I'm finally managing to win a campaign with my noxious clone descendant soldiers in Stellaris (long run? the noxious habitability penalty is a big issue) and spurred by the release of Stalker 2, queued up something with an FPS interface as a change of pace. But instead of jumping back into Cyberpunk 2077, whose surface I barely scratched when it came out, I thought I'd polish off a backlogged alternative. In the interest of seeing what the hype was about fifteen years ago, I alighted on Fallout 3.
Let the record show that no matter my rapture toward Morrowind when it came out and my inexcessive yet stable acceptance of TES4&5, I've always hated the idea of Bethesda's Fallouts on principle. Replacing turn-based tactics with FPS twitch-gaming is anti-intellectual vandalism and I've never forgiven them for it, flatly refused to play the series after #2, so I jumped into things now ready to tear this thing to pieces and... and... ah, crap. It's not terrible?
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| Stickin' with my elf wizard routine. |
First impression? There's more of Half-Life than Fallout in this tutorial. The many, many close-ups of emotive scientist and Barney faces to compete with that famous Source Engine demo of destructible environments and the G-man smiling and frowning which made such a splash in 2003 don't feel quite like the Elder Scrolls tutorials, where you'd get one or two NPCs asking you questions. I get the feeling Bethesda
OMG IT'S FRIGGIN LIAM NEESON!!!
didn't treat their new intellectual property like a SciFi Oblivion, but as their edge into competitors' genre. (And hey, it certainly worked.) Plus the vault computer deliberately sounding like Half-Life 1's trolley intro. All of it drags on a bit though. By the time I off the boss, I'm itching to get out into the big wide open world. Which, accidental the effect may be, works as a sense of vault-dwelling claustrophobia.
Anyway, the more I played the more I found myself immersed in something very much a product of its time. Side-note for the younger generation: despite (or because of) skyrocketing sales, for about fifteen years from the early 2000s to the mid 2010s, computer games just plain sucked. (This is how sites like GoG or Abandonia got off the ground: the oldies they peddled truly were better than contemporary fare.) Every company focused almost exclusively on the graphics arms race replacing artistic merit, online games broke into the mass market mandating idiot appeal and forcing every developer to promise investors another Counterstrike or World of Warcraft success story, and before Kickstarter offered an alternative, everything revolved around big publishers (e.g. EA) pushing the sports shovelware assembly line approach even in narrower niches, cranking out superficially "new" versions every few months.
So while not thrilled with Fallout 3, I'll admit most of its flaws, where it skimps or splurges unnecessarily, were market-wide trends, including the push for a full 3D FPS interface. If you don't want the full play-by-play, feel free to skip down to the conclusions.
Thursday: some light megatonnage
Once you get out there, the world is fairly empty and monotonous. The Half-Life feel fades rapidly, but neither does the architecture quite have the same retro-futuristic look as in 1&2. More generic ruins. Less to interact with or explore. Impressed by the work put into some of the unexpected but logical results like the Megaton sheriff getting himself killed if you tattle on the dangerous enemy in town, or your informer upping the price if you turn him down once, but such surprise penalties have also generally proven counterproductive, giving no incentive to stick with a negative outcome instead of reloading.
Combat datedness shows in enemies' sliding along the ground intertialess and the almost complete immunity you get from melee by climbing a waist-high boulder.
Portal having come out the year before, Mount&Blade being a several years old open beta, Fallout 3's relatively little attention paid to physics or pathing is a bit odd. I get rapidly annoyed at the nonsensical movements until finally figuring out what "VATS" is (while exploring the supermarket, two dozen fights in, laugh at me if you must for being so slow on the uptake; I kept trying to activate it out of combat.)
Otherwise, knowing Bethesda's tendencies I was expecting "difficulty" to be a nonsensical mix of instadeath and cakewalks, and that's what I'm getting. By level 3 I've already got my house, accumulated 30 stimpacks (a.k.a. health potions to the uninitiated.) Also: wait, so stealing tanks my karma meter, but murdering the junkie hooker
in order to gain access to her house to steal from is A-OK?
Friday: mostly about chewing
Fix some pipes to reach level 4. The wasteland's inexplicably full of gunslinging raiders instead of Fallout 2's more appropriate mix of spears and makeshift weaponry. Nobody throws rocks anymore, sadly. I end up with two free laser rifles and power armors (which I can't use) by running into some outcast Steel Brosevskis
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| chewed apart |
- letting themselves get torn to shreds by lvl2 mobs since their AI just stands there not fighting back.
On the other hand, here's another nice touch:
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| chewed up |
The visual artists actually seem to have remembered that roads are composed of multiple layers, not just the visible asphalt. Too bad such detail work is still repeated far too often to cover the entire landscape. You will get so damn sick of rebar and girders after a while.
