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[BRAINSTORM] LAL -- Alternate Starts for Fallout 4


Mael

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I thought we could try to guilt Arth into making an alternate start mod for FO4, and having ideas ready would make it easier.

 

Some ideas to start us off:

 

Escaped Synth 01: Synth escaped, has already worked with the railroad, and is now living on one of the settlements.

Escaped Synth 02: Synth escaped, but railroad handlers were killed and is now on its own.

Generic Settler 01: You just start out as a settler in one of the settlements, excluding the ones the player has to clear and build.

 

Attacked and Left For Dead 01: Same as the original with the random start locations and such.

 

Brotherhood of Steel Initiate 01: Start off in Cambridge Police Station with Paladin Danse.

Brotherhood of Steel Initiate 02: Start off in the bunker with Brandis.

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I should know better than to look at threads like this, spoilers bro, spoilers!

 

I do like those ideas though, so keep em coming :P

 

My only concern is that it's not generally intended to be "alternate game story" but "alternate start" and working in how to deal with Shaun could present some problems. We'll see, but don't spoil anything, cause I'm nowhere near following through on a large portion of the actual story and faction stuff.

 

I would add one though:

 

Minuteman: You're part of Preston Garvey's group in Concord, fighting for your lives.

 

Keep in mind that many of these are likely to require trying to remove reference to Sanctuary Hills as the place you lived before the war and shit. That's the kind of thing that's going to get in the way of a lot of thing with this. It's not like being Dovahkiin where that can fit no matter how you start.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I would add one though:

 

Minuteman: You're part of Preston Garvey's group in Concord, fighting for your lives.

 

Keep in mind that many of these are likely to require trying to remove reference to Sanctuary Hills as the place you lived before the war and shit. That's the kind of thing that's going to get in the way of a lot of thing with this. It's not like being Dovahkiin where that can fit no matter how you start.

Could even take it one step further, and have you start further south where the group "originated" from. Of course, that would mean changing even more things around, but it would certainly be interesting.

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I'm hoping we can have different races, because I'd like to play as a Ghoul or a Super Mutant, or even a Robot.

 

You were alive during the bombs, except you didn't die and you end up as a chem dealer in Goodneighbor.

 

The Institute kidnapped you and subjected you to an experimental form of FEV. You didn't turn into a "dumb dumb" and manage to escape into the city.

 

You were born an assassin droid, however a twist of fate and being struck by lightning changed everything. You've become self aware... need input.

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"... need input."

 

You assume a detective agency and takes the name Nick Valentine. (if feasible, of course.)

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  • 5 months later...

Old-ish thread but ... LAL was awesome in Skyrim and I've been thinking about it for FO4 for awhile. :)

 

1. Raider start 1 - You get bored of watching the robots at the race track and decide to head off on your own.

2. Raider start 2 - You complete the combat training course inside Vault 75 (i think it's 75 might be 95 have to look it up) Then you are kicked out because you scored too high!

3. Left for dead - There is a Deathclaw nest in northern area

that is associated with quest from Salem Witch Museum. With egg the deathclaw is friendly.

You wake up there with a motherly giant lizard guarding her nest :)

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...

My only concern is that it's not generally intended to be "alternate game story" but "alternate start" and working in how to deal with Shaun could present some problems.

...

So by now you've been through the beginning a couple times right?

My thoughts on the leading into the Alt Start part of what this mod would offer...

 

- Start off where the Husband/Wife are at the mirror. When the character/face is complete and player clicks Done a LAL dialogue box pops up asking if player wants to continue with vanilla start or choose alt start scenario.

 

- Choosing Alt-Start the dialogues for Special/Name come up and list of scenarios to choose.

 

- After that, the game will "fast forward" using the fade to white several times (like before the mirror scene and while in cryo chamber). Could show several flashes including playing with baby Shaun in crib, the v-tech guy at the door, seeing the news report of bombs, running to vault, the bomb, entering the cryo chamber, then the kidnapping would be in there and finally getting pip-boy and heading to exit. All that would be un-playable short flashes to fill in the story without having to play through it - which is the idea. ... Could even be audio only, just fade to white then have the sound files play through the above scenes and the kidnapping of course.

 

- Once the vault door / elevator is heading up is when the mod would send player to chosen Alt-Start.

 

- To roll play exiting the vault and ending up say in Cambridge Police station for BOS start - ... maybe all the shock of exiting the vault into wasteland made you pass out and a caravan carried you as far as cambridge. Or upon exiting, a Deathclaw knocked you out and carried you to her nest. Or raiders in the area heard the door opening and ambushed you. OR maybe you've been wandering the wastes, decided you were the one to step up and solve the commonwealth's problems and that is where you start off.

 

Anyway, just was thinking more on this ... Have fun :)

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I like the way Gribbleshnibit8 (who we apparently ran out of town here) implemented Roleplayer's Alternative Start for New Vegas. One of my favorite mods of all time.

 

Glacknarf seems to be trying something similar, but the quality of an alternate starts mod always comes down to the writing and how that text is formatted. (Glacknarf doesn't seem to realize he can add newlines to terminal entries...)

