Release: Oct 28 2008 (US), Oct 31 2008 (UK)
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Genre: Role-playing game
Pros: Massive world, malleable story, great combat mechanic, wonderful visuals, sense of freedom
Cons: Some bad voice acting, 3rd person looks awful
Buy me on Xbox 360, PC & Playstation 3!
In my mind, Bethesda were sitting around a table, discussing business strategies. One of them joked how Oblivion in the future would be a good money-maker. After all, he said, it worked great for Blizzard. They all laughed for a few seconds until a collective realisation of how fantastic that might be popped into their heads. Silence. Another one of them looked down at their local paper and spotted an advertisement: reputable, acclaimed gaming franchise for sale. One previous owner.
Obviously, that’s all not true. Probably.
So, here it is: a hotly-anticipated sequel from a different time and a previous generation. Despite the fact that the individual components powering Fallout 3 are completely different to Fallout and Fallout 2, it would be disrespectful to Bethesda (and the ghost of Interplay, obviously) if the former games were ignored. And they’re not – there are even cheeky mentions towards nabbing a few water chips and getting hold of a GECK at the beginning of Fallout 3. This is no simple re-imagining or a case of gutting the franchise to make it work in an Oblivion mould, no, it’s a very conscious and determined effort to create a sequel, and fans of Fallout in general should be thankful to Bethesda for doing it. They’ve turned themselves into a developmental phoenix, breathing new life into a dead series and heralding it with jubilation as it marches triumphantly over the gaming sphere.
Short story? Fallout 3 is more than just a post-apocalyptic Oblivion.
The game starts with you being born – literally – within Vault 101. You and the rest of your settlement reside in this large underground dwelling because, to put it bluntly, it beats the hell out of the post-war surface world. Since the planet was nuked everything has gotten stinky, riddled with dangerous radiation and nasty mutant things. Obviously, stuff happens and you end up having to leave. As your eyes adjust to the light and you take in the ruined world, you’re very aware that this is the first real money shot of the game.
It would be atypical of a review to mention the graphics engine (it’s very good) but it would be an incomplete and unfair sentiment. This isn’t just a title with neat rendering, or some swish technology. Although it has both. It’s the detail that leaves your jaw on the floor, and Bethesda have employed a seriously talented art team to create assets to produce a convincing and engaging world. Sure, you’ve got your beautiful sweeping vistas that rest snugly at the upper echelons of next-gen gaming, but there’s a real artistic integrity made bountifully apparent in the minutiae. You can’t take ten steps without marvelling at something, even if it’s just the massive draw distance. The only thing that lets the team down is the character models, but I’ll get to that later.
Welcome To Oblivion
Not far into the game it becomes apparent that, at its heart, this shares as much, if not more, with Oblivion as it does with previous Fallout titles. Its Oblivion side, mind you, has been heavily polished to a rich, deep lustre. Satisfaction guaranteed. Out is the fiddly and counter-intuitive leveling system, replaced with a generous ‘more EXP equals more good’ philosophy. You can’t really shoot yourself in the foot with your character in Fallout like you could with its fantasy-inspired ancestry, so I didn’t end up having to recreate my character about seven hours in. Which was nice. Also gone are major/minor abilities, making way for a Fallout-esque series of stats and skills. There’s a system of perks, too, that are dished out at leveling up time to give you a seriously unfair advantage over everything else by the time you reach the high levels.
After being set loose upon a massive world, Fallout 3 virtually compels you to become crippled with a severe bout of kleptomaniacal OCD. There’s a natural temptation to leave no rock unturned and no cranny unexplored, which ultimately results in you playing the game for the best part of forever. Compared to your average experience, Fallout 3 feels slower to the point it might even seem static: at the beginning of my game I was pretty much tied directly to Megaton and Rivet City, unable to do anything had I not vigorously experienced every single part of what the settlements had to offer. Ultimately, I’m not convinced the game is best experienced in this way. It’s far too big and much too deep to struggle around with quests that don’t feel like they’re suited to your current character, which is probably because they’re not. At the end of the day there’s plenty of experience to absorb, so there should be no reason to chug away at everything. But I did, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others do too.
On a second character, I walked straight from the vault to the first big outside plot event without even visiting the starting town of Megaton, and the game was absolutely fine with this happening. That’s the kind of specimen Fallout 3 is: you’re perfectly capable of just missing out on entire hours of gameplay if you’re not bothered.
