Deconstructing Fallout 3: Difficulty Curve

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When I first played Fallout 3 on my Xbox 360 way back in 2008, I found myself drawn to the hubs and the quests. Exploring the wasteland was fun, but ultimately I was looking for structure and a story. I’ve recently booted up Fallout 3 again, but this time on the PC. With extreme (but lore friendly) modding, I’ve found the exploration aspect far more enjoyable and the quests frankly lackluster. I want to deconstruct the quests in Fallout 3 to think about how they work in relation to an open world map and the player character’s development choices.

Let’s start with the basics. Not counting the three childhood quests, Fallout 3 has a total of 66 quests in the base game: 10 story quests, 18 side quests, 22 unmarked side quests, and 16 repeatable fetch quests. Again, I want to briefly break down each of these to see how they’ve made use of the new environment and the RPG elements.

Fog of war stifles exploration and strongly encourages player to discover locations through dialogue

From a design perspective, one of Fallout 3’s biggest hurdles was managing the difficulty curve in an open world. Fallout and Fallout 2 addressed this by placing Vault 13 and Arroyo in the far north while crafting a narrative that relied on unlocking the location of new, more difficult settlements. In terms of structure, these games also benefited from a timer, discouraging players from exploring the vacant wasteland in favor of following the story.

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The Interactivity Curve of Fallout: Shelter

Jan13

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If you follow The Rad-Lands on Twitter, you might know I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout: Shelter recently. I find the game pretty intriguing. The art direction has a lot of charm, the gameplay is smooth and can be picked up in a few minutes, and it feels great to do whatever is necessary to earn a lunchbox. Although this game does a lot right, it also takes a few missteps. Rather than providing a consistent curve of player interaction, Fallout: Shelter suffers from peaks and valleys.

The majority of Fallout: Shelter is built upon waiting. You put dwellers into the right room and you wait. You send people out into the wasteland and you wait. What separates Fallout: Shelter from similar time-lapsing mobile games is the illusion of agency. Because new rooms are built instantly and there’s an emphasis on collecting better equipment, players feel like they’re doing more than they are. Although unlocking a new room feels interactive, it is really just the beginning of a new timer.

That having been said, not all unlocked rooms are equal. Some provide the player far more satisfaction than others. To better explain how Fallout: Shelter wavers in player interaction, I’ve made the following graph:

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First lunchbox
First explorers return
Medical
Waiting
Overseer’s office
Radio Station
Weapons Workshop
SPECIAL Rooms
Objectives
Rare Weapons Workshop
Barber Shop
Rare Clothes and Weapons
All unlocks

If we accept this graph, we see a huge valley right at the mid-point of the unlock schedule. In a lot of ways, this makes sense. Up to the mid-point, the game gives just enough to keep players engaged. After the mid-point, gameplay is comprised of long term goals, goals that may take over a week to accomplish. Let’s briefly deconstruct each of the 13 points.

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First Lunchbox: This is the high point of the game for two reasons. The first is opening a lunchbox (usually) feels rewarding. Legendary characters and weapons are most useful at the beginning of the game, making the player feel great when a familiar face shows up at their vault door. Second, three free lunchboxes can be obtained at the very start of the game. This means if you’re unhappy with your lunchboxes and don’t want to spend money, you’re never more than an hour away from a second chance.

First Explorers Return: Once your explorers come back, you’ll have a handful of new loot to distribute to your dwellers. This doesn’t really do much, except slightly increase production speed and the survivability of future explorers, but it serves as a significant moment in the game’s interactivity curve from the novelty of distributing gear.

Medical: The second most important part of the interactivity curve. The Medbay allows dwellers to stay out longer, which allows for greater player interaction when they return with armfuls of loot. Again, this feels interactive, but it actually causes the player to invest less time as they no longer need to recall explorers every hour and a half. Psychologically, this ensures players don’t get burned out from checking on their vault.

