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Since the very beginning, the Fallout franchise has produced incredibly ambitious games. With
almost every new title becoming even larger and more impressive in scale. When creating
these massive worlds though, not every concept is going to make its way into the final product.
Whether it’s lack of time, lack of quality or some combination of both, there is a huge
amount of stories, weapons and characters that can only be restored with mods, if at
all. So this week we’re going to be spotlighting some of the cut content from the two most
recent Fallout PC games, Fallout 4 and New Vegas.
We’ll start with Fallout 4, which actually has a pretty decent amount of content that
will never be made into the game. One example is the quest “20 Leagues Under the Sea”.
You can find a few unused assets for the quest in the games files. Overall not much is known
about this underwater themed quest, but fans were able to piece together a few interesting
finds. The story of the quest, according to some unused dialogue, appears to have involved
an underwater vault and a Chinese nuclear submarine. Also included in the quest was
a harpoon gun that players could use, one that looks completely different from the version
that would later appear in Far Harbor. Located at Hamilton Place just off Tremont
Street, The Combat Zone is one of the most unique locations in Fallout 4. But when fans
first got access to the game, many were disappointed that there wasn’t much actual combat in
the Combat Zone. This was not always going to be the case though. Tommy Lonegan, the
fight club’s owner, was originally meant to have a much larger role in the game. And
some of his dialogue left behind in the game suggests that he would have functioned as
a betting bookie. Allowing players to bet and battle to the death in Thunderdome style
combat. For unknown reasons though, this feature was completely dropped, leaving The Combat
Zone feeling just a little bit empty. Moving on to New Vegas, one of the most notable
exclusions from the game is the removal of two NPC types in Freeside: the Beggars and
the Pickpockets. Probably intended to keep players on their toes while making their way
through the slums of New Vegas. Found in the files of the game is two pickpockets nicknamed
“Roger the Codger” and “Bitter Bob”, giving us just a hint of what might have been
in the poorest area of New Vegas. Speaking of Freeside, remember Rotface? For
those who don’t, Rotface was a very talkative ghoul who knew more than his fair share of
gossip and random information. Originally though, Rotface was going to have a bit more
to do. In fact he was going to have an entire quest dedicated to him, where the player gets
to decide his ultimate fate. The story of the quest was going to be that Rotface, newly
rich off the money you give him in exchange for information, would react one of a few
possible ways depending on what the player said to him in dialogue options. The first
possibility is that he would have started spending cash like crazy and attract too much
attention from jealous local thugs, ending up dead. The second is that he would have
worked up the courage to attempt to rob the player at gunpoint, which probably wouldn’t
have ended too well for him either. A third option was that he would just leave Freeside
altogether. But at the end of the day, it seems that Obsidian simply ran out of time
to put any of this in the game, leaving a half-finished script in New Vegas’ files
despite all his dialogue being present. Now for our comment showcase! This week’s
comment comes from Mrgolamhossein who has a theory that the infamous Pink Goo found
at the Suffolk County Charter School references a real life incident, specifically an experiment
that ran from 1946 to 1953 at an elementary school in Massachusetts that was done by the
US Atomic Energy Commission and the American oatmeal brand Quaker Oats. In the experiment
73 mentally disabled children were fed oatmeal containing radioactive calcium and other radioisotopes,
in order to track "how nutrients were digested". The children didn’t know that they were
eating radioactive material though, instead they were told by teachers that they were
simply “joining a science club”. This mirrors the “pink goo” being fed to the
kids in the game, also without the children knowing the full effects of what they were
eating. As for the real world event, some of the now fully grown children were able
to file a lawsuit in 1994, and although they never received an official apology from Quaker
Oats or the US government, they were each awarded $60,000 in damages.
On our last Fallout Hidden History we asked you to share your weirdest gnome
encounter from Far Harbor, and Hunter Henry supplied us with a very creepy encounter saying
*clear throat* “I was walking in the mist that day when the gnomes attacked, I saw a
group of raiders, and I saw it... the gnome and the mist got thicker and the raiders were
out of my line of sight, and the raiders started shooting at something, the mist cleared and
all the raiders were headless.”
Now it’s time for some trivia. Last week
we asked you the name of Lucio’s debut album in Overwatch and the answer was B) Synaesthesia
Auditiva. This week our Fallout question is about Far Harbor. What is the name of
the merchant Alan Lee’s sister?