I was stumped since the conception of FO2.99 on how the game should begin. I wasn’t going to do another  ”leave the vault” type thing since that was already done twice. I couldn’t do a tribal situation since I don’t have any tribal art. Instead, I’m going to go with your character having been a slave in a version of “Vault City”. I might as well call it that since it developed around the vault its citizens came out of. It’s a developed city with real buildings (I’m guessing mudbricks) instead of salvaged scrap like most of the other towns. It’s one of the main producers of food in the area so it’s got it’s own slave labor. Once you choose how your character looks and their skills, you’re in the house of your master who is near death from something. He tells you he’s going to let you go and not send you back to the slave market like what usually happens when slave’s masters die. He bought as a kid after his own child was killed by ________. I haven’t written the dialogue yet but he’ll tell you how you were like his own child. You’ll ask him why he didn’t let you go sooner and he’ll say something along the lines of that he was in a rough spot because if he let you go, you’d run away and the wasteland isn’t safe or that you might have been recaptured as soon as you left.  Or maybe he was disabled and would have had to beg for food if he didn’t have a slave. He’ll remind you how he never never worked you more than you could handle. He’ll tell you that your freedom papers have already been handed over to the “govenor” and that you’re free to go. You can decide to kill him if you want since you were a slave. Also, he gives you his PipBoy since he won’t be needing it anymore. You’re going to be forced to leave Vault City 2 since “they don’t want any slave retalliation” so they kick you out but give you a bag with some food, stims, and a 10mm pistol. Of course you get let back in for some reason. Yes, it’s been done before (Fallout 3) but you don’t want to have one of the biggest cities in the game open from the very beginning. A smaller town wouldn’t have the same slave dynamic.

I also recently figured out how to introduce the super mutants in a meaningful way. At the end of Fallout 1, The Master’s army was said to head east. Before, I thought that the super mutants in D.C. were the same ones. Well, they’re not. They come from one of the vaults in the area. It’s a different strain of FEV that causes mutations to continue throughout the super mutants life that causes them to grow throughout their life which produces the Behemoths. It also makes them not have hair. Back to FO1. The Master knew a lot of stuff so it’s likely he knew about any other FEV vats. After he was killed by the Vault Dweller, his army was scattered but one of his liutenenats (the main bad guy of FO2.99) knew from The Master that there was another source of FEV in a vault on the east coast. Once he found it, he could continue The Master’s plan. This presents me with a problem. It’s been almost 100 years since The Master was killed. It couldn’t have take that long to cross the US. Had the super mutant leader been checking every vault, he would have had so few troops left by the time he got to Richmond, that he wouldn’t be a threat. I think what I’m going to have to do, is have him give up on The Master’s plan for awhile while he was living in Broken Hills, but his hatred could only be stilled for so long. After awhile, he gathered the left over Super Mutants who felt the same way and lead them to find the vault and bring back The Master’s dream.

I’ve got more ideas but I’ll get to them tomorrow.

I pray that New Vegas will give the series hope.

[Edit]

I remember how bitchy I thought the people out NMA used to sound about hating FO3 but I just can’t like the game as much as I used to. It could have gone so much better. Reviewers didn’t seem to mind though.

Here’s my rough layout for Basset.

I say rough because I can’t make out how I want it to look in the final version since I don’t know of all the set pieces already in FO3. I think I’ll be using the buildings from the Republic of Dave since that gives me three different buildings. I wanted to use the homestead buildings but there’s only one or two types of them. I’ll use them for a town closer to the city.

I was thinking about having a wall of cars around the city to reinforce the either chainlink fence or wall around the town but that would actually makes it easier to climb over so if I do decide to, I’m going to need to place it about 10 feet away. I might just end up putting a moat. These are defensive people with a lot of guns so I’m going to emphasize that.

In the middle of the town is the main building where the “king” lives. I decided the descendant of Walter Basset ended up running the place and then his son after him. I always imagined Walter as having kids that had moved out by the time the war happened but I’m now making it that they were allowed in too as one would imagine. This could lead to a situation where Walter the… 3rd-5th, doesn’t have any children and problems insue. Heck, I guess your character could end up becoming king. I’m not sure if I’m going to go by “king” though. Maybe “chief” or adopting “walter” as a title.

