Fallout 3 & Me

So I'm on my third attempt at playing Fallout 3 and for the first time, I've managed to get more than an hour into the game without giving up in disgust.

I've made it further this time for two reasons. Firstly, I've turned down the difficulty so I don't have to plug every single creature with an unreasonable number of bullets before they hit the floor. Secondly, I found a way to modify the game so you move above a crawl.

With these two modifications, I thought the game would be much improved. And it is... It's still a cavalcade of small frustrations and scant rewards though.

Let's start with what I like about it.

1) The characters are... quite good.

I've had a run around Megaton & Rivet City so far and whilst some of the characters were quite fun to talk to... they all seemed fairly generic. I've certainly not come across any characters to rival Vampire Bloodlines ones' which is my current character benchmark for RPG's.

2) I like the way you gradually acquire radiation, often without really noticing.

3) There are plenty of things to do

Okay, I'm scraping the barrel now.



What annoys me?

Well:

1) The layout of the game world seems designed to annoy the player.

The wasteland is filled with arbitrary barriers, forcing you to take long and highly annoying detours. And if you think this is essential to the pacing of the game, you're wrong. Oblivion managed to create a massive open world without this sort of bullshit.

Each settlement is also laid out in the most annoying way possible. Megaton especially. Bethesda seem to think it's fun to wander around on identical looking catwalks for ten minutes every time you want to find the bar.


2) The combat system is terrible.

Now, as much as I hate the combat in Fallout 3, it's still miles better than it was in Oblivion. Having said that, the combat in fallout 3 makes me ask questions. Questions such as:

Why is hitting someone with a baseball bat more effective than shooting them?
What sort of raiders are these that can take five shots to the head without dying?
Why does the condition of my weapon affect how much damage it does rather than affect the rate at which it jams?

Fallout 3 doesn't seem to grasp what litterally every other game with guns has for the last 5 years (ignoring Deus Ex 2) that shooting does not become more fun the more you do it. Arbitarilly increasing the number of headshots it takes to drop a Rad Scorpion increases frustration, not fun. It breaks immersion.

My first rad scorpion soaked up an entire clip of assault rifle ammunition. Or, to be more technical about this, it absorbed over thirty pieces of metal traveling through its head at over two hundred miles per hour.

That's just fucking stupid.


3) There's still far too much mindless trekking around.

This wasn't as painful as it was before I hacked my running speed but even so... I get that the game is largely about exploration but guess what- so was Oblivion. In Oblivion, you could fast travel between all the major cities from the word go. Did this break immersion? No. It just meant you didn't have to spend 90% of your time "finding" places. Exploration is only fun if you chose to do it. If you're forced to, it's a chore.


4) The world is far too monotonous and dull.

Yes, I know it's supposed to be post apocalyptic but a nuclear war doesn't remove every colour from the game world other than grey and brown, does it?


5) Story? What story?

Now. There are nice bits of story. Very small nice bits of story. I like the guy that pops up in Megaton that asks you to blow up the city. I quite like the family of blood sub plot. But the other sub quests I've come across in the game fill me with nothing but apathy. They all seem fairly lifeless... not least because the characters themselves are falling over themselves to get you involved in side quests.

I know RPG's are based around the idea that you're the only competent individual in the game world and it's therefore up to you to sort absolutely everything out but this has been handled much more subtly in most other games. Case in point, I went to Rivet City on a quest for some woman who was writing a book. I came across this guy who wanted to do some drugs with me. After that, literally every conversation I had with anyone there had a question about this guy and how terrible it was that he was addicted to drugs.

Seriously? Is it that hard to get people to engage in the side quests that you have to take one that sounds really rather dull and force it into every conversation in a square mile radius?

Compare this to Oblivion where the Dark Brotherhood sub plot was only accessible after you'd murdered a civilian. And it was perfectly possible to go through the entire game without doing that.

RPG's live and die on their sub quests - that's where the character of the game world can really show itself. In Fallout 3, it's confused. It's desperate for your attention and will do anything to get you involved in what are supposed to be the voluntary aspects of the game.


So that's basically it. I hate the graphics & gameplay and I'm less than impressed by the story. I'm going to go and play something else.