Fallout 4 - A bad dream

The problems with Fallout 4 as part of the Fallout franchise are great and deep.  Internally the problems that are presented to the Player Character (PC) and thus to the player is in a setting that makes little to no actual sense.  Internal logic within the setting of the game is so highly skewed away from the basis for the franchise that it cannot be ignored.  By turning the franchise away from Role Playing Game (RPG) roots and going for a shallow action arcade shooter the basis for the game suffers to the point of breaking with the franchise.  The established concept of 'War never changes' makes it part and parcel of the human condition, and the long term ramifications are ones that require thought on the part of the player and a decent summation of outcomes based on the PC's actions.  Playing after such a game end can be highly fun and enjoyable and vary greatly from the ending summation, but that means it is just a variant out of that ending.  Fallout 4 has an ending movie that does not address such consequences.  Is the Institute destroyed or not and what happens with other factions will influence both of those endings.  The same is true of each of the other factions, as well, and their presences or destruction in the Commonwealth will have deep and abiding changes what follows, but none of that is featured in the ending movie.  Yet there is no way to eliminate all the factions and turn the Commonwealth into a true wasteland where it is kill or be killed and war is continuous.

Internally the logic for an arcade shooter of any sort is that it requires targets, and to that end targets must be in endless supply.  Yet this is a wasteland and the birth rate as seen throughout the series is relatively low save in the more civilized New California Republic.  Factions may hold sway or direct power in various places, but their internal numbers are relatively low compared to those they wish to control and do not feature the elements for creation of families, supplying people with safe haven nor in attempting to convert others to their faction.

Religious orders as in the case of the Hubologists or Children of Atom have extremely limited appeal due to their limited scope of beliefs, and while welcoming outsiders the internal codes of belief are so strict as to limit views on what happens outside their organizations.  A more traditional religion like Mormonism was seen as a threat to Caesar and wiped out as these were a people with more liberal views and yet adhered to the basics of humanity having free will and the freedom to decide their lives for themselves.  The mayhem and chaos of the Commonwealth means that there is no basis for an arcade shooter style game, and yet that was what the community got.

Now lets move on to factions or things that should have been factions in no particular order.

Super Mutants and FEV

Victims of FEV be they at the hands of The Master, the experiments leading to Super Mutants creating more of their kind at Vault 87, or The Institute all have one thing in common: limited numbers.  The Master created the largest and most diverse Super Mutant army as he was both a victim of FEV and cybernetically enhanced through a direct connection to a computer system.  While immobile he forced hundreds of people and creatures to be melded together by FEV and was a true threat to the world.  His demise and defeat of the Super Mutant army means that those numbers have dwindled as there is no way to create more Super Mutants: with the ending of the Mariposa Base came the end of the threat of Super Mutants in the west.  In the east, if the post-Fallout 3 canon of the success of Project Purity is correct, then all of those sites in the watershed for the Capitol region will be cleared of radiation.  As the Super Mutants had already run out of the eastern strain of FEV, the basis for creating more Super Mutants was at an end and their numbers would be on the constant decline in the Capitol region.

That leaves The Institute, and it had a time limited program of creating Super Mutants to examine the properties of the bodies and intellect to try and augment the Gen 3 Synth program.  Yet that research was a failure and the discards that were still alive were dumped above ground.  Like in the West and Capitol region this puts an upper end cap on the number of Super Mutants in the Commonwealth.  This breaks the paradigm of an arcade shooter getting new targets to knock down on a regular basis and the actual appearance of Super Mutants should dwindle the more they are knocked down.
 There are many, many opportunities for role-playing in such a condition as a few of these Super Mutants demonstrate some concept of cause and effect.  Added to that the wish to protect each other as they are considered 'brothers' and the decline in absolute numbers means that those better able to figure out what is going on will have a higher chance of survival.  This would break the concept of a Super Mutant Suicider as none of their 'brothers' would ever wish to see a life thrown away in explosive rage.  Even the dumbest of their kind place that kinship over rage, and that is one deep and abiding aspect of the Commonwealth Super Mutants that demonstrates some understanding of 'family'.

A final piece of the FEV is stored in the Nuka-World DLC at the Cloning Facility as seen in the Safari Adventure quest.  Here the presence of Super Mutants was noted by a surviving researcher who obtained tissue samples and isolated a form of the FEV and utilized it in gene splicing to create Gatorclaws.  It can be taken that the original research is still present and that the basis for FEV and its use are housed within that facility.  While no Super Mutants were created there, it serves as a repository of knowledge that is actually very advanced as the ghoulified researcher studied the material for years with advanced genetic tools and equipment.  Here the lack of ability to integrate DLC content into the base game comes to the forefront as this is research that a couple of factions would want to obtain:  The Institute and Brotherhood of Steel (Bos).  To accomplish the isolation of FEV, understand its workings and then use it for gene splicing in an exacting way is much further than The Institute had ever gotten with FEV and would be seen as highly dangerous technology and knowledge by the BoS.  Yet neither of these factions can even be informed of this which is part of why the conceptual basis for these factions is broken.  Nor can the PC enlist Virgil to go to Nuka-World to utilize the technology there to better understand the FEV and perhaps find a way to reverse it, though that might be a horrific process for those creatures that were melded together from multiple sources.

The basis for a real story is present: Super Mutants realize that their numbers are dwindling and that no new Super Mutants are appearing and to survive they must learn how to work together.  They are past the point of trying to storm Diamond City, and as settlements start to self-organize and protect themselves, they slowly go off the 'easy target' list and go into the 'high casualty' list.  Super Mutants would stop enraged 'brothers' from suiciding, as that makes things worse, not better.  An entire quest involving Strong and Fist as opposing leaders within the Super Mutant faction should arise naturally from this:  Strong wanting to understand some aspects of human nature and Fist wanting to basically shun humanity for the wrongs it has done to create Super Mutants.  A long quest involving negotiating with the larger Super Mutant encampments on behalf of one or even both of the leaders, trying to present their cases and even offering support and aid if they agree to stop raiding settlements could and should have been possible.  This would make the Super Mutants into a viable faction that, albeit violent, understands that such violence has its limits especially if a site or two is cleared of their 'brothers' by other events and there are none to storm back in and take it. Instead of a short sidequest and firefight, that entire quest could have been a multipart major quest with long-term ramifications.  And so long as the player doesn't side with The Institute, there are benefits to having a group of well armed and armored Super Mutants willing to storm important sites even if they don't agree with you all the time.

The Minutemen

Factions must have some basis for their coherence and have a set of objectives, goals, following and leadership that serve as its conceptual basis.  A free-form general protection faction, like the Minuteman, only needs the concept of communities helping each other to survive as its basis and some minimal command structure to help manage it.  It is a weak factional concept and yet can be very powerful given time to civilize and tame parts of the wasteland so that humanity is not in an active part of the food chain (while Raiders, et. al. would continue to be part of it).  What makes the concept of the Minutemen powerful is that it has an easy to understand basis and only requires some dedication and risk-taking on the part of just a few people at each settlement.  With work it becomes strong and without it everyone is left to fend for themselves.  Yet the concept of banding together will arise separately no matter what happens to the Minutemen: it is an age old concept of creating a Nation and will appear when no better basis for cooperative protection is around.

What isn't clearly understood is that the Minuteman concept is one that is of a militia, that being a lower level and self-organizing form of cooperative self-protection in towns, villages, counties and even small cities.  These organizations are loosely joined together with representatives from individual communities or even just households forming the strength of the organization.  Leadership isn't imposed but elected at that level, and the rank of Colonel is the highest one that has been historically available to such militia at a State-wide level in the US.  Such a militia can be strong, in theory, when local leaders and the highest level of leadership have general agreement on the basis for operation within the State and put themselves as available for emergencies or invasions to the top Executive elected position in a State, typically a governor.

As seen in FO4, there is no top level political leadership for the Commonwealth.  And as the northeastern States were amalgamated into the Commonwealth in 1969 in the Fallout universe, that means a top position that would have oversight on activities over the region.  Without that the lower level militias don't have a system of accountability save to each other, and that can fall apart rather quickly if there is no large-scale and pressing threat to the communities involved.  That is why the Minutemen fell in the Fallout universe in FO4: no higher level accountability structure from the political side.  In part that was due to the event of the massacre of the Commonwealth Provisional Government by The Institute.  Typically no amount of political infighting leads to an immediate massacre, and this meeting ended atypically with The Institute getting fingered as the culprit.  The reason why they are fingered is that such a massacre, when they are done on the political side, are done as part of a power grab and orchestrated beforehand, leaving a clear 'winner'.  That didn't happen and yet it was in the common interest of all communities to come to a working political arrangement.  Who won?  The Institute by keeping that from happening so they could continue to experiment on individuals taken from the wasteland.

Thus the job of the PC should not end at the ending of FO4 if the Minutemen are a surviving faction with multiple settlements agreeing to join it.  In fact that should be the start of the meat of the game, itself: helping to form a stable government for cooperative self-protection.  Standing up a provisional constitution, finding a way to get a legislative, judicial and executive branch hammered out and then holding elections would have been the real point of the game after dealing with The Institute.  When that happens then the role of 'General' actually can and should be reduced to that of the historical leader of militias in the US: Colonel.  A General is needed for a hard military that is rigidly organized and has the job of being a soldier as its profession.  A militia has that as a secondary concern and leading every day life as the primary one.  Militias aren't amateurs, as such, but they are not soldiers, either.  Seeing Minutemen going about their daily business of farming, crafting, running stores...that is the reward for being successful as a PC and a player:  Stability or at least meta-stability has been achieved and that is all anyone could ask for.


The Railroad


There is a dependent part of the Railroad that requires The Institute: the creation of new Gen 3 Synths.  If taking part in this factional ending then The Institute is destroyed and the source of new Gen 3 Synths go with it.  The ideological basis of freeing Gen 3 Synths from slavery ends on the day The Institute can't create any more and the Synth Retention Bureau is gone.  Without the ability to teleport the survivors of The Institute able to escape are left at the mercies of the wasteland, just like they did with Super Mutants but are not as well equipped to survive.  Gen 1 and 2 Synths can continue based on their power supplies, but without a command structure and active orders from above, their threat is limited.  Gen 3 Synths and Coursers are left and those wishing to seek their freedom need to find someplace that will take them in, and that is now a short-term mission of the RR.  That should take a few months at its worst, and without the need to 'protect' Gen 3 Synths via a mind-wipe and new background, processing of them should go at a rapid rate.  After that wave is dealt with there will be no RR: Desdemona has decided on the course that puts them out of a job.  The RR has a definite end goal and this is true if the PC takes the Minuteman path and is able to have a general evacuation of The Institute proceed.  As a faction the Railroad conceptually ends after that and their post main game content shows a bit of extracting revenge on a few Raider gangs, but otherwise doesn't offer much interesting content.

As a counter-espionage organization, the RR is nearly unable to survive against The Institute and failed at is prime mission of survival.  All of the spy trappings, however, didn't lead to espionage based protocols, or at least ones that were followed continuously.  That led to the Switchboard massacre and the current situation they are dealing with.  Here, instead of going for centralized espionage, the RR would have been much better served with a cell based system used by insurgents and serious revolutionary movements not just in our history but in that of the Fallout universe, as well.  Some of this is witnessed, but not in any truly organized fashion, instead using a few key people to serve as intermediaries between the RR and the Safehouses.  Perhaps with so few people  a good cell system couldn't be developed as the best of systems requires 3 people to a cell with very few contacts up or down the structure.  To get to the state they are in requires that they haven't taken the Switchboard attack to heart in full and even expose high value personnel on a first meeting.  There is no methodology to have an extended trust system, with reports moving upwards about new people and then having such new people put on missions or jobs to earn a spot in the organization.

Deacon, for all of his lies and manner, has some basic understanding of what needs to be done, but then goes against that interior logic to argue for the PC to be brought on-board the RR immediately.  Desdemona is actually correct in not wanting to expose their current HQ to an outsider, and yet Deacon will argue for just that.  As a player I would have been more than happy to cool my heels waiting for the data to be delivered from the Courser Chip (if you take that as your first exposure to the RR).  Secrecy is paramount to such organizations and no matter what your gut instinct tells you, if it is wrong just once it could be curtains for the entire organization.  Not only does this make sense, but is a missed opportunity for some serious role-playing which would have made the RR much more substantial as it would show that they mean business.  And if I wanted to become a player in the organization then that must start at the periphery, perhaps as a courier or errand boy for a safehouse.  Going that route means that when the Courser is taken down there is a pre-existing contact that can move your request for decryption up to HQ and then get a reply via other channels.  If done properly the entire RR part of FO4 would have been a major change from other organizations currently seen in the franchise and actually be quite refreshing to experience.  A whole stealth or espionage part of the game would be available on far more than simple hunt/kill/find data business and turn into a role-playing experience.

Lore wise the RR is a part of the lore after FO3.  It doesn't exactly live up to the expectations from that game, but neither does The Institute or the Commonwealth as a whole.  Before the attack the RR was in much better shape, and that attack at the Switchboard took place between FO3 and FO4, approximately 6 years before FO4, so the organization has had time to recover.  From what has been seen not all their operatives or safehouses were penetrated in 2281 and The Institute has been relatively slow going against the organization.  Bad leadership can be blamed on the downfall, though such bad leadership to let the organization be so deeply penetrated typically means the non-survival of the organization.  With enough good people, contacts and safehouses, the RR recovered and a good 5 years later it has...well...not many more people than it started with after the Switchboard attack.  Still Desdemona is right to enforce protocols and secrecy.  No matter how talented an outsider is, breaking those protocols is the sort of thing that led to the downfall of the RR at the Switchboard.  Yet the RR as conceptualized in FO3 has a greatly extended set of contacts outside the Commonwealth for smuggling runaway Synths out of the reach of The Institute.  That network was not lost as the absence of the Head of SRB demonstrates.

It is that network that should be the source of new agents and infrastructure building inwards and utilizing a safer cell based system for communications and even becoming somewhat decentralized.  While much of the interior expertise at the heart of the RR was lost at the Switchboard, those on the ground at the periphery in the smuggling groups and safehouses, the true purpose of the RR is to move Synths out from the Commonwealth, were left pretty much unmolested.  Operating out of the reach of The Institute, that system should have been drawn upon to create a better system of smaller safehouses that were widely distributed and harder to identify.  Talented individuals in that periphery should have been brought in to help restructure the organization under those who escaped the Switchboard.  There are other facilities that are isolated and beyond easy reach of The Institute that could serve much of the same purpose of the Switchboard but be more defensible and better camouflaged.  When attacked at the center of the organization it is incumbent for the periphery to change places, spaces and even rotate people laterally so as to confuse those seeking to find them.  Perhaps that did happen to some degree, but the major indicators is that safehouses were struck after the Switchboard and only a couple survived that under older protocols.  By becoming dependent on the center, the periphery was left vulnerable and unready to respond.

An actual endgame of having the last Synths being moved out of the system and closing down the safehouses is the actual goal for the RR.  It doesn't gain in strength even when it 'wins'.  There is no rationale for manning checkpoints as the RR is about movement of people undercover to save them from persecution and death.  Doing so openly will cause resentment amongst the population as a whole, plus makes agents a target for anyone wanting to take potshots at them.  Just as the underground railroad dissolved with the ending of slavery so too does the RR of FO4 end with the fall of The Institute:  in less than a year it should be gone as an organization and remembered for its ideals and good works done in the face of a superior opponent that it was able to survive if not defeat itself.  Without new Gen 3 Synths being made, the RR is on a clock ticking down until the last Synth that wants to be rescued is rescued, and you don't need to man checkpoints for that but use the informer network that the RR already has on the ground.  Plus a few more people may be willing to point surviving Synths to the right destination in recognition of the noble goal that the organization has now achieved.  And as the PC organized settlements, it should be easy to get the word out that these refugees need to be safely handled and moved to the RR.  Who needs checkpoints when there are far more friendly settlements that are easier to find by just following provisioners?


