30 For 30: Fallout

I turned 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 13, imagine Ron Perlman reading this entry out loud for the authentic Fallout experience.

While RPGs on videogame consoles had gotten better and better throughout the 90s, during the same period the genre had all but stagnated on PCs. Credit is largely given to BioWare for breathing life back into PC RPGs, but it's easy to forget that Fallout and its sequel were both out by the time Baldur's Gate arrived in late 1998. I don't want to diminish the impact that BioWare's classic had though I do think that Fallout deserves more credit than it gets, to say nothing of the Elder Scrolls series. Not so much for its influence on games released in its wake but rather for its originality and replayability, Fallout should be held up as one of those 'exceptions to the rule' games that proves companies don't need to rely on Fantasy or straight up Sci Fi settings to find an audience.

Even though Fallout's world and style borrows liberally from the Wasteland series, as well as other post-apocalyptic media like Mad Max, the addition of a retro-futuristic style gave the game its own personality. The inclusion of the song 'Maybe' by the Ink Spots and the famous Pip-Boy character make Fallout stand out from any other game of its era. Fallout is also a heavily atmospheric game, with a cinematic/ambient soundtrack that perfectly complements the environments of vast desert landscapes and run down post-apocalyptic settlements. This aesthetic and atmosphere is the crucial part of what makes the Fallout series what it is, far more than the overhead camera angle and turn based combat that most diehard fans want developers to bring back. This is why, despite being excited for the original version of what was supposed to be the third Fallout game (dubbed Van Buren), I wasn't worried when we first started to see what Bethesda was doing with their version of Fallout 3. In the midst of complaints that it was going to be a sloppily thrown together “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion but with guns”, I thought the addition of Fallout's aesthetic to a first person open world RPG in Bethesda's trademark style, if done properly, would be genius. Whatever flaws the game might have in the eyes of Fallout purists, I don't think there's any denying that Fallout 3 looks and feels like a Fallout game, which is a hell of a lot more than can be said for the execrable Fallout: Brotherhood Of Steel, a game everyone seems to have agreed to erase from history.

 Pip-Boy reenacts reaction to Brotherhood Of Steel

By today's standards, Fallout holds up pretty well. You might even be able to convince someone it was a modern day labor of love Kickstarter project to explain some of its awkward gameplay quirks as intentional throwbacks. Since character creation allows for a wide range of choices, you can usually find a way around the parts that prove difficult for your specific character because Fallout does a decent job of accounting for different builds and play styles. By contrast, I'd argue that the first Baldur's Gate suffers from close adherence to its license (Dungeons & Dragons, specifically the 2^nd edition), so that the first few hours of the game can be ridiculously hard thanks to the random dice roll based combat. And god help you if you've never played the game before and you go for a Mage style character (Mages being notoriously underpowered and weak in the first few levels of any 2^nd edition D&D experience). With Fallout, however, once you get over the slightly clunky interface you soon learn how the game is going to work and can adapt accordingly. It does suffer from the common mid-90s PC RPG issue where, unless you look up a FAQ, you won't know how important certain stats and abilities are going to be. For instance, you won't know that Throwing and Unarmed are useless skills unless you're going for a very specific character build. But once you learn how crucial Stimpacks are, the importance of aimed shots, the way the game's economy and barter system works, and how to maximize your AP usage during combat (by doing things like shooting enemies who use melee attacks from as far away as possible, forcing them to spend several turns moving before they can get close enough to hit you), Fallout plays as well as any modern game.

This AP abuse is a necessity against the god damn Deathclaws

I think the main reason it holds up so well, far better than Fallout 2, is that it isn't a terribly long game and encourages experimentation during subsequent replays. You can try to play through Fallout without killing anything, and conversely, you can wait until you have the best weapons and armor and go back through each town and kill everyone in it—including children, shockingly enough. Tired of shooting everything? Try a stealthy character who steals from people and plants explosives in the pockets of unwitting foes. Wonder what will happen if you min/max? Play through it with a low Intelligence stat, and the game accounts for this by giving you different dialogue options. On the flip side, if I recall correctly, you can play a character with high Speech and Science skills and talk the 'end boss' into realizing his plan is doomed to fail, avoiding a fight entirely. Fallout even lets you get a 'bad' ending by agreeing to join forces with the mutant army. Further adding to the replay and experimentation are the random events that happen when traveling on the world map—if you get really lucky, you can find a crashed UFO with the best gun in the game.

