The Blair Hippo Project (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} blairhippo) wrote,@ 2008-11-28 18:03:00 |
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The Best Part of Unemployment is the Video Gaming
You simply cannot fault Fallout 3 for lack of ambition; this is a game that's striving for greatness. And for a little while, it actually achieves it; the character creation, which takes you from the delivery room to various highlights of your childhood and transitions smoothly into the confusing and frightening night when you're punted out of the underground vault in which you've lived your entire life, is creative, memorable, and does a fabulous job of getting you invested in your alter ego right from the start. The post-apocalyptic wasteland is immense and populated with great flair and creativity; I suspect that you could spend literally hundreds of hours exploring it free-style and savoring all the stories (large and small) that Bethesda Softworks embedded into it.
But as wonderful as the game is at the start, it slowly but inexorably tapers into ... not "suck," certainly. More like "adequacy." The game never stops being fun; it does, however, stop being excellent. And that's a real shame.
It's an issue of gameplay balance more than anything. Ben Croshaw reviewed it with his usual mix of insight and profanity. He complains that if you rob everybody blind the game becomes too easy; he's wrong. The game simply becomes too easy, full stop. You hit a point where every potential threat in the game elicits only a laconic "Yeah, I can take 'em." Ben was a sticky-fingered kleptomaniac, I was a voracious scavenger, and I wound up in the same place he did, I just got there slower. It's the place where stimpacks (functionally identical to potions of healing) are so easy to come by that you just charge blindly into situations where you're ludicrously overmatched, because in order to kill you, the bad guys have to dish out damage faster than you can whack whatever hotkey you mapped to the ginormous stimpack soda fountain you have strapped to your back. When you're struggling with some combination of poor armor, low hit points, and small stimpack cache, it's interesting. When a grenade to your face does less damage than can be healed by one of the fifty stimpacks you have on your person, it's markedly less interesting.
Why? Why are the bloody things so prevalent? Why are they so ruthlessly effective? Why are they not the least bit addictive? (The game has an addiction mechanism for other chemical enhancers; stimpacks are, curiously, exempt.) Why do they cure you of everything that physically ails you? Why even bother adding a critical damage element when you can just heal it with one stroke of the hotkey?
The game has a radiation mechanism that, while not exactly having much to do with real-world radiation, is interesting ... at least for a while. In the early going, when your precious precious immortality-granting stimpacks are a bit tougher to come by, the best way to recover from your wounds is by eating or drinking. And damn near everything you eat or drink is, to some degree, radioactive. Thus, you're always mindful of how much radiation you're toting around, because the drug to get rid of it, "Rad-Away," is genuinely difficult to find.
This mechanic simply ceases to be interesting when you get your own house (which can happen fairly early in the game) and purchase "My First Infirmary" for it (which ain't cheap, but if you're diligently either scavenging the long-dead or robbing the still-living, you can afford it). Once you have this nifty device, you can purge yourself of radiation at will. So the amount of radiation you accrue becomes a big fat "Who cares?", because you can eliminate it, entirely, for free, damn near whenever you feel like it. And your stimpack cache eventually becomes large enough that you can down them like M&M's, meaning you no longer have to screw around with that tainted food or water in the first place.
Again, it's not that difficult to envision a fix. Eliminate My First Infirmary's magic radiation-eliminating properties and toss in few status flags that keep track of when you last ate/drank and start punishing you if you go too long without, and voila -- the radiation mechanism stays relevant throughout the game.
I don't mind that certain problems become easier to manage as the game progresses -- that's kind of the point of improving your character. But I do mind if you hit a point where core problems simply cease to matter, and that's what happens here.
Another example of the game helping you entirely too much is the Fast Travel mechanism. There's a lot of world to explore, but once you find something significant enough for the game to include it in your map, you can travel back to it whenever you chose. (Provided you're outside and not near anything that wants to turn you into lunch, but those are easy conditions to meet.) It prevents a lot of needless and boring tromping over the same terrain you've already visited, but it also means that traversing the map becomes trivially simple. Seriously, if you want to visit a store located Way Over There, you don't even have to change out of your pajamas; you arrive with the touch of a button. It's so easy to get around that the game mechanics wouldn't have changed one iota if it had teleporter pods scattered generously through the wasteland.
