(no subject)

[camwyn]

"Hm. Jamaica Plain. Lotta raiders end up here, looking for that old treasure."

-- actual canon dialog from my Fallout 4 companion last night; apparently the last mayor of Jamaica Plain blew a massive amount of the town budget installing marble flooring and SOOPER HIGH SECURITY, LIKE LASERS AND DEATH ROBOTS AND EVERYTHING, in a room under the town hall in order to house the TREASURES OF JAMAICA PLAIN

no, seriously

Comments

[autographedcat]

And what a treasure it turned out to be. :)

[camwyn]

On the bright side, I had Nick with me and I was able to read the newspaper on the premises; for all that Operation Winter's End was terminated early, the paper appeared to indicate that Valentine's efforts weren't entirely in vain back before the War, so that must've been something.

And I did get to deploy part of the treasure against the locals, repeatedly, so there's that.

[genarti]

AMAZING.

Personally, I blame jothra.

Somehow.

[camwyn]

I wasn't even looking for anything to do with treasure. Some folks on a farm north of the city had somehow heard of Jamaica Plain as a great place for people to move in and start a new settlement and they asked me to go clear it out so it'd be safe to live in (the game does not seem to understand that people living in an area that approximately corresponds to real-world Melrose are unlikely to think that Jamaica Plain is 'nearby' when it hands out clear-the-bad-guys quests).

[thewickedlady]

Bless video game geography logic. Bless it so!

[camwyn]

Seriously. Why did you send people to the Boston area to photograph the crap out of everything and do all that research- because they did, and they did great visual renderings, and there's apparently analogues to a lot of famous stuff including Danvers Asylum in the game that I haven't visited yet- why did you do all that research if you were going to let your code decide that 'on the opposite side of two rivers and quite a lot of supermutants' constituted 'nearby'?

[genarti]

Ha! Yeah, that does seem like a ways. What's the situation with the post-apocalyptic bridges over the Charles? (And does one get attacked by giant breaching mutant catfish or something?)

[camwyn]

There's a few bridges that are still mostly intact, and a lot more that're buckled or broken in the middle. No horrible mutant carp, alas, although you can find dead fish with weird lumps in a few places, and I found some kind of dead mutant dolphin thing with way bigger teeth than its size would generally indicate. Also there's mirelurks, which are mutant crabs that walk like a man and that are, in fact, the size of a man; a mirelurk queen is approximately the size of a tractor-trailer and heavily armored enough to take a human fortress by storm and not die. Their hatchlings are the size of a rabbit.

There's also a huge green roadlike thing that I haven't been able to get onto in a few areas. I think it's actually a monorail system rather than a road. There's no sign of the Zakim, but there are enough collapsed chunks of asphalt with railings attached in various places that I think I can safely say the Big Dig never happened.

Theoretically you could swim across the Charles if you were careful, but I wouldn't try it without taking anti-radiation prophylactic medication first and then putting on a hazmat suit.

[attractivegeekery]

Do the Upper/Lower Deck exist?

And to be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if the Mayor of JP did those things. Probably spent money that should have gone to public transit expansion! It's such a pain in the ass to get around JP without a car...

[camwyn]

I've seen a couple of ruined chunks of what looks like elevated double-deck highway. Most of them seem to be infested with mercenaries and you can only get to them via elevator while the mercenaries are shooting at you, so I can't verify if it's both decks or if that's just the way the road fell apart.

[attractivegeekery]

I'm going to pretend that one of the mercenaries has an accordion and plays the Godfather Suite. Because back in the day the busking accordion dude was one of my favorite parts of walking under the highway to the North End.

[camwyn]

It's entirely possible. I had to climb over a lot of rubble to get anywhere near the North End, at least until I found the secret escape tunnel that connected the Old North Church to somewhere a little more accessible.

Worth noting, there's a quest that involves tracking down two hundred year old evidence tapes scattered around the Commonwealth's police stations (as far north as Nahant and as far west as Natick, I think) so you can chase down the last known location of a pre-War gangster who escaped prosecution by ratting people out to the Feds. His voice and his overall style on the tapes are suspiciously familiar.