Trapped in Time

Maybe I'm just missing something. 

Now, really... don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this game.  I did.  I spent 50 hours exploring the nuclear wasteland that was once Washington DC, and I consdier this to be a decent addition to the Fallout series which I adored back in its sprite-based days.  But that's part of the problem.  Fallout 3, despite all the next-generation trappings, feels oddly antiquated.  While the game is remarkably multi-faceted, each one of those facets feels distinctly unpolished (if not overtly buggy), and we're asked to appreciate this stone for its weight rather than its clarity.  It repeatedly falls back on conventions that worked fifteen years ago, but which unravel when brought to more vivid life in 2008.

It gets off to an awkward enough start as you crawl out of your mother's womb in the opening scene.  I'm not being figurative.  There's nothing wrong with the first-person narrative device, but did it need to be accompanied by puerile blood spatter and squishy sound effects?  Here we are, struggling to get the world to accept video games as an artistic medium, and one of the most ambitious games of the year kicks off with a reproductive gross-out joke.  Classy, Bethesda.

Once the umbilical cord is cut, you guide your character through a few key childhood events, cleverly introducing you to the controls and allowing you to build your basic character attributes.  You explore your Vault -- where a few people have managed to escape nuclear devastation -- and learn the basic backstory that sets up your eventual departure into the Capital Wasteland.

The People:

Unfortunately, you are also given a crash-course in one of the most unfortunate aspects of Fallout 3.  Interactions with human characters are universally creepy, as your fellow humans robotically shuffle about, staring with blank eyes as they issue enthusiastic but dubiously acted dialogue.  For every solid voice actor (Liam Neeson as your father!), there is another one who must have been recently fired from the set of a local car dealership commercial (I was ready to strangle Moira by the end of the game -- think Sarah Palin on crack).  The sub-par voice acting plagues the entire game, and coupled with the stilted animation creates the effect of a world populated by animatronic props. 

Even worse than the delivery is the fact that people don't necessarily behave in logical ways.  Early in the game, for instance, I risked my life trying to help some poor girl to sort out some major problems with her brother.  While she was vaguely appreciative during the course of the quest, she was apparently stricken with amnesia afterwards, and never mentioned my deeds or inquired about her brother again.  She reverted back to Standard Issue NPC #27, and that was that.  Meanwhile, even in cities where I'd established a good reputation, I had to be careful not to let my gaze linger for more than a moment, lest I be accused of plotting a theft.  Similar social interactions were seen in Mass Effect, and were frankly executed much better there.

Certainly, these kind of problems are not new in video games.  But they are a symptom of Fallout 3's most serious flaw -- it doesn't do anything significantly new.  Why has this particular aspect of video gaming been stagnant for two decades?  The system of social interaction that runs beneath Fallout's surface is based on the same "choose-your-own-adventure" algorithms that have driven RPGs since their inception.  These heartless interactions were passable back when the characters were tiny sprites, but stand out clear as day in this intricately rendered dystopia.

The Places:

The environment fares better in most respects.  It is perhaps the game's greatest irony that this world, stripped bare by nuclear winter, seems more alive than the people who inhabit it.  Sure, it's drowning in shades of brown.  But hidden in the shattered homes and fractured highways, you can almost sense the human stories that once gave them life.  The effect is not as potent as the one observed in Bioshock, but the latter benefitted from a tighter, more linear structure which allowed the developers to focus more specifically on each location.  In Fallout, the ramshackle homes all begin to slur together, and it has a dulling effect.

One of the problems is that items seem strewn about thoughtlessly, and to uneven effect.  In one mailbox, you'll find a letter informing a family that they have been denied entrance into a vault.  This tells a story.  It potentially adds depth and humanity as you comb through their decimated home, imagining their sadness upon hearing the news that they would not be saved.  In the neighbor's mailbox, you'll find a vacuum cleaner.  Why?  I don't know.  Not only does this not tell a story, but it strains logic to imagine who would stuff a vacuum cleaner into a mailbox.  In the end, it's just detritus meant to be exchanged for cash, and they haphazzardly picked object 249 instead of 248.

These sorts of lazy moments are, unfortunately, the hallmark of "open-world" games.  Since the developers do not have the luxury of weaving a cohesive narrative through a more linear world, they approximate depth by peppering the landscape with myriad cabinets, desks, and safes that contain various bits of random things.  Every hundredth time or so that you press "A" to search your environment, you're rewarded with something useful, keeping the carrot on the stick.

This is not to say there aren't some interesting locations, because it's always a thrill to enter the ravaged interiors of familiar DC monuments.  But these are minor rewards after plodding through cut-and-paste subway stations, caves, and generic tenement buildings.  Those moments will make you glad you played, but it seems like a lot of busywork in the meantime.

The Combat:

Well... if the world around you is going to be lackluster, it may as well be fun to kill things in it.  And, happily, it is.

On the surface, Fallout 3 looks like any other first-person-shooter (or 3rd person shooter, if you unwisely reposition the camera... more on this later).  While you could technically play it this way, you're going to waste a ridiculous amount of ammunition in the process.  Taking a cue from Mass Effect, Fallout 3 allows you to temporarily pause the action for some strategic maneuvering.

By entering into the VATS targeting system, you gain the ability to draw a bead on specific body parts, and to string together multiple shots into one coordinated attack.  A headshot may do more damage, but it has a lower chance of finding its target.  A high-probability shot to the right arm might disable the enemy's weapon, or a shotgun blast to the legs may slow a creature's approach.  The interface is relatively simple, although I occasionally had a bear of a time getting the system to target a creature's head, as it merrily cycled through all the other body parts except that one.  Once set up, the battle will unfold cinematically as you watch your enemy's skull explode into a thousand little bits. 

