Fallout 3: Oblivion Five Hundred Years Later
I’d been waiting for Fallout 3 for ages (long before they even announced it) since I’d played Fallout on a Mac back in the Age of Grieger’s Mac Obsession (we’re currently in the Age of Grieger’s Mac Apathy) and hoped they’d come up with something more recent for me to dive into. As much as I love the game, the thought of trolling the same landscape with the same missions again, even years later, didn’t really turn me on.
So, BAM! Here landed the big fat, largely useless, Survival Edition I got from Amazon (I’m a collector’s edition junkie). I got it the day after it launched (yes, it’s been a month, I know). Since then, I’d played it whenever I had time (I have no time) until I finished it (a couple weeks ago) and then came back to it again a couple days ago to finish it (i.e. at least explore every spot on the map I could find, covering most of the side quests). And, so, here is my testimony of what I saw.
For those who hate reading long reviews
Overview
The game picks up in Vault 101 and starts you off with choices that remind me of the Ultima series. You’re choices dictate your gender and in general how you look. You grow up in a series of flashes (not really flashbacks but flashes of time) until you pick up the thread of the main quest and leave the Vault (no surprise or spoilers there…what’re you gonna do, spend all your time in the Vault?).
The Vault is near a town called Megaton which gets you started on the world environment and side quests. The town is fully loaded (if you’ve played Oblivion, you’ll start to notice a lot of similarities but we’ll get into that) so you can use it as a home base if you need to (though there are a couple others you can use as the game progresses).
You can choose to follow side quests which open up opportunities (like enabling you to call someplace home, get free medical aid, etc.) or just follow the main quest. If you follow the main quest (assuming you survive it), you’re in for a short game. Given what you’re up against (I’m trying not to spoil anything for you here), it’ll be a challenge but it’s doable. In the end, though, the open world that Bethesda created really makes you want to explore if only to see some of the detail work they created. Or, you might just want to follow in my footsteps and spend your time with my favorite hobby: blowing up vehicles.
Gameplay
Like I touched on, Fallout 3 plays like Oblivion in many ways. Everything from the background music (if you’re not using the radio) to some of the recorded voice dialog to the dialog system are all lifted from Oblivion. I don’t blame Bethesda for leveraging their engine to make this game happen faster (hell, if it means they get to make the storylines rich and plentiful, leverage all you want!). In fact, it makes me want to go back to Oblivion and finish it (I never did). For those that haven’t played Oblivion, you’re in for a treat. And of course, this is the first time Fallout has been rendered more like an FPS than an isometric crawler.
The main goal of this game is really about engrossing you in role playing. You get choices all over the place and there’s a great deal of potential for replayability if you’re the type that likes trying things out. Dialog trees are average in terms of choices but if you up certain skills/abilities you get to see more options, some of which are great. But, choices are not all made in dialog…they also come from how you approach quests/missions and how you build your character.
This is a big part of game play and a big reason this game is fun to play. I won’t go into detail on the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system since it’s…well…nothing special. It’s your standard attribute system that enhances skills associated with them. The really interesting aspect, but nothing new to Fallout fans, is the perk system. As you level up, you get to choose a perk (or you can choose a perk you’ve chosen to increase its effect, if possible) and the real magic is what the perks offer.
The perks define your character more than any skill or attribute out there. My favorite is Bloody Mess which guarantees a, well, bloody mess, if you crit a mob in combat. Others improve your thieving skills, gunnery skills, or your dialog choices (like Black Widow/Lady Killer). You can also get one called Contract Killer where killing certain “good” people will net you some credits (in the form of Fallout’s signature bottlecaps) and more Bad Karma.
Speaking of Karma, karma is a moving target based on your actions in the game. Kill an innocent person, accept an evil mission (like killing off the occupants of a town or building), or otherwise taking the “dark” path, earns you Bad Karma, while the opposite gives you Good Karma. Your Karma defines how people in the Wasteland respond to you and will open up choices or take them away. It’s a great system that again reminds me of Ultima. It lends itself to replayability if you really want to try out different ways to play.
