• The lore fix challenge
    142 replies, posted
as for the ghoul kid in a fridge, I can only really think of one solution which is just as ridiculous but at least doesn't blatantly say "yeah ghouls don't need food or water dude don't you know dude lmao" so what if when the nuke went off, that somehow supercharged the refrigerator and it ended up doing some accidental jury rigged cryogenic freeze, and the ghould kid hadn't actually thawed out until a few weeks before you came along?
I think the best solution is to just say that the old Fallout games and new ones basically contradict themselves regarding the whole ghouls thing. Coffin Willie and Billy basically suffered similiar circumstances and came out fine. Yeah, you can be picky and say "But Billy was in there since the war started", but that's just ignoring the primary point that two ghouls survived an extended period of time in seriously extreme isolation. A normal human would probably be unable to survive being buried alive in a coffin for only a few days at best, and I imagine the same with a fridge. These two survived months and years respectively without any form of sustenance. Those are extreme amounts no matter how you try to spin it when comparing to human survival rates, and one doesn't seem worse than the other when they're basically still accomplishing the same thing. Is it stupid? Yeah, in both situations. And you'll have people saying that Coffin Willie comes off as a joke, but I think that's unfair to give it a pass just because he comes out and says a few silly things after you unearth him, but people just refuse to give up on Billy. At best, I'm going to say that certain ghouls (not all) like Woody (another ghoul who is known for sleeping in awkward places for long unspecified periods), Billy, and Willie have the ability to go into a deep state of hibernation/torpor that allows them to survive without sustenance for extremely long periods of time. I'll liken it to how not all Children of Atom have immunity to radiation. At worst, all three of these examples are basically jokes of different varieties, with Billy's joke only being an extended affair, because it gives the developers an excuse to create a slightly more fleshed-out miniquest with a moral choice opportunity compared to finding Woody, and unearthing Willie, and the encounters being done in a moment.
In Fallout 1 you need to find a water chip for your vault so they can have clean water. Necropolis is located on top of Vault 12 and they're using that vault's water chip to keep their water clean. You make a deal with the ghouls to fix their water pump in exchange for their water chip, since if you just take the chip they'll die of thirst because they need water.
Okay but I clearly stated in a previous post that in FO2, a Ghoul survived Months without Water, Food or Air while being buried alive. It isn't also insane that water could have managed to leak into the fridge.
if the ghouls in necropolis lose their water for two weeks they all die, placing their need of water firmly in 'unchanged' territory. Fallout two has a lot of great things about it, but tonal consistency wasn't one of them. I'd place the narrative significance of a ghoul being dug out of a grave right about on the same level as the talking spore plant that teaches you how to beat a radscorpion at chess
I know, I'm just saying that just it has been done in the past so don't be surprised that it happened again.
the important difference is that the two ghouls you can dig up in 2 just have some funny lines and shamble away, and the ghouls that make no sense in 4 are very firmly integrated in the world with lengthy attached quests that make it much harder to write them off as just a joke, narritively speaking.
Can I just say that Billy's quest is not long by any measure? It's a 5-10 minute quest at best, it's only 'long' if you decide to fight all the enemies along the way, but otherwise, it's really just shooting a fridge, talking to a morally bankrupt dude and making a choice, finding a house, making another choice if you performed certain actions beforehand, and then it's over with nothing else. I think people really overstate the impact of this quest in terms of its duration and significance.
Remember that Fallout 2 is also that game that has 5 separate monty python random encounters. And they're not just references, they're literally recreating things from the movies in the fallout universe. And not to mention the Star Trek shuttle, the gate of infinity, and all manner of random shit you encounter. The Holy Hand Grenade being an attainable item doesn't make it a part of the lore. It makes it a joke that's supposed to laughed at, and then left behind as you continue to play the game.
Ghouls having the ability to go into hibernation sounds pretty damn cool along with their resistance to radiation, makes them a hardy bunch against the environment but don't have the real strength to deal with physical duress.