Megaton, then, is the place you’re likely to stumble upon after first exiting the vault. The whole town is built inside a crater around a live, undetonated atomic bomb. Contrast it with the next big town you come across, a giant naval vessel, and you can start to see a picture of geographical variety that Oblivion simply did not have. In Megaton, and the whole game, you’re welcome to go about at your own pace and do what you want. There’s the option of defusing its nuke, leaving it be or even rigging it to explode and wiping the town off the map. One of the definite positives to Fallout 3 is that it’s built to be played in multiple ways, and the design fundamentally complements that. Realising the advantages and limitations of your character is essential to getting through the experience without feeling exhausted.
One instance: I’m in an abandoned robot factory about five hours into the game. One thing has led to another and I’ve ended up turning everything on, setting loose a fleet of angry, laser-packing robots (that are beautifully modeled on old science fiction movies) and I haven’t put enough of my skill points into working with computers. I can’t disable them, even though I would like to, and I’ve got to just hoof it out of there instead of trying to fight because I don’t have either the ammo or the constitution for it.
Overall, the game is certainly not short. Its actual length depends on how much of the map you’re already familiar with and what side quests you choose to undertake. It’s not quite the length of Oblivion, but it’s a more structured title with less repetition in its aesthetics, enemies and environments. This, I argue, is a good thing.
Pip-Boy 3000 As Standard
Much has been made of V.A.T.S, or the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, which bridges the gap between first-person Oblivion-esque style and previous Fallout games. Tapping the right bumper in combat halts the game and brings up a screen where you can target various body parts depending on what you’re fighting. A percentage chance to hit is displayed, and you’re given a number of Action Points which you use to queue up a series of attacks. Using V.A.T.S is pretty easy, and the results are horrifically gory. Heads, for instance, either pop into a mass of goop, brains and eyeballs or just get blown off completely. V.A.T.S (and the liberal approach to drug taking) is clearly the reason the game is so heavily age-restricted, but after a while the animations become standard and you’re simply left to bask in enough hyperviolence to satisfy even Patrick Bateman. Using it is virtually mandatory, as combat flies by too quickly otherwise. Merely landing a hit with a firearm outside of V.A.T.S is a challenge unto itself, and part of the upside of the system is that it puts a serious bit of distance between itself and first person shooting games, happily finding its own niche and avoiding the problem of a rather banal and uninteresting FPS mechanic.
There’s a morality system included on top. Not as pronounced as in the recently released Fable II, the game sits merrily within the ethical grey. Your choices will usually result in a fair few people getting hurt regardless, which provides a stark difference from the moralistic definitives offered in Fable. Morality features usually preach strict absolutism, but a nice change of pace inside Fallout 3 is that you’re quite comfortable doing pretty much what you want. My character pinched pretty much anything that wasn’t bolted down and took the subsequent massive karma hit, but always answered questions politely and took the ‘good’ option during questing. The result? More good than bad, popular with other people but filthy rich from my night-time exploits.
Life’s not all perfect outside the vault, however, and Bethesa haven’t been able to shake off all the problems inherent to their engine. They’ve done their best to combat the awful level of vocal repetition that plagued Oblivion and have only succeeded to some extent: there’s still enough bad voice acting repeated so often that it becomes annoying. The optional third-person mode is so badly animated the only possible reason for wanting to use it is for screenshots on the PC version. And, whilst the game is seeping with gorgeous artwork and architecture, the character models are the weak link the chain. And when a bit of poor voice acting is combined with a lousy character model, you can’t help but feel that the game is a bit rough around the edges.
Devout Fallout follows will probably be disappointed to find out that the script isn’t as witty as it was in previous games. Sharp writing has never been Bethesda’s strong point, and that’s a shame because Fallout 3 could have really used it. Dialogue options are a resounding no-frills affair, with most of them simply being included to get the job done. It’s a shame that Bethesda couldn’t have diverted some of their money for, say, Liam Neeson and Malcom McDowell and given it towards a team of sharper, funnier writers. Or better voice actors. It’s perhaps the only serious error in presentation, and ultimately functions as merely an unsightly blemish on the face of a beautifully presented game.
But, ultimately, that’s not a terrible flaw.
Fallout 3 gives you a spiraling, enthralling open world, a complete sense of freedom and architecture and landscapes to truly gawp at. It’s more accomplished than it is lacking, and the post-apocalyptic world has been beautifully realised and lovingly filled with life I can’t help but feel a serious attachment to the game. The best way to articulate the beauty of Fallout 3 is probably just to slap it with a rating and leave the review on a high. It’s simply brilliant.
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