Spoilers: This post will look in depth at the conversation wheel presented in the conversation that begins the faction questline for the Brotherhood of Steel. The Quest itself is “Fire Support,” although I won’t spoil what the actual quest itself entails. What I am going to look at is the initial round of conversations presented via the Dialogue Wheel on the player’s screen.

Given that Power Armor is supposed to be such a significant focus for players in Fallout 4, the Brotherhood of Steel (the enigmatic wearers of said armor in previous Fallout titles) takes a bit of time to find compared to Fallout 3. In the course of another quest for the Minutemen, I intercepted a radio distress call from a Scribe. So I headed over to their broadcasted location to check it out.

After a dissatisfying and brief actual rescue, which involves a turkey shoot of a handful of ghouls (I mean, seriously, Jamaica Plains did a zombie herd that was a lot more fun), you meet your first Paladin. And here is where the Dialogue Wheel  shows how bad a design choice it turned out to be.

The Paladin, who is decked out in a full set of Power Armor, asks my Sole Survivor what she is doing at their location. Despite the fact that I am 1. responding to their emergency transmission and 2. the General of the Minutemen and the leader of a vast number of Wasteland settlements, my dialogue options are:

“Who are you?”

*Sarcastic*

“My business.”

“Trying to survive.”

Now the first and the third options are essentially non-options. Asking “who are you?” leads the Paladin to respond that he asked you first, and leads the player back to the first dialogue round. This essentially tells the player that they made the wrong choice, try again. The third option, “my business,” is just your B-Exit key written out. The Paladin ends the conversation and walks away, leaving you to start over again, just like with the first option. And that also is the game telling the player that they made the wrong choice.

Let’s move on to the second and the fourth options. The sarcastic option has you delivering a very bad (and badly delivered) line about being a pest exterminator. Really, really? I’m this tiny thing compared to this guy in Power Armor, who I just had to save from an insignificant number of ghouls, and I take no crack at him? The Sole Survivor should ask him if he needs training wheels for his Power Armor, at the least. The fourth option is even more lame. Yes, I am trying to survive by heading towards the sound of gunfire rather than away. And neither matter because in the end they are just the same choice, leading to the same response from the Paladin after a tiny sentence to bridge the gap.

Think of it like being told there are four flavors of ice cream, but that you are going to pick vanilla no matter what, and if you won’t then you don’t get any. So what choice is there really?

At first, it’s hard to see whether or not this example is just bad game writing or if it is an inescapable result of the Dialogue Wheel. On the one hand it is bad game writing. The other hand is that a wheel itself is a visual device, in a medium highly dependent on giving visual clues. Choices presented as being in opposition and balanced from other options construct gameplay in a way that does not allow for the emergence of a conversation between the Player Character and the NPC.

The entirety of the setup conversation between you and the first Paladin is literally why are you here into where are you from and now help me. Two things you already know and then the quest. There is a small, side dialogue which you can trigger in which the Paladin gives a vague and uninteresting explanation of what the Brotherhood of Steel is about. After you play through that whole scene, compare it to asking Benny why he shot you in Fallout: New Vegas.

A good RPG allows you to roleplay different moral choices within the context of the story. You must obtain the Platinum Chip from Benny to advance your faction quests. How you do that is up to you, and Benny responds very differently in accordance to your dialogue choices. In contrast, Fallout 4 makes a story out of the moral choices. That’s a side effect of the Dialogue Wheel in comparison to the old list module in previous games. Placing choices in a visual weight against the other leads to making fewer options and making players color inside the lines far too often. Why do you think “Sarcastic” is always Button X?

So to advance in the Brotherhood faction in any additional playthrough you find only the same experience, and you can’t even fast click through using A. There is this growing feeling that for some reason Fallout 4 was made with the intention of being played through only once by anyone other than the modding community. Some people would say that this is a function of a limited four choices available in the game’s Dialogue Wheel. In truth, there are five options, since you can cancel the conversation by using other keys on your controller. There is some laziness to constantly mapping a key to end the conversation after going to the effort to allow players to walk away at any time. The real problem though is the visual need to make four choices displayed as owning a section on the wheel into equally large emotional choices, which pushes out divergent storylines.

If players always have to have a sarcastic option, then the game writer also has to offer a nonsarcastic option every time. At the same time, they have to move along to the same goal, so neither can be scripted as having any game effect, and conversation in the RPG becomes button pushing, instead of something that evolves into other branches that enrich multiple runs through the game. If the Dialogue Wheel had been written as a list in circle form instead of polar opposites, with the actual dialogue line appearing at the bottom of the screen if you used the left trigger to scroll to the option choice, that might have helped the game offer actual evolving conversations. Instead, everything boils down to Brat, Kiss-ass, Exit, Speech Check. And that is an enormous constraint to gameplay.

Imagine instead a different conversation. The first dialogue scene would need to game check you to see if you had advanced enough to be the General of the Minutemen. This would allow a different experience for players who opted to skirt that faction in subsequent playthroughs. One first scene would allow you to approach as a mercenary, lost, ghoul-hunting or tracking the distress beacon. Or, if you are in the Minutemen, the game replaces lost with that option. Lost would open up options to talk about the Vault and have you tell the Brotherhood that you lived before the War. Minutemen would tailor the description of who the Brotherhood are to a more geopolitical explanation. True, it’s a more complex system than what they went with, but that is the level of effort that should have been put into the starter conversation for an entire faction.

Each with an option specific speech check. Go the mercenary route with a high enough Charisma? Go the lost route with a high enough Intelligence? Go Minutemen with a high enough Perception? Go distress beacon or ghoul hunter with a high enough Endurance or Agility? Allow for speech checks that change the demeanor of the Paladin or result in some immediate better reward. Like how about an improved light for my Pip-Boy?

TLDR: Sure, the game writing in Fallout 4 is bad, contrived and stale. Worse is the nature of the conversation wheel itself which masks a lack of real choice and evolving conversation behind the need to present players with a polar range of emotional expression. In the end, the medium hides the flawed mechanic and the flawed mechanic hides the bad, bad dialogue.