Fallout 3 Review
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I don't think I've ever seen a press release generate so much dismay as when Bethesda Softworks announced that it was going to develop Fallout 3. Fallout fans don't have much in common with Oblivion fans, and the Fallout games were nothing like the Elder Scrolls games, and so it was an odd pairing to say the least -- except for the fact that it combined a popular developer with a popular franchise, and was almost guaranteed to generate oodles of money. A lot of people, including me, feared that Fallout 3 would turn into Oblivion with guns, and while that didn't precisely turn out to be the case, it ended up being close enough for the fears to be justified.
Or at least that's my take, being one of the stodgy older gamers who still thinks that Baldur's Gate 2 is the best role-playing game of all time, and who wouldn't put Oblivion on a top 10 list. I'm also one of those gamers who only plays PC games, and who only plays games that offer a third-person perspective -- two areas where Bethesda doesn't excel -- making me not exactly in the target demographic for the game. And so while you might be getting the hint that I didn't enjoy Fallout 3 as much as some of the other reviewers out there, I recognize that this review isn't (at least entirely) about me. It's about whether the game is a good fit for you, and whether you should spend your money to buy it, and for that you'll need to keep reading.
Background
Fallout 3 starts out in the year 2277, 200 years after a nuclear war between the United States and China. Many people in the United States hid out in special vaults when the missiles started flying, and they managed to survive and stay healthy, but others weren't so lucky. Some people absorbed so much radiation that they turned into ghouls, others were captured or transformed into supermutants, and still others -- the (lucky) ones -- found themselves in an upside-down world where they had to scavenge whatever they could to stay alive.
The first two Fallout games took place on the West Coast of the United States, but Fallout 3 takes place in and around Washington D.C. You play a character who was born in Vault 101, one of the vaults in the D.C. suburbs. The game begins with your birth (where you choose your name, gender and appearance), and then it quickly moves you through some of the key moments in your life (such as your 10th birthday party where you receive a Pip-Boy 3000) until you hit the age of 19 and the game really starts. It's at that point that your father disappears from the vault, the vault's Overseer starts hunting for you, and you decide that it might be a good idea to leave the vault and see what's going on outside.
The (growing up) phase of the game is nicely effective. It introduces you to the world you're living in, it shows you with your father so you can form an emotional attachment to him (and actually care when he goes missing), it acts as a tutorial so you can see how to interact with objects and fight things, and it gives you a chance to define your character. For example, when you hit 16 you have to take an aptitude test, and the test decides which three skills you should tag (tagging a skill gives you a bonus with it).
The downside to the introductory sequence is that none of your decisions have any real consequences. As I was playing it, I kept thinking of Ultima IV, which started out by asking you a series of questions, and then it chose a class for you based on your answers. But in Fallout 3, either you can undo what the game picks for you (such as the tagged skills in the aptitude test), or the game pretends that you did something else. For example, you have a (best friend) named Amata, and even if you're totally rude to her every time you talk to her, and even if you help some thugs make fun of her, she still gives you a gun and helps you escape from the vault when you turn 19. I would have liked the early years better if people in the vault had remembered how I'd treated them.
Character Development
Bethesda incorporated a lot of familiar concepts from the original Fallout games into their system of character development in Fallout 3. The (special) attributes -- strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck -- are all back, and they control roughly the same things. Bethesda also brought back perks and skills (but not traits), and many of them should sound familiar. For example, you can hack computers using the science skill, you can pick locks using the lockpick skill, and you can improve your resistances with the toughness perk. Some skills (like stealing and gambling) disappeared, and the perks got rearranged (partially because you now get a perk every time you level rather than every three levels), but I'm guessing that anybody who played the original Fallout games will be right at home putting together a character for Fallout 3.
Probably the most interesting change in the character system involves action points. The original Fallouts were both turn-based games, and they needed action points to determine how much you could do during a turn of combat. But Fallout 3 is a real-time game, and obviously it doesn't have such a need. So what Bethesda did was introduce the Vault Assisted Targeting System (VATS), which allows you to pause combat and target different parts of your enemies' bodies. VATS makes combat much easier (some might say too easy), especially with moving targets, but you can only queue attacks into the system until you run out of action points, and then you have to wait for the action points to (slowly) regenerate. I thought this was a clever transition, since Bethesda kept the definition of action points about the same, but they figured out a way to incorporate them into a real-time game.
