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Buried Nuke Mines

Eranderil

New Member
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19
No.

More detailed? Sure: NO.

For context, went straight to gunner plaza after learning certain things and a certain vault undergoes a certain story related event. The above responses are equally as fair as the nuke minefield itself.

More detailed, seriously this time? Fine. I have the trait that makes me not trigger mines. They trigger anyway. I am fast enough to make it up to the door of the building(using jet), well outside the radius. Still kills me. I detonate one, dodge back outside of the radius, then move back into the gap. There's a new one there. If they had the nuke mines that densely packed, the entire minefield would go when one goes, and take the entire building with it. Would be satisfying to watch, even if it did autokill me. Jump over- still triggers mine, even when jumping off a nearby semi. I have enough HP and armor to tank three Super Mut Suiciders, I can handle a nuke mine or three. Kills anyway. Pretty certain I tried everything short of console commands here.

Look I get it, this is to force the quests, possibly to save on writing or coding, possibly just because the mod creators want people to experience all the hard work and writing they put into it (which is a perfectly fair desire), and building an army of allies to storm the castle is climactic. Hell, this might even be placeholder for future plans. I won't say I don't care, cause I do, and I probably would do all that proper stuff anyway. However it robs the player's agency to go in themselves and resolve the issue without risking anyone. I want to do a run where I resolve the issue in a glorious bloodbath, only risking myself, even if I just reload and then do it the right way. I want to see the reactions of Al, Jake, Aiden, and even random noisy vault security boy when I return and say "I said, an army would just slow me down. I meant it." I mean, seriously? I slaughtered every singly nuka world raider at once back when I was level 30 somethin, and I just hit 70, you think I can't take on an army of 'roided out gunners? With better weapons, armor and DR out the wazoo?

Suggested fix: Replace the spectral "everywhere" field with a REAL nuke minefield. There are already buried mines in game, it can still be treacherous. Heck, you can even make it so that they are "hair trigger mines" that ignore the perk, but can still be found and disarmed or triggered and fled. I haven't gotten inside yet (obviously), but once all the gunners are dead autocomplete the following quests until appropriate, while appropriate responses are written.

TLDR: Instakill fake Buried Nuke Mine minefield makes me sad for many, many reasons and I would like alternatives please.
 
Technically, if the quest idea is to trigger the gunners to nuke the place themselves, we could grab a fatman and do it. Or even a grenade or something. It also raises questions like "where the hell they get so many nukes to replenish it if they all detonate whenever there's a tresspasser and they use "protocol response"? Or does everyone know about it and never goes by? Still could be a wayward feral or mutant attack or whatever?" Buttt, it also makes for a pretty cool assault on GNN...
Does hijacking the place to normal state remove the minefield? I'm assuming for people with Depravity etc it would.
 
Whew lad, you just triggered me into another playthrough. I don't even remember these. I am going to beat them.
 
Technically, if the quest idea is to trigger the gunners to nuke the place themselves, we could grab a fatman and do it. Or even a grenade or something.
I'm fairly sure this isn't in the mod, just me criticizing the decision behind GNN attack. Which I still like ^^
Good luck anyway!
 
i think this is fine as an abstraction of the gunner's defense. i don't think it needs more adjustment.
We're gonna have to agree to disagree my friend. I would be far happier if they had shielded MIRV Nuke Autolaunchers than the minefield and locked down doors while the AutoMIRVs are active.

It would not only make WAY more sense from a logistics standpoint, but it'd be far easier to justify. Instead of tricking them into triggering their minefield, you trick the autoMIRVs into discharging their entire stockpile. Not only does this explain why it kills you anywhere, but is justifiable for how the entire thing doesn't go up if you trigger one, the limited range, and ultimately, why you can't use them. Plus you'd get the warning of that lovely nuke scream as they fired.

