Great Games That Actually Suck: Fallout 3

And now we come to the very nadir of my "Great Games That Actually Suck" series - Fallout 3. Now, don't misunderstand me - Fallout 3 is far from deserving the title of "Worst Game Ever;" instead, it's simply mediocre. But in a way, that makes it all the worse, especially considering that Fallout 1 & 2 are considered some of the greatest RPGs ever developed. Had Fallout 3 been a true stinker, we might have laughed at it as we would an Uwe Boll film and thought no more of it. Instead, it's practically offensive with its mediocrity, like following up a masterfully-prepared filet mignon with stale bread.

Naturally, one ought to prepare for mediocrity when dealing with Bethesda Softworks, who snatched up the rights to the Fallout franchise from Interplay. (Black Isle Studios had their own Fallout 3 in development, codenamed Van Buren, which sadly never saw the light of day) As I discussed in my review of Skyrim, Bethesda is a developer with such a low regard for quality that the rallying cry of their average fan is "The modders will fix it!" Their only notable output has been The Elder Scrolls series, and even that is a shining example of stagnation (or, perhaps, degradation, since each iteration of the franchise removes more and more features and adds more and more bugs).

Now, I realise that Fallout 3 has a significant number of defenders (or shall I say, apologists) who zealously denounce anyone who criticises the game as "Just nostalgic! Too old! Clinging to old mechanics! Can't accept change!" It's always the same refrain: the problem isn't with the game, the problem is with the critics. But to paraphrase SFDebris, if the only way you can defend something is to suggest that there is something wrong with people who dislike it, then would you kindly hang a sign around your neck that reads "I'm a fucking moron" so the rest of us can move on to someone who actually has a point.

Since Bethesda is the very definition of a one-trick pony, it's hardly surprising that they decided not to develop Fallout 3 as an isometric, turn-based RPG, and instead turn it into a first-person shooter with a few poorly-implemented RPG mechanics thrown in. It's much closer in feel to one of the Elder Scrolls games, albeit set in the Fallout universe, hence why Fallout 3 is derisively (and correctly) referred to as "Oblivion With Guns." That the game was released on consoles ought to have further clued gamers in to the fact that was going to be nothing like the first two games; PC games rarely make the transition to consoles without being stripped of much, if not most, of their depth and complexity.

The end result wasn't just "Oblivion With Guns," it was "Fallout - The Theme Park Version." Like one of the cargo cults of the South Pacific, it apes the superficial aspects of the Fallout games, whilst understanding absolutely nothing about what made the first two games so great. Take away the Fallout trappings - the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, the retro-futuristic look, the various wasteland factions - and what you'd be left with is yet another brown-coloured, post-apocalyptic shooter that would be nigh-indistinguishable from Rage or Borderlands.

Where to begin? That's a hard question to answer, because in Fallout 3 there's something wrong with everything, and it's usually a major thing. Take, for instance, the game's prologue, which takes place inside Vault 101, located near the ruins of Washington, D.C. The first Fallout game is an example of how to do an opening chapter right - after creating your character, the Vault Dweller, you begin right outside the Vault 13 entrance, with a control panel and a skeletal corpse nearby, along with some large rats moving about. By interacting with these things, the player learns how to interact with objects, loot bodies, equip items, and fight enemies, all without having to deal with some obnoxious forced tutorial section. This means that veteran players don't have to wade through an extended prologue before getting into the meat of the game. Fallout 3, on the other hand, has an agonisingly drawn-out tutorial section, beginning with the character's birth (and of course his/her mother dies in childbirth, because there's some law of RPG protagonists that they must have only one living parent) and ending when he/she is an adult. Much like Oblivion and Skyrim, the prologue is long and unskippable, as though Bethesda were completely unaware that people might wish to play through the game more than once.

