Fallout 3

System: PC
Release Date: 2008
Published By: Bethesda Softworks
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

Let's start with the pithy summary this time: Fallout 3 has a lot of really big ideas, but Bethesda apparently has no clue how to implement them. The game almost plays like its own highlight reel, since it's so full of half-explored and half-developed angles. With all the stuff Bethesda apparently wanted to pack into the Capital Wasteland, it's a wonder they managed to find room for so many goddamn minigames.

Because of course there are minigames. And, yes, they're really stupid, and you have to play them a thousand times. Did you guess lockpicking and hacking? Because if you did, well, holy shit are you the big winner today. Taking a page from the Big Book of Totally Unoriginal Ideas, Bethesda has elected to have you waste your precious game time playing Mastermind, of all things, every time you want to hack a computer terminal. Which is all the goddamn time. The lockpicking minigame annoys me somewhat less, since it appears to have something in the world to do with lockpicking (a big lock appears on the screen and you have to fiddle around at it with some bobby pins until you get it open or break your pin) and -- more importantly -- it doesn't take like five minutes to complete the way the hacking minigame does.

When you're not playing minigames, you'll be spending most of your time managing the game's gleefully terrible inventory. Like all games these days, Fallout 3 uses a weight-limited inventory, which is preferable to the bad old inventory tetris conceit, but can still, apparently, be made awful. Bethesda has made it awful by making the weight limit very low in comparison to the weights of items, by dropping tons and tons and tons of low-value loot instead of relatively sane amounts of more valuable loot, and by splitting your inventory onto four different list dumps that you can't even sort by weight to find out what's dragging you down. If you go over your weight limit, you can't run anymore, which is pretty standard. Bethesda, however, has taken the concept one step farther, and also disables the game's "fast travel" warping system when you're overloaded, meaning you can't even go back to town and sell anything. Fast travel also can only be used outside, and only takes you to the entrance of the location you're traveling to, which means you can't practically go back to town in the middle of a dungeon at all. The end result of this is that most of the loot you find gets left behind, since you can't carry it, and that, furthermore, you end up having to min-max what loot you do take in terms of value-per-pound, since you're going to need that money to pay for goddamn upkeep on your equipment.

And I don't just mean ammo. Did you think I just meant ammo? Because I don't. I mean, don't get the wrong idea -- you will need to purchase ammo, but that isn't all. You'll also find that all of your gear degrades as you use it, and you'll need to pay to have it repaired. But this isn't just World of Warcraft durability loss, where eventually it gets down to zero and then you can't use it until it's fixed -- oh, no, in Fallout 3 the power of your equipment degrades along with its condition, until eventually it's barely doing or preventing any damage at all. You can either repair gear yourself if you have enough repair skill and a similar item to scrap for parts, or you can pay a vendor to repair things for you. But vendors can never repair gear anywhere close to 100%, which means you'll rarely get the full potential out of your equipment. This leads to the annoying situation where you hoard "special" gear and don't use it because you might need it for harder things later. Oh, and, also, it leads to a lot of nonsense bookkeeping and the need to carry multiple sets of weaponry, which in turn eats into your precious inventory space even further.

All this inventory management nonsense really detracts from the game's greatest strength -- exploring the wasteland. Bethesda's created a really interesting and nuanced world, but then shackles you down with its idiotic systems design so you can't really just go out there and adventure. You range too far out from town and now all your gear's broken and you can't carry any more anyhow. There are also a few bits of map detail that don't make any sense at all; for example, there's a location called Big Town which is populated by people who've been thrown out of Little Lamplight. So you would probably expect Big Town and Little Lamplight to be relatively close together, yes? Well, you'd be wrong -- they're across the world from each other. But now I'm just nitpicking; the world is definitely the game's greatest strength, and there's something sort of chilling about walking around the Mall among the ruins of the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building, and digging through debris to recover the Bill of Rights.

The game uses its soundscape to the same general effect as Bioshock; there's a lot of old-tymey music going on, which, frankly, I don't understand at all -- in the alternate reality of Fallout 3, the bombs fell in 2077, and yet all the songs -- indeed, all the leftovers from the past -- are from the 1930s and 40s. Could that be how things are in an alternate universe? Yes.

Bethesda has clearly put some work into the game's engine; it can make exceedingly pretty things. Unfortunately, it spends most of its time making exceedingly brown things. I get that it's all post-apocalyptic and shit, but, seriously, can't there be rivers of lava and maybe a discothèque someplace? I mean, really, Deus Ex had that ten years ago in its completely ridiculous Hong Kong level, and, while completely ridiculous, at least it was not brown.

The game is extremely fragile, and must be treated like a scared little newborn baby bird or it'll explode in an ugly mess. Actually, chances are it'll explode in an ugly mess sooner or later no matter what you do, which I like to think was Bethesda's way of subtly satirizing the politics of war and power. Did you try to change targets too quickly? Game will probably hang. Did you just cross a zone border and then turn around really fast? Game will probably hang. Is there an ambient soundscape? Game will probably hang. Did you tab out of the window? Game will definitely hang. None of the above? Game might decide to hang anyhow, just to show you. This is just how software works in the grim darkness of the far future, asshole. If there were enough programmers left to debug things, it wouldn't be much of an apocalypse.

The talky-man bits are okay. I want to like them a lot more than I can, but far too often Bethesda leans on the creaky old wheeze of the false dichotomy, and I end up really wanting maybe some third option now and then. Maybe work things out instead of murdering either side of the disagreement. The game's moral compass is also out of whack; it's heavily infused with a sort of social democratic ends-justify-the-means attitude, and shitting all over random dudes is perceived as a good thing as long as other dudes benefit from it. You know, assuming the benefiting parties aren't racialists. The game also says it's a good thing to kill a bunch of innocent people to "free" them from a thing they don't know or care that they're trapped in. I guess it's a good thing we're the absolute arbiter of truth and goodness in the wastes!

So, as I say, there's a lot of potential here, but Bethesda really needs to go back to the drawing board and maybe hire some game designers who have any clue how to design games, since this slapdash effort just doesn't cut it. It's worth noting that, if you have the PC version, you can get a bunch of user-created mods to fix a lot of the really awful bits. Not that that's any excuse; Bethesda shouldn't have left the game the way it is in the first place. Oh, and to find these mods, you need to wade through dozens and dozens of awful mods that add weight to ammunition, add the need to eat and drink and sleep, and so forth, all of which were created by assholes who looked at Fallout 3 and said "hey, great game, but you know what it needs? More tedious bookkeeping!"

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