No amount of apologetics can justify the ghoul kid in the fridge. That's what all this is, apologetics. You can stretch and stretch and just make it fit in the lore, but it still sticks out like a sore thumb in the world. Aside from the dramatic revelation that ghouls apparently simply do not age, this is an astoundingly absurd situation that's treated as a joke, that carries several magnitudes more implication than some dude being buried for a few months. How did this kid not snap, and go insane? He kept a pretty level head considering he must have been rationing supplies hardcore. I mean, is there really 210 years worth of food and water in that fridge? Let's assume they have can enter a hibernation mode and live for extended periods of time. Then let's put aside what an astounding revelation this is when it comes to how ghouls interact with the world and the potential that carries. It's pretty damn convenient that he was awake when you happened by. Maybe ghouls feed on radiation inherently and can go without food and water. In which case, even more convenient the kid wasn't feral. When you get down to it, you're pretty much on the ball. This is more of an example of astoundingly horrible storytelling than it is an obvious lore break, but that doesn't excuse it from being a lore break in the first place. Most consider the ghoul-in-the-grave to be a joke, and can be largely disregarded, much is the same with the ghoul kid in the fridge. In which case, there's absolutely nothing wrong with conceding that both break the lore by implying ghouls can survive inhuman amounts of time without food and water, as a central conflict in the original game directly contradicts that notion. Even if the grave ghoul is 100% in-lore approved, as mentioned above, months don't compare to 210 years. Ghoul kid in the fridge isn't worth bringing up when trying to do a 'lore fix challenge.' There's nothing to fix. It's a wild-wasteland tier joke, not a particularly good one at that.
Didn't kid in the fridge also spark the infamous Hines tweet? That might also make it more reviled
Among other things, yeah. The ghoul kid didn't even bother me that much until I saw that tweet. Pete Hines is a PR dude totally separate from the writing staff, but it still leaves an awfully bad impression on how they choose to represent the integrity of their lore. Wild Wasteland really should have been a feature carried over from NV, not just to excuse some of the jokey stuff that Beth included, but to really allow Beth to go full ham in some places without upsetting cranky fans.
On the whole FEV v. Radiation debate, it's kind of a moot point. Fallout 1 and 2 established that when the nukes hit West-Tek and turned it into the glow, it destroyed the stores of FEV they'd been developing there, releasing it into the atmosphere and causing all life on the planet to mutate, with the exception of the people in the vaults and the sheltered Enclave personnel. For humans, most people seemed superficially unchanged, but it probably altered them such that irradiating them made the mutation into ghouls possible.
That would require that the FEV cloud that evidently created every single unrealistic thing in Fallout managed to infect all the people of Necropolis and Vault 12. Which means that a continent-spanning cloud of viral agents managed to travel more than a hundred miles in less than the time it takes to die from being exposed to almost the full brunt of a nuke's radiation package. I'm sorry, but the supersonic virus cloud theory doesn't make things that much more realistic or improve the verisimilitude. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/107267/65db749b-ae32-49e3-a690-6a3591e8450e/fallout 1 world map.jpg
The mutant FEV spreading in the atmosphere is from the Fallout Bible, it's not in the games. Also FEV doesn't create ghouls, we see that in Vault 34 where the inhabitants who didn't leave and become the Boomers became irradiated thanks to their nuclear generator breaking after Chris Haversam abandoned the vault, assuming he had turned into a ghoul. One of the reasons I was never a fan of the Fallout Bible was it turned the FEV into a super virus responsible for practically everything when originally it was just a means of making people into super soldiers that was never finished and turned into a monster making soup by The Master. The only connection between ghouls and the FEV in the original games is Harold. And he's not even a ghoul, he just looks kind of like one.
