Fallout 3

Not withstanding my scathing evaluation of Kanenko's 1992 Chester Cheetah title - which is still widely recognized as one of the most baroquely literate uses of the word "sucks" ever to appear on Usenet - I don't often write video game reviews. However, it's not often that I play a game like Fallout 3... or to be more precise, it's rare that I play a game in the manner that I played Fallout 3 this week. Normally I have hardly any time to play games, but this week I worked my way through about two-thirds of Fallout's main plot during a period where my wife was out of town and I was stuck at home with the flu. In other words, I had no distractions, no responsibilities, and I was on drugs most of the time. That means I played Fallout a lot and I got really into it. Yes, yes, I'm talking about a game that came out in October 2008, which makes me the last person on earth to play it, but I'm betting that if you've come this far you're just going to keep on reading anyway.

The Good:

The size and scope of the game world in Fallout 3 is one of its most impressive aspects. I'm sure that Elite has a bigger game universe, but that hardly counts since most of it is procedurally-generated. I'm pretty far along in the game and I bet I've only been to a quarter of the game world so far. But in addition to breadth, there's also depth to it; the number of side-quests and random NPC encounters and strange little details they've filled the world up with is just incredible. This bodes well for replayability, too - maybe my next character will strike off towards the west, away from the areas my current guy has explored. I think that if you were so inclined, you could spend many hours of play time just walking from one end of post-apocalyptic Washington DC to the other, simply looking at stuff. In fact, the place is so huge and byzantine that it could get very frustrating if you couldn't alt-tab over to the Fallout Wiki to get a clue about where to go next. Still, they've managed to realize a very ambitious game world and I salute them for it.

On a related note, the whole retro-future timeline they've concocted is quite interesting, and I enjoyed picking up little bits of alternate history here and there in ruined museums and so forth. As near as I can tell, the Fallout world is basically the same as ours up until about 1950, at which point their world developed cheap nuclear power but skipped most of the advances in electronics and computers that we take for granted. Hence, in 2077 everybody was driving around in huge 50's-looking cars with onboard reactors (think Ford Nucleon) but their computers are primitive, there's radio but no TV, and most stuff still works off of vacuum tubes. Now that I think about it, the future of the Fallout world is pretty much what people in the 1950's thought their future would be like. What a neat design aesthetic.

Anyway, it's two centuries after the nuclear holocaust and things are bad all over. It's obvious as you play Fallout 3 that the designers made a conscious effort to make goodies scarce to keep you from finding too much loot too soon. Bullets, medicine, repairable weapons, and non-radioactive food are all in short supply, and it feels completely in keeping with the game world. You can't just rush into a firefight without being forever vigilant about your ammunition and health supplies, and you learn to target certain enemies who you know will usually be carrying something you can use. I found out very quickly that I had to do a lot of sneaking around, so I could ambush a bad guy or otherwise take him down with as few wasted shots as possible. In Fallout 3, you gain levels and skills but you never really reach the stage of Ultimate Badassery that you inevitably do in other games. Part of this is due to how the difficulty scales as you advance in rank, but scarcity also plays a big part: you may have found a l33t gun, sure, but what good is it going to be when you run out of l33t bullets?

Going hand in hand with the issue of limited resources is the way the designers let you make your own choices about what's right and wrong. Since you have to hoard your supplies all the time, when a situation comes along that (for example) requires you to give away your last bottle of clean water to help out some poor desert-dweller, you often have really to stop and agonize over it. They give you plenty of chances to do good or cause harm, and to be generous or selfish. Sometimes your character has to do bad things just to stay alive, which is certainly not something you see often in a Star Wars game. Even though I was trying to play my character as a good guy, it was surprisingly easy to start thinking "do I help these guys, or should I just shoot them and take their food?". Not often does a video game make me ask myself that, and I appreciate it.

Once the shooting starts, I found myself using the very handy VATS system an awful lot. They way they worked a turn-based combat system with action points and percent-chance-to-hit into a real-time FPS game is quite well done and feels very natural. The slow-mo cinematic combat effects are fun (it's like being in my very own John Woo film!) and popping up from behind some cover to land a headshot with a critical hit and blowing off some monster's head... well, it just never gets old.