Brotherhood of Steel

The Brotherhood of Steel has morphed from its West Coast roots and has changed its basis in the East twice: once under the Lyons family and again under Arthur Maxson.  Their problems have been covered previously and require just a quick recap.  First is that the structure of the Brotherhood has seen the elimination of the Knights as a separate logistics operation with those roles having been transferred to the Scribes and the Knights now put under the Paladins.  The Lancers have been started up to cover aerial operations and form their own internal order.  Secondly Elder Maxson has taken on an expedition that is light on command infrastructure and that break with the Chains that Bind: the conceptual system of chain of command so that the leader does not directly command low-level subordinates but delegates that authority to a command structure.  Both of these conditions were seen in The Outcasts leaving the BoS in Fallout 3, and while changes to recruitment may be something that The Outcasts adjust to, the basic liquidation of an order and removal of intermediate command structures are both reasons for why The Outcasts left under Lyons.  They may only be a minority in what is seen when the Prydwen arrives, but a variant of their insignia is seen on every suit of Power Armor inside the BoS.

While Elder Maxson has shown himself capable in combat and had to negotiate with The Outcasts, there is a fundamental bridge that if it was rebuilt to get The Outcasts back into the BoS Eastern Division would have then drove them right out again with this expedition.  Indeed we can find no member on the Prydwen who was from The Outcasts.  While they may be getting on in years, The Outcasts are also hardened combat veterans and would serve as the core of the fighting prowess of the Eastern Division having been made self-reliant for years and understanding the rough necessity of survival.  Elder Maxson breaking the Chains that Bind, taking Liberty Prime along for the ride, when seen through the vision of The Outcasts is yet another leader going rogue and breaking with the past, tradition and basic command structure of the military.  Perhaps Elder Maxson left the highest echelons behind to govern the Eastern Division in the Capitol wasteland for a reason: he left behind the start of a civil break-up with The Outcasts and in his journey to the Commonwealth would be breaking up the organization he forged together.

Logistically the expedition as seen makes no damned sense and adheres entirely to the action arcade shooter concept.  Yet each Vertibird lost in combat is not one that can be magically replenished as there are no operational factories in the Commonwealth producing those parts or vehicles as a whole.  In fact the Prydwen and the contingent within it must be relatively small, compact and ready to adapt to local problems while dealing with a trickle of supplies coming all the way from over the Glowing Sea through a series of supply depots.  Recruits, Power Armor, ammunition, food, Vertibirds, spare parts...the list for keeping such an organization going is long and an expeditionary force being supplied by air must be small.  The numbers seen in the game in and around the Boston Airport are about it, but that means no patrols, no extended areas of control and very little presence outside of the facilities they occupy.  That would mean no crashing Vertibirds seen multiple times per day, no extended patrols even going up to the northwestern part of the map, no grand firefights against Super Mutants, period.

Why is that?  Every member lost would be a loss to combat skills for the organization and require a trained replacement that can't be physically trained in the Commonwealth. Why not?  Trainers require space and that would mean each of the Orders would require their own training environment and there just isn't the space for it nor the time until a reliable system of heavy transport on a regular basis can be instituted or created in the Commonwealth.  Logistically speaking, the BoS in the Commonwealth operates on a long thread and to get what we see in game would require daily overflights of Vertibirds not by one or two at a time, but entire squadrons.  Damn that would be impressive!  It wouldn't make any sense as it would require the Eastern Division to be in complete control over all of the Capitol wasteland, The Pitt and anything else they can get their armored mitts on.  It would also require a basic setting up of not just caravans for water but outright control and patrolling of the wasteland so that all communities within that zone are under BoS control and available for conscription.  And that is just to get that huge logistics supply chain in place!  And that would be something that would drive those hardened combat veterans known as The Outcasts right back out again.

What conclusion can be drawn from this?  That the BoS we are shown has not embraced its roots and while many detested the things that the Lyons family did, many of those things cannot be undone.  Recruits from the outside who pass Brotherhood fitness and ability tests can become members of the BoS.  The power structure we are given lacks all the standard pieces that makes a good military system work with subordinates delegated powers and responsibility and the leader overseeing the overall health of the entire organization.  Shorn of the internal checks on abuse of power, Elder Maxson now in his early 20's, has become a virtual warlord.  The trappings of the BoS are still there with the titles and ranks, and a vestige of the power structure is in place but can be over-ruled at any point by Elder Maxson who expects absolute obedience to his commands.  That is not the way of the BoS and without the Chains that Bind, Elder Maxson has corrupted the Eastern Division, perhaps using the easy excuse of 'necessity'.  Whatever the case, as presented, the BoS as given in FO4 are not plausible given the past of the BoS.


The Gunners

The Gunners are high-end mercenaries for hire...for everyone except the PC.  As shown they are immediately hostile to the PC and will just try to gun you down whenever they notice you.  What a sweet bunch, huh?  I mean it isn't like you actually want to contract their services...wouldn't it be cheaper to just  pay The Gunners a set amount every week or month to protect a settlement or three?  Maybe even offer them housing, good beds, food and the like for those on such duty?  It isn't as if the PC has a magical ability to create new stuff at a settlement, right?

Wait, you do?

Why isn't this something you can do with Gunners?  Well it would involve some sort of game mechanic for contracting, making sure that amounts were set aside to be paid out on a regular basis, say to a purser or quartermaster of The Gunners, and actually involve negotiating with The Gunners and interacting with its command structure.  As it is, who actually knows how to contact them?  Well a robot in Diamond City that wanted Deathclaw eggs was able to do that.  The Cabot family seems to have a contract with them.  After that?  Hmmmm....say who is paying these guys, anyways?  There aren't enough jobs around to support them and they have taken a couple of sites with high casualty rates, so where are their training facilities?  Gunner's Plaza doesn't have a decent shooting range or place to work out, and it seems to be mostly R&R and admin.

As presented The Gunners don't act like mercenaries, just better armed Raiders who like robots a bit less than the Rust Devils, but respect them more.  It is a faction that has technical background, at least enough to do reprogramming of robots and produce some higher end equipment.  The problem with The Gunners, like the BoS, is logistics.  Who pays them the high amounts necessary to keep all that running?  Even more to the point, how can they afford all that equipment?  This makes no sense at all.  The Institute may use them, here and there, but for that they have Kellogg, Coursers and lots of throw away Synths, so the actual need for using The Gunners is so small for The Institute that it isn't worth thinking about.  The Gunners cannot survive on scraps from The Institute.  And if there is an outside funding source it must be relatively large and well financed.  The only prior faction in the game for that is The Enclave, and they are in disarray on the east coast and not present in the Commonwealth.  The Enclave also prefers to operate on its own and NOT hire mercenaries, by and large, and scraps from distant survivors won't keep The Gunners going.

Anyone who has run FO4 with the Contraptions DLC content knows that it is possible to make new weapons, armor, ammo and gear given the right equipment.  That all requires resources, scavenging and purchase of said raw materials whenever its cheap to do so.  A place like Gunner's Plaza is chock-a-block with so much resource intensive goods that it would require a lot of time, effort and money to make it and keep it running.  Yet is it possible to even find a shop run by The Gunners who have a purchase list of things they will pay extra for?  How about representatives looking to trade on behalf of them?  Or putting up that they will accept certain goods as payment for contracts?  The answer to all of this is: NO.

Sad, really, as they would have made a fascinating faction.  Over the course of game play the opportunity to start interacting with The Gunners, perhaps on a sidequest, should have been introduced and that would then give a first Point of Contact with them.  Perhaps a store for trade or even finding low-level contract work they would be willing to pay a freelancer to do.  From there the 'getting to know you' game can proceed, with The Gunners being NEUTRAL at the start of the game and, if you start to work with them for protection of settlements, they might even become FRIENDLY though not 'allied' as such.

The Gunners are a military organization that needs something, and what it needs is the same thing the Minutemen need, in the end: a legitimizing organization.  As it stands The Gunners are a contract or two away from becoming Raiders: no amount of training and loyalty oaths will feed an empty stomach nor keep soldiers in line when there is no work to do.  Perhaps an unnamed third party with lots of cash to blow for very little is willing to keep The Gunners going, but with no hints of that anywhere in the game, that cannot be supported by something other than conjecture.  Sans the cash they are at risk of not being mercenaries but simply Raiders with a fancy name and still not being able to keep themselves fed.  The answer to this is a political system that has checks that can be put on The Gunners in exchange for becoming the actual military organization of the Commonwealth.  Leadership protocols would still be in place, save the Brigadier of The Gunners answerable to the Executive position of the Commonwealth.  This then offers a constant stream of funds for logistics and the removal of contracts as those now need to be processed by the government.

The Gunners wouldn't accept this immediately, which is why it should be part of a larger end-game scenario especially with a Minuteman or RR victory over The Institute.  Without any indication of exterior support for The Gunners in FO4 and with all indications being that they are an isolated phenomena of the Commonwealth, the only conclusion that can be drawn is they they service contracts inside the Commonwealth.  Their threats against MacCready demonstrate this, and The Gunners feel they are the sole taker of military style contracts in the Commonwealth and are willing to make sure any potential competition knows this.  They don't appear to go down to the level of harassing bodyguards, which is the sort of work MacCready is ready to accept, so there know their limits.  In addition while they may be for hire by some criminal organizations, they don't go after those.  The Triggermen have little to fear about The Gunners coming to harass them as they operate in different venues, though both use violence it is to different ends.


The Institute

When playing Fallout 3 I got the idea that The Institute was a bit more present in the affairs of the Commonwealth and didn't exactly operate in a very low profile mode.  At most they might be into a form of enforced experimentation via slavery on members of the population and at the lowest point they had visible individuals who operated directly like a power behind the throne sort of arrangement.  They were, perhaps, operating openly in what was old Central Boston and outside of that area they saw settlements and communities as too dispersed to bother with.

It made sense to see it that way as it takes quite a bit for an organization to send a few people at the highest levels out over the long distance from the Commonwealth to the Capitol Wasteland.  There is no hint that they simply traveled with a caravan or two, but that they came on their own through that harsh territory or that they might have come by sea travel.  Trying to make sense of the few times the Commonwealth, Boston, The Institute and Androids were mentioned left a sort of jigsaw puzzle to FO3 players.  Perhaps these Androids were being used as slave labor (with high starting cost, to be sure) to augment production of goods or perhaps even provide services that were not available from wastelanders.  What we didn't get was the feeling that The Institute was isolated not just from other parts of the wasteland, but unwilling to deal with the surface world much if at all.  That didn't fit with what we knew from The Pitt DLC of FO3, and some amount of active trade and even recognition of the quality of goods from The Pitt showed more than a passing interest in outside trade.

That sort of Institute, one operating behind the scenes but not underground, and even openly in some areas, plus understanding why trade was important to them for new equipment and ideas was missing in FO4.  An expectation of being able to have a role-playing environment that involved technology, slavery of Androids (Synths), and learning about the ways that The Institute exploited others outside of their immediate grasp were built up to a small degree by what was shown in FO3.    Taking up with another faction, the Railroad, would mean utilizing a different set of skills, contacts and interaction with individuals.  Playing both sides of the field would put the player in deadly danger of being called out or spotted as a double-agent.

Getting the Commonwealth that was delivered, while visually interesting, didn't live up to the sort of high technology to wastelander dichotomy that had been hinted at in FO3.  With the actual ability to play a role that one wanted to play in FO4 and handed something that was more warmed over wasteland with this tiny group with high technology living underground felt like a lost opportunity.  In over 2 centuries The Institute can barely manage what it has, and that is a problem as what it does have demonstrates some major problems with the faction in concept and execution.  The end result of such a tiny group of individuals, and the population size is smaller than that of Diamond City, points to major problems of genetic isolation, in-breeding and enforced population control as seen in Vault 81.  Yet in both Diamond City and Vault 81 there are enough children to support another generation of both places, with at least a representative group of individuals in their late teens or early 20s to serve as the next generation moving into the population to replace older individuals when they die.  The Institute is on its last generation of people, and has no echelon of individuals in their late teens to early 20s for immediate replacement of older members and only 2 children in the entire facility.  The population of The Institute is in for a severe decline over the next two decades and without facilities to educate children even on such a low level as seen in either Diamond City or Vault 81, there will be no Institute in 30 years.

Perhaps this was the goal of the Gen 3 Synth project?  Actually ANY goal of that project would be nice to hear as 'Mankind, Redefined' is a slogan that has no clear end-point objectives added to it.  To put it bluntly that redefinition must, itself, be defined, stated and have goals that can be achieved or the overall project is set to be on a Death March to absolute failure.  While having the ability to create individuals on the fly with pre-made routines and interaction capability is interesting, it must be pointed out that all Gen 3 Synths are sterile, consume food, and are based on the genome of one individual, Father.  The rationale for snatching him from Vault 111 was that as an infant he had an 'uncorrupted' genome, not tainted by radiation of the wasteland.  Yet this is true of each and every individual in Vault 111 and they were all intentionally taken off life support by The Institute, save for the sole survivor.  That was an insane move by the Director of that era as each of those people could, in theory, serve as the basis for an uncontaminated genome AND offer genetic diversity to the Gen 3 Synth project.  In point of fact, with The Institute as we are shown being a self-contained and isolated facility safe from exterior radiation, these individuals could be revived and brought into the population of The Institute to serve as a replacement group over a period of years with children being brought up to the ways of The Institute but leavened by pre-war knowledge of the survivors of Vault 111.  Psychologically The Institute has undergone drift away from the actual foundations of science and program execution: isolation has brought The Institute a sharp focus on one topic, Human Synthetics, yet prevent them from saying just what it is those Human Synthetics are supposed to be as an end goal.  As it is the Synth program has a relatively high maintenance overhead to it and in the Gen 3 line puts out individuals that must consume food to keep their biological bodies running.

They do need food as they consume it to survive when they show up in settlements run by the sole survivor.  Undercover or runaway Synths have the exact same overhead as normal humans in food and water, with only the actual need to sleep being a tell-tale sign that they aren't human.  Over time the humans in a settlement will eventually identify a Synth and eradicate them which is something that the Covenant group has been unable to formulate to counter Synth infiltration by The Institute.  With this in mind, what is the actual purpose of a Gen 3 Synth?  To serve as a workforce for the dwindling population of The Insitute?  If that is the case and the members inside The Institute refuse to recognize that many if not all Gen 3 Synths have the capacity for original thought and self-awareness, then the end of the Gen 3 Synth program would be to have a population tidying up a dead Institute.  Without a clear goal for the Gen 3 Synth program and seeing such Synths as property, then the very use of humans as a clear demonstration of the 'best' nature can create is being overlooked.  A perfect machine modeled on a human being would have the ability to be self-aware, original thinking and be creative as these are tell-tale signs of success in adapting to the natural environment.  Synths can be given immunity to the effects of radiation, yes, but that only makes sense if it is a genetic trait that can be passed on from generation to generation.

Here The Institute falls into the very same problem as The Master from Fallout who wanted to have Unity by converting everyone into Super Mutants via the FEV.  Super Mutants are sterile, and would be the LAST generation of thinking living beings on the planet.  Synths have this same problem, so that no matter how well made and designed they are, they are liable to the problems of nature and will die out.  Well die out after The Institute closes up shop due to lack of population that is, and that is less than a generation away.

Gen 3 Synths also have another problem and that is shown when Father tells the division heads that he is dying of cancer.  Fallout lore establishes that cancer was treatable in the pre-war world and was no longer a great killer but something easily cured.  Thus either The Institute lacks this medical knowledge and can't cure cancer, or they have it and this is a type that is different from any other form of cancer ever seen on the planet.  Father, therefore, has a genetic predisposition to this form of cancer.  So does every single Gen 3 Synth based on his genome.  If The Institute knew about this before making Gen 3 Synths, then it would have been caught and Father wouldn't be where he is in FO4.  Since it wasn't caught and Father has kept it a secret from everyone for years, that means he has allowed the production of Gen 3 Synths based on his genome to continue with the knowledge they have a genetic flaw in their basis.