As you wander the wasteland, you’ll encounter all sorts of things. I won’t go into detail here since I don’t want to spoil the fun or the suprises. Suffice it to say, it pays to wander (though wander with a loaded weapon). The land is littered with creatures that will want to kill you as well as raiders, mutants, and robots.
Bethesda kept the sometimes campy 50′s retro future motif (c’mon, you have to) and really went with it. There’s even a radio station, Galaxy News Radio, which has a DJ and mixes news bits (that actually change based on side quests and your actions), 50′s style music (some of which sound authentic…until they talk about mutants and the like), and even an old radio show. As annoyed as I was with the music at the beginning, I ended up liking it…wandering the wastes gets lonely sometimes and the music adds a bit of pep to the world.
Speaking of wandering the wastes, I had to mention, even if it’s brief, the cars. There are futuristic cars, trucks and buses littered across the landscape. Some of them still have their engines which means if you shoot the vehicle enough, you’ll set it ablaze…at that point, you need to move way back since the engines seem to contain nuclear material. I got a kick of out just randomly shooting vehicles here and there just to enjoy the bang. Better still, in some places, it turns into a tactical tool like when I nuked a band of raiders with a drive-in theater full of cars. Beautiful.
Oh and when you’re tired of wandering the wastes, the Oblivion fast travel system is here to help you with quick travel options to locations you’ve discovered already. This is a god send in a game with such an expansive landscape (I didn’t try it but it would take you probably a solid 10-15 minutes of continuous running without encounters to go from one side of the map to another…without encounters which are a dime a dozen in the wastelands). Of course, this assumes you can find every place. A perk displays all locations (they’re just undiscovered and they aren’t certain “surprise” locations that are part of quest plots) but even with a bit of aid offerred up in the form of a dotted line showing you connection points leading to your target it can be very counter intuitive finding the right tunnel to take or manhole that barely stands out from the rest of the landscape to enter to find the path to a special location.
Despite all this great stuff, there are flaws with gameplay. A number of bugs can wreak havoc on your questing. One bug I encountered had the NPC I needed to talk to to finish a quest stuck in the middle of a building I couldn’t enter. I had to look up the console command and object reference number to have the game move him to me. Other flaws include a flying deathclaw (I got on some rocks as it was coming after me and them whoosh, he flew up into the sky…only to appear below ground and fly up again in an endless loop), a vault door that opens up to empty space, the inability to reach a spot that marks the last discoverable spot on the map, and the VATS system making you waste bullets and opportunities by shooting into walls that weren’t in your path when you first aimed at a target.
I suppose the VATS system needs to be touched on. I’m not harping on the system, it’s actually a great way to meld the original Fallout VATS with an FPS model. My problem is that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The basic idea is, in the heat of combat (or just before), you can tap a key (V is the default which places it well for us WASD types) to enter the system which lets you click on specific body parts (head, arms, legs, torso and weapon for humanoids, other parts for non) and use up Action Points (AP) to target those parts. Targeting is supposed to increase the amount of damage inflicted and isolate it to that body part. In general, it works. In practice, though, it has its flaws, like the rest of the game. For instance, I’m a cover kind of guy (and I think a lot of people are…few FPSers who’ve played more tactical shooters like Counter Strike or COD play the crazed kamikaze tactic that you’d play in Quake or Unreal Tournament) and I’ll usually find some cover when I’m outnumbered or outgunned. But, I like to use VATS to target the head and the weapon arm of attackers (if they’re humanoid). So, I’ll crouch behind a short wall and send out some bullets to give the attacker a reason to find his/her own cover (okay, it doesn’t really work that way but let me live the dream) then I’ll hit the VATS key. Up it comes, I select my favorite body parts and let ‘er rip. Then, for some reason, my guy (or gal as the case may be) ends up sitting them shooting into a wall…the same wall I was comfortably shooting over just a second ago. I suspect it’s due to the fact that when I shoot from cover, I aim (that’s the point for the sight on the gun, right?) but it looks like the VATS decides to ignore the fact that a specialized targeted shot needs aim…so it’s shooting from the hip. Brilliant. Great, next thing you’ll see is me attempting to run with the game deciding I just want to walk…
