I have always had a soft-spot for post-apocalyptic fiction.  From movies to comics to games, if something is set after the end of the world, I’m usually willing to give it a shot.  Sometimes this turns out for the best, such as when I find something I enjoy like Jericho. Sometimes it doesn’t go well at all and I end up spending $9 to watch something like I Am Legend.

I trace most of this strange love of mine back to a little game called “Wasteland.”  Released back in 1988, Wasteland was an RPG in the mold of Bard’s Tale, but set in an America destroyed by nuclear war.  As a team of Desert Rangers (the law and order of the wastes), you wander the shattered lands of Nevada solving problems, saving lives, and kicking ass. I played the hell out of Wasteland, trying to make my way through it with various teams and skill sets, seeing what worked out the best. And, for years, Wasteland stood alone in terms of RPGs sharing the post-apocalyptic setting.  There were rumors of sequels (and one sort-of sequel called Fountain of Dreams, but we won’t talk about that…), but for the most part Wasteland was a lone oddity in a world of swords and sorcery.  That is, it was alone until the mid 90′s, when Black Isle Studios released what most called a “spiritual successor” to Wasteland.  That game, of course, was Fallout.

Fallout was an amazing game; it married a unique setting and aesthetic, fantastic (and witty) writing, and a great series of gameplay choices together into one wonderful package.  Fallout introduced it’s own character building system, SPECIAL, along with a huge set of perks that allowed a player to build up a character in a huge variety of ways.  You could be charming sniper, a super-scientist karate master, or just an average joe with a knack for explosives, among endless other options.  There were a huge variety of side quests, an interesting morality system, and a huge world to explore.  I was, as you can tell, in love again.

Just like the movie, but with more killer robots.

Several years later, Fallout 2 was released, and it featured all of the good from the first game, plus some extra good on top of that.  Now, don’t get me wrong, these games were not flawless by any account; in the grand scheme of things, though, the great far out-weighed the not great, and the games as a whole were brilliant.  This, of course, left me eagerly anticipating the next installment in the series.

But then something strange happened – part three never materialized.  Again, rumors abounds swirled around that it was coming, but nothing ever came to fruition.  Then Black Isle Studios themselves dissolved, and the ownership of the franchise was left with Interplay, who seemed bound and determined not to do anything useful with it.  When that proved unprofitable for them, they sold the name to Bethesda, developer of the Elder Scrolls series.  As someone who really wanted to like the Elder Scrolls but could never quite get into them, this made me a little trepeditious.  Oblivion was an ambitious game, but I also found it critically flawed – would these same flaws be making their way into a new Fallout?

As time went on, more information began to leak out about the project: it would be first person, it would be real time, it would have a simplified speech system; these things were not making me any more confident.  Add to that comments from some of the designers that old fans of Fallout basically needed to shut up and get with the times, and my enthusiasm for the whole thing was waning.  That said, I did not want to be one of those curmudgeon old fans completely unwilling to accept any changes; more of the same might be enjoyable, but it would also be a failure in its own way.  As pictures and video and hands-on started to leak out, my excitement started to rekindle – though I might have some concerns, it was still Fallout, damnit.

So that brings us to the day I finally had Fallout 3 in my sweaty hands.

DEATH, BIRTH, AND MUSTACHES

Fallout 3 begins with something that sends involuntary spasms of joy through any Fallout fan’s body: Ron Perlman explaining to us the nature of war, and its propensity for change.  After that, the player is brought, quite literally, into the gameworld through the birth of their character.  Resting in the hands of their father, the player decides on their basics: gender, name, and looks.  The game features Oblivion’s facial designer with its in-depth brow height detail, prodigious number of mustache and beard options, and awful, awful hair.  After that is decided, your mother promptly shuffles off the mortal coil, and the game jumps ahead a year.  Here, you learn the basics of moving around, as well as setting your SPECIAL attributes.  The game continues along down this line, jumping ever further forward in your life, and allowing you to set your skills and such along the way at key moments in your early life.  It’s a neat idea, and the execution is pulled off well.  It serves to quickly draw the player into the world of Vault 101, and attempts to give you some small level of emotional connection with those around you.