Waiting: A somewhat uncomfortable dip in the early gameplay. The vault is essentially in limbo until the population reaches 18. The science lab should serve as a bump between the Medbay and the Overseer’s Office, but radaway is practically useless. An exploring vault dweller will use roughly 1 radaway for every 5 stimpaks. The problem here is threefold:
* Quest are not unlocked at this point
* Radioactive enemies do not appear inside the vault at this point
* Your Medbay will (probably) not produce enough stimpaks to make equipping radaway worthwhile at this time.
For those three reasons, this period between unlocking the Medbay and the Overseer’s Office feels like a natural stopping point.

Overseer’s Office: Quests are critical to a player’s long-term commitment. Although combat is incredibly simple, navigating dungeons feels fun. The fog of war effect only adds to this, making dungeons appear larger and more mysterious than they actually are. Holiday quests and exclusive loot keep players coming back months later, if only for a few hours.

Radio Station: This is where gameplay starts to dip again. The radio allows you to recruit new dwellers faster than you could by breeding, but there’s a problem. The majority of dwellers arriving from the wasteland are what I call “X-Models.” X’s are vault dwellers who aren’t good at anything. They have a 1 or 2 in every S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attribute. The issue with having so many X’s is you cannot begin the lengthy process of enhancing them until you have at least 24 dwellers. Even then, you cannot begin optimizing them until you have 35 dwellers.

Weapon’s Workshop: There’s an initial excitement when you unlock the weapons workshop. Unfortunately, this part of the game is a nonmedy; something that makes you enjoy the product a little bit less. At this point, everyone in your vault probably has either a sawed-off shotgun or a rusty laser pistol. The problem is the best weapon the workshop can initially produce is a rusty laser pistol. A standard laser pistol is available with the tier-1 workshop, but it requires a randomly obtained blueprint. That means you cannot build a weapon dealing more than 7 damage until you upgrade. Unfortunately, while the workshop is unlocked at 22 dwellers, the upgraded workshop is unlocked at 45 dwellers. Further, quests require weapons with a minimum damage count. Meaning if you never received a rare or legendary weapon from a lunchbox, you’re stuck until you double your population. Again, this is an obvious quitting point.

S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Rooms: Another natural stopping point, despite the potential long-term rewards it brings. The training rooms are required to improve productivity, meet prerequisites for quests, and improve loot collection in the wasteland. Again, the problem is twofold: The first is that the most important room, the endurance training room, unlocks third before last, just ahead of the charisma and luck rooms. Endurance is required to improve health, which increases time in the wasteland, which increases loot, which is important since you can’t build rare weapons or clothes at this time. Second, the costly upgrades to these rooms have little effect on the timers. The difference between a tier-1 room and a tier-3 room is a 5% reduction on the timer. In other words, if a tier-1 room had an 8 hour timer, a tier-3 room would have a 7 hour 35 minute timer.

Objectives: There’s another uncomfortable lull while waiting for both a population increase and the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. rooms they bring. At this point, the player has probably completed all of the easy objectives and will likely receive objectives they cannot complete in a few hours. The issue here is that there’s no short term reward to work toward. New room unlocks, training, and objectives can take days at a time to complete. This dramatically reduces interactivity, which reduces retention.

Rare Weapons: If you’ve played long enough to unlock the upgraded weapon’s workshop, you’ve likely amassed a horde of rare crafting supplies and blueprints that you’ve been completely unable to use up to this point. Unlocking the weapons workshop feels fresh only for a moment. Despite the new possibilities, there’s an overarching issue of time. A rusty laser pistol takes 30 minutes to make. A rusty plasma rifle takes 9-18 hours to make, depending on the number of people in the workshop. Again, there’s no short term reward, but rare weapons are required to start mid-level quests.

Barber: Other than new quests, the mid-game is absent of short term rewards. The time between the radio station unlocked at 20 dwellers to the barber shop unlocked at 50 dwellers feels like a long, long haul. Luckily, the barbershop brings back some of the magic as cosmetic changes only require about an hour of waiting.

