CerebralDebris

The Short Version

• Platform: PC
• One Word: Apocalyptic
• Two Words: Incredible Depth
• Worth It: Yes
• Scale: terrible | poor | fair | good | great

The Long Version

Fallout 3’s the first game I’ve given a “great” to on this site, a rating I don’t expect to use often because, frankly, it’s thrown around far too easily by most game journalists. Most games aren’t great … most games are good, if they’re even that high-quality. The vast majority of games are either poor or fair. It takes effort to break from that, and it takes an incredible amount of work (and often, I think, no small amount of luck) to create something truly spectacular. Something great. Fallout 3 is great.

But (you knew there was a but, right?) … Fallout 3’s not perfect. Not that any game is perfect, mind you, but there are some glaring issues with Fallout 3 that stand out all the more because so very much of it is so well-realized, so immersive and so fun. We’ll get to those issues in due time, but first let’s talk about those things with make Fallout 3 an instant Game of the Year candidate.

I try to avoid game summaries in my reviews here because I think most people reading this already pretty much know the basics: You grew up in a post-nuclear vault. Your dad splits when you’re 19 years old. You leave the vault to find him, and wander out into the wastes of what was once Washington DC. If you’re not familiar with the previous Fallout games – and the odds are that you’re not since despite being brilliant, they weren’t widely played – then you’ll just have to trust me that they were two of the greatest games ever made. They combined a very dark sense of humor with a washed out, well-realized apocalyptic wasteland, and a story that starts from a straightforward task and unfolds to involve the fate of the entire surrounding area, and possibly the world. Hey, pretty cool.

In that, Fallout 3 is alike with its brethren. It’s set in the same post-apocalyptic world, the ashes of not our 2077, but the 2077 that the people of the 1950s thought they were headed for. A world of hover-cars with giant fins, where Patriotism runs rampant and the greatest threat to America is still The Commies (specifically the ones in China). You begin with a relatively straightforward task: Find Dad, but in Fallout fashion, this task only leads you into a much deeper plot which will eventually allow your character to become the greatest hero, or greatest villain, the Capital Wasteland has ever seen.

Like Oblivion before it, Fallout 3 is a big damn world with tons of exploration opportunity, and a good portion of the game (some sixty hours, in my play-through) had absolutely nothing to do with the main storyline. This is a good thing, in some ways, and a not-so-good-thing in others. Fortunately I learned my lesson with my first play-through of oblivion, where I finished the main storyline before doing basically any exploring, and thus found my desire to explore significantly decreased, as the sense of urgency lent by the main quest had been removed. With Fallout 3, I left the main quest for last, only advancing it once, by mistake, because I happened to stumble upon the next step while exploring at random. For players who aren’t preconditioned by Oblivion, however, it’s very easy to assume you should do the main quest first, and it’s fully possible to complete the game — which can’t be continued once the credits roll, unlike Oblivion — without seeing even a third of the entire game’s content.

It’s content you want to see, too, because unlike Oblivion’s fantasy world, Fallout 3’s world is not populated by near-identical, seemingly auto-generated dungeons and ruins. While the various locations often make use of the same building blocks, it’s obvious that thought and care was put into all of them (or nearly all of them), and many tell little stories of their own even if they have no quests directly related to them. Take the “Grisly Diner,” for example, a landmark that looks from a distance like the ruins of any other diner. Inside your character finds a grotesque scene of mutilated bodies and blood spatters, and it becomes clear that someone, or something, has been lying in wait and attacking unsuspecting visitors. You spin around, preparing to get the hell out of there, and instead come face to face with that something. A great little moment in the game, one that speaks of the barbarism and unpredictability of the wastes, without actually having any story attached to it.

The Fallout 3 world is filled with moments like these, not to mention many actual side-quests and stories (though surprisingly few total marked quests, compared to Oblivion). There are people all over the wastes who need your help, whether as a good samaratin, a fedex-style messenger, or even an assassin. All of them are willing to pay, in money, items, or karma, and you’ll have to choose who to help, who to hurt, and who to ignore. This is standard RPG stuff, but it’s extremely well-executed by the Fallout 3 team, and I found it highly compelling until near the very end, when I was simply slogging through the remaining few unexplored areas on my map, before going back to the main quest. The sense of exploration in Fallout 3 is perhaps the best that I’ve ever found in an RPG — it rewards players who peek into corners of buildings, and corners of the map.

It’s because of the quality of execution on most of the game that its few flaws stand out so much. First off, the main quest is actually rather short, and the climax is terrible. Probably the single most disappointing thing about the game are the game’s ending cinematic, and the events immediately leading up to it. Granted, they are closely preceded by arguably the coolest set-piece in RPG history (I won’t reveal the nature but trust me — it’ll have you grinning like an idiot as you literally follow destruction at its very heels). Still, Fallout and Fallout 2 had some of the most satisfying endings ever in a video game. Lengthy explanations of what happened to all of the people in the wastes, all of the towns you visited, all of the characters you came to know. Fallout 3 delivers a custom-engineered cinematic based on a couple of choices, but it’s short and nearly inscrutable. The first time I played through to it, I was barely sure what the hell I had just watched. II almost wish it had ended more like Oblivion, with the player dropped back off in the same living world, with no real “ending” so much as some commentary by various NPCs about the final, climactic events. That’s more realistic and, in a way, less dissapointing than what we’re given.

Fallout 3 also suffers from some tired RPG conventions that really need to change, and from some engine bugs that were also present in Oblivion. The sheer number of “people and things floating in mid-air because one pixel of their collision box thinks it’s on a staircase” situations available in Fallout 3 is staggering. Not the end of the world, but it does break the immersion a bit. Also, it’d be really nice if an RPG came out where towns actually changed over time. In Fallout 3, as in basically every RPG ever, Town X has N quests in it, and when you finish the N quests, Town X is stuck forever in “finished” mode. It’d be nice if you could leave Megaton for example, having finished the first round of quests there, and come back to find that some new settlers, with new problems, had come in. As it is, it rapidly goes from being the central hub of your experience, to “that place where I go to sell stuff, de-radiate, and drop off bobbleheads.”

I could go on listing off picky issues with the game, but then, I could also go on listing off the things that made me cackle with glee (like sneaking up behind someone and hitting them so hard in the head with a power-fist that their skull explodes). Suffice to say that the number of good experiences far outweighs the bad, and if you approach Fallout as a sort of single-player MMORPG, to be explored and adventured through at your own pace and with your own goals in mind, you’ll have a rewarding experience. 2008’s not over, but it’s close, and I haven’t played a better game yet this year. In all, I feel it’s a very worthy successor to the first two games, and I look forward to a few years from now, when Bethesda will hopefully provide us with another glimpse into this World of Tommorow gone bad.