Postmortem

So, to start – let’s ask a simple question: what went wrong? Obviously there’s the accent, which is maybe too plainly fake-Irish.[1] But beyond this, there are much bigger issues. For one, her storyline is a little too straightforward ‘fix the broken bird’. That’s not a bad starting point, but it ends up feeling lacklustre when it isn’t used well, and here… Well, it’s used badly. Cait’s entire character is that she’s a woman broken by trauma that is healed by the power of your friendship. That’s a powerful fantasy, and we can work with it in the fixing stage, but it also lies at the core of what went wrong at every stage.

Even the way we pick Cait up is also a great example. The Combat Zone gets a real write-up in the Worldspace section, but the short version: It’s a raider bar with a fighting ring. That’s a really cool concept, so why the hell can’t we engage with it beyond a one-time-only shoot ‘em all followed by simply… being given her??? For free? No strings attached?

By contrast, the original plan for the Combat Zone was interactive, with a fight in the ring against Cait – one that has voiced lines and that has been successfully modded back in with minimal script issues.[2] This version of Cait actively asks you to kill her in the ring after you win and resents that you beat her – and resents even more when Tommy ‘lends’ you her because she’s played out and sloppy. The vanilla equivalent’s tone is radically different, locating Cait as the undefeated champion sent with you to get clean, rather than someone on the very edge of suicide. Tommy’s own ‘I care about this girl’ subtext is rendered blatant text, and he makes no threats to the player if they mistreat her. If there’s interest, I can try and record both versions to show the differences.

The rest of her storyline plays out the same either way: She slowly warms up to you, reveals that she was sold as a slave, killed her parents for selling her, and has spiralled into serious Psycho abuse since. Lots of pathos, lots of tragedy, lots of ‘heal me with love’ energy. Eventually she trusts you enough – romance optional – to put getting clean in your hands, and you go kill a bunch of people to get the magical cure. This leaves us with two problems:

It is completely linear, and the addiction has no actual weight.

The resolution is hollow and disconnected from the world.

We’ll get more into that in the Fixes section.

There’s also an issue with her dialogue. And especially her barks – a split in direction that can’t decide whether she’s genuinely carefree or putting it on. She’s very talkative, and not always in a good way – the issue is not that she talks too much, but that too much of it is snarkily flirty, and it often fires at the wrong time due to the script engine’s limitations. And, with all due respect to Katy Townsend: many of the lines have poor emotional range, and not in a deliberate monotone. Given this is a constant issue with Bethesda titles I’m inclined to lay the blame on the studio rather than the performers – a voice actor will only give you their best read if they have great direction, and the necessity of lots of ‘generic’ dialogue that can’t be too angry, too sad, too wistful, gets in the way of a more dynamic performance.

The end result is we get a very mixed, mostly one-dimensional character. The game says: ‘This is Cait. She’s a drug-addicted bruiser with a dark past. But also, she’s fun and quirky! Don’t forget hot!’ Rather than letting those dimensions expand out with how they conflict, the experience is of muddy dissonance.

Fixing Cait

The first step to fixing Cait is to clarify her role within a party and gate her general barks behind different affinity levels. She begins as someone essentially rented to you by her owner, full of resentment and despair, but her barks don’t reflect this rage. Little details like this add up – they help sell the progression of the relationship. They don’t need to be ‘oh woe is me’ angst material, but more bitterness at the start fading out into comfort and actual hope will turn her from a one-note portrayal and embrace the actual complexity of her narrative.

Likewise, her affinity triggers need revision. The story of Cait is one of someone who has tried to bury their pain beneath rage, suicidal impulses, and adrenaline seeking. Her affinity triggers, though, are set up primarily to reward three things:

Being a right cunt to people, especially violently.

Drugs and sex, but with no weight to it.

Lockpicking and theft.

Basically? She’s a generic Evil Snarky companion until her quest fires and she stops liking drugs, but otherwise remains a right asshole. These affinity triggers, in a nutshell, are rigged to simply view ‘being helpful’ as bad.

The problem is that Cait’s entire quest is about realizing that life is worth living and you are someone who will help her, no strings attached. So – her dialogue responses to being a right cunt early might be positive, but her actual affinity should reward being helpful-without-self-sacrifice, and particularly reward protecting your own. We’ll consider Emotional Weighting shortly as Cait practically begs for it as a clash-of-values aspect to her story.

