grotsnik
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2010
- Messages
- 1,671
Old World Blues
Yeah, I got a lot of time for Old World Blues. The developers referred to it, internally and in PR, as a 'Wizard of Oz' story. Which means jokey references (the player's main motivation is to find their heart, brain and 'spine') but it's also about tone.
See, Fallout 2 takes a lot of flak for all the silliness, but it really comes back to a fantastic and key element/serious, crippling problem with the gameworld itself; you've got this principle that funny nonsense, (i.e. in-game logic based on outdated science fiction), can be treated seriously as a major part of the lore. If you get overexcited and stretch that principle, you end up with talking plants and xenomorph-alikes in Fallout 2; if you're a tone-deaf hack and you stretch that principle, you end up with entire towns terrorised by fake superheroes in Fallout 3.
And so the more you add to the lore as the franchise expands, the sillier the gameworld gets and the closer it becomes to pure lulzy sci-fi shoot-em-up comedy. Which is something MCA, Cain, Sawyer and co. have openly showed concern about - Cain disliked 3's attempts at comedy, they all stated Van Buren would be a return to the tone of the original game, I think one of them even said they wished the humour had been removed from the start...
And what OWB does is use the idea of a 4 or 5-hour DLC adventure for something other than 'let's just get the interns to make a new dungeon, stick some new overpowered loot in and charge an extra fifteen dollars' - it lets the devs draw a big fat tonal line between NV proper and the crazy fantasy-land of the DLC, and then use the latter as a playground for all of the lulziest, Fallout-2-esque shit they can invent, without having to worry about diluting the tone of the main game.
Appropriately, it reuses a lot of ideas and characters from the Environmental Protection Agency, a cut location from Fallout 2 that would've been pretty much the culmination of the game's absurdities:
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Environmental_Protection_Agency
It also shares some similarities with a couple of Van Buren locations (Boulder Dome and the starting prison, which itself had some of its identity mixed in with an earlier version of the Big MT).
Anyway, enough blathering.
Following a radio signal boasting of a Midnight Movie Showing, close to Nipton, the Courier is surprised to find a giant flickering projection of an eye...and a crashed satellite.
Aw, man. I was hoping it'd be Pink Flamingos.
The slightly snarky tone is in response to complaints by players that they didn't know Dead Money was going to take their items away.
As he activates the satellite, blue light flares up - and the Courier has a sudden premonition that he's about to be knocked unconscious and spirited to a faraway place through a contrived and never-properly-explained means of transportation!
Noooootaaggggggaiiiiiiiin-
Scientists of vision were drawn to the facility to tackle the greatest technological challenges of the era. They sought to create a new world, fueled by technology, for the benefit of all mankind. sonic emitters, space age alloys, DNA hybridization, force field particle research, Auto-Doc advances in cranial, cardiac, and trauma surgery... the hopes and dreams of a century became realities in the electronic forges of Big Mountain. The nucleus of this research was the Dome, a huge stone facility that held the labs of every science known to man. It was a think tank where no problem could not be solved, where no question could not be answered.
The Great War brought a new energy to Big Mountain and its scientists. Although sheltered from the frontlines, the scientists waged their own war, fighting their battles at the atomic level. Equations and calculations marched endlessly across the chalkboards and computer terminals toward one solution: Winning the war.
For years, the minds and computers of Big Mountain were a blaze of trajectories, weapon schematics, and nuclear theories. The problems began to outpace the solutions, first geometrically, then exponentially. As war escalated, so did the questions. On the night of October 23rd, 2077, the scientists received and answer that put all their questions to rest.
In the aftermath, Big Mountain's silent experiments went to sleep, their creators slowly dying the new world that had been left behind. And the great stone in the middle of the Big Empty lay untouched, filled with countless technological wonders... Wonders that, in the end, had been answers to the wrong question.
There's no real reason why our character would regain consciousness here, but we do get a rather lovely view of the landscape below.
Opening a nearby door, the Courier discovers...something he didn't expect.
Meet the Think Tank, scientists extraordinaire and professional malapropists. They're pretty much the sci-fi equivalent of the wizarding faculty from the Discworld books - in that they seem to spend their time bickering, getting distracted and rambling on at length, failing to deal with their massive character flaws, and coming up with insane and hugely impractical inventions.
