CerebralHawk
Active Member
- Messages
- 173
Have you ever, like so many others, looked at Fallout 4's boring vanilla settlement system, and wondered, "who even asked for this?"
I did. I may not be the only one. Bethesda might not have even seen my posts about it. I won't say what forums it was on (mostly because I don't remember 100%) and what name(s) I was using (same reason; this name has only been in use since 2020, and I've been online since 1994), but if you can find the posts, your Google-fu is better than my own.
The first time I asked for what became Fallout 4's settlement building system was after playing Fallout 3. I made a lengthy post (back then I was known for doing so under a much more popular name) detailing how I felt post-endgame content in Fallout 3 could go. If you remember, in the launch version of Fallout 3, the game had a definitive ending. Whether you did the thing or made someone else do the thing (no spoilers), you got an ending narration and you were kicked back to the title screen. You could reload your save (likely the autosave in the Jefferson Memorial) and go do other things, but there was no post-endgame content. The DLC Broken Steel changed that, and to this day, Fallout 3 is an open-ended game, like Fallout 4 (but not like Fallout: New Vegas, which, after four DLCs, remains closed). But, there is nothing to do in the Capital Wasteland, beyond side quests you didn't complete before. And the level cap of 20 is raised to 30, but if you do most side quests, you'll hit the new level cap naturally.
I suggested that you should be able to beef up security in Megaton, Little Lamplight, Big Town, The Republic of Dave, Rivet City, and a couple other settlements I'm forgetting. I suggested that you should be able to take over Andale, Evergreen Mills, Paradise Falls, and... that Deathclaw-infested city to the north I forget the name of right now. I suggested you should be able to build up walls if the settlement doesn't already have them (so, not Megaton), put up machine gun turrets (like the Talon Company had), attract settlers from across the Wasteland, and assign them to jobs. I never envisioned building whole cities though, just adding defenses to what Bethesda already placed. Stuff that could be destroyed and then repaired or built again.
So when Bethesda announced Fallout 4 and they showed how you could build stuff... at first I didn't think, "hey, they used my idea!". It was that different. When they showed that prototype UI where you could build stuff from junk, that was beyond anything I'd considered. When they showed you could build buildings from the ground up, I never thought about that. But as I explored the Commonwealth and dug into settlement building, I came to realize that this was exactly what I had asked for, albeit on a much grander scale.
I had an idea for the main quest of Fallout 4, too. Now, this was entirely based on Fallout 3 and our interactions with Dr. Zimmer and Victoria Watts, of the Institute and Railroad, respectively. I correctly guessed that the Institute would be M.I.T. (I mean, that was obvious), and, as the smartphone wars ramped up, and since synths were called androids back then, my story idea was that the player character would emerge from some vault (I was thinking more like a lifelong resident, like in Fallout 3, though — so, maybe Vault 81?) and come into this war between a Steve Jobs-type megalomaniac who wanted to control the androids, and this ultra-liberal Railroad that wanted androids to be free. (This idea was from before Steve Jobs died. I never revised the idea after he passed, but I did stop posting it until after Fallout 4 released.) So, we mostly got that for the Institute and Railroad quest lines.
Do you want to know what my idea for Fallout 5 is? I got a lot right about Fallout 4 and a major character (not saying who) even shares my first name, so I'd like to think Bethesda knows who I am, though I know it's more likely coincidence. Anyway, here goes. Setting is New York City. You don't start in a Vault. In fact, you're basically a Raider. You're in a small-time Raider gang that is basically fighting for scraps, barely getting by. The "intro" part of the game has you run out of food, so you and a couple others set out to go take something from a nearby group. While you're out, a Deathclaw attacks. But, we're not talking any normal Deathclaw.
Okay, hold up a minute. You know how in Fallout 3 we got the super-sized Super Mutants, the Behemoths? And in Fallout 4, we got the super-sized Mirelurk Queens? Well, did you know the Deathclaw is based on the Tarrasque from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition (which in turn was inspired by Godzilla, of course)? They're just a lot smaller. So, essentially a Deathclaw Behemoth, aka Tarrasque, smashes through New York City. Click that link, imagine that thing, about as tall as the Mass Fusion building. It's freaking huge. It's knocking over buildings left and right. It kills your whole party, and then it saunters off into the sunset, satisfied with its wake of destruction. You get trapped under some rubble. Title screen comes up.
