War Never Changes

Could this post be about anything other than Fallout 3?

No. No it could not.

There is going to have to be some sort of angelic choir crying out to the heavens every time this game's name is mentioned. Thank you, Bethesda, thank you.

I was playing The Witcher, which is fantastic, but now I can't put Fallout 3 down. It's just too good. What makes it so good? Well this post wasn't going to be a short one was it? Here we go...

When I first saw Bethesda Softwork's trailer for Fallout 3 (the one with a radio playing in a wrecked bus, the ruins of DC, and the Brotherhood of Steel paladin) I was excited because it was Fallout. Not because I thought it was going to be a really good game. Sort of the opposite of the way I thought about The Witcher. When I heard of The Witcher I thought it was going to be just another RPG, then I learned it was on the Aurora Engine so I thought it was going to be just another Neverwinter Nights, then I learned the setting was supposed to be grim and dark with every stabbing everyone in the back so I thought it was going to be just another grim-dark Neverwinter Nights. I was wrong of course. The Witcher is a wonderful game and in a way I can't wait to get back to it. The only thing that's stopping me is the presence of Fallout 3.

With Fallout 3 it could have been just another RPG. It could even have been another Fallout: Tactics or Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (shudder). Sure Fallout: Tactics wasn't terrible, but it didn't feel like Fallout to me. You didn't have the feeling of post apocalyptic survival, of the struggle to get along in the wasteland, of the important quests you had to undertake, of the impact your actions had. You didn't get the character interaction or development that you did in the previous Fallout titles (i.e. Fallout and Fallout 2). Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel just wasn't Fallout to me.

However, Bethesda know what they're doing, I think. They've had experience with role playing games and they knew the scale of importance that this game would have for fans of the first two Fallout titles. Originally they said it won't just be Morrowind with guns (this was before they had ever announced Oblivion). However, I think they sort of did make Morrowind with guns in the way that they didn't make it Oblivion with guns.

Oblivion was a better game than Morrowind. It had better graphics, a smoother interface, a more friendly way of dealing with things, and the entire thing was polished to a degree that made people buy it as a benchmark game rather than as an RPG. The problem was that Morrowind was deeper and more involving. Despite having cruder graphics and a more difficult way of playing, Morrowind delivered something else. A sense of immersion and atmosphere. The NPCs communicated by written text rather than recorded voice overs, but I found that I paid more attention to what they had to say in Morrowind.

Bethesda learned from their mistakes. And then some. They must have looked really hard at Oblivion and seen what they did right and what they could have improved on. People feel more like they belong in the wasteland. Their clothing and status seems more realistic, the voice acting is much better and there's less of the boring, drawn out, half a minute long monologue you might hear from characters in other role playing games. The Fallout setting is very well established and is so rich with material for designers to use. However, that means the game requires accuracy.

But enough about the background of my expectations for the game. What's it like to actually play?

It's bloody brilliant. Like I said I've played it far too much over the weekend. The levelling and difficulty seems to be pretty accurate. I find it much more tempting to engage in combat than to run away like I did in Fallout 2, but that's because the combat is so visceral and cool. V.A.T.S. shows you the action in slow motion and allows a measure of accuracy that would be otherwise unavailable to you in the fast-paced craziness of wasteland combat.

The game seems to become less one dimensional as I play. I was wandering through the wastes, to an area I had been to before when a hysterical woman yelled at me. Her bedraggled appearance and desperation made me think of a slave turned into a human bomb by getting strapped with explosive charges. And what do you know that was exactly what had happened to her. Unfortunately she wouldn't hold still as I tried to disarm the bomb and ended up panicking and fleeing... then exploding. Then I had to deal with the slavers who had done this to her.

Damn. This entry has become far too long already. Maybe after playing it some more I should post bullet points about what I like about the game. So far I haven't encountered much to complain about at all. Except for one character saying "I could care less" which is grammatically incorrect and will earn the NPC in question a bullet sandwich when I'm prepared to deal with the consequences of killing him. That's right, grammatical Nazism still exists, even after WWIII.