A system like that would only require a couple tweaks to the existing storyline as well. One is admittedly more annoying than the other. 1.) modeling and placing the AutoMIRVs, (that's probably the more annoying one) Replacing the NPC who defuses the issue- either in spirit or actuality. She would need to be an expert in turrets, moreso than explosives. Less annoying,(since really just dialog would need fixed) more voice lines though. You could even use pretty much the exact same cutscenes, I don't think you would even have to change the mannequin army aspect.

Sure, it would be annoying if you can't shoot out the AutoMIRVs, but if you stick them behind barricades and state that they operate on detecting vibrations, and are shut down when the Gunners are coming or going, boom, everything makes sense. Much cleaner suspension of disbelief.

Doesn't solve my chief complaint of not being able to storm the place solo, but would resolve my secondary complaint of how ridiculous the minefield is to start with. Would also make the army requirement feel much more justified.
 
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you misunderstand. i wasn't saying "this is exactly how i, a post nuclear tactical genius, would defend a paramilitary radio station ruin".

i was saying "the story requires you can't get in there before the story is ready, and the story requires some cinematic plan of attack, and this is fine for accomplishing those storyline goals in a way that is readable to the audience, especially considering the level of effort to change it now"

recording VA is expensive, even if it's just time to get volunteers to record and edit. Modeling is time consuming. the current story is "good enough" to get the point accross, and the cost of getting 1% better is WAY more then 1% effort, and i'd MUCH rather have those people put that effort into Chapter 3.
 
I didn't misunderstand. We just have different priorities.

If there's going to be a reason my functionally superhuman character can't storm the place solo, I at least want that reason to follow logically. For you, you would rather see forward development, than a development stall to fix a relatively minor issue.

Our conflict is that to me, this isn't a minor issue. This is a major story plothole that kind of ruins an otherwise pretty good story. And if they wanted to fix it, it realistically would take a small amount of modeling (mostly re-used assets built into a new combination- sound familiar?) and the re-recording of at MOST five lines of dialogue from, what, one character? Maybe 6 and 2 characters from when Jake mentions the minefield?

This isn't like re-publishing a book. It's a relatively light change, with a huge impact.
 
[...] It's a relatively light change, with a huge impact.
i think you overestimate it's impact to others because it bothers you. YOUR character is "functionally superhuman" so this feels like a disrespect of YOUR character. my character is a former army lawyer, who would never go charge a minefield, or a nuke launcher, or even a entirely surmountable machine gun nest, if there was a quieter way to get around the back and knock on the bunker door in order to get someone inside to just open it for the pizza delivery girl (large calzone, name's "Eff You"?). in my game, the plot hole is that we're even assulting the front door at all.

to you, AutoMIRVs are a more acceptable barrier then a minefield, but what about the next guy who KNOWS that he's fast enough to run past the fat man rain? or the guy after them who picked up the transportalponder from Big MT through Project Mojave and is upset they can't just teleport in (or the institute relay, for that matter).

from a certain perspective, plot holes are entirely unavoidable, and a good story teller will do their best to make sure it's believable, verisimilitudinous, if you will, the feeling of being real, not reality itself, but don't mistake the in universe justification for anything more then star trek technobabble on a sliding scale of quality.
 
@SarahAda
Oi, you just re-hashed my original complaint though. The way this is written almost completely robs player agency, which was my complaint in the first place. Robust code should be designed with end user behavior in mind. I also pointed out that having the doors sealed while something like an automirv is active makes sense, and would be a reasonable deterrent even for Speedy Gonzalez.(Also, in my first post I pointed out that I made it right up to the door even with the supposed minefield -this is an issue for the mines even more so than the automirv idea.) Sure, you can get to the blocked and locked door, but what then? I already posed the doors as linked to the automirv system, call them hardcoded to open when the system is shutdown as a safety precaution, and the automirvs shutdown when ammo's depleted as a maintenance precaution or whatever technobabble you like. All of which is way easier on the suspension of disbelief than a minefield that is not only literally everywhere, but autoreplenishing and somehow not self-detonating.

