Fallout 3 QA guy on subject of "200 years later"

[Per]

Re: To BN and Per

My point isn't that these were flawed quests. My point is that a brief summary can make any quest sound silly.

You missed this. As for the well quest, for Feargus the not-so-clever the well being "broken" might just mean a rope had got tangled. But anyway, it was obvious this was not something sai invited us to discuss specifically.

 

[sai | GLYPH]

A bunch of people had pointed out that the world of Fallout 3 in various aspects (not all) looks and acts as if the war was just a few months or years back, not 200 years back.

Does anyone have a link to the description by any chance? I feel kind of lost without it, and possibly wrong. I don't really want to continue down on tangents that may be completely unjustified due to my lack of knowledge.

And just so we're on the same page.

"the original has silly quests too" -- The original has silly quests if they're presented with little to no information aside from the essential mechanics of it, such as 'the village well is broken, and you fix it'. Beyond that there are some silly things, but that's no reason to accept without consideration new silly things.

"you don't know what it's going to be like" -- I feel like this statement is used in a black/white context, as if it's an underlying principle with which to argue. I disagree with this usage of it. I think in some cases it might be warranted to stand back and leave something alone. In some cases, I think some things may warrant more scrutiny. In this market case, I don't feel like the summary I was given is suggestive enough of a "goin down to the market to fetch some goods" vibe to really warrant the assumption that that is what it is. Then again, I haven't actually read the summary...so... maybe I should shut up.

"don't look for explanations, it spoils the fun" -- Just a horrible way to (not) think.

Right, that's one quest description out of infinitely many possible ones where this point of criticism would not be applicable. It does not in any way mean it was wrong to bring it up in the first place.

I think, when a question becomes part of a point, it becomes an assumption. Then, treating the argument as though it's an assumption, while calling it mere questioning - presents itself dishonestly. Ofcourse, I missed all the disclaimers so... it wasn't really dishonest at all - I just read it wrong.

To me... it seems like an issue we'll never match up on. I think we differ fundamentally when considering...
- How much does omission suggest lack of consideration?
- Where is the line between question and assumption?

I don't really know about Letterman, but I don't think that would have warranted geek points?

I figured it wasn't that geeky, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway. Letterman is somewhat famous for his Top Ten List gimmick.

Who said it was the only source of water? How can you know it didn't break recently and the person responsible for conservation wasn't around? Or even better, almost anyone could do it but someone was smart enough to use you do to the work.

Thankyou for showing that assumptions/questions go in either direction. Couldn't have done it better myself. I did not mean to be biased. It's just that the direction you've taken here was ancillary to the point of taking a proven and solid quest and deducing it to a silly sounding summary similar to that of what we've been presented regarding the super market quest.

As for the questions you follow up with in response to mine. I know the answers to my questions. I was asking them as if all the information I had was, "If you have enough mechanical skill, you can repair a broken well in Arroyo". Better yet, "If you have enough mechanical skill, you can repair THE broken well in Arroyo". And again you've shown that the questions can point in either direction.

It's nothing as far-fetched as Bethesda's quest (I wouldn't be surprised if they altered it after reading NMA)

What about this market quest suggests so heavily that the item there was the original stock from 200 years ago? This is what I mean about questions vs assumptions, cause when I read this statement right here, I feel like something is being assumed, not questioned. (Not to hold Per and BN accountable for Goral... just trying to explain where I'm coming from)

What's wrong with that quest? (Actually it's one of my favorite ones).

Nothing, and that was my point.

I really need to read this description from it's source. There's got to be something I'm missing.

EDIT:

You missed this. As for the well quest, for Feargus the not-so-clever the well being "broken" might just mean a rope had got tangled.

To assume this from, "If you have enough mechanical skill, you can repair the broken well in Arroyo," is a pretty decent leap from what is given.

I will give you that the market quest as I've heard of it certainly evokes a sense of shopping/scavenging. And it certainly assumes less to take it that way. So there's another issue: how much should an assumption run beyond what is given, and is that a means to judge the relative validity of multiple assumptions? I'd say... not much and yes for the most part.