Rare Clothes: With rare clothes and rare weapons, the player has everything they need to address any problem the game can throw at them. Although this unlock gives the player direction, rare weapons and clothes should have been unlocked much earlier in the game. Alternatively, there could have been a consistent (and randomized) unlock schedule by only requiring blueprints to create new items. When I finally upgraded the clothing workshop, I had 35 rare hides. 35 hides that were taking up storage space but had no possible application.

All Unlocks: This is where gameplay levels out completely. The vault has become self-sufficient and the player has the ability to create anything they want. The only thing left to do is engage in quests. From the moment the vault has 100 dwellers to the time when the player finally decides to stop playing, interactivity is locked at a solid 5.

Fallout: Shelter has an unusual interactivity curve. It feels like it was designed not to get people to spend money, but rather to let players engage with a lighthearted incarnation of the Fallout brand. However, it’s important to remember what this app is: A mobile game meant to prime an audience for Fallout 4. The game has been overhauled several times since its initial release and although it has its issues, Fallout: Shelter is still an enjoyable and addictive mobile experience.

Unpacking the Brotherhood of Steel: Part 2

Sep30

Previously, we analyzed the Brotherhood of Steel in the first three Fallout games.
Now, lets turn our attention to Fallout 3 and Fallout: NV. During the transition from isometric to 3D, the Brotherhood of Steel got dipped in the F.E.V., mutating the faction until it was barely recognizable as the force it once was. The BoS is the only faction to appear in every Fallout game, but it seems none of the writers know exactly what to do with them.

In Fallout 3, the Brotherhood of Steel became something players had never seen. Following up on Fallout Tactics, the Brotherhood moved east again, requiring a backstory even longer and more convoluted than the original Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout.
Apparently, the reason for the BoS mounting an east coast expedition was because there were reports of super mutants in Washington DC. How this information traveled 3000 miles in a world without long-range radio and without any Brotherhood operatives actually being on the east coast is anyone’s guess.
Leading this expedition was Paladin Lyons (later Elder Lyons) who brought his 3-year-old daughter on a 3000 mile expedition (on foot) across radioactive deserts swarming with mutants and blood cults. What could possibly go wrong?

The Lyons expedition then came across the ruins of Pittsburg (The Pitt) and cleansed the entire city in an event called “The Scourge”. The result was a great power vacuum that allowed the events of Fallout 3 to occur. Remember that Lyons still had a toddler to take care while he was purging the city.
The expedition finally moved to DC. Finding the city was overrun by super mutants, Lyons pushed back the green tide and transformed the ruined Pentagon into a fortress. Lyons shifted the focus of his army from the preservation of technology to ending the suffering of the Capital Wasteland.

Lyons’ focus on the settlers and people of the wasteland caused a divide. Traditionalist members of the chapter, who only wanted to preserve and research technology, formed their own sub-faction: the Outcasts.
According to Fallout 3, the Outcasts adhere to the tenants of the western Brotherhood of Steel. Based on previous Fallout games, this is largely true. The Outcasts hoard advanced technology to keep it away from common wastelanders. This is in line with Maxson’s notes from the first Fallout, but it isn’t in line without how the Brotherhood actually acted during the game.

The Outcasts did nothing wrong

The Outcasts are mostly representative of the Fallout BoS. They are outwardly friendly, educated, and approachable. They do not murder for technology and are happy to give their trust to any scavenger who is shown to support their cause. The player can gain entry to their fortress by exchanging technology with them. Keeping with the theme of technological preservation, the Outcasts have an interactive weapons research lab inside their fortress and are often seen patrolling with robots. The colors are different, but this feels similar to the Brotherhood’s original portrayal. However, while Vree was building new laser pistols and dissecting mutants, the Outcast weapon’s lab takes a step back, merely explains how weapons work.

Subtle storytelling: Outcasts use robots to supplement low numbers and it shows their extensive use of technology.