One of the most important choices you will make

Once your character creation is complete, you smoothly move into the story proper, which kicks off with your father, James, sneaking out of the vault, the vault police killing his assistant, and then coming to kill you as well for reasons I’m still not entirely clear on.  Regardless, with the help of the Overseer’s daughter, you murder a few people and make your escape as well. It is, to be honest, a nice, dramatic moment as you watch the giant vault door slowly open, head down the rocky tunnel, and emerge onto the hillside giving you a panoramic vista of the desolate wasteland as well.  Then, if you are like me, you jumped off the cliff to see how far you could safely fall. Then, after a quick reload, you set off into the world to start your adventure.

And that’s where things get a little rough.

VATS: IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER

Fallout 3, like pretty much every RPG ever, features a lot of fighting.  Traditionally, Fallout used a turn-based combat system with grid movement and an “Action Point” system.  Basically, every move you made from walking to reloading to aiming at people’s skulls took a certain number of AP.  When you used up all your AP for a round, your turn was over, and the AI would make its moves.  It was a strategic system, and it forced the player to really evaluate what actions to take. Blow a few AP using a Stimpak to stabilize yourself, or try to get off one last shot and hope it finishes off that Super Mutant before he gets to fire again.

When it was announced that Fallout 3 would use a realtime FPS system, I was very curious how they would integrate that with an RPG back-end that used number-crunching to determine hit rates, etc.  The answer turned out to be that they would make you miss sometimes. Basically, if you play the game in FPS mode, your shots will not necessarily go where you are aiming if you have a low skill level.  As your skill improves, the more accurately your shots will hit your target.  For those attempting to play this game as an FPS, of which I’m sure there were many, this can be initially frustrating as it’s not entirely clear why you are not hitting.  On the flip side of that, once you level up your skills a bit, it’s all too easy to play the game as an FPS.

Alas, the targeted Groin shot was removed

To give players a more “traditionally” Fallout method to approach combat, Bethesda added the VATS system. In essence, the VATS system works by pausing combat for a moment, allowing the player to pick out a few targeted shots (each costing a set amount of AP), and then having you unpause and launch the chosen attacks in rapid succession. VATS is very dramatic the first time you use it; everything goes into a slow-motion blur, and your enemies fall/burn/have their heads explode like blood sausages before you.  It’s pretty dramatic the second time you see it, too. Seeing it played out in slow motion every single time after that?  Not quite as exciting.

I also noticed that it just seemed a little too easy to hit in VATS.  I had my character heavily invested in Small Guns for most of the game, but midway through I decided to give Energy Weapons a try.  With only a minimal investment in the skill, I was soon making headshots with the best of them in VATS.  Perhaps my character was just awesome, but it felt like the hit percentages were just a little too easy.  Additionally, while you can use VATS while fighting with melee weapons, it takes away the ability to target different parts of the body.  This is inexplicable, and really takes away any sort of strategic options for melee fighters.

Get used to that blur effect and the gibs.  You’ll be seeing them a LOT.

Another critical choice the designers made in switching to the real-time system is that all inventory management pauses the action.  What this means, in effect, is that at any point in a battle, you can pause the action, dive into your bag, fix your equipment, and heal yourself up. In effect, so long as you have a ready supply of Stimpacks (which you probably will after the early parts of the game), you can pretty much enter battle with little worry of actually being killed – if your health gets low, just pause for a moment, pop a few stimpacks, and then get back to the action.  This holds true for when an enemy gets a lucky shot on you and cripples a limb or such; it really doesn’t matter, because you can heal it instantly and at no penalty.  The only times my character would get killed were from lucky rocket strikes, unseen landmines, or deathclaw attacks from the rear.  Other than that, combat held very little tension, as death was only a remote possibility.  Why the developers would take all the danger out of battle is a mystery, and it serves only to take the player out of the game world.

TUMBLEWEED AND TARGET PRACTICE

When you aren’t busy blasting the tails off radscorpians, or having Super Mutants rain chaingun fire on you from half a mile away (seriously, you will be getting shot by people about 2 pixels high on the horizon), exploring the Capital Wastes is actually a pretty enjoyable experience.  The landscape is vast, and nice little visual touches appear everywhere.  Shattered highway overpasses, burned out farmhouses, and long-faded billboards span the land during your travels.  The very first town you visit, Megaton, is visually impressive, with a wonderful junkmetal feel and sprawling architecture.  The capital itself, though mostly in ruins, really does capture the look and feel of DC, especially for anyone who has spent any amount of time there in the real world.