 

[TheWesDude]

It's not far fetched that the Enclave survivors of Navarro made it to Washington , it's not far fetched that the Super Mutants made it to the East or the ghouls. It's not a problem that the Brotherhood made it to DC, but it is far fetched to run into all four groups across the country, even if they aren't the same mutants or the same ghouls etc.

no, it is far fetched considering the situation.

not only did a few people get enough hardware and get enough recruits to move 200 miles, but they did all that AND have a sizeable working infrastructure.

thats the problem.

'If you have enough mechanical skill, you can repair a broken well in Arroyo.'

How has Arroyo survived with a broken well?
Why has no one else fixed it?
If no one knew how to fix it, how did you - who taught you?

if you know about mechanics and how they work, looking at something like a pump is not hard to find out why it broke. thats why the "if you have enough skill" qualifier. a pump is a simple machine, if nobody else in the town has the knowladge or the guy who maintains it is busy fixing something more important because they have alternate means of getting water and this is just more convienent method...

To assume this from, "If you have enough mechanical skill, you can repair the broken well in Arroyo," is a pretty decent leap from what is given.

I will give you that the market quest as I've heard of it certainly evokes a sense of shopping/scavenging. And it certainly assumes less to take it that way. So there's another issue: how much should an assumption run beyond what is given, and is that a means to judge the relative validity of multiple assumptions? I'd say... not much and yes for the most part.

part of the problem is we have not seen a lot (any) of the AWESHOME!!!11!1!1!!!!111ONE! dialogue.

and juding by the comments some of the reviewers, some say its great, some say its just like oblivious's dialogue but rather than 1 liners, its now 2! liners. cant get a whole lot of description/detail out of 1-2 lines of text.

 

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

no, it is far fetched considering the situation.

not only did a few people get enough hardware and get enough recruits to move 200 miles, but they did all that AND have a sizeable working infrastructure.

thats the problem.

It's not far fetched for any one of the said groups to move across the continent, set up a base and expand within the 30 years between games. It wouldn't be easy but it wouldn't be impossible either. In the case of the Enclave, they could have a range of new recruits from 20-30 years old just from enforced/artificial procreation, plus they'd have knowledge of pre-war caches across the country. And we don't know for sure how big an operation they do have in the capital, how much of it is robotic for instance.

It's not hard to write a believable scenario for any of the groups to be there, but when you've got more than one group transported across the country it starts to stretch any credibility to the breaking point. When you have Vaults citizens, Brotherhood Paladins, Raiders, Ghouls, Super Mutants and the Enclave appearing on the East coast then credibility has snapped and bounced back and stung you in the face.

Raiders could of been called something different, to emphasize that we are in a different area with it's own post war history and society. If the super mutants turn out to be not related to the Master's army why not make them totally different (they're halfway there in looks deptartment for a start). Vaults provided a continuity between the games, but did we have to start in one or leave it alone on a quest again?

 

[sai | GLYPH]

if you know about mechanics and how they work, looking at something like a pump is not hard to find out why it broke. thats why the "if you have enough skill" qualifier. a pump is a simple machine, if nobody else in the town has the knowladge or the guy who maintains it is busy fixing something more important because they have alternate means of getting water and this is just more convienent method...

Maybe I suck at communicating. Ok... Let's make a hypothetical situation here. Meet Billy. Billy hasn't played any of the Fallout games, but has some decent knowledge of what an rpg is, based on his playing I don't know... Planescape. Now meet Johnny. He's also never played fallout, but he's read about it.

Instance 1:
Johnny says to Billy, "There's this quest in Fallout 3 where you're told to go get some medicine from a supermarket".

Billy asks...
Are they sending me shopping?
How is the medicine still there after all this time?

Johnny says...
Maybe the market is like a stronghold for the raiders or something, and the item was put there recently.

Instance 2:
Johnny says to Billy, "In fallout 2, if you have enough repair skill, you can fix the well in the village of Arroyo."

Billy asks...
How has Arroyo survived with a broken well?
Why has no one else fixed it?
If no one knew how to fix it, how did you - who taught you?

Johnny says...
Maybe the quest giver is an idiot and just can't untangle a simple knot in the rope.

Conclusion:
Lack of information goes both ways. Both answers and questions assume information. In the case of answers it is explicit. In the case of questions it is implicit - the potential of a problem must be identified in order to ask a directed question.

