#i mean an amount of railroading that would stand out in a bioware game

[princess-stabbity]

anyway ive played thru act 1 of tyranny at least four times now bc its kind of a mess and its starting to piss me off

[batmanfucker69-archive]

Oh no...it’s time to talk about the companions. :(

Before I go into them individually I wanna say that gameplay wise they’re all pretty worthless. None of them can aim well and their AI is poor. The melee characters are ok in a fight but I’ve never had most of them do much when I’m fighting. This probably isn’t too controversial I mean most of the time bethesda games have bad AI it just stands out a lot in this game to me. 

Also the romance part felt tacked on super late like. it barely effects anything you barely get any new dialogue from romancing them. It’s really obvious they wanted to cash in on bioware’s popular romance function from mass effect and dragon age while putting in the least amount of effort. Also there’s the fact that they’re all the schrodinger’s bisexual trope, save for maybe a fetishizing line from Cait.

I’ll go in alphabet order of the characters names, and also cover their companion quest if they have one. 

Cait- She’s probably one of my favorites but like...she’s wasted potential. I still don’t understand why there’s like. British/Russian/Irish characters in these games because how did they get over here but anyway. Cait is located at an arena raiders go to bet on fighters. She’s one of the fighters you find when you come in but the raiders immediately attack you which is super lazy. There could have been a quest to get her but you kill everyone but her and her manager.

She’s basically forced to be your companion because her manager immediately sells you her contract. You can’t say no without being a rude asshole so I take her everytime but I sometimes just leave her in a settlement. She’s rude, and one of the characters who seems to enjoy you being rude to other people. But...then she says she enjoys how nice you are to her and everyone else but you’ve only gotten approval from her for being rude to other people or stealing. It’s incredibly confusing whether she sees you as someone like her or someone she wants to be like.

On the other hand I think her backstory is strong and I can see what Bethesda was going for with her. She’s conflilcted because she wants to be a good person, but doesn’t see how to in a world as cruel as she lives in. Which is a really good idea for a fallout character and if handled better she’d probably be one of my favorite characters in fallout as a whole.

Then there’s her companion quest which they royally fucked up on.Bethesda’s writers are not good enough to cover a sensitive issue like drug addiction. And making a magical machine that can just cure your addiction in like 5 seconds is super insulting.

Codsworth- I don’t care about Codsworth at all. They kind of touch on his old connection to your family but that goes no where and I...don’t care about my family. He never even finds out what happens to Shaun I don’t think. He’s just kinda there. He also doesn’t have a personal quest. 

Curie- Curie is controversial and for good reason. At first I thought she was a cute little robot who was programmed with AI and I thought it was neat that an AI other than a synth would be a romance option. I was so so wrong. They upload her consciousness into a failed memory transferred synth. 

They basically took someone who was in a vegetative state, erased their existance completely, and replaced their mind with Curie’s. Which is super fucked up. Of course they upload her into a sexy lady which is super objectifying...somehow more than when she was a robot. 

Wanting to feel more human could have been a really interesting development for an AI character but they just made it super fucked up while not confronting the fact that it’s super fucked up and there’s no other option in this quest it has to happen. Curie deserved better.

Danse- Another character that had a lot of potential. At first I thought he was a jackass from the Brotherhood, which he is, at first. When I first played the game I avoided him but I found his quest online and had to continue the brotherhood questline just to find out what happened to him.

He finds out he’s a synth, the things that the brotherhood are trying to destroy, and his entire life basically falls apart. He runs away at first but then he realizes someone will find him and just stays in this base waiting for someone to kill him. When you find him it’s a genuinely emotional scene and you actually get a choice on whether to kill him or not. 

However after the quest this good writing ends because other than his talks with you he continues to act like he’s a paladin in the Brotherhood. & if you do his quest but then go on to another faction’s side and kill destroy the brotherhood he ceases to be your companion and will glitch out and the game registers him as a regular settler but he doesn’t have the lines. To my knowledge this has never been patched and I really hope it isn’t intentional.

Deacon- Another companion with no personal quest, so I’ll go more into his backstory. His wife died which is new and original of course. But anyway he works for the railroad to make up for being in a gang that hatedsynths (and also killed his wife who was apparently a synth). He actually feels guilty for his past and joined the railroad as a means of redemption.

All this is a good basis for a character but it doesn’t really go anywhere. He’s a liar too but again this goes no where. He tells the player character he trusts them after a time but we never figure out his real name so who knows if he does or not because he’s prone to lying. He has some interesting dialogue around the Commonwealth but other than that there’s not much to him.

Dogmeat- This character is the most vile, the worst, morally corrupt character in the game. No jk. I do gotta say it’s confusing that there’s pure bred dogs in the post apocalypse. Whos breeding german shepards around here?

