Now, Bethesda has a lengthy history of angering their existing fanbases. Morrowind angered the fans of Daggerfall, who claimed that they “dumbed-down” the series, Oblivion angered the fans of Morrowind, for the same reason. And now, they’ve angered the “glittering gems of hatred” known as the fans of the Fallout series, for making Fallout 3 like Oblivion rather than like the original games.
So, is Fallout 3 good? Well, you probably already know the answer to that by now. It was released over a year ago. So, why am I writing a review of a game that is over a year old? Because this game is very divisive. How you feel about this game defines what kind of gamer you are, and what communities will trust you. So, here’s my take.
THE GOOD
CHOICE
The defining characteristic of the RPG genre is choice. Not those wishy-washy BioWare choices that only amount to “Save the world as a hero” or “Save the world as a jerk”. ACTUAL choices, like “Save the world” or “Doom the world”. Unlike most games, Fallout 3 actually has some of these.
While most of them are fairly black and white, like “blow up Megaton or not”, some of them have a sort of gray area. Like “Let the ghouls into Tenpenny tower, killing all of its previous inhabitants” or “Kill the ghouls for the racist bastards living in Tenpenny tower”. No matter what, someone dies, and no outcome is inherently better than the other.
WIDE OPEN WORLD
Bethesda games are known for letting the player explore a wide-open sandbox world, and Fallout 3 is no different. There are literally hundreds of locations for you to discover, and none of them are quite the same. This is a major improvement over Oblivion‘s copy-and-paste environments, which became tiresome after the third time you explore the same cave.
Another improvement over Oblivion‘s locations is that the places actually look like they may have served some purpose at one point or another. For example, the ruins of Springvale, a town where many of the predecessors of the people living in the vaults probably would have come from. In this town there’s a school, a grocery store nearby, and a subway station, all things that would be near a small town like Springvale.
Not every location in Fallout 3‘s large game world makes as much sense as the area surrounding Springvale does, but it’s still far, far better than Oblivion‘s “Hey, look, some abandoned ruins! Why is it there, you ask? ‘Cause it is,” mentality.
DIALOGUE
In Oblivion, and many other recent RPGs, dialogue is for the most part completely static. You may get a choice to respond as a jerk, but it won’t affect anything, though you’ll get some nice flavor dialogue. You’re pretty much railroaded through the whole thing. Though the main quest in Fallout 3 also falls victim to this, the side quests generally don’t. If you act like a jerk to someone, they may withhold information from you. But if you pass a skill check, you can make them tell you it anyway. Passing these speech checks may cause the quests to become radically different, and is a feature that should appear in more RPGs.
CHARACTER CREATION
The SPECIAL system from the first two Fallout games (which to this day remains one of the best character development systems ever made) returns in Fallout 3, though in a somewhat modified form. Some of the skills have been merged, usually in ways that make sense (Doctor and First Aid, Throwing and Explosives (it only makes since if you consider that the only explosives in the game are grenades)), and some of the more useless skills have been outright removed (Outdoorsman, Gambling), resulting in a rather significant reduction in skills available. And while the system is less balanced than it was before, it is leagues better than the character system in Oblivion.
VOICES
Remember the days when only some characters had voice actors, the rest were just written text? Good times. Full voice acting, as it is, is never really as effective as the voice/text combination. Having less voice files clogging up your disk allows for more dialogues. But, full voice acting is here, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be going away any time soon. And Fallout 3 does a fairly good job with the voice acting. It’s not up to Mass Effect standards, but it’s far more varied than Oblivion‘s six voice actors. If only they could get more of the skilled actors like Liam Neeson to voice their characters next time.
GORE
Bethesda Softworks made it clear that they wanted the gore to be over the top in Fallout 3, and that it is. It may not be realistic (I don’t know how a shot to one’s leg could cause their head to explode), but it sure is satisfying. It does temporarily break the immersion, but for the most part, it’s an acceptable break. It’s also some of the most detailed gore in years, instead of the enemies exploding into non-descript gibs, there’s actually legs, arms, eyeballs, and so forth. It’s a very cool effect.