The hole in the middle is the entrance to the bunker. The thing next to it is the foundation of the origional house. Why is that the only one there? Well it’s still in use for some reason so it was cleaned off and the ground may have covered over the old ones. Maybe the new houses are built on the old foundations. Maybe they broke up and got moved out of the way. I based the area off of a neighobour hood from where I plan on placing Basset. All the houses there are gone but the cars would have been left as big rusty heaps. I could not have  a bunch of cars in the forest by putting up that wall though. Oh yeah, Basset is far to the south, outside of the northern DC radiation and then area has trees and what not growing in it. I’m not going to make a dense forest everywhere (Some areas have completely grown back though) but the “normal areas” around Basset will have have sporadic trees and bushes. Having greenery is something that’s going in regardless of what anyone else thinks. Bethesda said they left it out because it didn’t feel Fallout-y but that’s faulty logic. FO1 and FO2 took place in the desert and already have things growing back like I’ve said before.

I’m super tired now so what else do I have to say. Brahim pens are in the back. There are guard towers around the wall. I need some space for crop growing.

The Brotherhood of Steel’s main focus is “preserving and developing technology” but I want to have a group devoted to keeping pre-war knowledge. They would be called something along the lines of the “Book Keepers” whose main focus is preserving history and searching books and holo-tapes for knowledge that would help humanity to survive. They wouldn’t be interested in superflous things like literature (somewhat born from my dislike of them too)

Please don’t hurt me mister. My dad died and he left me his special box he kept but I can’t get it open. It’s really important to me.

Your responses would be as follows:

How’d your old man kick the bucket? [CH<=4]

He got radiation poisoning you freakin’ jerk! (Cries)

Sorry for your loss, kid.  [CH>=5]

(sigh)

Don’t worry about it son. Your memories of your father will last longer out in this wasteland than whatever is in that box. [Speech check] [CH check?]

Why can’t you open it?

It had a key but I lost it around the ______.

Hold on. I’ll go look for it.

Let me try and pick the lock. [Lockpick]

Let’s blow that sucker open. [Explosives] If skill is too low, you use too many explosives and destroy the box.

You said what’s in the box was… important?

It’s really valuable to me. It was my dad’s.

Give it to me and I’ll take it to an engineer I know. [Lie]

Give me the box or your family is going to have two dead family members.

I’ll open the box after I open your head! You enter into combat with the kid. Obviously you’ll win and when you open the box, a message pops up saying. The only thing in the box was a teddy bear the kid was going to get for his birthday. You son of a bitch.

Sucks to be you, kid.

Sorry kid. I don’t have time for this.

That’s just the gist of it. Those aren’t all the choices or all of the dialogue that will be spoken but I wanted to show how I plan on making various skills useful for more than just a few things. I would like a “gray area” option. If I’m using the charisma skill wrong, someone let me know.

It’s around the area of Richmond VA. It’s about 13 miles across. I’m trying to make the citywide destruction a little more realistic so around the area where it says “Richmond” will be pretty much leveled except for a few buildings. I haven’t looked for an answer on what kind of bombs would have gone off during the Great War so this might change. A little farther out, there are going to be more ruined buildings. I’m leaving out any wooden buildings. Wood just wouldn’t survive 200 years. Actually, maybe treated wood could. I’ll have to check on that. A steel framed house with sheetrock walls and aluminum siding should still be there if the structure hasn’t rusted too much. This change from what FO3 looked like was sparked by looking at pictures of Hiroshima and looking at destroyed LA in Terminator Salvation. LA was pretty much gone except for some of the stronger looking structures. The same was true for Hiroshima which also suffered heavy fire damage which burned up everything flammable.

The Highland Park area is still going to be dead from the heavy Fallout from the DC area. FO2 has trees already growing back in the damn desert so FO3 needs a reason why that area is so radioactive still and has little plant life growing back.

The Jessup Farms area is going to be ruins that have been overgrown. This is around the area where Basset is going to be. “Water Town” is going to be around some of the intact buildings south of it near the river. I checked the flow of the river, and it doesn’t go through DC so there isn’t going to be any heavy radiation in the water like DC’s so it’s going to be safe to swim in. It still has some in it and so does the rain water, making “Water Town”‘s radiation remover more important.

Church Hill is within the major blast zone but below that, I’m going to have the city a little more developed than it is now so I can try and get some more semi-intact buildings.

In terms of human settlements, I haven’t thought of much else. I did think of Cannibal Town with signs in the area saying that and having skulls everywhere

One big problem I noticed about FO3 is that no one deals with food production. Everyone seems to be surviving off of rat-meat, which is okay, but also off of packaged pre-war food which is impossible. In fact, I’m removing any non-natural food minus Nuka-Cola.

