One of the advantages that computers hold over dedicated gaming machines is customization. Mods can alter how the game plays, looks or sounds. Settings allow you to make decisions of balancing performance yourself, rather than having them made for you: if you would rather a game run at sixty frames per second than at 1080p then you can turn the resolution down, or if you prefer a sharper looking game running at thirty frames per second you can decide otherwise. Today I want to talk about developer consoles in games.
Developer consoles are optional text interfaces in many PC games that allow you to configure various aspects of the game while it is running. They expose options that are usually only available to developers and are commonly used for things such as spawning enemies and items, fixing bugs or teleporting your character. In most games you’d never bother even looking at the console unless you had a really obscure bug, but in some they can become an integral part of the way you play the game.
I really like dogs. On a list of things I like, dogs would definitely be in the top five, just above David Bowie and just under breathing. Early on in my game of Fallout 3, I came across a dog called Dogmeat, and he followed me around and we conquered the wasteland together. In Fallout: New Vegas, your followers couldn’t die. They could get shot, but as in real life when they’d been shot too much they’d just faint for a bit and then rejoin you at your house sometime later. Quite unrealistically, if your followers in Fallout 3 get shot too much then they’ll just die forever. It’s very inconvenient, and I didn’t like the idea of having to play perfectly in order to keep this dog alive.
So I just typed SetEssential 0006a772 1 into the developer console and never had to worry about it again. Essential characters in Fallout (and any Bethesda game, really) are ones that can’t die. They just faint for a bit then get back up. It didn’t really unbalance the game, since if an enemy did enough damage to Dogmeat he would be knocked out until the end of the fight, it just made the game better for me. I had more fun because I could play it the way I wanted to, bending any rule that I found made the experience less enjoyable to me. In this way it’s very much like playing a board game, letting you make new house rules or ignore those that the designer put in based on personal taste.
I used the console occasionally in Fallout: New Vegas as well. In one mission I had two options, either blow up a base full of people or convince their leader to work with the people who wanted to blow them up. I rather liked the people I was being asked to blow up, so I decided to go for the second option, but since I had previously been part of a coup within this group and helped a different leader take control of it, there was no way I could. Despite the fact that, in my opinion, the new leader would probably have been more receptive to peace than the old one, the dialogue option simply wouldn’t come up if you had decided to oust the previous leader.
So I just typed SetObjectiveDisplayed 00136166 56 1 into the developer console, which skipped the part of the quest where I needed to talk to the leader and get him to agree to peace, and everybody lived happily ever after. Easy. If I had been playing New Vegas on my PS3 I would have been forced to either not do this quest (which, since it was part of the central quest line, would lock me out of a lot of content), or do something I didn’t really feel like my character would ever do.
There have been various other times I’ve used developer consoles for little things. The original Mass Effect has a lighting bug with modern video cards in a couple of levels that makes it nearly unplayable. You can’t turn the lighting off in the settings, but you can with the console, changing a game ending bug into just having to put up with a flatter looking game for twenty minutes. It’s a shame that a lot of games don’t have an easily accessible console, because it’s an excellent safety net that helps players fix problems themselves without having to wait for patches that may never come, or simply enjoy the game in a way the developer never anticipated.
