Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Exploring Fallout 4's Massive Sea:


By:Jessica Dillon


With the recent finding of the harpoon gun model everyone has one question on their mind. What is going on below the waves in the Commonwealth's ocean? I hate waiting for answers so I decided to make a separate save and "borrow" a suit of power armor that still had full power from the brotherhoods airship. After avoiding some fire I jumped into the sea directly in front of the airport and started walking. The movement once you get below water is actually EXTREMELY SLOW and takes about an hour to get anywhere decent in distance. I also had to glitch the water by tilting my camera at an downward angle to go from the normal murky look to a beautiful underwater scene. I did this search for few hours and covered a very large amount of area and here is what I found.

 First off the good news for those of us hoping for some ocean related DLC. There is a lot of sightseeing to do down here, from basic seaweed patches to the various sunken airplanes and boats to what looks to be destroyed submarines. There is a lot of work put in down here. At one point I even came to a ravine that had some very carefully placed capsized ships. There are also some arcs made of rock that you could walk through every so often as well a pipe line with lights on it that I followed for a bit out of curiosity. Weirdly enough  the map actually is cut short while you are underwater. If you try to walk to the edge you will be stopped with the "you can not go that way" message. While this could just be a launch bug maybe it could be that they where testing something and didn't completely fix it back in beta? There are also barrels like the ones you'd loot if you where just on normal land in random spots, possibly suggesting that something may be going on down here in the future.

Now for the disappointing news. I did not find much of anything that looked like it was accessible at this time and there is no way to really explore the ocean other than saving and walking in each direction since you can not jump high and it's extremely easy to get stuck. I also found no sea life other than the basic seaweed what so ever, not even a run of the mill fish school. The most movement you will even find is the occasional tire floating from virtually nowhere to the surface. On top of that the only way to see is the glitch. I checked at several points to see if there was natural visibility and even near the pipelines lights there was nothing but ocean dinginess. I did get to forcibly jump my way into wreckage as well and it had nothing at all in it not even the normal crates or barrels seen in wrecked trains.



I also looked around on the surface as well to see if I could find anything interesting. There isn't a lot here other than a few random old boats still floating around. I did however find an old boat with a large gutted dolphin like fish on it (I will name it Snaggletooth for article's sake.) This is the only creature in the game that does not have a name marker or looting option that I have found. Afterwords I found more weirdly placed Snaggletooth's in a few other places while playing pointing towards the fact that it's probably a pretty common catch around the commonwealth. I definitely think this points to a possible underwater DLC and makes me wonder if maybe some things are already in the game and just swam around me thanks to my very limiting situation. I can at the very least say exploring the sea was in it's on way very fun especially each time I saw a new shape in the distance.

Whether you are excited or the lack of sea life has bummed you out here are some points to remember. New Vegas did have  different breeds of fish which means sea life is existent for sure and affected differently by radiation in the fallout universe than other creatures. Most importantly for this game Snaggletooth proves there is strange sea life living in Boston. The sea floor also isn't just a flat boring surface it has things going on even if you can't interact with them. There is also the big plus of power armor working to some degree underwater. If that's not enough there is the existence of the Aquaboy perk that let's you explore and breath underwater rather easily. On top all this if we don't get anything official I'm sure we already have a creative mod lover working on adding some interesting content as you read!




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