They can also be quite hard to tell apart - they all look pretty much identical, Borous' and Klein's voice actors sound quite similar, and for two of the big conversations they all 'speak' through Klein (which is pretty much just a way of getting around the fucking annoying 'only one NPC can speak in any given dialogue' mechanic). All of them have little stylistic tics that distinguish them, but for clarity's sake I'll use their pre-robot portraits.
Dr Klein: leader of the gang. TALKS LIKE THIS.
Dr Borous: experimenter on animals - loves them all, especially dogs, but has a tendency to make them deadly and violent. He's also virulently anti-Communist and obsessed with the bullying and alienation he suffered in high school. All of his dialogue starts with a dash and tend to suffer bouts of sudden melodramatic capitalisation.
8: Speaks only white noise - the result of our old friend Elijah's reign of destruction when he came here. As per the R2-D2 Law Of Incomprehensible Robots, he's the sensible one.
0: 0's voiced by an actor called James Urbaniak, from the Venture Brothers (which I haven't seen). Apparently he was originally intended to be a manic newscaster, but then got rewritten to make his character more focused on the fact that he's actually renownedly the least competent of the scientists and is downtrodden and unappreciated as a result, to the extent that no-one can remember his name. Which means he makes little out-of-place newscaster references all the time, but it's never really integrated into his personality. Goddamn rewrites. *conversation options appear inside asterisks*
Dala: The girl of the group, Dala misses being human and compensates for it with a creepy quasi-sexual obsession about the human body itself, which she calls 'formography', and humans, who she calls 'teddy bears'.
BE WARNED, INTRUDER! YOU ARE IN THE PRESENCE OF THE MIGHTY THINK TANK OF BIG MT, THE COLLECTIVE GENIUSES OF...WE...
...BY OPPENHEIMER, WHICH OF YOU SELF-PROFESSED GENIUSES HAS BEEN ADJUSTING MY VOLUME KNOB? WHO WAS IT?! WAS IT YOU, 8?
(Noises)
...OH, DR O, WAS IT? A LIKELY STORY. O COULDN'T SPARK TWO NEURONS IF THEY WERE IN A LATTICE OF BIOMED GEL.
*What? Me? Breaking news, Klein, it wasn't me, all right? I am the robotical engineer, 8 is soundwaves, that's his speciality.*
*You always do this, you always demean me in front of guests! And it's not 'O', all right, it's-'*
ENOUGH! EITHER OF YOU DO IT AGAIN, IT'LL BE THE LAST TIME! NOW...NOW...
GREAT...I FORGOT WHAT I WAS SAYING...WHAT WAS I TALKING ABOUT?
How are you all speaking through that one voice box?
DID IT...DID IT JUST SAY SOMETHING? BOROUS, YOU WORK WITH ANIMALS. TRANSLATE.
-It's a LOBOTOMITE! Here, in the DOME!-
OH, AS IF THIS SITUATION COULDN'T GET ANY WORSE, NOW WE'VE GOT LOBOTOMITES. DALA, GET THE SPRAY BEFORE IT EXCRETES EVERYWHERE.
Dr. Klein...if my hypothesis is correct, this Lobotomite is the repository of the brain we sent the signal to - the skinvelope containing it. If so, it's proof that there may be life beyond the Crater. Just look at it...the way it blinks. It's like a big hairless teddy bear.
I KNOW WHAT IT IS, DALA. I WANT TO KNOW WHY IT'S DOWN HERE, WITH ITS...ITS LIMBS ALL OVER EVERYTHING.
If you don't like the banter of this very long conversation or you just want to get to the Epic Shooting Shit Bro If I Wanted To Read I'd Read A Book, there are occasional dialogue options that let you cut through the Think Tank's ramblings. But if Youtube's any judge, players who don't like dialogue won't even read the dialogue options, so they end up picking the first option they see, going through the conversation the longest way around, and complaining that it's boring. Serves the buggers right.
AND ARE THOSE...PENISES I SEE WRIGGLING ON ITS FEET? DISGUSTING.
I believe those are toes, Dr Klein. Little teddy bear toes. Penises are much larger than those tiny extremities...eh, not that I would know.
