This DLC could actually have a mod created to tie in with it which would be a nice solution to fast travel. The thing that bugged me the most about Fallout 3 was the ability to magic travel, and wandering around on foot made the land area feel far too small. (Hey, it’s that water tower again. Hi water tower!)

The vehicle mods are fun, but not really practical, I looked into those because Fallout 2 had the right idea; give the player a car! However, due to the nature of the movement system in Bethy games, it works about as well as the Horse did in Oblivion… which is to say; pretty damn poorly. And there are further hitches that made it worse than that.

However…

If you’re still reading and you haven’t made the idiot assumption that this is a post to bash Fallout 3 (good for you, you can actually set aside rashly made assumptions in favour of observation, which most of humanity tends to be incapable of), then you’ll be rewarded as I’m about to get to the meat of the matter.

Mothership Zeta presents us with an interesting possibility for a mod, as I said. Envision this…

The first part of the mod is that it completely disables Fast Travel, a mix of slowing the overall player movement speed along with the inclusion of the sprint mod could also help give the World a larger feel, but I digress…. we start off with disabling fast travel.

Then, when one is aboard the Mothership, one can gain the ability to hop around, akin to Star Trek’s transporters or Cable’s bodysliding. You’d be able to get a replenishable amount of ‘translocator beacons’ which could be named and then dropped in place as a static item.

So for example, I could name one ‘Canterbury Commons’ and drop it just outside the town.

One would also have an alien device that can scan the area of the Capitol Wasteland for translocator beacons and present a list, showing the names of the beacons as they were given by the player, thus presenting a list of locations that the player has visited and dropped a translocator beacon at.

The player would then select one, and opt to ‘translocate’. This would move them to the selected beacon, and as the area finishes loading in, a rift-like animation plays around the player signalling that they’ve just arrived at their destination, which will be a short distance from the translocator beacon.

Furthermore, such a system would also allow for easier house mods, the player could go to their house and drop a translocator beacon outside, or even inside their house, this would allow players to perform transports to their favourite shops or place of rest, even.

To finish up, the player could even have a temporary translocation return, which they could drop, translocate somewhere, and then go back to where they were at which point that item would become useless, these would be replenishable too, of course, but the player would probably have to find the items to build them, or power them via fission batteries or whatnot.

Having that tech around as part of the Fallout world would be a bit silly, even as top-secret Gov’t tech. However, having that around as a form of alien technology? Now there’s an idea, eh? And considering the thought that Star Trek came about in the 60′s, it’s not that far off the era of Sci-Fi that Fallout tends to represent.

Plus it could be cheesed up a bit by giving the translocators gigantic antennae with balls at the end and little rings around, and good stuff like that.

So yes, such a mod tied into the arrival of Mothership Beta could fix the primary niggling aspect of Fallout 3 for me, forever. No more WhizzBangMagicTransport, and no more passing that damned water tower for the billionth time.

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@Starky

Yes, yes it would.

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What can I say, I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed Fallout 1 and 2 and think Planescape: Torment is man’s crowning achievement.

Go on, put me in a box.

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Yeah, see, that doesn’t work on the Internet, because there are people that stupid.

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ASIDE: As someone who plays a lot of non-computer roleplaying games I get pretty confused by what people’s expectations are for computer-based “roleplaying games”. I actually used CRPGs as an example fo a kind of game that I’d play where I had, in essence, zero creative engagement.
Sometimes I think people are asking too much of CRPGs – or at least they are asking the wrong things. What the right things are though is something I haven’t worked out. Presumably it is not something like “My Life With Master” or “Dogs in the Vineyard”, but it is also more than just “Baldur’s Gate, Again, With Better 3D Bosoms”.

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Which he did.

Before Tolkien you had old folktales, elves dwarves and so on yes, all different all unique. The myth of elves and dwarves for example often crossed and were basically one and the same (Norse dark elves)

After Tolkien you had the modern fantasy setting, He took all that mythology, stitched it together into a world.
He invented a language for it, he created that pattern which almost all fantasy has followed from.

Just as vampires existed in myth before Bram Stoker, it doesn’t change the fact that he basically invented the modern take on the Vampire Myth, and almost all vampire fiction that has followed has being massively influenced by his works.

Nobody has forgotten anything of mythology, hell I’d go so far as to say we know more about mythology now than we ever have, given the dedicated works of many, many people studying it…
To dismiss his works as “crap tastic” or deny the influence and power they’ve had, to deny that Tolkien was the first to create that fantasy world template that almost all modern fantasy uses – is idiotic on a scale usually reserved for creationist arguments.

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As for why the sum of the parts gets high scores when all the individual parts are mediocre at best… My theory is that it’s difficult to put yourself in the I’m an objective reviewer seat, take a look at the HUGE WORLD! and MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF DETAIL! and OVER 1000000 LOCATIONS! and then say that the developers didn’t try hard enough.

Oblivion’s gameplay was fundamentally broken on its most basic levels, a fact that was discarded by most as a minor annoyance. If that bothers you, maybe you have slightly different priorities than game reviewers… and wildly different priorities than game consumers.

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