Lyons and the eastern Brotherhood are portrayed as humanitarians, but it doesn’t really come through. In the base game, the Brotherhood talks about helping people, but they only operate within the city ruins. No one in Megaton or Rivet City has opinions on them. It’s hard to say that they’re keeping the mutants in check, because the mutants come from Vault 87, which is on the opposite side of the wasteland. It raises the question as to what the eastern Brotherhood is actually doing.

In the Broken Steel DLC, the Brotherhood took a greater humanitarian role, controlling the water purifier and distributing water to distant settlements. The eastern Brotherhood’s actions doesn’t make the western Brotherhood evil, it just means they have different priorities. The traditional Brotherhood uses the knight motif as an organizational structure, but Lyons group imitates the image of knights in shining armor.

Meanwhile, on the west coast…

In Fallout: New Vegas, the western Brotherhood is portrayed as monstrous techno-raiders. This is a far cry from the other four incarnations that players had been exposed to over nearly 20 years and is especially striking because much of New Vegas was written by Chris Avellone, a Fallout 2 writer.

Unfortunately, the backstory of the BoS in New Vegas relies heavily on Fallout: Van Buren, which was never finished. Somehow, the Brotherhood of Steel transformed from “research and development powerhouse who reintroduced technology into the wasteland, but stayed out of the NCR power structure” to xenophobic, murdering, hoarders of technology.

Tell, don’t show: Mojave chapter is obsessed with Helios One, but the Courier can never help them, even with the super-weapon in hand.

The Mojave chapter of the BoS is portrayed in an overwhelmingly negative light. The player is told that they are xenophobic, isolationist, technology hoarders who will attack people for technology, but the player never sees this. This could have been fixed by something as simple as a random event where a BoS knight demands a player hand over their laser pistol.
The Brotherhood quest line in New Vegas involves being captured (because the player was trespassing), being made into a temporary slave, then having immediate acceptance from the chapter (most of whom need help from the Courier). The Mojave chapter doesn’t steal technology from the player nor task them with collecting technology (as the Outcasts did).

One of the companions, Veronica, notes that there isn’t enough genetic diversity in the Mojave chapter, but the player never sees this either. If the developers wanted to prove their point, they should have clearly made Brotherhood characters with familial relationships. There’s a handful of quests explaining why the Mojave chapter is in trouble, but the narrative impact of these quests doesn’t fit with what the player actually sees.

Shown advanced technology, the Mojave elder doesn’t even seize it for himself, he just ignores it. Veronica is confused and so is the player.

The one “show, don’t tell” moment in New Vegas, is when Veronica approaches the elder with 200 year old prototype technology and tells him outright that they will die if they don’t adapt. The elder promptly dismisses this.

Remember that before their trouble with the NCR the Brotherhood was “research and development powerhouse who reintroduced technology into the wasteland, but stayed out of the NCR power structure.” The New Vegas incarnation doesn’t reflect this, instead it casts the Mojave chapter as a tribe without purpose, merely surviving under the sands.

Had more of the Brotherhood storyline revolved around technological changes and the Helios power plant, it would have created a much stronger narrative for the player to base their opinion on. As it stands, the player is told that the Brotherhood is a band of techno-raiders, but other than Father Elijah (which is a different discussion) they are shown to be friendly to anyone who passes security and willing to take help from an outsider.
The lore and the gameplay simply don’t match up.

Even the Brotherhood’s endings in New Vegas are mostly negative. They are as follows:

Brotherhood is wiped out
Brotherhood is wiped out by Caesar
Brotherhood steals technology from traders
Brotherhood declares a truce with NCR
Brotherhood doesn’t attack NCR, but steals technology from traders

All but one of these endings portray the Brotherhood as either techno-raiders or a doomed ideology, but the gameplay doesn’t reflect this. There was opportunity to show what the writers had in mind, but instead the Brotherhood is shown to be misunderstood within the context of the gameplay, while the fluff is telling the players that the Brotherhood is doomed.

The writers seemed bent on making players hate the BoS, but veteran players will have mixed feelings.

