Leveling Down

Fallout 3 does an excellent job of immersing you in a post-nuclear war torn DC.

2008 has been a tough year in gaming for me to decide on a game of the year. Most of the big name releases this year have all had flaws in some form or another that have prevented them from being a game that clearly rises above the rest. Ninja Gaiden II had its technical issues, Call of Duty: World at War is another WWII rehash in the series, Gears of War 2 has broken matchmaking and balancing even worse than Call of Duty: World at War, Fable II never fully delivers on its epic promise, Dead Space manages to entertain but not kill the competition, and Left 4 Dead’s lack of any sort of persistent stats or ranking prevent it from being less than what it could have really been. Well, I’m glad I finally got around to Fallout 3, and it’s looking like there is a game that may emerge as my game of the year for 2008.

I was a fan of Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and Oblivion, but never played the first two Fallout games on the PC. I figured, Fallout 3 will just be Oblivion with guns so it’ll be awesome right? And while my initial experience was correct: that it would be awesome, it’s not really as much like Oblivion as I dismissed it to be. In fact, it actually gives me more of a BioShock vibe but with a deeper system (which I will get to later).

The game starts with you literally being born, allowing you to choose your gender and name. After some time spent with your childhood and teenage years, you eventually emerge from the vault that you’ve been living in your whole life to a post-nuclear wasteland. I honestly found the early years to be a little boring, including the escape from the vault itself. Something about all of the limitations in place had me off to somewhat of an underwhelming start.

However, once I made it out of the vault and hit the first town of Megaton, things picked up a bit. I want to talk about the first quest and dungeon I encountered in greater detail, so there will definitely be spoilers but I think they’re worth talking about to illustrate the depth of the game. After all, there are dozens of quests and dungeons throughout the game world so this is but a fraction of the game.

————BEGIN SPOILERS————–
The First Quest
The first quest that you come across when you enter the town of Megaton is that there’s a huge atomic bomb in the middle of town. If you talk to the sheriff and offer to dismantle the bomb, he will pay you (you can even try to sweet-talk him into paying you five times more if your Speech skill is high enough). Not too long later when you go to the bar in town, a guy named Mr. Burke will offer to pay you a hefty sum to detonate that same nuke, wiping out the town completely. He assures you that you will be able to do it from a safe distance away. At that point you are given various options. You can either accept his offer, tell him you’ll think about it, or flat out reject him (and kill him too if you wish). There’s even a fourth option: if you’re female with the Black Widow perk you can seduce him into changing his mind or getting someone else to do it.

I flat out rejected him and disarmed the bomb. The sheriff thanked me and it was all a happy ending to the quest. But what if I tried one of the other two options? If I decided to detonate the bomb, the town and all of its inhabitants would be wiped off the map for the rest of the game. Seemed like a huge price to pay. The last option though, is the most interesting: if you tell him you’ll consider it. You can actually go back and talk to the sheriff and tell him what the guy in the bar is up to. At that point, if you’re a good enough person, the sheriff will believe you and accompany you back to the bar to confront the guy. If you’re not that good of a person, he’ll just dismiss you.

This is what I like about the game – how so many different ways things can play out. When confronted with the sheriff, Mr. Burke will actually attempt to kill the sheriff and will succeed unless you intervene. The moment he pulls his silenced pistol on the sheriff, you can fire your weapon and if you kill Mr. Burke, the sheriff will thank you. Otherwise, the sheriff will be killed and you’ll never see him again for the rest of the game!

The First Dungeon
The town is all well and good, but I was itching to actually fight some enemies. I had just acquired a 10mm handgun, and wanted to see how the combat mechanics were outside of just using a BB gun when I was a kid. As I was wandering the wasteland outside the starting area, I came upon Springvale School. While I didn’t have any quests or anything there, it looked to be its own instance – basically a dungeon in the traditional fantasy RPG sense. I decided to check it out.

Upon entering the school, I discovered that it was run down (like everything else in the world of Fallout 3) but had been taken over by a group of raiders. These humans were in a sense “pirates” in Fallout 3 – scavengers that looked to kill and loot whenever and wherever they could. Upon entering my first fight with a raider lunging at me, I shot a few rounds of my 10mm and was shocked to see that I blew her head cleanly off and it fell to the floor, several feet away from the body. Whoa – this game is pretty violent. But I was still pretty gleeful as I continued sneaking through the school, checking corpses, various desks, and shelves for anything of value that I could use – whether it was healthkits, ammo for my guns, and various other trinkets of value. It felt very BioShock-ish in that dungeon, as it was a two hour romp where I explored the school, fighting off raiders, and reading logs about how the raiders were trying to dig underground to break into the vault I grew up in. The raiders were unsuccessful, as they encountered giant ants in the tunnel which ended up killing those of them that ventured down that far.