Our tax dollars at work

While wandering the wastes, though, I did several times encounter a rather critical problem.  Pre-set scenes, no doubt primed to trigger when the player stumbled into the correct place, were playing out around me, but with me unable to actually see them.  In one key instance, I was roaming a hillside, when suddenly I saw two quick messages flash up on the bottom of the screen: “Raider critically hits Dogmeat” followed a moment later by “Dogmeat has been killed.”  Now, as any Fallout fan knows, Dogmeat is your vicious canine traveling companion.  The problem here was that Dogmeat was not traveling with me, nor had I ever even seen or heard hide nor hair of him.  Clearly, this was a point in the game where I was supposed to get the opportunity to recruit him, but he was dead before I was even aware there was anything going on.  A search around the immediate area revealed neither his corpse nor any raiders, either.  Whatever happened had come and gone like a phantom in the night.  This happened to me several times in different scenarios, and it left me feeling like I had missed out on something important.  If you are going to take the time to set up these scenes, make sure they are triggered in a way that actually allows the player to experience them properly.

ONE MAN’S JUNK…

One thing you will find in abundance in the wasteland is stuff.  Coffee mugs, burned up books, machine parts – pretty much anything you can think of. Many of these seemingly random things can be used in assembling various weapons and items gained through the discovery of schematics.  Of course, most of them are actually completely useless.  This abundance of random junk is especially frustrating when compared with the relative lack of variety in actual weapons and armor.  Compared to the previous Fallout installments, the arsenal available to the player in Fallout 3 seems pitifully minimal. Recent reports indicate that the DLC coming out will throw in some expansion of inventory, but only to those who want to pay for it.

Additionally, with the limited equipment available, the player also has to manage the condition of their equipment.  Every time you fire a gun, every time you take a hit, your weapon or your armor loses some condition.  As the condition gets worse, the equipment performs worse.  Equipment can be repaired (up to a point) for a price by most merchants, or if you have the proper level of repair skill and an identical weapon, you can cannibalize one for parts and use it to repair the other.  This basically functions as a money sink, as you are either paying to have your equipment repaired, or you are destroying weapons you would otherwise sell to use for parts.  Ultimately, it feels completely unnecessary, and the rate at which your equipment disintegrates often seems very rapid.  An alternative I would have liked to have seen them explore was to use your Repair skills to allow you to use some of the multitude of other junk you find lying around to repair things.

On top of that, Bethesda felt compelled to embrace the minigame fad by turning lockpicking and hacking into separate little challenges.  The hacking one is minorly irritating, but gets rapidly easier as your skill increases.  Lockpicking, on the other hand, seems completely arbitrary regardless of your skill level, and adds nothing to the game except frustration.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ARE YOU?

Beyond combat and exploration, of course, are more “human” matters.  Interaction with the many NPCs of the world is handled in traditional Fallout fashion, with branching conversation trees which have options affected by the character’s skills, attributes, or other factors.  A character with a very high speech skill, for instance, will often get the opportunity to sweet-talk NPCs or just outright lie to them, with varying amounts of success.  Intelligent characters will often be able to present analytical thoughts to resolve situations, whereas strong characters might just get to offer to crush some heads if people don’t give them what they want.  The options seem to pop up fairly often, and does give the player a nice range of ways to deal with various situations.

Shockingly, this town’s biggest problem is tetanus

And the situations are indeed varied.  There are a huge number of quests in the game, ranging from easy-to-resolve local problems to long treks across the wastes to find long-lost objects.  Most of the quests do a good job of presenting the player with various methods of completing them, usually involving some sort of moral or ethical choice.  Do you take the ghoul at his word and assassinate the alleged bigot, or do you do a little digging and try and find out the truth of the situation?  Some of the quest chains can be quite long, and the bulk of the time you spend playing the game will most likely be spent doing side quests as opposed the main quest itself.  Obviously, depending on how you resolve certain steps of quest chains, additional parts may open up or be closed off forever.

The quests, however, are not without problems.  On several chains, I found myself unable to advance any further after the NPCs involved vanished.  This would usually occur after being told to meet the NPC in question at a new location.  Traveling there, I’d find no sign of them.  Returning to where they were originally, I’d find they weren’t there either.  Somewhere in the Capital Wastes, a small wormhole had opened and sucked them away to worlds unknown.  While this might have been an exciting hypothetical trip for the NPC, it left me stuck with no way to proceed on a few different quests.  Also, on one occasion, I had a delightful conversation with someone I was supposed to kill, and as soon as I left the room, it informed me I had killed them.  Heading back into the room showed that, yes, they were indeed dead.  The mysteries of Fallout run deep.