I think OWB is often genuinely very funny (Borous in particular made me laugh out loud a few times) but it repeats this 'sexually frustrated robots obsess about sex!' gag far too often, mainly with Dala but with a number of other characters as well. Personally, I think it starts to drag early on and never recovers.
*I don't recall the human penis ever being that large.*
It depends on one's own frame of reference, Dr O. Look at its little nose with its two orifices for ingesting oxygen.
NOSES? BY THE GREAT STATIC, THESE LOBOTOMITES CONFOUND ME WITH THEIR SHEER NUMBER OF USELESS EXTREMITIES.
NOW IT'S HOLDING UP AN ARRAY OF FULLY-ERECT HAND-PENISES. IF IT TRIES TO INSERT THEM, ACTIVATE VIVISECTORS.
-Dr Klein, WAIT! I...I don't believe those gestures were random. Random AT ALL...-
-It's been...following our conversation! The Lobotomite...understands us!-
I agree with Borous' histrionic findings. This little Lobotomite is unusually attentive for something whose brain has been extracted.
NONSENSE. LOBOTOMITES CAN'T COMPREHEND US.
(Noises)
*8, have you been at the Mentats again? If we slow down our auro-processo-receptors to understand this excretion, we'll all be rendered ignorant!*
ALL OF YOU, POWER DOWN, SHUT UP AND LET ME PROVE ONCE AND FOR ALL HOW WRONG YOU ALL ARE. AS USUAL.
LOBOTOMITE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? CAN YOU SPEAK?
Yes. I'm guessing that crashed satellite was yours?
It's a bit of an unfortunate side-effect of focusing on the bickering of the Think-Tank that the player character's reduced to a bit of a quiet straight-man, and a lot of the dialogue options end up leading to the same result.
THOSE WERE WORDS, WEREN'T THEY? IN THE FORM OF QUESTIONS. IT'S ASKING ME QUESTIONS. IS THIS SOME KIND OF TRICK?
-Our efforts have turned against us! In playing GOD, we created a MONSTER!-
Perhaps as we were ruthlessly lobotomising it with our cutters, we filled this skinvelope with...awareness. A teddy bear with new stuffing.
*Wait. If what you're theorising is that this Lobotomite understands us...can reason with us...*
THEN THIS MAY BE JUST THE ANSWER WE'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR. AT LAST, A CHANCE TO...
-Dr Klein! A TRANSMISSION from the FORBIDDEN Zone! Coming right at US!-
Behind us, the big screen lights up.
It is I, Dr Mobius, transmitting from my dome-shaped...dome in the Forbidden Zone. A Zone that is...yes...forbidden to you.
Even now my deadly Robo-Scorpions swarm across Big MT with their pincers and pointy laser tails. Soon, all of Science will be mine.
Even the technologies sealed in the Big MT research centres cannot save you. So cower in your 'Think Tank'. Wait, for the end.
Uh...that's it.
Goodbye.
MOBIUS. ALWAYS THE SAME BROADCAST. HE'S CLEARLY MAD, DRIVEN INSANE BY HIS FLAWED AND IMPRECISE KINDERGARTEN-LEVEL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY.
*What are we going to do? There's no way we can breach the Forbidden Zone? There's robot scorpions everywhere!*
-The FORBIDDEN Zone, where no brain has ever ENTERED. Or RETURNED!-
Except Dr Mobius. And the technologies that could save us, they are out of our reach.
AND DR MOBIUS MOCKS US. DID YOU SEE HIS CRACKED MONITOR? HE'S CLEARLY LET HIMSELF GO.
If you couldn't tell, Klein has a bit of an insecurity issue when it comes to Mobius, which is also signified by their names' significance (all of the other scientists' names are related to loops).
(Noises)
*What? Ask the Lobotomite for help? 8, I think you need the fluid levels in your logic-assist pumps checked.*
If this Lobotomite responded, Dr Klein, then it is clearly intelligent, perhaps even displays heretofore unknown levels of helpfulness.
-But what of its brain? We scooped that out! We don't even know where we left it! And as for putting it back in...none of us have that knowledge!-
Yes, but it's still aware and responsive. Look at it...it's regarding us even now, with its big teddy bear eyes.