For a year that might be an act of self-denial.  Longer than that, and it becomes a willful act of malice on the part of the acting Director of The Institute to withhold knowledge of a problem that is the very basis of the Gen 3 Synth program which is seen as a success.  Failure is an option when running scientific experiments, and by not informing the scientists of this problem and stopping the production of Gen 3 Synths, Father is showing a base human flaw driven either by fear, cowardice or just figuring that this will be dealt with AFTER his passing.  Without negative input into scientific knowledge, that is the knowledge of what doesn't work, there is no opportunity to figure out why it didn't work.  Without knowledge of this form of cancer The Institute is now years behind in finding out its basis and perhaps creating a cure for it.  Or at least delving into pre-war records on how cancer was cured so they can utilize that, though a bit late on the uptake on that score.  If Father truly loves science and scientific advancement, he would have informed everyone about this years ago, instead of keeping it secret with his doctor who was not given the means to do expansive research as it was to be kept confidential.

The worst part is that the sole survivor as 'the backup' has a 50/50 chance of having those SAME genetic traits.  And as that cancer took decades to show up, the sole survivor would not be showing it as they did go through medical exams in the pre-war world before going into Vault 111.  That means the act of the previous Director and Kellogg may have killed off the individual who might be free of this genetic problem.  What does need to be pointed out that dying and going into a deep freeze, presumably with the chemicals to preserve tissue already in the body, everyone in Vault 111 might still be revived.  That is part and parcel of cryogenic suspension, after all, where people will that their body be put into a deep freeze state with proper chemicals to prevent ice crystal formation and preserved until they can be treated and revivified.  Thus the entire population of Vault 111 might still be brought back to a living, waking state despite the intentional act of mass murder directed at them.

On the logistics side, The Institute seems to be pretty much a showcase of technology that, while impressive, doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  Starting with Synths, particularly the Gen 3 variety, we can see that one can be constructed from empty holding matrix to fully fleshed individual in about 10 minutes.  These are then processed...somewhere.   Perhaps it is a fully roboticized downloading of a basic personality matrix with directives and some physiological tests to see if all the random factors have made a Synth that can be upgraded to a Courser.  Call that about a half-hour, with time on a firing range...somewhere...included.  From start to finish all of this can be wrapped up in an hour or so, possibly, with a very few units going on to advanced programming and responses to become Coursers and the rest able to serve as individuals able to clean, do basic maintenance, and so on.  That is roughly 24 a day, buts lets put that down to 20 a day for calculation purposes, as some number don't pass muster.  In a week that is 140 Gen 3 Synths.  In a year, that is 7,280 Gen 3 Synths.  At that point there are more Gen 3 Synths than there are individuals in the Commonwealth.  There is a problem with Gen 3 Synths: they have a biological system that requires certain nutrients to remain stable, and quite a few Gen 3 Synths become fond of Fancy Lad Snack Cakes.  One box of Fancy Lad Snack Cakes per week might do for a Gen 3 Synth food addict, and since not every Gen 3 Synth likes the stuff, we can put a number down to, say, 5,000 boxes per year, roughly speaking.

At that point The Institute isn't about 'redefining' mankind, but maintaining a Gen 3 Synth population that is larger than everyone we see inside The Institute by a few orders of magnitude.  Hey, where are all these Gen 3 Synths, anyways?  Or do so few of them pass muster that the lovely construction system is constantly remaking Synths in the hope of a pass rate of something like 0.001% or less?  Because if that is the case, then the Gen 3 Synth program is a failure as it is a waste of time, resources, energy and manpower that would be better spent doing something else.  Like expanding The Institute's living space because it is woefully short on genetic variation and needs to expand to so as to not develop problems with in-breeding.  If they had gene therapy or something like it, then Father wouldn't have a cancer that couldn't be treated, and would indicate that The Institute does know how to utilize genetic treatments suitable for countering cancer.  Vault 81 has a problem of its tiny lab not being able to grow food quickly enough to keep its population stable, so there must be some protein synthesis going on somewhere to support its low population.  The Institute has this problem in spades.

If you side with The Institute actually knowing what they are doing, then where is all the necessary space to hold all the excess Gen 1, 2 and 3 Synths?  And if it is so competent that it doesn't need that space, then where are those Synths?  You can't find rank upon rank of Gen 1 and 2 Synths in broom closets, after all.  They do take up physical space and that space must be somewhere.  Gen 3's need more space due to their biological components, and its probably not a good idea to put a Gen 3 into a shutdown state for hours, not to speak of days, weeks, months or years.  Assuming that you can, then there is the same problem with Gen 1 and 2's: where are they.  Over 7,000 per year if The Institute is competent is what backing them on that requires.  Storage space, preferably climate controlled, which would help in preserving the state of most of those units because packing them in cosmoline would require a tedious cleaning job when you wanted to re-activate them.  There are more high tech and lower overhead ways to do this, of course, but all of those still require space.  If we got to see Mr. House's robot army, then where is the Synth army of The Institute?  You know the army of floor sweepers, garbage cleaners and the ones who clean the toilets?  If you packed a year's worth of Gen 3 Synths into one space it might fill up all of Dunwich Borer's quarry from lowest to highest point, with overflow out on to the landscape.

The only thing that would fit what is seen is that The Institute we get to see isn't the actual thing, itself.  It is more of a demo model with some selected members working in it to try and figure out just how humans and Gen 3 Synths can work together, or at least have the Gen 3's subservient to humans at all times with none of those nasty concepts coming from free will.  By deciding that the very factors of independent decision making that necessarily has a creative portion to it doesn't constitute free will, The Institute is making a case for predestinationism or even for humans not having free will.  Yet inventiveness requires this, which is why Curie feels so limited as a robot: she lacks that spark of being human, of freeing herself of mechanical and programming restraints and getting another set of input into her base personality to be processed biologically.  She understands the basis for such capability is rooted in nature, and a Synth brain in a more or less natural body is a suitable basis for this to happen.  Curie was an oddity, to be sure, but for there to be emergent behavior that leads to self-recognition at a base level, she concludes what is necessary to break free of those constraints.  You can't even tell The Institute about this since they don't allow Companions in with you.  Besides they would just see her as their property, shut her down and strip her of her personality that would be judged aberrant, faulty and damaging to The Institute's reputation.  Not as a success.

So where does that leave The Institute?  It is unable to do basic program management or handle large scale programs properly.  It wants to have a subservient mankind with all of the features but none of the drawbacks of human, and yet make such beings as subservient to flawed humans.  When given a base genetic flaw on the grandest program The Institute has been working at for over a century, the information is hidden away and then kept under wraps, and never acted upon when it is revealed.  The truly awe-inspiring ability to create Synths on a continual basis isn't supported logistically, save that there are so many failures that the success rate is low enough to deem any program with such a success rate to be an utter failure in any other context.  The population inside The Institute is not sustainable for another full generation and may have undergone catastrophic genetic drift to the point where the need for sterilization or birth control is necessary and the children heavily screened before birth to prevent genetic defects from running rampant.  None of this adds up to what we see in the game.  It does serve as an arcade shooter foil, but it is made of foil that doesn't survive a light scratching at the surface and tears easily.  Plus for all the worries about property and wanting to 'recover' it, much in the way of other property is lost on hare-brained expeditions with little to no obvious purpose.  While they can replace a few individuals competently, they also do so for no reason that can ever be found out.  The Institute in the way of Father promises much, but delivers nothing save to use the PC as a replacement for Kellogg that he hopes will be the right person to guide The Institute into the future.  A person with a body count in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands by that point.

A bad, bad dream

Fallout 4 had actual and real promise to it as a game in the Fallout franchise as we would start with a pre-war individual and then need to make an abrupt change to the wasteland of the post-war world.  You would have had a job, pre-war, and possibly go through a few days leading up to the fateful Saturday when the bombs dropped.  You could have been anything: a returning veteran, a lawyer, someone who worked at a Red Rocket servicing trucks, an employee of Rob Co., General Atomics, Dunwich or Slocum Joe's.  You might have been an undercover agent for the Enclave, working in trying to rub out criminals that the regular police were too corrupt to tackle, or handling threats that were outside normal experiences of any police, thus some of your work might have been fictionalized to cover it up.  You could have been a Chinese infiltrator, a bookie, a junkie, or that cranky old guy trying to fix his lawnmower.

A good and solid 2 or 3 hours of game play in a 70 hour or more game is not unreasonable for staging a prelude to what is to come.  Some careers might have some warning of what was coming and stashed a cache of equipment for you knowing that you were placed in the Vault 111 neighborhood for a reason.  Or you just might have been an everyday person with no preparations at all.  Maybe you had a Mr. Handy robot, but most people couldn't afford one, so you would ask the neighbor to lend their Mr. Handy to you once in awhile.  You would get to drive a car or take a bus, chat with co-workers, joke with customers or just huddle in a cubicle trying to parse out programming code for a new robot line.  Then the bombs dropped.  You had seen the world as it worked and didn't work pre-war.  You might have been married, single, cohabiting, with any variation of that you could think about.  And once you were thawed out you wouldn't have a 'save your son' story thrown at you and your very first concern might be in finding out if any of the other people inside their cryopods could be saved.  Just because their life support readings are off-line doesn't mean that they weren't properly put into suspension...this IS Vault-Tec we are talking about, after all.

Based on just what you saw coming out of cryogenic suspension, you might figure out that someone let you out or that it was just a random thing, or that something had gone wrong and the system chose to defrost you to solve the problem.  As a player you would be given facts, evidence, choices and not be steered towards finding your son and giving up everyone else for dead.  These were your neighbors.  Some of them might be friends or even lovers, all coming from a cul de sac sort of drama arrangement that would have fit perfectly with the Fallout franchise.  Would your pre-war skills stand to the test of the post-war world?  You might not know how to use a gun, or you may have been all too proficient at it.  You might not be a mechanical genius or you might see the complex diagrams used to create new items and declare them to not be efficient enough and improve them.  You would be translating pre-war skills into a post-war world, and while secretarial or clerical skills might not seem like good survival skills, they sure do come in handy in making lists of things you need and even figuring out where some good resources might be based on pre-war experience and that means more resources found more often.

How you started would then determine just what sort of attitude you took towards everything in the wasteland.  A pre-war drug pusher might not see strung out Raiders as hostile, but as a customer base.  That kind of turns the entire pre-scripted nature of Concord on its head, twists it around and turns it into something totally other.  Are you up to the task of dealing with a large Raider gang, not with violence but with price negotiation and factoring in the lives of innocents into the bargain?  Or if you were that pre-war Enclave agent, mowing these drug addled violent junkies might just be a clean-up operation and a Deathclaw something you were trained to handle.  Coming out of the past is not a de novo start: this is not a blank slate but one that has been written on and must be taken into consideration to make the rest of the game make sense.  Aiming to become a drug kingpin in the post-apocalypse is just as valid a response as wanting to establish a new government to bring order to all the chaos, with everything in-between also on the table.  This would require a deep world, one with established post-war themes that the Fallout franchise is famous for including and each faction would demonstrate that they not only adapted to this world but did their best to survive and expand in it.  That would bring conflict and war, war never changes.

People can and indeed must change when confronting life, in general, and a shattered world of a post-war era that has gone to hell. To be able to describe that trajectory is the primary job of a role-playing game and when coupled with player agency leads to diverse endings.  Tacking on a 'find your child' quest and thinking this can be a 'good' narrative that will press players onwards is not just lazy writing but an active insult to the Fallout player base.  A player has no investment in the pre-war world, the marriage that is presented or the infant that is the product of a romantic time after going to the park.  Player agency in the pre-war era and then ending it would expand role-playing choices and even allow for differing ways to approach the post-war era with different drivers and motives.  Removing choice and player agency in what is purported to be a role-playing game does not reflect a rich world, but a poor one that is poorly designed from the start.

While many new people were brought into the Fallout franchise by FO4, they got a rude awakening when playing either Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas as both of those featured role-playing where the decisions you made changed what you could say, who you could approach and what you could and could not accomplish.  In particular with FONV players could do damned near anything from being a saint that wouldn't harm any living thing all the way to a psychopathic murderer that left a pile of corpses behind them and made the Mojave into an empty wasteland (at least in the base game).  With prior parts of the franchise still on sale (and inexpensive) quite a few gamers got to experience what was and still is the Fallout phenomenon and then get a basis to compare the latest part of the franchise with its prior installments.  This is part of the reason that the post-launch FO4 critical reviews and scoring have not gone up after the first 3 months: players learned about what this franchise was and find more to be disappointed with in the current installment compared to the prior ones.  A player willing to invest a bit more time to play prior parts of the franchise then begins a serious process of analysis and comparison of those entries with FO4 and the result is the slow decline of FO4 away from the top of the franchise and down towards the bottom of it.

The only bright spot of FO4 is that the updated Creation Engine has allowed for modders to have the ability to start taking apart game mechanics, like the horrifically abused Perk system and start the process of restoring a skill and perk system, so that players get meaningful choices on how they want to approach the game.  Sadly this cannot fix the broken speech system nor the awful plot that theoretically should be driving the PC forward but is totally unimmersive to the player.  In a game that entices immersion via exploration and crafting, it also breaks that immersion by continually bringing the main story plot line up again and again.  If you want to be a PC that has actually rapidly adjusted their outlook, then having the 'you're over 200 years old!?!' bit thrown at you gets a bit tedious, to the point where you would like to throttle that person and say: yes, get over it since I DID A FEW WEEKS AGO.  Sadly the ability to actually do that or even have sensible replies to NPCs is lacking.  No one is so insular or so driven as to not listen to other approaches to a common problem or even problems for life in general (once you get to know them) save a religious fanatic and those are pretty easy to spot.  Yet the player can spend a long time thinking about what they actually WANT to say to an NPC, especially a faction leader, and get stuck with the same 4 choices which boil down to 3 positive and 1 negative.  For a franchise used to making the moral and ethical areas grey, the speech choices go totally to black and white.  And if you really don't want to slaughter your way across the wasteland?  Sorry, that is something you need to seek in a prior installment of the franchise.  Action combat game mechanics rule the roost in FO4.

One of the major problems that Bethesda Game Studios has had in its franchises is actually coming up with a game that demonstrates that it understands how a faction operates on the ground.  This isn't that necessary with free-form factions, like the Minutemen, but is a damned necessity with any faction that is driven by something other than basic self-defense.  The Brotherhood of Steel should act like it is just the spear point sent into the wasteland to assess and try and deal with The Institute, and have a regular organization that is sane, sensible, defensible and can be sustained by incoming supplies.  That leaves a wide range of role-playing opportunities both for and against the BoS in and of itself.  Those supply lines are vital to the success of the mission, and yet they are shoved aside as even a concept so the player can get an endless supply of exploding vertibirds and a coterie of dead BoS members larger than ANY chapter witnessed in the franchise...or more than all of them combined if you have a long enough time at the game.

A clandestine RR that has suffered a severe setback doesn't break its internal security rules because it has seen what can happen when it does that and it isn't pretty.  Gaining the trust of that organization is a long, slow getting to know you dance that requires patience on the part of the player to actually understand the organization.  The 'getting to know you' period is mandatory under all circumstances, and placing trust in the actions of the RR if you haven't won them over so as to get vital information from them creates an air of realism that no amount of poor random vocalizations by NPCs can ever do.  Deacon, for all of being a companion and such, needs to know his place in the organization and actually go through that 'getting to know you' period BEYOND just one operation.  Yet the flimsy plot demands otherwise, thus operational security goes out the window.

The Institute needs to be scaled to what it is purported to be and the grand showcase that we get needs to have all the underlying parts of what allows it to be as it is clearly shown, and that might not be a pretty sight.  As shown it is far too small to do very much, and without any real physical space to actually have the equipment necessary to process or store anything from food to Synths it comes off as just a showpiece not an actual working organization. What is given is a shallow and a rather vapid 'we are the future' faction that doesn't have either a well defined past or present and doesn't act like the things it says that matter actually matter.  As an organization they are unable to run even simple projects in a rational way or even bother to define what their end goals are for the organization.  When made the head of the organization it is not possible to actually change policies, reassign personnel...well if you had more than the handful available you might get a talent pool and that isn't allowed...or even start to execute based on those changes.  If you can't point out the major flaw in their Gen 3 Synth program in that having the genetic basis for all Gen 3 Synths have an underlying genetic factor leading to an unknown and uncurable form of cancer, well, for all the supposed intelligence there these people just aren't that smart.