Using the VATS system costs Action Points, which slowly replenish over time.  This, of course, prevents you from abusing it.  But Action Points are plentiful enough that you will rarely find yourself needing to squeeze off any rounds manually.

The overall effect is impressive, and while I thought it might become boring after a while, this system remained consistently entertaining throughout the game.  It should be noted that, although intended to add a layer of strategy to the procedings, most battles boiled down to selecting the head and firing away.  The strategic elements were, again, performed better in Mass Effect where the targeting system allowed you to coordinate attacks across an entire party of warriors.  Here, the strategy seems a bit wasted since most enemies are dispached in similar ways.

Quests:

The main storyline of the game can actually be completed rather quickly, but you are encouraged to go off the beaten path.  Doing so will reveal the other 95% of this game's content.  There is, honestly, a ton of entirely optional stuff to do, and you'll only get out of this game what you put in.

Unfortunately, most of that stuff boils down to the typical RPG quests, and many seem out of place in this gritty dystopia.  In a town of precisely two people, am I really supposed to believe that one resident needs my help to win the affection of the other?  And worse, am I really supposed to believe that collecting 30 soda bottles is the best way to do so?  These things are ok in the cartoony land of Hyrule, but are just absurd here.  Maybe the "Republic of Dave" would be funny if it were just one delusional fool, but what am I supposed to think when I have to run around town reminding the other four townspeople to vote for him, and they respond without any trace of irony?  All the fanboys love to holler and shout about how mature video game storytelling has become, but here's a simple truth: If Fallout 3 were a movie and you witnessed these scenes, you'd walk out of the theater in disgust.

Role Playing:

Leveling up is, perhaps, the greatest joy of any RPG, and is the one thing that Fallout 3 does perfectly.  Upon reaching each new level, you are not only allowed to distribute points into various abilities, but you are allowed to choose another "perk."  These perks impart powerful new characteristics, and change the game significantly.  Perhaps you want to improve your chance of connecting with head shots?  Or maybe the ability to disable enemy robots would be handy?

Since the game has a level cap of 20, you cannot possibly "top off" your character before the end of the game.  This is exactly how a RPG should be... the whole point is to gradually create a unique character, and not to wind up with the same omnipotent warlord as everybody else. 

Graphics and Sound:

Look, the graphics are decent, and nothing more.  I don't know what everybody is going on about here.  The Capital Wasteland is expansive, and impressive at distance.  But the characters and objects feel polygonal.  You know that strange, intangible sense of heft and mass that you get while playing Gears of War?  This game doesn't have that.  Buildings feel like cardboard cutouts.  Your weapons look startlingly cheap and generic.  Enemies clip straight through you (in dramatic slow-motion!) during fight scenes.  And we've already discussed how lousy the humans look.

And god forbid you set the game into 3rd person view.  This is completely unacceptable in 2008.  Your poorly-rendered character clearly has no connection with the environment.  Your feet glide with no impact on the ground.  You jump by stiffly levetating in the air.  It looks unbelievably terrible -- one wonders why the option was even provided.

The sound design is far more impressive (forgetting the voicework).  The Capital Wasteland has a relatively barren soundscape, but this only serves to highlight the ambient noises, particularly if you're running in surround sound.  Weapons ring out with gusto, and sound better than they look.  The game also sports a fantastic set of radio channels which can be tuned in depending on geographic position.  These are well-voiced (for a change) and stocked with wonderful period music.

Bugs:

Unfortunately, Fallout 3 is embarrassingly buggy -- enough that I'm forced to give it an average score despite being an above-average game.  I have no sympathy for this kind of thing anymore.  A few glitches are understandable, particularly considering the size of this thing.  But ever since consoles went online, developers have decided there is no need to finish these products before shipping them because they can be patched later.

I had to revert to a previous save at one point because a particular hallway kept causing my game to fatally freeze.  I found one NPC dead because he apparently fell off an elevated walkway due to a bad pathing routine.  I couldn't finish one quest because the humans involved simply wouldn't go through the final animations of the event.  One of them was standing on the edge of railing, instead of on the floor where he was clearly meant to be.  By the end of the game, I was saving every five minutes because I was afraid of some game-crashing bug coming along to screw everything up.   Hell, even the save/load game screen lags like you're operating it by satellite from Baghdad.

I can almost understand these problems in a PC game, where you're trying to get the same software to run on every single computer in the world, regardless of specific configuration.  But since this one is running on a bunch of identical machines, there is simply no excuse for this shoddiness.  If a car's wheels keep falling off, I'm not going to rate it well, no matter how awesome the car is while it's rolling.  This game was shipped broken.  Period.

Final Verdict:

Fallout 3 is an enjoyable resurrection of a once-brilliant franchise, but the astronomical review scores are flat-out insulting to gamers everywhere.  Nearly everything this game attempts has already been done better by someone else.  You want complex social interactions?  Try Mass Effect.  You want a rich and engrossing dystopian environment?  Try Bioshock (in a particularly stunning bit of irony, since Bioshock's setting was such an obvious nod to Fallout) or Half Life 2.  You want an interesting combination of first-person combat and strategic decision making?  Go back to Mass Effect again.  You want simple graphical splendor?  Gears of War 2 just came out.

When the denizens of Washington DC retreated underground to escape the war, they found themselves trapped in the culture of 1950s America.  Emerging, they discovered that the world had gone on without them.  Their happy cartoon mascots and Rockwell-inspired advertisements were laid bare as ironic anachronisms, detached from a new reality.  Sadly, the Fallout series has suffered a similar fate.  This game would have been a revelation in 2003, but video games have evolved since then, and Fallout 3 has been living -- so to speak -- in a cave.