In both original Fallout titles, the overarching plot was extremely simplistic; in the first game it was "Find the water chip, stop the Super Mutants" and in the second it was "Find the GECK, stop the Enclave." But the path the player followed through the story could change dramatically depending on what sort of character you were playing as, giving the player a great deal of "ownership" of the story, if you will. Fallout 3, on the other hand, is a largely linear affair despite the apparently open-ended nature of the game world. As in in Oblivion, the player character is often reduced to being a lackey for NPCs who are the real movers and shakers of the game's story. In Oblivion, it was Martin who was the true hero of the story, whereas in Fallout 3 it's Dad who acts as the principal agent of the story. And in both of these instances, the characters are voiced by big name actors, because if there's one thing Bethseda loves, it blowing huge sums of money on high-priced voice actors, and leaving a half-dozen actors to voice the rest of the NPCs.

The actual plot involves the player character's father trying to find a way to purify the water supply in the Capital Wasteland, a plan he names "Project Purity." Project Purity requires a GECK, but the Enclave has other plans, desiring to take control of Project Purity and eliminate all mutants, ghouls, and wastelanders. Predictably, the player character (or "The Lone Wanderer") plays the errand boy throughout all this. The whole plot is essentially a mash-up of the first two games...something about water purification, something about super mutants, something about a GECK, and something about the Enclave. With the game set on the East Coast, Bethesda had the opportunity to bring some completely new factions to the Fallout universe, but instead they simply rehashed what had been done before. They couldn't even get the original factions right - the Brotherhood of Steel has gone from a band of xenophobic fanatics to a bunch of white knight paladins, and the super mutants might as well be orcs with guns.

Furthermore, Fallout 3 is absolutely riddled with plot holes and things that simply make no sense and demonstrate clearly that Bethesda didn't think the game's plot or setting all the way through. For instance, the game makes a big deal about Project Purity, basically a glorified Brita filter, even though filtering water through earth can remove nearly all radioactive particles...something that is a basic skill for surviving nuclear war! And the actual Project Purity installation is located in the Jefferson Memorial for no other reason than Bethesda thought it was cool (which, as you'll quickly realise after playing the game, seems to be their rationale for everything, no matter how little sense it makes). Too bad the Jefferson Memorial is located downstream of the Potomac drainage basin, meaning that everyone else upstream of Washington, D.C. is going to be stuck drinking contaminated water. Did I mention the whole Project Purity bit makes no goddamn sense?

Furthermore, Bethesda didn't seem to realise that, in the time the game takes place, two hundred years have passed since the nuclear war that devastated the world. So why is there this sickly green glow everywhere the player goes? Why is there almost no vegetation growing anywhere? Why can I find still edible packages of food lying around? Why do ruined cars explode with mushroom clouds when shot? Even assuming the idiotic explanation that this is because they're nuclear-powered, wouldn't this mean that a single accident on a busy street would quickly escalate into a nuclear apocalypse? ZANY! WACKY!

Bethesda developer: "Durrrr hurrrr...'sploshuns are cool, mannnnnn...."

It's a good thing that nuclear warheads have the common courtesy to leave monuments largely undamaged.

And continuing with Fallout 3's theme of "let's throw some random crap into the game that makes no bloody sense just because we think it looks cool" the player can go to the White House, which took a direct hit from a nuclear bomb and was subsequently reduced to a crater:

Bethesda developer: "See, it's the White House, but it's been BLOWN UP, SEE!!!??? We're so ZANY and WACKY!!!"

Well, if it took a direct hit from a nuclear warhead, then why the hell are the surrounding buildings almost totally undamaged? Apparently in Bethesda's version of the Fallout world, nuclear bombs possess no more destructive power than a single conventional bomb. But while they will leave most structures intact, they will prevent any vegetation from growing for at least two centuries.

But you don't have to play through the entire game to fully grasp the sheer stupidity on display in Fallout 3, no, you can find it all at Megaton, the first town the player visits. Megaton is so named because it was built from airplane parts around an unexploded nuclear bomb, which begs the question of...why? It's not as if people in the Fallout world have forgotten what nuclear weapons are capable of; on the contrary, people should be scared shitless of them. So what possible reason would people have to build a town around one? And why would you even need to build a town in the first place, considering that the ruins of Washington contain numerous buildings that are largely intact? Why not simply live there instead?

Oh, but there's a group of people who worship the unexploded atomic bomb because, well...ZANY!!! WACKY!!!