Hancock- I know everyone loves him but. He’s so poorly written. If he cares about his people so much why are they living on the streets while he gets a whole building to himself? Bethesda really didn’t know how to make him what they wanted him to be. Sure there’s little law in Goodneighbor, but he lets gangs take over the back allies and it isn’t even mentioned in game. He’s just confusing as a character, his backstory is a little interesting, but I think a lot more could be done with it. 

I don’t care about his asshole brother and neither does he apparently, since he never does anything about Diamond City like I thought he would and the bad blood between them is mentioned about twice the whole game. His whole ghoulification is also ignorable to him, and isn’t used for much.

Robert MacCready- He has a dead wife and a dying son so he gets bonus Todd points. The only reason he’s in the Commonwealth is to find a cure for his son. You do help him find this, so at least they wrapped up this plot point. The reason he doesn’t leave the Commonwealth right away is because you become good friends and I honestly think that’s sweet. Unfortunately he’s still a dick. Not as big of an ass as in 3 but I still don’t really like him. And why does he yell “Tunnel Snakes Rule!”? sometimes when he goes into combat? It doesn’t seem like the Tunnel Snakes really became a thing after fallout 3 and it’s just super forced. 

He used to run with the Gunners, who are just a generic raider group but with better armor pretty much. He doesn’t give us much insight into them and we just kill off some of them who were looking for him because it’ll get them off his ass? apparently. This quest also bleeds into him finding a cure for his son’s mysterious illness, but the two events are pretty much unrelated.

I feel like his character could have been really good since he knew the brotherhood from back home but he rarely talks about them and really he’s disappointing more than anything.

Nick Valentine- Hoo boy do I have unpopular opinions here. Nick is a waste of a character with a horrible character quest that really goes no where. We never find out why the institute abandoned him but I guess that’s in a DLC I never bought and just shows how lazy bethesda’s writing is. A quest involving the institute would be a million times better than the shitty quest we did get. His dialogue is mostly one-liners but he does seem to genuinely care about the main character, but he has no reason to which I guess could be good or bad. I do love his aesthetic, though. It’s 50s noire, which is what the theme of the game should be. 

Anyway, personal quest. You go on fetch quests to different police stations around the CommonWealth and kill whatever the heck’s infesting the place. It’s pretty boring other than learning about what happened to prewar gangsters. After that we find out these tapes are for, it turns out that there’s prewar gangster still alive and in a twist Nick doesn’t have a dead wife but a dead fiance to mix things up.

This revenge plot for Nick could have been great but they did absolutely everything wrong. So this gangster turned himself into a ghoul on purpose. Before the Great War. How did he know that a load of radiation would make him immortal? it’s never explained! And he locked himself in a bunker for over 200 years and he never left. You would think this would affect him somehow but he acts completely normal and acts only slightly annoyed two armed people broke into his bunker. And then you don’t even get a choice in the matter Nick just fuckin kills him and you leave the tunnel conveniently right where his fiance died. 

His whole companion quest is some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen in my life and I absolutely hate it and it makes me want to avoid Nick all together.

Piper Wright- She’s kinda boring. I like the set up they gave her but all her conflicts are never resolved at all. She doesn’t have a companion quest but she desperately needs one. I guess she sorta has one where she just asks about your character’s whole backstory and I think it’s funny you can just make shit up but she writes an article about it anyway. Her backstory is actually fantastic and gives really good reasons for her actions and her job. She has strong feelings that people deserve to know the truth and this gets her in trouble a lot. But as I said, none of it goes anywhere since she doesn’t have a companion quest and basically has no personality other than she gets in trouble.

I guess they ran out of time with her because I really think something was planned for her but got scrapped because of time.

Preston Garvey- I think he’s one of the best written ones. He has a strong sense of justice and is one of the few people who genuinely just want to do what’s right. I don’t know if it’s his voice actor but I like talking to him a lot. Bethesda really needed to add more minutemen characters because him spewing out a ton of side quests before you can actually talk to him is annoying. I wish we got a backstory for him other than being a minutemen and telling us their history. His romance is a lot better written than everyone else’s I think he does actually enjoy my character’s company.

Also I’m realy confused as to why he isn’t the general and your character is. I mean if they just didn’t call you general and he was nothing would change at all. Actually it would make more sense because he’s the one giving you orders.

Strong- uuuuuh don’t care super mutants have no personality in bethesda games skip

X6-88- I have to admit I rarely side with the institute so I haven’t seen X6 as much as the other companions. He’s very robotic, and he’s a courser but he’s just as bad in a fight as the rest of them. I don’t think he has a companion quest either. I can’t say much about him because Bethesda didn’t really do anything with him.

Anyway...they’re better than the fallout 3 companions but...that’s really not saying much because none of them had personalities.