The End Is Nigh: Fallout 3
By Martin Gaston
‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This week: Fallout 3 and the appeal of a good environment.
Narrative is often the main driving force empowering me to see an RPG to its conclusion.
As a 70-hour trek through a series of repetitious quests, textures, dungeons and characters, my experience with Fallout 3 was no different. The game’s beautiful ruined vistas initially hid the grim reality of the game’s graphical and atmospheric replication, but it was an engagement with the in-game world that gave me the fortitude to see it through. It’s no small feat, either: it took me almost three days.
On atmosphere, the entire Fallout series deserves special recognition. Birthed from the never-to-be-seen-again creative annals of late nineties PC game design, the team at Bethesda clearly knew a good thing when they saw one. The marriage of the series’ compelling faux-retro design aesthetic to Bethesda’s distinct RPG mould resulted in success for both parties: as much as I enjoyed Oblivion, it lacked Fallout 3’s detail in its homogenous features, with each new indistinguishable goblin dungeon becoming noticeably harder to slog through.
The narrative is fleshed out through the player experiencing the environment, with Fallout 3’s world providing more stories to the player than its fractured bands of inhabitants. With every generic quest comes the opportunity to explore: an abandoned house shows two skeletons hugging, a piece of lingerie is hidden in an underground metro station, and an innocent looking abandoned village turns into a death trap. There are countless more tiny atmosphere-dredged experiences dotted across the game’s take on post-apocalyptic Washington DC. Preening through these areas is always far outside of the boundaries of the main quest, and with Bethesda delivering narrative through exploration it’s these broader events which propel players forward with far more gusto than the game’s ultimate goal of restoring or sabotaging your father’s life work.
The emphasis on exploration is strengthened by the relative ignorance of the player. The catastrophic events leading to the world’s apocalypse are rarely expressed in words, quests or actions, and can often only be partially gleamed by scrubbing the environment for occasional clues – although Bethesda do pull on some of these threads for the meat of their DLC expansions. This is also why the initial hours of Fallout 3 are so daunting, with the game throwing you into its stylised environment with far too many weapons, traits, perks, stats and items without explaining how to use any of them.
This goes against the grain of naturalistic gamer tendencies. I initially worried far too much about doing things wrong, investing the wrong points into the wrong stats or fretting over whether my preferred choice of weapon was the most suitable. Areas had to be discovered via exploration, and the game effectively dumps you into the massive expanse with nothing more than flimsy directions towards the starter hub. It’s easy to get lost, and it’s easier to get killed. Items are far too expensive, and there’s the continual niggling feeling that if you stray from the track you’ll probably get your chops lopped off by a mutated bear. It’s a lot to take in.
Mirroring the in-game character’s inexperience to the surface world, the biggest challenge in the game for players is to overcome the formidable early stages. At the end of the experience the player has adapted to the hostilities of the environment, they’ve got about a billion bullets and the resulting heaps of experience points have given them the skills to land a perfect headshot from a mile away. It’s like Robinson Crusoe, only with mutants and dismembering.
The realisation eventually dawns: there’s no wrong way to play. Apart from specialising in melee, that is, because melee is terrible. Provided the player’s equipment is up to scratch, and that doesn’t take long, the world becomes their oyster. Most areas, despite their visual repetition, even have their own touch of aesthetic uniqueness to make an expedition worthwhile. It’s at this point I realised that a traditional design would have stymied the entire game.
Fallout 3’s narrative experience is too broad to be funnelled through a linear series of quests and events. Unfortunately that doesn’t stop Bethesda from attempting, with the need to anchor the player to the warm comforts of a structured beginning, middle and end evidently too great. But the narrative experience of Fallout 3, embodied by the captivating world itself, can’t be compressed into a rolling movie that plays before the end credits. It’s not surprising at all that Bethesda removed the rigid ending from their Broken Steel expansion, and allowed the player to continue their explorations after completing the main quest. It might deprive the game of a solid ending, but Fallout 3 is all the better for it.
I agree. Thank goodness Bethesda took the aesthetics from this dead series and applied to to an RPG
I’ve always said a Fallout RPG would be a marriage of two great ideas
“This goes against the grain of naturalistic gamer tendencies. I initially worried far too much about doing things wrong, investing the wrong points into the wrong stats or fretting over whether my preferred choice of weapon was the most suitable. Areas had to be discovered via exploration, and the game effectively dumps you into the massive expanse with nothing more than flimsy directions towards the starter hub. It’s easy to get lost, and it’s easier to get killed. Items are far too expensive, and there’s the continual niggling feeling that if you stray from the track you’ll probably get your chops lopped off by a mutated bear. It’s a lot to take in.”