As in other games BGS has put out, becoming a faction leader or at least the 'most important operative' in the faction is pretty much a quick and easy thing to do.  The rewards are slim and titles never hold any authority behind them because the PC is never given the tools to actually utilize their position and deal with its responsibilities.  The trade-off in rising in a faction is that you do get more leeway, more authority and are held responsible for what you do at ever increasing scrutiny to see if you are abiding by the tenets of the organization.  At the very highest level a player would have to deal with schedules, personnel assignments, and an actual budget to figure out how to keep the organization running.  Making that transition from troubleshooter to administrative overseer or CEO is a difficult transition to make, while still giving entertaining content and a real rationale for the player to take a more active role in events...if they want to do that.  Part of the fun of being at that high level is that you no longer get the cats and dogs missions, the 'could you do this vitally important thing that needs to be done RSN but you can do at your leisure?' sorts of missions.  The damned Radiant Quests that only serve as grind for the player to get levels but advance no story, no plot and are just Filler Quests for lack of better made content. All of those can, should and indeed must disappear at the Faction Leader level of things.  A leader with an active bent to them will lead by example and be willing to show how missions can and should be done, and this should change opinions inside and outside the organization both pro and con.  A less active leader for the organization delegates authority and responsibility for missions and then keeps track of them, asses outcomes, and lets the lower level individuals know what they did right, what they did wrong and all of that taken in context of just how hard the mission was in total.  Very few games ever offer that depth of activity level, however, yet if becoming a faction leader in a role-playing environment then that level of detail becomes necessary.  It takes skilled writing and coding to handle these affairs, and are actually more difficult than working on combat in the game engine as it requires an in-depth assessment of each faction and what they are about and how they go about activities.

A title without authority is hollow, and that hollow area is where the nuts and bolts of factions comes into play.  You can't turn the Minutemen into a true military without a government, but you can't start the process of MAKING a government for the Commonwealth so you can never get a true military.  The BoS has its core and foundation credo trampled upon, and yet you cannot bring up this lack of fidelity to them and impeach their current leader as a man setting himself up not as an Elder like Elder Lyons but something much closer to Father Elijah in FONV: a man with his own, personal agenda and the Brotherhood is just a tool to achieve it, in this case it is fame and glory for himself by doing this difficult task.  And the RR doesn't offer the opportunity for the PC to become a talent scout or trainer for new operatives so that the organization can become a bit more secure and active at the same time.  And for all the glitzy bits of The Institute, the PC never gets to enact policy changes, change personnel, and decide what the future of The Institute actually is.  And with the Vault-Tec DLC the ability of the PC to actually make something that functions far better than The Institute is put in their hands: older technology that works, is adaptable and doesn't suffer the power problems The Institute has.  Plus it has lots of living space available.

BGS can be credited with putting out a game with far fewer crashes than their previous outings, though it is based on an old game engine that is long in the tooth.  If you didn't like the strange physics of prior games put out by the studio, then you won't like those same ones showing up in FO4.  That could be readily forgiven along with the lack of a good melee system if the main story was compelling, interesting and immersive.  BGS tends to rely on relatively dull main stories and then shines in the small stories, the interesting side quests and some demonstration that what the player does actually matters in smaller affairs.  FO4 has some good and fun side quests and even interesting story based DLC content, yet all of that is in service to a game that has not taken past lessons to heart on how to broaden the role-playing aspects of their game without sacrificing  player agency.  Moving to shooter and action mechanics, and doing a much better job at them to be granted, has come at the sacrifice of an interesting plot, story and characters with some feeling that these decisions actually matter.  The conflict that is pushed out to try and make this work is driven by the supposedly most intelligent group around, yet they have not learned lessons from history about what happens when overbearing authority is utilized against a population of people: it isn't liked all that much.

The reason The Institute destroyed the beginnings of the Provisional Commonwealth Government was that the assembly was raucous, there were many different opinions and The Institute didn't hold any more sway than any other settlement.  It was, in other words, representative of the people involved who had a common goal of trying to secure a better future but having differing opinions on the best way forward.  This was wiped out by The Institute since such a body would not adhere to what The Institute 'knew' was the best path forward, which was to kow-tow to them.  Apparently the concept of earning trust was a bit too complex and involved for The Institute, and thus the wasteland's first hope for recovery on the east coast was destroyed by them.  Yet here was something that might have actually been an interesting role-playing experience and might have served to show just how The Institute actually works on the inside.  From a holotape found inside The Institute it is possible to discern a difference of opinion during the era of the CPG: at one point The Institute, itself, was somewhat more diverse in opinions on what the best path forward actually was.  Given the nature of the way those in charge of The Institute view negative internal feedback in the time of Father, it is possible that such opinions were over-ridden and squelched from simple authority of 'you shall obey the leadership'.  Yet The Institute, itself, is so small that it does not suffer from the one thing any organization just slightly larger than itself will get: office politics.  Such rigid obedience and rapid squelching of dissent is only possible in such a small organization, and yet it isn't large enough to sustain itself over time.  These things just do not work together or even make any basic sense.  A conflict from a diversity of opinions, with smaller groups seeking their own slice of the pie is something perfectly suited to an RPG and The Institute would have been the prime place to show it.

Finally there are the side quests and DLC content that should have long-term ramifications if a certain set of paths are followed.  With all the tongue-in-cheek humor of Automotron, especially when the comic book path is followed, the idea of having robot minions doing your bidding could play out in very interesting ways once the player gets their hands on that power.  By having a factory available to be refurbished and brought into full production, the PC should have been granted that ability that The Mechanist had and to utilize it with better skill.  For all of the fun of that DLC, there is no carry-through, no long-term ramifications and no major changes in NPC dialogue beyond companions of robots being a true threat to life and limb.

The Cabot House quest line offers the concept of a dark and foreboding power manifesting in the world and that if it isn't stopped than a true monster will be released that will transform the wasteland for the worst.  Given the nature of the franchise it would be very possible that creatures from the sea that weren't Mirelurks, Fog Crawlers, etc. but something far less amenable to physical or energy weapons might start showing up.  Perhaps Lorenzo Cabot was in contact with Yog-Sothoth or some other Cthulhoid entity seeking its own ends in the post-nuclear world, and releasing him and siding with him would have started a threat that would engulf everyone, even The Institute as it so unwisely thinks itself isolated when the realms of the earth and thought are very amenable to eldritch powers.  Instead Lorenzo will sit on his butt and give you a new Mysterious Serum every week or so.  So much for having him lead an army of creatures or R'lyeh rising up off the coast.

Given the Raider ending of the Nuka-World DLC, wouldn't it have been interesting to use the equipment in Nuka-World to find out where The Institute was and to find a way in?  The worst ending to The Institute is NOT blowing it up, but putting it in the hands of Raiders...Raiders led by the PC.  Putting the technology of The Institute into their hands and enslaving any survivors would mean a fate far worse for the Commonwealth than any of the base game endings.  Sadly this is not available as a possibility.  And all that fancy equipment, knowledge and so forth at Nuka World isn't of any interest to the BoS or The Institute.  Here you can find a gene splicing machine that not only separated out FEV from a dead Super Mutant, but then had the FEV adapted to suit other organisms without such horrific effects.  This equipment could lead to better Synth muscles, skin and tissue plus use a variety of sources for its creation.  And this same equipment would want to be sequestered by the BoS who would see it as a deadly weapon.  Weaponizing soft drinks would be of interest to ALL of the factions, period.  Being able to change a bottle of Nuka-Cola into a nuclear assisted explosive would catch the eyes of every faction leader.  Sadly, you can't get story lines like that in FO4.

Talking about Nuka-World I had thought there would have been an unlock for those with both Automotron and Far Harbor for Bradburton.  Having one's head preserved is a pretty bad decision after all, but there is a solution available based on prior content.  First off the actual equipment to create a Robobrain robot is available in the Commonwealth.  Secondly one of the people who led the Robobrain project is still alive in Far Harbor after becoming a Robobrain, himself.  Thus the PC has the means, available background and skill to offer John Caleb Bradburton a new way to get around: turn him into a Robobrain.  All of the pieces are there and yet the one other way out, and a good way to establish order in Nuka-World and rid it of Raiders should be available: get Bradburton up and running as a Robobrain as HE knows all the ins and outs of the park, all of the defenses available for it and he is the only one who has a snowball's chance in hell of utilizing all of it to get the place up and running again.  Given weaponized soft drinks, robots and the skill to utilize them, a team-up of the PC and Bradburton would pretty much spell the end for the Raiders and might even put a new force on the ground in the Commonwealth.

I thought the end of FO4 and all of its DLCs would be yet another ending to the game: the return of Bradburton with the help of the Sole Survivor to start up a new era of mankind with trade routes secured by Nuka-Cola powered and weaponized robots, favored groups getting their hands on weapons and armor that were augmented with Nuka-Cola, with the goal of restarting secure trade to create a functioning economy in the Commonwealth.  Some factions would reject this or even oppose it, while others would embrace it as it would mark the end of the era of Raiders and the terror of Super Mutants.  By combining all the DLC story pieces the beginning of the post-post-apocalypse would start in the Commonwealth.  And imagine a fusion reactor that isn't started with a fusion core but with a bottle of Nuka-Cola.  That would have been a fun and worthy role-playing opportunity that would reward good and expansive game play.  Instead there is the bad dream that is Fallout 4 - the missed opportunities.

Fallout 4: Elder Maxson

Each Brotherhood Chapter or Division is run by an Elder or set of Elders, depending on the size of the organization.  In the Mojave the Brotherhood of Steel (BoS) had a single Elder though it did have a Senior Paladin and Scribe.  When Elder Maxson shows up he has a retinue of Senior staff, though the old way of accounting for job roles seems to have blurred.

In the BoS there are three organizations or groups: Scribes, Knights and Paladins.

Scribes work to record the information of the old world, take in technical documents, do research into documents and generally decide on what information can be used and what must be withheld to safeguard mankind.  Being a Scribe is not a major combat role, though all members of the BoS are trained in combat.  In FO4 this function continues as it was in prior games.

Knights are the rank that actually produce the weapons, armor, ammunition and consumables for the BoS.  These are the engineers and engineering researchers, and their function goes beyond production to refurbishing and maintaining the infrastructure of the BoS in the way of facilities beyond simple supplies.  Knights take in documents from the Scribes and deliver newly found ones to them, although that is a role all members have it is the Knights that tend to get into the nitty-gritty of discovered sites from the old world.  The Knights are major combatants wearing Power Armor for hazardous exploration and while they are not marksmen they are more than capable of holding their own in combat.

Paladins are the highly trained combatants of the BoS.  Their role is to oversee the training of all individuals, ensure that the logistics needs of the Knights are met, and they are the ones that lead missions and patrols, learning how to utilize the strengths of Knights and Scribes to navigate the horrors of newly discovered emplacements.  Paladins are also the enforcers of order in the BoS and the the Senior Paladin is the one who decides which jobs go to which Paladins and they, in turn, apply to Senior Knights and Scribes to get the proper mix of personnel for new missions.  Simple patrols are normally delegated to those needing more combat experience, but for those missions going to really bad places, the input of the Senior members is sought out to protect the personnel going and the BoS as a whole.

Part of the way the BoS operates is through what is known as The Chains That Bind.  This is a chain of command structure in which the Elder consults with Senior members about what needs to be done, and then delegates responsibilities to them.  These Senior members then go to the next rank down and further delegate roles and missions, which, in turn, can also be delegated if that member is granted the authority to do so.  This is an important point in Fallout: New Vegas (FNV) as a plot line for the BoS Mojave Chapter can turn on this very point.  What has happened is that this methodology has been broken by Elder McNamara in directly ordering patrols to get information for him, and did not consult with Senior staff and gave it as a direct order.  Even if he did consult with Senior staff, it is not the role of an Elder, any Elder, to hand out missions to subordinates further down the chain of command than Senior members.  Elder McNamara can be peacefully replaced for violating this axiom of the BoS by Senior Paladin Hardin.

This is a core and non-negotiable part of the BoS: if the organization is to function properly with safeguards, then Elders do not give missions to subordinates directly as that is the role of Senior members.  Lack of coordination, protection and documentation means that BoS members can get killed by not being properly prepared for a mission.  Running the organization as a whole, making sure it works as a whole and safeguarding it as a whole is the primary job of an Elder in the BoS.

In Fallout 4, every single time the Sole Survivor is ordered to do something directly by Elder Maxson, he is violating the core concept of The Chains That Bind.

In fact I thought this was going to be a major plot line for the BoS, because Elder Maxson has violated so much of the Codex (by what we know of it at least) and the Founder's Axioms (what we know of them) that it isn't funny.  The man cannot be reasoned with by an underling and you cannot send complaints up the chain of command, either.  In fact telling a Paladin, like Paladin Danse, that you are getting orders from Elder Maxson directly should get some major response out of him.  Yet the Sole Survivor isn't given that chance.

To bring the Brotherhood Outcasts and the Lyon's Pride BoS together after the death of the last Lyon's family member, would require giving in something to the Outcasts and they should have sticking by the Axioms and Founder's Principles as their major source of contention with the way things were under Lyons.  That is the reason they LEFT to become the Outcasts, after all.  The Chains That Bind are a core part of how the BoS operates and maintains itself so that all parts of the Brotherhood function properly as an organization.  Many things can be given a hand-waving pass, or negotiated, but this direct ordering by an Elder to someone two, three or more ranks down without going through the proper chain of command is a way to get dismissed by a Senior member.  One suspects that the Outcasts actually tried that and were denied the ability to present their case, and thus they walked as the deviations from the very principles that let the BoS survive were being grossly violated in their view.

To get them back in there would need to be a reaffirmation of The Chains That Bind so that any upper level member of the BoS handing out commands to someone not directly under them and skipping a level or two of command could be called on it and dismissed.  When brought on-board the Prydwen Elder Maxson confirms that PC is under Paladin Danse, and this is something that Danse confirms.  Thus the Chain of Command is from Elder Maxson to a Senior Paladin or Danse if he is the Senior Paladin for this contingent sent from DC, although that would mean that Danse wouldn't personally be overseeing the PC.  Thus there is a link in the chain missing as this is what Danse is instructed to do, and that is NOT the job of a Senior Paladin.  So where is the Senior Paladin under Maxson?  Was this position abolished to give Elder Maxson direct say over the Paladins?

The position of Proctor appears as designating a Senior member of the BoS and it is worth considering each in turn.

Proctor Teagan is the man who runs the store on the Prydwen that keeps the troops supplied with food, weapons, armor, mods and chems.  This is typically the position of a Knight as they are the ones who do the scavenging of sites, repair of equipment and production of new items.  This is an important position for logistics, as well, and that is the purview of the Knights.  His armor is appropriate to that of an engineer, and that is also the realm of Knights in the BoS.

Proctor Ingram is in charge of the maintenance bay for Power Armor on the Prydwen, and has the appearance of being an engineer.  That puts her in the Knights of the BoS as this is the repair and maintenance duties which are in control of the Knights.

Proctor Quinlan is in charge of document gathering, organizing research patrols, cataloging of documents and assisting in research on the Prydwen.  These are all duties of a Scribe and he is the Head Scribe on-board the Prydwen.  While this is a high ranking position it is not one of being a Senior Scribe.

Thus what can be derived from this is that the command structure of the Eastern Division varies from the Western Division, which is due to the changes brought about by Elder Lyons.  The old order of Knights now falls directly in the combat section under the Paladins.  All of the logistics, maintenance and other duties that were typically those of Knights has been shifted to the Scribes, which makes the Scribes the most important group in the Eastern Division as seen on the Prydwen.  In fact this may be a necessity due to lack of space on the Prydwen with the emphasis placed on combat more than logistics.

A new branch, that of Lancer, has been formed and it appears to be a separate one that is charged with duties for the Prydwen and Vertibirds.  Thus there is a set of three branches in the Eastern Division as seen on the Prydwen:  Scribes, Paladins and Lancers.