I'm sorry I didn't provide the positive half to the well quest analysis or the negative half of the market quest analysis. I figured the well quest it spoke for itself in a forum where everyone's already played it, and where everyone already knows that the quest is solid. And I figured the doubts concerning the market quest were well known at this point, assuming everyone here's read the thread. So... I thought, to keep it concise, I would just place doubt on something already known, and build up something unknown. That way I'd get both dynamics for half the price in text. So much for that. Hopefully the above rewrite is sufficient in this respect now?

part of the problem is we have not seen a lot (any) of the AWESHOME!!!11!1!1!!!!111ONE! dialogue.

Like I said, lack of information - but that's not why I'm tending to doubt there's good dialogue or solid quests. It's that what we've been given suggests there's probably equal (or little to no) effort put into the dialogue or quest depth as everything else.

and juding by the comments some of the reviewers, some say its great, some say its just like oblivious's dialogue but rather than 1 liners, its now 2! liners. cant get a whole lot of description/detail out of 1-2 lines of text.

Is that expressive writing or are the dialogue trees really only 2 lines deep?

In any case. Developing a quest depends on more than just what people say to you. Information can be relayed in other ways (no compass jokes please). And... smaller quests usually didn't have much more than 1 or 2 lines of dialogue dedicated to them.

 

[Goral]

@ sai|glyph
You were the one picking on perfectly valid quests and that and only that triggered my response. You could have just written that these are all speculations for now but nooo... It's better to pick on good quests from previous games to make Fallout 3 look better.
The first quest you mentioned was the most primitive in the whole Fallout 2 (it's amazing that it did boost as well as karma and your experience) so there's not much to pick on, repair the well in primitive village - that's it. The second is perfectly valid and it didn't prove your point in any way. You just like bickering. My point is, your point was clear but the examples you provided didn't fit at all to your assumptions.

 

[sarfa]

No one was picking on anything Goral.

sai|glyph was simply poiting out that any quest, no matter how well written, or well executed can be summarised and made to look crap and silly. He did this by choosing a quest we all know and summarising it like that. The overall point being that so far all we know about this medicine in the supermarket quest is a brief summary- the kind of brief summary sai|glyph gave for the Broken Well quest to make it sound crap.

For all we know it may be the best quest ever written for any computer game, with twists, turns and dancing chimpanzees. Hence it's unfair at this point to say it's utterly crap. All we have is a brief summary, and any quest, no matter how well written can be sold short by such a summary.

I'm sure that sai|glyph had no intention of "picking on good quests from previous games to make Fallout 3 look better".

This sort of shit really annoys me, the people who jump up and down on half facts we know about Fallout 3 when there are so many better reasons to be annoyed. It's like trying to hang someone with 30cm of rope and a door when you've got ten feet of rope and a well built gallows in the corner of the room. There's no point blaming Bethesda and saying they suck because they might have gotten something wrong (But plenty point in discussing such instances) when we can complain about the stuff we know they've gotten wrong.

 

[Thorgrimm]

plus in the 50s the rage was nuclear winter if WW3 happened. nuclear winter is only possible with lots and lots of ground blasts.

Actually, up until the advent of Carl Sagan's entry into the nuclear war debate in the 80's it was believed that a nuclear war would elevate the temperatures and turn everything into a desert.



Cheers, Thorgrimm

 

[Per]

For all we know it may be the best quest ever written for any computer game, with twists, turns and dancing chimpanzees. Hence it's unfair at this point to say it's utterly crap. All we have is a brief summary, and any quest, no matter how well written can be sold short by such a summary.

And I'd like to say (again and again) that all this is essentially off topic. It doesn't matter if the quest was misrepresented or not. If it will set people's minds at ease we could all agree there's no way in hell that Bethesda could ever design a bad quest in any game. The original point is unaffected. You can all stop tripping over each other shouting that it's hypothetical. I knew from page one because I was the first to say it.

 

[whirlingdervish]

The made better argument kind of works until you apply it to things we actually know about the backstory and the game world.

Even IF the cars were made "better" they still disintegrate in a nuclear reaction when you shoot them with small arms fire.

This has been estalished.

What hasn't been established is how those volatile machines managed to survive THE FRIGGIN A-BOMBS, in order to be there to be shot by a 19 year old player character, 200 years after the bombs went off.