If we ask it politely and leave the part about the unnecessarily ruthless lobotomising out, it might be favourably disposed towards us.
Lobotomising? You lobotomised me?
We removed your brain, yes. So soft. Barely wrinkled, yet so...flush with experience and knowledge.
-Once the brain was out, then came the COILS...the TESLA COILS...the COILS of NIKOLA Tesla.-
(Noises)
*Yeah, 8, no need to brag. Wherever your brain is, it's transmitting thoughts to you through the...what...the...um...*
-The TESLA COILS! In its HEAD!-
This is fortunate in many respects. If your brain was anywhere in the Dome, why, you could access your aggression centres.
CIRCUMVENTING THE PACIFICATION FIELD IS A NO-NO. WE HAVE NEVER BEEN IN A FIGHT. WE DO NOT WANT THAT.
-Reminds me of my days in American High. And Richie Marcus...-
I don't know if Borous' voice actor recorded this line early on, but the delivery's wrong; he sounds nostalgic when he should be venomous and fearful.
(Medicine) That doesn't explain the laser-sutures on my chest...and on my spine.
I assume full responsibilty. I take my duties in the prodding and excision of living, breathing tissue quite seriously.
Although, in truth, the Auto-Doc had done most of the work already. Quite industrious, almost cut into my investigations. Once it had removed the brain and I misplaced it, other organs began to cry for direction using your nerves as telegraph wires. Rather than let them send their signals, I removed them as well. Sssh, little organs. Go to sleep in your tanks. Dala loves you.
-FIRST was the HEART...-
-WAIT, I mean...SECOND was the HEART. Brain was first. THIRD...the SPINE...-
If you ripped out my brain, where the hell is it?
*The brain lost itself...not in the metaphysical sense. Might have gotten flushed into one of the pipes. Actually, I think that's fairly likely.*
-If so, it was flushed all the way to Mobius. Fwoooooosh! That...is the sound of FLUSHING.-
BY THE FISSURE OF ROLANDO...ENOUGH OF THIS BIOLOGICAL SURGERY TALK. LOBOTOMITE, LISTEN TO MY VOICE. IT DENOMINATES ME TO ASK, BUT...WE NEED YOUR HELP.
IN MOST PROBABLE OF PROBABILITIES, OUR ENEMY, MOBIUS, HAS YOUR BRAIN. THIS IS NOT GOOD. HE WILL MOST LIKELY COME AFTER OUR BRAINS NEXT.
WE WANT YOU TO STOP HIM. SOMEHOW. WITH SCIENCE.
You said something about needing technologies to stop Mobius?
YES. IT IS OUR ONLY CHANCE. A DESPERATE PLAN THAT CAME TO US AFTER MOBIUS' FIRST BROADCAST.
MAYBE...JUST MAYBE...IF WE RECLAIM THESE BURIED TECHNOLOGIES, WE CAN PUT AN END TO MOBIUS AND THE HORRORS SPAWNING FROM THE FORBIDDEN ZONE.
(Intelligence) What, exactly, is the plan? You're losing me in generalities. I need specifics.
THE PLAN IS VERY COMPLICATED. WE ARE STILL CALCULATING HOW IT WOULD WORK IF IT SUCCEEDED. THAT IS OUR PART OF THE PLAN.
I'll help. What do you need me to do?
EXCELLENT. THIS IS TURNING OUT MUCH BETTER THAN THE ACTIVATE-THE-RETREAT-PROTOCOLS-AND-COWER-IN-MY-ROOM IDEA I HAD EARLIER.
(Noises)
8 IS CORRECT. ALL WE NEED ARE THE SCHEMATICS. THIS DOES NOT MEAN WE DO NOT WANT THE HARD, COLD TECHNOLOGY, HOWEVER.
This is the game's way of telling us that we're perfectly welcome to sell the 'technologies' we pick up without breaking the quest.
SO DO NOT GIVE INTO YOUR BIOLOGICAL TIRED-LAZINESS AND DECIDE YOU WOULD SWEAT TOO MUCH CARRYING THEM. YOU HAVE A NEW SPINE. USE IT.
AND EVEN IF YOU DIE IN THE ACT OF RECLAMATION, SIMPLY REACHING THEM WILL AUTO-TRANSMITIFY THE SCHEMATICS TO US. THAT IS STILL GOOD. ...FOR US.
