Pissed off by aliens (and liking it)

Per

Per

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Crispy Gamer muses on endings and morality in Mothership Zeta.<blockquote>Anyone who has played Fallout 3 knows what happened next. The Pip-Boy mascot popped up on the screen, and he was pissed: "You have lost Karma!" In the previous 100-plus hours I'd spent playing the game, I would have been hurt by that rebuke. I've always been the ultimate goody two-shoes in Fallout 3, resisting temptations to kill, steal, deceive and manipulate. It would be difficult to play a more virtuous game of Fallout 3 than I did. But suddenly, Pip-Boy and his precious karma meant nothing to me. Mothership Zeta had broken me and my sunshiny vision of "Post-Apocalyptia."

I wondered, is this how the story ends? Is Zeta, as the last new downloadable chapter, The End of Fallout 3? Think before you answer. Fallout 3 has had ending issues from, well, the beginning. If you have the original game with no add-ons, you could consider the closing cinematic an ending. People hated that ending, though. (I loved it, but the people who didn't were louder than I was.)

So Bethesda came out with Broken Steel. All of a sudden there's an argument to be made that the "Take it Back!" mission, which extends and then re-concludes the main story, is the "real" ending. Yet while I may be in the minority, I believe that Zeta's final recalibration of the Wasteland moral code provides the true thematic conclusion to Bethesda's great work.</blockquote>Go read it before the aliens get you.
 
People hated that ending, though. (I loved it, but the people who didn't were louder than I was.)
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One of the reasons we hated it was because you had companions who are radiation resistant who refuse to enter the water purifier command chamber when you ask them, sprouting such bullshit as "Its your destiny" or "I don't wanna".

You're forced to enter the water purifier, you are not given the option to do so out of your own free will.

Now if the ending was truly a case in which only your sacrifice could save others the ending would have been far more stronger.
 
Dude be reading way too into the game if the thinks the Aliens are a clever metaphor for foreigners.
That or he is being sarcastic, hard to tell.
 
Per said:
Go read it before the aliens get you.
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[spoiler:a3ce3f8c04][/spoiler:a3ce3f8c04]

My Fallout 3 experience has been peppered with little moments of insight into the human condition, and it was a pleasant surprise that Zeta was able to give this Lone Wanderer one final epiphany.
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What do you think he means with "little moments of insight into the human condition"?
I'm thinking he means something weird, like x-ray goggles or something or other.
 
Man, a fool has been born who does not understand the concept of DLC, or the concept, as it is, that could be called 'injected content'.
Truly, his powers of limited comprehension cause failure in the realization of this simple definition.

@Alec - The dark side of our ability to create such lifeless creatures, that which we have given the blessing of the name known as "lifeless Fallout 3 NPC."
A capable insight into the idea that man should not play god, never seen so astute a statement since Shelley's Frankenstein itself, if I may say so, and I shall, with certainty.
 
Summary: Man sees being a space racist as entertaining.

Review: A true example of the Lost style of writing. By making things as vague and void of answers as possible, people will fill the gaps in for you and thus solve the problem of having to think of things like reasons and motivations.
 
That was a bad article.

Bethesda has always been wonky with what "good" and "evil" actions are, and this guy tries to go WAY too deep and find some hidden meaning where there isn't any.

If you step into any random store in oblivion and move an apple that's sitting out on display (not even putting it in your inventory, but using the physics-move) a centimeter, you'll be branded a criminal and have guards charging in the room ready to kill you.

I wonder if he wrote an article about the deeply moving psychological effects of touching an apple as well.
 
100+ hours? That must be a lie.

It only took me 11 hours or so to get to vomit time.

"...little moments of insight into the human condition..." = "Damn, this game is almost as stupid as real life. Immersion FTW!"
 
Alphadrop said:
Dude be reading way too into the game if the thinks the Aliens are a clever metaphor for foreigners.
That or he is being sarcastic, hard to tell.
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Or he has just finished watching District 9...
 
My Fallout 3 experience has been peppered with little moments of insight into the human condition, and it was a pleasant surprise that Zeta was able to give this Lone Wanderer one final epiphany.
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I can't shake the feeling that they're still doing this just to spite us. No one could be that stupid...
 
Zeta, though, is unusually committed to making the aliens feel alien. The extraterrestrials' backstory is told only in shards that never form a coherent whole. They've been performing awful experiments for centuries; they're creating genetic abominations from human subjects; they've built a "death ray." But to what end, and how does it all fit together? The answer never comes, and the aliens' impenetrable chatters and shrieks -- which are essentially the soundtrack of Zeta -- only serve to drive home their strangeness and the exasperating unknowability of their reason for being.
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I guess people can see depth wherever they want. To me that's bad storytelling. :shrug:
 
The funny thing is, in praising an aspect of MZ, the author of the article implicitly, but obviously obliviously to himself, criticizes FO3 and all the other DLC's.

If he has played through the game for a 100 hours entirely based on the karma meter, constantly and with ease achieving the 'right' things to do, than this pretty much points to the moral poverty of the entire rest of the game. It means that there are no hard choices, that there aren't any gray areas, moments or decisions. It means that the game is bland, black and white, and not even trying to give you any true moral dilemma. Only now, with aliens that are made to seem alien and hostile enough to warrant retribution towards what seems to be innocents, he plays the game based on how he reacts to a situation, not based on what the karma meter says he should do.

This should've been a part of quest design for the rest of the game in the first place. Megaton could've been a cesspool of sin and moral depravity, the game could've tried to really entice you into exploding the town, instead of just giving you a tasteless money transaction. Cannibalistic mutants could've been shown as starving, deprived from water and food, with cannibalism as the only apparent way out; instead they're all just hostile and mostly mindless. If the entire game had been more complex with moral situations, aliens would've been the perfect dilemma if they were actually made to be more human instead of alien. A scenario similar to The Master, where a misguided intention to improve a situation led to a deplorable outcome, would already have been a far more interesting situation than the unsolved idiocy of MZ. What if the aliens had actually had good intentions, but this simply required some measure of human sacrifice?

Sadly though, a dualistic morality system simply cannot handle such complex situations. How would such a system rate the sacrifice of few to save many, or the sacrifice of few to improve the situation of many? How would it rate the explosion of Megaton if Megaton had been a den of thieves and brigands? It can't, therefore the game doesn't have complex situations. This is probably also why the aliens' motives are never really explained.
 
This is probably also why the aliens' motives are never really explained.
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My money is on "they didn't care to create a story for MZ". With all the laziness they have shown with other part of the game (and DLCs) I think that's the only real rason. After all they can use the excuse that they are aliens and therefore incomprehensible (sp?) to us earthlings.
 
Bethesda mustn't dare throwing it on the "The aliens are beyond your comprehension" angle, only good writers are allowed to make that claim for alien species they have created.

MZ is simply a lousy space corridor shooter based on a Fallout Easter Egg.
 
Alphadrop said:
Dude be reading way too into the game if the thinks the Aliens are a clever metaphor for foreigners.
That or he is being sarcastic, hard to tell.
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Well, if he's being serious, then I can but call him a blathering idiot! Especially with the part where they're hald responsible for the nuclear war... FO was not about placing the blame outside somewhere...

Regardless, seeing any kind of "moral recalibration" in MZ, is bullshit.
 
Unfortunately I read his dribble till the end. I think this last sentence sums up his craptastic views.

"My Fallout 3 experience has been peppered with little moments of insight into the human condition, and it was a pleasant surprise that Zeta was able to give this Lone Wanderer one final epiphany."
 
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