Within the Paladins there is a hierarchy that has a few missing positions.  Under Elder Maxson there is a vacant slot for a Sentinel, then vacancies for Star Paladin, then Paladin-Commander, Paladin, Knight-Commander, Knight-Captain, Knight-Sergeant, and then Knight.

At the bottom ranks for each of these groups are Initiates who are just getting used to being a member of the BoS and then Aspirants who are trying to earn a full position in their groups.

With all of that taken into consideration, is this power structure something that the ex-Outcasts would put up with even for an expedition as seen in FO4?  This is an expedition with a goal and by the standards of the BoS, a worthy goal.  They carry Liberty Prime's parts to help make this a success.  The concept that the abuse of knowledge must be ended is laudable by those standards.  Yet the sacrifices in power structure, checks on authority and over-reach, and adhering to the Founder's Principles and Axioms are ones that must be incorporated for their relevant purposes.  Those are designed to stop unchecked abuse of power by an Elder, and they have a real and important purpose.  As shown Elder Maxson has done away with these checks to power, and taken with him one of the most powerful artifacts of the pre-war era with him.  As players we do not see who the Senior Paladin is that orders are supposed to go through.  Without a Sentinel, Star-Paladin or Paladin-Commander to put a proper chain of command in place, Elder Maxson is free to abuse his power and directly order underlings even those under the tutelage of Paladins instead of going through the proper chain of command.  These are things the ex-Outcasts would rail against and the argument of 'necessity' is one that has been used in the past to cover power grabs in history.

Even if his leadership as Elder is acknowledged by the Western Division, the differences in organization and accountability would still trouble Outcasts.  Varying so far from the way the Brotherhood operates in the West has its limits, and this wholesale change and direct command style is one of the very reasons the Outcasts left in the first place.

Question posed by CD Projekt Red

It's a simple question that the game developers asked of their community and just about everyone and is more or less: "You fire your gun at a human enemy 10 levels higher than you - headshot."

What happens?

As I've discussed before there are level based games and non-level based games, so this question is presuming a level based game mechanic.  Within level based games there are those that either grant  Hit Points at a level up or require serious investment in stats, abilities, powers, etc. to get more of them or otherwise acquire pieces that can act as some sort of armor (DR, DT, Ablative) to protect the Hit Points you have.  What this question brings up in the first instance is the concept of 'Area Hits' and this requires a look at Hit Points (HP).  Pushing back the time envelope to the days of paper and pencil gaming, the concept of Area Hits came into being after some dissatisfaction with the way HPs were utilized in most RPGs way back when in the early 1970's.

RPGs used HPs as a generalized indicator of how much damage a Player Character (PC), Non-Player Character (NPC), monster or fortification could take before it was killed or destroyed.  In level based games PCs and NPCs had HPs based on their class and level, while monsters had differing amounts of HPs based on what they were and how tough they were (as a general rule).  Fortifications, installations and the like tended to have some form of HPs that required either very high level attacks or siege equipment to damage.  There were also critical hits or 'double damage' hits that could either incapacitate a being in some way, or do far more damage to them based on the specialized form of attack scenario involved.  Beyond that were armor piercing attacks that could negate half or more of the armor resistance in a DR or DT system, or reduce the effectiveness of Ablative Armor by that amount when considering incoming damage which means it took that damage and ablated it, but didn't take twice the damage as this was finding a way to negate effectiveness of Ablative Armor against a certain attack.  Critical hits could stun, knock someone back, blind them, disable a limb, sever a limb (depending on severity of the critical based on weapon type and skill levels) or even decapitate.  What you couldn't do was AIM an attack to do that sort of damage: it was a critical hit based on random chance moderated by skill level, weapon and armor types, and even savings throws added in for fun.

Basically some of the first systems utilized HPs in a way that was understood but rarely talked about in that all those HPs aren't necessarily to a body but to combat effectiveness which included evasion, dodging, and some level of exhaustion.  In level based systems this meant how well the PC, NPC or monster could avoid taking damage and that most of the damage taken was slowly wearing someone down during the course of combat so that they lost HPs and the rare 'critical hit' was actually getting through to the opponent's actual body.  What that meant is the HPs a PC or NPC has from levels are layered on top of their first level of HPs, though very few people ever ran campaigns that had those two separated due to the amount of record keeping involved.  Regaining HPs was classically just resting for a period of time to recover from combat, using spells or potions and then continuing on the journey.  In general the headshot wasn't something in the early days of RPGs and in most subsequent games, either.  Without a good aiming mechanic the idea of being able to hit a particular part of a target, known as an Area Hit, was out of the question.

By the late 1970's and early 1980's this started to change as new sub-genres got added into the RPG fold: science fiction, military, post-apocalypse, horror and mixtures of same.  In particular the military and post-apocalypse games started to address this as pistols and rifles can be used to target body parts, thus Area Hits became a factor based on the game system used.  What this meant was that body armor, which had also been generalized to applying to the whole body, now had to be segmented into areas they covered.  With that segmentation of coverage also came the segmentation of HPs which then had to be balanced against applied damage.  Each game that utilized the Area Hits system would also utilized either a generalized 'hit anywhere on target and get a proportionate role to see where the hit landed' for damage or direct aim with penalties against a specific body part (usually limbs and head, with Center of Mass shots being the randomized application but weighted to the torso).

With segmenting HPs came the proportion of HPs and their distribution which each system would arrange in their own fashion.  Typically the torso had the largest share of HPs and this could range between 35% to 75% of overall HPs.  As an example if each leg gets 10% of overall HPs, that accounts for 20% of the HPs, and if each arm gets 7.5% that is another 15%, then give 5% to the head which totals up to 40% and 60% goes to the torso.  Rounding up is allowed just to simplify things, thus a character with 100 HPs has: 10 HP per leg, 8 HP per arm, 5 HP for the head and (taking off one point for rounding up on the arms) 58 HP for the torso.  Now if your average .22lr round fired out of a pistol does single 6-sided die of damage (or 1d6 in the parlance of dice used for RPGs), then there is a chance that a head shot will instantly kill a person with 100 HPs in a 2 in 6 chance.  Now it is possible to say that at 0 HP to the head the person is rendered unconscious and put in a 'bleeding out' state, perhaps draining the damage amount per round from the torso or remaining HPs to represent blood loss.

While there is little respect for the .22lr as a combat round, it must be understood that a head shot from a pistol using .22lr can kill someone in a single hit to the head by going through soft tissue to the brain or by forms of internal bleeding that will put pressure on the brain leading to death in a short term.  This is a first instance of how Area Hits started to work in RPGs but had incredibly complex mechanics as each body part suffered a penalty for aiming at it based on overall percentage of area represented in a typical silhouette for targeting.  The head is a relatively small target compared to the overall body, so that targeting the head suffered some severe minuses when targeting.

All of this is still in the paper and pencil era of gaming utilizing a round-based system for segmenting combat based on other factors.  Still the concept of firing on the run meant it was penalized but would also restrict opponent's movement from cover unless they wanted to take a savings throw against the suppression fire.  Saving an action and letting an opponent move to get an opportunity shot was also something that could be done, and when done from cover and either prone or in a firing stance, it meant bonuses to aiming.  Toss in skill, sight or scope adjustments and whatever else the system would feature and a good first hit at replicating combat came into being for RPGs.

Thus the question from CDPR gains an added level to it as they are asking if Area Hits are a thing, and if they are what are the consequences?

Now to the other part of the headshot equation which is armor.  What is poorly understood about  head armor, is that it must leave some capacity for an individual to use their primary senses of sight and hearing.  Early examples of historical head armor typically either were on just the crown of the head and didn't try to address the neck and other parts of the face.  Later forms (and this is seen in Bronze Age pieces) would go much further down, feature ear openings and even a piece over the nose or nose and cheeks.  These pieces would not fare well against primary strikes from an opponent with a sword or an arrow in a well placed strike against the head.  It might be somewhat useful against sling stones and be effective at warding of glancing blows that had been deflected either by skill or a shield (or the opponent just barely hitting while dodging an attack). 

Later eras would try to protect nearly everything and leave slits of various forms for eye openings, but then individuals would suffer penalties in situational awareness when there was more than a single opponent in front or near them.  While not a bad thing for mounted combat, in dismounted combat this sort of restriction to sight and hearing could have fatal consequences.  Still battlefields were messy scrums and protecting against errant blows and glancing blows was still desired.  These later helmets can and did offer protection against main attacks from many types of weapons, which is why they were used and that also explains the wide varieties of styles of them which tried to address the type of combat they were made for.

For a time in the era of firearms, head armor became ornamental or absent, right up to the point when shrapnel was introduced by explosive cannon balls, grenades and mines.  WWI started with no real head armor by any side, but the number of men dying or incapacitated due to concussion and shrapnel soon brought back head armor to thwart that.  Some of the best coverage offered protection from the rear and even was formed to have rain drip out to the sides or further away from the neck while protecting the neck.  In the modern era this function hasn't changed much save to move to laminates replacing metal. A helmet's main function is still that for lessening concussion, deflecting or absorbing shrapnel and generally protecting the head from the environment.  A rifle shot will penetrate it, and even a close range pistol shot will do so to most helmets since it is hard to build up enough protection via layers to absorb the kinetic energy of the projectile to cause it to fragment without transmitting that exact, same energy to the head and thus the brain.

So if hitting an individual with that same .22lr for 1d6 of damage and a helmet has a DT  3, then there is a no chance for either bleed out shot or instant kill, but a 50/50 chance of doing damage if the shot hits the helmet.  Shots that hit but not in the helmet have the prior percentages and damage applied.  Also note that this is now sliding into the real world and brings into question game dynamics when associated with real world events.  Are there instances where helmets have actually stopped major damage?  Yes.  There are also instances where individuals have survived headshots by having a round pass through their helmet, through their skull, through their brain, exit out the rear of the skull and punch through the helmet.  Are these instances damned rare?  Yup.  Should you rely on luck to hope that this is what will happen if you are wearing such stuff?  Probably not.

Part of the major problem with segmented body armor in modern games is that the HPs are not also segmented and allow for real world damage to take place.  Take a game like Fallout 4 where you can target a head in VATS with a heavy damage output weapon, say a Gauss Rifle that has been fully upgraded, and each hit is applied to the entire number of HPs of the individual instead of blowing their head clear off.  With fully upgraded skills to back up such a weapon, its overall damage output is in the 500 to 600 range of damage.  If an opponent has, say, 1200 HP (a higher level Deathclaw, say) and only 10% were in the head that would mean they have 120 HP in the head.  Now you won't be doing full damage unless you are lucky or score a critical hit and in either case the opponent does have some DR so that is factored in. But even at 20% damage applied to a max 600 damage output weapon should yield a one hit kill as that is also a load of kinetic damage applied to the braincase.  At lower ranges a double barrel shotgun blast to a relatively low level opponent will not kill them after using both barrels at point blank range.  Thus the enemies in Fallout 4 are damage sponges meant to take many, many rounds even to the most critical part of their body and keep on coming.  Basically area hits only matter against opponents that can lose a limb or a head and die, typically ghouls though they have spongy heads, and some forms of robot that can adjust to missing limbs.

The answer to the question on headshots is: what type of game are you trying to run?

Is it a power fantasy system?  Then, no, the headshot won't kill and you will have spongy enemies.

Are area hits being implemented?  If no then a critical hit system may be implemented to offer a 'lucky' incapacitating or one hit kill shot, but it is all luck.

If area hits are being implemented then are you also implementing segmented damage per area of the body being considered?  If no then see the prior answer.  If yes then in all likelihood a shot from even a relatively low power projectile can kill someone.  Anyone who scoffs at .22lr shots to the head has yet to volunteer to take one and demonstrate the effects of a relatively high velocity but low applied force projectile to their own head across a small surface area.  Why?  Because you would be committing a form of suicide and most people just aren't up for that.  This isn't even in Dirty Harry territory with a .44Mag, just a simple plinking pistol used mostly to shoot tin cans, bottles and varmints of the rodentia variety.

And in level based games, if only a small percentage of HPs are in the head, then a guy 10 levels higher still won't have many HPs in the head, and the actual number garnered per level is important at that point as a game balance issue.  The fragility of the head, however, is paramount in considering damage applied to it as the brain and major sensory organs for sight, hearing, smell and taste are all centralized in the head.  Further the head has openings for nerve bundles from these senses to go into the brain.  Those playing contact sports can attest to the problems of long term damage to the brain, like in boxing where the damage can be enough to knock an individual unconscious, but even barring that the long term number of impacts to the head will have an effect on reasoning and cognition.  An Area Hits system with segmented armor and segmented HPs then is offering a level of 'realism' for 'immersion', and if you want that to be present in the game then a headshot can and indeed should be lethal.  This is circumstantial as such shots rely on type of force applied (piercing, blunt, kinetic projectile, etc.) and the specific type of effect such damage applies.  A headshot with a sword not mitigated by armor can still have negative effects on an individual.  A blunt trauma instrument like a lead pipe may do enough to knock someone out, but also have a chance for internal bleeding. Specialized attacks that are not thwarted by armor typically have a different game mechanic applied to them and are a separate consideration based on the game type with an example being certain mental or disorienting attacks via mystical, magical or technological means.

Should a well placed .22lr shot take out someone 10 levels higher?  There is no simple answer to that as it presumes a level based system with accruing HPs over time.  This is a problem CDPR has had in the Witcher 3 where all those HPs require better combat gear in the way of armor and weapons as the opponents are outputting more damage, as well.  To keep from making a game a scavenger hunt, why not disconnect HPs from levels, and keep levels to things like acquiring skills that can enhance use of weapons but doesn't change the actual physics of the weapons themselves?  Getting a better chance to hit, a faster reload or even being able to control one's emotions to steady their hands and concentrate are sure great things to have when using a firearm or any weapon, come to think about it.  If base HPs are relatively static that means that weapons and armor can also be made static, though the use of them can become very ingenious.  If this sort of thing is implemented then segmented HPs will allow for even low level individuals to take out higher level ones.  That is how Samuel Colt was able to make men equal, and that weapon is still just as lethal today as when it was first designed.  That goes for all arms since no matter how tough people get, they still have the same physiology and physics applied to them as when the weapon was designed.  Physiological differences for things like cyborgs or robots require game mechanics and game balancing, yet the eye must be kept on the physical world for what these changes will actually do: no benefit is accrued without some form of drawback to it.

I don't know exactly what CD Projekt Red is going to do in the way or 'realism' or 'immersion' but if you want something that has a relatively accurate mirror in real life with its consequences, then the entire set of combat mechanics or elements must revolve around what actually happens when a headshot is landed.  Not all blows are lethal and blows meant to stun, like those in boxing, would require an integrated stunning mechanic that factors in recovery and training, while those utilizing physical projectiles would do far less stunning damage and more immediate damage for impairment and possibly sudden death.  A more static HP system and a grounded base of equipment with weapons means not having to search for marginally better equipment to continue going after marginally more spongy foes and puts the ball in the court of RPG game play and mechanics that don't rely on scavenger hunts.  More meaningful quests and less searching for what are minor upgrades means more role playing and tougher decisions, and that requires a very deep set of stories, individuals, society, groups, factions and their reactions to everything that a player is known to be doing.  Move ingenuity on the part of the player to the forefront and create a stable combat set of elements that play well to role playing while not distracting from the actual stories unfolding, which means fewer busy-work quests to just be a little better in combat and concentrate on all that other stuff that makes role playing games unique.

Fallout 4: Singular Lore Problem - Red Workbench

Fallout 4 has a number of lore based problems, which I've covered in summary form elsewhere.  As the title says there is one with the red workbench used to scrap and create materials inside a 'settlement' area.  If you try to write fiction in the Fallout universe it is necessary to explain discrepancies and lore problems to ensure the setting conforms to the game world, and that is particularly difficult for Fallout 4.  As the red workbench is recognized by in game Non-Player Characters (NPC) at a couple of sites, it is necessary to then explain the background of them as they are something that exists in the game world.  The problem is that they didn't exist before the Great War.

