In it is a chair sat next to a projector that faces a screen. We sit in the ruined chair. The screen flickers into life. It is a presentation by Vault-Tec, the evil company that built Fallout's vaults, ostensibly life-saving chambers, in truth horrific social experiments - and Vault 11 is one of the worst. The presentation, which includes voice over from the chirpy male voice from before, is a filmstrip in the iconic Fallout loading screen fashion.
The chirpy male voice tells us our sacrifice means the vault can continue to thrive. We see a picture of a man on a beach, sitting on a chair, cocktail in hand, watching the sun go down.
This is a two-minute film about our lives, but it has nothing to do with real life. This is the unobtainable, perfect 50s American life imagined by Vault-Tec.
This is Vault-Tec at its most monstrous, trying to convince its latest victim - the player - to accept their death peacefully, as if they should be grateful. This is also Fallout at its monstrous best - unsettling, insane and kind of funny. The lights go off and the walls of the room raise to reveal rock hard robots and ceiling-mounted turrets who immediately attack.
These robots are not messing about, and take everything you've got - all your stimpacks, all your performance enhancing drugs and all the ammo you're packing for your most damaging weapon.
You survive the encounter by the skin of your teeth, panting, confused and horrified. What just happened? Vault 11 is also deeply troubling. Its end seems inspired by the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures, an experiment that involved working out to what extent people would violate their own morals when ordered to. Vault 11 teaches us people would be willing to go quite far in such a situation.
In a wonderful, unexpected twist, we find ourselves walking in the overseer's shoes, somehow a part of the deadly experiment as a player in-game and out.
We are the guinea pig, and we find that we obey. We sit in the chair and wait to die, just like all the overseers did before us. This, I think, is Vault 11's true genius. The robots still smouldering, we notice the floor is littered with over a dozen human corpses, each an overseer sacrificed for the good of the vault because the people voted for them to die.
We count 16 corpses, which means Vault 11's social experiment lasted for 16 years after the bombs fell. New Vegas is set around years since the Great War of We arrive at the scene some years after Vault 11 fell into chaos, after the armed rebellion swept death throughout the place.
Everyone died - or so it seems. Behind another door is the vault mainframe. This was the mainframe programmed to kill the entire vault unless it was given a yearly sacrifice.
Inside a terminal we find a recording named Vault 11 Solution. Out of I don't know how many. We've talked and it's over. We're not going to send anybody to die anymore. So shut off our water or gas us or do whatever it is you're programmed to do. But we're done listening to you. This man was one of the five people we heard in the voice recording we found at the entrance to Vault 11 - and it sounds like the man who tried to stop the suicide, the man who, we suspect, escaped.
There's something else, an "automated solution response", which the five survivors would have heard after making the decision to defy the mainframe. Be sure to check with your overseer to find out if it's safe to leave.
Here at Vault-Tec, your safety is our number one priority. Vault 11, we now realise, was yet another social experiment by Vault-Tec, which wanted to see how far vault dwellers would go under order of an authority figure. When the five survivors we hear in the recording found at the entrance to the vault learned of this, when they realised all of the backstabbing, the politics, the threats, the fighting, the stress, the terror, the rape and the murder were based on a lie, they were so ashamed of their actions that they felt there was no option but to commit suicide.
Better that than the true story of Vault 11 ever come to light. Maybe Voice 1 felt differently. Maybe he felt the true story of Vault 11 had to come to light, to educate, to help prevent something like this from ever happening again. Did the other four try to silence Voice 1 after he refused to commit suicide? Did Voice 1 kill them in self-defense? Did Voice 1 murder them in order to save himself?
Or maybe the other four committed suicide, as it first appears when we enter the vault and view the scene, hundreds of years later. We simply don't have all the answers. All we know is Voice 1 was the sole survivor of the horror of Vault Vault 11 starts with a bang - four in fact - and it gets better from there.
