True, but I would say there are certain advantages to not being professionals too. You don't have to sell out to please a publisher, you don't have to release an unfinished game b/c you're trying to get it out before Christmas, theres no budget constraints, and minor errors or outdated graphics are more forgivable. That said, in order for the project to stand out, it'd have to have some semblence of professionalism, which I think is possible with the right people in charge. (which is the hard part)
There are certainly advantages to amateurism, it just makes things take longer.
I think our main point of disagreement has to do with whether we assume that the main character is motivated by some sort of moral principles. Using Fallout 2 as an example, the whole 'save the people' thing works if the character, as most people would do, cares about the village he grew up in. But theres also the possibility too that once he steps out of the village, starts making some money, becomes a made man et cetera, he stops caring. Would he, at that point go through all that trouble to sneak onto the oil rig? Remember, he didn't know that the Enclave was out to exterminate everyone. On the other hand, I agree that the guy could use a little more urgency for his main quest.
The point is is that it's easy to find an incentive for evil people: money. It's hard to find an incentive for good people, so you need something like that.
Similarly, your example would assume that the character would go out of his way to help people he didn't know. As this game needs a beginning and an end (but not the same end results), it also needs different incentives for different types of characters to do the "main quest." Ok, taking my story example, the selfish, powerhungry, adventurous, enterprising characters have enough reason to find the government installation. As you point out, I'm a little weak on the reasons why an altruistic character would go out of his way to find it. It's hard to give the character a blank slate, but have him care about something enough to risk his life for it.
The altruistic character wouldn't need to go out of his way: it's the point of being altruistic. But you need to, at the very least, give incentives to good people as well.
Someone mentioned on another forum (SSE) that the two things you should need to know when starting out are: 1) why should I care? 2) why don't I know anything? The first point I'll get to later, but the second point is important as well. You shouldn't know people in NCR, The Hub, etc., b/c that is up to the player to explore. So we'd have to assume he'd have either come from afar, or been stuck in one place for his whole life. The downside is, ironically, that both involve restricting his background. We could still give him a blank state but have him in a certain situation before he finds the vault dweller corpse. (eg shovelling brahmin crap or stuck in another shitty job) to provide background and some motivation. We wouldn't make any assumptions about how he got there, other than he's a nobody and that he doesn't know the surrounding area too well.
Why? It's easy to give him a blank slate: You don't mention his history, but let the player make it up.
You just have the player encounter whatever it is he encounters, and then simply don't mention why he was there in the first place: there's no reason to know.
My problem is giving the person any kind of background, even just a situation. Leave him free to do whatever he(or she) wants, and to decide whatever his(or her) background is for him(or her)self.
I think again the problem goes back to the character's morality. He might not be the type to shun nukes on principle. It doesn't take living in a post-apocalyptic world to realize that 'using nukes is bad,' but you have to realize, people want to be bad too. I mean, the leaders of the US and China in the Fallout world both knew what would happen if they started a nuclear war, but they did it anyway. Why? Because they didn't want to give in to the other side. Similarly the character could have a powerful enemy- and he would face to decision to take them out w/ a press of the button, or on the other hand, realize the implications of what he was doing. (side note, if he could control the bombers, I would assume he could nuke one map location w/o taking out the whole world)
Again: nukes will have no leverage, and no point. They won't even be a danger. They won't be a danger because noone either knows some fool might drop a bomb on them, and if they do know, they will attack you, because they have nothing to lose anyway(it's the problem with hostage holding: once you get what you want, there's no reason why you wouldn't ask for more).
Furthermore, it'd be empty and simply too standard. The evil character might nuke some group, and the good character might dismantle them. Personally, I think that there are much more satisfying scenarios, and scenarios where the end-game actually revolves around an enemy, instead of an item of power.
Something I think is worth exploring is that the more powerful you become, the less you have to rely on society, and it distances you from it. It's like, "I don't care anymore. I'll nuke my only real enemy, and walk off in my power armor and new technology and do whatever the hell I want." Who knows what some of us would do if society degenerated, and there were no legal consequences for anything we did.
You already had that in FO1 and 2, you could simply kill everyone in the wastes and not care. I did that once, just to see how far I'd get. Easy enough. There's no real reason to take it to a higher level.
