My Continuing Thoughts on Fallout 3

I’ve already talked at length about various gameplay and plot aspects of Fallout 3, in the sense of an impartial critic.  However, amidst all of that, Fallout is an immense and capable game, and I have, at this point, put far in excess of 80 hours into it, over the course of four different characters, and I am still quite certain that I have not uncovered everything.  This puts it into a very elite class of games, as there are few that held my interest for such a vast amount of time.  It has also, oddly enough, been one of the few games that has emotionally affected me in a fairly profound way.  So, in that light, I wanted to supplement things by talking about some of my personal experiences with the game.

One of the first things that intrigued me about the game was a section on the Fallout 3 official webpage, where someone had posted blurbs about a handful of different player characters that has been used during the final testing of the game.  Each one of them had a fairly lengthy post, and each one featured a distinctive play style, goals, and characterization.  And so, in that vein, I decided to create characters that would be just as fleshed out during the course of gameplay.

My first character, Zigmund Argon, took his name from the Argonauts of legend, conjuring up tales of wanderers on a journey of discovery and homecoming.  As is my tradition in most RPG games, I devote the first playthrough to the moral approach – Zigmund would be my official do-gooder.  And so he set forth, skilled in weapons and repair, after verbally confronting the overseer and failing to convince him to change course.  Initially, his journey was hard – as he always offered help for free, and had no luck to speak of, he was usually hard-up for cash, although he managed to get by on supplies.  Because of this, he could not afford expensive schematics, spending most of his money on weapon upkeep, and only much later on did he have access to other things.  But at the same time, he basked in the glow of helping his fellow citizens, and made a decent living for himself.  To this day (seeing as how he had the foresight to avoid messing around with the brotherhood and arriving at the fateful scenario at the end of the plot), he adventures with his trusty laser-toting manservant Fawkes, exploring and bringing peace to the communities scattered across the wasteland.

And so, that being done, I then set about creating a much different character.  Ellery Faust, so named for bargaining with the devil, was to be female, violent – and just a bit evil.  She was angrier from the beginning, often beating up bullies and doing other antisocial things.  When crisis finally struck, she got into a fateful argument with the overseer, caving in his skull with her trusty baseball bat, and angering her friend.  She left the vault and ventured forth into the world, quickly coming across the town of Megaton, meeting up with with a certain shady individual, and setting the charge on the town’s iconic centerpiece.  Satisfied with her rash decision, she ventured over to Tenpenny Towers, and watched as the town was obliterated.  And then, after settling into her luxurious penthouse suite, she decided to venture back to see if anything was salvageable from the town’s ruins.

And then, something unexpected happened.  I suppose, for the sake of understanding, I should let you in on a little backstory – while in elementary school, I checked out a japanese comic book form the library entitled Barefoot Gen.  It is, in effect, a chronicle of a young boy’s experience growing up in wartime japan, up through the firebombings to the final chapter set in the aftermath of the Hiroshima nuclear blast.  It is a very powerful comic, and it has perhaps a similar impact to the more well-known anime Grave of the Fireflies.  Both are tragic in their own way, but Barefoot Gen is truly traumatizing, especially in its depictions of the nuclear aftermath, of people with melted faces dying horrifically of radiation poisoning.  After reading it, I was plagued by vivid nightmares for close to a month, and even now, the impact of it is sufficiently strong enough that I have hesitated to reread it.

At any rate, my character made her way to the radiation, and as expected, the town was a radioactive slag heap with nothing much to commend it.  Satisfied with the destruction, Ellery Faust made to leave – only to be confronted by Moira from the Craterside Supply.

Only, it wasn’t the Moira from before – she was now a ghoul, hideously disfigured, but just similar enough to be recognizable.  Talking to her, and hearing the horrible wavering in her voice as she slowly came to the realization that she was now a ghoul, barely maintaining an upbeat façade as she fully realized the severity of her situation, hit me in the chest like an emotional sledgehammer.  I gamely played on for a bit longer, shooting and looting my way through Dukov’s Place and thoroughly butchering a trade caravan, but I just felt so thoroughly… wrong for what I had done.  Now, keep in mind that I’ve been “bad” in plenty of games before – I’ve minigunned my way through a mall of badly-rendered bystanders in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City with hardly a qualm.  But to commit an act of terror so horrendous – and to come face to face with the result – was truly traumatizing.  

I couldn’t keep playing – I felt so wrong, so disturbed by that course, that I finally decided to completely end that line of play, and take Ellery back to the point of leaving Vault 101 to rewrite her story.  I switched around a few stats, and modified her story a bit – instead of being just evil, she would be angry, but with the notion of doing whatever was necessary to survive, hoarding everything she possibly could, and doing whatever was in her best interests.  And so, upon reaching Megaton, she took up a cash offer to defuse the bomb, and set out on a different path.  Dukov still fell prey to her pistol – she didn’t take kindly to his misogynistic remarks – and she alternately stole and helped when there was something in it for her, becoming essentially a mercenary, and engrossing herself in the completion of the wasteland survival guide before setting off on the main plotline.