I decided to venture down to the tunnel myself to see what was up, and had to fight off several waves of giant ants before I reached a dead end. Two corpses lay on the ground, and after searching the bodies, I was delighted to find that one of them had an assault rifle. Awesome! I was so happy and I guess that was the “treasure” of the dungeon that was Springvale School. I also noticed a shiny book underneath the arm of one of the corpses, and I could not get to the book. Eventually I thought, let me try equipping my hunting knife and see if I can just swing at the arm. That way maybe it’ll knock the corpse off to the side and I can get the book. I was quite surprised that after one swing, the arm was cut completely off. I grabbed the book and ran, but felt a little guilty that I just defiled a corpse. I guess you can cut limbs off corpses in this game.

————-END SPOILERS————–

I’m starting to really enjoy this game now. I’m about 12 hours in, and I find it more appealing than Oblivion’s fantasy world simply because I’m working with handguns, shotguns, and assault rifles instead of daggers, clubs, and swords. Shooting people in targeted areas like their arms or head give combat a more satisfying feel compared to just slicing haphazardly with the sword. I like the precision shooting V.A.T.S. feature of the game. You can play it like a shooter, but the precision mode adds an a welcome layer of strategy to the combat. Depending on your stats and your distance to the enemy, you have a certain % that you will hit a targeted area of the enemy. If you shoot the weapon the enemy is holding enough times, the enemy will drop the weapon. If you damage one of his legs enough, his leg will get disabled and he will not be able to run. Shoot the antenna of a giant ant and it will go into a frenzy, attacking nearby ants for you.

I think the reason why I enjoy the game so much is that it is basically like BioShock + Oblivion, or really, just a much more advanced version of BioShock. Fallout 3 and BioShock share many similarities – you are exploring a world that has been completely destroyed, scrounging up whatever you can find on floors, shelves, and corpses. At the same time, you have various enemies to deal with that would like nothing better than to kill you and loot your corpse.

The location for the game also hits a little close to home, as I grew up and went to school around the DC area. If you know about the landmarks like the various museums, the Monument, and the Metro subway system, it makes the experience even grander. Seeing how various inhabitants have holed up in museums and subway tunnels as a result of the nuclear fallout and constant warfare sometimes sent chills down my spine. No longer was this a fantasy world with dragons flying around, but a very possible scenario if DC was hit by nukes. Maybe that’s why certain nuclear related material was edited out of the Japanese release for the game.

While BioShock had more of a simplistic leveling up system of picking what attributes to equip, Fallout 3 has the more traditional RPG number crunching for your stats. As you level up through each of the 20 levels in the game, you are awarded stat points to distribute towards whatever skills you feel would benefit you most, such as lockpicking, handling various gun types, speaking to others, etc. With the ability to play so many different types of characters, there’s rarely ever just one way to get through the game so people can really build their character however they wish to play. I think that the game does a good job of not making it feel too RPGish – the stats and perks you can learn are well explained and honestly not much different from the Perk system of the Call of Duty games. It’s no hardcore Dungeons & Dragons style RPG with saving throws and all that so I’d still encourage anyone to play this game even if “RPGs are not your thing”.

I also like that it has a classic Resident Evil-style feel to it too: a survival horror theme where you really can run out of ammo if you are not conservative. No longer do I have to deal with a small money cap and unlimited ammo like in Bioshock – Fallout 3 has me scavenging for bottle caps and ammo rounds wherever I go so it really feels like I’m just trying to survive. Eventually I’m hoping that all of these bottlecaps I’m saving will net me some strong weapons.

I’d say that if you enjoyed BioShock, Fallout 3 is not much more of a stretch and should definitely be picked up if you’re in the mood for an immersive 50 hour shooter/RPG. This isn’t 50 hours of turn-based random combat or back and forth traveling – it’s all action and exploration. The game is more of an adventure game than anything, and there’s rarely any backtracking due to the game allowing you to immediately warp to any location you’ve already discovered.

There aren’t too many games I’ve played that are a shooter and RPG hybrid, but Fallout 3 does it and manages to possibly be the best game of 2008. It seems to do everything it set out to do, without leaving the player feeling disappointed. As I play through the game and prepare my eventual review, I can only wonder if the game will stay as excellent as it has been. Something tells me that I have nothing to worry about.

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