The green circle on the left is Vault 13, my point of origin. The one on the far right is Vault 15, my destination. The green circle in the middle is "unknown." It's an unheralded desert encounter, one which no one told you to anticipate and which has no bearing on your immediate goal. Yet it would be the height of disingenuousness to call it "random." I mean, look at its placement. You might potentially avoid finding it, if you decided to take a weird circuitous route between the Vaults (though actually, doing so would allow you to short-circuit much of the game's plot, at the cost of being insanely dangerous), but seeing as how the game gives you no other direction, what are the odds of that?
Still, it is one of Fallout's virtues that you don't have to go into this location. You could continue on your way and ignore it forever. However, that is both dull, from a story-telling perspective, and a huge missed opportunity for loot and xp, so of course I'm going to explore this mysterious location.
And immediately discover one of the game's more bizarre concessions to realism. It can detect when you have a weapon equipped, and npcs in friendly areas don't like it. I'm not entirely sure what the makers of Fallout thought the player would get out of this system quirk, but it does force me to do some annoying inventory shuffling.
It was worth it, though, because the town of Shady Sands contains valuable information and sidequests. It's also the first opportunity to interact with npcs.
Here's the dialogue screen. Seth here has some basic information about the town, and his fellow gate guard knows about the surrounding area, though neither of them is particularly well informed about the water chip. Seth does tell me about a deadly radscorpion infestation, and because rpg protagonists apparently have some sort of "tell me about your petty problems so I can solve them aura" I make a note of this as something to keep in mind for after I explore the town.
But though the sidequest xp is valuable, the real reason to come to Shady Sands is for a fateful encounter.
Ian, the mercenary, that handsome fellow in the black leather jacket. There is no overstating how much he'll help your early survivability. Though as valuable a companion, he's kind of a terrible mercenary. He joins up with me for a promise of "a share of the action" which is just ridiculously vague (and also has no mechanical weight, and thus is never mentioned again). The reason for this is that I've got a high intelligence, which made the dialogue option show and a good Speech rating, which allowed me to say it without embarrassing myself. You can't rely on diplomacy to the exclusion of other skill, but it does save you a lot of trouble.
With Ian in tow, I explore the rest of the town, meeting Aradesh:
Who is astonishingly useless, considering that he has a special dialogue screen and voiced lines. He gives you some minor information about the town and its problems, but nothing you couldn't infer from talking to Seth.
We also meet his daughter, Tandi:
Tandi is weird because she gives off certain cues. So much about her dialogue says "I am the disaffected daughter of an isolated village elder, do the right sidequest and I will join your party as a spunky sidekick," but nothing ever comes of it. She turns out to be an important character in Fallout 2, and in the subsequent canon, but for now, she's useless. It turns out to be something of a running theme with the animated characters.
With nothing else to do, Ian and I head to the radscorpion caves.
It looks a lot like the rat-infested caves near Vault 13, but I'm going to give the game a pass here. It's obviously a technological limitation. Got to save memory by reusing tile sets.
The presence of Ian makes this cave a lot easier than it would otherwise be, but radscorpions themselves do not fuck around, so I decide to equip my gun and risk some of my precious ammo.
I mean, look at those things. They're huge. Plus they greatly outnumber me (and unlike rats, radscorpions will wreck a low level character if they're underestimated). The upside of this is that they give a very significant amount of xp. Enough that I level up before clearing out the cave.
Thanks to my high intelligence, I get 20 skill points per level. If I hadn't taken the "gifted" trait, I could have gotten as many as 25, but I probably wouldn't have, because I'd have had seven fewer attribute points, and maxing out intelligence would not have been so good an idea.
I put all my available skill points into Small Guns, boosting it by 40 points (due to it being a tagged skill). It might seem foolish to overspecialize like this, but more combat skill helps me immediately, and I'm almost certain to gain another level or two before my other skills become important.
After clearing out the radscorpions, I can loot their bodies, taking their tails.
This is not merely some grizzly trophy. You need at least one scorpion tail to help make an antivenin back in Shady Sands. The rest can be bartered away for essential supplies.
Speaking of antivenin, going back into town reveals another one of the game's less charming mechanics. The doctor will not speak to me at night. Don't get me wrong, I don't have a general problem with day/night cycles in games. Majora's Mask is one of my favorites. However, it actually has to be used to create a living world, with nighttime opening up a whole new set of interactions, quests, and activities. Used thoughtlessly, having night just forces your character to stand around. Like so:
This screen, which opens up off your Pip-boy, gives you a whole slew of resting options. Also, you can see the note there on the left which gives you a deadline for saving the Vault. I don't remember what exactly happens if you fail, but I think it's just a sub-optimal ending.
Despite not having time to waste, I decide to wait around until noon, just to be extra sure that I can get in to see the doctor. I do, and subsequently give him a scorpion tail and receive a dose of antivenin for myself (along with the much more important experience points).
While walking around noontime Shady Sands, I encounter Tandi again, and decide to ask her a couple of questions.
Fallout has a rare dialogue feature, the "tell me about" button (seen on the right of the dialogue window). It allows you to type in a topic and get answers from npcs outside of their normal dialogue topics. It sounds handy, but there's a reason this feature is so rare - it never works.
As seen above, asking Tandi about Vault 15, literally the most notable nearby landmark and the single most important topic to a player character at this point in the game, yields a useless blow-off answer. (You get a sarcastic response if you ask her about herself and minor gossip if you ask about certain people around town, but nothing super-informative). Of course, Tandi faces the unique problem that anything she says has to be voiced, so there's a technological obstacle to her being too chatty, but it just goes to show the general uselessness of the animated characters (despite the fact that they seem like "major" npcs and thus more likely to be clued in to what's going on).
Given the lack of helpful hints, I'm more or less done with Shady Sands for now. I just have one more errand. I need to get rid of all these damned scorpion tails. To do this, I find Seth and hit the Barter button (also seen on the right of the dialogue window). That brings up the barter screen.
The way bartering works is that you've got a ledger divided into two parts, with your inventory on the left and the npc's inventory on the right. You drag the stuff you want to get rid of to the left side of the ledger and the stuff you want to the right side. Then, the game assigns each half of the transaction a value in bottlecaps (based on some objective value for the equipment, modified by each character's Barter skill). If the value of your stuff is greater than the value of the npc's stuff, they accept the offer.
Why barter with Seth and not some other npc? It could be that I psychically sensed that he had rope and then had an amazing premonition that I would soon need rope. Or it could be that I've played this game before and had the necessity of this exact transaction burned into my head by a prior experience of extremely painful frustration and confusion.
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