Fallout 3 The Pitt Previews

100LBSofDogmeat said:
Another disappointing addition to a disappointing game. More graphics over content; I'm not talking about new weapons and armors. And exactly how does one get from the D.C. area to Pittsburgh? It doesn't seem to be explained at all in these reviews. Though they are full of the normal journalistic fluff I expect from such websites.
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gamespy said:
Since The Pitt takes place in the real Pittsburgh (and not in a virtual reality simulation like Operation Anchorage), you'll have to travel there via train from the Capitol Wasteland...
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hehe

I also liked the press release. It made me lol:

Brother None said:
Ally with the slaves, or join their Raider overlords? The Pitt is very morally ambiguous...
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Damn! should I help the poor slaves? Or join the evil slaving raiders? Since they are all one-dimensional cardboard cutouts it s very morally ambiguous to decide!!
 
100LBSofDogmeat said:
And exactly how does one get from the D.C. area to Pittsburgh?
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"Since The Pitt takes place in the real Pittsburgh (and not in a virtual reality simulation like Operation Anchorage), you'll have to travel there via train from the Capitol Wasteland, but it remains to be seen just how you'll learn of the quest." (GameSpy)
 
Jim Cojones said:
"Since The Pitt takes place in the real Pittsburgh (and not in a virtual reality simulation like Operation Anchorage), you'll have to travel there via train from the Capitol Wasteland, but it remains to be seen just how you'll learn of the quest." (GameSpy)
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Wow... and I thought it didn't get any worse. So after the war they managed to get trains up and running to transport slaves? Good job, Bethsoft.
 
There is room for moral ambiguity when it comes to slavery in a post-apoc wasteland. After all, there's really no commodity payment that comes close to being sheltered and defended. Sure, the quality of life is poor, but it's better than the alternative.

After all, who is least threatened by the horrors of the wastes? The slaves in Slavertown, or the teenagers in Soon-To-Be-Overrun-By-Mutants-Ville?

Of course, you completely invalidate any discussion of such a point when you include a self-sufficient city of children in your setting.
 
Gamespy, even though they probably didn't mean to, just gave us a perfect example of the problems Bethesda has when trying to portray 'Choice and Consequence'.


You can try to infiltrate as a Slave, and thus meet the Slave community, understand their plight, and start helping them out...

Or you can infiltrate as a Slaver, get promptly beaten up and turned into a Slave. Thus getting forced to swallow the same swill.


It's only after you do an obligatory 'run around and fetch this' quest that you get to start choosing who you'll help.


Why can't you just join the Slavers from the get-go, and skip this crap? Let the guy who wants to hide as a Slave deal with their menial work while he bides his time. Let me do something else!
 
Section8 said:
There is room for moral ambiguity when it comes to slavery in a post-apoc wasteland. After all, there's really no commodity payment that comes close to being sheltered and defended. Sure, the quality of life is poor, but it's better than the alternative.

After all, who is least threatened by the horrors of the wastes? The slaves in Slavertown, or the teenagers in Soon-To-Be-Overrun-By-Mutants-Ville?

Of course, you completely invalidate any discussion of such a point when you include a self-sufficient city of children in your setting.
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But Bethesoft already droped the ball in Fallout 3 with slavers that have no ability to exist (or has anyone ever seen someone buy slaves?), I have not seen any gray areas here.

Why suddenly should the Pitt DLC be different? We are talking here about the same company, its not like they suddenly got a few more writters. And from what one can hear it also seems not to be all to different from the usual game in the quality of Dialogues.
 
Is it just me, or is that guy in the background of the Auto-Axe shot wearing a Lord Humungus get-up, sans the mask?
 
The Dutch Ghost said:
Huh?
The DLCs are just $10 each you know.
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I should have written 'around' 100 bucks. If the DLC's are for 10, and there will be 3 of them, plus the game itself for 50-60 bucks, it's kinda around $100, if you haven't noticed.
 
Section8 said:
There is room for moral ambiguity when it comes to slavery in a post-apoc wasteland. After all, there's really no commodity payment that comes close to being sheltered and defended. Sure, the quality of life is poor, but it's better than the alternative.

After all, who is least threatened by the horrors of the wastes? The slaves in Slavertown, or the teenagers in Soon-To-Be-Overrun-By-Mutants-Ville?