In terms of sex and romance, Cait should operate almost in reverse of the F4 standard – beginning (after the initial low end affinity trigger kicks out of the ‘I hate and resent you’ stage) with her offering it as a casual thing because she’s been trying to drown out her trauma, then progressing to her ending that casual thing when she hits high affinity and trusts the player enough to know they won’t kick her to the curb over it, with a possibility of renewing a casual thing after she’s clean and hits maximum affinity again depending on her Emotional Weighting. As it stands, her dialogue already supports something like this, but without the extra impact of something being offered and then revoked:

If there's anythin' I learned at the Combat Zone, it was that nobody does things for other people without expectin' somethin' in return. Now I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but your kindness is startin' to make me wonder.

The way we pick her up is also… honestly, bizarre. Whether basegame or the cut original, she’s simply given to the player, with her push back being that she either goes alone (which Tommy, her owner, is magically okay with) or with you. Tommy makes a point about how you’re doing him a favour by taking her with you, but this is a favour we can never cash in. So, the obvious fix here: Cait isn’t free. She’s under contract and even sloppy, she’s a big draw as the undefeated champion. Without Intimidation, high Charisma, or Local Leader, her contract needs to be bought out – say for 500 caps – or rented (in which case Tommy will want her back, cuing a quest), or if you already have a Reputation in Goodneighbour or Libertalia, owing Tommy a favour that cues a quest later. We can come back to that in narrative design’s section.

Next, and rather bigger, is the issue of her dialogue and quest. There’s nothing unworkable in her backstory, but the dialogue around it needs to be tightened and have more push back, and her addiction needs to actually matter. It should be possible to press too early and be told to firmly go fuck yourself, and there should be moments in which her substance abuse lead to some genuine fuck ups when she’s left in a settlement before she gets clean. The decision to swap her out, only to come back to find she’s trashed the settlement or hub’s bar and you’ve got to make good on her behalf or something similar, gives weight to her addictions and also makes the ‘I’ve got to get clean, this shit is killing me’ land as a ‘finally’ if she rejects the demand to go clean earlier. This, ultimately, is the power fantasy at the heart of Cait: that the person you love who is tearing themselves apart in front of you can pull back from the abyss. That’s the key to her quest and her character – that desperate hope, at first given to someone, then shared with someone, that while it may not ever be okay, something worth living is attainable. This hope, though, needs to be hard won – and as it is, Cait will pretty much hand it to you if you shoot a whole bunch of smack in front of her and then tell someone asking you for help to go fuck themselves, which is nonsensical.

As it stands, her affinity quest really has three phases. First, she likes you enough to open up about how things really were in the Combat Zone, then about how killing her parents in revenge for a childhood of abuse and the ultimate betrayal of being sold into slavery did nothing to cure the pain inside of her and how she’s hooked on Psycho because of it, and then finally, the ‘help me get clean’ segment.

How she gets clean is a bit of a pull – Vault 95’s got a magic machine, the only thing that can fix Cait, so go kill a bunch of people and use it. Boring, and worst of all, tied to the Faction That Isn’t, the Gunners.  The solution should instead involve finding some form of catharsis for killing her parents – an open-ended problem that permits her to heal enough to make a real go at it by some combination of the following

Finding, and killing, some slavers.

Assisting the Railroad, despite her cynicism.

Witnessing a healthy family – e.g. the Peabodies, subject to its rewrite – or even Piper and Nat.

This should, ideally, be one of those unmarked quests that does not have a compass – only Cait’s dialogue as a loose and semi-reliable guide. When she hits that threshold of catharsis, the marked quest kicks off. This is also where the Emotional Weighting meters can really come into play by restructuring the possible quest like so:

Stage 1: Trust.

Solution 1: Reusing Cait’s actual dialogue about treating her nicely… do just that. Build the Trust meter she has with you to 75 and Empathy up to 50.

Outcome 1: Cait stops sleeping with you and opens up about her past. Remove the affinity boosts for arbitrary violence.

Solution 2: Be a reliable bastard instead. Build Trust to 75 but without Empathy at 50.

Outcome 2: Cait continues the casual thing but opens up, but feels an obligation to double down on the hard act.

Solution 3: Fail. Yes, we’re bringing back failstates. If Cait travels with you long enough without coming to trust you, it diverts into the alternate form of the quest where things get dark. That one’s for later. This isn’t a permanent fail, as there’ll be a chance to pull her back from the brink – but it’s very much a quietly ticking time bomb waiting to go off.

Outcomes 1 and 2 both feed into Stage 2, which fires after a suitable time delay.

Stage 2: Catharsis.

Stage 2 is where you chase down that unmarked catharsis, maybe without even knowing you’re doing it. If you unlocked Outcome 1, Cait gains periodic barks about wanting to make a difference in the world. If you didn’t, she stays cynical and quite vicious throughout.

Solution 1: Catharsis through Extreme Violence. This is where you find and kill some slavers[3] – an option open whether or not you built Cait’s empathy up or not, because this one keys off Trust and Justice.

