I mean, there's nothing much to look at, and there's nothing valuable to loot, but something about the art direction appeals to me. There's just this crappy little shack in the middle of the desert that hides a ladder to an underground facility. Nothing heralds it as a significant location. There's something plausibly science-fiction-y about its general blandness.
Crawling down the ladder, I enter . . . another cave.
Inhabited by . . . more rats. Thanks to their general wimpiness and the presence of Ian, I feel secure enough to switch back to my knife. I'm still super-paranoid about running out of ammo because I don't really remember at what point in the game things start to turn around and my income gets high enough to make supplies a non-issue.
Though the rats are individually trivial, their combined xp is enough to bump me up to level 3.
Third level brings with it my first opportunity to select a Perk. You get one perk every three levels, and each one modifies your character in one of a variety of useful ways. The Perk I choose is Awareness, which doesn't do a whole heck of a lot, but does allow me to see the exact hit point totals of my enemies. It was the best choice available at level 3.
I think the thing I love most about Fallout's leveling system is the cute little drawings that accompany all the various character traits. They, more than anything, contribute to the game's satirically cheerful psuedo-50s vibe.
Using my increased powers, I cut a swath through the rats and reached what looks like a dead end.
This damned elevator shaft. There's no real hint of what you're supposed to do here. The first few times I played this game, I practically pulled my hair out in frustration. What you're supposed to do is use a mechanic that only rarely comes into play.
You have to switch your cursor over to the action mode and hold down the right button until the various action tiles come up and select the "use item" option.
This brings up a list of your items, and you can select one to activate on the location pointed to by the cursor. This is something you only have to do with great infrequency. The item you have to use is the rope, which has no other use, is only uncommonly found (Seth is one of the few people to have one to trade), and there's no real hint that it even exists if you haven't already encountered it.
Arrgh!
Luckily, I've played this game so much that I already knew what to do, but it's an aggravation that has stuck with me for many years. I mean, I suppose I get it. What you're supposed to do is use real-world reasoning and apply it to your situation. You're faced with a broken elevator shaft. How do you get down? A rope. Obviously. It's not a hugely difficult puzzle, but it kind of breaks the social contract between gamer and game. It hasn't really signaled that it has adventure game elements. And it doesn't have enough of them to make it a consistent part of your toolkit.
I guess when I consider it carefully, I approve of stuff like this more than it annoys me. Fallout is a rich and detailed game, with a lot to see and do. It embraces the "role" part of "roleplaying game," and if sometimes that feels like a misstep, that's no great sin.
At the bottom of the shaft, I found a bleak and abandoned Vault, filled with . . . rats.
Well, pig rats. These are larger and more aggressive than regular rats, but still mostly harmless. I stick with my knife and let Ian do the bulk of the damage. Going chamber by chamber, I'm able to round up all the Vault's xp and snag myself a neat piece of equipment.
A swanky leather jacket. No longer am I an out-of-place Vault dork. I am now a true wastelander. Raiders and giant rats will fear to cross me. I also picked up a second rope, which comes in handy for descending to the third level of the Vault (again, this is the only place in the game that uses rope).
There are more pig rats down there, but they're no harder to kill than any of the others. When you get to the bottom-right corner, a message displays, informing you that your search is useless due to the Vault's cave in.
Where do you go next? There's no real way to tell. The most obvious destination is Shady Sands.
Where we find out that Tandi is missing!
I guess this is just the natural evolution of the character's abundant uselessness, but it's still one of those "what the fuck" moments. I know you're better than this, Fallout.
However, I'm one of those designated hero types, bound by narrative law to poke myself into every random problem I encounter, regardless of whether it affects me personally (or even whether I have a reasonable chance of helping), so I agree to try and rescue her (although the game's laudable commitment to freedom does allow me to just keep on walking, here, but then I would miss out on xp).
After getting the story from Seth, he directs me to the Khans' base of operations.
It is my abiding good fortune that these are not the type of post-apocalyptic raiders that kill strangers on sight and loot their corpses for valuables, so I'm able to barge my way in to see the leader and do something profoundly ridiculous.
I'm something of an optimist about human nature, so there is nothing prima facie absurd to me about negotiating for the release of a prisoner, even from a deadly gang of low-lifes and slavers. However, the way that Duke goes about it stretches credibility.
"I represent a threat you don't even understand. Do you really want to risk my wrath?"
What is that backed up by? My leather jacket. My fifty some-odd bullets? My fierce reputation as a level three adventurer. ("Watch out guys, he has Awareness").
What's going on here is that I put enough points in Speech last level to be able to trigger the special dialogue. Not for the last time has my character's propensity for bullshit gotten him out of a serious jam (and spared me the tedium of all this nasty "playing the game's content" business). In the Fallout games, being good at talking is less a way to find common ground between individuals and more of a mind-control superpower.
It does have its compensations, though . . .
By which I mean the joys of a young girl's gratitude and the satisfaction of a job well done, and not whatever the hell this middle dialogue option is trying to get me to do. I know it's sort of my responsibility as a let's-player to show off as much of the game's content as possible, but seriously, she's like sixteen. I haven't wanted to sleep with a sixteen-year-old since . . . around the time Fallout was originally released, actually.
Still, I'm docking the game points for this, because I didn't actually play the game until it had already been out for three or four years, and I didn't discover this little side adventure until just now, and that's just gross.
So, just for the record, I did not try and parlay my rescuing duties into any kind of awkward rpg "sexiness" and simply accepted her thanks and walked away with nothing more than a few hundred xp and my pride as a human being.
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