Moving away from combat, other flaws (or in some cases irritants) are really just left overs from the Oblivion engine. There’s inventory management (hey, I’m happy not to have to deal with the Diablo style boxed inventory management scheme) which isn’t so much a flaw as an irritant since lots of good loot tends to weight a lot. Then there’s the obligatory dungeon crawls (okay, I know, it’s part of any RPG but after a while, it gets tiresome trudging through some caverns killing deathclaws or whatever only to find more ammo and armor that I’m trying to manage–see inventory management–to fit in my pack so I can sell it). These are made better by the lack of portals to towers you need to clear (from Oblivion). Then there are the sometimes pointless things that look more like something the devs planned on doing but never followed through on or finished off in a disappointing way. Maybe it’s part of the humor or an inside joke or something. For instance, one place you go to as part of a quest offers you the ability to fire off what seems like a nuke but nooo clue where it went or what the point was outside of the possible “Opps” joke. You can also find lots of broadcast towers, power relay stations, and water towers. Some have loot and such but others just give you a switch to pull to turn on some random signal which does nothing to further any plots or give you anything more than maybe some “flavor” content. It’s one thing to catch a signal in the middle of the wasteland, which when followed leads you to a long “abandoned” (not trying to spoil anything here) room underground that treats you to a potentially sorrowful footnote to the overall story, and another thing to get morse coded signals (no, I didn’t decipher them to see if there was anything interesting) that lead to a broadcast tower and nothing more.
Another interesting thing, whether it’s a flaw or not is your call though I count it as a flaw, is the level cap. Once I reached level 20, that was it…but I reached level 20 with a couple of side quests, a couple more legs of the main quest and several undiscovered locations on my map. So, all the exploration, mutant killing and problem solving I was doing was doing nothing to improve my character any more. Honestly, this isn’t an MMO so level caps should never be reached unless you literally did EVERYTHING in the game or at least 99% of it. There were doors I still couldn’t open (granted, I could’ve wasted all my level advancements and put all my points in just one attribute but what’s the fun of doing that?) and areas I couldn’t access.
And, one last thing I’ll gripe about is the AI for the companions. I understand that they can have their own ways of doing things in combat but does it have to involve charging headlong into a firefight they can’t win? I ended up finding the command to set the companions I got to essential so they couldn’t die. Not because I’m trying to cheat but because I didn’t want them to die…the wasteland is a lonely place and a certain companion you’ll remember from the earlier Fallout games makes an appearance…an appearance that’d be very short if he wasn’t essential. Besides, I was playing on hard and I wasn’t having any problem holding my own before I found these companions very late in the game.
Despite the flaws, though, some of which can be easily overlooked, gameplay is overall on part with Oblivion in that it gives you the breadth to be who you want to be rather than being some generic proagonist who just follows the storyline on rails. The environments are incredible immersive even with a UI visible (which you can always toggle off) and lend themselves to the storyline and overall time period and reality of the game. Seeing a couple of skeletons spooning on a bed in the middle of the blasted wasteland almost brings it home, making you feel like you’re in the middle of a post-apocalytic landscape where millions lived and died. You come across all types of people and are challenged with a lot of moral and ethical issues which you are free to decide either way. I compare it a lot to Ultima but that’s a compliment considering just how unique that series was and how much it defined the CRPG genre.
Technology: Graphics, Sound and Beyond
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. A lot borrowed from Oblivion means a lot of the same good and bad. The good: the environments have huge amounts of detail and demonstrate the time and care Bethesda’s design team took in building them. The long distance LOD engine let’s you climb a hill and really get a great panoramic view of the blasted landscape…you really get a sense for how big the environment is and how small you can be. It also lends itself to exploration as you’ll see some odd structure or something else that catches your eye and compels you to head off in that direction to find out what it is. Don’t get me wrong, the graphics still pop but they pop in the places I expect them to (in the distance ahead or nearer–but still distant–as you rotate your view).