Consider that entry scene where you are running out of your house to go to Vault 111, and take a quick look across the street at the house there, particularly its carport, and notice that not only is the red workbench not there, but the other workbenches for power armor, weapons and armor are also absent.  They are present when you arrive over two centuries later, but they aren't there on the day the bombs fell.  This brings up an important question: just when, exactly, were these put in place?

Codsworth, for all the dings and oxidation going on with his outer shell, would surely have noticed a delivery van pulling up right after everyone left.  Now it can be posited that he had some negative effects to the localized EMP of the bomb or bombs dropped south of Boston, and that a restart cycle took some time for him to get up and operational again.  Still his memories of just before the war seem to be relatively intact and the presence of objects that patently weren't there in those last moments would be something he should recognize.  So that is a problem, though a minor one.  Yet that means that the delivery or construction of those workbenches happened in that short period of time: the day that the cars generally became inoperable and the shockwave of the blast(s) were felt even in Sanctuary Hills.  The infrastructure went down, the roads were clogged with wrecks, and the survivors were starting to fight over scraps for survival.  Plus the ghoulification of many people now put an additional threat into the mix, and that would also hamper any attempts to deliver those workbenches.

With regards to lore, there are no indicators as to which company made the workbenches, particularly the magical red workbench.  As a game mechanic the player can just slap down anything that is available to be made from it and it instantly appears.   Even including magic this requires a very high level of material manipulation in the finest of details, particularly for making things like the machinegun turrets.  Machineguns require tempered steel, properly made and tuned barrels, and a set of small springs, mechanical catches, pieces to eject cartridges and, in general, a raft of parts that require forging and machining to fit into place.  This is not to speak of the ammunition that they use, which is also made with them and never needs to be replenished.  This is before the automatic sensing mechanisms and Identify Friend or Foe system for circuitry is put in place, and that is something we can't do today.  Fallout 4 is a strange place in its alternate reality, but it still relies on some basic physical mechanics and principles that don't change just because the time line has.

What this means is that the red workbench comes pre-loaded with diagrams, schematics and internal workings to forge parts, reprogram circuitry, and then assemble a working piece near instantly right before your very eyes.  This isn't an IKEA kit that requires you to unbox it and put it together yourself, but something taken care of by the red workbench.  By doing so and having a system of matter storage that isn't internal (or anywhere come to that) the red workbench becomes the single most sophisticated piece of equipment in the Fallout universe, even including the Zetan ships.  Those aliens can do some dematerialization and rematerialization, but only like the transporter from Star Trek, and it reassembles stuff just as it was.  The red workbench works through some other means as there is no beam coming from it to the materialization site for a finished piece, but it just instantly appears.  Instantaneous appearance at a distance requires quantum mechanics to operate and that is where the red workbench fits, even with magic included in the mix.

This then begs the question: who made it?

Did the Zetans decide to drop a number of these in the Commonwealth for reasons of their own?  Well, if they had that sort of technology they wouldn't need large ships to galavant around the universe but just use quantum mechanics to get where they want to go.  Plus they wouldn't be so backward in other areas of the sciences to keep needing new biiomaterial to study.  If they had this technology there is a good possibility they wouldn't even bother to physically go to other star systems, and thus they are ruled out of the mix.  They don't employ, deploy or use anything like this and if they did it would have all sorts of fun things they require that we don't as their basic construction system.  Plus it obviously has some interactivity with the Pip-Boy, allowing for materials you are carrying as a Player Character (PC) to be instantly moved into the workshop system, and that wouldn't be something the Zetans would ever bother with.  Positing a 'we stole it from them and repurposed it' forgets that the Zetans don't have this technology in the first place, so it is ruled out by that.  So the Zetans get scratched off the list.

How about RobCo, the company that Robert House formed?  Now this brings up possibilities as the Pip-Boy is made by them and must be included in the mix.  Unless a highly sophisticated scanning and sorting routine is applied by the red workbench to the PC to figure out what they are carrying, the only other way to do that is through the system that is already doing that in the way of the Pip-Boy.  It is easier to use that system to hook it into the red workbench rather than posit a scanning system and the general non-use of the workbench by NPCs.  There is no animation for an NPC to use the red workbench and no NPC is ever seen materializing something out of thin air that could only be made by the red workbench.  No one would live on heaps of garbage if there was a means to convert it to useful materials and spare parts as that stuff is just too valuable to leave as litter.  This would make any place that has one tend to be litter and scavenger free since it only takes a few hours to do the clean-up work.  So many settlement sites live with useful materials in the way of garbage just sitting around that it makes no sense that they wouldn't use the workbench if they knew how to use it.  And when the PC is granted license to use one by an NPC for a settlement, it is more in the way of 'good luck if you can get it to work' than anything like a real and sincere grant of power.  The only difference between the PC and NPCs?  The Pip-Boy.

So RobCo gets put into the running as they were the pre-war masters of robotics, engineering and were even getting into space flight.  Plus they provided much in the way of equipment to Vault-Tec that it cannot be ruled out of the equation.  But for all of their prowess, this sort of design really isn't in their ballpark.  A company that begins to fit this bill is General Atomics as they also designed robots and concentrated on long-term power systems for government, commercial and private use.  General Atomics supplied generators to Vaults for Vault-Tec and even had a few Mr. Handy style of robots put in a few of them.  While the original programming basis for the Mr. Handy was designed before RobCo got in the picture, the fact is that the programming interface if not the code itself was moved over to RobCo Termlink Code as Mr. Handy robots can be hacked using the same tools made for RobCo robots.  The Gutsy line of Mr. Handy robots was a first instance of cooperation between the two companies and the Robobrain robot would continue that cooperation.  This joint venture style of production would promote both companies and be profitable to them, which meant a more fluid working environment in Vaults since General Atomics equipment would use RobCo based interfaces.  The power production end of General Atomics would be well suited to making the red workbench seen in FO4 and even provide it with an easy to access interface for anyone with a Pip-Boy.  What is lacking is the matter storage and re-arrangement concept for construction, and that starts to become the singular point in which neither company is demonstrated as having a footing.

After these two powerhouses there are some outliers like Wattz Consumer Electronics, though they tended to be more in the home delivery of goods and construction of plasma weapons as small arms.  Dunwich LLC may have an eldritch link, though that isn't very amenable to being regularized, systematized and put into the form of the red workbench.  House & House tools didn't have this as a specialty and once brought into the RobCo fold there was no massive change to the way RobCo operated.  What other links are there for the red workbench, then?

In the Vault-Tec DLC for FO4 we do get to see that an industrial form of workbench system was delivered to the construction crew at Vault 88.  As Vault 88 didn't get past initial construction phases due to bureaucratic problems, the PC is allowed to find and reactivate the integrated workbench system though they are much larger devices than the ones seen on the surface of FO4.  Here is a direct link with Vault-Tec actually able to get such equipment which was supposed to be used to speed up Vault construction.  If the war hadn't happened then the creation of Vault 88, at least the construction end of it, should go very quickly and it doesn't take long for the player to construct a basic vault in more than a few game days.  Yet nowhere is it hinted that Vault-Tec actually made these devices, and if they had been common pre-war then there is a very good chance that the entire industrial basis for the US economy would have radically altered in just a few years.  Gone would be the large factories as smaller production facilities and even home workbench units would begin to supplant the old industrial sector in the US economy.  That didn't happen, thus what is seen in FO4 in the Vault-Tec DLC is a large scale prototype system, not ready for wider use outside of the Vault.  Still it has all the plans that the exterior workbenches have without having a ready system to transmit nor receive them that means they are stored in a portable system that then gives an interface and structure to the workbenches.  That is the Pip-Boy, and the first time a workbench is used it's local plans synch up with it so that later plans can then be loaded into it.  Each of the DLCs have different post-war construction plans and there are even expanded plans available from the smaller workshop style DLCs.  The workbench is a tool, then, and its guidance system is governed externally outside of hand use of tools that can be seen on the workbench.

Is there anywhere that has similar technology to this?  Matter teleportation is seen being used by The Institute, Zetans and Big MT.  If the first two are ruled out that leaves the last one, the Big Brains at Big MT.  While it is a private concern, it is also one that worked with the government, military and other businesses and there is even a bit of envy towards what Vault-Tec was doing.  That and the spore creatures seen at Big MT show some link with the ones seen in one of the Vaults in Fallout: New Vegas.  So would they create such devices?  Here is an attitude taken by Borous, part of the Think Tank at Big MT: "Whether it was holograms, NEW Auto-Docs, toxins, vending machines... we wound them up, let them go into TINY ISOLATED TOWNS. Then... we OBSERVED!"

Now the Commonwealth is no tiny isolated town, to be sure, but there is the post-war delivery problem to be added into the mix.  As we do not know exactly when they were delivered and have a window of time from the Great War to the Sole Survivor getting out of Vault 111, there is a lot to play with in the way of possibilities.  Big MT was more or less off-line for a time after the Great War and then suffered some internal problems as the outside world started to try and creep into their holdfast crater.  With exposure to the outside world Dr. Mobius then performed a memory wipe on his colleagues, installed some inhibitions and fears, then went to the Forbidden Zone to keep their paranoia up so they would become obsessed with him.  That was before the start of FNV by a year or two, and would overlap the Fallout 3 period.  As the Think Tank didn't realize the outside world survived until after the Courier arrived there and settled matters, that then puts in a time-frame of post-Courier and Sole Survivor leaving the Vault.  FNV starts in 2281 and FO4 starts in 2287, and after putting in a good year to finish FNV for the Courier, that then closes the window to between 2282 and 2287.

Is it possible that Big MT made the workbench system for Vault-Tec?  Yes, it is as part of their outreach to that company.  It would make a lovely opportunity to do some social experiments, so that is a prime consideration.  Offering faster Vault construction technology would be just the ticket to those sorts of experiments.

Did Big MT like to create new things to send out into the world and see what they would do?  Yes, they did.

Does Big MT have a demonstrated system of matter teleportation?  In the way of the transportalponder, yes they do.

Could the Courier get between the Mojave and the Commonwealth in less than 5 years to then have these workbenches delivered to various sites?  That is not impossible.

This then eliminates the Who, What, Where, When and How portions of the problem, and that leaves only the 'Why?' portion.  This is, perhaps, the easiest of the questions having the ability to teleport people and equipment would also mean having the sensory apparatus to see if any similar system is being used.  Such systems utilize a large amount of energy and that use can be tracked down, just like the Brotherhood of Steel was doing in FO4.  Anyone using this sort of technology would be of great interest to Big MT, and finding out if that source were friendly or hostile would be a prime concern.  The Courier could be delivered close to the off-loading zone for Vault 88, which would have been above the surface, and then need to survive some raider attacks to then look around for appropriate spots to place down workbenches.  By the end of Old World Blues the Courier has the technology to shut down and restart robots at close range and should have enough general persuasive ability to get agreement to put down a workbench in some small settlements.  Also for those places that seem deserted it would be very easy to put a workbench down, which would explain why so many of them are in places that aren't inhabited.

The Courier would have left no real, lasting impression on much of anyone as the Commonwealth is far away from the Mojave and the main thing that the Think Tank would desire would be observation of what happened next.  Additionally the red workbenches may have other technology built into them to track where the teleportation signals are coming from to then try and figure out who is using this technology. When the Sole Survivor arrives and starts to utilize the main functional systems of the workbenches, then that would also be tracked as well as what the goodies that were programmed into were used for.  By putting a Pip-Boy interface as a hurdle was a means to limit the use of such technology to those who had some technical background from a Vault, plus would allow the Courier to utilize them on an as-needed basis for creating other goods.  With a final set of known points the Courier could then travel to each workbench site to take stock of its placement and gain an understanding of what was happening there, although that might be very rare as there are a lot of loose ends to tie up in the Mojave.

As there is no lore behind the Red Workbench and its powers, it is left up to the players to figure it out on their lonesome.  Good luck with that, I tellya!

The Witcher 3: The Ugly - Player Agency

What is Player Agency?  In an RPG this is the mechanic that allows the Player Character (PC) to make long-lasting decisions with ramifications not just in speech options but to building out skills, abilities, improving stats and equipment that will then change how NPCs and the game world react to them.  In The Witcher 3 (TW3), there is an illusion of Player Agency in that individual quests or decisions will have some different long-term outcomes, but that is limited to those directly involved in that quest line.  Thus saving the life of someone may get thanks or disdain from a loved one later on, but no word about that spreads beyond that quest.  In other words there is no general reputation system guiding the factions within the game world, no word of mouth that spreads faster than the Witcher can travel and generally nothing that gets larger world recognition within the game based on the decisions made.  There are a couple of exceptions to this, as the main plot centers on this and a sub-plot side-quest to remove the Redanian King both have such ramifications.  The first cannot be failed and the second only fails by not doing it at all, which means little room for actual role-playing is available in that quest.

An example of the lack of choices are seen in the large number of bandits, deserters and pirates that are instantly hostile to Geralt and simply seek to kill him.  There are a few instances where getting rid of these individuals may 'liberate' a site so that those chased off from them will return to it, but that does not go beyond the individual site.  The rulers of that area (or proxy rulers) do not hear of this sort of thing and word doesn't spread to nearby friendly places that indicate that their general feelings for Witchers is being modified for this individual.  A few quests with ramifications is not a framework for changing how factions view the PC and then react to what the PC does.  Rescue a small military unit and word doesn't spread amongst the fellow soldiers about it.  Help out a village with a monster and word doesn't spread about it.  Refuse payment because you are moved by the bad straights of those offering to pay for the quest, and that word doesn't spread, either.

On the flip side it isn't possible to join any of the rogue bands and help them to help themselves.  Consider that most of the game play takes place in a region where the terrain has bogged down proper military operations and a war of attrition has started up, with the diseases and insects of the terrain just as much, if not more of a threat to the two armies than the actual haphazard fighting.  There are many camps of bandits, deserters and pirates that add to the problems of the locals and the military on both sides, thus someone able to demonstrate some base leadership ability and organizational skills could prove more than just a nasty sideshow to an already miserable war theater.  Two armies would just love to get out of this mess in the swamp lands of Velen, but that will require a great logistical build-up now that both sides have exhausted their immediate supplies in the last attempt at a breakout.  In short, this lull and no-man's land affair is ripe for a force for change and that is the usual role of the PC in most games, no matter what the over-arching quest line is about.  Even a moderate reinforcement of local communities could tip the balance of power in this interim period.  Many small decisions of who to help and how to help them could and should have long-lasting effects in terms of the game timeframe.

That is Player Agency at the Theater level of military operations, and while most players will not see Geralt as having a stake in this, his very actions in and of themselves might begin tipping that balance in this Theater of war.  In fact this Theater would actually have a profound impact on the Strategic level of military operations, so changing the tide in the Theater might just change the tide of the overall war OUTSIDE of the main quest line.  Logistics is king in warfare, and the swampy lands of Velen are hell on logistics, supply, maintenance and medical practitioners.

The central city in the game is Novigrad which remains studiously neutral in the war between the Nilfgaardian and Redanian Empires.  It is, in medieval terms, an 'open city' although nominally reinforced by a side, it is not closed to either side and is independent in its operations.  Of course it isn't that simple as such cities tend to be highly prosperous ones that seek to avoid the war as it is bad for trade.  Novigrad has the largest fleet  around and the coffers to outfit 2 complete armies, so it is a capable neutrality that neither side wishes to antagonize.  While nominally in Redanian territory it houses the Church of the Eternal Fire and Witch Hunters, who seek to wipe out mages, sorceresses, herbalists, pellars and anyone even faintly related to magic.  When Geralt arrives this pogrom is in full swing and the start of anti-human sentiment is starting up.  This city offers one hint of a quest line that must have been scotched by the developers as it would require some in-depth RPG mechanics in a game only featuring a few RPG elements.  It is one that is hinted at by the King of Beggars: uniting the criminal factions to remove the Church and its Witch Hunters to attempt to bring some rationality back to the way the city is run.

