Fallout 3 (PS3, 2008)
Fallout 3 is one of the first AAA games I played in the 7th generation. I got my PS3 in mid-2008 and played this a year and a bit later. I had Call of Duty 4 and Grand Theft Auto IV at launch and BioShock was in there at some point too, but in terms of the games from the first two or three years of the console nothing really matched this in terms of scale. I hated it. I had never played an RPG that didn't involve Pokémon and I had no idea what to do. I finished the main story and thought the entire premise was catastrophically dumb.
Fortunately, multiple years later I realise it's not actually that difficult to figure out what to do in games and here I am now, with the Game of the Year edition completed and the last of the PS3 games I wanted to finish out of the way. Since it's 2019 you probably know the deal with Fallout games by now. Set in a post-nuclear apocalypse Washington D.C. two hundred and something years in the future, you explore the world and do stuff in it. Compared to my first experience with the game, I can say now that the main story quest isn't really that important, in that it's not hugely different in terms of length or gameplay compared to other quests. Like any good open world game Fallout 3 has to be what the player makes of it, with each experience being unique to them and the way they approached the things they faced.
With that in mind, the most important part of the game would be the open world you're in. It's huge. Since there are no vehicles it really feels huge in a way other sandboxes from the time don't, since if you don't use fast travel it will take a long time and probably several random enemy encounters to get anywhere. Plus, you'll probably find somewhere else to explore before you make it to your destination. There's no denying the levels of care and attention that went into so much of the world, because there is detail along with the volume. The half-ruined subway stations are all pretty similar but the things you'll find in them aren't, and each of the hundreds of named locations have things in them for you to discover. Although I was primarily focused on finishing the game, and although I usually approach sandboxes with as many guides as possible holding my hand, I found myself getting sucked in to locations and random characters more than once, wanting to explore for its own sake.
Despite the size of the world and all of this detail though, part of me still finds it a bit... stale. I'm a big fan of post-apocalypse scenarios and dystopias because I like seeing how society reacts to a drastic change. What I've described before should be right up my street then, but there's something about the Capital Wasteland which doesn't draw me in the way other games have. The simplest way I would describe it is that the game's like a museum. I can go in, I can look at endless things and think it's all very nice, but there's no personal or emotional connection to anything. None of the characters are particularly engaging. I don't know if that's a writing or a presentation problem, but none of the quests amounted to more than objective completion for me. (This is a lie and I'll come to one particular case later.) Occasionally I'd find a computer terminal with logs from someone charting their own personal deterioration or that of society and it would make me think of what happened to make the world like this, but they were rare and brief.
I think part of my reaction to the world is the colour of it. I'm pretty sure every colour in the game is contained in that screenshot. No matter, the gameplay is surely what makes a game worth playing. Fallout's V.A.T.S. system (does the S in VATS stand for system)? lets you stop time and target specific parts of an enemy's body during combat. You then get to see the effects in slow motion, usually in my case featuring their head fly off and disintegrate. This, after 70 hours and hundreds of enemies killed, does not get boring. Big fan. The only weapons you ever need are ones with bullets, because this is what happens. You'll need to use V.A.T.S. too, because if you try and target manually or deal with more than one enemy at once you'll probably get ruined, and have to constantly flick between shooting them and bringing up your menu to use health items. The survivalist element of the game rings a bit hollow in situations like these, because it's hard to get into what's ostensibly a clunky and overmatched firefight when you can pause several times and hope your stimpaks or disgusting scavenged food don't run out.
A problem I had with Fallout 3 all those years ago was equipment deterioration. I had never played a game where you had to repair your weapons before. Now, I realise there's enough assault rifles and combat shotguns throughout the world that you never really have a problem. I know if you play on PC you can use mods that make the game harder in terms of resources but I think making weapons and aid and armour harder to come by would put me off the game completely. You can have four or five different weapons with different ammo types on the go at any one time, rotating them when one breaks or you run out of ammo. There isn't really much else to say of the gameplay, other than going into most situations all guns blazing is your best option. Stealth doesn't seem to be a viable option no matter how high your stats are, which is a shame. Although there are lots of different enemies you'll approach most of them in the same way.