Finally, no list of positives for Fallout 3 is complete without a mention of Dogmeat. Almost every NPC companion I've ever encountered in any game has been cheap cannon fodder at best, and a deadly hindrance at worst (I'm looking in your direction, Half-Life 2 squad members who block you from going through a door while alien soldiers are shooting you in the back). But this little guy is different - he's a genuine help in combat, he follows quietly without saying stupid stuff, he growls to alert you to nearby danger, and he usually doesn't get in your way. Plus, you can tell him to go fetch useful stuff for you (I think I once even saw him open a locked ammo box?!). I really liked having him around, in a definite Boy And His Dog kind of way. However, I must say that I wish they had done a little more with him. You can say things like "good boy" and "bad dog" to him, but as far as I could tell, there's no in-game effect no matter what you say. And, although you can tell him to "stay" so he doesn't go chasing after a too-strong group of bad guys, they missed an obvious trick by not letting you whistle to summon him again. And that leads us to...

The Not As Good:

It only takes about ten minutes of playing to recognize that Fallout 3's in-game map is terrible. Yes, I realize that computers in the Fallout universe are very primitive compared to what we have today - but did the map really have to be green-on-green like my dad's TRS-80? Not to mention, showing every story of the building you're in at the same time is so not useful. I can't count the number of times I got confused, thinking I was in the right room but actually being one floor above or below it.

Speaking of moving around - I know I gave props the combat system just a minute ago, but I need to call back a few of those same props. Allow me to un-prop thusly: I love the turn-based VATS system. I do not so much love the "freehand" real-time combat that you're forced to rely on once you use up all your VATS action points. Part of my problem is that I'm just not that great at FPS games, but I think I can legitimately pin some of the blame on the game itself as well. The first-person mouse controls are just kind of clunky and hard to aim. In the third-person view (the POV is switchable between the two) the camera is all over the place, the targeting reticule is often obscured by the back of my character's head, and the lack of any kind of auto-aim makes it even tougher to hit. Even when not in combat, I tend to switch back and forth between first- and third-person depending on the situation; neither one is ever quite right all the time.

Now, remember how I said the game world is super huge and the locations are varied? Well, that openness and lived-in feel has an evil, bearded counterpart called "I keep picking up the same ten items". I'm not saying I don't like my standard run-of-the-mill guns - they kill giant irradiated roaches real good, after all - but in thirty hours of play I've come across exactly two unique weapons. It doesn't have to be Diablo II (you find: Scintillating Ochre Longsword of the Dragon!) but some additional minor variation in the kind of stuff you pick up would be most appreciated. Or, let me do like KotOR and buy upgrades for my various weapons to make them deadlier or more accurate. I kind of hoped they were heading in this direction with the "buy schematics to make weapons" thing they do, but it's still not quite what I was looking for.

One thing that's not in short supply is in Fallout 3 is NPCs to talk to - there must be a couple hundred scattered across the whole wasteland. And that brings me to my last ding on the game: dialogue trees. It's funny, but after playing Mass Effect with its (genius) dialogue wheel, I just can't willingly go back to the same old "pick a response from these three choices" thing we've been doing for the last couple decades. In terms of suspension of disbelief, it is almost literally the difference between playing a part in an interactive movie and navigating the menu options at your ATM. Sure, you're given plenty of chances to have an effect on the outcome of the game by choosing to say one thing versus another, but it seems there are just as many times where the only thing you can do is exhaust every possible reply until they're all grayed out. Luckily you can click through most of the NPC speech.

Conclusion:

Wow, I didn't think this was going to end up being quite so long. Anyway, I'll wrap this up in an uncharacteristically simple way: Fallout 3 is a great game and you should play it if you haven't already. It has a few definite faults, which for the most part are both overshadowed and made all the more obvious by its many high points. Enjoy, and have a Nuka-Cola on me.

- guest blogger Matt