SO THAT HAPPENED

This next section is going to be talking about the end of the game, so if you haven’t gotten there yet and have any intention of ever playing it, you should probably skip down to the last bit.

For everyone else, let’s talk about the biggest disappointment in the game: the ending. The entire endgame sequence of Fallout 3 is flawed in several ways, and those flaws teach us some valuable lessons about game design.  In quick summary, with minimal spoilers, the final sequence begins when Good Guy Brigade decides they need to take back a certain building that’s been taken over by Bad Guy Group.  To that end, they decide to launch a full assault (with you in tow, of course). This begins what could be a very exciting sequence of street-to-street fighting, making your way through the ruins to the destination point, dealing headon with the enemy in a pitched battle.  That’s what could have happened, but instead the player is treated to an incredibly boring sequence of walking.  This is because the Good Guy Brigade decides to bring a secret weapon with them, and this secret weapon does 99% of the fighting for you.

Now, I know what Bethesda was thinking here – they felt they had cooked up a visually impressive sequence of events that any player would absolutely love to watch!  The inherent problem here is that it completely takes the player out of the action.  All they do is trail along, taking in the set pieces that I’m sure the designer was very proud of.  The player is ripped out of world of the game at the exact point they should be getting drawn into it more than ever.  It’s an attempt at Half-Life 2 style storytelling, but it’s handled in a ham-handed fashion and simply does not work.

Just stare at this picture for a few minutes, and that will about equal the excitement of the endgame

Once the player reaches the destination, they actually get to do a little bit of fighting, but nothing that would even represent a challenge to anyone at this point in the game.  Between the lack of difficulty and the lack of having had to do anything in the previous sequence, most players are at this point led to believe that this cannot possibly be the end of the game.  This must be just yet another step along the main quest.  That’s what you keep thinking right up to the point you enter the final chamber to engage in some actions that defy all logical thought, and then the credits roll.  I don’t want to spoil much, but really, the very last part of the game makes no damn sense.  For anyone who’s played through, all I have to say is “Uh, Fawkes?  Remember him? Isn’t there something special about him that MAY BE INCREDIBLY USEFUL HERE?”

Have no fear, though; the disappointment isn’t over yet.  Fallout 1 and 2 were both well known for their lengthy closing sequences, in which the effects of your decisions throughout the game on the various people and places you encountered are covered.  This was a very satisfying (or upsetting) way of seeing concrete and lasting effects from your choices.  Fallout 3 decides to do away with this feature, and gives you a few meager endings based on one or two major choices.  Rumor has it that originally the game included hundreds of permutations on the ending, following in the traditional Fallout mold, but that the developers decided it was ultimately “boring” for the players to have to watch that.  So, for some reason it is considered boring to have a satisfying conclusion to your game, but not boring to force the player to walk around for 5 minutes while some secret super-weapon does all the work for you?

But I digress…

IN CONCLUSION

Fallout 3 is a game of ups and downs; Bethesda’s attempts at moving the Fallout world into both 3D and into realtime gameplay has its share of successes and failures.  Exploring the wide world of the capital wastes is very enjoyable, and simply picking a direction and walking to see what’s out there tends to lead to plenty of opportunity for adventure.  The quests available are varied and generally enjoyable, though not without bugs.  The main story itself, unfortunately, is probably the weakest quest in the game, capped off by an awful endgame.  Combat is simplistic, with little opportunity for strategy, and the VATS system is a useful, if not minimally enjoyable, creation.

Fallout 3 is a good game on its own, one which I enjoyed more than Oblivion, but as an entry in the Fallout universe, it is a definite disappointment.  I hate to use the term “dumbed down,” but one cannot help but walk away with that impression (supported by statements from the developers themselves).  Fallout 3 tries to be too many things at once, and doesn’t commit itself to doing any of those things exceedingly well, leaving a player with the feeling that there is a lot of potential there, but that it just never quite reached fruition.  With the recent release of modding tools to the public, perhaps some industrious fans will take up the mantle of nurturing some of these fledgling ideas into something greater, and fixing some of the flaws that overshadow what could have been a great game.