How Do Fallout’s NPCs Get Home?

hey dog it's time for you to go home it's not safe out here you've got to go back to Vault 101 where the heck is he going I mean literally where the heck is he going we know where he says he's going and I'm pretty sure he'll get there but is he really going to walk all the way back other characters in Fallout 3 do this too they say they're going to meet you somewhere we're going to head back home now and then they just run off and that's interesting because there are a lot of deadly creatures in the Wasteland of Fallout 3 and at least in the case of dog meat these characters can die so is dog meat just Invincible when he's walking home does he even interact with these robots and these monsters and these Raiders also there's a gigantic River in between us and where he's going that he's going to have to cross can he swim I've never seen him swim so that's what we're doing today we're going to be following dog meet as well as a variety of other NPCs from the places they are to the places they say they're going to go so we can figure out the real details of how they make these Journeys or if they make them at all for this video I spent roughly 20 hours sitting in front of my television following NPCs around in a variety of different video games while I was doing that there was a 0% chance I would have eaten a decent meal if it wasn't for the sponsor of this video Factor can you spare any more water no I've given this guy like 30 bottles of purified water you don't need any more water I've given you plenty you know what you probably need you probably need food could I interest you in 20% off what does that say 50 50% off your first Factor box and 20% off your next month of orders using promo code any Austin 50 now no that wouldn't be helpful to you Beggars can't be choosers factor is a meal delivery service that sends you high quality meals all of which can be prepared and ready to eat roughly as easily as making a frozen pizza honestly it's probably even easier than making a frozen pizza if you have a microwave but I don't have a microwave cuz I'm a weirdo so I have to put them in the oven which is fine the convenient thing for me about factor is that I'm very lazy and while I obviously respect and believe that uh cooking your own food is a sacred thing I just don't want to most of the time I just want to throw something in the oven or in the microwave and just have food ready to eat and the fact that factor gives you good food is just a plus and factor is super flexible with letting you pause or restart your subscription as you need to so if there is a week that you do want to do your own meal prep you can do that no problem and then when you have another week where you have a lot going on and you're not sure if you're going to have time to cook for yourself it'll be there right where you left it no fuss deliver me food chef in a factory somewhere I assume that's how it works I don't know head to factor75.com or click the link below and use the code any Austin 50 to get 50% off your first Factor box and 20% off your next month of orders that's code any Austin 50 no spaces at factor75.com to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month of orders now as soon as I told dog me to walk all the way back to Vault 101 he immediately walked in the opposite direction that he was supposed to which does not bode well I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because he's a smart dog and I'm sure he'll obviously figure it out but in the mean oh dog me has passed away yeah it turns out that dog meat does not lose his taste for blood even when you're not uh accompanying him directly and as long as you're in relatively close proximity he will just run head first into any enemies that he can smell and he will usually get himself killed pretty quickly which obviously is sad but is sort of a prison of his own making because he usually does pick these fights himself but we do need him alive in order to do this exercise so I'm going to have to play guard Duty going forward and let me tell you if you want to do this you better have a good gun the further dog me walked the weirder his directional choices got it's almost like every turn he made was the opposite of the turn I would have expected him to go based on where we're trying to get to but I almost wondered if there was something about the fact that we had to cross the pomac river that was getting in the way cuz again at this point I don't know that dog meat can swim so maybe he's looking for a spot where he can cross the river on some sort of bridge or maybe just a spot where the river is dried up but no he can swim so I don't know what he was doing I don't know why we walked so far dog why did you walk so far and then as soon as he got out of the river he just kind of started wandering again and you'll notice this pretty much anytime you follow an NPC around in a Bethesda game there is a lot of sort of wandering One Direction and then immediately turning around and double backing the other direction there's a lot of like stopping and just looking at nothing for a little while they just make a lot of odd choices in terms of how they get from point A to point B now my first thought is that behaviors like this are just glitches or mistakes or lazy development but I almost got to wondering if I was to follow people around in real life would they do similar things so I went to my local grocery store and I followed a couple of different people around very gently you know it wasn't weird it was just it was people watching it was regular people watching and as I observe these people I would make a mental note anytime I notice them doing something that if it were in a game I would consider it kind of like a glitch and let me tell you we do this stuff all the time there was a 5minute chunk that I was looking to go buy some sugar-free Red Bull and within that 5-minute chunk I did it three times I would walk one way and then just kind of zone out and then realize I passed the aisle and then turn back around and then go back the other way I saw a lady just like bump into a wall with her cart and I'm not making fun of these people I'm saying this is like a normal