 

[sarfa]

For all we know it may be the best quest ever written for any computer game, with twists, turns and dancing chimpanzees. Hence it's unfair at this point to say it's utterly crap. All we have is a brief summary, and any quest, no matter how well written can be sold short by such a summary.

And I'd like to say (again and again) that all this is essentially off topic. It doesn't matter if the quest was misrepresented or not. If it will set people's minds at ease we could all agree there's no way in hell that Bethesda could ever design a bad quest in any game. The original point is unaffected. You can all stop tripping over each other shouting that it's hypothetical. I knew from page one because I was the first to say it.

Yes, but not everyone else who jumped on the "Lets criticise this quest based on hypothesis withoute evidence" bandwagon seemed to notice that.

No one in their right mind with experience of Bethesda games would claim that Bethesda could never design a bad quest. The majority of quests they design are really shit.

Whirlingdervish, if the cars were that volatile and have been since they were designed, I'd be asking what official was bribed for the vehicle to comply with health and safety conditions. Presumably the reason there so volatile is due to being left alone and unmanitained for 200 years, so they survived the A-Bombs by not being volatile when they were dropped.

 

[JESUS]

I think its valid to assume the supermarket quest is bad written with the info we got, they don't give us much info to assume otherwise.
Bethesda seens to enjoy this little info before their games are released so their defense can be the same( if you don't have all the info about this don't say it's a piece of shit before you had play it).
In my humble opinion it's just too much, the quest of the well in Arroyo was easy to justify, the shit that BS is making (like the exploding cars), are just way out there in terms of stretching your imagination and trying to come up with some reasonable explanation as to why this is there.

And Per you forgot the usual bullshit defense of the fanboys:
If you don't like the game go make your own.

 

[Per]

And Per you forgot the usual bullshit defense of the fanboys:
If you don't like the game go make your own.

I actually thought of that, but the original list didn't really allow for it, so I thought it could perhaps fall under point 1. There are other things I had to leave out, like "you didn't want it in the first place, so you can't complain that it turned out bad".

 

[Texas Renegade]

The best thing about that medecine quest is in the preview it reveals that Burke is ticked at you that even after you ratted him out and he had to shoot the sherrif, and he told you to finish the job.

You still betrayed him by disarming the bomb.

Therefore he has let it be known to the raiders and such that he wants you dead( the previewer found a note or something on one of the raiders).

Does this mean that bounty hunters may be in the game?

 

[thefalloutfan]

Does this mean that bounty hunters may be in the game?

Not sure, but from the leaked screenshots hosted, we know there are these stats:

Locks Picked
People Mezzed
Corpses Eaten
Stimpaks Taken
Computers Hacked
Mysterious Stranger Visits
RadAway Taken
Books Read
Pockets Picked
Robots Disabled
Speech Successes
Weapons Created
Times Addicted
Creatures Killed
Quests Completed
Contracts Completed
People Killed
Paralyzing Punches
Chems Taken
Sandman Kills
Captives Rescued

The bolded ones, could be something like that. Mysterious stranger visits? Hmm, interesting. Come on release the damn game

 

[Brother None]

Mysterious stranger visits refers to the Mysterious Stranger perk, as already confirmed.

 

[Public]

Remember when Todd was saying how Misteriously Stranger works, that a guy comes and shoot one enemy in a head.

And the guy said "That's sooo awesome!"

Wonder how it will actually look in the game.

 

[TheGM]

Remember when Todd was saying how Misteriously Stranger works, that a guy comes and shoot one enemy in a head.

And the guy said "That's sooo awesome!"

Wonder how it will actually look in the game.

*Game pauses a Mysterious stranger appears in the distance with a rifle, Fires a shot killing the enemy, tips his hat to the PC and leaves*

Something like that would be awesome.

"who the **** was that guy?" - The Chosen Dweller.

 

[Per]

Even in the far future superheroes will hotly debate Fallout 3's timeline.

 

[Slaughter Manslaught]

Mysterious Stranger Visits

When I read this, I thought about a garl/guy in a trenchcoat visiting the player in the night and fucking him/her. I hope no guy visits me in the middle of the night to fuck my guy. That would be totally gay.. A hetero-visit for each sex would be okay, though.

But seriously... it's a weird perk, but got a noir style... although it could be something else than some guy randomly shooting someone just... just because. Yeah. I mean, who the fuck is he?