Fallout 3

In the future, civilization survived nuclear warfare by relocating into underground vaults. Fallout 3 begins as you the player are literally born in Vault 101 into the arms of your father (Liam Neeson). As a child you are introduced to the games character creation system where you are able to increase a number of your personal traits such as Luck and Strength. You are also given an electronic device called the Pip-Boy 3000 which tracks your health, skills and objectives. On your nineteenth birthday however, your father escapes the vault and you are sentenced to death by the vault’s overseer. It is up to you to venture out into the Wasteland and relocate your father. The outside world of Washington D.C. has been transformed into a post apocalyptic catastrophe of destruction, where mutants lurk, bandits prey and townsfolk struggle to survive.

Fallout fans will be relieved that the opening exchanges of Bethesda Softworks’ new RPG game, represent a vast improvement over their previous project, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Humorously scripted sequences, such as a moral choice quiz test and cleverly disguised tutorial sequences, which signifies your growth from a new born baby to adult, demonstrate that Bethesda has grown in terms of its storytelling and scripting.  Vault 101 has been compared to the opening dungeon of Oblivion, but it feels like a much tighter and more interesting introduction. It also delivers the players to Fallout 3’s most impressive display, which is the outside world. Exiting the vault you are rewarded with the sight of the Wasteland. It is a truly open world, with an incredible draw distance that allows you to see the vast planes ahead of you. Burnt out cars, telegraph poles, shacks, cliff faces, little robots and shanty towns populate the world. You can hear the sound of the wind sweeping across the barren wasteland. The attention to detail is simply impeccable.

Significantly, unlike STALKER,  there are no load screens across the planes – only when you enter buildings – offering a highly immersive experience. As the game is a FPS and RPG hybrid, you are free to explore the world, uncover missions and slay enemies, which will earn you experience points. These experience points can be spent on skills such as Sneaking, Small Guns, Lockpicking and Speech. You will also be able to gain special abilities called Perks, which are unlocked as you level up. Perks such as Lady Killer, allow for abilities like additional dialogue when talking to women, while an entirely different one like Little Leaguer increases your melee weapons skill points.

With such diversity to many of these skills and abilities, it is a shame that many of these skills were not put to better use. Many of Fallout 3’s main mission quests feel very generic and conventional and underuse many of these skills. Stealth for example – particularly at low levels – is virtually useless. You are not rewarded with stealth in anyway apart from conserving ammo. Only killing your opponents with your firearms, will earn you experience points. Why would you stealth the game with such diverse firearms either? Stealth is therefore reduced mainly to pick pocketing, which might be used once or twice in the main campaign. Other skills like barter and unarmed, which increase your melee damage with your fists, will not be of much use to most gamers, other than to merely experiment with.

The very nature of the skills and stats system is overly contrived too. You start off with 15 points for each skill and then increase them with additionally given points.  The problem with this though is that if the player has 49 points for lockpicking they will not even be able to attempt to crack a lock because it is set to a 50 point skill level. The entire system feels extremely unbalanced and rather unsatisfying. Sometimes it completely gels and you will be able to either bribe someone for information, or alternatively pickpocket him to steal a key and then break into his computer to find the information you need. Yet at the same time this merely reminds you of the way a game like Deus Ex - a far superior RPG and FPS hybrid - offered this level of freedom on a much more consistent basis.

As stated many of the main quests feel highly generic, offering objectives such as rescuing captured townsfolk, retrieving items such as a satellite dish, exploring experimental facilities (of course), and searching through caverns and shanty towns to solve people’s problems. After you have played forty hours of a game like The Witcher, you cannot help but feel a sense of déjà vu for many of these tasks. Megaton for example – one of the first towns you visit – is filled with people requiring your help with various tasks. Typically you – the voiceless player – are the one tasked with walking in and solving many of these problems. The AI of the civilians in these towns and villages is fairly decent. They do have some impressive display of a routine. At night for example, they will sleep and their shops will be locked. During the day you might even see some store owners having breakfast before going to their shops. It is also impressive how NPCs will take to heart what you say to them and react different. If you are kind they will offer you rewards such as money or if you are rude to them, become unpleasant. It just doesn’t quite have the charm of a game like The Witcher though. This is mostly likely because the animations of the NPC characters are fairly poorly and just not quite as fluent as they should have been. They have excellent lip synching, but their facial animations are nearly non-existent and their movements are stiff. The Gamebryo engine has been powering games since 2001 (Dark Age of Camelot) and despite much of its excellence, in regards to lighting and draw distance, it lets Bethesda down in their storytelling and depiction of the people, in what is an otherwise terrific and interesting world.

One of the more interesting aspects of the game is the combat. Body parts can be blown off enemies with a large assortment of weapons such as machine guns, laser pistols, hunting rifles and bazookas. This is a very bloody and brutal game. What makes the combat unique is a system that is known as VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System). When you enter a certain range in combat you can press a button to enter this system and the action will freeze on screen. It will bring up on your nearest target the percentage at which you can hit their individual body parts. You have a number of action points which is the equivalent of how many shots you can take to hit your enemy. The results at times can be spectacular, especially when you manage to blow the head clean off a mutant with your hunting rifle. It can feel very satisfying at times. The combat just needed some minor tweaks though. A faster running speed for the player would have added a greater sense of urgency, while lean keys as well as prone may have added to the diversity and dynamics of the combat. The AI also needed far more hit animations in real-time, as well as improved scripting. Enemies and NPCs will often run around in circles, sometimes bump into each other, and into the level geometry. Most enemies are not particularly tactical either and will merely stand in the open to fire upon you, or just try and rush up to you to outgun you. You might be able excuse them given most of them are mutants though. There are not that many enemy types throughout the game, mainly bandits, mutants, scorpions and soldiers.

The main campaign is likely to last most players between fifteen to twenty hours. This might seem short for such an open world game, but there are a number of side quests that can be explored during the game. It is quite frustrating that the games finale does not allow players to continue to explore through the open world to complete these quests. This means that you have to either load an older save or restart the game over to find these quests. Similarly the game’s final decision does not quite reflect the games entire emphasis on Karma. Throughout the entire game your actions will give you either good or bad Karma. If you steal something or break into a computer you will receive negative Karma. Give a man some clean water and you will have positive Karma. The games ending very, very briefly touches on what you’ve done, but it feels like the last choice you make almost overrides everything else you’ve done, which is disappointing given what an interesting idea Karma is during the game.

Fallout 3’s story is quite competent in terms of its dialogue and arc – it’s bearable but it never reaches the sophistication of Mass Effect and is never quite as satirical as it would like to be. There are little references to the previous Fallout games and some comic touches, but elements like the experiments lab and the warring factions are nothing we haven’t seen before. There is however a very disturbing moment – similar to Cohen’s Masterpiece from Bioshock – that takes place inside a virtual reality simulation program. I am still trying to work out what the point of it was – but it is a terrifying sequence all the same. The campaign could have used more variety like this, perhaps just not as gruesome.

Even if the main campaign is not all you would expect, Fallout 3 still offers excellent replay value in going back through the game to complete many of its side quests or to merely experiment with some of the perks. It is a very well optimised game that runs well without lag, though there are problems that just wouldn’t expect from a blockbuster title like this. Frequently the game may stop responding upon starting or it will tab you back to desktop during game time. The games arrow system can also be very annoying flickering back and forth when you are tantalisingly close to your objective, but still unsure of where to go. These are minor complaints but they really should have been ironed out. It is a good game, a very playable one, but you cannot help but ask what could have been with a less generic and conventional campaign. It is just thankful that the unique setting and atmospheric world save the game from the gates of oblivion.