Duck and Cover

gluttoncreeper wrote:Tell us your opinions, complaints, and rants.

gluttoncreeper wrote:This thread is for comments on the samples that are posted from GCG on their webpage. Tell us your opinions, complaints, and rants.

Of course most of the samples that will be posted, will not have been edited yet (this will start in Oct), only reviewed for content, and will contain errors, and will be picture lite, since the art contracts are not finalized.

Enjoy the samples and sample blasting, bad-mouthing (keep it clean), and beatings. There will be some new samples up within the week.

Hatchen wrote:I don't think Sean would have made a front cover like that, he actually does a pretty good job. But whomever did the front cover sure made it not look so good. It looks more so like a quick concept for a quick reference for something by far bigger. Looks like you, creeper, will have a hard time with this crowd. Having badly edited material and art as examples of your work does not help either. I suggest you and your crew seclude yourselves for a long while, do some actual work, than show something that is worth seeing.

PiP wrote:

gluttoncreeper wrote:Tell us your opinions, complaints, and rants.

can you handle it, bitch?

This is an odd read.
The first bit tries to present itself as some kind of newspaper article ('historical news') but it carries the wrong tone. Sentences like 'All of the great monuments, convenience stores (hell, convenience itself)' don't fit in such an article. It's extremely informal and approaches the world of Fallout with a viewpoint derived from our own world and as such fails to create the atmosphere that the Fallout manual, for instance, did have.

It's also plain wrong in some cases. The European Union didn't exist in Fallout, for instance. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait? Hello?

And some parts are just silly. One tries to explain the idea of celebrating certain dates. It occupies two paragraphs and doesn't serve to show anything, not even the idea of commemmorating the nuclear exchange is offered to give it some kind of reason for existing.
I also don't get the idea of trying to explain why the world isn't post-apocalyptic after having introduced the concept yourself. It feels very inconsistent.
Lastly, it's supposedly from 2155, but according to canon, NCR hadn't been founded yet (eh, the vault Dweller hadn't even started out on his quest for the water chip either).

Then comes a newspaper carrying the name 'Vault City Rogue Press', which seems to be a contradictio in terminis. It is also from before the journey of the Chosen One, and hence much of the article is not consistent with the timeline. How do they know about the Enclave?

And again with the informal style. Although more fitting since this seems to be an opinion-magazine. Then again, its opinion is very weird. It first offers the view that people disagree with Vault City's policies (I can't see anyone admitting that in Vault City, especially in a public newspaper), then carries on to sing its praises.
Why is it then called 'Rogue Press'? And how did they know that Vault 13 didn't receive its G.E.C.K. (and what relevance could it possibly have in the article?).
And the conclusion that some Vaults must not have used their GECKs since they haven't been found is also silly. Hello, they can't communicate with you when they're hundreds of miles away, can they?
And why is there the addition of a spacecraft the Enclave looked into? Seems to be pretty uncanonical.
Oh, and the Necropolis ghouls are now cannibals as well. Although this might be true, I don't seem to recall any cannibalistic tendencies.
In the end the article suddenly reveals that Vault City knows that the Enclave is trying to kill off the rest of the USA, even though they could not possibly know about this. Hell, it's even very unlikely they'd know about this even after the Chosen One defeated them, since they operated very much in the dark and not many people knew about their existence.


It then ends as if it were the intro to a game, with the words 'There is, of course, resistance to such a plan.' completely destroying any kind of atmosphere the article might have had.

The next article, again Rogue Press, shows surprising knowledge of exactly what happened at the West Tek facility (although technically possible, it's highly unlikely they knew this). It also refers to the common version of the Super Mutant (the dumb version) as not being a Super Mutant, but just a dumb giant.

F.E.V. was also not originally intended to create a super soldier, it was intended to protect the population against possible biological weapons the Chinese were suspected to have. When what they created turned out to have different effects, experiments began to see what they could achieve with it, one goal being possibly the super soldiers.
It also claims that FEV could not be covered up when the vaults finally opened, even though no-one knew about it until Richard Grey re-discovered it, and even after he was defeated the outside world knew almost nothing of it, save for the Enclave.
The article then takes on a very different tone from the previous Rogue Press article, being very uncertain about what happened to other Vaults, even though, in the previous article, many claims were made about the Vaults.

Next article: again the NCR newspaper, again with an impossible date.
Again with information they would probably never know. Details about the founding of the Brotherhood of Steel and its dispositions, which they are very unlikely to know considering the secretive nature of the Brotherhood. And details about the 'Eastern Brotherhood of Steel', which is really annoying, since it acknowledges Tactics as canon(yech), and it's pretty hard for them to know anything about a faction that hasn't even been established yet, and when it was established it was established pretty far away.
And again with details about the Enclave they could not possibly know. Especially not some 100 years before the Enclave did anything on the mainland.
And why does the NCR Historical Press explain to its readers what the NCR is? The people who would read this would live in the NCR.
In a surprisingly stupid form of internal contradiction it claims that Jet was invented in 2241, while the article was written in 2164. It also claims that Jet was invented in New Reno, but I'm not sure whether this would be known to them.
And then an even dumber mistake: they start writing as if they were in Vault City, even though the article is supposed to be written from the NCR point of view. being somewhat aprreciative of San Francisco going along fine without the NCR, they then say that 'we are all given a place in the social order here' when talking about Vault City.
The article also claims that 'heroes' get a day pass in Vault City, even though there's no indication of that in the game at all.
Even worse, it then claims that Necropolis is worth seeing, and mentions some other towns, but not the Hub.

And then the Redding Rag, which talks about the Vault Dweller as if he were some giant hero, even though his exploits are barely known outside of Vault 13 and Arroyo. Even in NCR he's not remembered as the man who saved the world, but as the man who killed the raiders. His accounts are never known in such great detail.
Also 'a number of scholars now agree'. What, there's an academic community now? In Redding?


In short, the writers display an amazing lack of ability to write in character and make a lot of huge mistakes due to that. It seems as if the articles were written without the idea of having to write them in character in mind.

One thing that could vastly improve this intro would be to drop the idea that it has to be in character and correct a lot of canonical mistakes.
Aside from that, some proofreading certainly wouldn't hurt either.