In the slow exploration of the long abandoned place we learn the story of its people and the events that led to the incident at the entrance. It is a rollercoaster ride light on combat - save the killing of the odd mutated rat and the cacophony of chaos at the climax - but heavy on story.
The peaks are packed with intense anxiety that hurtle toward revelatory troughs. There are moments throughout, such as when you learn what Katherine Stone put herself through for her husband, and, well, pretty much everything that has to do with the sacrificial chamber, that live long in the memory.
Vault 11 is, quite simply, Fallout at its very best, another example of a seemingly innocuous quest leading to something surprisingly intricate and entrancing. Don't forget to pick up that differential pressure controller, by the way. Vault 11 designer Eric Fenstermaker speaks about the making of the human condition.
Eric Fenstermaker is a writer and designer who worked at Obsidian Entertainment for over a decade before leaving to go freelance. He got his start in college as a summer programming intern at Pipeworks Software in Eugene, Oregon, working on a couple of Godzilla fighting games.
Obsidian was Fenstermaker's first job after college. He inched his way into level and narrative design over time after joining as a gameplay scripter. New Vegas was about halfway into his time at the studio.
More recently, Fenstermaker wrapped up work on Pillars of Eternity 2. He was a lot of fun to write in the first game, and the other writers on that team are terrific to collaborate with, so doing him for the sequel was a no-brainer to me.
Josh Sawyer, who was the project director, walked into my office one day and told me I was going to be doing Vault 11 and it should take inspiration in some fashion from Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery.
I had never read it, and I resolved at that point it would be better if I didn't read it as part of the research, just because I wanted the narrative of the level to stand on its own and not be some kind of rehash - even subconsciously. All I had to go on was the basic description Josh gave me, which was that the story was about a small town where every year they choose a person at random and stone them to death.
I think. I really should read it at some point. So I started thinking about what an annual execution would look like as a social experiment. What was the initial idea for Vault 11, the top level conceit you were going for? Everything came out of trying to envision what a community might do if they were forced to murder one of their own every year.
What kind of system would they settle on? It occurred to me that, while random selection would seem to be the fairest approach, it probably wouldn't have sat well with people.
I figured they'd want to believe they had some kind of control over their circumstances. And the more aggressive types would work quickly toward a structure that they could manipulate in their favour. A democratic framework would probably be the path of least resistance in that regard - it sounds fair on its face, it's an American ideal - especially for that generation, it minimises individual guilt over the decision, and it allows for a rationale.
A random selection could mean you, could mean your kid. A democratic choice, you just have to not be the most hated person in the vault that year. That is something you could see an entire community getting behind, and it's also of course easily corrupted and manipulated.
So the reverse election became the foundation of the story. And with Fallout, you always have this pairing of willful s naivete with the stark, brutal realities of human nature. So a lot of the joy for me came from bringing in trappings from the postwar era, and at the conceptual level I thought it would be fitting and fun if we found out at the end that Vault-Tec had made a quaintly optimistic hypothesis about the experiment's outcome and then been proven horribly wrong.
The design document itself wasn't extensive. It was all text, and I think much of it was devoted to an overview of the narrative, and an explanation of the order in which it would be experienced. The rest of it was art and sound requests. Since it was a vault, most of the level art came from preexisting Fallout 3 tilesets, so I focused my art requests on smaller things that would create the right atmosphere.
I caught wind that legendary Fallout artist Brian Menze, a few doors down, was not overly busy at the time so I saddled him with a ton of requests for 50s-era campaign and recruitment posters, as well as the filmstrip slides. Some of the posters got blown up and printed out and they're still hanging at Obsidian in their common area.
Tell us about the design process. How do you go from a cool idea to it being this cool place in the game? I spent almost all my time trying to work out the plot and how the level would progress it. I never got it quite as clean as I'd have liked, but the design took longer than it was supposed to as it was, and various managers had begun breathing heavily down my neck, so I had to run with it.