Outcome 1: Amongst the dead, Cait finds a measure of peace. It’s too late to undo her own pain, but she’s been able to stop someone else’s. She continues struggling with her addiction and branches into Stage 3A.

Solution 2: Catharsis through idealism. Work with the Railroad – whether creating a refuge for runaway synths or killing coursers. This one is only functional if Cait’s Empathy is above 50.

Outcome 2: Cait doesn’t find the peace she unknowingly hoped for, and struggles to express why (it’s because she’s still not 100% convinced Synths are human beings.) She continues abusing Psycho and drinking to forget, and branches into Stage 3B.

Outcome 2a: If Cait and Nick or Curie have a high relationship score, Cait finds catharsis helping synths instead. This requires her to have spent time adventuring with Nick and/or Synth!Curie. Deacon won’t work (he annoys her, and Cait’s emotional state requires direct experiences of the humanity of the synth, not an abstraction) This route opens 3A too.

Solution 3: Happy Families. This is the indirect route, and the one that should be least obvious. Completing Piper’s quest in a way that helps resolve Nat’s struggle, completing Mac’s quest with him bringing his son to live in a settlement, finding a way to help Marcy and Jun Long go on with their life together, reuniting the revised Peabodies, and various other ‘save the family’ quests (e.g. Finch farms) should all increment a hidden counter. If it hits 3 or higher, Outcome 3 fires.

Outcome 3: Cait falls into a pit of despair at the full realization that her monstrous parents were unfathomably cruel even by wasteland standards, and the agonizing grief she finally feels for the child she was and who she could have been. She leaves the party (unless persuaded by a very difficult speech check to remain, in which case this is averted and she redirects to Stage 3B) and disappears for a week before resurfacing in the Hotel Rexford, beaten to hell but resolved that she’s done with her life – one last push or it’s over. This merges her questline into the final stage of the ‘dark place’ version, Stage 3(D)A. It is implied she attempts suicide by picking fights during this time but remains the cursed undisputed champion, unable to die. The player also needs to pick up her tab. However, as dark and punitive as it seems, this primes Cait for her ‘best’ outcome – she enters her second Combat Mode, which is weaker by a fair margin, but her feverish need to make a life worth living flags her for automatic success in the transition to ‘Good End’ Cait.

From there, we move to mainline Stage 3 – the ‘Cait needs to get clean’ phase.

Stage 3: Healing.

This one’s division is rooted in when and under what circumstances she decides and accepts this. 3A Cait is immediately prepared to as part of her cathartic shift – there is no delay, and it flows immediately from the Outcome 1/2a dialogue to her asking for help to move the unfathomable weight from her shoulders. 3B Cait requires either an additional instigating Incident (see below for that) or a suitable delay. The other key difference lies in the ultimate flag – 3A Cait has a much higher chance of hitting peak Cait, while 3B Cait, thanks to her continuing period of Psycho abuse, is more likely to end on the Broken Bird state. Neither is set in stone and player choices for Stage 3 are crucial still.

Stage 3 has, unlike baseline F4, a variety of possible solutions.

Solution 1: The base-game Vault 95 run. Unlike Base F4, the Gunners are (part of the broader rewriting) a real faction, and so it is possible to bargain with them for access to Vault 95’s advanced treatment equipment as well as to kill your way in. If Cait has racked up a negative Gunner Reputation, they will refuse her – forcing you to either resort to violence yourself, or find another solution. ‘Kill ‘em all for the magic machine’ is very much a fail-state last-resort for this questline.

Outcome 1: Cait gets clean, but the underlying trauma is still there. Unless she’s on 3A or has her Empathy high enough, this triggers the Relapsing Broken Bird outcome down the line. If Cait’s Affection score is high enough, she suggests renewing the physical relationship if it has lapsed.

Solution 2: Vault 81 reactivity. If the Mole Rat Plague storyline ended with the protagonists preventing a mass outbreak and the death of Austin, the Vault is prepared to stretch its medical supplies and knowledge to assist Cait in detox for a three week period. If Curie remained as the Vault’s Miss Doctor, this is an automatic success.

Outcome 2: Cait gets clean. If Curie is there and she and Cait have a positive relationship score, she also gets a much needed dose of psychotherapy and achieves the ‘good’ ending. If Curie is absent, then as Outcome 1. If Tina de Luca is still selling chems and Curie is absent, Cait’s recovery is sidelined unless her Empathy rating is high enough, resulting in the Relapsing Broken Bird outcome. If Cait’s Affection score is high enough, she suggests renewing the physical relationship if it has lapsed.

Solution 3: The Institute. They can magic her good as new. Takes three days.