But ok, if you don't want to go that direction, I'll try to come up with a different scenario with personal incentives. It'll still involve nukes (it is Fallout after all...) So say you find the Pipboy off the dead guy and you see the commercial for the military base. But you also see a datadisk showing some sort of malfunction in the automated bomber system, and theres a countdown to California getting nuked. So you're motivated to 1) get out of the way 2) save the 'world' 3) Become powerful by finding technology. I still think you should be able to choose what to do w/ the nukes at the end (i originally wanted it to be a surprise, so i dont think it works so well in this scenario), but if you really have a problem with the nuke idea in general, lets think of something else- maybe involving FEV?
Nukes never were prominent in Fallout, in Fallout 1 there's only one nuke in the entire game, and all you can do with it is set it off to kill the Master. It would be very Fallou without nukes, it's the setting afterall, not the items. Having left-over nukes would also be a bit silly, because:
As established in another thread, rockets wouldn't have been used, but bombers.
All of the nukes will have been used already.
Defining a clear enemy is needed, but don't bring ir out in public as an enemy. Remeber FO1, you didn't know about the Master until you actually met him. YOu wouldn't know about the evil mutant group as the enemy through most of the game anyway.
Having a main endgame enemy could be necessary, but he needs to be hidden and, moreover, there needs to be something else why you're actually doing things.
However, it would be still nice to see how some of their attitudes change when you become more powerful, or they find out what you're after.
Attitudes should change, yes.
However, they shouldn't find out what you're after. For instance, you could try to find tha vault(or whatever) to loot it, or maybe to save the people. Things like that change attitudes.
Finally, it still wouldn't be Fallout if we didn't have some sort of theme based on humanity's self destructive behavior. It would have to be different from the first two's for originality sake. I've said that I'd like some sort of society vs individual thing, this time putting the choice of destructive behavior in the player's hands, but given the change in plot, I'm not sure how that would work anymore. What are some other underlying themes to explore?
Well, underlying themes can be easily put in. Frankly, I don't really see the need to start focusing one, neither Fallout 2 or 1 focused on a single thing, they just went on, and took whatever was fealt to be appropriate. So you had xenophobia in one town, drugs in another, sex in another etc. There isn't really a need for an underlying theme, in my opinion.
With that being said, the individual versus society thing is a bit...redundant. That automatically happens in any game where you control a person. This happens because there is always something greater you're fighting against, and whatever this greater thing is, it will be you against that greater thing. Against greater things, even, since you will find such things in every place(criminal groups, for instance).
Now for my revised proposal:
The player is travelling to a place(the starting place), when he accidentally stumbles across a dead body. The dead body of a vault dweller who died of dehydration. You find a PIPboy, yet you have no clue on how to operate it. THat's beyond your knowledge at that point.
Note that no explanation whatsoever is given as to why the player is there and what his background is-there's no need to explain such things.
So, you're first "task" is to find out how the hell that thing you just find works. YOu go to the nearest town, and there could be someone(somehow) who knows how it works. There's your game entry point.
Then, when you find out how it works, you get a Fallout style intro movie: You get someone explaining that they're in trouble, that the one who you found dead was sent out to save them(let's make it a vault, for old time's sake. Just not one with a shortage in water, but some kind of other problem...you don't know yet.) They also mention a reward.
There's the incentive. The good character will want to save them, the evil character will want to kill the lot of them and take whatever they have.
When you finally find the vault, you'l have explored the wastes, possibly made some friends and enemies, and encountered some of the major groups. When you find the vault, it's empty.
Wild goose chase follows, and you encounter the real enemy(apart from all the smaller enemies you've been facing).
The enemy being another vault's dwellers, who were part of a rather cruel social experiment: They were exposed to small amounts of radiation during their life in the vault(through food, ventilation etc.), and they have been seriously deformed because of it. This makes them want to flee from their own vault, and to do so, they went to another vault, the vault that you just found completely empty.
Next twist in the tale: THe group of vault dwellers is split over whether they want to go inhabit the vault they just raided, or not. And they're also split over whether or not they should let the previous dwellers of the raided vault live on in that vault, or not.
This puts the player in a position to choose things, or just loot the whole goddamned empty vault(if that's what you came for).
This could even lead to a bit of a power trip with you ending up as the master of whatever group you're supporting.
Comment on that, then.....
.............im not meaning it would be a great fallout-seqel or sumpin' but it would be a great game the title coul've been the khans not fallout just so its clear that i dont think there will EVER be made a game as great as fallout
I didn't realise that people could be so stupid and actually rise to the top of any organisation.
) I would like it a lot better. But give some feedback.