Locked Door Puzzle

You may already have seen in and around the internet that Fallout 3 is winning a lot of Game/RPG of the year awards. Put simply it deserves all this success and more. With the big glut of high profile titles released over the christmas period my copy of Fallout 3 sat on the shelf for over a month while I played through other material, and that’s definitely something I’ve come to regret as Fallout is one of the best games I’ve ever played and possibly even my favourite of all time. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so enamoured with a game that reading forum tards ripping into it actually angers me.

I’ve never really been into sandbox gaming. I love the concept of a free flowing world to explore as you like but in practice I’ve always found these worlds to be deeply hollow. Earlier this year I caved into the hype and bought GTAIV and 6 hours later I was bored to tears, sure it’s a great big city but apart from stealing cars, driving about, and shooting gangsters there is so little to do there of any consequence. Even Oblivion failed to hold me for very long because the villages and cities you found didn’t feel unique, they didn’t seem to be populated by real people but cookie cutter fantasy cliches.

All the World’s A Stage

Fallout 3 however delivers exactly what I’ve been looking for from a sandbox world. If you wander off in some random direction across the wasteland, sooner or later you’ll find something, maybe a run down settlement, a sewer entrance, or a decaying building that seem distinct from anything you’ve seen before. Then once you’re inside you’re going to find characters, people with their own stories to tell as they try to live out the post-apocalypse in their own way.

The icing on the cake is that the game then let’s you get involved in these little mini-stories, these side quests however you like. Not just like Metal Gear where you choose to be a stealthy creep, or a cheap sniper, a bloody melee fighter or an assault rifle wielding maniac. Not just like Mass Effect where you can be a goody two shoes or an utter bastard or a dull neutral generic hero. In fact it’s all of that and more. Everything you say and do effects the future of that little pocket of society struggling to survive.

The post apocalyptic retro-future setting really helps the game, because in a working society most towns and cities will be very similar but in the wasteland of Fallout 3 everyone is handling their predicament differently. You’ll come across a hotel full of rich people living in relative luxury like nothing happened, an underground cave complex full of children who’ve built a community you have to leave when you become an adult, a run down village run by a delusional leader who’s declared it an independent republic, a subway station now inhabited by noble vampire like cannibals, and so much more.

Did I Tell You About The Time…

Truth be told none of the individual stories nor the main quest are incredibly strong, and you can trace many of them as clear homages to films and books. However the sheer quantity of them, and the freedom to play them out in your own way more than makes up for having one incredibly strong storyline. The choices it asks you to make are beautifully varied often full of fantastic moral abiguity. On top of which the emergent elements of the gameplay create your own personal stories, the kind you’ll be boring anyone who’ll listen with for weeks.

When I’ve not been playing Fallout myself, I’ve been watching my housemate play through it for herself and it’s like watching a different game. The way she approaches every situation is different to what I would have done and rather than spoiling it like someone telling you the ending to a film, it’s more like sharing holiday stories and the different things you both saw in the same city. It can even be frustrating “Why didn’t you do this? Why did you say that?” but it’s up to each of you to find what you enjoy about the world.

Truth be told I’ve been playing the game like a massive arsehole selfishly and cruelly punishing anyone in the wasteland unfortunate enough to run across me. I blew up the bomb worshipping town of Megaton after I’d ripped them off for every last bottle cap I could wring out of them, partly because the view of a small nuke going off at night is beautiful but largely because the rich swine at Tenpenny Tower gave me a penthouse suite with a view and robot butler as a reward. My straight laced housemate chose to save the town, be their hero but in her attempts to be noble she still went and got the town sheriff killed and that amused me greatly. Fallout 3 never gives you a right or wrong choice and neither does it make the consequences of your choices obvious until it’s too late.

A World of My Own

Design wise Bethesda have come up with some great ideas dealing with leveling and random encounters. While areas in the game will scale in level to ensure you can explore the landscape in any order and still be challenged, once you’ve entered an area it locks to that level. So if you get hammered by the enemies and come back later you will be stronger. Also, on top of all the specifically designed areas on the map there are lots of random encounters where an area will be turned into a randomly selected piece of gameplay that will then also lock for your game if you come back later. On top of all that enemies don’t respawn, so your second trip through an area if littered with your bodies not a fresh batch of XP fodder to remind you it’s just a game. All this means you’ve got a world that is different for each person playing it but never feeling random or arbitrary.

I don’t really need to tell you to go play Fallout 3 because the game is selling by the bucket load and is getting an enormous amount of critical praise, but if like me you’re a gamer that loves interactive storytelling you’d be doing yourself a great disservice if you didn’t spend a little time with this game. By 5 hours in I was calling it genius, by 10 hours I’d told all my friends I was going to burn all the rest of my gamers as I don’t need them anymore, I’m now approaching 40 hours and fearing that I might only get another 20 hours of so before I’m done, and this is filling me with sadness. Sure not everyone is going to love Fallout 3 as much as I do but if you can’t find something in here to enjoy then you might as well forget about videogames or life in general as you have a cold dead heart. Forget the main quest, just get out there into the wasteland and find your own adventures.