Also, swimming increases your radiation level, which is actually fairly accurate, since rain washes radioactive dust like any other contaminant into waterways. I was planning to bitch about roleplaying until being sent to the vampire cult.
 |
| refusing to chew |
Sure, Vance's take on the issue, taking only blood, doesn't make them sound all that less threatening. Fun fact: most people need their blood to live. But much like encountering the necromancer in Arcanum, I always like these half-surprises in RPGs when you're sent to slay a villain who turns out to be reasonable. Much as I dislike full reversals to heroism (the "witch that doesn't witch" approach) an evil or neutral character who's actually reasoned through his stance is far more interesting, and their self-aware enforcement of mythopoesis is refreshing. Even better, the rank-and-file are written less philosophical than Vance himself, making clear that his leadership is in fact reining in cannibalistic petty thugs, plus his reasonable solutions both to the town and the new recruit... ok, kudos to whoever wrote this quest chain. (Except for Ian's cheerful attitude once he settles in back home, so shortly after he murdered his own parents.)
The practical side of gameplay is a bit shakier. Using spare weapons as spare parts for repairs is always a nice feature, though doing it instantly in your inventory obviously serves more as an encumbrance aid (which my 4 strength admittedly mandates.)
I'm already encountering super mutants at lvl 5?! Near newbietown? Sigh, power creep and villain decay strike again.
I was angry about the change to food (everything's irradiated) but I'm increasingly liking the idea of popping a Rad-X to chew up my food supply all at once at half-penalty, saving both stimpacks and inventory space, a more deliberate use of resources rewarding foresight.
Saturday: of ants and pants
Both the main quest and Moira's chain coincide so I'm graduating to the big city!
Oh, wait, never mind, this rando' kid wants me to kill some fire ants.
Which turns out to be a both time-consuming and supply-consuming quest. Best way to deal with the ants (without wasting a ton of ammo) would be to buff up with their resistance glands and some +STR and bat away at them in melee, but my base strength doesn't make that particularly viable. Weak writing too with a standard annoying nerdling mad scientist. And the other incidental quest has you delivering lingerie for bonus nonsense points.
That, some assorted exploration and several trips to loot Minefield house by house make a dull installment.
Sunday: lurkin' 'n luggin'
Get distracted by the Anchorage Memorial. Hit Lvl 7. With plenty of frag mines, a hunting rifle and a ripper, the giant mutant lobsters are less trouble than the giant mutant ants were, but still an ungodly slog.
I will say this though: having grown up amidst urban decay I can appreciate a healthy gray bleakness, and Bethesda's level design has always sagely provided for scenic vistas and anticipatory or meditative vantage points.
Exiting the memorial at its top to gaze across the... Potomac, I guess(?) (I dunno from DeeCees) immediately brings to mind exiting Blackreach through a mountaintop to witness dawn breaking over the statue of Azura. Same gimmick with three years' graphic improvement. Still works, damnit.
Breeze through the mole rat dungeon only to be ambushed by assassins on the other end, in an obviously recycled TES routine. And apparently there's no other way up into the city proper? Why? I do like the dungeons with multiple entrances interconnecting the overland map, but this is pushing it. Glad they toned it down for Skyrim.
Dukov's place... a suspension chamber used to chill booze... Wadsworth... a teddy bear factory... naughty knickers... while less nonsensical than #2, this series is still leaning too hard on the forced goofy lolrandom comedy angle instead of building coherent postapocalyptic societies.
Heh. Moira sends me to peacefully infiltrate the lobster lair. No problem at-all ma'am, since I've already brutally slaughtered every single thing in that place, and their little dogs too.
Only now do I realize I'd skipped the newbie dungeon, Springvale school. The length of everything is quintupled
and septupled by constantly checking a wiki to see which
"miscellaneous" items will be needed for crafting later, and teleporting
back home to Megaton constantly to haul in the loot. All these positive rewards
are making me feel negatively punished for playing. At least in Skyrim I
could use infinite-strength lycanthropy for muling, and it didn't force teleportation on you.
(+1STR booze ish my beshtesht fren'!) Level 8 aaaand good night.
(+1STR booze ish my beshtesht fren'!) Level 8 aaaand good night.
Monday: busting a cap in your economy
Money is surprisingly hard to come by with no barter skill, unlike most games where I'd be swimming in cash regardless. Not that I particularly need it except for shack upgrades, since you loot more than enough of what you need. So I guess I'm still swimming in cash.
At least I got a chuckle out of activating a guard bot in the metro which takes my ticket and tells me to move along. See? That's context-appropriate, in-character humor. Why is that so hard? And surprise!
- this is apparently the route to my next destination anyway. Slick level design when you put your mind to it Bethesda. Wolfman approves.
(Wait, D.C. actually has a neighbourhood called Chevy Chase? wtf?)
