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Part 4: The blind dogs of the sun in their running...


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Part 4: The blind dogs of the sun in their running...
Previous: Part 3: The last to fall were the buildings, distant and solemn...

 

Mole rats. Disgusting creatures. I saw some down by the water recently, I steered clear of them. To be sure, they're easy kills, despite their penchant for burrowing through concrete and immediately popping up dozens of yards away as if they move faster while digging than in the open air. Clara and her newfound canine friend tear through a handful, and then Clara, exhibiting that can-do attitude we all know and... know, goes to the corpses and cuts bits of meat off and yanks out their teeth. This lady has a super-serious problem with hoarding, let me tell you. Just as she did back across the bridge in Sanctuary Hills, she proceeds to spend hours carefully going over every bit of ground and carefully grinding up old used tires, whole tree trunks, glass bottles, and pretty much anything she can get her hands on, storing the resultant junk in a bottomless container inside the gas station. To her, the mole rat teeth are just the icing on the cake.

 

Once she's finished clearing the area of anything not nailed down, and a few things that are nailed down, she continues walking on down the road. She wanders up to a pair of mosquitos who apparently found the National Buffout Stockpile and spent a few years ingesting, because whoa are those bugs big. As is her wont, after killing them she proceeds to rip the carcasses apart looking for anything edible. Lucky for me I don't have a stomach, or I'd get quite nauseous just being near her when she's in a scavenging mood.

 

Further into the town of Concord, and we start to hear gunfire. Or maybe it's just me that hears the gunfire. Any person with an IQ higher than single digits would probably be a tad hesitant to wade right into a bullet storm, but I guess that answers my question - she hears it too, she just can't be bothered to not try to get herself riddled with lead. She whips out her gun and starts shooting at some people who are shooting at other people, never considering the possibility that the first people are the good guys and the second people are the bad guys. It all turns out all right in the end, though, so I guess her luck played her a good one here too.

 

There's a building with a balcony up top, and a guy up there shouts to her to pick up a weapon off the ground and run inside for more fighting, and is there any purpose to me pointing out the lack of sound judgment exhibited by Clara anymore? She barely survived a firefight with a bunch of bandits outside where she could run away if things got bad, and now at the behest of someone she doesn't even know and barely saw for perhaps six seconds, she's running to join another battle, this time in cramped quarters and no knowledge of where enemies might be.

 

Luckily for her (yet again), these raiders seem to be operating in pairs at well-spaced intervals, so as not to give any invading vigilantes more than a token bit of resistance. I can imagine the conversation they had before the fight - "Okay, we know that if we all band together we can wipe them out without trouble, so let's split up into groups of two and go hide in corners so any itinerant do-gooders can kill us with minimal effort." Lucky for Clara, most of the raiders in the world are even less inclined to forethought than she is.

 

A handful of raiders later, and we meet up with Mr. Balcony again. His name is Preston Garvey, and he's heading up a group of refugees. None of them have guns, even though firearms are not in short supply, which seems a little odd considering that their lives are literally hinging on bringing enough firepower to bear on an attacking force of bloodthirsty maniacs. Perhaps they're all inveterate pacifists and would rather die than engage in self-defense. I try not to judge.

 

Preston and his sidekicks exhort Clara to go find a fusion core, which is apparently a superpowered battery capable of providing enough energy to run a small city for years without burning out yet can only run a suit of power armor for a few hours. They ask her to continue helping with the defense, which is a little odd considering that all of the raiders have already been killed off. Or so I thought... after all, she cleared the way to the building, no enemies left outside, and now the inside is completely safe too, right? But apparently something bad is out there anyway, according to the Crazy Old Lady who's convinced that something wicked this way comes.

 

Armed with the information that not only are more raiders inexplicably teleporting in to the area but a something "angry" is coming, because I'm sure the raiders aren't really angry, just mildly miffed - Clara heads up to the roof, steps into a busted-up suit of power armor, grabs a minigun off a derelict Vertibird, and jumps down to the ground, a tactical decision I question due to the fact that it puts her right at the proper range and angle to be flanked all the better. She starts shooting at the bandits, who start shooting back, and although she is currently wearing several inches of thick steel and a nuclear-powered exoskeleton, she's sure taking quite a lot of damage from those little homemade weapons. Still, she does manage to kill off most of the raiders. The remaining raiders are all set to die too, when out of a hole in the ground pops up the world's ugliest Jack-in-the-box, a horned monstrosity that would not look out of place in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

 

This beast, called a Deathclaw, proceeds to mow down the rest of the raiders, kick Dogmeat's ass, and take a huge amount of punishment from this ostensibly powerful weapon Clara's wielding before finally succumbing to, at my estimation, eleven thousand lead projectiles to the head and sternum. Clara, instead of using this God-given opportunity to rethink her current goals and objectives and give up on the outer world and return to her nice, safe freezer back in the vault, heads back in the building to talk to Preston & Co. who have, judging by the speed at which they've gathered in the lobby, either teleported or phased through solid matter to get there before she did.

 

After a brief argument where the Crazy Old Lady says crazy old lady things and the rest of the group (with one notable exception) agrees that the Crazy Old Lady is the universal Fount of Wisdom, everyone starts walking very very slowly to Sanctuary Hills, which according to the Crazy Old Lady is the safest place in the Commonwealth. Judging by its proximity to merciless raiders, insane robots, and subterranean horrors including mutant rats and furious deathclaws, I would have to disagree, but does anyone ever listen to me? No. Mostly because I can't actually speak, but the argument still stands.