THE BAD
COMBAT
Role-playing games are defined by their combat system. It’s why there’s a character creation system in the first place. It’s what separates them from choose your own adventure stories. They can make or break and RPG. Fallout 3′s combat isn’t bad enough to break the entire experience, but it leaves something to be desired. This could be caused by the games’ choppy, fast, and overall poor animations. Or the path-finding A.I. that moves faster than you can turn, and in seemingly random ways. Or the frustratingly stupid artificial inteligence, who for some reason can’t seem to find their way up stairs to fight you, or even jump up a rock. It’s probably a combination of all these flaws that add up to more than the sum of their parts.
STUPID
Hey kids, did you know that a laser pistol is no more powerful than a regular old pistol? Or that guns somehow become more powerful the better you are at using them? Or that radiation can last over 200 years without getting even slightly less deadly? Or that 200 year old food is perfectly good to eat? It’ll restore your health, just radiate you a little! Or that nuclear blasts put things in the wackiest places (Tires and toilets in storm drains, tin cans in mailboxes)?
It’s little things like these that end up breaking down the believability in the game-world that Bethesda put so much effort into. And it’s a damn shame.
KARMA
The karma system in Fallout 3 has a very black-and-white view of morality. Killing is almost always bad,like if you kill a scientist who through his experiments killed an entire town by accident, without showing any sort of remorse or regret. This nets you some bad karma. Or killing people in the virtual “tranquility lane” world also gets you negative karma (unless performed in a very specific way that practically requires a walkthrough to figure out), even though you’re actually ending their endless torment by Dr. Braun by doing so. I’m not advocating killing here, I’m just saying that there should be a little gray area, where you neither gain or lose karma. Stealing is also treated in the same way.
CONSEQUENCE
Remember how much I was talking up the game’s choices before? Well, yes the game has choices in it. A lot of them, actually. But, the problem is those choices often have no consequence to them. Besides blowing up Megaton, anyway. Enslave the cyborg in the “Replicated Man” quest? Three Dog (the radio host for Galaxy News Radio) tells you how much of a jerk you are. Complete the Blood Ties quest? Three Dog tells you that you completed the Blood Ties quest, with no differing messages based on how you completed it. Nothing ever effects the game world in any way, shape, or form. Just gives you some flavor dialogue here or there.
MAIN QUEST
While the side quests in Fallout 3 are (mostly) great, the main quest is pretty bad. It starts out strong, with your character searching for his (or her) father in the wasteland, gathering clues and learning more about his (or her) past. But once you find him, it quickly degrades into a series of fetch quests. And then there’s the ending.
The ending consists of a slideshow, that slightly differs based on your choices. In the original Fallouts, the endings varied greatly based on your in-game choices, the announcer describing how they affected the game world in the future. In Fallout 3, the announcer gives you a different speech based on your karma level, tells you what decision you made for the final quest, and gives you a slideshow of your accomplishments (That you may or may not have actually done). It’s underwhelming to say the least.
BUGS
Bethesda has a perfect track record of making buggy games. From Daggerfall‘s infinitely spawning guards crashing the game, to Oblivion‘s floating paintbrushes, they have always been extraordinarily buggy, sometimes even game-breakingly so. Fallout 3 is no different. Sometimes, character models will stretch out towards the sky. You can also escape the vault as a baby, if you know how. Or, you could end up having to restart the game when VATS fails to make your character shoot. Or, you can climb over the walls of, say, Megaton, and end up in a vast, invisible wasteland, with no way out besides fast travelling, or using the door backwards. Then there’s Nova’s head spinning vertically into her body when she’s talking to someone. Or the fact that the wooden box can be used to effortlessly pick up NPCs due to the broken physics. And the list goes on and on. Don’t worry, they’ll never be fixed. Bethesda prefers to make new games instead of supporting their previous ones.
CONCLUSION
Overall, Fallout 3 is a good, but flawed game. It’s a definite step up from Oblivion, and is one of the best mainstream Role Playing Games released in years. It doesn’t live up to the impossibly high expectations set by it’s predecessors, but that’s to be expected, because Fallout 1 and 2 are arguably the best role playing games ever created. On a side note, The downloadable content is generally not very good (the exceptions being Broken Steel and Point Lookout), and if you didn’t buy the recently released game of the year edition, I wouldn’t recommend you buy them (besides the two good ones), unless you really like Fallout 3. If you liked Oblivion, you’ll love Fallout 3, But if you’re a fan of the originals, you’ll probably be sorely disappointed by it.
Visuals: 3/5
Audio: 4/5
Fun: 2/5
Overall: 2.5/5
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