Also, I know the steel bros call themselves "paladins" but when did they start talking like cops out of a golden age Superman comic? Where's that aloof technocrat edge?
Oh and look, our next monster's a super-super-mutant. A giant giant. How... creative.
On the other hand, I'd expected Three Dog to annoy the shit out of me, but much like Moira he owns his quirkiness.
Sloppy level design when you don't put your mind to it Bethesda.
The Outcasts act more like the Brotherhood I knew and loved to hate, but their stupid "game within a game" quest doesn't pass muster. Feels like Goldeneye. Am I being Goldeneyed? While it's got decent production values (this was one of the DLCs) it's still a looong teeediouusss grriiiiiiind disjointed from the game I actually wanted to play.
And the payoff is so high that I'm basically set from now on... as soon as I do several more boring loot runs.
Lvl 12, two and a half of those levels all in the simulation. Blatant paid DLC cheat.
Tuesday: FAATHEEERRRRR!!!
Spend some quality time in the flooded sewers, then the library. Not much to be said about them. Same lobsters and mobsters with higher stats and better loot. The introduction of rocket launchers into fights does change positioning a bit.
Swim to Rivet City. For the price of one rad-away, it's much better than grinding my way along the coastline. Finally get to finish that stupid giant ant quest, and open up some new shops to dump all these assault rifles I've been looting.
Interestingly, this little bit of orphan-driven exploration has allowed me to skip Three-Dog's quest step. But, given Anacostia station routes straight up to the national mall, I decide to go through with it anyway. Ten mines/grenades, twenty motherfucker cells and five hundred rounds of assault rifle ammo later (seriously, that was a LOT of super mutants) I decide I've had enough of this game's grind and un-go-un-through with it after all, skipping to the Jefferson memorial.
(So I'm guessing "purity" will eventually turn out to mean dad's racist against mutants or something?)
Why doesn't Pinkerton's lair have an easier way out after you've reached him?
Gotta
say I'm likin' the Rivet. At least some of the world-building so
conspicuously absent from the rest of the game was included here, plus
the broken aircraft carrier with a medieval drawbridge makes a memorable
location you don't see in every RPG, plus the automatic social
stratification down through the decks is just icing on the cake. And of course it comes with a crow's nest for sightseeing. Lovely.The "underground railroad" quest was telegraphed though.
Bum around the streets a bit, but the combat's not getting any more entertaining (hunting rifle VATS headshots being my ammo-efficient mainstay despite having acquired some more interesting guns) so let's strap on some talon armor, outcast helmet, laser rifle, some refreshing ice-cold nuka-cola and move this story along. A long relatively uneventful slog across the barren wastes later... aaand we're in Pleasantville. Another game-within-a-game. How creative. The trial-and error (or musical?) puzzle to exit without playing along makes me realize
OMG IT'S LIAM NEESON AGAIN!!!
how little puzzle-solving I've seen so far.
And then! He seriously just runs out into the wastes in his overalls to fistfight giant radscorpions! Across the entire map! WHAT!? Is this the stupidest escort mission ever or a brilliant meta-commentary on the stupidity of escort missions in general? ... OK, teleporting to the destination seems to work too.
I try to detour through Girdershade but it's apparently built around some random goofiness about Nuka-Cola. Never mind. Blunt object indeed.
Meanwhle, back at the Jefferson memorial, fetch this, fetch that, flip this switch and finally the bad guys show up. Generic Schutzstaffel fare, because Mr. Bond, I expect you to regurgitate.
OMG THEY KILLED LIAM NEESON! YOU BASTARDS!!! (for being too cheap to hire him for an entire game) (at least he lasted longer than Emperor Stewart in Oblivion)
Wednesday - Thursday: Vault Ache
After a daring sewer escape, the Steel Bros' base should probably impress me, but mostly it looks like a whole lotta redundancy and extras whose life stories don't particularly interest me. But since they're sending me to another vault, and those seem to be the most interesting things in this game, let's upgrade to power armor and top-tier weaponry and skip over to those.
Vault 108; clonetopia. Gary heads crippled. No explanation anywhere as to what happened, aside from mass inasnity due to critical Gary mass? Just Garys. Lotsa Garys. Narratively unsatisfying, yet weirdly effective in its creepiness nonetheless.
Vault 92; don't stop the music. You're sent there to retreive a violin. Fine, thinks I, they can't all be winners. The actual story, though, using background music to pipe murder-memes subliminally through the sound system, is interesting enough. Though it hardly justifies the rando' gigantic pile of lobsters you need to wade through as a timesink. Why not at least write them in as being lured by music or something?
Vault 101; return of the native. Disappointing. Go in, one-shot the baddy's skull off, go back out after wandering around aimlessly looking for information which apparently does not exist? If the vaults were psych experiments, what exactly was 101's gimmick? Or 13's for that matter?