And here’s where I discovered another ideosyncracy – simply by moving the plot forward, and not randomly offing bystanders for fun, even stealing and being dishonest a good bit does little to slow your inevitable ascension to sainthood.  Simply getting out of Tranquility Lane quickly, because it is kind of boring, gives you a karmic boost, and the same thing seems to occur when you bring Dr. Li to the citadel, even when you watch as all of her research assistants are carved up by feral ghouls in the escape tunnel.  It seems that you have to be bad quite a bit to even remain neutral, and simply moving the plot forward moves you towards goodness.  Through no concerted effort, Ellery Faust, the character supposed to be evil or at least self-interested, found herself a Capitol Crusader, practically worshipped in Megaton, although she had never done a selfless thing for the town.  

(Oh, and one quick note – it irks me to no end that the game keeps referring to it as the Capital Wasteland, rather than the Capitol Wasteland, as would be the correct term for it.)

Another thing to mention is that certain bad acts seem to have radically different consequences depending on where you are.  In Megaton, Tenpenny Towers, and some other places, if you go around lifting people’s property, the owner comes up to you, scolds you angrily, and takes back the property.  Fair enough, I suppose.  But go to Rivet City, and it’s all different.  My character lifts one bowl of noodles, with the nearest person many yards away, and all of a sudden, someone yells “thief!”  And from that point on, every single person on the ship turns hostile and tries to kill you!  Needless to say, leaving the ship then becomes quite an adventure, especially if you’re trying to stay neutral by not killing everyone on board.  And so, after getting lost in the maze of the ship and running a few steps ahead of a hail of bullets, my character finally legs it back across the gangplank, as shots snap all around her.  The total cost, for a bowl of noodles: a very large amount of stimpacks and a newfound appreciation for the danger of vigilante justice.  

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After rereading this first section of this essay, I notice that it talks quite a bit from the perspective of the character.  This is one thing that Fallout 3 does quite well – unlike the jRPGs that I usually play, the characters themselves are fairly fleshed out, and it’s more “guide the predefined personalities” than anything else (but I suppose jGCAG, for japanese guiding characters around game, doesn’t quite have the same ring to it).  With Fallout 3, with its variety of gameplay styles and choices, you feel that you can really get into the roleplaying, developing your character by virtue of his choices in the game.

In that vein, I probably put the most roleplaying effort into my third creation, Gunter Strom (the fourth character, created mainly to play around with some previously unused skills and a high charisma stat, pretty much ends up being another do-gooder).  Admittedly, I also got the idea to flesh out the characters a bit more from the Fallout 3 official site, where there is a posting detailing the stories behind many of the myriad player characters played by the development team while testing the game.  

The story of Gunter Strom is as follows: as a child, he was disruptive but disciplined, angry at the frivolousness of the other vault dwellers, and geared for survival.  He took the opportunity of being hunted to strike out at the heavy-handed security guards, using his bat and gun to settle a number of scores, although he held off from destroying the overseer at the last moment.  Once on land, he was quickly taken with the notion of the Brotherhood Outcasts, and set himself to help retrieve things to ensure the survival of the most viable societies.  Upon visiting Megaton and Rivet City, he evaluated the cities and deemed them the most likely to succeed in restoring civilization to the wastes.  However, he quickly realized that other settlements had sprung up in much more tenuous situations, but at the same time these civilizations were drawing away the precious resources that were essential for survival, wasting them on settlements that would ultimately be doomed, while denying them to the best hopes for civilization’s survival.  In order to preserve those cities, he set about systematically eliminating the other outposts, leaving only a couple of survivors to pass along a message – those wishing to survive should head for the real cities.  Of course, all of the supplies collected were brought back to Megaton and Rivet City, in order to keep the cities strong and successful.  Of course, he took on a reputation for evil, but dismissed it, knowing that he did only what was necessary to ensure the overall prosperity of a newly blossoming civilization.

So, finally, I had an evil character, and as it turns out, it is possible for those determined enough to rack up a significant amount of evil, even without taking the initial hit by bombing Megaton.  In fact, a quick rampage through Underworld and Tenpenny Towers will rack up enough evil that the main plot karma bonuses are completely canceled out.

However, the karma system itself has a lot of weaknesses, especially being that, once you’ve gotten to a certain level, the game makes it much more difficult to reverse course.  The reason being, if you are good, hitmen are sent after you – and if you are bad, bounty hunters.  The problem is, these bands are good and evil respectively according to the karma system, and you generally have no choice but to attack them in order to survive.  However, because they are aligned characters, killing them only reinforces whatever karma direction you’re already going in.  Not to mention that if you’re looking at it from a moral standpoint, killing people who attack you without warning, and who don’t give you an opportunity to surrender, really shouldn’t make you evil, while shooting an equivalent group of people wearing different clothing would otherwise make you good.