Sadly, not all parts of the character system are as well thought out. For some reason, despite allowing characters to select three (or four) times as many perks as in Fallout 2, Fallout 3 actually has fewer perks to choose from, which is just odd. For any sort of perk or bonus system, it's always better to give players too many options rather than too few, and Fallout 3 has too few. Melee characters in particular get the short end of the stick here, since no perks were created for their playing style at all (what happened to the slayer perk?).
Bethesda also dumbed down the character system a bit, which I found to be kind of sad but not entirely surprisingly, since games seem to keep going in that direction. For example, the traps and throwing skills of the original Fallout games were combined into a single explosives skill, and even with a low rating in the skill I never failed to disarm a trap. I'm not even sure if it's possible to fail. Then there's the minimum strength requirement for weapons, which doesn't exist any more, and so characters can use any weapon they want, even if it's bigger than they are. And finally, the prerequisites for perks were reduced. Fallout 2 had some perks that required an attribute rating of 10, but in Fallout 3 the highest attribute requirement is 7. That might not sound like a bad thing, but it means that most characters can learn all (or nearly all) of the perks, and you're not forced to make any choices. A good character development system should always require you to make choices.
But the biggest problem with the character system in Fallout 3 is the level cap. Even without selecting any perks to add levels or experience bonuses to my character, I hit the level cap after exploring only half of the world, and since there's little variety to the enemies and equipment, that gave me little incentive to keep visiting optional locations. Bethesda in particular, with their goal of providing players with huge worlds where you can wander around for hundreds of hours, only shoot themselves in the foot by implementing a level cap. They either need to be much more careful about how they reward experience points to players, or they need to dump the cap altogether.
Gameplay
For gameplay, Fallout 3 has a lot in common with Oblivion. You're given a large world to explore, and there are numerous quests to complete, but mostly the game is about combat. As you make your way around the D.C. wasteland you'll encounter ghouls, supermutants, deathclaws, and more, and you'll have to fend them off using a variety of weapons. For ranged attacks you might use a Chinese assault rifle or a sniper rifle, and for melee combat you might use a baseball bat or a combat knife. You can also fight enemies with your fists, or use special (unarmed weapons) like brass knuckles.
Fighting creatures is pretty easy. The mouse controls your targeting cursor, and you just need to point it at an enemy and then click the left mouse button to fire (or swing) your weapon. If you hold down the right mouse button then you'll aim your weapon, which will give you a better view of your enemy, and if you press the V key then you'll enter VATS, which will allow you to automatically target different parts of the enemy's body (and show you the odds of hitting each part). Most of the time your goal is to shoot the enemy in the head, but some enemies, like giant ants and crab-like mirelurks, are vulnerable in other places as well.
Surprisingly, Fallout 3 has far fewer quests than Oblivion, but it compensates for this deficit by making its locations far more interesting to explore. If you played Oblivion, then you might remember that it included a bunch of oblivion gates and elven ruins that were all about the same. Fallout 3, meanwhile, has monuments, museums, libraries, metro stations, and more to explore, and not only are they all a little bit different, they also often have story elements involved. For example, early in the game you can visit a school where raiders are hiding out. The raiders figured that they could dig from the basement of the school to reach a nearby vault, but in the process they disturbed some giant ants. So when you get to the school you have to fight raiders and giant ants, and you can see the start of the tunnel.
The quests themselves are sometimes fun and sometimes not. Most of the quests involve going somewhere and killing anything that gets in your way, and that gets old after a while, especially when the trip involves going through a bunch of metro stations, but other quests are more original. For example, at one point you meet a lady who has a huge Nuka-Cola collection, and she asks you to help her complete it. At another point you meet a shopkeeper who is putting together a wasteland survival guide, and she asks you to experience things (such as getting severe radiation poisoning) so she can write about them. Finally, a historian asks you to scavenge the Declaration of Independence from the National Archives, and in the process you also find the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta. Bethesda made good use of the D.C. area, and I'm guessing the city is even more fun to explore if (unlike me) you actually know something about it.
Another nice thing about the quests is that you're always given multiple ways to solve them. Usually, there are (good) ways versus (evil) ways to wrap things up, such as when you visit the town of Megaton and discover that it was built around a live nuclear warhead. The people of the town obviously want you to disarm the bomb, but some outside interests would rather see it detonated. So which option do you choose? There are also sometimes stealthy or diplomatic ways to deal with issues, and every so often you have to make a karma-neutral choice, such as with the lady with the Nuka-Cola collection. For that quest you can turn in the items directly to the lady for one reward, or you can give them to her boyfriend (so he looks better in her eyes) and get a different reward.
