Not RPG month, I swear: Fallout 3 GOTY

The humor of buying this game is I never really intended to. I can't remember why, but FO:NV was on my wishlist, so a friend bought it for me. Or maybe it wasn't and he just bought me it, I don't know. I'd never played through FO:3 and I was told FO:NV totally replaces three.

I'm a little weird in this - If there's a sequel that totally outpaces the original, I always want to make sure I give the original a fair shake, because there's no going back. So I bought FO:3 because someone else bought me FO:NV when I didn't really want either. Then I started playing FO:3 when there are other games I felt like playing, but I just finished a controller game and I was trying to avoid RPGs since I wanted to play Witcher 2 a year after the first one. So I started playing ... A controller game that is also a RPG.

Ahem. I'm playing it KB+M though!

Fallout is a little weird for me as well because I never played the originals. One of my close childhood friends had three 'favorite' games: X-Com, Master of Orion and Fallout. Oh, and probably Simcity, but I'd played that before I knew him. So he loaned me two of them and I don't think I ever loaned anything else. X-Com and MoO are amazing classics, so I never played Fallout. That's sort of dumb, but for some reason I just never did even though he raved about it tons when we were kids. That's probably pretty shameful as my PC gaming cred goes, but I honestly don't have any cred. I just played lots of X-Com.

And it wasn't hard.

I do not necessarily like the post-apocalypse dystopia setting in any broad sense of the term. Though I don't think that post-apoc is necessarily as bad as say, time travel, it has a certain way of ruining any thematic sense. Stuff just gets thrown in without any real sense of logic, creating game worlds that lack any sort of coherence. I do love Dark Sun mind you, but fantasy post-apocalypse is a pretty rare treat comparatively. I like to classify Morrowind, likely my favorite true fantasy rpg, as sort of in that vein as well. Granted, I know basically nothing about Fallout's setting, but I'm leaning against it almost on an innate level.

So Fallout probably always had its work cut out for it. But hey Rage managed it, right?


First things first: This game has issues. My system is pretty stable as PCs go, and way over the recommended system specs, being brand new and all. The game likes to crash on start up, likes to crash while running and I had to adjust the FoV. So right off the bat the game is pretty exciting for being the first in just about forever to make me feel sick to my stomach.

not a good sign

Also the game out of the box wants to run at 1176x664 resolution? I've never even heard of that rez. Which monitors run that, some alternate universe silicon? I also had to edit an ini file to change the number of cores it uses. I mean, that's PC gaming, but it's been a long time since I've had to edit an ini file not once but twice.

On top of that, and apparently this is a common issue, the game becomes increasingly unstable as you go. Almost right from the get go it is impossible to recommend this game seeing as it required multiple hacks and bits of duct tape to keep going. Part of the problem is the engine, part of the problem is multicore set ups, part of it lies with my sound card ... It's a mess.

One of the things I hate about gaming, which I bring up a fair bit, is the feeling of being "lost" in the game's instructions. This is slightly more complex than saying I hate "being lost" or that I hate that type of problem solving, though if you could do away with feeling lost by sacrificing the other I'd probably be all for. I'm not sure about it, but it's a total hypothetical since this isn't going to change.

What I mean is, games in the modern enterprise tell you do something by going somewhere. By giving you instructions - no matter how terrible or poorly explained - the game assumes you are then capable of finding where you need to go. Then little further instruction or attempt to convey where you're going is offered. This is why I find myself missing Dead Space: The 'crumbs' button just removes this feeling entirely. Also good in game maps, concise directions, a reasonable sense of level design...

Mind you, if the puzzle is finding where to go that seems totally fine to me - But that's not what's going on here. The problem is partially one of poorly conveyed information, the other a sense of drama. Fallout 3 opens with ... After a long and decidedly boring introduction, with you being rushed 'out of the vault' to escape. Except the directions aren't good and the in game map is actually horrible to look at. So you stumble around, klaxons blaring and people shouting, long after everyone willing to give chase is dead anyway. The sense of immersion drains from the game entirely, leaking out and onto the floor in a tiresome puddle. It's also just boring. You find yourself irritated, usually with sirens going, or some idiot npc whining into your ear.

So after I got out of the vault and into the wider world it quickly dawned on me why I'd enjoy this game: It feels like Morrowind. Granted, it feels like a watered down, sloppy and haphazard Morrowind but it does have that feel. Morrowind among my top 3 favorite RPGs, perhaps it is my favorite RPG though I'd be pressed to come to any sort of firm conclusion.

The game's setting is a mishmash. I was under the impression that Fallout was taken as a dystopian RPG mixed with a strong undercurrent of gallows humor. Unfortunately, Fallout 3 leans so heavily on being desolate that the game feels less like a charmed look at a post-apocalypse and more like you're playing Quake. The game is ugly, the people are ugly and attempts at humor feel so completely out of place you don't even notice them. There's a scene where a robot used for medical work accidentally killed a patient while servicing a sprained leg. The whole situation is clearly surreal and meant to be a source of humor, but its played so straight and the game is so dark that the joke just falls flat.