It is particularly interesting that the Brotherhood has no allies at the start of New Vegas. House wants them wiped out, Caesar wants them wiped out, and Yes Man sarcastically says that they are the Couriers biggest threat (even if the Courier is a decorated member of the faction). The only group willing to work with the BoS is the NCR, who only agrees because they’re being attacked on all sides and are stretched too thin as it is.

Many disgruntled fans say that the Brotherhood must be destroyed because they are incompatible with the Mojave wasteland being policed by a robot army (House/Independent). However, that only stands if the Brotherhood acts as they have been portrayed, rather than how they are show to act in the game. With an independent ending, the Courier would have the opportunity make the Brotherhood as they once were to NCR, an R&D powerhouse that distributes technology back into the wasteland while staying out of the power structure.

It appears that the lore and direction of the Brotherhood was overtaken by the story of Van Buren. Players were expected to accept that change without questioning the previous five stories about the Brotherhood. As more lore is added to the Fallout universe, the Brotherhood of Steel’s original goal is lost, replaced by a fascist military state hell-bent on keeping technology away from commoners.

It’s been a long ride to this point and it hasn’t always been clear why they have undergone these changes, especially since they were once described as a powerhouse in the NCR government. Though many fans dislike the BoS, the qualms they have are mostly from the latest games (more specifically New Vegas), rather than looking that the organization and the lore as a whole.

Will they ever come back?

Unpacking the Brotherhood of Steel: Part 1

Sep16

The Brotherhood of Steel is the only faction to appear in every single Fallout game. From charming isolationists in Fallout to conquering warlords in Fallout: Tactics and then xenophobic isolationists in New Vegas, the Brotherhood of Steel has served as the lighthouse of the Fallout franchise. Despite their strong presence, the Brotherhood perhaps the most inconsistent and controversial faction. This inconsistency has led many fans to see the Brotherhood as little more than techno-raiders, rather than knights of knowledge.

To better understand the Brotherhood and their changing mission, I wantto unpack the canonical forms of the Brotherhood of Steel in two parts. First from Fallout 1-Tactics and then from Fallout 3-4.

In the first game, the player’s interaction with the Brotherhood of Steel was entirely optional. The faction existed as the end-game hub. The Lost Hills bunker contained S.P.E.C.I.A.L upgrades, energy weapons, power-armor, skill bonuses, and temporary companions. Beneath the surface of
Yet entry came at a price and this is where the faction earned a negative reputation in the eyes of many. “New recruits” to the Brotherhood had to travel several weeks southeast to a hostile radioactive dungeon called The Glow. No one was expected to return. Brotherhood soldiers died inside at the Glow. Corpses of “new recruits” litter the surface. Although many have died trying to join the Brotherhood, it is important to remember that Fallout is a world where a handful of pills can make someone completely immune to radiation for 24 hours.Additionally, although the Brotherhood sent the Vault Dweller on a suicide mission, they were true to their word and admitted the player character to their ranks.

Anyone wanna roast some hotdogs?

In their first incarnation, the Brotherhood is complex. They’re isolationist, they’re militaristic, they’re bureaucratic, and they’re scientific. Librarian Vree conducts a thorough autopsy of a super mutant, the report of which is literally used to save the world. Overall, the Brotherhood acts like the military they spawned from: they engage in routine training, paperwork, scientific study, and they keep a tight fist on their toys, particularly power armor.

There are a few small details hidden in the original incarnation of the Brotherhood that are often ignored.
The first is the singer of Junktown, who reveals that despite his only marketable skill being his voice, he is still allowed to perform within the Lost Hills bunker (he actually shows the player where the bunker is).
The second is that Vree mentions she built a new laser pistol. This shows that the Brotherhood isn’t just collecting technology (as The Outcasts do in Fallout 3) they are manufacturing it.
Third, both the Gun Runners and Jake’s Weapons sell the super-sledge. The item’s description states that the super-sledge was invented by the Brotherhood of Steel. This would imply that the Brotherhood is trading their new technology, rather than protecting it. This is further reinforced by the good (canon) ending which states that knights drove the mutants away (with minimal loss of life), joined the NCR (but stayed out of the power-structure), and reintroduced technology into the wasteland while also engaging in research and development. .