My entire point is the way the minefield is set up flat out DOESN'T feel real. That's the full root of the problem. If a minefield was as densely packed as this is implied to be, a single frag grenade would blow the entire building sky high. Hell, a single well-tossed pebble would do the trick.

When you then take into account the player agency it robs, it doesn't feel good from a player perspective regardless of playstyle. I'm a melee junkie. I have built my character to make tanks look like tissue paper, in comparison to, and under attack from him. You prefer stealth and speech. Neither one of us would assault the place as scripted without a MUCH better reason than a "minefield." You had a REALLY good point with the Institute tele system. If you're institute aligned, WHY NOT just tele in. Railroad? They get a Vertibird. We simply should be allowed to tackle this issue how we see fit in the first place, and follow the scripted story if we simply don't have better options or if we just want to.

I tried to pose what I would consider a relatively reasonable compromise. Keep the instakill nukefield, but reskin it to make it feel better from a player perspective. I posed it in such a way to where minimal changes would need to be made to make it feel much more reasonable to just about any build, while neutering most alternative entry methods. Yes, the institute tele system does still pose a plot hole point, but maybe instead of that being the excuse to not change anything, it's an opportunity to add a really interesting lore twist, like the com-hub interferes with the frequency of the tele network or whatever techno-babble strikes your fancy. How about this twist: the Institute is the Gunners mystery sponsor? (Kinda expecting that to be the case, honestly.) They wouldn't be likely to TP you in when you are actively acting against their interests.

If we want to get right down to brass tacks here- We have a generally really high quality mod- atypically well written and designed, that clearly has a passionate fanbase and devbase of highly varied gameplay styles. Then we have one massively glaring weakness that doesn't work well for most playstyles, or at all from virtually any role-player standpoint. I would think the desire would be to correct or at least improve that weakness, rather than plugging our ears and pretending it isn't there.

Ultimately, it is just a suggestion, and it's up to the Dev's to decide if they want to consider it or not. But considering even people who don't like my proposed solution acknowledge that what currently exists doesn't really work for them implies that I at the very least have a point. (Even you admitted, this doesn't work for your playstyle.) I'm open to other suggestions, or other ideas, but I can't agree that this is "good enough." It's not even close to the standard set by the rest of the mod.
 
This isn't the only 1% plot hole. the fabric can only be so tightly woven. how does The Ron have all these prewar files just lying around, where as the brotherhood, a thousand times larger, is scrounging for parts and electronics manuals? The Gunners ALREADY had the technology to transmit on the commhub's frequency, that's how we run into them in the first place. disease cures can't possibly work because casandra hints viruses and bacteria have mutated massively thanks to radiation so any cure for any disease would be good about one season in one area like the flu vaccine but different for each town. if technology is so rare that two paramilitary societies are fighting two separate wars over prototypes, how can jake and the player bang together peak technology at a workbench from crystal decanters and telephone innards. there are a dozen escaped synths running around the commonwealth, and we hear about 15 more ready to escape during underground undercover, but retention has like 6 coursers tops and one formatting chair; hardly the industrial reclamation effort needed to deal with that kind of failure rate. why do the gunners care about settlements? oh it's hinted at supplies and labor, but doofuses come out of the wood work when you drop down a recruitment beacon, and they obviously have the infrastructure to conscript and train 15 gunners to attack a settlement of 4 dudes, so it'd be easier to just make their own farms. and let's not even get started on the vit-o-matic and the special system.