A town I’m making to deal mainly with food production will be called Bassett, named after its founder Walter Bassett. Walter became worried when the world began to run out of oil in the 2050′s and watched the news compusviely, becoming more and more paranoid as time went on. He began constructing a fallout shelter under his house and began stock piling weapons to insure his family’s survival. Half-way through it’s contruction, Walter ran out of money but managed to convince his surrounding neighbors to pitch in and guarantee a place in the shelter. It wasn’t a choice Walter was happy to make but it was one he had to. The realization that if his family were the only ones left after the war, they would need others to help repopulate helped him accept the inevetable. Needless to say, the war happened and everyone left the shelter after the radiation had receded to a safe level. A few children had been born during the time in the shelter and two older folks died. Walter survived only two years after leaving the shelter due to his old age but the already settled area around the shelter was named Matasareanu in his honor and also for that fact that the large metal door in the middle of town says “Bassett” on it anyway. Normally, the family would have stayed within the protection of the fallout shelter but the generator (Maybe nuclear? I need to check if they had that.) ran out of fuel and the town began raising bhramin for food and needed to watch over them. The shelter was stripped of useful equipment and then relegated to storage, growing mushrooms, and a safehouse. It was used as a jail once. So the town developed and built up a large wall around made out of cars and other junk. The paranoia of Walter was still famillair to some of the citizens while the town was being constructed so defense was emphasized. A moat was dug surrounding the town and the bhramin pens. Some objected and thought it was overkill but as time went on, and bands of raiders began to form, it paid off. The town being somewhat far away from downtown Richmond, had better hunting oppertunites around some of the young forests starting to reappear. They had a large supply of weapons to hunt with anyway. Bassett (now the name of the town) didn’t have a supply of clean water after the shelter’s power shut off so it ended up forming a symbiotic relationship with “Water Town” (pending). The citizens of “Water Town” came from a vault near the edge of downtown Richmond. They were near a river and still had the water purification systems and power from the geo-thermal systems of the Vault. The town of Bassett grew into an agrarian society after being forced out of their shelter while the citizens of “Water Town” grew to become more technologically motivated due to living half in and half out of the vault and keeping all of its systems running past the amount of time they were supposed to last. Bassett trades food for water and “Water Town” trades water for food.

I haven’t completely thought of how the cities would be layed out. Bassett has a wall similar to Junktown around it from FO1, a fallout shelter opening in the middle. There is also a space (I’m not sure inside or outside of the wall) with the crops and the bramin pens. You would need alot of junk to make a wall to cover that but at least the bramin need to be protected. Maybe give them a big pen and have guards with rifles on watch duty. “Water Town” on the other hand has half the town living on the outside where the water purifier is while some live in the Vault or maybe just go in there at night time. Now that I have this kind of dynamic going on, I can work on some quests. I need them to be interesting so I’m trying to avoid any kind of “Fix the water purifier” or “Clear the rats out of the fallout shelter.” What I really want to do is have some quest, that depending on how you carry it out can have big consequences on the two towns. I’m seeing something that could spark up an occupation of “Water Town” by Basset. They’ve been friends for a long time so something big would have to happen. Maybe you could sabotage the water filter just for the hell of it and have “Water Town” starve and have “Basset” invade someone for their water purifier. I’ll think about it.

A year ago or so, I got an issue of Game Informer in the mail. The one with the BOS member on the front. It looked like it was going to be a cool game and I remembered seeing the name on an old PC game site. I don’t like playing a series without knowing what happened in the earlier games so I downloaded FO1 and FO2 (I own them now so it’s okay) and was like “This is a masterpiece.” Anyway, Fallout 3 came around and I ignored the hatred for it infesting the No Mutants Allowed boards. They were getting extremely angry while there was little information on the game. Somehow, they ended up being pretty right but I’ll get back to that. Anyway, I didn’t care I played the game and I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t perfect but it was good enough. Things were fine until I got Mass Effect for Christmas and realized how much better the story telling could have been in FO3. When the GECK was realeased, I wanted to try it out but never got around to it until recently. My past annoyance turned into understanding after reading a bit on the Vault Wiki but mostly reading everything that was wrong with FO3 that I never quite caught onto. For example, why is there a Fatman type nuke in the middle of Megaton and why hasn’t anyone tried to move it? There are parts of it I like but they got a lot wrong but I wouldn’t say “They raped it.” like I once read.

So there we have it, my dream to be a game designer (I forgot to mention this), a game that could have been much better of a beloved series of mine, and all the tools I need to make my own. Now the design stage begins. As a final note, I’m not remaking Fallout 3, I’m making a very very unconnected prequel to the game.