RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Whether one was anticipating or dreading Bethesda’s entry into the series, few can deny the popularity of the Fallout RPGs.  In a genre rife with swords, magic, dragons, demons, and other fantasy tropes, the Fallout games took a bold, mature new direction with their post-apocalyptic setting and retro-futuristic style.  In giving Fallout 3 the Oblivion treatment, Bethesda invited many suspicions, some of them valid, as to whether they could maintain the feel of the series and improve on the flaws of their earlier titles.  The answer to both is an emphatic “yes,” followed instantly by several “buts.”  Sadly, the “buts” are likely to be the last thing you remember of Fallout 3.

Faced with the prospect of world-wide nuclear war, the United States built a nationwide network of vaults, ostensibly to safeguard its best, brightest, and most well connected.  As the bombs fell and the planet burned, entire generations were born, grew up and died without ever knowing anything of the outside world.  Some eventually opened their doors willingly.  Others were forced to leave, or simply died off.  Vault 101, where the story starts, was intended to never open again. The player is told this in the prologue-slash-character creation sequence, sheparded by their father through childhood and adolescence in the vault.  One fateful day, the child is abandoned as dear old dad leaves for no obvious reason, and the player is left to follow him into the ruins of the greater Washington, DC area to find out why.

Like Oblivion, Fallout 3‘s character generation sequence also serves as a tutorial, where the game lets you determine your character’s appearance, gender, and core stats, then determines your skills based on how you progress through childhood.  For instance, fending off a bully with your fists will cause you to favor unarmed combat, convincing a guard to intervene favors social skills, et cetera.  You have the option of changing your character at the end of the prologue, and the choices you made do have subtle effects throughout the game; some characters may react differently to a man or woman, to a strong or smart character, and so on.  The game is patient in explaining how movement, interaction, and combat work, though the basics seem woefully inadequate in preparing you for your eventual emergence into the wasteland.  Not to fault the prologue, of course; the game is just that big and broad.

“You guys worship an unexploded nuclear bomb?” “Yeah, but nobody’s that observant. It’s mainly a Christmas and Easter thing.”

All pretense aside, this is a shooter at heart, albeit deeper than your average Halo clone, or even that other Oblivion with guns, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.  Standard FPS controls apply for movement and interaction, with the option to set hotkeys for quick weapon switching.  Your wrist-mounted Pipboy handles inventory management, monitors your condition, keeps track of your quests and notes, and displays world and local maps; oddly, local maps seem to show all the floors in a given zone at once, making many buildings confusing to get through.  Mercifully, Fallout 3 keeps Oblivion‘s fast travel option, allowing for rapid jumps from one previously visited location to another.  The Pipboy also provides a short-ranged light, which helps somewhat in dark areas, but isn’t enough all the time; nightvision would be a boon, and as this was present in Oblivion, its absence is puzzling here.  Conversation still uses the Oblivion interface, though dialogue trees have improved dramatically – it’s not on par with the first two Fallout games, but it comes very close at times – and Bethesda has done away with the cumbersome topic list and persuasion minigame.

Battles occur in real time, though the VATS system lets you pause the action with the push of a button and, at a cost of action points, make precision shots to the head, limbs, etc.  It’s not perfect; going into VATS will give you precision aim, but you’ll be unable to move, and enemies are free to close in or return fire.  Still, VATS goes a long way in evening the odds, and it rarely comes off as unbalancing in either direction.  AI is relatively competent at ranged combat, with humanoid enemies retreating from unfavorable odds or staying behind good cover, but most are simple-minded and charge right in.  Fights are very often brutal to comical excess, with heads and arms exploding or going flying even from weak pistol rounds, even without the Bloody Mess perk.  With a lockpicking minigame, hacking element, and simple but serviceable stealth mechanics, you’ll get the sense that this is trying to cater more to the Deus Ex crowd than strict RPG fans, not that this is a bad thing.

Bethesda has kept the SPECIAL system of stat management intact, and made only minor trimmings to the traditional skill tree (collapsing first aid and doctor into one skill, for instance).  Optional traits no longer exist, but in their place players are now issued perks every level.  Enemies scale to your level, but within ranges; some zones start at level 4 and max out at 8, matching your level until you surpass it.  Rare is the zone that feels too difficult to pick through with caution and superior tactics, which is a laudable improvement over Oblivion.  There are plentiful incentives to explore, without the pesky need to grind.  Sadly, when you do hit the level cap, the urge to explore will almost certainly plummet.

Talon mercs prepare to eject a Behemoth from the Capitol with a mini-nuke. No, it’s not overkill. Seriously.