If I have to traverse the map with a single clip of ammo and badly-damaged armor, I should be worried, dammit. A simple random encounter mechanism, which the first two games had, would have made the game much more immersive and satisfying.
And then there's the Grand Finale, which works as spectacle and tries for something haunting and memorable, but fails on any level beyond eye-candy. During the final assault, you're really just along for the ride; the good guys have refurbished a huge ass-stomping robot to unleash on the bad guys, and all you have to do is run after it and watch it annihilate all opposition. Though certainly fun to watch, it was about as satisfying as a cut-scene. (In fact, in a game like this, you'd expect to scavenge for the killer robot's missing pieces, possibly as part of an optional side-quest that, if you fail to complete, forces you to do the assault the hard way and taking heavy casualties in the process. Or maybe as a way of rewarding those players who pimped-out their Science and Repair skills at the expense of the more traditional Blow Shit Up skills. Nope; the NPCs have this one under control entirely, thanks.)
Once you get where you're going, there's a base full of bad guys to waste, but you've been in harder fights than this with less help. And then you're finally presented with an option where a heroic sacrifice is needed -- and either you can make the sacrifice yourself, or try to talk an NPC into making it for you.
It's a nice idea. But the execution falls flat for three reasons:
So, yeah. The ending would have been great if it didn't have me going "Bitch, please" for three completely independent reasons.
There are other deficiencies. The game is quite glitchy, at least on the PC; I wound up having to re-load games because it had glitched its way into various impassible cul-de-sacs, and I actually witnessed a woman getting married to her imaginary friend. Your helper NPCs have absolutely no impact on the non-combat portions of the game, because other NPCs pretend they don't exist at all; I really wanted to know whether Paladin Cross was still alive and was looking forward to the reaction when I showed up at the Citadel with Fawkes in tow, but nobody gave a shit about either their alleged comrade in arms or their mortal enemy. The conclusion to the main quest is quite rushed; tromping around with Fawkes at my back looked like it'd be fun, but I made the mistake of going to the next portion of the main plot, which immediately tobaggoned me to the less-than-satisfying ending. The risque sense of humor from prior incarnations is gone entirely; Fallout 2 had a porn studio, Fallout 3 gives you a cuddle-hooker. (There was one side-quest I completed just so somebody in this game would get laid, dammit.) The writing was inconsistent; the nuclear war was allegedly about 200 years ago, but there are portions that only make sense if it was much more recent -- maybe just a few years ago. (Little Lamplight, I'm looking in your direction.) The "Local Map" feature is often unintelligible and cluttered to the point of uselessness; If I'm going to be traversing multiple vertical levels, then any auto-map feature really needs to be able to show me those levels individually.
I just spent 1500 words harping on what's wrong with the game -- but it's actually a damn good game. When it's truly rolling, it's immersive and satisfying as hell, with several moments that elicited genuine emotional reactions from me. The side-quests are creative and fun -- Moira's Wasteland Survival Guide was an absolute hoot, and functions as the best tutorial evar. (The fact that Moira sounds a bit like Sarah Palin only added to the fun.) The combat system has enough depth to be interesting without being overwhelming, and the game gives you a wide variety of ways to play it. And there is oh so much to see and do. It's a very good game. It's going to go on many peoples' Best of the Year lists, deservedly so.
No, I harp on the flaws because this game shouldn't have been "very good" -- it should have been fucking awesome. With a little more time, every mistake this game makes is fixable. Give this six more months of development -- six more months of QA testing, of playtesting, of addressing the balance issues that show up at mid to high levels, of adding some crucial elements and getting some of the suck out of that finale -- and you'd have a game that would show up on a whole bunch of Best of All Time lists.
Would that we could all fail so nobly.
