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Odds are, if you’re a fan of CRPGs, you’ve either played or heard an earful about Fallout 3 by now. The sites I browse seem to be groaning at the seams with Fallout 3 reviews.

Which makes it a perfect time to exercise my individuality and…write a Fallout 3 review. Well, a first impression, really, hardly a review, but the insight contained here-in is sure to astound and amaze, causing you to forget that this is the three thousandth time you’ve read about VATs now.

Before I start, I want to get something out of the way. Most of the indie reviews I’ve read devote a fair amount of time to comparing Fallout 3 to it’s predecessors. I say indies because the mainstream reviewers are too busy trying to outdo each other in praising [this month’s hyped title] as the second coming of our Lord and Savior.

Anyway, yes, so most of the “decent” reviews start off with a lengthy section comparing Fallout 3 to 1 & 2. I just want to take a moment to say :

I don’t care. Not even a little bit.

I needed to highlight that fact because every discussion on Fallout 3 that I’ve seen has degenerated into fisticuffs over whether it is, or is not, a worthy successor. I don’t care, and anyone who attempts to start that discussion up in the comments section will be met with my patented Blank Apathetic Stare. You won’t be able to see it through the Interwebs, of course, so you will need to take my word for it, but I will be staring at you apathetically, oh yes, make no doubt.

Which isn’t to say I don’t understand the disgruntlement that fans feel. I grind my teeth when I see how they’re turning my beloved Prince of Persia into some emo, manga kid. And I was bitterly disappointed by the Deus Ex sequel, Invisible War. So I do understand the pain, in the abstract. But I don’t feel it myself here and this will reflect in my opinion, the “3″ on the end of the title is meaningless to me.

Right, now that I’ve wasted a few paragraphs, not on comparing F3 to the previous Fallouts, but on explaining why I won’t be doing so , lets get on with things.

I should probably start with talking about the worst parts of Fallout 3 first because that is what the game itself does. Someone in design didn’t get the memo about putting your best foot forward and trying to draw the player in from the get-go, because Fallout 3 tried it’s hardest to force me into giving it up in disgust.

The starting tutorial isn’t really bad, it’s more just…well it’s a tutorial. Tutorials are by definition bland. The number of games that have pulled off exciting tutorials are few and far between, and most of them have a simple set of mechanics. I’ve always been in favor of splitting the tutorial off into a separate level, I don’t know why it is so in vogue to have it be the first level of the game these days. Any tension or drama is continuously sabotaged by messages popping up describing how to access your inventory.

But, ah well, nothing we can do about that. Like Oblivion’s tutorial, I didn’t find it that bad, and at least it introduced the plot. However, the problem comes once you finish that part and enter the world. You see, you are guided fairly quickly over to nearby Megaton, which is a pity, because Megaton is the most dreary part of the entire game, not to mention the worst possible introduction to the game’s theme.

You see, if you start exploring the wastes you get a nice post apocalyptic, survivalist vibe. But Megaton…well, megaton is like a poorly done post apocalyptic theme park. It’s got a neat layout, too neat, like a carefully constructed amusement ride. The whole thing is too…fake. People are fairly content, the place is self contained, the problems of survival in the wastes too far removed. Instead you get given quests about detonating the nuclear bomb in the middle from men trying way too hard to be ominous. Or women who want you to step on landmines as “an experiment". All with incredibly clumsy dialogue to boot.

It just pours cold water on the atmosphere, really. I was, at that point, about to put F3 aside and go back to Dead Space. But a few others who were playing it convinced me to hang in there, and, surprisingly, they were right. It got better. Much better.

You see, once you are out in the wastes, exploring the ravaged remains of American civilization, fighting off the other scavengers and trying to scrounge up the supplies to continue doing so, it’s like you come up from a murky fog into pure, refreshing air. When the quests aren’t trying to be too clever and you are just out there exploring the world, seeing what is over the next hill, it shines.

Bethesda have surpassed themselves in the environmental design department, truly, not since Morrowind have I enjoyed just getting lost and wandering around so much. Not only is the setting beautiful, the map is packed with locations to explore and discover, and thankfully they have avoided Oblivion’s problem of only having 3 types of dungeon to explore. I’m surprised by how often I run into a sight I haven’t seen before.

I’d like to add here that I’ve never been a huge fan of the Mad Max, post apocalyptic settings but I begin to see the attraction. Exploring a supermarket overrun by raiders or an old car workshop which now houses a huge, mutant ant Queen and her skittering broodlings, it’s just got a wonderful feeling of context. In most RPGs you explore the ruins of ancient civilizations, in a PA game the ancient civilization is yours and those ruins are that much more meaningful because of it.

Bethesda also did a wonderful job with the repair/scavenging system, it is simple yet highly effective at creating that “scrounging in junk” feeling. Almost all the items you find are run down, by combining the parts from various similar items you can create a fairly decent weapon or piece of armor. But the more you use that item, the more it wears out and so you constantly need to be hunting for more pieces to replace worn ones.

