Urban Accessible

[charwo]

If this idea has been done, then excuse my ignorance, but given the trouble one has to go through to not fast travel through DC seems a bit much. Much of the city is only accessible by subway lines and sewers. While this makes sense on a first walk through, it continues to be a pain for long afterward. And if you have a vehicle, the commute is worse than New York! Good grief! So....what I think would be a good idea for the game is an urban accessible mod. It would run something like this: After fighting your way into the GNR compound with Sentinel Lyons, a Scribe approaches you about scouting out the ruins. Big deal right? You do some that in the Geomapping quests. Well, this is different. The Brotherhood wants to open the city to foot traffic and needs someone to 'clear out the areas' to be safe enough for debris clearing teams to work. Now this won't exactly be turning DC street grid uncluttered, but what it will do is clear the rubble from certain blocked streets, allowing foot and cart traffic, and thus allow the supply lines of the Brotherhood to become streamlined.

 

In terms of what would be required by modders, it would be a simple matter of finding which sections of DC have the lest amount of rubble, and then creating a new landscape, wherein the material in the street have been removed, unblocking the way between areas. Then to activate it, you'd need a Brotherhood Scribe stationed at the GNR outpost where the quest can be activated and updated. Other than voice acting, it wouldn't require a lot of work. Well, that is is the crews are never seen, and the work is done completely off camera. Not being overly familiar with GECK I know with the Morrowind version of the Elder Scrolls construction kit, a similar issue could be dealt with just by deleting all the refuse. All you might need to put down is a new street under the rubble pile, which doesn't require any planning. If I were more familiar with the mod program I'd do it myself. But the tricky part is how the AI would verify these areas have been scouted. What I propose is that the script read that in order to clear an area for the crews to clear a block, the player must kill something like five supermutants on either side for a low threat area, or five on each side for something like the Vernon Square/Mall blockage. After that the area is considered safe enough for the crews to go in. And you could rig up a system where after the quest, going to the intersections in question would send a flag up that intersection side is free for removal. The Player would have to do both sides of course.

 

The end result is that whether you are hard core and don't do fast travel or have a vehicle, you can make life a lot easier on yourself with hard work and totally in game. And if it's scripted right, it wouldn't compromise the mission structure either main quest or side quest. So, anyone else like this idea?

[MichikoUnknownFox]

I mentioned a bit of this in your other thread, which you probably haven't read yet at this point.

 

It's possible, but it's actually more complicated than you describe. The problem is the cells are not actually connected in the DCWorld. Opening the rubble up won't connect them. If you try using the TCL console command, you'll see what I mean. You have to copy the contents of entire cells and paste them together. It will conflict with the vanilla quests, and will conflict with all the mods made so far that rely on the existence of the vanilla pattern. You're going to need to fix all of those too.

 

It's possible for sure, but you're going to have to edit a lot of things. It'll take many months (or years depending on how much time the modders spend on it; some of us have jobs and can't mod full-time) of work and testing.

 

If work on this were started years ago when FO3 was still new, it would've been more likely that it would've taken off. By this point, as a modder, I'm just worried that even if I started a mod like this, I or many of the players may have already lost interest in FO3 altogether, especially with new games coming out practically every month. Maybe the next Fallout game would even be out by then.