You simply cannot fault Fallout 3 for lack of ambition; this is a game that's striving for greatness. And for a little while, it actually achieves it; the character creation, which takes you from the delivery room to various highlights of your childhood and transitions smoothly into the confusing and frightening night when you're punted out of the underground vault in which you've lived your entire life, is creative, memorable, and does a fabulous job of getting you invested in your alter ego right from the start. The post-apocalyptic wasteland is immense and populated with great flair and creativity; I suspect that you could spend literally hundreds of hours exploring it free-style and savoring all the stories (large and small) that Bethesda Softworks embedded into it.
But as wonderful as the game is at the start, it slowly but inexorably tapers into ... not "suck," certainly. More like "adequacy." The game never stops being fun; it does, however, stop being excellent. And that's a real shame.
It's an issue of gameplay balance more than anything. Ben Croshaw reviewed it with his usual mix of insight and profanity. He complains that if you rob everybody blind the game becomes too easy; he's wrong. The game simply becomes too easy, full stop. You hit a point where every potential threat in the game elicits only a laconic "Yeah, I can take 'em." Ben was a sticky-fingered kleptomaniac, I was a voracious scavenger, and I wound up in the same place he did, I just got there slower. It's the place where stimpacks (functionally identical to potions of healing) are so easy to come by that you just charge blindly into situations where you're ludicrously overmatched, because in order to kill you, the bad guys have to dish out damage faster than you can whack whatever hotkey you mapped to the ginormous stimpack soda fountain you have strapped to your back. When you're struggling with some combination of poor armor, low hit points, and small stimpack cache, it's interesting. When a grenade to your face does less damage than can be healed by one of the fifty stimpacks you have on your person, it's markedly less interesting.
Why? Why are the bloody things so prevalent? Why are they so ruthlessly effective? Why are they not the least bit addictive? (The game has an addiction mechanism for other chemical enhancers; stimpacks are, curiously, exempt.) Why do they cure you of everything that physically ails you? Why even bother adding a critical damage element when you can just heal it with one stroke of the hotkey?
The game has a radiation mechanism that, while not exactly having much to do with real-world radiation, is interesting ... at least for a while. In the early going, when your precious precious immortality-granting stimpacks are a bit tougher to come by, the best way to recover from your wounds is by eating or drinking. And damn near everything you eat or drink is, to some degree, radioactive. Thus, you're always mindful of how much radiation you're toting around, because the drug to get rid of it, "Rad-Away," is genuinely difficult to find.
This mechanic simply ceases to be interesting when you get your own house (which can happen fairly early in the game) and purchase "My First Infirmary" for it (which ain't cheap, but if you're diligently either scavenging the long-dead or robbing the still-living, you can afford it). Once you have this nifty device, you can purge yourself of radiation at will. So the amount of radiation you accrue becomes a big fat "Who cares?", because you can eliminate it, entirely, for free, damn near whenever you feel like it. And your stimpack cache eventually becomes large enough that you can down them like M&M's, meaning you no longer have to screw around with that tainted food or water in the first place.
Again, it's not that difficult to envision a fix. Eliminate My First Infirmary's magic radiation-eliminating properties and toss in few status flags that keep track of when you last ate/drank and start punishing you if you go too long without, and voila -- the radiation mechanism stays relevant throughout the game.
I don't mind that certain problems become easier to manage as the game progresses -- that's kind of the point of improving your character. But I do mind if you hit a point where core problems simply cease to matter, and that's what happens here.
Another example of the game helping you entirely too much is the Fast Travel mechanism. There's a lot of world to explore, but once you find something significant enough for the game to include it in your map, you can travel back to it whenever you chose. (Provided you're outside and not near anything that wants to turn you into lunch, but those are easy conditions to meet.) It prevents a lot of needless and boring tromping over the same terrain you've already visited, but it also means that traversing the map becomes trivially simple. Seriously, if you want to visit a store located Way Over There, you don't even have to change out of your pajamas; you arrive with the touch of a button. It's so easy to get around that the game mechanics wouldn't have changed one iota if it had teleporter pods scattered generously through the wasteland.
If I have to traverse the map with a single clip of ammo and badly-damaged armor, I should be worried, dammit. A simple random encounter mechanism, which the first two games had, would have made the game much more immersive and satisfying.