Implementation was fast. Compared to my other levels, I spent hardly any time on it. For all the flack that engine gets, the level design tools are very efficient, and you can lay out a vault in no time. I don't think many of our design documents even included layouts or maybe it was just me , because our schedule was so tight and because in many cases was just easier to build out the interiors and iterate on them in-game.
Is there some Fallout lore reference book you could refer to to ensure Vault 11 made sense in the Fallout universe? How much freedom did you have when creating the vault and the characters in it? There was no book. We had a few ex-Black Isle guys like Josh who had been part of the early games in the series, and knew the setting really well. They were always helpful when questions came up. The nice thing about the vaults though is they have very little baggage to them in terms of lore.
With Vault 11 I really had carte blanche when it came to narrative choices. As long as I got the tone right, it was going to feel like it belonged.
There were a few goals. I wanted the whole thing to be structured as a mystery where players would see the outcome first and then progress through the level trying to learn the reason for it. So the first point of interest the player is meant to come across is where the "survivors" lie, near the entrance. From there, I wanted things to get stranger and more opaque before they became clearer, which is maybe a dubious goal for a narrative designer.
The hope was to make it very difficult at first to imagine what on earth these people could have been up to, so when the story all slowly came together, the revelation would hopefully be satisfying. The lore of Vault 11 represents the story about a community that has an unquestionable trust in the system, thus doing what they are told to do and ignore conventional morality.
It reminds me of the short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, which was an incredibly disturbing tale when it was published in the New Yorker in In a small town of people, there is a lottery held on June 27 every year and taking only two hours. At first, the village people and kids collect small stones, put them in their pockets.
Then, family proceeds to stand together, waiting for the lottery procedure to be commenced by Mr. Summers, a businessman who seems to have absolute political authority in the town.
Old Man Werner is a firm advocate for preserving the tradition of holding the annual lottery while denouncing other villages for abandoning it, irrationally believing that without this ritual, the society will go back to a barbaric state as if the lottery is the only thing that makes the community progress. Tessie Hutchinson arrives late to the crowd, admitting she forgets what day it is.
This makes her stand out in the crowd as if her misconduct on such important day is unforgivable. Then, the lottery proceeds as follows: first, each head of families mostly husbands or adult sons represent their families to draw a slip of paper from Mr.
Both involve a yearly ritual that is followed up by an irrational decision-making process of a community toward one of their fellow. Nevertheless, in The Lottery, the whole process is arbitrarily followed by villagers regardless of consequences, in the name of tradition, whereas in Vault 11, it is believed that by refusing to sacrifice one, the result may be a total extermination of everyone in the community.
Although there is no real enforcer of tradition but the collective minds of community members, going against tradition means rejecting the foundation that establishes the identity of that society. Still, there is no heavenly punishment if one decides to denounce his or her tradition, yet, people are still stoned to death in for betraying those intangible values.
In Vault 11, the difference from The Lottery is that tradition is enforced by a tangible thing, the vault computer, and there is a supposedly real consequence for disobeying the tradition: the threat of extermination.
The demand for self-preservation outweighs morality. Hence, democracy in Vault 11 acts in a reversed way where individuals persuade the public not the vote for him or her.
Nevertheless, the public in Vault 11 is different from the public in The Lottery because they, the vault dwellers, do have a sense of guilt when voting for a person to become the overseer. Yet, the survival of the whole community is the priority, and there is no point in saving one life if that action would lead to a total annihilation of the population, including that saved individual.
I fail to see an alternative logic around this perspective. I ask myself when putting the lives of the vault population and of one resident on a scale, which would weigh heavier. Evidently, prolonging the inevitable faith of the population, that is, until the last surviving person of Vault 11 becomes the overseer, is a more desirable outcome. However, things change dramatically after Katherine becomes the overseer and proposes Overseer Order , which nullifies the election process and uses randomization to determine the next person to be sacrificed.