My first entry: The Institute. Why the fuck would we blow it up when siding with every single group except the Institute? And for that matter, why does siding when them require maintaining the Status Quo? * Minutemen ending: They get in, capture the facility intact, turn it into a safe haven through which they can coordinate militias, transport them anywhere they're needed, manufacture needed supplies, and take advantage of the synth program to manufacture replacement body parts + install them to help the wounded. Perhaps in time scientists might restart the R&D side, but primarily, this would just be a way for the Minutemen to remain pretty much unkillable. * Brotherood ending: No explosion here, but the facility would be gutted, repurposed into their biiiiig underground clubhouse! * Railroad ending: Similar to the BoS ending, only instead of using it to hoard technology and lord over the Commonwealth, they'd use it as a mainland Acadia. * Institute ending A: What we get. Some players will want it and there's nothing wrong with this ending for those players, so it's perfectly ok as an option. * Institute ending B: Nate/Nora decided, for better or worse, that it was time to blow the Institute up. The kablooey is too awesome to omit entirely, and this is a good enough justification to have it: Blind rage seasoned with grief. And perhaps mild psychosis. * Institute Ending C: We take over, continue to operate it as a center for R&D, but instaed of the Gen 3s being slaves, they're given the right to free will, treated as actual people, and the facility is turned around to serve the true public good its capable of serving. The 'good' ending, also can be tied in with the RR or Minutemen if the player so desires.. Entry the second: Travis 'Lonely' Miles * Fuck off, I want a repeater station for Galaxy News Radio or Radio New Vegas. Entry the third: Preston Garvey I wouldn't change much about his backstory, but I would change one key element: That major promotion he gives you. IT feels a bit odd to me that he jumps you from PFC to General in <30 seconds, then proceeds to send you out to do literally everything while he lazes in Sanctuary standing on your roof going " 'Least it ain't rainin' ". He would be General, and you would have to earn your way up the ranks by doing the wetwork you're already assigned when going down the Minutemen path. Given how he feels about the Minutemen, I think he should hold a lot more reverence for the post and be quite careful about who he hands it to. By endgame you would still become General, but it wouldn't just be handed to you right from the word go, and it'd require maxing his affinity out as a means of gaining his trust and respect. Entry the fourth: Nuka World. What grinds my gears about Nuka World is you can't try to redeem the raiders. It's great fun using them as target practice and all, but I'd like to add in an ending where you can quietly assassinate the gang leaders, install puppets/yes men, then while working with the Minutemen, slowly but surely shift them away from raiding and put their combat capabilities to good use.
it did always miff me about how the group dedicated to collecting and hoarding dangerous technology as the brotherhood are decides to just fucking nuke a treasure trove of that exact technology
I really wish people would stop citing the Fallout Bible as a canon source. It's alright if you take it in a very general sense, but even Chris Avellone (who wrote the damn thing) doesn't consider it canon. It was only really meant to provide some background and answer fan questions about Fallout 1 and 2, but a lot of stuff in it got invalidated with the releases of 3, NV, and 4.
So... why did they just not give a shit about unique power armours in 4? Like... why do literally none of the variants look different?
Need Automatron for tesla armor.
Like none of the helmets even remotely look different, the... two variants. Then the space armour is just a shitty reskin. Like for fucking real?
They want you to buy power armor skin microtransactions. Earlier games only really had the tesla veriant as unique so at least it's not much worse off.
Because they don't give any shits about any unique weapon or armor? Even aside from random legendaries, you can get completely unique named weapons in Fallout 3 and 4, with powers and abilities no other piece of equipment gives, and it'll still look like the bog standard version of the item. There are a few exceptions yeah, but for the most part, they don't spring for new art for these things.
This isn't lore but: how does the laser musket's reload work? And how are Fo4 power armour's hand's controlled?
I think in lore the musket is charged by cranking it but they didn't want to give you an unlimited ammo gun. Either that or you but the MF cell in somewhere and you use the crank to move the energy from the cell to the capacitor.
Power armor forearms have an internal handlebar that i can only assume features buttons for each mechanical finger on the side the user's fingers curl around. You press them harder, the finger tightens more, similar to modern VR haptic controllers.
it's best not to think about laser musket (or any other fictional gun in this franchise... or hell videogames in general) too hard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndrfEvrudCg
maybe the fridge was really full when he got in it
I wrote my own story on this because there's a lot of things that are just 'there' and not explained, including the Laser Rifle: The Minutemen came upon a cache of Laser Rifles and brought them back to the Castle. Arming each Minuteman with a high-tech Laser Rifle would significantly boost their firepower, and show everyone they mean business. Only there was one problem: 90% of the rifles were nonfunctional. The fault was a small connector or diode that rusted out, possibly a fault in this particular batch from before the war. This connector sends a charge from the trigger to the MFC to initiate the micro-fusion reaction and generate energy to power a brief but intense laser beam. They are saddened as they suddenly realise why finding so many laser rifles was too good to be true. Having studied the problem as well as examining the functional examples, the resident engineer devises a solution: use a manual wind-up to generate the initial charge, and hold it in a circuit until the trigger is pulled. He begins converting hundreds of busted laser rifles to this new form, which he personally compares as being akin to a bolt-action rifle. The General at the time declares that the conversion shall be known as the Laser Musket in order to fit the revolutionary theme the group are based around.
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