And then there's the Grand Finale, which works as spectacle and tries for something haunting and memorable, but fails on any level beyond eye-candy. During the final assault, you're really just along for the ride; the good guys have refurbished a huge ass-stomping robot to unleash on the bad guys, and all you have to do is run after it and watch it annihilate all opposition. Though certainly fun to watch, it was about as satisfying as a cut-scene. (In fact, in a game like this, you'd expect to scavenge for the killer robot's missing pieces, possibly as part of an optional side-quest that, if you fail to complete, forces you to do the assault the hard way and taking heavy casualties in the process. Or maybe as a way of rewarding those players who pimped-out their Science and Repair skills at the expense of the more traditional Blow Shit Up skills. Nope; the NPCs have this one under control entirely, thanks.)
Once you get where you're going, there's a base full of bad guys to waste, but you've been in harder fights than this with less help. And then you're finally presented with an option where a heroic sacrifice is needed -- and either you can make the sacrifice yourself, or try to talk an NPC into making it for you.
It's a nice idea. But the execution falls flat for three reasons:
- They ripped it off from Start Trek II. Wholesale. Room fulla super-deadly radiation? Yeah, we've been here before, thanks.
- According to the mechanics laid-out by the game, a room fulla super-deadly radiation isn't that big of a threat. Just put on some radiation-resistant armor (check), pop some Rad-X pills (check), and start tearing through your accumulated stash of Rad-Away like they were Kleenex (big check), and you should be fine. Instead, you die due to authorial fiat, which is the most irritating of all deaths.
- It's a false choice. To the helper NPC I just picked up, a room fulla super-deadly radiation is about as threatening as a tanning bed. In fact, that was a major plot point just an hour ago! Seriously, how come sending him in there wasn't even an option?
So, yeah. The ending would have been great if it didn't have me going "Bitch, please" for three completely independent reasons.
There are other deficiencies. The game is quite glitchy, at least on the PC; I wound up having to re-load games because it had glitched its way into various impassible cul-de-sacs, and I actually witnessed a woman getting married to her imaginary friend. Your helper NPCs have absolutely no impact on the non-combat portions of the game, because other NPCs pretend they don't exist at all; I really wanted to know whether Paladin Cross was still alive and was looking forward to the reaction when I showed up at the Citadel with Fawkes in tow, but nobody gave a shit about either their alleged comrade in arms or their mortal enemy. The conclusion to the main quest is quite rushed; tromping around with Fawkes at my back looked like it'd be fun, but I made the mistake of going to the next portion of the main plot, which immediately tobaggoned me to the less-than-satisfying ending. The risque sense of humor from prior incarnations is gone entirely; Fallout 2 had a porn studio, Fallout 3 gives you a cuddle-hooker. (There was one side-quest I completed just so somebody in this game would get laid, dammit.) The writing was inconsistent; the nuclear war was allegedly about 200 years ago, but there are portions that only make sense if it was much more recent -- maybe just a few years ago. (Little Lamplight, I'm looking in your direction.) The "Local Map" feature is often unintelligible and cluttered to the point of uselessness; If I'm going to be traversing multiple vertical levels, then any auto-map feature really needs to be able to show me those levels individually.
I just spent 1500 words harping on what's wrong with the game -- but it's actually a damn good game. When it's truly rolling, it's immersive and satisfying as hell, with several moments that elicited genuine emotional reactions from me. The side-quests are creative and fun -- Moira's Wasteland Survival Guide was an absolute hoot, and functions as the best tutorial evar. (The fact that Moira sounds a bit like Sarah Palin only added to the fun.) The combat system has enough depth to be interesting without being overwhelming, and the game gives you a wide variety of ways to play it. And there is oh so much to see and do. It's a very good game. It's going to go on many peoples' Best of the Year lists, deservedly so.
No, I harp on the flaws because this game shouldn't have been "very good" -- it should have been fucking awesome. With a little more time, every mistake this game makes is fixable. Give this six more months of development -- six more months of QA testing, of playtesting, of addressing the balance issues that show up at mid to high levels, of adding some crucial elements and getting some of the suck out of that finale -- and you'd have a game that would show up on a whole bunch of Best of All Time lists.
Would that we could all fail so nobly.