Hearing this, as a player, brought a smile to my face as, surely, this must be the largest secondary quest in the entire game: swing the city of Novigrad to being completely neutral and even expand its trade by allowing magic users and others to freely practice their trades, which are taxable.  When corruption sets into government then that government starts to operate more as a criminal faction, one powerful enough to get rid of the regular criminals, and that is a threat to those normal crime factions.  The Mafia sided with the Allies against Mussolini in Sicily, a concept which would fit in with what is seen of the Church of the Eternal Fire becoming dealers in addictive drugs, extortion and other assorted criminal enterprises.  This must surely be a tense story line of Geralt serving as go-between so that the criminal faction heads might be brought around to usurping control and restoring standard civil government that enforces laws. 

Why?  Criminals who operate as government have corrupted moral standards and that makes the clear line between what is legal and illegal hazy, and just turns the government into a true criminal enterprise.  With there being no immorality, enforcing laws becomes a secondary concern to taking as much in the way of goods and cash from those under the rulers.  A return to 'sanity' as the King of Beggars puts it, requires there to be a sharp dividing line of morality so that normal criminal operations aren't put out of business by those associated with the government who use the power of government to wipe out the normal criminals.  Having moral standards and increased trade means higher prices can be charged for everything, and that includes criminal operations: a corrupt government is bad for criminals especially when the morals it is pushing are bad for business.

Consider the implications in the main quest line to having Novigrad cleaned up by the criminals so that they can properly operate: all the stuff about getting Dandelion out to learn about Ciri would come at the end of that quest.  Plus with restored civic order, Novigrad could actually start hiring mercenaries and forming up a local militia: it has the cash to do so and there are a lot of disgruntled deserters who would like to operate in a normal environment and not have a price on their heads.  Say, what was that about helping the bandit scum in Velen that neighbors Novigrad, again?  If TW3 was an RPG first, with RPG game mechanics fully working, then a small powerbase in Velen could be grafted to Novigrad and serve as a local counter-balance to the two military organizations.  Neutral trade would expand and both sides could depend on it, so long as they didn't move on it.  Either side might seek to take Novigrad, but that would move the other to aid it, immediately, due to the personal way both Rulers operate.  There is an example of such an influential City State with expanded territory in Kovir, and Novigrad would be set to pull off something similar with a cross-agreement between a semi-unified group of deserters, bandits and pirates willing to fall under rule of a wealthy City State to better arm and protect themselves against the two hostile armies.

Finally there is the conspiracy to remove the Redanian King as he is quite mad and destroying the very infrastructure that allowed Redania to become powerful in the first place.  That conspiracy is led by the ex-head of Intelligence for Redania under its prior ruler, and he is now one of the criminal bosses in Novigrad.  To me this entire concept hinted at by the King of Beggars seems to have been set up with the idea of turning the tide of the entire war just to solve the quest line Geralt is on.  With a mob boss turned Emperor, and the other bosses running Novigrad to bring back sanity and profitability, plus remove government as a competitor, the entire end game of the war is written out there, but lacks a good quest line for it.  This is where Theater level changes can have Strategic importance, and it all starts with one man on a mission that isn't to actually do that.  This would, indeed, be an optional side-quest though it would branch out very quickly to consume a major portion of the game.

If that covers the Theater and Strategic levels of Player Agency, then there is only the Tactical side left.  Here is the stuff of the actual gameplay: the decisions made, the way combat is handled and the general flow of the game.  Combat elements are a way to implement parts of the RPG structure, yet this is sorely lacking in TW3 where combat mechanics take precedence and then the game designers tinker with that to remove some key aspects of Player Agency leading up to combat.  An example of this is going into a house being ransacked by 'creditors' (just plain thieves at that point) and the end of the discussion line gets Geralt thrown into a fistfight.  This is not unusual.  And fistfights are sprung on the PC and many of them operate so as to remove all the player decisions leading up to it on a tactical level.  Take a long-lasting decoction before going into the cutscene and then being thrown into a fistfight?  Sorry, mate, but the game designers wiped that from the slate as they did all the other decisions you made to keep your health up.  The player is repeatedly urged to 'prepare for battle' and then has those preparations wiped out by the whim of the game designers.  That is a slap to the face of the player: sorry, we want this fight to be artificially hard so you can fail it, so just get used to it.  Or, in other words: we lied to you and you believed us, sucker.

Say isn't that steel sword for humans and such?  When someone threatens your life and they have brought fists to a sword wielding Witcher, why is Geralt stuck using his fists?  There is only a code duello in Toussaint, not the dark alleys and bars of Novigrad.  Oh and you can't use any Witcher Signs, either, because, you know, REASONS that game designers refuse to explain to you about what is proper and improper fighting when someone wants to beat you up.  And here I thought that the illiterate cut-throats and thieves didn't operate by such rules.  Silly me.

In fact after any cutscene you had better take a quick moment to see what the designers decided to do to your PC while the cinematics were running, since there are some actual BATTLES where this is done as well.  Yeah, effects that should last for a few hours in the game and do so normally during normal game play get wiped out in a few minutes because, you know, REASONS.  Prepare for battle, sucker, and we'll just wipe those out for you when we want to for 'dramatic tension'.

That is the most base sort of Tactical Player Agency: controlling what your PC does, what is worn, what equipment is used and what other effects that act normally are put in place.  Whenever a game designer decides to overrule the player, then Player Agency is lost.  This happened so many times in TW3 that I lost count, and it left a long and bitter taste in my mouth as a player who is used to game designers in RPG, even those RPGs with only some nominal elements in it, respecting the actions of the player.  Especially when the player is specifically told to prepare ahead of time for combat.  No game designer of a putative RPG should ever do that. And for this alone the classification of 'Action RPG' starts to turn into 'Action Visual Novel with a few RPG elements here and there'.

I can still give The Witcher 3 a recommendation for playing, but it is with the steep proviso that Player Agency isn't respected on designer whimsy.  If the generally linear story with choke-point decisions are a few good RPG elements, not respecting actual player choice on a tactical level indicates a lack of an RPG framework or even just respecting basic, common sense when preparing for a situation.  It is one thing to not prepare properly and live with the consequences, it is another to have the entire set of preparations thrown out and the rules changed without notice due to game design that you get no warning about.  I'll make no bones about The Witcher 3 being a good, if not great experience, but it is not a wholehearted support of the entire player experience.  This didn't have to be done in this manner to get dramatic scenes, and the abuse of this mechanic so frequently is a major negative to the whole experience to myself as a gamer.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - A newcomer's perspective

Up front admission: I am not invested in the Witcher game series or books.  Thus take what criticism as you may, knowing that little nugget at the get-go.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its Expansions were bought as a low price bundle as I'd spent more on games I didn't end up liking all that much, and as there was so much community talking about it being an RPG (Role Playing Game) field changing entry, I figured that I might as well give it a shot.  That said I also understood that I get to play one main character (with a bit of time spent with another character here and there) and that one role is Geralt of Rivia, a Witcher.  A Witcher is a monster hunter and the game is quite pointed in showing that not all monsters are non-human and not all monsters are horrible.  A truly pleasant change from the norm of gaming, that.

Witchers are mutated humans dealing with creatures after a cosmic Conjunction of the Spheres took place long before the game's setting 500 years ago.  Basically creatures and being from other universes came to invade a world that had existing races of Elves, Dwarves and Halflings, and creatures that were considered natural to that world.  The Conjunction of the Spheres appears to be an event that happens periodically, though not regularly, since you can't set your calendar by it.  This magical event may have brought humans to the world, though no one is particularly clear on that.  This is a world in which magic takes certain forms and people have had to learn these forms as they manifested after the Conjunction.  It is clear that there is some form of power behind magic and that magical abilities can not only be learned but they can manifest in certain blood-lines of families, Places of Power which continually regenerate themselves with a form of pure magic, and that certain places are generally graced with magic somewhat more powerfully than is the norm throughout the rest of the world.  Magic is a manifestation of universal power of some sort, yet it can be tapped not just by conscious will but by devices, items and artifacts as well.  The Conjunction was a magical event, then, that allowed worlds from different universes or dimensions to conjoin with the world of game play, and beings from those different worlds were able to migrate to this world and, presumably, the reverse is also true.

To counter the post-conjunction creatures, mages sought to understand the basis for their general forms and then concoct a type of mutagen that would change a select few humans into beings with a tougher physiology and have some natural magical abilities.  Boys prove to be the ones most able to survive this process, and getting to a success rate of even 30% took decades of trial and error, and it must be noted that those who did not succeed were either died from the ordeal, were crippled or mentally unable to function.  With the way to train boys to withstand this process, the Witcher schools developed as the world had many creatures and little means for even the best of mages to deal with them.  This can be considered a re-ordering of a boy's genes which then express themselves by changing the body, the mind, and to allow access to a few particular Witcher Signs that are natural to use.in the way of magic.  The total body transformation leaves the Witcher human in form, but greatly enhances their strength, reflexes, vision, hearing, and all other internal aspects of their body including widening what can be ingested.  Most obvious and telling to this is the change in eyes to those of a feline, and are a tell-tale of a Witcher.

Witchers and those who practice magic deeply via training are sterile: that is just part of the sacrifice to gaining such power.  While those seeking to use magic faced their own trials did so willingly, few others were willing to send boys to the Witcher schools, although that could happen as a payment for a contract to take out a threat from a creature or creatures, The Law of Surprise could be invoked by the Witcher taking the job and this would tend to yield up a boy who would then go to the Witcher school.  Geralt of Rivia did this once and got a girl of the Elder Blood, part of a lineage of those wielding great innate power and prophesied to have one that will end the Power of the Frost to overtake the world but at her own sacrifice.  Ciri was part of that dying lineage and all Geralt knew how to do was being a Witcher...and so Ciri trained with the few Witchers remaining at the School of the Wolf in Kaer Mohren, the last known Witcher School. Kaer Mohren had succumbed to the hatred, bigotry and fear of others who demolished most of the outer works and killed off all who were there driven to do so with assassins in tow.  Only those on the Path were left, and one of the trainers survived by faking his own death, such is the power of a Witcher over his body.  The world outside had come to feel that the advances in military prowess and weapons would be a match for the post-conjunction creatures, and the day of the Witcher was drawing to a close.

The greater world is one that is on the cusp of firearms, but not there just yet.  In fact for all the greater ability to make better weapons, the need for magic to be part of that process may actually curb the development of such weapons: it may be that the hand bombs or grenade style weapons might be it, though rockets would not be out of the question given the technology around the setting for the game play and their use as fireworks.  Yet there are creatures immune even to these things, and a few that cannot be killed save by their own kind in a permanent fashion.  The few Witchers that returned to the School of the Wolf coalesced to some degree around the old instructor and the young girl who was coming into her own powers far different than those of Witchers.  She also would have training from Geralt's friend and lover, the sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg and later with the sorceress Triss Merigold of Maribor:  Yennefer took on a figure of a mother while Triss took on that of a big sister, and both were sorceresses capable of creating and retaining youthful beauty for decades if not a century or more, though neither could have children.  Ciri is wanted by many: some to kill her, others to use her for political purposes, others to control her powers for their own ends and the few around her that just want her to have her own life and they will go through everything and anything for that.

The game starts with Ciri missing and Geralt only being informed by a vague letter from Yennefer who wants to meet up with him.  Vesemir  (the one who survived the destruction of the school) is with Geralt as they track down Yennefer and enter the starting play area of White Orchard.  Geralt as a Witcher has his two main weapons, a silver sword for monsters and a steel sword for everyone else, plus some basic armor and a few potions that are toxic even to him and lethal to most humans.  He has basic Witcher Signs that he can cast and they are limited in scope though can gain in power and function with investment of skill points.  Coming in the player has choices to make and must learn the game world and the modest dialogue system: do not expect a rich dialogue system with many choices as the game offers only one character with a known background, limited skill and abilities set, plus some other features like reading books to get background information or purchasing (or finding) crafting diagrams so that smiths can make up new equipment for Geralt.  And there is a handy part of having background information on creatures and people kept in a catalog for the player, so if you need to get some background you just have to pull up those screens while the game auto-pauses.  Need to find out what Sign, bomb or weapon oil is useful on a creature?  Just look it up!  Want to get some background on someone you've met before?  Look it up!  And new people and creatures get new entries...ever so handy.  So after a half-hour reading through those...

A first impression that would stick with me throughout the game is the lack of player agency and too damned many cut-scenes.  And while the game pushes the player to prepare for an upcoming confrontation (usually combat oriented) a timed cut-scene will often interrupt that and may actually remove some or all the preparations the player has made.  Know that long-lasting potion you took just before the cut-scene that you didn't know was coming up to prepare for the encounter just like you were encouraged to do?  So sorry, the game designers figured out that you need to be going in without that and just thrown into the fire because...well no good rationale comes to mind save to 'heighten tension'.  And get you killed.  So the game designers told a bit of a falsehood there: die and learn.  Then this same thing is pulled on simple conversation scenes leading up to combat.

I guess that is groundbreaking in a backwards sort of way.

In White Orchard you have the opportunity to experience the hatred for Witchers up close and personal, along with admiration, fear and some actual love towards them.  Plus respect for the even by those that hate them because they know that Witchers are not to be trifled with.  A big feature of the life of a Witcher is taking on contracts, and I found it a good idea to scoop off every damned notice from a public notice board whenever I got to it, just so the quests for the locale could be found out.  Other quests you can get just by walking around and talking to people.  The world of the Witcher is filled with people, but you can only talk to a select few.  Such is life in the modern hybrid RPG.

With that you get an understanding of the local problems stemming from the invasion of the southern power, Nilfgaard, against the northern power of Redania plus rag-tag hangers-on from other places that Nilfgaard has conquered.  Non-humans aren't liked over much, either, amongst the local humans and the figuring out of just who hates what and why takes a bit of doing.  There are no 'good' decisions to make, save for killing monsters and even that isn't always all that clear-cut.  Still there is money in it, though not much due to this being a place of peasants, and that can make the actual problems with monsters all the more palpable and real.  White Orchard is a microcosm of the larger game world and the place to learn powers, skills, repair equipment, find better equipment and learn how to make potions.  Help the right people at the right time and in the right way, and you can get other rewards and even some freebies...you have to figure out just who those people are.  And there are even a couple of instances where keeping your trap shut may just be the best of all possible solutions.

The strength of the game is that decisions made by the PC have ramifications and effects that are not necessarily immediate.  In a world of moral grey, deciding what to do and why to do it means working with the mess that is around you and figuring out where Geralt's Path goes.  Is he a kindly person who, no matter how bitter and spiteful others are, tends to turn the other cheek or even show generosity, mercy and kindness?  Is he the kick-ass badass that counts corpses and takes their names (not that you can actually do that, of course)?  Is he the hard-bitten man of the world who shows disdain to the world and perhaps even starts to do that to the ones he loves?  Who Geralt becomes is up to the player, and the state of the world begins to reflect these choices, though not much at first, the larger scale ramifications start to reach out and change just what sort of game ending the player will get.

For a first playthrough I went with Traditional Geralt, generally a good guy, sticks by his first love Yennefer, does his best by Ciri but has some clear differences with some decisions she makes and generally isn't bad or spiteful, though he will often give a world weary retort to those who deserve it.  For play style I stuck with the Cat School concept of light armor, fast attacks, and using signs to help bolster defenses.  It is a basic style I modified the second time around with a New Game + and it felt more like being an experienced Witcher coming into a known situation.  In this go-around I went with Triss, was a bit more hard-bitten at times and yet had a soft spot for Ciri.  A total restart playthrough and with that it was Professional Witcher who dearly loved Ciri to prepare her for going on her own but loving her to bits.  Yennefer and Triss got Friend Zoned, and I played all the expansions to get Syanna and Anna Henrietta reconciled.  A contract is a contract, and even once it is paid out, if there is something left undone you damned well DO IT.  You know: professional ethics.  And if you are told that you can keep your money, well, it is exactly what is meant by that and if it is done in a contract setting then it isn't a contract but done from the heart.

Can't say I haven't played the game!  I may hate the in-game card game of Gwent, but there is a mod for that, thankfully.  Too bad there aren't a few mods for actual companions and not just spawned in characters who follow you with little interaction...and yet there are a few people that could actually be justified in wanting to follow along with Geralt and I'm a bit saddened that they didn't have a chance to do so.