Since the inhabitants (or rather a number of the inhabitants, though not all) are human (Oblivion had various races of humanoid which sometimes made you wonder if the odd look they had was due to the graphics engine or just the way the designers intended it to be), I had figured the engine would render them in weird ways but it seems they either worked out the kinks or decided on better models. Regardless, the people look good both close up and at shooting distance. 
There were flaws in places of course. Jjust as the story and environment of Fallout expose the flaws of humanity underneath the velour that was the 50′s style Ozzie and Harriet-like faux society the Fallout universe is based on, so do the flaws in the game expose the potentially shortened development cycle Bethesda probably had to accept in order to avoid a Vanguard-like desperation game launch. Rocks floating a few feet in the air, NPCs and mobs stuck in the environment (or flying through it as with the flying Deathclaw), unfinished areas or places where textures didn’t quite cover everything, and (another Oblivion carryover) objects floating as soon as you disturb a neighboring one.
The audio is great with the aforementioned radio station as well as the Oblivion carryover background music (it may be a carryover but it still works). I can’t say there was anything to complain about here. Sound effects generally made sense and often worked well though sometimes you could hear stuff a floor below or above you even though it sounded like it was coming from your left or right.
No review of Fallout 3 would be complete, though, without the biggest technological issue being mentioned: crashing. It seems to point to the fact that Bethesda probably spent a lot of money and time building this out and got to a point where they just said, we have to launch this thing before it bankrupts us. This sucker crashes if you look at it wrong. I can’t say it’s happened during actual gameplay (a good thing) or that it corrupts saved games (which would kill this game) but it does happen at times when it shouldn’t. I have a decent system (QuadCore 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GT) running XP SP2 (until I installed SP3 a couple weeks ago) and I’ve played tons of games on it. Outside of another game that will not be mentioned here (okay it will, The Guild 2: Venice…fucking JoWooD), I rarely have crash issues. This game will crash sometimes when you Alt-Tab out. It’ll crash if you quickload. Basically, if it has to deal with the OS, it’ll run the risk of a CTD. It’s annoying unless you’re just playing. So, far, no patch has come out to fix this issue so it really dings the quality of the game’s technology.
Buy or Sell
So, with all that, should you get it? Well, if you’re a Fallout fan there’s no question. If you loved Oblivion and don’t mind trading in your bow and sword for a Mad Max environment complete with mini-nukes, there’s also, no question. Go buy it and have fun.
But what if you aren’t a fan of either genre? If you’re an FPS shooter fan and couldn’t stand still long enough to piss in an RPG, then stear clear. Make no mistake, this is ultimately an RPG. Aiming down a rifle barrel and shooting only to see your bullets follow a short barrel shotgun pattern out the barrel is very unsatisfying as an FPS shooter afficiando. You want the aim to be based on your skills, not some random die roll in the background somewhere.
If you’re an RPG fan who either played Ultima and loved the freedom or play MMOs not to level up and raid but to explore and discover, this game’s for you.
Finally, if you’ve never played an RPG or adventure game and are looking to try one out, this is definitely for you. It represents a best of breed despite its flaws and does what an RPG is supposed to do, immerse you in the story and environment and allowing you to role play as you want, not as the story wants you to role play. Get it.
The Numbers
Gameplay: 8
Story/Plot/Questing: 8
Graphics: 8
Sound: 9
Replayability: 8
Tech/Stability: 5
Overall: 8
Chances: Good. It’s sold well so far and has a good pedigree. Plus it’s available for XBox 360 so there’s a larger market exposed to it.
Dev: Bethesda Softworks
Pub: Bethesda Softworks
Buy it from Amazon!
– grieger