Inside Megaton, the player finds the most irritating NPC in the game - Moira Brown. She wants to write a survival guide for the wasteland (two hundred years after the bombs dropped? Kind of late for that, isn't it?), and so she has you do all manner of ZANY and WACKY things like irradiating yourself or walking through a minefield to gather information for her guide. Oh, but the stupidity is just beginning.

See, there's a bloke hanging around Megaton who wants to set off the atomic bomb in the middle of the town. Why? Well, his boss, Allistair Tenpenny, considers the town a blight on the landscape and wants it removed, because everyone knows that setting off a nuclear bomb does wonderful things for property values. Now, given the rampant stupidity on display, I imagine most players will go for the "evil" route and set off the bomb:

Oh, but the ZANINESS and WACKINESS doesn't end there, oh no! Somehow Moira Brown survived being at ground zero of a nuclear blast, and has been transformed into a ghoul (despite the fact that it takes several weeks or months for individuals to become ghouls). And how does she rebuke the player when she finds out he's responsible for nuking her home?

"'Apologise to everyone in town and don't do it again!"

ZANY!!!

WACKY!!! 

*Headdesk*

Or how about the town of Little Lamplight? It's an underground town populated entirely by children, because they kick people out once they reach the age of 16. So how does the population of Little Lamplight sustain itself? Why isn't it abandoned? Do they kidnap children from the surface? Do people in Little Pregnant start having children as soon as they hit puberty? (something that the game doesn't even hint at?)

Or how about one of the game's most powerful weapons, the Fat Man? It's basically a miniature nuke launcher, because in a post-apocalyptic world people are going to be extremely casual about the use of nuclear weapons. Supposedly it was based on the Davy Crockett, a real-life mini-nuke launcher, but Bethesda obviously didn't read the part about it subjecting everyone within a quarter mile to a lethal dose of radiation, because the Fat Man won't harm you so long as you're clear of the blast.

But the best example of Fallout 3's cargo-cultish imitation of the classic Fallout games has to be the encounter with President Eden, leader of the Enclave. It turns out that he's actually a sentient computer (which requires a Science skill check, even though it's painfully obvious that he's a machine), and you can convince him that his plan is flawed and that he ought to self-destruct. The conversation where this happens is so stupid it has to be seen to be believed:

PC: "[Speech] This has to end, Eden. You need to destroy yourself and your base"
Eden: "And why would I do that, when I am clearly the best hope for the people of the Wasteland?"
PC: "You can't just decide to take over, and force everyone to follow you."
Eden: "What alternative would you suggest? Without the Enclave, what would the world do?"
PC: "If you don't stop it now, where will it end? It's up to you to do what's right."
Eden: "Yes, I suppose it is. Very well, you shall have your wish. Once you have left, I will put an end to the Enclave."

Bethesda was clearly aiming to recreate the confrontation with the Master in the first Fallout game, but in that case, the player had to present evidence and a logical argument to convince him that his plan was doomed from the start. In Fallout 3, the player just throws vague platitudes at President Eden until he declares "Oh, I guess you're right" and self-destructs. Really, if one conversation could illustrate how utterly stupid the writing in this game is, this would be it.

Or perhaps the worst bit of writing comes when the Lone Wanderer nukes Megaton and Dad finds out about it. So what does dear old Dad have to say to his mass-murdering son? Now, before you take a guess, keep in mind that this Bethesda we're talking about, so you'll have to think up the dumbest possible thing imaginable.

Are you ready? When Dad finds out you nuked Megaton, he states that he's "very disappointed in you."

VERY. DISAPPOINTED. IN. YOU.

Good Lord, this is asinine. Saying that you are "disappointed" in your child is something you say when comes home with an "F" on his report card, not when he sets off a fucking nuclear bomb in the middle of a town! What would the Lone Wanderer have to do to make Dad truly angry? Commit genocide? Violate the dead body of his wife in front of him? Nuking Megaton ought to make the everyone in the game try to shoot the Lone Wanderer on sight. It ought to make him the most hated person in the Capital Wasteland, even worse than the Enclave. It should not result in Dad acting like you just stuck your hand in the cookie jar!