Of course, you completely invalidate any discussion of such a point when you include a self-sufficient city of children in your setting.
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Maybe if slaves weren't slaves, but servants. Perhaps you're better off now then you were before, but there's no telling whether that's true or not, because you didn't get to decide between shining some twats shoes for the rest of your life or trying to be self sufficient.
 
Thoughts go back to the Shivering Isles DLC, when you exit the sewers, a message just pops up that says "Go to this cool thing it'll be awesome!"

Ridiculous.
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The Shivering Isles DLC was amazing, if ALL of Oblivion was like that DLC then it would have been a fucking great game. Where Oblivion was mostly a generic world with nothing really memorable, the Shivering Isles was an interesting and well-developed setting with some great locations and characters. Best of all it was truly original and it shows that Bethesda actually can create excellent stuff under the right conditions, unfortunately they definitely did not repeat that success in Fallout 3.

The initial "hey, go here to access the DLC" bit was admittedly a poor choice but given the style of The Elder Scrolls, and it was the same in Morrowind with addons, you really did need something to let you know where to access the content just because of the open-world/sandbox nature of the games. Even Firaxis do similar things in the Civilization games, and I doubt there's anybody who would dispute that they are amazing developers.

So, errh... So if I understood this right, they produce large enough quantities of steel to need a host of slaves to keep up with demand. Then begs the question, who in blazes are they selling it to? Or is there something from Van Buren that explains the need for steel in such large quantities? Or is it just Bethesda not thinking things through again?
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Its got nothing to do with fucking Van Buren.. I constantly see people whinging and bitching (who themselves don't really think things through) about "where does X group get Y resource", well obviously in a location that is building itself up will need plenty of steel. Steel has been one of the most important resources in society since the 19th century, why the hell would that change? There was nothing in any Fallout game that indicates new technologies were invented that could replace steel throughout society. I would imagine the Brotherhood of Steel used it to build up the Citadel; there was a fucking lot of stuff there that used steel and it had to come from somewhere; now we know where it came from. I would also imagine that the Enclave might have used it as well; we know from Fallout 2 that they do trade with outsiders and criminal organisations for resources when they need it.

Oh, and facepalm on:
"There are definitely things that people said, 'Oh, it would've been cool to do this!' or 'We need more of that, it's awesome!' That's The Pitt."

Pete Hines
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I don't exactly like what Beth did with Fallout 3 but come on man, for fuck's sake. What is 'facepalm-worthy' about this? Focusing on linguistics is really fucking stupid; plenty of the Black Isle devs would describe things as cool/awesome/good ideas, just because somebody says "This is cool, we should have more of it" it doesn't mean its a bad idea. That something is cool doesn't mean it isn't good, it just means they like it.. The same usage of cool/awesome/great was often used by the Doom developers and I distinctly remember Lorne Lanning from Oddworld Inhabitants describing things in those terms when talking about Abe's Exoddus back in the day.

Wow... and I thought it didn't get any worse. So after the war they managed to get trains up and running to transport slaves? Good job, Bethsoft.
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After 200 fucking years of course they would! If there is a major need to transport masses of people, trains are one of the best ways to do it! There are clearly train tracks that the player can walk along, and there are sometimes dead trains. It wouldn't be too difficult to collect a bunch of power cells, do up one of the trains and get it running given the resources at hand. I guess this "institute" would be able to help with some of the more technical matters (given its MIT and they can produce androids) if needed, but I doubt that level of skill would be required to get a 300+ train running, even if it was steam-powered. By the time of Fallout 3 trains are 4-500 year old technology so it pales in comparison to getting a modern car to run.. Even the nazis knew how useful trains could be in transporting people.. why wouldn't a group of raiders with regional power make use of existing tracks and technology?

hm.

Evil raiders, or oppressed slaves

That sounds morally ambiguous.
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This is pretty much how slavery has been portrayed by all of human society for almost 200 years now, what do you expect? In the real world, slavery is well below the acceptable standard of human civilization and chattel slavery doesn't really exist anymore. Slavers are universally portrayed as assholes and 'bad guys' who would rather exploit their fellow man than find other ways to survive in what we as a society actually DO consider to be somewhat "evil." Given that, how do you portray slavers as "good guys" or morally ambiguous? Not even Fallout 2 bothered to try, and I fucking love Fallout 2 but the slavers in F2 were also pretty much portrayed as violent assholes to be slaughtered wholesale. Sure you could join them but it severely affects the gameplay in that you are considered an 'evil bastard' by many you cross in the game world, and you take serious karma hits, getting reviled and titles like "scourge of the wastes" if you continue along that path.