It took me a while to notice the setting is based on an alternate history Earth, though I haven't quite picked up what has changed, other than a weird 60s vibe to much of the game's scenery. I really like this element, pardoning the fact all the computers use weird green line CRTs. I'm old enough to have used these in real life and it's seriously irritating. You can develop laser guns but you can't develop functional monitors? I understand its part of the setting, but much of the other stuff is stylistic or aesthetic choices that don't take away from the game. Weird ass terminals that look downright horrible on screen just stand out. It just resonates with how weak the style guide for the product, as a whole, is.

that was a helicopter

A ton of the setting is just incredibly lazy as well. The nuclear war was supposed to have been two hundred years ago, but much of the game can't decide if that means stuff should look just out of the junkyard, vastly changed or completely silly. NPCs complain about a lack of scrap metal to work with, while some locations have piles of old cars, barely even rusted, all of a couple minutes away. It also has the Dead Space problem: corpses and mangled bodies everywhere. The problem is, the game is so huge and there's so few people going around. Where are all these dead bodies coming from? And why haven't mutated wolves eaten them? Over and over again the game throws stuff at you that really breaks up your immersion for the setting. If you don't notice this stuff and just go by the moment, it works well. But if you do, the game feels lopsided and lazy.

Also seriously, I've seen photographs of the irradiated areas on our planet - Chernobyl being the main one - and it's a pity Fallout doesn't take its cues from that stuff at least a little. Instead its just rocky and brownity brown town all over.

Weirdly enough, once you get out of the vault (which is a good lead in, mind you, if executed a tingle limply) and start exploring the game's dialogue and writing stand away from the setting. Character dialogue is good and quests are good. I'd only gotten a single companion, but he amuses me constantly, and the dialogue enemies spew at you is good too. The game's plot is, if at times way more thrown to tropes than I'd like, often the complete inverse. I don't want to spoil it since I was so pleased with it. It's so unusual to play a RPG where the story isn't Captain Darkevillord plans to murder all of the things and use his magic, so stop him via blah blah artifacts blah. I tend to play RPGs as the good guy nowadays, mostly because being evil usually comes off as gaming the system and stealing literally everything. On the other hand as the good guy you get some nice immoral enemies to really vent on. Nothing better than murdering slavers.

wait is this morrowind

Combat is ... Strange. It's sort of a shooter, sort of a rpg, with this weird turn based shooting "thing" you can activate but aren't supposed to use all the time. In both situations your stats and perks work, I think? I believe your shot gets steadier as you go, or maybe it doesn't. It sure feels like it. Enemies have boatloads of Health though, which makes the whole thing sort of a slogfest. In VATS aiming the game slows down and you can practically watch bullets strike your enemy. Watching a spray of bullets bouncing off a mutant's head at pointblank is just strange. Stranger when they seem, at best, mildly perturbed by the experience. The game uses the Oblivion style leveling system, where your level corresponds to some but not all enemies in game. I find this so incredibly lazy and half-assed, but it leads to weird moments where you realize you're fighting something scripted that dies in two hits, or scorpions in the wastes being more dangerous than armed bands of roving super mutants.The mechanic, to me, symbolizes the ultimate act of laziness on a RPG dev's part: the game no longer needs to make any attempt to convey to you "places to go" or a path through its midst. Instead you simply are almost always suitable, and you can finish the game a couple hours into playing.

Also pretty lazy is how NPCs fire and shoot on you - They're crack shots over insane distances, and cover (on your end) has surprisingly little meaning. There's a running issue in many FPS games where enemies can fire on you from positions that can be hard to detect, but this game pushes that issue to new, completely surreal levels. When you find yourself spinning in circles to try to catch a bullet in flight, leading you back to your aggressor I ... I mean, it's just so strange.

On the other hand, there's this incredibly neat aspect to the game and its random NPCs - Enemies of various factions do in fact fight, and in the case a large band of roving raiders manages to overcome a hostile soldier outpost, they'll pick up and use the superior gear (or if their weapon is knocked from their hands, they'll race to recover it). This creates a ton more diversity, as suddenly a goofball looking raider whips out a plasma rifle or you can come across a battle between scorpions and bears, or hear the sounds of distant battle. Coming over the horizon to see laser rifles firing at each other in the distance as explosions echo just adds an element of apparent truth to the hostility of the world. Some of this is scripted, but some of it isn't, so none of it ends up feeling scripts.

Eventually it just fell over

Overall Fallout 3 is not really a game I'd recommend. Beyond the crashing, the game just feels like punching through nausea half the time. The in game maps are terrible, and sometimes you find yourself wandering in circles, or being fired on from weird angles or whatever. The game's story is good up to a point, then powerfully boring. I kept playing in the hopes it would get back up, but it never really did. Still, I have FO:NV, and I'll probably give that a shot with the hopes it is a little better.
Still, it certainly wasn't terrible. I actually react with a measure of delight when a game crashes though, and enjoy fixing it to get it to work, which might explain why I finished this though.