The Pip-Boy is everything wrong with Bethesda's Fallout

I could spend all day ripping into everything wrong with Bethesda's Fallout games, and over time I'll probably be able to air many of my frustrations with them. For now, however, I'd like to take a quick look at one small but glaring issue; one that is both symptomatic of and representative of everything wrong with both of Bethesda's attempts at making a Fallout game.

This.

Unless you've been living under a rock since 2008, this is the Pip-Boy 3000, a wrist-mounted personal computer that displays your stats, inventory, and map, all while the lovable Vault Boy provides handy visualizations.

And it is all completely wrong.

The Pip-Boy from Fallout 1 and 2 was NEVER a wrist-mounted device. It was a handheld box, which is obvious if you have ever seen the classic Pip-Boy. It is far too wide and cumbersome to be carried on the wrist.

Why did Bethesda change this? For the same reason that it seems they make all their decisions by: It looked cool. The same reason that a gang living in a vault whose doors have never been opened since the bombs first fell somehow has access to leather jackets and custom snake patches. The same reason that the denizens of Rivet City never cleaned up all the junk in the lower levels even though clearing this junk out would provide ample space for growing crops. Hell, the same reason that all of the settlements in Fallout 3 seem to have no crops anywhere near them and yet are somehow able to eat.

But I digress. To give credit to Bethesda, they did attempt to fix this by establishing that the Pip-Boys in Fallout 3 was a later model (3000 instead of 2000), and while this still didn't wash out the sour taste it had left, it would make sense that the higher-numbered (and therefore later built) vaults on the east coast would get the newer models while the earlier ones (such as Vault 13, where the Vault Dweller emerged from in the first game) would get the more primitive models. It allowed allowed this new version to exist without bending already established lore in half...

...until New Vegas and 4 happened.

Fallout: New Vegas takes place back on the West Coast, and after completing the mercifully short player creation sequence in Doc Mitchell's house, he naturally hands you a Pip-Boy... 3000. He even states that it was the one he was given back when he was growing up in Vault 21. It would be possible to write this off by saying that the new models were introduced fairly early on and that some vaults on the west were also given the 3000 models, but not only is this never established in any of the games proper, but the denizens in Vault 11 are all shown to be wearing the 3000 models instead of the 2000 models.

The use of the Pip-Boy 3000 in New Vegas was not Obsidian's fault; they were only allotted 18 months to make the game, and making a 3D version of the original handheld Pip-Boy would have taken up precious development time they could be put to better use making the rest of the game as good as it could possibly be. I don't blame them for this, nor does it take away from the magnificence that the rest of New Vegas was. But it does show a total lack of foresight or basic understanding of the universe that they inherited on Bethesda's part to allow something like this to happen. All it would take was a single line in Fallout 3 or 4 to clean this whole mess up, to establish why some vaults have earlier handheld models and some have later wrist-mounted models, and why this doesn't sync up with their numbering or order of construction.

But not only did they not do that, they managed to dig the hole they were in even deeper.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the very first model of the Pip-Boy, courtesy of the Fallout 4 introductory cutscene:

This should raise some questions: why is it that the Pip-Boy 1.0 was wrist-mounted, and yet the Pip-Boy 2000, a later model, was handheld? Why was the jump back to wrist-mounted made again after the 2000 model? Is the numbering misleading? Is the 2000 model is simply a budget handheld model while the higher-grade main line was wrist-based, and the 3000 numbering applied to all the 'standard' ones, and there were merely different revisions in this line? This would seem the most likely and logical, especially since the model in Fallout 4 is specifically referred to as the 'Mark IV' model. However, as per usual, Bethesda spent no time whatsoever explaining anything, and simply threw a bunch of ideas at the wall and left other people to sort them out.

The Pip-Boy in Fallout 3 onward is a perfect microcosm of Bethesda's attitude towards Fallout's lore: make it 'cool' at the cost of world consistency. Who cares about established lore when you can make it LOOK good? Who cares about making sure your stories all sync up in logical ways, so long as your world looks 'cool'?

New Vegas was proof that the Fallout formula could appeal to a new generation while still remaining true to its roots. But as long as Bethesda remains committed to making their entries superficially appealing at the cost of consistency, such as with the Pip-Boy, it will remain the exception, not the norm.

The self-imposed hell of the Half-Life fanbase

In mid-July of this year, Half-Life writer and former Valve employee Mark Laidlaw gave an interview to arcadeattack.co.uk. The entire interview can be read here, and is well worth the read.

