So,  I have a blog now. What is this world coming to? For my inaugural blog post, I’d like to talk at length about a subject that will come up again and again in my works: video games. I am an avid gamer, and over the course of my wasted youth, I have acquired some insights into what makes for a good game experience and what doesn’t. So, I’d like to talk about Fallout 4.

Fallout 4 is a good game overall, but there are some serious missed opportunities. I have played every Fallout game ever made (except Fallout Tactics, which sucks, from what I hear) and in every single one you can only play as a human. You can choose which sex you are, and decide on a skin pigment, and in later games, customize your appearance, but all these characters are human; in a world where ghouls, sentient robots, super mutants, and more recently, synths, exist, you are only allowed to be a human. How very vanilla.

I favor a better system, like the one in Dragon Age: Origins, where your race and class combinations give you different origin stories that all converge at Ostagar. If you don’t choose a particular origin story, the game references a placeholder character who didn’t fare so well as you would have. Fallout doesn’t have classes, so the origin stories would either have to be chosen specifically by the player, or assigned based on the player’s race. So there would be one for human characters, one for super mutants, one for ghouls, one for robots, and one for synths. All stories would converge in the Commonwealth in 2287, and the events from that point would be much the same, though I envision each of the races having slightly different playstyles and mechanical benefits as well.

The current origin story is this: you and your spouse are lounging around your home with your domestic robot and your baby, you hear of the Great War starting, then run to the local vault where you get frozen for a couple centuries. You briefly wake up, see your spouse get killed by a man with a facial scar who steals your son, get refrozen, then reawaken later and set off to find him. In theory, this should be compelling. In fact, it’s kind of dull. We are only barely introduced to these characters, and have no particular reason to care about them, even if the player-character theoretically does. I’m going to offer suggestions about the possible origin stories of characters of different types in later posts, but for now I will give ideas for improving the human backstory.  Bethesda, if you’re reading (which is unlikely, but still) feel free to steal my ideas; if it leads to better games in the future, it’s fine by me.

To improve this origin story, it would help to set the scene if the story started a little slower, perhaps several days before the Great War. You could see what 2077 Boston looks like, including locations you visit later in the game, like the Super Duper Mart, or some of the landmarks. You could meet characters who show up later as ghouls, perhaps even see placeholder characters from some of the other origin stories the player could choose from. Most importantly of all, you would have some time to interact with your spouse, your child, and Codsworth, your robot butler. Once the story events trigger the Great War, the player would have to make a mad dash for the vault, and game would play out much the same as the game currently does. The human backstory would be the least changed of the bunch.

For the purposes of readability, I’m going to cover the other proposed origin stories in later posts.