To further expand on the vault idea, I thought about more of what the player would do once inside and how the greater society works. I kind of want it to be structured a bit like the Old World Blues and Honest Hearts DLC, where you’re stuck inside once you arrive but after you’re done you can come back at any time (with one exception in this case).
Once you enter the vault, you are prevented from leaving by the overseer. They’ll let a handful of people into the vault, but no longer allows anyone to leave. Very few people left before, but after being filled in on what’s going on in the Mojave by an NCR deserter who also managed to get into the vault, a lockdown was put into place. This was to prevent the larger factions (Legion, NCR, and Vegas) from discovering the vault and taking interest in the vault’s endless food supply. This action was met with little resistance from the other vault dwellers since they had no desire to leave anyway. You are then stripped of your weapons (you’d be able to keep holdouts), or you just try to fight your way out (and fail every quest in the vault, I doubt anyone would want this but I need the option to be there regardless).
Your first task would be to settle in and meet a few of the more noteworthy NPCs in the vault that you’re told you’re going to be living with. One of these people is the leader of the other political faction in the vault. There is the status quo faction (for now will be called the Utopists), they basically live hedonistically in the vault, taking full advantage of the fact that nearly every need is taken care of for them. The only useful skill they have is required education in basic literacy and being able to fix any of the machines if an emergency were to happen. The other faction, that you meet here (for called the Disciplinarians for now), are more of the opinion that they should only be using the vault as a safety net while they train the vault dwellers to be able to venture out into the wasteland and build a society of sorts using the vault’s resources as a foundation instead of living in excess. After 200 years of luxury, the ideology of the Disciplinarians has diminished to the point of almost non-existence, there is only a handful of them left. You find out there’s an election in the vault that’s about to happen in a few days. This political faction wants to open up the vault again allowing you to leave.
From here, you would have 3 main ways of completing the questline. You could either help the Disciplinarians win the election either through hard work (completing side quests for the other vault dwellers) and persuasion or underhanded means, escape by getting your hands onto the vault door’s password and getting passed the turrets and robots (optionally getting your weapons back first, since you won’t be able to return to the vault if you didn’t ruin their randomized password system first), or helping the overseer (by extension the Utopists) into winning the election (you could also just submit to you being trapped here by just doing the bare minimum and talking to the overseer or by having the Disciplinarians lose the election). I would like to have an ending slideshow for the vault once the questline is resolved.
If you got out, by either having the Disciplinarians win or if you escaped yourself and broke the automatic password changing system, you can reveal the vault to the major factions, the Brotherhood of Steel, or the Followers of the Apocalypse, which leads to a quest where these factions will either invade or strike a deal with them (Most have the invasion option. House, NCR and Followers get the deal outcome. If you do things a certain way you can also have Legion reach a deal as well).
If you stay in the vault and don’t escape, after the slideshow you will not be able to leave the vault narratively. What I mean is, the vault would also have VR pods for those that got a bit stir crazy living in the vault. If you end the quest this way, you can use the VR pods to “return” to the Mojave and continue to play the game normally. From a narrative perspective, this is a simulation of the world as your character understands it and you get to experience it using the pod. When you return to the vault’s door, it would take you to the VR pods without any of the equipment you had (basically it moves all equipment into a container, until you go back into the simulation). No need to do this if you don’t want to, just want this in place so this choice still would have consequences without just ending the game right there.
. And that vault entrance seems pretty well hidden lol, it took me a second to notice the door