Especially in the early levels, this system is great. In a number of battles I have found myself desperate for ammo or new parts, I’d kill a raider and immediately loot them to gain the equipment necessary to kill the next one charging me.

Not only is the repair system effective, the radiation one is too. Almost every piece of food is radiated but restores health. At first I avoided these, relying on stim packs, but once things started getting nasty I found myself needing to use the consumables, in fact I’d scrounge every last piece of mole-meat or nuke-cola I could find, gobbling them up. Once your radiation level gets too high you have to use some Rad-Away or deal with the sickness, not super realistic, sure, but the Rad-Away is scarce enough that it felt like a balancing act, or at least gave an immersive sense of the perils of post apocalyptic life.

On top of those two systems, all the “buffs” in the game are drugs, it is all too easy to get addicted, which adds a nice balance to things, preventing you from just going wild on the “potions” like you can in other RPGs. I’ve been addicted to Vodka 3 times so far, kind of amusing since it’s the drink I prefer in real life, heh.

Now, I’m only level 9, bear in mind, so the balance may change later and you have so much gear that the balance gets thrown out of whack and the challenge goes out of it. But, for now, it’s good stuff.

I should probably talk about VATs. I suspect it’s one of those love it or hate it features. Personally, I find it alright. Just…alright. It strikes me as a first iteration of a potentially great feature. It needs more options, like proper use in melee, and it needs penalties for close quarters shooting so that headshots aren’t so easy up close. And the slow mo needs to be sped up for non-critical shots. But overall..it works alright. I think that expanding and re-balancing the system could be fairly neat. I’ve had some great moments with it, like staring in awe as a deathclaw takes a grenade straight on and keeps coming through the smoke in slow motion, barely damaged. Panicky, awe inducing moment, that.

The character system in Fallout 3 is a mixed bag. The skills I chose all seem to matter, I didn’t feel cheated at all, which is great. Not only that, skill checks are plentiful and open meaningful options for your character, which is, again, really nice, you really feel like your character pick is meaningful. But the actual character system itself isn’t amazingly engrossing to “play". By which I mean that fun mini-game where you agonize over where to spend points and which perks to take at level up . Most of the perks are boring, minor skill boosts, so you won’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, sadly.

I should probably mention the mini-games here. Both the lock picking and hacking mini-games require minimum levels to perform, so you can’t pick a very difficult lock with a skill of 1 just by having great reflexes or lots of time, which is good, Oblivion got that very wrong.

While the lock picking mini-game is fine, reminiscent of Thief 3, the hacking one is abysmal. Not really hard, just tedious and it gives you no feeling of actually being a hacker. Pointless cruft.

Overall, the “wander around and explore” RPG part of Fallout 3 is quite enjoyable, even great. Only Morrowind is better in this regard, I feel, and it even beats MW in some regards.

What Fallout 3 fails utterly at is the story portion of the RPG experience. Undeniably the weakest part of the game, the story and dialogue fluctuates between acceptably mediocre to horrible, clumsy. And, sadly, this malaise seems to cluster around the main quest. I’ve barely started following it, when I tried to and met Three Dogg, the radio DJ, I quickly went back to random wandering in disgust.

The core problem is whenever Bethesda try to be clever. Their standard, down to earth characters are actually fine. They don’t stand out but they are convincing bit parts, you can believe them as people. Whenever the game tries to show you some special character or storyline though, it really drops the ball. In fact the whole thing just screams that Bethesda need to hire some writing talent. Even some of the zany quests, like the one with the AntAgonizer, could have worked with a skilled writer behind them, someone who can write complex, believable human emotions. The seeds of potential are there but I can only shake my head at the clumsy execution. I heard Bethesda hired one of the guys who worked on Mask of the Betrayer and put him to work on an MMO, what a waste of talent, he was desperately needed on F3.

Time to wrap up this “first impressions", it’s getting long and looking suspiciously like a review. So far, my impression is that Fallout 3 is a great “exploration-RPG". I tend to have two distinct urges in RPGs, the desire for a strong, gripping story, and the desire for fun, open exploration. I rarely find the two satisfied in the same game, if it’s even possible, the two seem opposing philosophies (though I will try in SoW). Fallout 3 satisfies that second urge well. At the end of the day it may not be a classic RPG, but it is a good one, doing a lot to restore my faith in Bethesda after Oblivion.

But please, Bethesda, please, hire some writers.

One of the comments from the previous post suggested that I try desaturating the picture a bit. And I think I agree, SoW is more dark and gloomy in tone, the image is fairly bright and colourful.

On the other hand, you don’t want to go too monotone or things just get boring to look at.