This turn of events transforms the story of Vault 11 into an identical version of The Lottery. Now, every resident has an equally random chance of being elected, and they no longer have to face with their sense of guilt. All of a sudden, the moral and political problem is solved though it upsets the social structure of the vault.
In an absolute egalitarian society, the idea that everyone has an equal chance to be sacrificed does not appeal well to the upper class. As a result, a civil war breaks out following the issuance of Order Vault 11 population destroys itself faster than the possibility of being exterminated by the vault computer. Photo: Milgram Experiment participant. Via Pacific Standard.
It has always been the vault computer that is the root of all problems in Vault It is not a really smart and independent-thinking Artificial Intelligence as we usually see in sci-fi movies. Hence, the computer becomes an unquestionable authority in the vault because everyone automatically accepts the way it is.
This reminds me of the infamous Milgram experiment. The Milgram experiment, conducted in by psychologist Stanley Milgram, involved a series of tests in order to assess to what extent participants would violate their own moral codes when given an order from an authority figure.
The setting is simple. The learner-actor is strapped into an electric chair. In a different room, the participant is given a device that can give a fake electric shock to the learner. The two conduct a series of questions where the teacher asks, the learner answers. For each wrong answer, the learner receives a fake shock with an increasing degree and acts as if he is in an incredible pain.
If at any time the participant wants to stop the experiment for worrying the well-being of the learner-actor, he is given a set of four consecutive commands by the authority figure:.
The terminal here requires a password to access. Past the office is a blocked passage to the atrium. The hallway before the office leads to the utility room and another blocked passage to the atrium. In the utility room, the differential pressure controller required for the Still in the Dark quest for the Brotherhood of Steel is located in a locker in the righthand side of the submerged room. The utility room provides access to the atrium via the flooded lower reactor level. Conversely, a set of Average locked doors can be picked one floor above to circumvent the flooded areas.
In the atrium, the Vault 11 overseer's terminal password is found on the upper balcony terminal. A holotape, Prepared speech of Gus Olson, ombudsman, for the annual overseer election , is found on the podium below. This level also features the Vault cafeteria, which has a large supply of food and a first aid box. The cafeteria's entrance is boobytrapped with explosives and a gas leak located here can cause a violent chain reaction.
Accessing the overseer's terminal with the aforementioned password can open a chamber under the desk. This opens into a long tunnel. At this point, a pre-programmed voice speaks as the Courier approaches a door illuminated by a bright light. At the end of the tunnel is a room with a single chair in the center, along with a projector. The voice instructs the player character to sit in the chair to start the presentation. Delaying this will cause the recording to repeat, "you have no choice but to sit in the chair" until the Courier complies.
The exit door locks as soon as the presentation starts. Pleasant scenes are shown while a voice reassures the individual that they lived a good life and their next one will be better yet. At the conclusion of the presentation, wall panels on both sides of the room slide back, and four robots and eight turrets will simultaneously attack the player character.
Remaining in the chair until the film concludes is dangerous as the robots and turrets open fire immediately. Once the automatons are dealt with, the player character can access a small room with the Vault mainframe computer inside. This computer unlocks the door and reveals the true purpose of the Vault, determining how long it would take for the population to refuse further sacrifices, essentially a test of self-preservation versus morality.
The Happy Trails slide show is a presentation created by Vault-Tec Industries specifically for use in Vault 11 and its experiment. The slide show would play when a chosen sacrifice would enter the sacrificial chamber and sit down in the chair in the middle of the room. The purpose of the slide show was meant to bring the sacrifice to false sense calm and acceptance before their violent death.
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Please help by improving the article. Main article: Happy Trails slideshow. An overview of the Vault 11 walls with propaganda posters. Pugilism Illustrated. Mini nuke near the security room. It was basically - my idea was Vault 11, but with like, Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery' at the heart of it.
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