This whole place sounds dangerous. Those devices sound dangerous.
NONSENSE. THIS PLACE IS NO MORE DANGEROUS THAN A NUCLEAR DETONATION SITE, OUR TECHNOLOGIES NO MORE LETHAL THAN AN OVERCHARGED TESLA CANNON.
THE TECHNOLOGIES ARE THE X-2 TRANSMITTER ANTENNA ARRAY, USED TO FOCUS COHERENT THOUGHT AT EXCESSIVELY HIGH FREQUENCIES.
-The psycho-analytic cardiac-dampening stealth suit, a suit like NOTHING this world has ever SEEN! Or could EVER see!-
...and 8's Sonic-Soundwave-Emitter-Projecto-Gun, able to broadcast sound at lethal frequencies. It also gives a great biogel massage.
THERE. WE HAVE INFORMED YOU OF ALL WE NEED. WE ESTIMATE IF YOU ARE FOCUSED, YOUR TIME INVESTMENT WILL BE MINIMAL. EH, BY OUR STANDARDS.
IF YOU WORK QUICKLY, YOU WILL BE THE RECIPIENT OF A GESTURE OF GRATITUDE FROM US. WE DO NOT BESTOW THESE OLD-WORLD GESTURES LIGHTLY.
I know you get a different ending slide depending on whether or not you 'work quickly' (that is to say, if you explore the non-quest-related locations or not), but I haven't been able to find any mention the Old World item Klein's talking about. Doesn't matter, since we're going to damn well go exploring.
What if I take my time, explore the crater?
WHAT ILLOGIC IS THIS? KEEP YOUR FILTHY PENIS-TIPPED FEET OUT OF OUR LABS AND SECRETS!
Guess I'd better get walking, then.
The little teddy-bear could always run right into the pylon perimeter on its thick, turgid feet, returning it to us erectly - directly.
THE RADAR FENCE THAT SURROUNDS THE BIG MT CRATER WILL PREVENT - ER, PROTECT YOU FROM STRAYING BEYOND THE FACILITY.
-The mighty radar fence protects us ALL! Get too close to the blinking posts, and the proximity warning shall be your...WARNING you are too close!
*If you get near it, your vision will blur as the electrodes in your head shut off by one, click click click...*
You see, if rendered unconscious by the pylons, you will be returned to the Sink, seemingly instantaneously by your deadened perceptions.
I don't know if at some stage the devs planned not to include fast-travel in the DLC, but since there is, the pylons are pointless.
So I can't leave?
*Oh, Dr Klein...Dr Klein? If I may intersect for a moment?*
WHAT IS IT? THE LOBOTOMITE IS ASKING ME THINGS, O, AND I AM TRYING TO IGNORE THEM. MY PROCESSORS CAN'T IGNORE YOU BOTH AT THE SAME TIME.
*Well...you know how we asked it to fetch the Sonic Emitter thing? Turns out we already have it. What are the odds?*
WHAT IS THIS, A HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE FAIR?! GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER, YOU'RE MAKING US LOOK LIKE A BUNCH OF ROUND-EARTHERS!
*You're always yelling! My receptors can't take it any more - and neither can my feelings!*
I AM YELLING BECAUSE YOU CONTAMINATED SPECIMENS CAN'T KEEP YOUR PROBES OFF THE VOLUME KNOB ON MY VOICE MODULE!
If you have the gun already, I don't understand what you need.
IT IS TRULY THE END OF ALL INTELLIGENCE WHEN THE LOBOTOMITE SPEAKS MORE SENSE THAN YOU 'GENIUSES'.
SO - IF WE HAVE THE SOUNDWAVE...SONIC PROJECT...PROJECT-O THING GUN...THEN WHAT IN HEISENBERG'S NAME DO WE NEED FROM X-8?! ANYONE?
I believe we need a new frequency embedded into the gun. It was designed to broadcast many sounds once charged. We just don't know the frequency.
-And it is LOST in X-8! Just as X-8 was forever lost to us! The sadness of my high-school days! The sadness of my YOUTH, LOST! LOST!-
*Oh, really, Borous? All you did in high school was Commie fink tattle-tale on all the kids you hated, you little teacher's pet brown-hound.*
GIVE. THE LOBOTOMITE. THE EMITTER.