human thing that you do that you probably don't notice you do I definitely do it all the time and I'm a genius you know we we tend to overestimate ourselves in that way so much like a Bethesda game you might say that we were kind of lazily developed Food For Thought now I'm not saying Bethesda intentionally programmed these things to run badly so that we would uh seem so it would seem more human I'm just saying that as humans we have flaws and a lot of times those flaws accidentally make their ways into the works of art that we have and I think that's good I think that's a positive thing if every NPC just like did the right thing and was official all the time it'd be like living in a crazy Elon Musk Spock land no thanks now that said there are some behaviors from NPCs that I uh could not justify with this roundabout logic I'm using for example another NPC that I really wanted to follow around was this child this this is a child that you rescue from slavery in Paradise Falls and after you do that the child says I'm going to go to little Lamplight we're going to head back home now and then the child runs off into the night but what's interesting about children in Fallout is that they cannot be harmed I think they're the only NPC C that has god-given protection strictly based on their demographic but unlike dog meat he also doesn't have any way of fighting back so when this invincible child runs into to A rad scorpion what's he going to do uh usually what they do is they hide eventually they'll get bored of hiding and then they'll run between those two actions usually the enemy will either uh go away from them or they will then run away from the enemy and everything's fine but there was one instance where the kid ran away from a Meer lurk King which is like a really buff fish guy probably a foot taller than me and I'm 7 foot I'm 5'11 but the kid he was trapped in a corner by one of these Myer Kings and eventually I guess he decided that he wasn't going to be able to outrun him and he wasn't going to be able to hide from him forever he had to get to little Lamplight eventually so he just fought him a little 4ft tall kid just went fullon open fists with this uh 8ft tall gargantuan monster for himself so they just kind of boxed for a little while and then eventually the kid ran away and that was that pretty funny anyway back to the dog I think theun fun EST thing about escorting dog meat around is that anytime he brutally uh kills somebody no matter how much damage he took no matter how far away he had to wander From the Path he was on the moment that enemy is dead he just locks all the way back in and starts walking same speed straight back to Vault 101 allegedly and this is even more amusing if you consider that it sort of implies that this is what happens every time you send dog meat back to the Vault you just normally don't see it see you later dog meat hope you don't commit any first or second or third degree crime on your way to the Vault you know it's kind of like a schro dinger's dog situation right dog me is neither alive nor Dead He's neither guilty nor innocent of murder unless you're looking at him which also means that the game doesn't uh always function correctly unless you're not looking directly at it the illusion of these characters getting from one place to another is broken if you actually want to look at these characters getting from one place to another you need to look away in order for the universe to hold together which may actually be true of real life as well I don't think too hard about that I just said and I'm not a scientist could be true though now as I think we all assumed after about 90 minutes dog meet finally made a defensible navigational decision and he turned back east and walked all the way back to Vault 101 it took about another 2 hours but it was pretty straightforward from there on out and just like if you fast travel to the Vault he walks up the little path and then perches up there waiting for you to return so that's great and if you extrapolate this to the whole game it's actually pretty impressive I know that it's uh very old at this point and I'm sure a lot of you don't think it's as interesting as I do but I love this idea that if an NPC in a Bethesda game says I'm going to go here and you decide you want to say prove it they actually will it's a little funky cuz they might get murdered but the threads of the world are there it's almost like a big giant slightly crappy version of Majora's Mask you know perhaps the best Zelda game ever made back on the N64 where they had a 3-day cycle and every single NPC in this Village had a point in space to go to at every single moment so you could follow people throughout their entire routine across these 3 days that was obviously a much more elegant way to do it but it was also way smaller in scale so it's not unique to Bethesda games right even other modern games like tears of the Kingdom has this same thing going on you can find NPCs wandering along the paths and they will go all the way from one place to another place there are obviously a few wrinkles right Nintendo makes their games with a little bit uh more polish than Bethesda maybe does like for example characters in tears of the kingdom when it starts raining as I'm sure we've all seen they will run and sort of try to find shelter and they'll look for whatever the closest thing is along their path that will offer kind of an overhang to hide under so in this case this lady just found like a rock that was sloped just enough that it would protect her from the rain then she waited for the rain to get done and went back on her way it's also cool cuz in tears of the kingdom when you talk to these NPCs they're not people who are uh normally going to give you quests there's not that kind of interaction they really are background characters but you could talk to them and they might say something like oh you should go here and look at these things it's so cool and then they'll walk and it turns out they are walking to the place that they recommended you go see for example this lady walked all the way to kakaro Village walked all the way up some steps and went to an observation platform so she could View