Dad's Wager: Fallout 3

In my world, the biggest factor in determining an RPG's (role-playing game's) success in regards to personal satisfaction and appreciation is how much the game offers to make me consider why I make the choices I do. That's one of the main reasons I don't enjoy playing Japanese-style RPGs, as they tend to run on predetermined, destiny-based plotlines that make the experience more literally playing a role, as if one was in a play with a fixed script. When I role-play, I want to explore what makes me tick in real life. Recent releases like Mass Effect have been great for that, but I have to say that Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3 (2008) is the greatest yet, and with a few tweaks could be my favourite RPG thus far.

The newest addition to a series I've never played, Fallout 3 takes place two hundred years after a nuclear war has decimated most if not all of the U.S. and is set in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding area. You play someone who's grown up in a Vault, an underground bunkered community safe from radiation and other dangers above. Raised by your loving dad after mom dies in childbirth, life is content until you're woken up one day to discover that Dad's left the Vault (forbidden!), the Vault's Overseer is furious and has already had Dad's assistant killed, and Dad, that louse, has left you nothing but a cryptic note explaining absolutely nothing in regards to where he's gone and why. It should be mentioned here that Dad is the Vault's doctor, so it's a safe bet that whatever's happened has something to do with scientific pursuits of grave importance. And so, up you go in to the big wide Capital Wasteland, a lonely nineteen year-old forced to take your first taste of the world as you set out to find your father, and ask him why he left you.

The most notable thing about Fallout 3 is that it's massive. What I mean by this is, the map is humongous, and very, very full. Even the buildings are huge compared to similar zones in other games - you can easily spend two hours exploring a bombed-out school or office building. And it's not just the size that requires so much time. You know how the word "wasteland" is generally preceeded by "barren", and used to describe a place that is empty and desolate? The Capital Wasteland is a literal land laid to waste, full not only of rubble and half-ruined buildings, but the detritus of human society. Everywhere you turn the ground will be littered with things like bent tin cans, empy bottles, lunch boxes, and it's pretty common to find drugs lying around in a bathroom. The sheer amount of random crap lying around for you to pick up in Fallout 3 is astonishing, but perfectly realistic and an effort much appreciated by this gamer. Also, a lot of it isn't so random, as you can build your own weapons out of certain items, and one of those weapons is a launcher that can use anything as ammo. Anyways, from a visual point of view, it's one of the most holistic games I've seen. It even does the "retro future" thing well, without seeming forced or winky to trying too hard. I don't think I've ever seen this style feel normal before.

Indeed, Fallout 3's attention to detail extends clear through to its soundtrack. Sure, it has an instrumental score, but it also has two fixed in-game radio stations, one of which plays nothing but retro jazz and big band tunes - all of which have lyrics that make nice, often sad or hilarious allegories for things like leaving the Vault, Dad's quest, and one, from South Pacific, that I've determined is a dark in-joke for folks who know their U.S. WWII history as relates to the sequence of events that led to the bombing of Hiroshima. People who still insist that video games as a medium are brainless and stupid have less of a leg to stand on in this decade than ever before.

A nice gameplay touch is the "Perk" system. Every time you level up, you distribute your skill points and then must select from a list of perks, according to your level and skill/attribute ranks. On top of that, some perks have ranks, so as more perks become available to you, choosing between acquiring new ones (say, better criticals) and raising the ranks of existing ones (increasing the number of skill points you get for reading books, for example) becomes a tough tactical decision. Oh, and speaking of tactical decisions, you can't progress past level 20, so choose those perks and skill increases wisely! My other favourite aspect of Fallout 3's gameplay? You can't just magically repair your weapons and body armor, you must have spares to take the parts from. In other words, in order to repair an assault rifle, you'll need another assault rifle on your person. Fun! It's those little touches, upping realism and requiring a little strategy, that really tie a game together.

There are, of course, downsides to the gameplay. The in-game targeting system, V.A.T.S., can be very helpful, but can also be a real hinderance. If you're low on ammo, you'll likely waste more in V.A.T.S. than you will just eyeballing it. However, you could inadvertently wind up wasting a lot eyeballing as well. The game's assisted targeting or auto-aim can't be turned off, so far as I can tell, and what would in a first-person shooter be a guaranteed kill shot can end up missing the target. The auto-aim also doesn't work through gaps so well, meaning that if you want to be sneaky and pop someone through a hole in a fence, regardless of where your cursor is aimed there's a high chance that round will be considered to have hit the fence, and if you're really unlucky it might ricochet back and kill you. It's almost like the game punishes people who are better shots than the assisted targeting is, and it can make playing my favourite character type, the sneaky little sniper, very frustrating.

