The Dunwich Building

[LordPariah]

What, exactly is up with it compared to the rest of the wastes..

Its obviously haunted. But no where else in the wastes really are. I can understand the trauma that is included in a nuclear apocalypse, but by this standard should that kind of thing happen everywhere?

 

Should all of the wastes be haunted by the ghosts of the past- literally?

 

Or was there something special about the Dunwich Building?

 

My take is that someone there was a latent psyker whos powers were activated by the bomb.

 

I mean, lorewise there are psykers in the Fallout universe - people with psionic powers.

 

What if he/she died violently? Then all that psychic energy would likely explode and cause strange, lovecraftian affects - circa F.E.A.R.

 

Your guys' take?

Edited June 27, 2013 by GaylordPariah

[7thsealord]

Maybe we should blame the old indian burial ground that the place was built on. ;)

[DZMaven]

It's supposed to be a H.P. Lovecraft inspired area, named after The Dunwich Horror. Betheseda is a big fan of his apparently.

It's implied the weirdness there is due to the obelisk discovered under the building. (You did find that, right? lol)

[Nintii]

When you do the Point Lookout DLC you will be asked to find a mysterious book in one of the quests

and it's linked to the underground pillar in the Dunwich bldg.

You must burn it or something like that if I remember correctly, it's supposed to be "evil".

[eLucifer]

Every place haunted? This ain't Metro. :P

[Synavix]

I think it gives the place a unique, scary feeling towards it. It would look pretty repetitive and more of a horror game if they added it to quite a few buildings.

[Rooker75]

I've cleared that building a half dozen times and that one ghoul that appears in front of you after a flashback still scares the heck out of me every time.

[madman132]

Oh please no more "haunting" of buildings.

I recognize the "Ghost story" and then i get bored immediately and all atmossphere is lost on me. I will get startled by things and i know that i will get startled by things because oh so many ghoststories do that all the time.

I found the vaults far more creepy then dunwich building. The dunwich building has ghosts and monsters i already saw, it is either that or humans possessed by "unknowable evil". And it's supernatural so it doesn't have to make any sense.

 

In the vaults, i know the "evil", it was my species, the monster is not some unknowable BS, it is me.

 

 

Furthermore, i went into fallout expecting silver age scifi overlayed apocalypse and the dunwhich is a horror/fantasy bit that seems out of place. You got survival horror in my game, and i don't like survival horror because it relies on fantasy way too much. Survival horror doesn't work for me because even if the game scares me sufficiently it will merely have me find a solution to a problem that wont work within the gameworld because it's impractical to implement.

"Jump out the window! Oh, doesn't work because the window isn't a destructible object..."

 

That is, *if* i don't immediately identify the bad guy as evil ghost creature thing. We've all seen that before, some unseen unstoppable evil that annoys protagonists of movies and need to be stopped by lifting a curse or just escaping from the haunted place because evil ghosts don't like to travel apparently...

[Rennn]

Oh please no more "haunting" of buildings.

I recognize the "Ghost story" and then i get bored immediately and all atmossphere is lost on me. I will get startled by things and i know that i will get startled by things because oh so many ghoststories do that all the time.

I found the vaults far more creepy then dunwich building. The dunwich building has ghosts and monsters i already saw, it is either that or humans possessed by "unknowable evil". And it's supernatural so it doesn't have to make any sense.

 

In the vaults, i know the "evil", it was my species, the monster is not some unknowable BS, it is me.

 

 

Furthermore, i went into fallout expecting silver age scifi overlayed apocalypse and the dunwhich is a horror/fantasy bit that seems out of place. You got survival horror in my game, and i don't like survival horror because it relies on fantasy way too much. Survival horror doesn't work for me because even if the game scares me sufficiently it will merely have me find a solution to a problem that wont work within the gameworld because it's impractical to implement.

"Jump out the window! Oh, doesn't work because the window isn't a destructible object..."

 

That is, *if* i don't immediately identify the bad guy as evil ghost creature thing. We've all seen that before, some unseen unstoppable evil that annoys protagonists of movies and need to be stopped by lifting a curse or just escaping from the haunted place because evil ghosts don't like to travel apparently...

 

Relax, it's just an easter egg for HP Lovecraft fans. All his books had those admittedly cheap "unknowable horrors", but ofc they were written in like the 1920s, so what do you expect? It didn't stop them from becoming arguably the most influential horror literature ever. The Dunwich building just alludes to that, nothing more, nothing less. It's like Hackdirt in Oblivion, or Apocrypha in Skyrim.

Now that I think about it... the sheer quantity of mythos references in TES and the new Fallouts seems to indicate that Bethesda is a big fan of Lovecraft.

 

That said, I agree with your assessment that survival horror games are painfully limited. If there's a terrifying abomination of some sort chasing me, I should be able to lock doors, barricade stuff, jump out windows, climb trees, and generally have freedom of movement and interaction. Otherwise it just feels like a cheap exercise in frustration. *cough* Dead Space *cough*.

Some horror games attempt this kind of environmental interaction (Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth), but none actually manage to fully pull it off.

 

I maintain that the scariest moment I've had in a game though, was being stalked by a rabid bear through a wrecked cabin in the woods, in Condemned 2: Bloodshot.

[charwo]

There are also evil spirits in the top floor of the Red Racer buildings, with the same whispering sounds as the Virulent Underchambers. But that's not because of any pre-war evil, but the Surgeon.

 

Honestly it takes a LOT for the supernatural to puncture through into the material world of Fallout: psykers are vanishingly small. You can count the number of supernatural encounters (that aren't Easter eggs) in Fallout on one hand: the Master's psyckers, Anna Winslow's ghost, the Forecaster, The Dunwich quests and the Surgeon's lab. The Ghost of She thing is possible, but you're on drugs. That there is no supernatural activity at Germantown, the Divide, Vault 106 or Big Mountain, not even the Sierra Madre is astonishing. And the supernatural you can see, you can bludgeon to death and defeat.