Verisimilitude: good enough to feel real. hitchcock talked about "fridge logic", that moment when you've watched a film and got up afterwords, satisfied and thinking about how cool the story was, and while looking through the coldcuts you think "hey! how come the mcguffin was so big a deal, they could buy 5 of them at the market bazaar in the second scene?" but by that point, the plot has already done it's job. it worked on you. you bought in enough to watch the whole film and enjoy it. it doesn't matter that you can take it apart in the afterglow, because it didn't break down while telling the story.

you're asking for better Midichlorian, which is understandable, but sometimes it's a better story if the writers don't pop that bubble.

how come we can't just walk in there? i can snipe 30 guys per minute with vats.
"minefield"
but i can walk through mines with my special perks.
"it's a really good minefield. do you want on the rollercoaster or not kid?"
 
Here's the crux of the issue you keep conveniently ignoring: How many of those plot holes actively force your experience to be worse because they critically damage one of the flagship aspects of Bethesda games? The answer is none. None of those things take your build and deliberately kneecap it. In fact, most of those plotholes exist specifically to facilitate the broadest spectrum of builds possible. Are they annoying? Some are, some aren't, and yes, I acknowledge that gamification is important.

Ultimately the issue is this: This particular structure removes player agency. If you are going to remove player agency, the reason you present should be extremely convincing or the experience as a whole is cheapened. And again- nothing about the ghostly omnipresent minefield feels real. Not in the slightest. A ten year old experiencing that would tell you- that's just not how mines work. It's wonkey and feels obviously out of place, both from a realism standpoint and from a standpoint of gameplay trend- literally no other mines in the game behave this way. The setup here directly conflicts with every other mine related gameplay trend within fallout 4. You talk about the fridge effect, but the way this is designed, you don't even get TO the fridge effect because immediately off the bat you realize that something is very very wrong. Maybe not if you follow the quest prompts exactly, like a good little robot, but I would bet my left leg most fallout 4 players don't play that way. Gameplay is not a movie- it's an interaction.

This comes down to suspension of disbelief. What you are suggesting is "suck it up and suspend your own." That's just a crappy attitude an worse writing even in movies. Suspension of disbelief works best when things flow naturally, and established trends are observed, and almost immediately breaks down when they aren't, or are abruptly altered in a single instance before resuming normalcy. Your own example of Midichlorians only goes to prove this point. When the trend was established it worked fine. The moment the trend was tampered with there was massive outcry. The minefield is midichlorians added to fallout 4.

Your arguments are sound if I was one, singular, isolated incident. However, other replies to this thread prove that I am not. You yourself pointed out that you wouldn't even do things the way this quest forces, so even you are another incident where this system impeded- not promoted- your gameplay. If you can't acknowledge that, then I'd say we're done here. At that point no matter what I say or how I say it- you aren't bothering to listen.
 