IF in this DLC there is anything morally ambiguous I doubt it will be in relation to the slavery element.. it will probably come down to the deeper story aspects of it involving the 'cure for mutation', whatever that is, rather than the superficial aspects like slavery which are really just storytelling devices.
 
Everyone is super lazy? Their moms died and they didn't have anyone to tell them to clean up their rooms?

I don't exactly like what Beth did with Fallout 3 but come on man, for fuck's sake. What is 'facepalm-worthy' about this?
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Not that it is facepalm worthy, but it just further proves how Beth sometimes just slaps together elements they think are 'cool', and they lack a overarching vision.
 
Not even Fallout 2 bothered to try
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And what about Vault city? That definitively was a society based on slavery. And it is implied that some cities of NCR used them too...

Given that, how do you portray slavers as "good guys" or morally ambiguous?
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The slavers as the people who hunt and enslave others have always bad reputation, coz they represent a risk for you.

How to portray slaver as "good guys"? Mmm, what about some blink in the past? What about the greek cities of the antic? What about the roman empire? What about feudalism?
All assholes, Aristotes, Platon, Pericles, Demosthene, Pline, Thucydides? No? Why not? They DID own slaves. Some of them justify it pretty good actually.

In a society without mechanic industries, unless you enjoy very hard and difficult physical labor, the right choice IS to own slaves or equivalent. How do you build walls, palace, ships? How do you exploit mines? How do you farm alone whitout tractors?
You pay them you are going to say. But no. it doesn't work like that. Even if you find people ready to work in salt mines, or iron mines, believe that they will be wanting to be paid a high salary.
And if the cost of the salaries is higher or equal to your estimated profit, then you don't do it.
But if the workforce is (relatively) free, then you can launch your project.
So economically it can be justified. Then the morality will follow.
And it is the one who think otherwise who is wrong, because without slave, your whole society can't devellop itself.

So yes, i think it is pretty much easy, when back in a stone age, to find moral ambiguity in slavery.
But i don't think bethesda is going to go any near that.
 
Grayswandir said:
Not even Fallout 2 bothered to try
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How to portray slaver as "good guys"? Mmm, what about some blink in the past? What about the greek cities of the antic? What about the roman empire? What about feudalism?
All assholes, Aristotes, Platon, Pericles, Demosthene, Pline, Thucydides? No? Why not? They DID own slaves. Some of them justify it pretty good actually.

In a society without mechanic industries, unless you enjoy very hard and difficult physical labor, the right choice IS to own slaves or equivalent. How do you build walls, palace, ships? How do you exploit mines? How do you farm alone whitout tractors?
You pay them you are going to say. But no. it doesn't work like that. Even if you find people ready to work in salt mines, or iron mines, believe that they will be wanting to be paid a high salary.
And if the cost of the salaries is higher or equal to your estimated profit, then you don't do it.
But if the workforce is (relatively) free, then you can launch your project.
So economically it can be justified. Then the morality will follow.
And it is the one who think otherwise who is wrong, because without slave, your whole society can't devellop itself.

So yes, i think it is pretty much easy, when back in a stone age, to find moral ambiguity in slavery.
But i don't think bethesda is going to go any near that.
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Well... I always thought Platon was an asshole due to his slaving views. The thing is if you wanta portray a morally ambiguous addon don't give us "poor slaves-vs-evil raiders overlords" that really is stupid. Fallout 2 was morally ambiguos because there were many factions (the vault city-NCR-Redding connection for example) and you really didn't know who was using you and who was really trying to make it good for everyone. Or broken hills, sure the mutants seemed to be good enough but you had those people saying they were evil (and as it turned out there were both mutants and humans trying to kill the other), same happened in vault 13 with the deathclaws, deathclaws claimed to be protecting and helping people but some of those very people claimed to be held in the vault against their will.

The other way to present morally ambiguous setting would be toshine a nice light on someone you had been led to believe was an evil asshole, but given FO3 "superb" writing, well I don't see it coming. And again. with raider slavers I don't see any way you can depict them in a lighter way, perhaps if Pittsburg was led by an autocratic asshole who seemed to be oppressing his people but then when you got to meet him you would find out his point of view, how he has to take the necessary measures to protect the people against trogs and mutants and shit, he could have a way wth words and seem he doesn't like to oppress his poeple but he has to...
 
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