Do Gooder Press

I haven’t been able to put many hours into the mega-mod, Fallout: The Frontier, and if you haven’t found a way to get it yet, you’ll have to wait, possibly forever. Their site has only an announcement regarding a bit of what’s at play and its sub-pages are 404’s. The mod itself has been hidden on the Nexus. In addition, there’s a few items of content in the actual mod that have raised a few eyebrows involving slavery and something I’ll call “speed dating” with a Deathclaw.

Myself, I never reached these parts of the mod, as it took a lot of tweaking and experimenting to get it to actually run. Even with the limited time I spent with the main NCR quest and a few sidequests, I could tell that this mod was… well, a mod. That isn’t to say that a ton of work didn’t go into it or they didn’t pull off some amazing stuff with an old and notoriously buggy engine. It’s just that the seams really show in places. Also, I could see some spots where they had an idea for what they wanted to happen and went for something that the game really couldn’t deliver on.

Comparisons to the Call of Duty franchise are fair for the first parts of the mod, which I did play through. You have the option of skipping some cutscenes, which is probably for the best. There’s a reason why the other Fallout games relied on slideshows, terminal entries, or only a few lines of dialog to set the stage. One part of these scenes is the battle for the Helios One power plant in the Mojave, which is there to explain why the NCR folk are in The Frontier, away from the desert. Ironically, they’re deserters, because General Oliver rescinded his promise that the conscripted men under one General Blackthorn could go home after taking Helios One. You’re reliving the memories of a soldier who was there, so you don’t get to have much agency, and you’re asked to end the lives of several wounded soldiers because there’s not enough medical supplies to save them.

Put a pin in that bit about medicine, as it irks me later on.

So anyway, you join up for a “tour” with the NCR for 2,000 caps. They know who you are, as you’re the “legendary Courier 6.” I couldn’t decide if this was a meta thing or was a breaking of the 4th wall where it appears that some of the NPC’s realize that you’re the protagonist and therefore you’re running the show. You meet a few soldiers, especially their special ops team called “The Wolfpack.” They’re the ones that you get to know even better right after you get captured by the Legion on your first mission. Your character is tortured for information regarding whatever the NCR is cooking up here in the ruins of Portland, which you don’t have, so you end up on a cross.

Cut to the Wolfpack who are sent out to save you. You get to play as Hardcase, the leader. It’s not difficult to do as you have regenerating health and four unkillable comrades to help. You can die, but you just reload from your last save or checkpoint. Finally, you reach the Courier (your character), free them, and then have to escort them to a landing zone where you’re picked up by Vertibirds. Sadly, on the way back, the Wolfpack’s vehicle is shot down and the Legion descends on the wreckage. Playing as Hardcase, you shoot at as many Legionnaires as you can, but this is a “supposed to lose” fight, and eventually, you’re overwhelmed and Legate Valarius (head of the Frontier Legion) gives you a final farewell before you’re riddled with bullets.

I will note that their portrayal of my character was completely wrong, as the second “I” was released from the cross, “I” immediately didn’t loot the nearby corpses for weapons, armor, ammo, and things I could sell. It totally wrecked my immersion, I’m telling you.

So then it’s off to the infirmary with you, where blood and other supplies are taken from dying soldiers being operated on to save your life. Again, put a pin in this, as it now really bugged me. I suppose this was all to drive home how important you are and kind of make you feel like you owe it to the NCR and General Blackthorn for sacrificing so many soldiers and vehicles to get you back. You’re shown what the NCR is fighting to protect, which is basically a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, unfinished since the Great War and hidden under the airport. And that’s about as far as I got before reading about the problematic things that have cropped up since release.

I hope it gets retooled and a Steam release, because for all its flaws, it’s still got some interesting parts to it. That said, it does have a few issues that stood out, apart from the controversial stuff:

• So much walking. Not just in terms of long hikes from place to place on the map (yes, the Mojave had some of that, too) but in-engine scenes where you’re supposed to follow someone while they monologue at you. This dialog is unskippable, and both it and the stroll you’re on just keeps going and going.

• The Gamebryo engine is a temperamental beast most of the time, and I’m sure some of the setpieces pushed it beyond its design limits. If you do play it, look up the console commands for no-clipping as there were several times I spawned in a new scene on the wrong side of a wall and had to find a way “in” to the playable area.

• The Gamebryo engine is really bad at conversations between NPC’s. I suspect that how the game is run relies on a series of triggers, flags, and other moving bits that go off when certain conditions are met. From my perspective, I think whatever that sets them off can be affected by lag or other bits of the game having to catch up to what’s going on, which means that if two NPCs are talking, there’s a gap between the end of one character’s dialog and the start of the other’s. This is really weird to see when one sentence is supposed to cut off another, sounding instead like one actor in our stage play just ran out of script and the other one hasn’t heard their cue yet. It’s a small thing, but several scenes relied on what I’m sure were supposed to be snappy replies, taking all the air out of whatever was being said.

• This is a mod made of mods. As the more issues have come to light, the writing has shown itself to be kind of a tarball, added to by trying to make everything kind of work together. There didn’t appear to be a core story or direction for The Frontier, so everything was just kind of stitched together and main quests often ended with explosions out of nowhere or didn’t flow together smoothly from a narrative perspective. That said, the sidequest areas were decent enough and many would’ve fit right in most other Fallout games.

I put two pins in stuff having to do with death and dying in Fallout. and it’s not exactly the fault of this game that it stood out. However, they shouldn’t have drawn attention to it: When you can take a nuke to the face and recover by downing a few healing items, it’s hard to be believably dramatic about the fragility of life in a video game. I hoovered up enough stimpaks to save everyone in the med bay before I’d gotten jumped by the Legion, so they’re not exactly rare, and they fix everything from crippled limbs to being one hit point away from death. I know plot-driven injury and incapacitation are a staple in games, but the addition of me needing health items that meant others would die in a military medical facility came off as too convenient, at least to me.

It’s like how in fantasy games, important people dying is shown to be a really big deal when you’ve got enough healing spells and other items that should, in theory, be able to bring anyone to a level of health that’s so robust they could probably succeed at their own fetch quests. But we’re not allowed to use them, because if we did, that’d probably wreck the plot. The trick is to hide this well enough that it doesn’t become the obvious solution to everything, especially royal succession or other leadership positions prone to assassination.

Anyway, I never reached the areas where it’s said are things beyond the pale, even for Fallout, so I can’t directly comment on those. I read that the mod was being retooled to address these concerns, but given the state of their website and the fact that the lead dev has quit, I have no idea what the future holds for it. I had put the game on hold in the hopes for a less crash-prone version, but that might never come, either. Earlier today, one of the devs did a Q&A on Twitter, so I’m linking it here for further reading.

Anyway, if you want a total conversion mod for a Bethesda game that’s been very well received, I’ll plug yet again for Enderall: Forgotten Stories… if you can get it to run. 🙂