The Ticketbot Problem

D

Dougly

It Wandered In From the Wastes
Like many of you, one of the elements of the Fallout 3 previews that consistently makes me cringe is the whole "ticketbot in the D.C. Metro" thing. While I suppose having a ticketbot that shreds people to pieces might be considered "amusing," it does feel out of place with Fallout. It makes me fear that those who are designing the new game may have somehow decided that, since there was humor in the two previous Fallouts, that the Fallout world somehow operates without rationality.

I was thinking about this problem last night, and an idea about how to better explain the presence of heavily armed robots in the D.C. Metro came to me. What if, rather than serving as ticket bots, a security presence was necessary in the D.C. Metro system because there was fear that, during an invasion, the system might be seized by a foreign military and used for their operations in the area?

I'm not sure where they could fit it into the game - perhaps a history holodisk, or something of the sort - but if they wanted further justification, they could include some mention of heavily armed security bots being placed in subway systems throughout the nation after communist insurgents (like the ones in the Van Buren tech demo) seized the subway system of a major city, and used it for conducting city wide attacks.

I'm sure my idea has its own flaws, but I honestly think it's better than saying that people used to get shredded just for jumping a turn style or forgetting to bring their metro pass.

Any thoughts?
 
I never really had a problem with this. It's not any more odd to me than a Mr. Handy or other defective robot fighting you.

There are lots of renegade robots in fallout, seems entirely reasonable.
 
xdarkyrex said:
I never really had a problem with this. It's not any more odd to me than a Mr. Handy or other defective robot fighting you.

There are lots of renegade robots in fallout, seems entirely reasonable.
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Fair enough, but I think it creates at least a minor consistency problem, as well. The "ticketbots" sound more heavily armed than the brainbots that were responsible for protecting many sensitive military installations.

The brainbots normally only had shotguns. If my memory is correct, the D.C. ticketbots have some kind of rapid fire laser gun?
 
xdarkyrex said:
I never really had a problem with this. It's not any more odd to me than a Mr. Handy or other defective robot fighting you.

There are lots of renegade robots in fallout, seems entirely reasonable.
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Perhaps, but Mr Handy isn't armed with a minigun or laser weapon that it will deploy when it gets a question or response that its program can't process or identifies as 'wrong'.

Renegade robots yes, but civilian models aren't supposed to be armed with military hardware.
 
xdarkyrex said:
There are lots of renegade robots in fallout, seems entirely reasonable.
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The robots you fought in Fallout 1-2 were with very few exceptions:

a) guarding military installations,
b) controlled by the Unity, or
c) controlled by the Enclave.

Nowhere did you have randomly wandering robots. Nowhere did you have non-military robots that were dangerous just sort of by accident.
 
On the one hand we have Mr. Handy with it's little popgun. On the other we have ticket bots with enough firepower to take down a gang of supermutants. Overkill much?

Edit: Now that I think about it, wasn't the only Mr. Handy seen with a weapon a survivor of the Enclave Vertibird crash in Klamath?
 
Mr. Handy are unarmed. For some reason some of Mr. Handy in MB have miniguns in their inventory, but they have no weapon animations, so they don't use them.

BTW.
Who was working on MB?

xdarkyrex said:
There are lots of renegade robots in fallout, seems entirely reasonable.
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Where?,
 
xdarkyrex said:
I also didn't realize that the robots were really well armed. why the hell are they well armed?
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Go back and look at some of the previews. In the first one where they mentioned the ticketbots, I think, they were described as having powerful guns.

They'd have to be powerful, anyway. In the preview, VD101 hacks into the Metro robot system, and uses the robots to attack some Super Mutants. Whatever the "ticketbot" is armed with, it was enough to rip some of the mutants to shreds. After, of course, the mutants fail to present "tickets" upon the robot's demend.

Meh. I still say that a better explanation for having heavily armed robots in the metro would be invasion/insurgent security concerns. It makes a lot more sense than sticking high powered weapons on robots that are primarily meant to deal with turn style jumpers and the like. You could still have the robots available for characters with a high science/hack skill, and, instead of asking for tickets, they could say something like, "unauthorized armed presence detected" before they blast someone away.
 
The Dutch Ghost said:
they could say something like, "unauthorized armed presence detected" before they blast someone away.
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Yes, but that would make sense and not be funny.
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It'd be darkly funny. But then, Bethesda don't have a clue what that is.
 
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