If Fallout 3's gameplay has a problem, it's with repetition. There are only about 50 types of weapons available in the game, and a whole slew of them are lame melee weapons like tire irons and lead pipes. There also aren't many types of enemies. There are four types of supermutants, three types of ghouls, one type of raider, six types of robots, and so forth, which might sound like a lot if you add them all up, but you encounter most of them well before the halfway point in the game, and after that it's just a matter of killing the same things over and over again with the same weapons. Plus, since Fallout 3 features very little level scaling, these repetitive battles get easier as the game goes on, making them even more boring than they would be otherwise (though, for what it's worth, no level scaling also means that there aren't several different variations of each major item like in Oblivion). For Fallout 3 to stay entertaining for a full 100 hours (which is how much time I estimate you could spend exploring all of the locations), Bethesda really needed to double or triple the number of unique enemies, especially the higher level opponents.
Sound
I'm not much of a judge of music, so I won't comment on Fallout 3's soundtrack here. What I'll talk about instead is the voice acting. Bethesda had a lot of problems with the voice acting in Oblivion, starting with having about three guys do all of the random peasant voices, and ending with advertising that they had Patrick Stewart in the cast, and then killing off his character in the first five minutes. Fallout 3 doesn't have these problems. Bethesda must have doubled or tripled the number of actors in the cast, so you hardly ever notice different people with the same voice, and the big name actors they recruited, Liam Neeson and Malcolm McDowell, actually play a role for the majority of the campaign. Plus, Ron Perlman is back as the voice of the narrator (he gets to say (war never changes) about five times), and the other actors do a competent job, making Fallout 3 much more pleasant to listen to than Oblivion.
Interface
Sadly, Fallout 3 does not have a good PC interface, and it's not even close. Some of the problems are no doubt because Bethesda designed the game for consoles and then didn't bother to port it very well to the PC. That would explain why you're not allowed to name your saved games (which, coupled with not including profiles, makes running multiple games really exciting), and why the hotkeys are so limited. For example, to see your weapons you have to press the tab key, then click on the inventory tab, and then click on the weapons tab. When was the last time you played a role-playing game, and you had to click three times to see your inventory rather than just press the (I) key? I know when it was for me -- when I played Oblivion, which used the exact same crummy system.
But PC-versus-console issues aside, there are some other problems with the interface. If you play using the third-person perspective, the targeting cursor is off, and so you have to keep switching to the first-person perspective to see what you're really aiming at. Also, there is no mini-map -- probably to help with the game's (immersion) -- but I like mini-maps because they show me where I am and where I need to go. To me, the best interface is the one that gives you the most options, and so I'd like to at least be given the choice of whether or not I want a mini-map enabled. Finally, the overhead maps are often worthless. Many of the locations in Fallout 3 have multiple floors that overlap each other, and having one map for all the floors combined doesn't really help to show you where you are -- especially when the map has an incredibly low resolution and barely works even when there's only one floor. In some ways it's kind of fun that Bethesda mixed old technology with the future, but that doesn't mean that I want to view my maps on the Pip-Boy's small green screen. Please give me real maps.
Fortunately, not everything about the interface is bad. Fallout 3, like Oblivion before it, includes a fast travel feature, so once you've visited a location you can instantly return to it at any time. That's a great time-saver, especially in downtown D.C. where the debris is so thick that getting anywhere involves popping into and out of a bunch of metro stations. Also, the load, save, and transition times are all very fast, so you wont have to spend much time staring at a loading screen while you're playing the game.
Conclusion
The more I play Fallout 3, the more I consider it to be a (functional) game. It includes a big world with lots of places to explore and lots of enemies to kill, but there isn't a lot to draw you in. The main questline isn't especially involving, there aren't a lot of enemies or types of equipment, and you might hit the level cap well before the end of the game, giving you a long stretch of time where you can't improve your character at all. That is, everything about the game works, and you can spend a lot of time with it, but it isn't always exciting.
When I play a role-playing game, I always hope for interesting characters, quotable dialogue, and memorable story elements. Fallout 3 just doesn't offer these things, and, in fact, many of its story elements feel like they're warmed over retreads from the original Fallout games (like when you learn how the supermutants came into being, or when you discover who your real enemy is). However, I'd describe Oblivion in about the same way, and a whole bunch of people liked that game, so I suspect a whole bunch of people will like this game as well. Fallout 3 isn't a bad game, but it isn't a great game, either, and my guess is that it will only really appeal to the Oblivion crowd.