Here follows a bit where 8 'sonjaculates' a soundwave into the gun and everyone acts like the sound is sperm. It's not very funny.
(Guns) Got anything that spits lead?
WHAT DID IT SAY? SPITS LEAD? WHAT, LIKE PENCILS?
*Oh, I think it wants a combustion pistol.*
-A GUN? Are you MAD? We can't give it a GUN. GUNS kill, leave big open holes in you that are like sores but WORSE.-
(Noises)
Dr 8 is correct. We have already given the teddy bear a lethal sonic death ray filled with his sonic ejaculate and sterilised by my soft wooWOOing. Giving the teddy bear a gun would be the equivalent of following a glass of hemlock with an Abraxo chaser. Delicious and redundantly deadly.
IF WE'RE GOING TO BRING THE SOCRATIC METHOD INTO IT, FINE. GIVE THE LOBOTO-BEAR A COMBUSTION GUN. BOROUS? DON'T YOU HAVE SOMETHING LIKE THAT?
-Yes, I have THE Cyberdog gun. With the little floppy metal ears and the curious nose sensor. Here.-
FINE, DONE. THAT GUN MAKES ME UNCOMFORTABLE ANYWAY. ALWAYS AFRAID IT'S GOING TO HUMP MY CHASSIS. ANYTHING ELSE, LOBOTOMITE?
FINE. BOROUS, MORE AMMO. THE GOOD STUFF.
FINE. SO...YES. GET THESE THINGS FOR US. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND THEIR COMPLICATED SCHEMATICS. THAT IS FOR US TO DO.
Oh, I'll be sure not to tamper with anything. I promise.
WELL. GOOD. WHAT ARE THE TOKEN WORDS SPOKEN IN THIS CASE? UH...'THANK YOU'? YES. THANK YOU.
Wait - is it leaving? Uh, but Dr Klein, the Lobotomite will need rest. Recuperation. Things like that. I volunteer my chambers that it might be stared at, my monitor radars slowly scanning its form to collect sensitive data.
-NO! That would put it too CLOSE to us! It could press BUTTONS, turn lights ON and OFF, and worse, let OTHER lobotomites in!
*We could give it Mobius' old room. It's where its brain got scooped out anyway, and plus, some of its old parts are in there.*
I SUPPOSE. WE'LL HAVE TO MOVE THAT COUCH OUT OF THERE. BEEN PUTTING THAT OFF FOR TOO LONG.
THERE IS NO MORE WE CAN DO TO AID YOU AND OUR PATIENCE LEVELS ARE DEPLETED. NOW GO. REST IN THE SINK IF YOU MUST, BUT LEAVE US TO OUR RESEARCH.
*Uh, if you're done, can we move again? My biogel's starting to crampagulate.*
OF COURSE. GO MAN YOUR SCIENCE STATIONS! I AM SURROUNDED BY CHILDREN...
It makes sense to talk to the individual members of the Think Tank now, most of whom have plenty to say and mini-quests to offer. But that was a fucking long conversation, so instead we go check out our new pad.
NEXT TIME: Robo-butlers, high school reunions, using science to create inhuman abominations and actual gameplay!
Yeah, I got a lot of time for Old World Blues. The developers referred to it, internally and in PR, as a 'Wizard of Oz' story. Which means jokey references (the player's main motivation is to find their heart, brain and 'spine') but it's also about tone.
See, Fallout 2 takes a lot of flak for all the silliness, but it really comes back to a fantastic and key element/serious, crippling problem with the gameworld itself; you've got this principle that funny nonsense, (i.e. in-game logic based on outdated science fiction), can be treated seriously as a major part of the lore. If you get overexcited and stretch that principle, you end up with talking plants and xenomorph-alikes in Fallout 2; if you're a tone-deaf hack and you stretch that principle, you end up with entire towns terrorised by fake superheroes in Fallout 3.
And so the more you add to the lore as the franchise expands, the sillier the gameworld gets and the closer it becomes to pure lulzy sci-fi shoot-em-up comedy. Which is something MCA, Cain, Sawyer and co. have openly showed concern about - Cain disliked 3's attempts at comedy, they all stated Van Buren would be a return to the tone of the original game, I think one of them even said they wished the humour had been removed from the start...