Playing the Game of the Year edition I got to experience all five DLC stories, which I will cover briefly in ascending order of enjoyment:
Point Lookout: You are transported to a southern-gothic inspired swamp attached to a ruined seaside town. The place is infested with ghouls and a cult that eat something called Punga Fruit which makes you act like you swallow ten LSD tabs a day. There's very little connection to anything in the main game.
Mothership Zeta: You are transported to an alien craft and have to escape. You discover the aliens were experimenting and creating alien-human hybrids with considerably less success than in The X-Files. None of the enemies speak, and there's very little characterisation.
Broken Steel: You no longer die at the end of the main story. You get to finish off one of the main in-game factions for good, although due to the brevity of the main quest and the non-linear approach you can take to the game you may not feel strongly about either of them. I didn't, but the Enclave were bigger dicks to me, so they got bombed.
Operation: Anchorage: A training simulator set in the past as communist China invades Alaska and you have to save them. Standard stuff gameplay-wise, but has considerable relation to the main game so feels more worthwhile.
The Pitt: You are transported to a steelworks in Pittsburgh, where people are enslaved. As you fight to liberate them you discover why they're enslaved, and ultimately get to decide whether or not to free them.
The Pitt was the most profound part of the game for me. So much so that after choosing to side with the slaves the first time I changed my mind halfway through, and continued to check on the progress of the outcome several times afterwards. One of the things I think was missing for me in a game like this was meaningful consequence to your actions (especially in a game with a karma system with little rewards for being good), so to finally have it at some point was a welcome surprise. There was even a slight gameplay shift in the episode as I used melee weapons for the first time, which were much more satisfying than I was expecting.
Sadly, moments like that are rare. There are some Vaults in the game you can discover and explore that are seriously weird and make you realise why so much of the world you're in is so f***ed up but for the most part I can't really get away from the museum comparison. It's all very nice, it's all very detailed and you can spend hours going round trying to look at everything, but very little of it sticks with me.
I will tell you what does stick with me though. Bugs. Doing some research on the game beforehand I think some of my reticence towards getting immersed in the world stemmed from the nagging sense that if I explored too much of it my save file would get too big and I wouldn't be able explore anymore. If it was an isolated game in 2008 with this sort of scale I'd understand and realise why, but my god, this mob kept making games like this? And they're as popular as they are? What the f*** is wrong with you people? Why have you enabled this broken bullshit? I love frame rates that drop to about 0.3 fps when there's too much stuff on the screen, because everything that I've done up until that point is still there and has to be remembered. Great system. No, really. I think I had fewer bugs than a lot of people but the threat of them really stopped me getting into the game at times when I could feel myself slipping away, and that's a shame.
One last complaint before I sum up, I can't avoid this one. The main story. Your dad, before you were born, was working on a machine that would purify water in large quantities. Partly with his help you get it to a state where it can be repaired, great. Except to turn it on you have to expose yourself to a massive quantity of radiation and die. But! Just before this end sequence you may have made friends with a super mutant. Super mutants are immune to radiation. Healed by it in fact. So you can just send him in to press the button, right? Nope. And even if you get some other human lackey to go in and press the button, the game still ends. I know there are Fallout fans on here, why does an open world game have an end? Why does it end after finishing the main story, not letting you carry on exploring afterwards? It's not like anything else in the game has a bearing on what you do.
So, to sum up. A huge, detailed and very brown world which is very well created but not particularly immersive, partly because I spend the whole time thinking my PS3 is going to explode. A consistently satisfying central gameplay mechanic which you need to rely on because enemy encounters in real time are practically unsurvivable. Additional DLC episodes which are either the same or different, occasionally adding something when they're the same and feeling completely pointless when they aren't. I suppose I'm glad I got to finish it and feel some sense of personal growth after nine years, but I won't be remembering it as fondly as I know a lot of people do.
