Fallout 3 Plot Review (Warning: Contains Massive Spoilers)

Warning:  The following section of commentary contains spoilers for Fallout 3, and they’re not of the type you can mount on your car.  If you have not played the Fallout 3 single-player campaign through to the end credits, I would suggest that you do so before reading this – so that the ending, such as it is, won’t be spoiled for you, and so you can more easily put these comments into context.

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While there is much to be commended about Fallout 3, the creators forget one important step: if you are seeking to create a game where a character can have complete control over their play style, it ends up chafing significantly when you suddenly yank that control away, especially when such a forced choice actually makes the impact of the plot advancement that much more unrealistic and unsatisfying.

The first major instance of this is when you are locked into the Tranquility Lane simulation.  Yes, true, it advances the plot.  But it also strips away your choices, and drastically shifts the gameplay for a bit.  There you are, heady from exploration and combat, and you’re suddenly locked into a situation that involves neither, and almost takes on the feel of a puzzle game reminiscent of Myst (or, perhaps, a far more serious, unhumorous, and sinister version of Monkey Island).  This is all well and good, but I’m not playing any of those games – I’m playing Fallout 3, and the game-within-a-game feels ultimately unsatisfying and out of place, and it completely destroys the pacing and immersion.  

Once you’ve escaped that situation, you then get to meet your dad, hang out with him briefly in Rivet City and the Jefferson Memorial, and then you get to stand by and watch as the game sacrifices him by irradiating a bunch of Enclave goons along with himself, in one of the most anticlimactic and unimpressive demises possible.  Given how much the game hypes up the relationship and the initial quest, it’s a huge letdown to simply watch him keel over and then have to run away, all that effort wasted.  They could have done so much more emotionally with the relationship, and it is disappointing that this relationship is quickly relegated to a footnote, with little if any emotional intensity.  (And that brings me to a continuity problem…  didn’t Colonel Autumn get killed in that radiation blast, and then inexplicably come back?)

The exit from Vault 87, again, is another forced-choice situation, and one essentially ripped straight from the original Half-Life – it was annoying then, and it sucks even worse in this context.  There you are, persevering against hordes of Super Mutants, and then someone throws a flashbang at you and it’s all over?  Give me a break!  Arbitrarily stripping away choices does not really help the game progress, and again, it limits the immersion when control is suddenly taken out of the player’s hands.

The most egregious error, though, is in the endgame.  Okay, so the penultimate battle between the Enclave and the Brotherhood is fought outside the memorial building (read: you walk behind a giant robot and watch as it smashes the bajeezus out of everything).  Then you walk in the side door, shoot a handful of Enclave soldiers, walk into the rotunda, and have a final, epic battle between Colonel Autumn and his minions (read: shoot Autumn a couple of times in the head and watch his skull bounce around, and make short work of the Enclave guards – seriously, if you’re doing it right, you won’t even empty a single clip).  And then…  the binary choice.

You see, Project Purity is going to go out all Doomsday-style, unless someone walks into the irradiated chamber, sacrificing themselves to save everyone else.  First off, it’s not even original (as anyone who has watched The Wrath of Khan can attest to).  And second, it’s kind of a sucky choice, isn’t it?  Here’s your character, who has just fought through countless battles, and who you may have become somewhat attached to in the nature of customized RPG characters, forced into a powerless choice – he can either go in there, and get killed off (which is painful when it happens to a character you’ve just spend hours customizing and playing with), or he can order some cannon-fodder soldier to go do it for him and look like a cowardly dick (and, for that matter, have the narrator scold him during the outro FMV for reasonably not wanting to die a horrid, screaming death from radiation poisoning).  So, you’ve been able to shape everything you’ve done so far, and had fun choosing your character’s destiny – and then the game leaves you with this.

And why is this choice so irksome?  It’s not because of the clichédness of the plot point, or because of the choices that were given.  It’s because of the choice that isn’t given as an option.

There’s your character, standing near the Project Purity chamber, next to the sentinel character.  And there, on the other side of him, is a Super Mutant.  No, not an enemy.  Not a hostile threat.  Remember him?  It’s Fawkes, the intelligent super mutant from Vault 87.  It’s the same super mutant who comes to your rescue at the end of the Enclave base, and it’s the same super mutant who you can choose to accompany you all the way into the Project Purity chamber.

Remember anything else about him, though?

Oh, yeah.  That’s right.

He retrieved the G.E.C.K. for you.

By walking through a room full of lethal radiation.

So there you are, arguing over who to sacrifice to the radiation.  And right there, standing next to you, is a Super Mutant that can withstand nearly any level of radiation, and do whatever you need him to do while you’re at it.  And so, it would seem, the most sensible route would be to turn to the super mutant and have him activate the device.  After all, he can withstand the radiation, the device would be activated, everyone would walk away alive, triumphant, and happy, and the situation would be perfectly resolved.

But the game designers, in all of their wisdom, do not offer that option.  And, in fact, despite the obvious and compelling logic of it, never seemed to have considered that situation at all.

And so your character is stuck making a stupid binary decision, and all the while you’re staring at the game in utter disbelief, wondering why the most sensible option was explicitly left out.  As a result, instead of an emotionally charged, dramatic ending, the immersion of the game is lost as you swear at the in-game characters for being locked into a ridiculous, easily-defused situation simply by virtue of bad plot design.  Which means that, for an otherwise enjoyable game, the endgame is wholly unsatisfying and does not measure up to the caliber of the other gameplay elements.

In fact, if I had to level one major criticism at the game, it would be that the plotting of the game seemed designed to destroy any tangible emotional tension in any of the game’s major plot stages.    I felt far more emotion when out exploring the game world, when something unexpected would literally cause me to jump, and where I could simply wander around and take in the bleak ambience.  During the plot sections of the game, though, everything felt more or less emotionally flat, and at some points felt like I was being dicked around a la Grand Theft Auto missions rather than doing anything that felt particularly meaningful.  And that is unfortunate, because Fallout 3 has the potential to be a great game, and often is, when large sections of the main plot are taken out of the equation.  Had it been paired up with a solid storyline, perhaps something along the lines of Mass Effect (or, dare I say, Oni?), then I think it could have been a truly outstanding game.

And one other note – what is it about games like this where they have to work towards a finite ending like this?  When I ran into the final scenario in the game, there was still so much to do, and so many areas that I had yet to explore.  So why end it?  Sure, have an ending sequence that wraps up the main storyline (and takes away the irradiated water thing at the same time).  And then, let the main character be free to explore his surroundings, and reap the rewards of all of his challenging tasks!  To do otherwise, to build the main character up and then callously end his story, reminds me too much of Terranigma, the most psychologically harrowing RPG of all time (someday, I intend to write a full post on the massive heap of traumatizing fail that is Terranigma’s ending).  I would have much preferred to be able to continue on with the character and explore the world regardless, continuing to explore and build, and play out all of the other parts of the expansive game on my own terms (and which I intend to do, at some point, from a save point prior to the climactic battle).  I mean, heck, if you need to take a page from the GTA series, take that one – wrap up the plot, give the character some main-plot-finishing bonuses, and then let them explore and play to their heart’s content.  Open-game worlds and finite endings do not mesh well – the didn’t in Mass Effect, and they don’t here.  Stop robbing the player of choice, or deciding when or on what terms to complete their gameplay, and leave it up to them.  Games are not on rails any more, and you’re not just delivering a chunk of gameplay hours.  You’re delivering an entire virtual world, and your game only shows its full potential when you hand the player the keys to the city and let them choose their character’s path and destiny.