MD13
Formerly howler1313
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2009
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On that note, gouri, one of my favorite moments from the story was when...
You meet your son for the first time since being frozen to find out that he's older than you are. You kind of just accept this, ask him two or three questions, and then move on with your life. Like, the writing in that scene is just terrible. This guy meets the son he's been searching for (off and on...I had a post-apocalyptic bachelor pad to build, son!) since he woke up. He proceeds to have about a three minute conversation with him before accepting a mission from the (former) kid, looting the Institute for everything he could carry, and then heading back into the wasteland. My dude barely even sounded all that shocked that his son was older than him, and still creepily calls him "Father" instead of Shawn after finding out the truth.
The above is why I honestly think this game would have worked just as well without the dead spouse, kidnapped son story. Your character could just as easily have been a blank slate, single guy (or gal) who wakes up in the wasteland after a few hundred years of cryosleep gone wrong, gets himself involved in the civil war going on there, and goes from there. Given that adding a kidnapped son (who was an infant and not even a character when he was taken) and a wife that dies after about five lines of dialogue, it's not as if we've got an emotional attachment to the two anyway. I doubt anyone here was like, "I MUST FIND MY SON!" So why bother with that plot at all? Investigating the Institute for the sake of answering questions about what they're doing would have been interesting enough to me without the son coming into play at all.
As you said, Fallout is a series about exploration, and I agree that giving your character a mandatory backstory was a mistake and, more importantly, totally pointless. Almost nothing from this game would have needed to be changed if you removed Shawn from it altogether. Hell, just make it about someone else's kid who was kidnapped by the Institute, with you and Nick Valentine playing buddy cops to figure things out and try to get him back.
Agreed. The main plot was horrendous overall, probably the weakest thing about the game. I'd also like to be invested in the building, but it's currently a pain in the ass and I'll wait for mods for it. I don't need an intricate plot to enjoy an adventure like FO4, but man their dialogue makes me skip lines until the quest is delivered.