RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

I’ve heard tell that in the days of the NES and SNES era, when a new Dragon Quest game was coming out in Japan, it would be like a national holiday as people lined up to get their copy. RPGs have never reached such lofty heights of popularity here in North America. Final Fantasy VII managed to popularize the genre certainly. The series and the genre itself have become much more well known since — and seen an increase in sales as well. And while no RPG has had the worldwide acclaim sales, and following that Final Fantasy VII did, Fallout 3 deserves a special mention for its breakthrough performance in the North American market in particular.

Home sweet home.

Fallout 3 was released last fall, on October 28, 2008, to be precise. We ran a story a few days prior to its release (right here, if you please) wherein Bethesda announced that it had teamed up with Best Buy to host a midnight release of the game at eleven locations across the U.S. So let me get this straight…  A midnight release… for a video game? And it’s an RPG? We’re all used to the hype that surrounds big game releases these days, but normally that’s reserved for games like Halo 3, not anything remotely associated with the role-playing genre. Bethesda absolutely worked the hype machine to make this game the most anticipated of the year.

Bethesda released massive amounts of media, offered special limited edition per-order packages, and secured themselves a special spot as the kings of controversy when Fallout 3 managed to get an Adults Only rating in Australia, thus making it unsellable in the land Down Under. This caused quite the uproar in the gaming world. The cause of the high rating turned out to be reference to and in-game use of drugs — a big no-bo, and one which was eventually edited in all versions of the game. Do you think all this controversy hurt Fallout 3? No, not so much. There’s no such thing as bad press they say, and gamers do love to scream “Censorship!” at every opportunity.

I’m not trying to suggest that the game was all hype either. It performed admirably, selling 610,000 copies in the first month, and 4.7 million by the end of the year. It earned almost universally high review scores and swept the RPG category on most 2008 game awards online as well as “Role-Playing Game of the Year” at the AIAS 12th annual Interactive Achievement Awards, and “Game of the Year” at the 2008 GDC Awards.

War! What is good for? Absolutely n– Err… nevermind.

Part of this success was due to the blurring of the line between RPG and action; Bethesda definitely pulled in the salivating graphics fans and the trigger happy shooter fans, the sort who won’t go near something like Persona 4 (also an M-rated and critically acclaimed RPG). It’s also a game tailor-made for the U.S. market, made by Americans for Americans, you could say. Set in a post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. many familiar landmarks feature prominently in the game. It also expressly set itself up as an adult game, due to the high violence content. I was working for another site when the first Fallout 3 screens were released during E3 2007. I had to ask permission to post one of them as it depicted… wait for it… an exploding head. If you asked the Fallout 3 staff “War, what is good for?” the answer would be “gore.” Why that’s a draw, I’m not certain, but that may be due to my being neither American, nor twenty years old, nor male, which was the basic demographic they were aiming for — successfully by the way. To be fair, this was a mainstay of the series, not something tossed in just to get new fans, but with curent-gereration graphics the developers could make it all messier than ever.

Fallout 3 took a path less travelled by RPGs and by doing so managed to garner attention rarely ever paid to the genre.  For that it deserves the title of Game Changer… and of goriest RPG of the decade.