Anyway, help me decide, which of these 3 colour saturation levels looks the best?

one

two

three

Cast your vote in this forum poll please, it’ll be easier for me to tally up the results (assuming more than 3 people care one way or the other, lol). I’m lazy like that.

I felt like painting a bit this morning, so I took a stab at the concept art for the Peasant background (I talked about character backgrounds a while back). Anyway, the peasant background is as follows :

—————————————————————————-

Peasant

You grew up in a small farming community. From a young age you were put to work in the fields. Your early adult life was filled with the toil of hard labour, the feel of sweat on your brow and the sun beating down on your back. You didn’t get much in the way of an education but your arms are strong and you can work for hours without complaint.

Benefits :

+1 Strength
+1 Endurance
+10 Starting Knowledge
- Free Knowledge(Animal Lore 1)

—————————————————————————-

Basically, the Peasant background gives you the best starting stat boosts but the worst starting knowledge points/skill bonuses.

But that’s enough of a teaser about the game mechanics, the real point is the art, am I right?

So here is the artwork I whipped up for this background this morning, took about 2 hours :

Click here for full size.

I suppose I can show you the character creation screen for selecting your childhood background. I don’t like to show work that’s in-process aka halfway between prototype and finished, but I’ll make an exception, just this once. Just keep that in mind, it’s a work in process, some of the elements are still just prototypes, like the gray buttons in the step navigation bar at the top, there is still plenty of time for tweaks.

Click here for a peek.

Well, it’s not as good as what a professional concept artist could have done, but it’s something. So that’s…one out of fifteen background pieces done. Heh, I really need to clone myself.

I’m really getting tired of feeling like an old man at 26, but I’m going to invoke that feeling again by saying :

“You know, gaming was better back in my day”

Because it really feels like the gaming scene is moving away from me. Like I’m outside looking in, watching a party but not really sure what people are so excited about.

I’ve got to admit, I started to wonder if it was me. My mom told me when I was younger (and inhaled sugar like oxygen) that my taste in food and drink would change as I grew older, and sure enough it did. And now I’m feeling less and less excited by gaming and I have to wonder if it is simply the same gradual change?

Perhaps that’s part of it, but every now and then a game comes along which grabs me by the throat, draws me in and doesn’t release me till it’s finished. So I do still have the capacity to feel that old excitement. Which leads me to suspect it isn’t me as much as the general environment. Gaming itself has changed, I think we all feel it.

And it hasn’t been a good change.

Now, this idea isn’t new, if you’re reading this indie dev blog it’s probable that you’ve heard this all before. But it’s still fairly aggravating to read that this gradual spiral down into mediocrity is part of someone’s bloody business strategy.

First in the annoyance inducing list is this wonderful piece over on the escapist. Attack of the Clones

I don’t really think I need to rant about this, Shamus did a good enough job there.

Then there are these articles over at Gamasutra, a site dedicated to industry professionals discussing industry professional stuff.

Gaming Megatrends 1

and

Gaming Megatrends 2

Some choice quotes :

However, it also means that traditional gamers no longer constitute the majority of games users.

We must therefore simplify the accessibility of a game for users, if we want to support the current growth of the number of games players.

This need to develop games that are accessible, yet not lacking in depth, largely explains the near-disappearance of flight simulators – despite the doubtlessly large number of fans that they have accumulated.

The golden rule is to make sure that the player manages to “win” at the beginning of the game, and that he avoids getting lost.

Simplification of the game concept.

Soooo…gamers are going to be milked via micro-transactions for un-challenging, disposable, clone games that are increasingly simpler and simpler so as to maximize accessibility.

Awesome. The future seems bright, eh?

(Amusingly enough, the first megatrend article, after going on about simplifying things, ends with a call for greater graphic fidelity and the ability to destroy everything in the environment. Telling, isn’t it, who this design philosophy is aimed at?)

Honestly, there isn’t anything that can really be done to stop or reverse these megatrends, sadly. It’s a simple consequence of consumer buying patterns, just as the dominance of massive junk food chains is. It’s hard to be angry with businesspeople just for wanting to make more money from their investments, even if it is ruining the lifestyle you enjoy.

Ok, it’s not really that hard to be angry. Fairly easy, in fact. But it is futile.

All we can do is hope that the game industry comes to mirror the pattern of the food and hospitality industries. That, while “junk food” dominates the mass market, smaller companies (indies and the like) can step up and supply the need for “fine cuisine". I think we are seeing the beginning of that, hopefully the movement reaches it’s full potential.

Which reminds me, I need to make a reservation, we’re going out to a nice restaurant tonight, celebrating the end of Denbeigh’s steamed vegetable diet (ugh) with the best food we can find. Starting with sushi, yum!

OMG, I want one :

Sheer Awesome

Ok, so this thingamajig won an award in 2007. Why is it not on my desk, displaying video games already? It’s been a year already. Seriously.