You are then rescued by some group, like the Brotherhood of Steel. They ask you who you are and what you were before they found you. This is where you create your character. So you can lie about being a raider, or not. They train you, though you can choose to leave the faction and seek out your own action. There would be four factions, like usual, but unlike previous Fallout games, the name of the game is not to side with one faction against the other three. This time around, you have to bring up all four factions equally, and then negotiate a peace between them, because only with the help of all four factions, can you hope to bring down the Deathclaw Behemoth — or whatever they call it. D&D players are just gonna call it what it is, a Tarrasque. I'm not sure who all the factions are and what their role will be, but the end game will have you attacking theTarrasque Deathclaw Behemoth from all sides, and then somehow tricking it into swallowing an atomic bomb, which is then detonated inside the beast, killing it for good.
Like the first Fallout, there would be a timer. The Deathclaw Behemoth, like the Tarrasque it's based on, wakes up every so often to feed. It's not a short period, though. So you would have a reasonable but finite amount of time to prepare for its return, and if you're not ready, and you lose, that's it for you. You would have to start the whole game over. There would be a point where you have all four factions ready to take on the Deathclaw Behemoth, but it's going to be super hard. And you could ready them further if you have time to make the final fight easier, if you were that efficient with your time.
Settlement building would, and would not, be a part of my Fallout 5. Since you have so little time, overall, to prepare for the final fight, you wouldn't waste it building up settlements. However, settlement building would be a part of the endgame content for sure. Once the Deathclaw Behemoth died, you would be faced with the question of, "well, what do we do now?" And the answer to that is... you rebuild.
One element that has remained strong in both of the Bethesda Fallout games is family. We've done the "child searching for their father" and we've done the "parent searching for their son." Parent/child is straight out, it's overplayed. Similar to Fable II, I'm thinking your character has an older brother or maybe sister who looks out for you (so you're younger, like 12), and they're killed in the Deathclaw Behemoth attack. And they raised you and taught you everything, so at certain quest points, you'll do a flashback where you have an interaction with the sibling (hoping it's a sister since Bethesda has focused primarily on male relatives) and it motivates you to press onward, and it teaches you something. Fast-forward to the endgame, the very first thing you build is a memorial/shrine to that sibling. In the endgame narration, you talk about how your sibling helped raise you, and it made you a better man/woman, and you were able to save all these people, and while everybody's thanking you for bringing them together to slay the beast, it's important for you to first pay tribute to the one who helped you take the first steps.
...Anyway, we'll see how far off I am in about a decade or so. One thing I am almost sure of, Super Mutant Behemoths and Mirelurk Queens are here to stay, and a new beast will get a Behemoth variant. I think it's only natural it's the Deathclaw, given its basis. And they could even go in the Cloverfield direction and never actually show it, or at least all of it at any one point before the final fight. So then when you see it, it's like, "holy s—t balls, that's way bigger than I thought."
I did. I may not be the only one. Bethesda might not have even seen my posts about it. I won't say what forums it was on (mostly because I don't remember 100%) and what name(s) I was using (same reason; this name has only been in use since 2020, and I've been online since 1994), but if you can find the posts, your Google-fu is better than my own.
The first time I asked for what became Fallout 4's settlement building system was after playing Fallout 3. I made a lengthy post (back then I was known for doing so under a much more popular name) detailing how I felt post-endgame content in Fallout 3 could go. If you remember, in the launch version of Fallout 3, the game had a definitive ending. Whether you did the thing or made someone else do the thing (no spoilers), you got an ending narration and you were kicked back to the title screen. You could reload your save (likely the autosave in the Jefferson Memorial) and go do other things, but there was no post-endgame content. The DLC Broken Steel changed that, and to this day, Fallout 3 is an open-ended game, like Fallout 4 (but not like Fallout: New Vegas, which, after four DLCs, remains closed). But, there is nothing to do in the Capital Wasteland, beyond side quests you didn't complete before. And the level cap of 20 is raised to 30, but if you do most side quests, you'll hit the new level cap naturally.
I suggested that you should be able to beef up security in Megaton, Little Lamplight, Big Town, The Republic of Dave, Rivet City, and a couple other settlements I'm forgetting. I suggested that you should be able to take over Andale, Evergreen Mills, Paradise Falls, and... that Deathclaw-infested city to the north I forget the name of right now. I suggested you should be able to build up walls if the settlement doesn't already have them (so, not Megaton), put up machine gun turrets (like the Talon Company had), attract settlers from across the Wasteland, and assign them to jobs. I never envisioned building whole cities though, just adding defenses to what Bethesda already placed. Stuff that could be destroyed and then repaired or built again.
So when Bethesda announced Fallout 4 and they showed how you could build stuff... at first I didn't think, "hey, they used my idea!". It was that different. When they showed that prototype UI where you could build stuff from junk, that was beyond anything I'd considered. When they showed you could build buildings from the ground up, I never thought about that. But as I explored the Commonwealth and dug into settlement building, I came to realize that this was exactly what I had asked for, albeit on a much grander scale.