 

Next: Part 5: You take your time, you do your work well...
Go to TOC

 

Author's note:
Mole Rats may be one of the weakest creatures found in the wasteland, but they still wig me out. Two sets of teeth? It may seem odd for an entity with no mouth, much less a single set of teeth, to be complaining about hyperdontia in subterranean rodents, but if we go down that road we'll end up asking how I can type up this diary without hands, so let's skip it, shall we?

 

Image: Each one of those slimy, dirty, disease-ridden rodents has been butchered and their meat stuffed into a pack, in case she gets a little peckish later on. She is the living embodiment of the word "revolting."
blogentry-462261-0-39271000-1458354851_thumb.jpg

 

Have a question or comment for Vault Suit? Tie it to a raven's leg, and release the raven to the East Winds, while saying a small prayer and burning an effigy of the Pip-Boy.

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Deathclaws, environmental storytelling, one-trick ponies, early game shine

 

 

Where did the Deathclaw come from? I've been all through the underground areas of Concord, and there's no place it could have entered, unless we accept the theory that it was a tiny baby and entered through a manhole, growing large on the ever-present mudcrabs down there, before finally busting its way out amidst the "noise and chaos" of a relatively minor gunfight. Bethesda tends to do this sort of thing a lot, actually - adding an exit point for a vignette or something, with no apparent entry point. I'm not just talking about mammoths in small caves or deathclaws in a sewer... you occasionally find things like a group of spiders moving into a mine with no way they could have done so except through the front door. Sometimes Bethesda puts a lampshade on it and has an NPC say something like "I can't figure out where these spiders have come from!" but drawing attention to a problem is not the same as solving it. I'd call it, not bad environmental storytelling, but perhaps incomplete environmental storytelling. For the spiders in a cave, just add a little hole to the open air somewhere (which is a problem in itself, because you never see these cave holes when walking around outside, but it's done so often it has become easy to overlook). For the deathclaw, just add a deathclaw-sized entrance somewhere.

 

While I'm at it, why not ask - if "noise and chaos" brings Deathclaws in, why isn't Boston completely overrun? You find a spot, any spot, and just sit still for a while, you'll hear gunfire and explosions as roving gangs of raiders, gunners, super mutants, crabs, dogs, and later on BOS soldiers all contend for the same few square kilometers of space. Makes you wonder how Diamond City and Goodneighbor ever got started in the first place when the area is so completely packed with hostile people and animals bent on suicidally slugging it out with one another, and Deathclaws being drawn in from every corner of the globe.

 

I can't complain too much, though. They wanted a good fight to really show off how the power armor works, as well as give us all a nice setpiece with the deathclaw erupting from the ground (something that never happens again, again as Bethesda is wont to do, they do love their one-trick ponies) early in the game, and it works out okay.

 

Early in this case probably being the important word. Yet another thing Bethesda does a lot is polish the hell out of the early game, leaving much of the side stuff... not unfinished, necessarily, but less polished. If you take the cynical view, you'd think it was because demos and game reviewers are usually given a limited time to play the game, and almost always they'll pick the main quest, to get as much done as possible, so polish up that early bit and make sure there aren't a lot of bugs to bring down those scores, so more folks will buy the game.

 

But that would require, as I say, a cynical outlook. Good thing I don't have one of those.

 

 

 

Backtracking

 

 

I should be clear - I'm not necessarily against incomplete environmental storytelling. It is often much more engaging to not have everything revealed, as long as we can come up with a reasonable explanation of it ourselves. If you can't show it, then just hint at it - but don't fail to do either and then draw attention to the fact that you didn't.

 

I'm also not against one-trick ponies - in fact, quite the opposite. Bethesda's one-trick ponies aren't a problem at all, and I quite like the technique, though I understand some game developers dislike it and try to avoid doing so.

 

 

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You know, I was kinda "worried" at how the story from the Vault Suit might pan out, But it works :D
 

 

 

As for your observations: I agree. I think the key (or bobby pin) to playing Bethesda games is to just accept the anomalies and keep trudging on. I am not saying that I (we) are better than the rest, but the average player puts very little thought into playing the game. They are more interested in the point-and-kill aspect of the game. (ok, maybe I AM saying we are better than the rest...)
Which of course brings me to the most glaring of FallOut4's issues: it is barely a RPG. As has been said many times before, the main quest (finding your missing son, who you have barely even seen) is severly lacking. Your spouse being killed before your eyes is also an event I felt kinda "oh gosh, that is kinda harsh" about. Thankfully the rest of the game draws you in enough to want to keep playing though.

 

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You know, I was kinda "worried" at how the story from the Vault Suit might pan out, But it works :D

 

Spoiler

As for your observations: I agree. I think the key (or bobby pin) to playing Bethesda games is to just accept the anomalies and keep trudging on. I am not saying that I (we) are better than the rest, but the average player puts very little thought into playing the game. They are more interested in the point-and-kill aspect of the game. (ok, maybe I AM saying we are better than the rest...)

Which of course brings me to the most glaring of FallOut4's issues: it is barely a RPG. As has been said many times before, the main quest (finding your missing son, who you have barely even seen) is severly lacking. Your spouse being killed before your eyes is also an event I felt kinda "oh gosh, that is kinda harsh" about. Thankfully the rest of the game draws you in enough to want to keep playing though.

 

 

It's actually a little difficult from time to time to avoid writing it from Clara's perspective accidentally.

I'm used to not only playing the game myself (and not through the eyes of someone else), and I'm still writing Mace Raiden in first person... and going back and forth leads me to occasionally write things like "I head up onto the roof and get into the power armor" instead of "Clara heads up onto the roof and gets into the power armor" and the like.

 

 

And it is kind of surprising how addictive this game is. At first my attitude was "meh" and I figured I'd quickly drop it, but it unexpectedly grew on me.

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