And the ending? Well, it turns out the only way to turn on the Project Purity machine is to walk into a room and throw a switch, which will deliver a lethal dose of radiation to anyone standing in the chamber. So the two options are to either A: sacrifice yourself, or B: get one of the Brotherhood of Steel members to sacrifice herself. But during the course of the game the player might have enlisted the services of a ghoul, a robot, or a super mutant as their henchmen, all of whom are immune to radiation. So why can one of them throw the switch? No reason, save for some utterly bullshit excuses, such as they "don't want to interfere in your destiny." And if you listen closely, you can hear Bethesda's programmers making choo-choo noises as they railroad the plot.

Given the appalling quality of the writing, the only thing that might have saved Fallout 3 is the gameplay, but alas that too is every bit as mediocre as the rest of the game. I will never accept the argument that the isometric, turn-based gameplay of the original Fallout games is "outdated" or that it "won't sell," and I'm rather certain that what the Fallout community wanted was something that played like the first two games, not Oblivion with guns.

Oh, sure, Bethesda did a good job of copying the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system and skill sets from the first two games, then completely failed to implement them properly, thus proving once again that they don't have a clue about RPG mechanics, what purpose they serve, or why they exist. In the original Fallout, outcomes were decided entirely based on the PC's skills and attributes. A PC with a higher Perception stat or high guns skill would be more likely to hit an opponent than one without those skills and attributes. A PC who had a high Intelligence would get appropriate dialogue options, whereas someone with low Intelligence would sound like a gibbering moron. The game could play out entirely different depending on how you built your character.

Well there's none of that in Fallout 3. Since the game is played from a first-person perspective, that means that your character's ability to aim and hit an opponent is based on the player's skill, not that of the player character, which is something an RPG should never do. Player skill should never trump character skill, because then you are not playing as your character, you are simply playing as *you*! So what effect does raising your gun skills have in Fallout 3, then? It makes your bullets do more damage. That's not how guns work, Bethesda! If I fire a bullet into someone's face, it doesn't matter whether I'm a sharpshooter or a clumsy buffoon, he's probably going to die.

None of the other skills and attributes matter, either. Someone with a Strength of 1 can fire a MIRV with little difficulty. Someone with an Intelligence of 1 can talk like a scientist. There are Speech and Intelligence checks in dialogue, but Bethesda obviously don't know what an intelligent person would say, so the [Intelligence] dialogue options usually boil down the player character stating the thunderingly obvious.

[Intelligence]Nuclear weapons are devastating weapons of mass destruction and do not, in fact, merely tickle.

Then there is V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System), Bethesda's cack-handed attempt at replicating turn-based combat in a real-time game. During combat, the player actives V.A.T.S., which pauses the game and allows them to aim at various body parts on a targeted NPC. Attacks can be queued up, with the number of attacks determined by your Action Points, and upon exiting V.A.T.S. the player character will carry out the attacks (in slow-motion bullet time, naturally, which gets old after seeing it about a dozen times or so).

The issue with V.A.T.S. is while your character is attacking, he's virtually invulnerable. That's bad enough, but once you get a perk that restores all your AP after killing something in V.A.T.S., it becomes beyond broken. No doubt Bethesda's justification for this was that the player was invincible while making aimed shots in the original Fallout, but that was because it was turn-based, meaning that the enemy was invincible while aiming his shots, too. Since Fallout 3 is in real time, V.A.T.S. essentially gives you all the benefits of turn-based combat, while giving none of it to your enemies. Worse, crippling your opponent's arms and legs does bugger all, meaning there's no reason to aim at anything but your enemy's head. And they removed the option for a groin attack, those bastards!

"Forgettable" is probably the most generous term I could give to Fallout 3's gameplay. There's no real sense that you've created a unique character, or that the game world is reacting to the character you've created. The game's morality system is completely binary, with choices falling squarely into "Good" versus "Evil," and the karma is so easily abused as to be laughable. Nuked Megaton and are now classified as "Very Evil?" Just donate a few thousand caps to an NPC in Rivet City to raise your Karma, then kill him to get back the caps with only a slight hit to your Karma. Then again, maybe that was an intentional move on Bethesda's part, you know, to bring more ZANINESS and WACKINESS to the wasteland.

