Restive Thoughts

I used to laugh at other RPGs when I'd go into town during "night" and see all the NPCs standing exactly where they always were, and find all the shops still open. "Ha ha, as if the blacksmith would really be awake to sell me a new helm at 3AM!" I'd laugh, smugly. But now that I'm playing through Fallout 3, where people disappear and shops close up at night, I find myself longing for the old and unrealistic ways. For example, right now I need to buy some more ammo to finish my quest to rid the subway of mutated fire ants, but it's the middle of the night and I can't find anywhere that's open at this hour where I can trade all the useless junk I've picked up in the post-apocalyptic wasteland for some more bullets that I can use to keep playing the game! Argh.

Luckily you can press "T" to make your character wait for a specified number of hours, which is okay. However, I find this kind of clunky, and you also don't regenerate any hitpoints while you're waiting unless you're sleeping in a bed. The problem is, there are only a few designated sleeping areas, and so far my character hasn't found any that don't cost money to use. I'm too stingy (and my character too poor) to pay for a room in the common house, so when my guy comes back to town in the middle of the night, I have to make him stand still for eight hours. I also had a really cool suspension-of-disbelief moment ruined by this mechanism early on... I was travelling through the wasteland towards a town that I was supposed to raid for supplies. It was starting to get dark and I thought it would be easier to fight in the daytime, so I found a sheltered area that was protected by rocks, and made my little "camp" there. I was getting into the whole role-playing thing, but the sight of my guy just standing there like a tree while the sun set and then rose again was too stupid to not break the illusion and make me mad at the game designers.

They almost could have fixed this little problem, and in an interesting way too. Just let me buy a sleeping bag at the general store, which I could then use to go to sleep anywhere I want. Maybe it wouldn't let me sleep in the middle of the town square or inside the enemy base, but that's fine. I want to be able to camp out in the boonies to regnerate HP. Maybe sleeping under the stars would only regnerate a certain percentage of health, but that's believable. Maybe the twist would be that paying to sleep in a real bed is always safe, but when you're camping out you have a certain percent chance to be woken up by wild dogs or raiders or whatever. They could've even added a cool layer of strategic decision-making to it by giving the enemies a chance to totally surprise you while you're alseep, based on your perception stat... if you're caught unawares, you have to fight them off bare-handed.

See? That would have been a cool feature. Oh well.

- guest blogger Matt