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I suppose I should probably post this already, instead of simply updating it constantly, but I don’t want to flood my weblog with excessive Fallout 3 posts (even if it would probably be accurate, given that Fallout 3 has been the game that I have played continuously since its release, mostly to the exclusion of all the other games in my possession).  My progress so far: four well-fleshed-out characters, none of which have yet hit their level caps, and a playtime well in excess of the 100 hours of total gameplay advertised by most reviews (which puts it most definitely in the running for overall dollars/gameplay value, and has yielded far more playtime than any other open-world game that I have played to date).  Despite this, I continue to discover new locations even now, and there still remain a number which I have yet to locate (oasis, deathclaw and yao guai tunnels, rockopolis, among others).  Overall, it’s one of the most extensive games I’ve ever seen, and even with the reuse of game assets, it is incredible to me that the level designers were able to create so many unique areas to explore.

Of course, adding to that is quite a simple proposition, given the recently released SDK tools and the huge flood of modifications that are already showing up for the game.  As could be predicted, I jumped into the modding side of it as well, although admittedly I’ve mainly created a personal mod to tweak a few in-game things to the way that I wanted them to work.  However, I probably have about 20 or so mods installed at the moment, which add and expand the world dramatically, and offer a number of new ways to play (and new weapons to play around with).  Of course, one of the major improvements is additional in-world radio, to break up the auditory monotony, and I’ve had quite a bit of fun conjuring up new playlists to fit into the general theme of the game (so far, I have a mostly big-band and straight-ahead jazz station together).  In fact, I admit that I got into the game enough to do some of my own amateur voice acting, to create a new radio DJ personality to integrate into a music station (a shy technician hacking together a station from a satellite relay dish under siege on the opposite coast).  

I suppose that’s what helps a game withstand the test of time, though – a strong player base, and an influx of new content, user-created or otherwise, that keeps things fresh.  With unmoddable games, like your usual shooters (or even your usual GTAs), once the single-player campaign is done, and you’ve seen it all, there is little else to do.  As a result, you quickly lose interest, and if the game hasn’t delivered sufficiently, you can often end feeling just a bit cheated that there wasn’t more to get out of it (while some games I have played, like Crysis Warhead, have been short but satisfying, others have simply been short – and, come to think of it, I haven’t touched the game at all after finishing it).  With a game like Fallout 3, though, it never really feels like it gets old, because there is so much content already there, and more being developed daily by an enthusiastic fan base (and by the developers as well, I suppose, with 3 DLC packs to arrive in the upcoming months).  

I also think that another thing that helps is that the game is based not just around combat, but also around the simple joy of exploration, of poking around the environment to see what can be found.  In fact, this sense of catharsis is rarely seen in most games, especially FPS games, where there are few if any lulls in the action, and where such lulls are usually occupied by annoying puzzle elements.  In Fallout 3, though, there is something supremely relaxing about simply wandering through the wilderness.  Often, you won’t even see much in the way of enemies, and it’s just you and an endless, varied environment to hike through, a nice walk in the wasteland.  You can exult in climbing up a hill just to see the expansive vista that awaits, or you can simply enjoy the environment and watch the sun’s slow progression across the sky.  Even in a burnt-out wasteland, you can feel oddly connected with nature, and deeply immersed in the ambience of the game world.  Put together with the effective and entertaining combat, and it is perhaps the best example of a game as catharsis that you can find, a game that can, for the most part, take you away from it all, if only for a few hours.

Of course, every so often, something does come along and shatter that immersion pretty much completely.  The most glaring example I can think of, of course, is the inclusion of the bizarrely invincible children present throughout the game.  Okay, I get it, ratings boards probably don’t look too kindly at blowing away kids, but in terms of realism or game immersion, the developers probably would have been better off simply leaving kids out of the game entirely.  Sure, that opens up some plot irregularities, but it’s far less immersion-killing than kids staring dumbly at you as you empty an assault rifle into them, and then run away unhurt.  I don’t mean to sound heartless, of course – I certainly don’t endorse killing kids.  However, if you want to create a plausible post-apocalyptic world full of desperation and human weakness, having kids get killed is par for the course – in the real world, in many places, kids are fighting and dying as we speak, so it is perhaps a bit naive of us to want to gloss over that sort of reality.  That being said, though, it is a game, and its themes are already gruesome enough without adding even more.

Of course, there is also always the much-debated sexual issue.  However, as many people have already discussed it at length, I won’t spend too much time dwelling on it.  I will note that one of the mods I installed added an exotic dance stage to Moriarty’s Saloon in Megaton, and I will admit that my primary motivation was less titillation (c’mon, uncanny-valley characters nakedly gyrating wasn’t all that appealing in the GTA series, and it hasn’t gotten much better with time), and more adding a bit more of a sense of adult “reality” to the game world.  It feels decidedly odd to have a world so filled with violence and desperation, and yet so completely chaste, that I felt it needed something more (and, as an added bonus, it actually makes Moriarty’s look lively for once, instead of indistinguishable from most any other joyless drink-serving venue in the game).  While in a general FPS game this might go relatively unnoticed, due to the steady diet of violence, in an open-world game trying to conjure up a plausible reality, it’s downright disconcerting.

In any case, I think I’ll leave my musings here, for now – even here in my articles, Fallout 3 is beginning to dominate, and I think it’s high time to discuss something else.  However, let me just say this – warts and all, Fallout 3 is an incredibly good time to play, and is fast becoming one of those milestone experiences that will be etched indelibly in my gaming memories.