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Part 10: I watched as the Lamb opened the first of seven seals...


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Part 10: I watched as the Lamb opened the first of seven seals...
Previous: Part 9: For we who grew up tall and proud, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud...

 

Park Street Station. You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. I believe the quote continues from that point, mentioning something about "caution," but Clara doesn't seem to know what the word means most of the time. Blundering about, wildly shooting her explosive tommygun, she makes enough noise at the best of times to wake up Pete Townshend from a sound sleep. At worst, Chuck Baird.

 

Getting to Park Street Station was something of a nightmare anyway. Packs of dogs (some of which were glowing green), raiders, hostile robots, scavengers, and super mutants stand between Diamond City and the station. Then she (of course) gets lost and ends up near the waterfront, fighting mirelurks and radscorpions. By then her best weapon is out of ammunition, as is her second and third best, and she has to resort to knifework. It is, I suppose, a testament to her skills hard-won in the prewar kitchen that she does so well at flensing these giant crablike beasts. By the time she manages to get to Park Street Station, she has been poisoned, stabbed, repeatedly shot, burned, virtually drowned, scraped, bruised, fallen off a high building, and nearly pecked to death by an enraged seagull. Rather than calling it a day and heading for home to rest up and maybe recruit a better follower than Preston, such as perhaps a Legendary Albino Glowing Deathclaw, she proceeds to dive right downstairs.

 

As it turns out, it's not too bad. The place is full of people who've watched too many B-grade gangster movies, but they're not too hard to down. As a bonus, she stocks up on explosive SMG ammunition again from all the corpses of these Triggermen, emphasis on the "men." Equal-opportunity employment this ain't... ghouls are fine, but you'd better have a penis to work here.

 

After slaughtering her way down the railway station a bit, she eventually comes across (drum roll)... a vault door. This one is a little different from the one she was frozen in. For one thing, it has a completely different number painted on it. For another, the security console to open the door is on the outside.

 

Now, I've previously said that Vault Tec's security is something of a joke. I mean, if any random Tom, Dick, or Harry can just waltz in, there's not much point in having a door lock in the first place, right? Who are they keeping out, cockroaches? Didn't work. But this is even worse - with the lock on the outside, anyone with a pip-boy (which are apparently not uncommon, extracting from what Paladin Danse says) can open it up. Clara proceeds to do just that, and continues going through the guards like a hot knife through warm butter.

 

Of course, her intellect is not up to par. For one thing, she jumps down into a place where she cannot, under any circumstances, get out of. She can't climb out, she certainly can't jump out, but she goes down anyway, like a complete moron, not considering the possibility that there might not be a way out.

 

Down the hole, there's nobody else to bar her way. Her thieving and hoarding personality quirks come to the forefront all throughout this place, though, and she really can't stop herself from picking up every little piece of junk she can find. I give up - let the dumbass break her back carrying around ten thousand pounds of ceramic cups. Fine.

 

Anyway, she finally comes across Mercer Frey Nick Valentine, being taunted through a window by another southie. Said gangster-wannabe, who has an actual name, to differentiate him from all the other mooks, exhibits the same intellectual capacity as Clara - that of a lukewarm pound of ground beef. Valentine manages to convince him that his life is in danger and his boss wants to kill him via an intricate web of lies and deceit that boils down to, basically, saying "your boss wants to kill you." The fucking idiot runs away, but not too far, because he seems magnetically attracted to Clara's location, and she puts a few dozen bullets between his eyes. RIP Dino, he went out with a bang. Well, more sort of a bump? A wimpy bang. Definitely bigger than a knock, anyway. A bang-ette, I suppose. Clara continues on and releases Valentine from his prison.

 

Nick Valentine, as it turns out, is one heck of a guy. He's got nerves of steel, this dude. And a lead stomach. And a silver tongue, fists of iron, and a heart of gold. Oh, and brass balls. What I'm getting at is, he's made of metal. A robot. Or android, I guess that's more descriptive. You'd think that with all the distrust, and bad rep Synths have in the Commonwealth, living in Diamond City might be something of a problem for him, but apparently they make exceptions if you're obviously a Synth, and not hiding it.

 

Nick, Preston, and Clara continue on through the vault, killing newly arrived Triggermen by the dozens, Clara holding up the procession somewhat with her attempts to steal all the things. Eventually they make it out, despite Preston and Valentine refusing to shoot their weapons and instead use them as clubs for some damn reason. Eventually they manage to pass an impassible door, and waiting outside as if summoned by script magic, is a fat guy and a skinny girl. Valentine makes it very clear, several times, before they even get to the door, that "Skinny" Malone is a fat guy. The last great prejudice, I suppose.