Surprisingly, the Brotherhood all but disappeared in Fallout 2. Their bunker remained the end-game hub as it contained S.P.E.C.I.A.L. upgrades, but it lacked structure and only had one quest. Since the formation of the NCR, the Brotherhood established a handful of business offices across the wasteland. It is worth nothing that these bunkers are empty, manned only by a guard at the front door.
Indeed, there are only two Brotherhood operatives in the whole game. The first is a knight who says that you’ve “come a long way” then refuses to talk to you again. The second is Matt at the BoS bunker in San Francisco, who gives a small amount of backstory before asking the player to steal vertibird plans from the Enclave.

Matt tells the player this cryptic phrase: “The Brotherhood of Steel is not the power that we once were. We believed ourselves to be the sole source of technology left to mankind. Secure in this belief we have let our order decline over the years.”

The player is never told exactly what happened to the Brotherhood between Fallout and Fallout 2, but it is implied that the Enclave overtook them as the technological powerhouse. The game’s cover and main menu reflects this. The antiquated T-51b has been replaced by the advanced Enclave armor. This still leaves one question unanswered, what ever happened to the Brotherhood’s work with the NCR, “reintroducing technology into the wasteland and becoming a powerhouse for research and development”?

Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel is considered semi-canon. Only the most pivotal events effect the overall Fallout storyline. It likely would have been cut altogether had Fallout 3 not put the Brotherhood of Steel on the east coast, 3000 miles from their home bunker.

Tactics attempts to fill the gap between Fallout and Fallout 2. The Brotherhood was split in two. Those that wanted to keep outsiders from their ranks remained in California and the rest were sent on blimps (somehow) over the Rocky Mountains. It seems as though a single line of exposition from the opening narration of Fallout Tactics is meant to explain the fall of the BoS from research powerhouse to xenophobic technology hoardes. The Brotherhood who remained in California would split again between Fallout 2 and Fallout 3, prompting a separate subfaction to head east. Surely these divisions left the organization weakened.

In the actual game, the Brotherhood act as Space Marines from Warhammer 40,000. All across the Midwest villages are wiped clean of any hostiles. The survivors can either offer their strongest children as Brotherhood recruits or be wiped out. At the same time, this incarnation of the Brotherhood of Steel takes in tribals, ghouls, super mutants, talking deathclaws, dogs, robots, and even Vault Boy.

The story of Fallout Tactics hardly deals with the Brotherhood’s quest to preserve technology (there are a few missions but the majority of the story is about facing the next threat). Instead, the mid-western Brotherhood is on a great crusade to capture villages and eliminate hostiles.The ending is an exception. The player is given the ability to decide if the Midwest will expand on existing technology (in a Mass Effect 3 type ending) or start from the ground up. I believe that your perception of this BoS incarnation really depends on whether or not you like Warhammer.

Yep. Vault Boy was actually a companion in Tactics.

Even in the original games, the developers never seemed sure exactly how the Brotherhood of Steel should be perceived or what their role is. Yet, the Brotherhood has appeared in every Fallout game. Indeed, if you count the non-canon “Brotherhood of Steel”, they are in the namesake of two titles. However, there are still unanswered questions. When Bethesda got their hands on the Brotherhood, their tone changed again and then again two years later when the franchise returned to the hands of Fallout 2 writer Chris Avellone. Next time, we’ll be looking at the 3D incarnations of the Brotherhood of Steel.

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Tag Archives: Fallout Factions

Deconstructing Fallout 3: Difficulty Curve

The Interactivity Curve of Fallout: Shelter

Unpacking the Brotherhood of Steel: Part 2

Unpacking the Brotherhood of Steel: Part 1