And what OWB does is use the idea of a 4 or 5-hour DLC adventure for something other than 'let's just get the interns to make a new dungeon, stick some new overpowered loot in and charge an extra fifteen dollars' - it lets the devs draw a big fat tonal line between NV proper and the crazy fantasy-land of the DLC, and then use the latter as a playground for all of the lulziest, Fallout-2-esque shit they can invent, without having to worry about diluting the tone of the main game.
Appropriately, it reuses a lot of ideas and characters from the Environmental Protection Agency, a cut location from Fallout 2 that would've been pretty much the culmination of the game's absurdities:
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Environmental_Protection_Agency
It also shares some similarities with a couple of Van Buren locations (Boulder Dome and the starting prison, which itself had some of its identity mixed in with an earlier version of the Big MT).
Anyway, enough blathering.
Following a radio signal boasting of a Midnight Movie Showing, close to Nipton, the Courier is surprised to find a giant flickering projection of an eye...and a crashed satellite.
The slightly snarky tone is in response to complaints by players that they didn't know Dead Money was going to take their items away.
As he activates the satellite, blue light flares up - and the Courier has a sudden premonition that he's about to be knocked unconscious and spirited to a faraway place through a contrived and never-properly-explained means of transportation!
There's no real reason why our character would regain consciousness here, but we do get a rather lovely view of the landscape below.
Opening a nearby door, the Courier discovers...something he didn't expect.
Meet the Think Tank, scientists extraordinaire and professional malapropists. They're pretty much the sci-fi equivalent of the wizarding faculty from the Discworld books - in that they seem to spend their time bickering, getting distracted and rambling on at length, failing to deal with their massive character flaws, and coming up with insane and hugely impractical inventions.
They can also be quite hard to tell apart - they all look pretty much identical, Borous' and Klein's voice actors sound quite similar, and for two of the big conversations they all 'speak' through Klein (which is pretty much just a way of getting around the fucking annoying 'only one NPC can speak in any given dialogue' mechanic). All of them have little stylistic tics that distinguish them, but for clarity's sake I'll use their pre-robot portraits.
If you don't like the banter of this very long conversation or you just want to get to the Epic Shooting Shit Bro If I Wanted To Read I'd Read A Book, there are occasional dialogue options that let you cut through the Think Tank's ramblings. But if Youtube's any judge, players who don't like dialogue won't even read the dialogue options, so they end up picking the first option they see, going through the conversation the longest way around, and complaining that it's boring. Serves the buggers right.
I think OWB is often genuinely very funny (Borous in particular made me laugh out loud a few times) but it repeats this 'sexually frustrated robots obsess about sex!' gag far too often, mainly with Dala but with a number of other characters as well. Personally, I think it starts to drag early on and never recovers.
It's a bit of an unfortunate side-effect of focusing on the bickering of the Think-Tank that the player character's reduced to a bit of a quiet straight-man, and a lot of the dialogue options end up leading to the same result.
Behind us, the big screen lights up.
If you couldn't tell, Klein has a bit of an insecurity issue when it comes to Mobius, which is also signified by their names' significance (all of the other scientists' names are related to loops).
I don't know if Borous' voice actor recorded this line early on, but the delivery's wrong; he sounds nostalgic when he should be venomous and fearful.
This is the game's way of telling us that we're perfectly welcome to sell the 'technologies' we pick up without breaking the quest.
I know you get a different ending slide depending on whether or not you 'work quickly' (that is to say, if you explore the non-quest-related locations or not), but I haven't been able to find any mention the Old World item Klein's talking about. Doesn't matter, since we're going to damn well go exploring.
I don't know if at some stage the devs planned not to include fast-travel in the DLC, but since there is, the pylons are pointless.
Here follows a bit where 8 'sonjaculates' a soundwave into the gun and everyone acts like the sound is sperm. It's not very funny.
It makes sense to talk to the individual members of the Think Tank now, most of whom have plenty to say and mini-quests to offer. But that was a fucking long conversation, so instead we go check out our new pad.
NEXT TIME: Robo-butlers, high school reunions, using science to create inhuman abominations and actual gameplay!