Fallout 4:
Vault-Wreck
Project Snapshot
Vault-Wreck is a mod for Fallout 4, built using Bethesda's Creation Kit. It contains a standalone quest available to players of every level, and begins as they enter the Downtown Boston peninsula. The main action of the quest takes place in the Vault-Tec Regional Offices: Boston, a subterranean compound near the wreck of the USS Riptide. The quest's story focuses around the manager of these offices, a ghoul who survived the bombs falling and has valuable information about the cryogenic experiment of Vault 111.
Engine: Bethesda's Creation Kit
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Base Game: Fallout 4
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Development Time: 120 hours
Level Overview
Vault-Wreck is a story-driven quest that provides players the opportunity to get closure on Vault-Tec's role in the loss of the player character's family. Upon entering the Boston Downtown area, the player receives an urgent message on their Pip-Boy requesting help evacuating the Vault-Tec Regional Offices. They make their way to the underground offices, which served as a hub for research, soliciting, and PR before the bombs fell. Discovering the manager there - still alive after all these years due to radiation turning her into a ghoul - they've only just begun to ask about the experiments and Vault-Tec's involvement in Shaun's kidnapping when the building is attacked by raiders.
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Still needing answers, the player makes a deal to help the manager escape alive in exchange for information. Navigating through the office they have the opportunity to do some investigating of their own, uncovering holotape records from the scientist responsible for developing the cryogenic technology. Along the way they must fight off raiders to protect the manager, weaving through the building to reach an emergency evacuation route in the building's sewers.
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In the final conversation of the quest, the manager reveals to the player that although the cryogenic experiment was planned without the Vault-Dweller's consent Vault-Tec had nothing to do with the murder of the player's spouse or the kidnapping of Shaun. The quest closes with the manager suggesting the player make their way to the baseball field, where she's pretty sure there's a settlement, and opens the stage cleanly for the Kellogg and Institute plot line to begin.
Maps & Layouts
Vault-Wreck is made up of three cells made using Bethesda's Creation Kit. Details of each cell are listed below, along with maps and images that showcase important features.
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Please note that the art assets showcased originate from Creation Kit - no custom models or materials were created.
Vault-Tec Regional Offices: Interior
Lobby (Ground Floor)
This is the first area the player enters as they make their way towards their first quest objective. The space is deliberately small, and features only one obvious path: the elevator. Cluttered with trash, this space was designed to imply that the manager had been dumping all of the junk and filth from the offices here while trying to keep them clean after the bombs dropped.
Research & Management Floor
This area is accessed once the player rides the elevator down into the Vault-Tec offices proper. Wrapped around a central subterranean courtyard, the floor features solo offices for management staff, a reception area for guests, a boardroom, a break room, a cubicles office area, and a records storage room. Despite being owned by Vault-Tec, this area of the building is intentionally more office themed rather than feeling like a true Vault. Vault-Tec posters and paraphernalia litter the space, however, and the emphasis of blue reinforces the connection with Vault-Tec branding.
Upstairs Reception
The Manager's Office
The Boardroom
The Breakroom
The Cubicles Room
Records Storage
Showroom & Consultation Floor
A more public-facing location, this floor served as a recruitment center for Vault-Dwellers. Clients interested in the Vault program would regularly visit this floor before the war. They'd be taken on tours of a "Vault showroom," an apartment-like space built using Vault materials, though notably far more spacious than actual Vault living-quarters. After the tour, they'd be taken into the consultation room to be officially registered for the program. The consultation space was loosely designed based on the consultation areas of chain banks such as Wells Fargo, with comfortable furniture and refreshments for clients and desks for the salespeople. A U-shaped stairwell connects the consultation room to the cubicles room of the second floor.
Consultation Room
Vault Showroom: Living Room
Vault Showroom: Bedroom
Downstairs Lobby
The Atrium
This courtyard-like space sits at the center of the ring-shaped Vault-Tec offices. With a skylight broken in, radiation has slipped into the space and caused glowing fungus to sprout around the corpse of a central tree. In the back corner is a maintenance entrance to the sewers that the raiders used to enter the office from outside.
The Sewers
Located beneath the Vault-Tec offices, these sewers connect directly out to the Commonwealth. This is the route the raiders used to access the building for their attack. The corpse of a Vault-Tec scientist is tucked into a back corner as though they tried to flee the fallout, and here the player can find the final holotape detailing the cryogenic experiment's development.
The Sewers
The Dead Scientist
Holotapes: The Cryogenic Experiment Reports
A key element of Vault-Wreck are the custom holotapes the player can discover around the environment. There are 4 in total, detailing the scientific process of Dr. Alice Cooper - a Vault-Tec employee responsible for developing the technology to successfully put plants, animals, and eventually humans into cryogenic stasis and revive them.
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The four tapes form a narrative arc of their own, detailing how the experiment at first went well before taking a turn for the worst when applied to more complex life forms than the single-celled organisms Dr. Cooper started with. The final tape reveals that although for a time it looked as though the Vault-Tec executives would push on to human trials before verifying the technology on animals, Dr. Cooper eventually reached a breakthrough that rendered the experiment ultimately safe - including for humans.
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As an Easter egg, one of Dr. Cooper's test subjects is a German Shepherd. This is meant to imply that Dogmeat may also have been one of her test subjects, left in stasis somewhere until his cryopod inadvertently deactivated.
Post-Mortem
What Went Well?
What Went Wrong?
What I Learned?
- Due to thoughtful initial documentation, I was able to execute the design almost exactly as initially planned.
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- The holotapes form a compelling narrative and provide a second layer of engagement with the space and the story of the location.
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- The aesthetics turned out significantly better than my previous Fallout 4 project due to more careful aesthetic reference from similar locations in the base game and better allotment of time across all spaces.
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- The sound design in the holotapes allowed me to invest another skillset in a way that kept me excited and motivated about the project.
- There was initial overscope in the planned storyline and mechanics that would have distracted the focus if implemented. Smart cuts made in an early milestone allowed the project to reach current levels of polish.
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- Combat is a bit uninspiring. Acceptable, but somewhat flat.
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- Due to AI processing slowly, sometimes the Manager hitches along her path in ways that aren't seamlessly believable.
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- Initial attempts to start the quest on Story Manager events ended up being an unnecessary time sink that took away from time that could have been dedicated to other polish areas.
- How to pace a story along a limited number of story beats (holotapes).
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- Controlling AI spawning, movement, and travel packages via Papyrus and helper quests.
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- Setting up helper quests to monitor player behavior outside of the actual progression of the quest for starting quests on in-game events.
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- Creation, mixing, and mastering of voice and audio files for implementation into Creation Kit (dialogue and holotapes).