This is a game of a generally set series of events with modifications due to player actions, though most of those modifications are upon individuals, not the earth-shattering course of events.  The predestinationism of prophecy seems to be a major thing in this world and the Slavic mythos background that pervades so much of the world.  Geralt isn't a world saver, but he can influence the one who is doing that task as a supporting father (which is what he became due to The Law of Surprise) preparing his daughter for her life.

This is a father/daughter story at its heart and if you are unstinting of being a good father, then there are rewards for it.  It is the depth of the impact on other people, who you help and who you give the cold shoulder to, that has effects though rarely large at start they can snowball over time though within very strict limits.  The larger war can turn based on one quest and how the overall relationship with Ciri went, and those, in turn, will determine the ending credits and narration.  It is a game with an end and then a post-game set of expansions...and they can be integrated and played before completing the main story, too, though that is not the order of intent by the designers. They did take it into consideration and offer some new dialogue here and there if you do an out of order playthrough, but game mechanics and levels are then out of balance for the main part of the game.

If the strength of story and making the limited decision tree turn into something meaningful are what makes the game hold together, it does so but not without problems in other areas.

Combat, in general, is sub-par for a 3rd person free-cam game, and it is often just godawful.  Lets aim a crossbow in 3rd person!  Lets do it with a high precision mouse!  There are times when the game wouldn't change camera position even if I swept my mouse a few inches and other times it would shake like all get out when I was barely moving it at all.  Stuff I could pull off with relative ease, like simply aiming a damned crossbow, in 1st person games became something I finally just turned over to Geralt's auto-aim.  Hell, in swarming combat situations that I would work to pick off outliers so as not to get swarmed in a 1st person game, I had no choice but to wade in, jump around like a scalded cat, and generally just swing with the sword wildly.  Hey, it works, more or less.  I'm sure that if I spent hours trying to get my mouse configured to a T and did all sorts of changes to configuration files this could be worked out...though going to play something else might then be a true PITA as the mouse settings would have to be changed.

Thus this lack of play style meant I had to fall back on a form of regenerative healing, and The Gourmet perk became mandatory so that I wouldn't eat through all my food and be poor just trying to get enough food in me to survive combat...which makes no damned sense at all.  It was either that or potions, and by process of elimination and examining potion toxicity and the skills with them, I figured out that potions would be truly situational affairs.  In general I would take a decoction that had high toxicity, long lasting effects and had a palpable change in either damage output or defenses in general, which then prioritized only a few of them for use.  This is a preferred way to play I have picked up for myself and generally don't use potions unless they are the ONLY form of healing available in the field.  Say what you will, in other games it is something that yields decent amounts of cash...here it meant I didn't have to bother with any of the skills in the potion/decoction/bomb making area.  This means all those ability points go elsewhere, and if I got to swing around fast and wildly, then when I connect I get to do some actual, real damage!

Like other open worlds the main story is vital!  Pressing!  Say could you get my cat out of a tree?  I'll pay you for it!

Once I got to Velen after White Orchard and seeing Yen, I decided it was time to start playing Skyrim ... little did I know that you could get a level 10 or 11 quest for a place and right behind it was a level 30 something monster!  Oh joy!  Oh rapture!  There is a mighty scaling problem in the game and you can be wandering around, happily going through stuff that is generally tough, but something you can handle, and then hit a sudden brick wall of a single creature with that nasty skull as its designator and no matter what you have, you can't move its health bar even a smidgen.  If story and depth of characters are a plus, then the constant chase for levels and better gear is a serious minus for the game, beyond my personal combat problems.  The overall system of weapons, armor and creatures means that the pack of Nekkers you take out can have, just a good 100 feet beyond it, a high level Leshen you can't touch with anything, period and that will one-shot kill you.  This makes no damned sense.  I can see a high level creature  living in its lair that is a fear to all and only the highest level of PC will dare...yeah, there would be lore and stories and stuff about it.  A free-roaming random spawn of low level stuff right next to it?  Huh?  On the plus side, you learn that Geralt can run pretty fast, so there is that.  And on the Professional go-around, I even started to avoid the random packs and other fun random stuff as I didn't have a contract for it and the experience payout was godawful.

On the subject of travel...horseback if you need to get to a generally unexplored area, and then on foot after that seems to work best for me.  In fact, I spent most of my playtime on foot as the janky combat system was NOT improved by being on horseback.  Sure you can get a low percentage chance of a one-shot kill if you are galloping around the battlefield!  Mostly I just swung and missed...yet I learned how to hit people on horseback as they were coming at me pretty well as a ground pounder.  That is even without using Aard to knock them off their mounts.  Still if I had to get there and the distance wasn't that far, I walked, ran, did wind sprints or fast traveled. Too bad you can't raise Geralt's stamina by doing all that running around...the guy would be prepared to fight while running a marathon if he did.  Travel by boat is more or less relaxing and I give great thanks for making the speed of sailing unrealistic so you can get to places by not having to spend a night out on the boat.  None of the small boats are set up for that and seem to be made of rotten boards that the nearest flying monster can tear apart in a few minutes.  Maybe, with all the great metals available, they'll discover metal hulls for boats some day.  Since there isn't a negative for swimming, save for slower travel, that became a decent way to get around between near islands or places close enough so it wasn't a chore.

Now on to that gear chasing bit.  The main part of the game play is chasing after incrementally better gear that is level restricted, so that you must be of at least that level to use it.  See that set of gauntlets that are just a bit better than the ones you are wearing?  You can't figure out how to wear them properly...even if they are of the same type as you have on but just have a higher level designator to them.  Ditto that for swords and the crossbows, plus crossbow bolts.  And yet you need the higher defenses and damage output of those higher level items to be able to deal with higher level creatures, you see?  One set of Hunting Trousers is level 11 and you are wearing their level 8 counterpart, while being at level 9.  Sorry, mate, you just don't know how to wear those better ones!  Of course if you decide to throw them into storage you'll come across something much better by the time you get to level 11.  After awhile I thought the game could have been properly named - The Witcher 3: Treasure Hunt.

The crafting system, outside of the Witcher potions, oils, decoctions and whatnot, is also level determined and there are different skill identifiers for the craftsmen,  A diagram for a mastercrafted Gambeson cannot be made by a mere journeyman, and I'm fine with that.  However, when the game hands me a lower level piece that requires a higher level diagram and higher level craftsman, I begin to scratch my head.  Who, exactly, made this piece which is supposed to have some minimums on level requirement for it?  Again this follows through for the other stuff using diagrams, as well, if it isn't Witcher specific gear.

So while you are out trying to save your daughter by chance with your associations of dubious nature, your actual and real job is to be on a set of scavenger hunts for better gear diagrams for the type of gear you use, or to hope that something better in the way of gear comes out of a chest or someone you knock off.  What is a Witcher's main and actual job?  Well monster contracts get just enough coin in to pay for equipment repairs, but the real stuff you need is done via scavenger hunts, although they are called Treasure Hunts to glorify them a bit.  And that means you explore a lot just to get the diagrams to make the gear that, well, you probably can't use immediately...but you sure do need that experience and something better to take down that very high level monster that is behind that low level encounter zone so you can get to the NEXT important diagram nearby.  Or just run like all get out since most of the monsters are pretty slow, and then have yet another diagram for something you can't use yet.  Really, what is up with this? This makes no damned sense.

The actual story and important decisions that are made are the main reason why the Witcher 3 gets into the RPG category, although it has none of the skill trees, bonuses or anything that is typical of an RPG.  It is a set character RPG, and that means skills that the protagonist doesn't use by their background just aren't there and the skills and abilities are limited to those of the Witcher class.  Geralt, for all his combat skills, doesn't have a real stealth skill: sneaking and hiding in shadows just aren't that much of a thing for the guy and, lets face it, he isn't built for it.  He probably smells of dead necrophages, too.  Taking a bath is reserved for cutscenes and the best way to get rid of the smell is to get better armor...which you are, by god, going to do a lot of in the game.  Basically it is a minimalist RPG with well defined characters, world, back story, and background, which means it is a rich world to play in.  You can eavesdrop on conversations and get some very interesting and often hilarious back and forth between NPCs.  While Geralt can't interact with the vast majority of people in the world, if you start to surreptitiously follow an NPC and they figure it out they might get in a bit of a huff and tell you to sod off.  Otherwise an NPC will generally just give a random piece of dialogue or hum, fart, spit, whistle or even sing to themselves, loudly.  Geralt is picky about who he sleeps with outside of the main romance interests: he prefers brothels to the street walking strumpets, and then there are only three that he would even consider sleeping with in each brothel.  But it is hard to find THAT in a typical RPG so kudos!  Now can we get better animations for those scenes?

And then there is romance.

As a player I have my preferences.

To put it even a bit more succinctly, I found some of the NPCs that are either one-night stands or just able to interact with in a normal way but obviously wanting to spend time on the road with Geralt to be more interesting than the Big Romance Choice he is given.  It's a bit much to ask that he sticks with either A or B since when a good C is found in that he doesn't get to rethink his life a bit at that point.  They might not want to be long-term lovers or such, but they would be a welcome addition for a period of time and, who knows what might happen?  That would be breaking with canon, true, but as I understand it the games already do that on a number of fronts.

In the Hearts of Stone Expansion there is a woman Geralt met up with way back in the first game, Shani, and she is a doctor in Oxenfurt, who gets pressed into medical service for the Redanian army on an as-needed basis.  She can be romanced for a one-night stand and has actual admiration for Geralt but knows their lifestyles will never allow them to get together.  Yet, after doing the Professional run-through without romancing Yen or Triss, but having this lovely estate in Toussaint, it could be argued, and I think quite well, that Toussaint is a place much in need of her services, given how many Knights Errant there are and the situations they get themselves into.  The estate is well situated to serve the city of Beauclaire, the Tourney Grounds and yet is easy to get to for the poor, as well.  Shani is politically neutral and seeks to help her fellow man, no matter what flag they are under, thus moving to Toussaint is not something out of the question.  Also it is a good place for Geralt to get contracts as there is always another wine cellar that has been infested with god knows what to be cleaned out of monsters. If Shani does have to go to the front to serve as a doctor, well, as is pointed out a few times in the game, particularly by the Witcher Eskel: where ever there is a war, there is work for a Witcher. And if Shani wants children, well, there are war orphans to consider...but if she wants to be an actual mother, then that is a tacit admission of not wanting to go to the front for military campaigns at some point in the very near future.  In Toussaint much can be done and a change in life would be available for the charming doctor, Shani.  Too bad Geralt can't bring this up with her if he is unattached.  Shame, really.  They do make a charming couple.

Speaking of Toussaint, if you can get to Syanna surviving the whole thing and probably getting familial pardon or some such while catching up on lost time with her sister, it is noted that she is quite the rough and tumble sort and able to wield a sword decently.  After being a successful bandit leader for a decade or so, the palace life just might start to pale in comparison.  If she is looking for a change of scenery there is always Geralt and his estate...and he does get out and about for Witcher work so her sword can be put to use and maybe even get a hand-me-down silver sword from Geralt.  There is a difference between being a bandit leader and facing, say, a pack of Nekkers or group of Drowners, but it isn't a huge difference and she just needs to improve her combat skills and be properly equipped.  And who just so happens to have a trunk load of good weapons he has leveled beyond?  Hmmm.... even if you hate what Syanna became in her life, if you had enough pity to help her get past the problems then maybe the best way to relieve some of her frustration would be whacking things with a long sharpy stick.  She's pretty good at it!

Who else is good at it?  Jutta An Dimun out in the Skellige Isles.  Very good at it, though no match for a Witcher, she has bested every other single guy who came her way.  And she looks like she wants a real husband, and what better way to find one than to travel with Geralt?  That would have made a wonderful side quest that was unmarked: do enough with her, let her see enough of the wider world and she would then have a much wider suite of men she might consider.  She might get a husband or even might decide that life on the road is what she wants for a few more years.  Give her a hand-me-down silver sword and she should be good to go.

Doing the Professional run after the other two started to get me into thinking about just what Geralt represents beyond being just a Witcher to other people, women in particular.  The fun but ultimately trivial one-night stands do point to women looking for choices in their lives and who Geralt is becomes the primary part of the consideration and his job is just his profession, not necessarily his passion.  Taking down threats from monsters is a job, a profession, and it even earns regular pay because of the problems of the world: he can travel and earn enough to live on or settle down and deal with the deeper problems of a region and keep in good stead.

After guiding Ciri to the end of the main game there are the loose ends and somewhat empty period that the Expansion Packs try to fill, and do a decent job of it...even when they don't offer any larger opportunities to understand just where Geralt is going in life after it or what the ramifications of the main game actions are in the Expansions.  Committing to Yen or Triss is choosing to finally settle down with either of them.  Yet he also knows both pretty well, given the circumstances. The problems between him and either of them start to become apparent in the dialogue choices that are available, especially the negative ones.  They are the conversation paths not taken at that point in time: you choose one and go on to the next.  Yet each of them are valid paths of thought and a few of them will start to crop up over the long haul.  His commentary to Ciri on who he goes with and why is telling at one point in her quest...and even more telling when he isn't asked why he has gone with neither of them.  Ciri not asking that question on the Professional run is telling given her love for both Yen and Triss and just may be a recognition that Geralt realizes that his past history has ultimately decided against them for different reasons.

It is a subtle game point done by a game that makes many of them, over the course of play.  In many ways killing monsters is just a way to get to a cutscene, a narrative scene, a pre-rendered and predetermined scene that has multiple branches coming to it and multiple branches leaving it.  Often the scenes are a choke point for finally driving out results of past decisions.  Battles can be swung based on who your real friends are and if they are willing to support you when YOU need help.  Make friends and you can have support when you come down to a crunch time.  Say good-bye at the docks and a life path is stopped.  Say the magic is gone and then the words about 'be careful what you wish for' become palpable and turns on the very person who spoke them.

How do you tell someone that you love them, but don't particularly like them?  That sort of dialogue isn't available in the game for the romance interests and the only way to do it is to demonstrate kindness, affection and, at the ultimate point, say 'no' to going on or going further.  Yet it doesn't convey what is meant which is sad for a game that plays so much in the in-between areas, this sort of path isn't available as it implies there is some need for reconciliation or telling someone what their faults are but in the gentlest of ways.  You can get argument dialogue, pretty easily in fact, but a heartfelt discussion of mutual understanding of each other's weaknesses and strengths?  Sadly, no.

For the non-romance interests, if you have any want to make sure they survive but know they are not part of the romance of Geralt's life, then telling them what they are doing is just plain nuts is required for a couple of them.  A bit of soft spoken tough love can do wonders here and there, used sparingly.  Let them know that you don't want to see them throw their lives away and that they mean something to Geralt, and it just may be enough to save them.  But that sort of thing is damned easy to screw up, too.

And as for the main love interest, that of the father/daughter relationship, it requires recognizing that Ciri is becoming a woman in full and needs support.  She needs to know how to blow off steam creatively, she needs to know that you trust her to make her own decisions, and when it is apparent that Geralt is not the hero of her story, that he supports her no matter what she decides.  Simple words to describe some of the hardest RPG decisions I have had to make in a game.  All of these are difficult and require on-the-spot character and situation analysis that isn't combat oriented but oriented to back story and background of the game and the people in it.  All the monster slaying and scavenger hunt stuff is to support these critical decisions.  You, as a player, will form decisions based on what path you choose for Geralt.  Who Geralt of Rivia is and what he becomes in the game world is put in your hands as a player and the results will build up over time.

That is why, for all the lacks the game has in abilities, skills, dialogue and the rest of it, it is still one of the deepest and most meaningful RPGs out in the market.  It is not an RPG first, however, and has a bare amount of RPG elements in it.  At this point I would even have problems putting it in the Action RPG categoy, and might put it in the Action Video Novel RPG genre.  For all of its problems it is well worth playing and replaying to find out just what all the hard decisions actually are and what happens when you follow that other path for the White Wolf that is Geralt.  Is it a great RPG?  No.  Does it have a great story? Yes.  Do note that these two things can co-exist and do so very well in The Witcher 3.