One section, however, was especially interesting:

Do you have any idea whether Half-Life 3 will ever be released and would you be willing to work on this title?

No idea. And I have no interest in going back. I had ideas for Episode 3. They were all supposed to take the series to a point where I could step away from it and leave it to the next generation. I had hoped for a reset between HL2 and HL3 that was as dramatic as the shift between HL1 and HL2. I honestly don’t know if anyone else shared this goal, but it seemed important to me to give ultimate freedom to whoever inherited the series, with my own personal set of loose ends tied up to my satisfaction. Unfortunately, I was not able to do that. But I never thought as far ahead as HL3, unless you were to say that HL3 and Episode 3 were the same thing. I will say that I expected every installment would end without resolution, forever and ever…there was some rumor going around that Ep3 or HL3 would end Gordon Freeman’s story, and I don’t think that was accurate. My intention was that Ep3 would simply tie up the plot threads that were particular to HL2. But it would still end like HL1 and HL2, with Gordon in an indeterminate space, on hold, waiting for the next game to begin. So one cliffhanger after another.

If you are of a sound mind, then that section should be further proof of what you have known for a long time: the adventures of Gordon Freeman are over.

The Half-Life fandom, however, is not a community of sound minds.

Since Episode 2's release in October 2007, this community has been patiently waiting for the continuation of the bespectacled crowbar enthusiast's story, and has recieved nothing but radio silence in return. Ten years of absolutely no word on the status of their promised conclusion. Ten years of Valve drifting completely away from single-player narritive driven games and toward competitive multiplayer games (with, surprise surprise, plenty of microtransactions to go around), and then moving away from games completely, to work on VR hardware and of selling other people's games on Steam.

Oh yeah, and paid mods. Let's not forget that debacle.

So, it really begs the question: why are people holding on? Why can this community not give up Gordon Freeman's ghost?

Many of the faithful point to the various leaks that have come our way over the years, but with the exception of some 2008-era pieces of concept art, these almost always come in the form of small orphaned files code snippets found in updates to Valve's games, from previously unseen animations for Dr. Magnusson being found in Portal 2, to various bits of code in their various VR demos mentioning HL3. However, all these confirm is that HL3 was indeed in development at some point. It indicates nothing pertaining to its current status. We have no idea how long these pieces of software have been in development, we have no idea when those files or bits of code date to, and we have no idea if they even still have any internal use at Valve. As someone who has worked on small personal game projects, let me just say that legacy files from scrapped ideas or mechanics are a bitch to clean up. There will almost always be something falling through the cracks. Hell, to this day, TF2 contains code and an unused sound clip from a scrapped Escort gamemode. The gamemode may have been scrapped, but those tiny artifacts from its development went unnoticed and undeleted, all the way up to release. If a bit unused project code (and a whole lot of other stuff, as this page stands testament to) can go unnoticed and accidentally released in the full retail release of one of the most anticipated games of all time, then it's completely probable that a bit of code referring to "crowbar ziplines" with the hl3 prefix can sneak their way into a free VR demo

This is, of course, assuming that these 'leaks' are accidental, which seems highly unlikely. Valve surely generates web traffic every time an HL3 buzz comes around, so it would make sense to plant the occasional model or code snippet to get the hype going. They get an instant blast of free publicity, and all they needed to do was drag a .SMD file in their update files.

Even ignoring any monetary motivations, it's important that Valve employees are still human beings. Human beings who, in many cases, grew up soaked in internet culture, including trolling. So it's not hard to imagine that certain HL3 references popping up "accidentally" in files are the results of bored developers who want to have a little fun with their audience. In fact, don't imagine, read Gabe Newell himself saying that this happens.

This, combined with every head writer and all but two minor writers having left the company, should present a clear situation: not only is HL3 not coming, but any story-based games aren't coming either. DotA-based card games that nobody asked for? Maybe. VR demos? Maybe. But single player, narrative-driven games? No. What's the point in them for Valve if they can't monitize it afterwards with skinner box microtransactions? Let's face it: the glorified gambling machines that are presented to us as lootboxes or crates make far more money and require much less effort than building an entire game. Building maps and writing scripts takes a lot of time. Using photoshop to make a wolf skin for an AK-47 doesn't.

Believe me, I want to be proven wrong. But somehow I doubt I will.

Wake up and smell the ashes.