Outcome 3: Cait gets clean, but the conditions of her treatment – complicity in ongoing slavery and abuses – plague her. She relapses into addiction later on, but the healthcare is good enough she avoids the Broken Bird outcome. Her Trust, Empathy, and Justice are permanently capped at 50 and can go no higher. She does not renew the intimacy and, if the catharsis was achieved by helping fight slavery, returns to her bitter dialogues from the very launch. This is a false ‘good end’ – one in which Cait loses faith in the world and the player to do justice, and is effectively locked into the state she was before the questline, right down to reverting to her initial combat mode and affinity indexes.

Solution 4: Curie and a settlement, provided it has a medical clinic and the player can scrounge up enough addictol and stimpaks for the physiological side of things. Takes three weeks and locks both companions. (4A: Synth Curie suggests using the Memory Den to process Cait’s trauma more efficiently, in a mirror of the player using Nick to dive Kellogg’s brain. This reduces the timeline to a single week and lowers the Empathy and Trust weights required for the Good End.)

Outcome 4: Branches. If Cait and Curie have a positive relationship score, this route guarantees the ‘good end’ to Cait’s questline regardless of other factors. If they have a negative one, Cait remains troubled – unless her Empathy and Trust of the player are both high enough, it ends in the Relapsed Broken Bird endstate. Unlocks the hidden Cait-Curie relationship perks.

Solution 5: Encourage her not to get clean, you absolute villain.

Outcome 5: If Trust is at maximum, Cait agrees – she’s nothing without the drugs that keep her on top in a fight. This is perhaps the single worst end state, and accordingly, Cait’s Incidents should accelerate. She enters the fourth Combat Mode, but a hidden integer starts counting – after three combat downings, she finally finds peace in death. This Cait burns bright and brutal, but brief. If Trust is below Maximum, Cait loses all Trust in the player, leaves their service, and takes up residence in Goodneighbour’s Memory Den as a bouncer trying to use the Loungers to relieve her pain enough to quit on her own terms. She can only be rerecruited with a very challenging Speech check, but will never renew the intimacy once rehired and will revert to her bitter dialogue. Rehired Cait does not enter the fourth Combat Mode and is mechanically no different to Second Mode Cait - whether you succeed or fail, this act of utter bastardy is a complete betrayal of her.

Combat Modes

In the above outline, I’ve referenced Combat Modes. The idea here is that mechanically, Cait should be divided into four possible modes. Her First Mode is the basic melee-based bruiser with an ability to go full Psycho – giving her a burst of attack speed and damage. Her Second Mode is where the drugs are catching up and she becomes slower and weaker than she was, but is still a melee-based bruiser with the ability to trigger the Psycho rush but with a stun at the end. Her Third Mode loses the psycho ability but replaces it with the ability to get herself up periodically without needing to be rescued – the will to live as game mechanic – and, depending on if she’s a Broken Bird or not, restores the health and speed penalty.

The fourth is Suicidal Cait, who triggers the Psycho rush in every combat, is unable to use ranged weapons, and who takes additional damage but deals plenty more too. Suicidal Cait doesn’t last long in this world, and that's the price of being a bastard: you kill your friend, because her appeal to you to help her get clean wasn't just about getting off the Psycho, but about wanting to believe better things are possible for her. It's not the addiction that ultimately does her in, but the fact you talk her into giving up that hope she might one day escape the pain.

Part 2 soon – detailing the aesthetic shifts for Cait, the Incidents that give her addiction weight, a possible Tommy Lonnegan questline to tie the Combat Zone to the Triggermen and make renting her or trading her for a favour a rewarding proposition, endstate details and perks, and her companion interactions.

[1] ‘But how does she even have one 200 years after the –‘ shut up. The assumption travel is impossible is foolishness of the highest order: human beings crossed the Atlantic with nothing more technologically complicated than shallow-draught single-masted clinker-built ships and knowledge of the tides. People fucking row across the Atlantic! Crazy people, but people! ‘Oh but ghoul whales – ‘ sir how many ghoul whales and sharks do you think exist in the devastated oceans. ‘But radstorms and – ‘ Human beings are real good at looking at the unfathomable dangers of the sea, going ‘hold my beer’, and proceeding to do impossible things. You think a radstorm is that much more dangerous than trying to round the cape in an arctic blow??? ‘wow Europe must be worse than America – ‘ or maybe its better and some people look specifically at the chaos of the American Wastelands and think: yes, perfect! People are profoundly unserious on this point! Can you tell I’m annoyed! Exclamation mark!

[2] Two mods are required to reimplement – one that reimplements, and one that patches. These aren’t due to the particularly complex scripting, though.