Graphically, Fallout 3 is an eyesore. Not just because of the puke-green haze hanging over everything, but because of the quality of the graphics themselves. The game runs on the same godawful Gamebryo engine that Oblivion used, which means spotty framerates, constant hiccups as the game loads in distant models and textures, and, oh yes, the ugliest goddamn facial models I've ever seen! It truly warms my heart to see that Bethesda has not improved on this glaring flaw from Oblivion, so once again NPCs faces resemble lumpy dough.

On the audio side of things, Bethesda repeats the folly of Oblivion and hires two big-name actors (Liam Neeson and Malcom McDowell) to voice major characters, and then has a handful of other actors to do the voices for every other NPC in the game. This results in the same feeling that one had throughout Oblivion - "Hey, didn't I just talk to you?"

The soundtrack to Fallout 3 is thoroughly unmemorable. Mark Morgan, the composer of the ambient soundscapes of the first two games, offered to work on Fallout 3, but instead Bethesda had Inon Zur compose the soundtrack, resulting in an orchestral, cinematic score that's totally ill-fitting for the setting. Rather than enhancing the sinister, desolate atmosphere of the post-apocalyptic world (such as the Vault 13 music),  the soundtrack to Fallout 3 just sort of hangs in the air and is completely forgettable.

And I'd be remiss in my duty as a reviewer if I did not point out the unhappy fact that Fallout 3 possesses more bugs than the Brazilian rainforest. If the game isn't freezing or locking up, it's crashing to the desktop. If it isn't freezing or CTDing, it's having enemies mysterious floating up in the air, or dead bodies flailing and trashing about spasmodically. Sometimes, after killing someone, their limbs will stretch out like rubber bands while their body thrashes about. Wasteland textures models will end up stretching across the entire screen. Dead NPCs sometimes warn you about not stealing their things.

NPCs referring to the player character by the wrong gender. Followers dropping dead upon entering a new area. Pushing buttons too fast in the menus might cause the game to lock up! PS3 versions of the game will experience significant slow-down once the save file reaches a certain size. In some areas of the game, it's possible to fall out of the map and into a never-ending void below. The player character dying inexplicably after loading a save. And mixed together with all this is crashes, crashes, and yet more crashes.

Get used to seeing this.

This...this is simply inexcusable. Perhaps the wretchedly buggy state of Fallout 3 would be understandable if the publisher had rushed development, but Bethesda had four bloody years to make this thing...and they had an existing graphics engine, to boot! There is no excuse whatsoever for Fallout 3 to be as buggy as it is. None at all.

In the end, Fallout 3 is simply a waste. It has no reason to exist. By setting the game on the East Coast, Bethesda had the opportunity to do something completely new and unexpected, but instead they chose the lazy path of rehashing the first two games. Fallout 3 adds nothing to the Fallout world, shows us nothing we have not seen before, and provides a gameplay experience that is little more than Oblivion with guns. I must reiterate what I said before - this isn't Fallout, this is Fallout: The Theme Park Version. It superficially apes the look and setting of the first two games while failing to grasp what made those games so great. It fails to understand how the black humour of Fallout 1 and 2 worked, and instead focuses on being WACKY and ZANY, resulting in a game that doesn't treat the Fallout franchise with any degree of seriousness.

But what really galls me are the legions of apologists that this game has, who attack anyone who dares to suggest that Fallout 3 ought to have played similarly to its predecessors. Honestly, how fucking low do your standards have to be to accept this buggy, poorly-written, dumbed-down mess of a game as a worthy successor to the Black Isle titles? And to think this won the Game of the Year award from the "professional" gaming press...give me a break. Between this and their defence of the godawful Mass Effect 3, I'm not sure which is a more damning indictment of the gaming press.

If anyone is looking to play a Fallout game, either get the originals from gog.com, or play the vastly superior, Obsidian-developed follow-up New Vegas. But don't subsidise mediocrity - avoid Fallout 3 like it's radioactive.