sci-Fi film that was kind of pulpy, dealt with a man who created a monster from "the ID" and had nightmares while the creature went out and killed his colleagues and then the astronauts. If you go even further back to Weird Tales pulps you will probably find stories about dreams. Lovecraft for instance, but other writers as well. To take another great Sci-Fi flick, Invasion of the Body Snatchers- the aliens took over in your dreams.

I also think this could combine with the narcotics found in Fallout. Remember the 1950s is also a time where people were becoming involved with, and concerned with drugs. Reefer madness and the mind altering affects of drugs played an interesting role in the conservatism of the time, especially as artists were beginning to experiment. Not sure, but it might have been the 1960s where the CIA was supposedly experiement with LSD.

I am not sure, but I think if done right, and I don't think FO2 was done right, dream sequences could be very interesting and could figure into the horror side of the Fallout Universe very nicely.
 
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