 

Live Another Life was fortunate in that Skyrim didn't provide a lot of space for text, so backgrounds tended to be at most a few words that were maybe clarified by one liners spoken by the statue.

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I'm not sure if I'm actually going to do one or not, because so much of the game is bogged down in main quest material that it makes it damn near impossible to get away from the whole Shaun narrative and still be somewhat convincing. So much hangs on you, your dead spouse, and your missing son that it would almost have to be forcefully mashed into the scenarios. Plus I have no real desire to screw around with trying to get voiced player dialogue if a particular start absolutely needs that.

 

I do like that he went with a holotape and a terminal to set things up in the beginning, which does kind of give the impression you could simply be Nate/Nora playing Fallout 4 from within the game world :P

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I'm not sure if I'm actually going to do one or not, because so much of the game is bogged down in main quest material that it makes it damn near impossible to get away from the whole Shaun narrative and still be somewhat convincing. So much hangs on you, your dead spouse, and your missing son that it would almost have to be forcefully mashed into the scenarios.

 

I think you make this sound harder than it is. It's just writing around the concepts of "a missing child" and "a murdered spouse." Terminals give you more freedom to make the necessary connections.

  • Raider: You awake from a stupor, still stoned out of your gourd from a long night of torture and mayhem. The ground is filthy; you're filthy. The boys are laughing about their big prize, crowing about how they dispatched their latest victims. Ugh, more of the same, but the haze seems to be wearing off: the boss murdered your "wife" and sold your "adopted" child to a rival faction. Or was that a dream? You're not really sure. Fortunately, you don't have to think too hard anymore; you have some Psycho left and one hell of a machete. Time for daddy to go to work.

     

  • Alien Abductee: You always knew the truth was out there, that they were real. You just didn't think you and your family would be the ones taken. After what seemed like an eternity, the little green men returned to Earth for more subjects, and you saw an opportunity to escape. In the chaos, your husband was killed and you were forced to leave your child behind. You don't think you'll see them again, not in this life anyway, but there's always hope... and this ray gun. Certainly, they'll be back to retrieve their technology. Prime Directive and all that, right?
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Which is all well and good, but then what do you do about the later stages of the MQ where it's pretty much a given you were in Vault 111?

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Which is all well and good, but then what do you do about the later stages of the MQ where it's pretty much a given you were in Vault 111?

 

There are less than 20 dialogue responses that specifically mention Vault 111.

 

But, off the top of my head, there are at least several ways to handle Vault 111 depending on the starts:

  • Start in Vault 111, but dress up the environment to look like some faction has taken over.
  • Start in Vault 111, but come out of cryo earlier/later, play out the alternate start in a self-contained world, skip cryo, and start the main quest.
  • Start in Vault 111, but come out of cryo earlier/later, play out the alternate start in a self-contained world, go back into cryo, and start the main quest.
  • Skip Vault 111, start somewhere else, direct the player to go to Vault 111, cryo, and start the main quest.
  • Skip Vault 111, play out a Vault 111 dream sequence, "cryo" and wake up somewhere else as someone else, and start the main quest.
  • Skip Vault 111, and skip or replace Vault 111 dialogue/scenes/quests.
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I still like my idea from a few posts up... Just shorten the time between the mirror and v111 exit to a short 'dream' sequence. Then any alt start can take place, and quest stuff is intact.

If you try to get completely away from the vault 111 lore then yeah you're going to have a headache rewriting later quests.

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It occurs to me, an interesting idea for an alt start mod would be that, you're a Synth struggling with dealing with the implanted memories of being Nate/Nora, and though you know you're not them the memories are so strong and potent they might compel you to see them through to try and gain some semblance of peace. Like Nick trying to find peace for the real Nick. Naturally, this requires you to be a Synth no matter what, but beyond that you could have whatever sort of history in the Commonwealth you want, more or less. This would allow some explanation to the pushing of the main story, whilst allowing you to not be Nate/Nora and giving you an RP reason to try and resist the main story, you don't want to risk your life dealing with the problems of a dead person who's memories are merely implantation's to you.

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  • 2 weeks later...

These other alternate start mods apparently don't complete all of the necessary quests and quest stages, so they break vanilla quests and scripts, and introduce compatibility issues with other mods that depend on those quests or quest stages to be completed or not completed.

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Not terribly surprised. It took me ages to find all that stuff for Skyrim too.

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Not terribly surprised. It took me ages to find all that stuff for Skyrim too.

 

Some aren't even bothering. At least one just blocked off the entrance to Vault 111 to avoid having to do any more work:

 

"I attempted to seal off vault 111 due to the glitchy behaviour of it caused by not going through mq101 and mq102. I've tried to place any items eg cryolator into accessible areas to compensate. In the future I will take another look at this, but it is u likely to change simply due to how script dependent vault 111 is."
 
"The reason infinite load screens and stuff happen is because they rely on mq101, which I've completely rewrote - the error arises from calling a script which doesn't exist."
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