Fallout 3 is a strange game. On the one hand it's one of the most open
and expansive videogame experiences to come along in a long time, but
on the other hand it's marred by a myriad of niggling issues that
ultimately lead to it not living up to Bethesda's grandiose vision.
The
Fallout series is one of the most beloved in all of modern video games.
It's mix of traditional RPG trappings and darkly humorous subject
matter meant that when Bethesda took over the reigns, people started to
become a little concerned. Bethesda have been known in the past mainly
for the Elder Scrolls series, some of the most serious and hardcore
games on the market. The main trepidation that the gaming public had
was that Bethesda would simply turn Fallout 3 into "Oblivion with
guns." Well....they pretty much have. Not that that's necessarily a bad
thing.
The story of Fallout 3 begins with you characters birth
inside Vault 101. You see, some 200 years before this the world was
thrown into a nuclear holocaust sometime after WWII. Most of the
Earth's population was decimated, but some were able to survive by
hiding in specially made underground vaults. "No one ever enters, and
no one ever leaves," this is what you are lead to believe as you grow
up inside the relatively safe walls of you steel home. The opening
portion of the game acts as both a tutorial and a character creation
process, letting you decide what skills and abilities your avatar will
use when you inevitably step outside into the vast Capital Wasteland.
Your time inside the vault is cut short when your Father (voiced by
Liam Neeson) suddenly and inexplicably ventures outside, forcing you to
follow and hopefully track him down.
As your eyes adjust to the
blazing sun, you begin to realise how immense the world of Fallout 3
really is. Thanks to an impressive draw distance, you can see the
ruined remnants of the Capitol building and Washington Monument miles
away in the distance. There is a true sense of isolation at work here
and that sensation is only heightened when you take a glance at you in
game map. This game could take a while!
Bethesda should really
be congratulated for crafting such an unflinching vision of a
post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. They don't call it a wasteland for
nothing, the sea of browns and greys is only occasionally broken up by
pockets of civilization like the town of Megaton, built around a still
active nuclear warhead, or Rivet City, a converted Aircraft Carrier.
The feeling of despair and hopelessness is one of the best parts of
Fallout 3.
Although the game takes place from a first person
perspective, it does not play like a traditional first person shooter.
Being an RPG, every bullet or punch is still governed by skill checks
and behind the scenes "dice rolls." What this means in practical terms
is that you might be standing 3 feet away from a Super Mutant and
unload a clip into his face, but only hit with half of the bullets.
This sounds horrible on paper but once you get used to it, it lends a
sense of strategy to preceding and gives all the different weapon and
armour types specific uses. In what might have been an attempt to
hearken back to previous Fallout games, Bethesda has created the VATS
system. By pressing a button the game freezes and zooms in on your
closest enemy. From there you can highlight different body parts and
queue up attacks which are then played out in slow motion, with body
parts flying and bullet casings spiralling into the air. This is a good
alternative to the pseudo - FPS action, as it gives the you a distinct
advantage over your opponents. Besides, seeing a feral dogs head
explode really never gets old!
Combat isn't the only option in
F3. Most quests have multiple ways to complete them. For example, early
on in the town of Megaton you meet a woman who is writing a Wasteland
Survival Guide. She recruits you to go out to a nearby deserted
supermarket and bring her back food and medicine. Now, you could go to
the supermarket and do as she asks or you could simply wait around for
a day, go back to her and lie, telling her that the market was empty.
Either way you get the reward. Another option would be to pull out your
gun and kill her and then just loot her corpse for you reward.
All
of these choices play into the karma system, doing good deeds and
helping others nets you good karma, while plundering and pillaging the
innocent will obviously net you bad karma. Different quest lines open
up depending on you moral alignment and some characters won't even
bother to talk to you unless you're good or evil. While this system
lends some gravity to the choices you make in the world, it's also
somewhat rudimentary, with either the saintly option or the devil
option. A middle-ground and some shades of gray would have made for a
much better experience.
The graphics on show in Fallout 3 are
mostly excellent. As i said before the draw distance is amazing and the
atmosphere while your wandering through the wasteland is almost
unmatched. Adversely, the character models leave a bit to be desired.
When engaged in a conversation, the game zooms in on the characters
face and the lack of facial expression is pretty jarring. A supposedly
bad ass slaver might be telling you to, "fuck off somewhere else,
vault-pussy," but their face looks like they're reciting the periodic
table.
The voice acting for the most part is pretty weak, you'll
here the same voice actors used for different characters countless
times as you play the game and what they have to say isn't particularly
well-written to begin with. For despots who have had to survive by
eating irradiated dog-meat for the last 200 years, the citizens of the
Capitol Wastes sound remarkably well-educated.
This brings me to
my biggest problem with Fallout 3, the story telling. Bethesda kind of
designed themselves into a hole with the way they go about the
narrative. The only way that the story progresses is either through
one-on-one conversations, or scripted events that take place within the
game world. The conversations are usually pretty boring and
poorly-voiced and suffer from the old RPG problem of the player having
to stare at a list of pre-defined phrases to keep the dialogue moving,
this means that when important story material is trying to be explained
I was just looking at the bottom of the screen for the next good/evil
thing I was going to say. Scripted events in first person games are
nothing new, Half-Life did them back in 1998 and at the time it was
breakthrough in immersive story telling. Fallout 3 fails this on both a
creative and technical level. Several times throughout the main quest
key characters meet their demise. The designers presumably wanted me to
feel sadness and anguish toward these poor souls untimely death.
Instead I was straining to hear what they had to say over the din of
the background music or laughing at the shoddy animation that turned
what should have been a heartbreaking moment into a hammy amateur drama
performance.
As I said at the beginning of this review Fallout 3
is a strange game. It had a lot going for it, a gigantic and
enthralling game-world, strong combat and a great atmosphere. Sadly,
technical bugs and poor design decisions turned the newest Fallout
adventure into an exercise of frustration and grand ideas that were
ultimately not the sum of their parts.