I had an idea for the main quest of Fallout 4, too. Now, this was entirely based on Fallout 3 and our interactions with Dr. Zimmer and Victoria Watts, of the Institute and Railroad, respectively. I correctly guessed that the Institute would be M.I.T. (I mean, that was obvious), and, as the smartphone wars ramped up, and since synths were called androids back then, my story idea was that the player character would emerge from some vault (I was thinking more like a lifelong resident, like in Fallout 3, though — so, maybe Vault 81?) and come into this war between a Steve Jobs-type megalomaniac who wanted to control the androids, and this ultra-liberal Railroad that wanted androids to be free. (This idea was from before Steve Jobs died. I never revised the idea after he passed, but I did stop posting it until after Fallout 4 released.) So, we mostly got that for the Institute and Railroad quest lines.
Do you want to know what my idea for Fallout 5 is? I got a lot right about Fallout 4 and a major character (not saying who) even shares my first name, so I'd like to think Bethesda knows who I am, though I know it's more likely coincidence. Anyway, here goes. Setting is New York City. You don't start in a Vault. In fact, you're basically a Raider. You're in a small-time Raider gang that is basically fighting for scraps, barely getting by. The "intro" part of the game has you run out of food, so you and a couple others set out to go take something from a nearby group. While you're out, a Deathclaw attacks. But, we're not talking any normal Deathclaw.
Okay, hold up a minute. You know how in Fallout 3 we got the super-sized Super Mutants, the Behemoths? And in Fallout 4, we got the super-sized Mirelurk Queens? Well, did you know the Deathclaw is based on the Tarrasque from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition (which in turn was inspired by Godzilla, of course)? They're just a lot smaller. So, essentially a Deathclaw Behemoth, aka Tarrasque, smashes through New York City. Click that link, imagine that thing, about as tall as the Mass Fusion building. It's freaking huge. It's knocking over buildings left and right. It kills your whole party, and then it saunters off into the sunset, satisfied with its wake of destruction. You get trapped under some rubble. Title screen comes up.
You are then rescued by some group, like the Brotherhood of Steel. They ask you who you are and what you were before they found you. This is where you create your character. So you can lie about being a raider, or not. They train you, though you can choose to leave the faction and seek out your own action. There would be four factions, like usual, but unlike previous Fallout games, the name of the game is not to side with one faction against the other three. This time around, you have to bring up all four factions equally, and then negotiate a peace between them, because only with the help of all four factions, can you hope to bring down the Deathclaw Behemoth — or whatever they call it. D&D players are just gonna call it what it is, a Tarrasque. I'm not sure who all the factions are and what their role will be, but the end game will have you attacking the
Like the first Fallout, there would be a timer. The Deathclaw Behemoth, like the Tarrasque it's based on, wakes up every so often to feed. It's not a short period, though. So you would have a reasonable but finite amount of time to prepare for its return, and if you're not ready, and you lose, that's it for you. You would have to start the whole game over. There would be a point where you have all four factions ready to take on the Deathclaw Behemoth, but it's going to be super hard. And you could ready them further if you have time to make the final fight easier, if you were that efficient with your time.
Settlement building would, and would not, be a part of my Fallout 5. Since you have so little time, overall, to prepare for the final fight, you wouldn't waste it building up settlements. However, settlement building would be a part of the endgame content for sure. Once the Deathclaw Behemoth died, you would be faced with the question of, "well, what do we do now?" And the answer to that is... you rebuild.
One element that has remained strong in both of the Bethesda Fallout games is family. We've done the "child searching for their father" and we've done the "parent searching for their son." Parent/child is straight out, it's overplayed. Similar to Fable II, I'm thinking your character has an older brother or maybe sister who looks out for you (so you're younger, like 12), and they're killed in the Deathclaw Behemoth attack. And they raised you and taught you everything, so at certain quest points, you'll do a flashback where you have an interaction with the sibling (hoping it's a sister since Bethesda has focused primarily on male relatives) and it motivates you to press onward, and it teaches you something. Fast-forward to the endgame, the very first thing you build is a memorial/shrine to that sibling. In the endgame narration, you talk about how your sibling helped raise you, and it made you a better man/woman, and you were able to save all these people, and while everybody's thanking you for bringing them together to slay the beast, it's important for you to first pay tribute to the one who helped you take the first steps.
...Anyway, we'll see how far off I am in about a decade or so. One thing I am almost sure of, Super Mutant Behemoths and Mirelurk Queens are here to stay, and a new beast will get a Behemoth variant. I think it's only natural it's the Deathclaw, given its basis. And they could even go in the Cloverfield direction and never actually show it, or at least all of it at any one point before the final fight. So then when you see it, it's like, "holy s—t balls, that's way bigger than I thought."