Graphically, Fallout 3‘s got the goods.  Animations are stiff, and bodies sometimes make weird, inexplicable motions when dying, but the wasteland’s denizens look more like, well, people.  The game borrows Oblivion‘s annoying fascination with prefab locations – you’ll grow sick of the samey subways and office buildings quickly – and every surface in the game is way too shiny and reflective.  Still, these are minor grievances in the face of top-notch set design and artistic style.  The DC area looks beautifully dilapidated.  Capitol Hill stands a ruined, war-torn shell, with the reflecting pool radioactive and littered with junk.  The damaged but defiant Washington Monument stretches into the sky, looming large even from deep in the wasteland.  Armored troopers have turned the gutted Pentagon into a fortress, while a handful of ragged survivors have carved a makeshift town out of a pile of junk surrounding an intact nuclear bomb.  And this is leaving aside the genuinely interesting dungeon areas, like the Lovecraft-inspired Dunwich building, or a vault that was subjected to cruel mind-control experiments.

The audio works well to bolster the atmosphere.  Effects are reliably good, with only a handful of weapon effects – some pistols, SMGs, and assault rifles – sounding lackluster.  Background music tends to meander and sound harmlessly eerie out in the wilds, though it adjusts for towns and dungeons to grow more welcoming or menacing.  It picks up dramatically for fights, and it seems to differ depending on whether you’re fighting normal humans, armored soldiers, mutants, or robots.  It never really grabs the ears, but it never fades too far into the background either.  NPC banter can still sound disjointed and awkward, but dialog with the player sounds more authentic.  Not every old or black person is voiced by the same actor (though many are) and only a handful of NPCs truly grate the nerves.

By contrast, key figures are well served by their actors: Liam Neeson brings a lot of warmth and heart to the role of your father, and players may recognize Malcolm McDowell as Enclave president John Henry Eden, who steals the show with every minute of his radio addresses between patriotic marching band music.  And speaking of radio, the Pipboy’s radio is a welcome function.  The boisterous wasteland DJ Three Dog spins the news (“no matter how bad it hurts!”) alongside vintage 50’s music, and you can sometimes pick up unique broadcast signals or the odd distress call.  It’d be remiss not to mention Ron Perlman, ably reprising his role as the series’ narrator, and delivering the classic “War never changes” line in a way only he seems able to.

So to recap, the vast majority of this game falls into the ‘flawed, but excellent’ category.  There were a few inexplicable crashes to desktop and one confusing bug involving an NPC who claimed to fetch something, didn’t move, and said “here it is” seconds later. So far, however, there is little to detract from the overall game.  However, as mentioned before there is one truly crippling flaw, and unfortunately it’s impossible to ignore.  To be blunt, the story fails in a truly spectacular fashion.  It’s not broken or unfinished; Bethesda simply screwed up.  The mod community has their work cut out for them here.

“And I want to be rich. Y’know, someone important… like an actor.” “Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan.”

It’s difficult to explain without venturing into spoiler territory, but somewhere around the halfway to two-thirds mark things start going awry.  Bethesda grudgingly sidestepped the inevitable controversy over child killing by making children immortal, then decided it’d be fun to force the player through a town composed entirely of children.  Whether you agree with their decision or not, this section breaks the game’s own internal logic to hamstring the player’s choices, and they could easily have worked around this.  Another segment forces you to be evil unless you figure out a puzzle, and it’s not obvious there is a puzzle to be solved.  Almost as jarring are unexplained reappearances of characters that supposedly died or disappeared earlier.  All this is contrasted, unfavorably, against several good and interesting sidequests; one of the most noteworthy is a Fedex letter quest that turns into a standoff between a town and a gang of blood-drinking survivalists, which can end in several very different ways.

The ending, however, makes the story’s deficiencies pale in comparison, and it deserves special contempt for actively insulting the player’s intelligence.  Suffice it to say Bethesda made a point of creating characters specifically for a given situation, then ignores them when that situation repeats itself.  The ending cutscene is based mostly on the player’s karma, giving little to no mention of actual deeds and only fleeting glimpses of places visited throughout the course of the game.  And let’s be clear: individual story sections do work.  The escape from the vault is frantic.  Encounters with your father are emotional.  Running street fights against Enclave soldiers are intense.  But the ending is simply a train wreck, and Bethesda’s claim of “up to 200” endings – in some interviews it went as high as 500 – is beyond ludicrous; it is a complete lie.  In an ideal world, someone would be fired for this.

The tragedy in this is the rest of the game is very good and legitimately worth playing.  The right elements are here: the fighting is intense, but not overwhelming; the RPG mechanics work, and usually well; the quests branch out and have multiple solutions in true Fallout style; the retro sci-fi atmosphere is captured almost perfectly; and the wasteland has never looked or sounded better.  None of these elements are perfect, but they’re all compelling enough for their flaws to be negligible.  The story, however, just drops the ball so hard that the rest of the game suffers.  That the game ends right when the main plotline does just accents the point.  Oblivion and Morrowind didn’t have the most brilliant of plots, but this didn’t detract from the experience.  By contrast, Fallout 3‘s main story effectively sabotages an otherwise excellent game, and does so in such a clumsy, lazy fashion it’s almost inconceivable that the sidequests – the good parts – and the main story were put together by the same team.

It’s truly a shame to end this review on such a dour note, but that’s exactly how Fallout 3 ends.  You might have fun, you might lose days at a time, you might even come back for more, but you will never forget how it lets you down.