The single biggest downside to Fallout 3, and what causes the war within me for recommending it, is that it is the first gratuitously violent game I've played. Now, if you know me, or read this blog, you know I'm against sanitizing violence. The thing is, Fallout 3 goes to places unnecessary: all critical hits and/or kill shots result in decapitation or dismemberment. I can see this being justifiable when using explosives, missile launchers, the Fat Man (a mini-nuke launcher), or even a shotgun at close range, but so help me, I'm 99.9% certain it is physically impossible to decapitate a man with a single .44 pistol round to the forehead at 100 meters. You can in theory circumvent this unpleasantry by only using energy weapons, which turn people to ash or goo, but even the plasma rifle can, in V.A.T.S. animation, somehow manage to blow someone's head off before the instant incineration caused when plasma meets organic matter. And, of course, V.A.T.S. happens in slow-motion. It's disgusting, it's unhealthy, it's completely gratuitous and, unfortunately, it's an inescapable part of an otherwise incredible game. I wasn't expecting this at all from a Bethesda game, but Corey says that in this they were just being true to the rest of the series, which Bethesda didn't work on. I wonder if it's Bethesda taking a swipe at this aspect of the series when Galaxy News Radio's DJ, Three Dog, makes a sarcastic comment about "today's forecast: excessively violent, with a chance of dismemberment!". I'm all for ratings boards, but when Australia's board refused to allow Fallout 3 in-country because the game developers wanted to call morphine "morphine" (i.e. a real-world drug reference), but didn't blink an eye over the relentless, excessive decapitations....well, that just seems strange to me. I mean, it's not like using cutesy names for drugs discourages usage - "Special K", anyone? - but excessive violence does desensitize.

And yet, in spite of that major downside, Fallout 3 is the most interesting, probably best RPG I've ever played on the RP side of things. The main story is excellent, and the side quests are just great, and range from fun 'n frivolous to annoying-but-beneficial to dark and disturbing, and everything in between. Also, there are a few fun sci-fi/horror homage quests, like "Those!" and "The Replicated Man" (or, Bladerunner). In keeping with the overall tone of the game, even fun quests will send you to dark places. In "The Nuka-Cola Challenge", you'll have to make a stop at the Wasteland's main slave camp, and whether you just steal the cola and sneak away or kill all the slavers and lead the slaves to safety has nothing to do with the quest, and is entirely up to you. But either way, doing "The Nuka-Cola Challenge" will force you to confront this option. Which brings me to my appreciation for Bethesda's clear stances on good and evil. The most common human enemies in Fallout 3 are slavers and raiders, roving gangs of humans who thrive on slaughter, sadism, and sexual torture, and for whom no potential victim is off-limits. The only reason I cringe when killing a raider is if V.A.T.S. decapitates one. You get Karma (this game's good/evil measurement) for killing them, and a bounty if you join the Regulators after level 14. However, you can choose to live like a raider in Fallout 3, which brings us to this game's best, most interesting, most unique aspect: the ending. If you don't want to know how it ends, this would be a good time to stop reading. In most RPGs, the main quest leads up to you triumphing over seemingly impossible odds, to either continue making the world a better place or begin your formal reign of terror. What makes Fallout 3 different, and more interesting, is that the game will end with your death. No matter how you've chosen to live your life, whether you've brought light to dark places or lived a life of careless evil and depravity, you will die. Much like in real life, you might say. Before your death, you must choose whether to commit a final, wide-scale act of evil, a final, wide-scale act of good, or to do nothing, and simply wait until the clock runs out...but for you, every action has the same consequence. The wantonly evil acts available in Fallout 3 are often so useless - like blowing up the only city you can buy a house in, or extorting people who can't give you more than a couple of bucks - that, combined with the ending, it's almost like a secular, video game version of Pascal's Wager.

There's so much I've left out here, like some of the funny bits, or the main quest, or how drug use will turn you into an addict and severely impact your attributes, or how you can get power armor that'll make you look just like the cap trooper on the cover of my edition of Starship Troopers. If you've been to D.C., as I have, you may get a real kick out of recognizing half-ruined landmarks, or knowing where to go when your quest objective is something like "go to the museum of Natural History and speak with Reilly". I know I did! On a different note, the voice acting is even more uniformly excellent than Mass Effect, and if Dad sounds familiar, that's because he's known by day as Liam Neeson. I have mixed feelings about famous actors making forays into voice work, as professional voice actors have been all but eliminated from Hollywood animated movies in favour of famous names, and major studio games are now the only high-profile platform for professional voice actors to strut their stuff and, you know, make a living). But, it seems like there are only a handful of game voice actors who don't make me want to skip the dialogue, and they seem to be getting regular work on good titles, so...I just don't know.

Fallout 3''s grim nature and setting, plus its gratuitous violence, make it less fun than other RPGs I've played, but all in all, I'm willing to crown it most interesting. If you can stomach it, its a fascinating excercise in, well, yourself, and how you live your life, and to what purpose. Or, to paraphrase the tagline for Shaun of the Dead, a smash hit father-daughter wasteland adventure. With mutants.