i wasn't going to re-engage here. this felt fruitless, arguing at a brick wall while a propaganda tape plays, but it's saturday, i'm avoiding cleaning my house, and i this stuck in my craw:
How many of those plot holes actively force your experience to be worse because they critically damage one of the flagship aspects of Bethesda games?
  1. every single time i run into a dialog box where i have to choose between "yes", "yes, but sarcastic", "yes, but rude" and "maybe later".
  2. the entirety of Nuka world, where all i want to do is play these jerks against each other so they waste their strength in infighting while the minuteman assemble an attack squad from my 31 settlements, but the quest designer gave us two options: "become a raider", "become a raider but sarcastic", "become a raider but rude", or "fight 900 dudes alone".
  3. three quarters of the brotherhood quest line where we are sending the equivalent of futuretech nuclear battlemechs to punch the equivalent of 1920s street gangs and three scientists with jury rigged robots and a cloning machine.
  4. the brotherhood has no resources. they need to scrounge from dirt farmers in order to rebuild their giant robot death machine that they flew up here with their nuclear powered airship. the wattage required to run one suit of T-51b could run enough lighting, hydroponics and water filtration to produce more food then they need the entire time they are here. why TF did you fly it up here without any logistics then, master battle lord of strategy?
  5. the mechanist has HUNDREDS of robots at her disposal, and lives in a underground garbage pile. why is she fighting "my tyrany of the commonwealth" with the longest dumbest lever of the Robobrains, unreliable processors made from the prewar brains of criminals, instead of like, building apartments?
  6. building is basically considered lost technology. multiple settlement quests boil down to "we're too dumb to use the workbench 5 literal meters from where we are standing while having this conversation. can you help us?"
  7. half the railroad quest line where we are wasting time on one-off smuggling when the battle of bunker hill shows the railroad outnumbers the institute ~ 2 to 1
  8. i can't drop the silver shadow outfit. i've never met anyone who cares about the silver shadow. i don't care about the silver shadow. i am never going into the memory den's side room to talk to that quest giver, but somehow my pipboy refuses to let me put this critical important object down, but will let me put down the last remaining nukanuke shell, prewar prototype experimental tech worth god knows what to someone who could reverse engineer it.
  9. where the hell are all these starving raiders getting bullets? it's been 200 years since anyone manufactured anything. some ammo from the 1970s so rare that every cartridge is a museum piece.
  10. east coast supermutants, just all of them DC supermutants all together. every bit of their lore and history. all of it. just every last thing about post-apocalypse-orcs.
  11. the way cait's addition is handled is dumb and insulting, and makes a mockery of people who really suffer. i feel a little sick to my stomache every time she gets out of that stupid chair at the bottom of that vault.
  12. the main threat of the whole game is the institute doing something, but the something they are doing is... checks notes... building a generator.
  13. a generator, by the way, that is to address a power drain so slight that hasn't even slowed down production of something like (60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours /30 seconds per synth) three thousand gen 3 synths a day.
  14. the number of synth components hidden on NPCs. half the population of the commonwealth is gen 3 synths, but this still is a tiny fraction of the production we're shown on screen. either the institute has infiltrated every single settlement twice over, or they are resource-less scientists hiding from a vengeful unwashed mob. it can't be both at once or you are hiding from yourself.
  15. no one figured out "the institute" was underneath the intact but somehow unoccupied "commonwealth institute of technology" who's prewar nickname was "the institute"? piper? nick? either of you on this at all?
  16. oh, by the way, at least one solution to the institute is "dig". not kidding, you go stand in the courtyard of the CIT building, and dig down. 100+ years of fear in the commonwealth and this could have been solved by a diamond city security guard with a shovel?
 
Damn, what a comeback after 2 weeks.
Maybe the "flagship" aspect of Bethesda games is that they're stupid? Well, not all of them and not that much but it's way too obvious in FO4. So the minefield thing would at least be on par with the rest of the game. Vanilla gunners get nukes from somewhere so they might as well make a minefield out of them and make a standard procedure of probably blowing them all up. Yeah, we can't avoid it cause quest, but we also can't kill Preston or dig into the Institute before the time comes. We can't get in Greentech before courser quest. Can't enter Fort Hagen until Nick tells us to go for it. Etc etc. Sure, the SS2 writing is generally much better but whatever.
Just for the sake of it, here's a couple counterpoints.
1. Not the whole institute is sent to Bunker hill. They firmly believe a courser and a bunch of synths (and you) can handle it. By the way they hype up coursers, that should be true but they're trash. Then you supposedly fuck it up and alert everyone. Even if you don't, they come anyway.
2. You can drop or store the silver shroud outfit after completing the quest. Another case of Bethesda not wanting the player to get stuck on a quest so much you have to carry something heavy forever (like the spacesuits in nuka-world). And I actually like the quest but Nora's VA is really overdoing it there.

Also the super secret and protected Cabot house and its guard stalking you relentlessly to invite you there while blowing you off at the door.
 
oh, by the way, at least one solution to the institute is "dig". not kidding, you go stand in the courtyard of the CIT building, and dig down. 100+ years of fear in the commonwealth and this could have been solved by a diamond city security guard with a shovel?
ROFLMAO

The whole FO4 plot in a nutshell.
 
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