We can’t always get what we want. - Rolling Stones
You’ve got a massive game-changing project proposed here.
Why limit yourself to this admittedly-flawed engine? And to such a limited genre in such a relatively tiny game-space?
I love Fallout.....and I loathe Bethesda. And I want to make a damn point that Bethesda are garbage environmental storytellers in general. See I have very mixed feelings about drawning from TT traditions because a lot of them are lazy, gamey and BAD.
Mostly that Fallout 4 is a decent GAME but a terrible FALLOUT game not even so much because of the simplified dialogue (which is bad) but because of it's cynical and lazy (Bethesda cynical and lazy?) service to the brand:
And this need to be noted by future game designers. If I could make this work and it were to become popular, two big ifs, I could so how with minimal tweaking so can save even a Turkey like Fallout 4. This is an era of BADLY written media. You have shameless, souless rehashes of past nostalgia (all Michael Bay movies, The Force Awakens), woke garbage that defiles the greatness of the original without giving us a compelling critique and justification for it's own existence (Dark Fate, the Last Jedi) and incompetent garbage that doesn't understand it's source material (Ghostbusters 2016)
Fallout 4 is all of these things, but to a relatively mild degree.....Fallout76 is.....I'm not going there.
My personal belief is that open-world design is BAD, especially in a Fallout setting where you need space to justify all the set pieces. The Commonwealth is WAY too busy for a wasteland because thee kinetics of the map is something that needs to be spread over at least the whole of Mass, Connecticut and Rhode Island, or at least to the Western suburbs of Worchester. That way you could have BOTH the rebuilt city in Boston AND the urban battleground in Worchester. You could have a vastly different dynamic by the sea and in the inland, so you can both service the brand AND try new things with distance as a justification and buffer. Also, the map is too small to handwave conservation of detail, which is the problem I have with Rivet City and Megaton and Bunker Hill. In Fallout 1 and 2 you never quite knew the extent of its cities, because it was divided up into maps of just the important stuff.
But even with this crappy map, you can do this TOO, you just need to be smart in your post-war world-building. Look....the idea that he seaboard was left to fall apart. by centuries of decay is tropey and lazy.....but the idea that the Eastern seaboard around Bostom is in ruins because it was hit by a Catagory 5 three months before the start of the game? Now that interesting! But you need to justify the th world-building in evidence that PEOPLE understand what's going on in their world.
Wars, even small wars, CONSUME resources not add to them. Raiders should not be hanging around drinking moonshine, or dudes like Sagnus who are more ambitious is gonna hang em from meat hooks, if the Minutemen don't pick them off piecemeal. They need to go after economic objectives. And remember too that human capital, while less efficient than robots is still a valuable thing. The notion that Gabriel was a minuteman turned raider is interesting, the moral slide is not. If you could change the terminal entries to where Gabriel is trying to make Libertalia self-sufficient, and getting people to learn skills, engage in trade, and it's not working, or not working as fast as he liked. I mean, if you still want him to be a bad guy, let him use Libertailia as a black market for child slaves. He on't catch them, he don't use them, he just lets sickos from around the NE come discretely to buy and sell and he takes a primo commission he uses to keep the community afloat.
THere's so much basicness in modern pop storytelling it's really alarming. And I think this could, should I pull it off, provide fodder about how to approach these sorts of things,
