Sunday 6 December 2015

Dealing with the Fallout


I had to be physically dragged away from the computer.  My wife pointed out that our teenage son had been waiting patiently for two weeks to play Fallout 4.  She wanted me to behave like an adult and let him have a turn.  I of course refused and threatened violence, whereupon she made good on my promise.  I was banished to the garage in shame and eventually became bored enough to do some work on the Necrons.  I'll probably have to wait a while before I can don my Grognak the Barbarian costume again and wreak havoc on the denizens of post-apocalyptic Boston.


To be honest, I was getting a bit bored with it (is 70 hours excessive?).  In order to advance the storyline, you have to side with one of the main factions and I don't really like any of them.  The Minutemen are bloody do-gooders who devolve the game into a grubby version of The Sims.  The Brotherhood of Steel are gung-ho military zealots. The Railroad are delusional synth-lovers and The Institute is just creepy, but not in a good way. I didn't want to pledge my allegiance to any Faction, so I joined them all and just kept switching faction quests.


It didn't help that my favourite companions are Strong (an Ork) and Nick Valentine (a Flayed One) who are generally disliked by everyone.  It started getting silly. I got to the Bunker Hill quest and walked into a pitched battle where none of the factions were hostile to me.  I had no idea who I was supposed to be shooting at.  Strong said he was hungry and suggested that we eat everyone but the combatants kept re-spawning and wouldn't shoot back.  So I just left them to it and buggered off into The Glowing Sea.  I'll start building up the Lead Belly perk and maybe I can become one of The Children of Atom without slowly melting into a puddle of radioactive goo.


If Fallout4 was 40k, I reckon The Minutemen would be the Tau with their ever expanding shanty towns built 'for the greater good'.  The Institute would try to bring about another Dark Age of Technology with their Abominable Intelligence machines. The Brotherhood of Steel would declare Elder Maxson as the Emperor and indulge in a spot of subjugation-of-the-masses.  The Railroad would try to turn everyone into Necron synths via the bio-transference machines in Madam Irma's Memory Den.  And the Commonwealth would burn.


The Tyranids are, of course, the feral ghouls. Had there been a Feral Ghoul faction in the game I'd have joined in an instant.  Hunting in packs with mindless savagery and insatiable hunger is more my style but probably doesn't make for a good storyline.


2 comments:

  1. Kneeling?! Jesus, I don't even want to think about the time and effort needed to do that...

    ReplyDelete