these old giant ruins which she had told me about all the way back at the place she started you know it's very similar to what Bethesda did two decades ago in Fallout 3 but with just that characteristic Nintendo restraint and polish so that almost brings us to the end of exploring how these NPCs behave in Fallout 3 but there is one other class of NPCs that was uh actually the spark that got me interested in doing this video doing this experiment and that is these guys this is somebody who has been captured by super mutants and you as the player character can go to them and uh let them go you can free them cuz you are an angel and anytime you free them they'll always say something like oh thank you so much I can't believe it I'm a lie you know here's a reward I've got to get out of here but they never say where they're going and I've always been really curious about like what what is this NPC's life look like after my role in their life is done do they go somewhere specific do they have a home or maybe in this case because they don't have a destination they do just disappear like maybe we would have expected the other people to do the problem is they run really fast they run faster than the player character so it's really hard to keep up with them and because you don't know where their destination is you can't even like make good decisions about how to cut them off so in the past it's always been too annoying to follow them but of course I couldn't not do it for this video so here's what happens Ready set go all right here we go where are we going okay down over here okay train station got it going inside here oh wait where'd he go hello hello oh my God he turned into a ghoul okay so this guy just made a beline for the nearest enterable door then he went into it and then he disappeared forever obviously there's a fun little narrative you can build that he did turn into a ghoul but I'm pretty sure that like as far as the game mechanics are concerned that man is gone which kind of goes to what I was saying that maybe because they don't have a destination they do just disappear but let's do it one more time with a different one of these captive people and just see if that still happens hello ma'am would you like to be freed today okay off you go oh jeez man she's really running now that's a lady that knows how to escape captivity she ran for a little ways and then immediately started swimming in the pomac river but then she stayed in the pomac river and she stayed in the pomac river and then she tried to drown herself in the pomac river and it was really hard to see her so I kept almost losing track of her it felt like playing one of those ball cupping games not ball cup you know what I'm saying the games with the balls and the cups doesn't matter and then again after about 10 minutes she got out and started sprinting out into the Wasteland again now when you follow these NPCs around you really do have to be careful about watching where they're going because if you take your eyes off of them they will just Dart behind a rock and then you won't know which way they went and then you're done so you have to follow them and as you follow them they're gradually going to get farther and farther away from you cuz they're faster than you so you have to make guesses about what way you think they're going to go and then try to like do a little Pythagorean theorem and cut them off in the way that they turn thankfully every once in a while they do like just stop to catch their breath which often gives you a chance to keep up with them so it's not horrible but it is annoying and what's interesting about this lady is we passed a lot of potential doors that she could have gone in if that's what she was going to do subway station doors houses buildings we even got pretty close to the city of Megaton at one point and I almost got excited cuz I thought oh maybe this is like a a little in Universe explanation for all of those settlers that end up in Megaton they're people who were released and then they run there and now they live there but she didn't want to live in Megaton she looked she took one look at that hunk of junk and said no thanks I'd rather take my chances out in the Wasteland and let me tell you we ran all through the night she would get scared and she would hide when we got attacked I would defend us and I would save her life the more we ran the more attached to her I got and then at one point she stopped to catch her breath and she said this this is hopeless which kind of weirdly felt kind of sad to me because you know she's an NPC in a video game she didn't choose this situation which kind of weirdly felt kind of sad to me this is hopeless the sun was just starting to creep up over the horizon and we had been running all night long when we got attacked again of course she didn't have any way to defend herself so it was up to me to play bodyguard and I'm sad to report that I failed no she got totally turned into green goo by a laser gun every little Quirk of her personality all of that pessimism she had was just totally apathetically liquefied by a computer program with a gun oh well the consequence of this is that we will never really know where she was going and maybe she didn't really know where she was going it almost felt like she was running just for the sake of running trying to stay alive as long as she could even if she was never destined to settle down in one place I've met people like that in real life I'm sure you have too the cold reality of the game programming is probably something that's knowable I'm sure somebody in the comments could even tell me based on their knowledge of the creation engine why this uh NPC behaved how they did and obviously I would love to know that I like to learn more about that stuff but for my part the more interesting question to me is I wonder if God struggles to comprehend our behavior in the same way that we struggle to comprehend hers I'm Annie Austin thanks for watching [Music] watching you wake up at the crack to go to work for what

Channel: Any Austin

Views: 508,137

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Id: W-mBGhzF_jU

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2024