Yeah, do you know why none of that matters? Because Fallout 3 throws levels at you insanely quickly, has stats that barely matter, skills that can be easily maxed, god-mode at the press of a button, aid items thrown around EVERYWHERE, weapons and ammo galore, etc.
Also, I have no idea what you’re talking about with respect to item prices. It takes somewhere around a few hours out of the Vault to be swimming in caps from all the excess ammo and other (weightless) loot you can carry around.
Anon,
I agree with everything you pointed out, and that’s the impression I was trying to give in the paragraph following the one you quoted. It wasn’t until about 15-20 hours into the game that I could comfortably say I was in that position, before that point my experience was as stated. I took it slow, perhaps, but it was definitely a long time before I was trundling around the Wastes like a professional.
Look, the fact that the unease you feel about your initial decisions goes away because you realize that there is no “wrong” solution is no excuse; you should not _have_ to feel as though the game can destroy you at any given moment for making the wrong choices, because you should feel some measure of confidence you made the right choices.
The fact that you can’t make a choice that screws you over also robs you of the feeling of victory. I know that feeling doesn’t matter to many fallout 3 players. I also know that most don’t play it for 70 hours, and come to actually realize that there are no wrong choices. I expect many will just paddle around for 10-20 hours and call it a day.
But some of us do care about such things as freedom – both to win, and to lose. It’s what makes a game a meaningful experience, makes it a medium in it’s own right. It’s about consequences, and earning the consequences, at that. And from that perspective, fallout 3 fails. And no, it would not have stymied the experience to include an actual game in fallout 3, but it _would_ have made the first 10-20 hours much less accessible, because of Bethesda’s apparently limited game design skills. And it would thusly have robbed a lot of players of a lot of fun.
At the end of the day tho, I reject what you’re saying – that traditional game design would have broken Fallout 3. It wouldn’t have. Not if it had been undertaken by people who are both able to be creative and brilliant in designing emergent narratives, and at the same time, able to make the actual win/lose mechanisms interesting and fun. Bethesda was great at the former, horrible at the later. I say this with great confidence, because really basic game design errors are abound in fallout 3. It’s as if the majority of the people working on the game just didn’t feel any passion about the actual gameness.
Look at Fallout 1 and 2 – they had merciless character creation systems, but they also had an instant and immediate way for you to test your character out. You got tossed into a cave, had to duke it out with nasties, and emerged knowing how solid your design was. You were immediately gratified with confidence in your choices, or a quick dismissal if your foresight wasn’t up to par.
Yes, Fallout 1 was really difficult – but it was also pretty short. You weren’t supposed to make a character and get it right the first time if you had never played a gurps game before, didn’t talk about it with anybody, didn’t get a gameguide, or didn’t give it your best shot. Yes, the learning curve for making your own character was hard, but guess what? That was _optional_. You could hop on a qualified character that was pre-designed for you just fine. Spend 30 hours with fallout 1 and you’ll have it beat, I guarantee it…and it does it without making your choices meaningless. And it does it without styming the experience.
“I agree with everything you pointed out, and that’s the impression I was trying to give in the paragraph following the one you quoted. It wasn’t until about 15-20 hours into the game that I could comfortably say I was in that position, before that point my experience was as stated. I took it slow, perhaps, but it was definitely a long time before I was trundling around the Wastes like a professional.”
Fair enough, though I would assert that you don’t really need to wait until the “end of the experience” when you can disarm a nuclear bomb at level 2 with 25 Explosives skill, kill super mutants with your 10mm pistol because VATS is absurd and super mutants are stupid, or go from most evil person in the Wasteland to the Wasteland’s savior by handing out some water.
“I agree. Thank goodness Bethesda took the aesthetics from this dead series and applied to to an RPG”
You should realize that Fallout has been an RPG series since 1997. If anything, Fallout 3 is less of an RPG than its predecessors.
…*facepalm*
Do your research before leaving cocksure comments.
haha lol at people pointing out fallout 3’s flaws. I agree with all of them.
Seriously? All of the FAllOUTs’ had the option to fiddle with the difficulty and lets not forget the endless way you could cheat at it. The third is a great installment to a great series with many stories tell and stories for you to write in your own mind as a player. God forbid you need to be sat infront of a screen to feel accomplished about something. Play the game and shut your mouth. Thats how I feel. -_-
Fallout 3 is my favorite game of all time!