Vault 106; are you on the drugs? Yes, all of the drugs. Not very experimental, is it? Could've just stuck some cameras in a college dorm, saved cash on inhalants and you'd get your "girls gone wild" tape as a bonus. Plays like a less interesting version of the Garys.
Slight detour for Moira's last quest. Goes pretty much like I assumed.
Vault 87 - requires multiple more steps to enter, so fuck it all, I'm burned out.
Conclusions?
I had expected to get annoyed and quit much faster. Most of Fallout 3's aggravation was just state-of-the-art in 2008: the meta-humor, the paid cheats in the form of DLCs, the Diablo-ish farming of endless swarms of mobs. Some, like the emphasis on loot, loot and more loot, I'm still complaining about in the likes of BG3. I did however find some surprisingly good or mixed points.
- The radio stations provide some much-needed immersion.
- Aesthetics: fundamentally solid for their
time, yet pathetically under-developed. (At least it's not relying on Oblivion's bloom effect to smooth out model blockiness.) I like the bleak look of the
irradiated landscape, and there are times when the sun breaks out over
the pasty wastes, ruins looming in the distance, which hit just the precise
note of humanity's dusk I was looking for. But the landscape and structures vary so little that pretty quick you're staring at lots of the same old samey sameness.
- Dungeons with multiple exits across the landscape interweaving with soft natural barriers are something I wish I'd see more of in RPGs, even if this game overdid it. A bit more than Skyrim, a bit less than Fallout 3 would be ideal.- Bethesda's always been pretty good at giving you the ability to skip around by exploring, both geographically and in plot (lobster lair, main quest) so I'm still happy with that.
- Makes better use of radiation than Stalker did (again: love popping a rad-x to gulp down all my irradiated food) but undercuts it with too-easy fixes.
- Putting in the work for FPS mechanics only to then slap on a pausing
auto-targeting system sounds laughably counterproductive at face value,
but given the rudimentary physics and character motion, VATS feels more and more
like a saving grace. As a bonus it maintains playability now the
twitch-combat mechanics have aged so noticeably. Also likely did a lot
to bridge the gap with those like myself who resented the shift to FPS.
But running in circles and hiding to wait for action points to recharge
is boring, so I'm guessing many over the years arrived at my compromise
of generally opening with a VATS salvo then finishing off a target
manually. Still, I'd rather have a functional true FPS system.
But the bad ideas tend to outnumber the good:
- Hacking minigame: while you can sometimes get a hint, it's still a luck-based timesink.
- Inventory: unsorted, unsortable, narrow focused, endless scrolling timesink.
- Key remapping: only halfway, some like "take all" not rebindable, I can never understand why companies go halfway on this.
- The first Fallout was a marvel of dramatic escalation, and this game largely throws it out the window. Multiple guns right away, super mutants at level 5, and though (edit: I have NO idea what third thing I was about to list here. Proofreaders earn their keep, damnit.)
- Loot runs with a small inventory, hermetic landscape barriers and entirely too many ambushes force teleportation on you. The ambushes spawning right on top of you when you teleport to a discovered location are particularly dumb.
- Was crafting actually intended to be useless? I stopped gathering those way-too-heavy materials when I saw I was already getting access to top-line gear as drops, and never looked back.
- Home infirmary breaks economy. Not that the economy works in the first place. Way too much loot. Mostly I stopped even gathering it the last few dungeons.
- Mobs even less diverse than Oblivion two years earlier
- Level scaling less blatant than Oblivion, but still hard to miss the same mobs I'd been fighting all game gradually becoming damage sponges as I hit level 14-17
- Overpowered DLC rewards, pay-to-win
- Let's ask ourselves: how many more creative locations or monsters could we have developed with Neeson's thirty-line paycheck? Not to mention the other big names. There's a difference between hiring professional actors for quality or famous actors for publicity.
- The lack of Stalker Zone artifacts, TES reagent gathering, noncombat encounters or similar
incentives takes some of the zing out of exploration, regressing the
overland map's purpose to D&D-ish transitions between the real
action. This is a big one. Fallout 3 just doesn't feel like an open world.
- Good voicing, bland writing. Moira and Three Dog make good on their ridiculous set-ups, but otherwise it's pretty much all downhill after Vance. Simplistic good guys vs. bad guys conflicts (I still say my idea for daddums to turn out to want to "purify" genetics was better than throwing in generic Nazis, you so painstakingly telegraphed the "purity" line and everything) and most characters are obvious comic relief or filler. Hard to take any of their problems seriously. Not nearly as bad as #2, but let's admit among Skyrim's many improvements was coherence around its central motifs.
So buy Fallout 3: it's less painful to play than anticipated!
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