 

Anyway, after a quick conversation where you'd expect Nick Valentine to take the lead, Malone being an old frienemy and all, Clara defuses the situation and the three of them are allowed to leave without further violence. You'd think that the mob boss might be a little more irritated at having just had his entire gang slaughtered, but Clara's silver tongue (borrowed from Valentine, possibly) gets them out of the jam. A quick trip back through some of the vault construction site and the four of us are all out in the open air again. I'd breathe a sigh of relief if I had lungs.

 

Nick Valentine likewise seems happy to be out of the hole, and tells Clara to head to his office in Diamond City. After specifically saying that she wouldn't follow him, he waits for her to follow him which she does. The three of them walk through the ruins of Boston toward Diamond City, which would be a dangerous trip, except Clara and Preston already cleared it all out. A nice, restful walk down a quiet street toward a safe place, with "quiet" meaning lots of random gunfire in the distance and "safe" meaning "probably not likely to be attacked for a few minutes anyway." I'm really into this now - Clara seems to be fully back on track to finding her lost son. The end is in sight! Right?

 

Next: Part 11: Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you...
Sidetrack: Intermission 3
Go to TOC

 

Author's note: If Nick Valentine can wander around Diamond City while other Synths are ruthlessly expelled when they're found, why hasn't the Institute twigged to this strategy? Just peel the skin off your agents, it being more socially acceptable to walk around with all your metal parts showing.

 

Image: This is the door to Vault 114. Note Vault-Tec's continued use of blue and yellow. I can't help but wonder if they got a bulk discount on paints and dyes in those colors or something.
blogentry-462261-0-14440400-1462545807_thumb.jpg

 

Have a question or comment for Vault Suit? Send your question and $5 U.S. to "Vault Suit Incorporated," c/o Content Consumer, 1234 Brokepecker Lane, Ottowa, Mexico.

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Vault-Tec Security, one-way doors, MERCER FREY REINCARNATED

 

 

Okay, I get why you want a nifty lock that can only be opened by a pip-boy. It makes sense, it really does. But why not be a little consistent with it? I'm not even asking for consistency with previous games here - go ahead and make your pip-boy the key even though no other game did that, that's fine. But put the lock either on the inside, on the outside, or both.

By putting the door lock only where the player comes to and not on the other side, you're removing a bit of immersion. It becomes obvious that this is a videogame progress blocker, and not something you'd find in the real world.

Skyrim did the same thing, with the dragon claw doors. It irks me. The design of Labyrinthian was better, actually - the player starts the game with the Flames spell, but the designers still put in a Flames spell tome in front of a fire-lock door, just like they did with frost. They could have gone the lazy route and, knowing that the player starts with Flames and there's no point in putting a flames spell tome there, ignored it, thus making the frostbite spell tome an obvious wrench away from immersion. In that instance, the level designer understood that how real people would build their progress blockers is important to immersion and verisimilitude.

This bit with the pip-boy lock on the outside of the door, and only on the outside, because that's where the player comes from, duh... it's reminiscent of a rush job.

Your QA testers are supposed to spot stuff like that, but I imagine that Bethesda's QA department consists of a single, overworked guy, who can barely keep up with the bug reports, and has no time for flavor. Much like Hollywood no longer seems to employ consistency spotters.

 

Another thing that bugs me about Bethesda's (*) level design is that they rely far too much on the unspoken agreement between game maker and game player to ignore a lack of realism in dungeon design. I'm talking specifically about the one-way trip you take down a little chute in Vault 114. Players jump down, completely secure in the belief that there's another way out. In real life, if you're a spelunker and you try something like that, you're more than likely to end up a starved corpse. Now this may well be a specious argument, because as I say, every computer game out there relies on this understanding that there will always be a way out. What goes in a tabletop RPG game just doesn't fly in a computer game - as a GM, I can reasonably trap my players in an inescapable hole, but in a computer game, this dedication to realism makes the fun go away. In a tabletop game, the players are still going to have fun... even when starving to death in a hole... whereas in a computer game doing this is seen as really shitty level design.

(*) In this I'm not actually poking at Bethesda specifically here, but the genre as a whole. Bethesda is no worse than many studios, and is in fact better than some. But I'm coming to the computer with a perspective grounded in tabletop games, where your actions have consequences, and not meaningless paragon/renegade consequences either. For the vast majority of players, I'd say that probably the way things are done is not only acceptable, but far more desirable than otherwise.

 

One thing that I do have a legitimate bitch about is Nick Valentine picking unpickable doors. Yet another call back to Mercer Frey... I'm beginning to wonder if this was deliberate.

 

 

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