All of this aside, what makes Fallout mean something to me is the world that it builds. Which is perhaps ironic because it's not like other fictional worlds I want to escape into when reality has me down. This is why I find the appeal of it, and why it continues to mean something to me, hard to explain. The best I can do is to say that it gives me something that no other games or media can. It has a feel and atmosphere all its own, affecting me in a way that is somewhat dreamlike and yet somewhat nightmarish, too. It's perfect for playing late at night with headphones on, an eeriness seeming to pervade the room while you're wandering through post-apocalyptic ruins and scrounging for supplies in every nook and cranny. Sure, it has some goofy characters and moments that lighten the mood; I don't want to make Fallout seem as unendingly bleak as Silent Hill 2. But you know, it can be just as bleak at times, especially with its bummer of an ending, dooming your character to continue wandering the wasteland instead of returning home to live in the Vault you just saved. I wouldn't call it depressing, it's more melancholic, like the ending of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. And anytime I can compare a game to a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, it has to be worth something.

Fallout 3

Fallout 3 (360)

Fallout 3's greatest accomplishment isn't that it has an incredible atmosphere. It isn't that it has an interesting game world to explore and inhabit. It isn't how relatively free and non-linear it is. No, Fallout 3's greatest accomplishment is that it lives up to the first game in the series. I wouldn't say that Fallout 3 is as good today as Fallout 1 was back in 1997, but it's still a fantastic game despite some problems that keep it from being as good as it should have been.

I've now finished Fallout 3 twice. In a row. I rarely start a game all over once I've finished it for the first time, so I think this speaks to the quality and unique-ness of Fallout 3, how engrossing and compelling it is. Even the first Fallout can't match the way this game feels and makes you feel: wandering a post-nuclear war wasteland at night with strange creatures attacking you; making your way through the ruins of downtown Washington, D.C., trading assault rifle fire with hulking mutants while your radio plays old 1940s music; making use of the V.A.T.S. mode to shoot a town mayor's head off...Fallout 3 is a game of singular delights and moods. Bethesda rightly stayed closer to the 'feel' of Fallout 1 rather than Fallout 2 when developing this game, keeping the mixture of "bleak post-nuclear war humanity surviving tooth and nail" and "silly, retro 1950s scifi" at a perfect level.
As much as I love Fallout 3, it is a flawed game. Deeply flawed in some ways, in fact. The most nagging thing about the game is ultimately how little freedom you're truly given insofar as the main quest arc is concerned. You're railroaded down the same path no matter if you play the game as an evil sociopath or a saint, and the difference between the endings isn't meaningful enough to matter. Though, as I said, Fallout 3 does an excellent job with atmosphere and the world, it often fails to not seem game-y. From the lock picking and hacking mini-games to the way certain story specific characters are literally unkillable (the fact that you can kill 90% of the characters in the game makes their invulnerability all the more absurd) to the way the V.A.T.S. system combat is stupidly easy but trying to shoot in real time makes it ridiculously clunky, Fallout 3 generally fails to really put you in the game.

Add to this the general freeze/crash bugs that you'll encounter, and it's very clear that this was a Western developed game. For as much as the Japanese have fallen behind the West in terms of general game quality, innovation, and playability, they at least have the good grace to test the hell out of their games and better make you forget you're playing a game. It's always a little disappointing when you need to 'save crawl' (that is to say, constantly saving/loading to get past obstacles) but when you have to do this because you're afraid the game will crash again, it becomes 'infuriating' instead of 'a little disappointing.' Moreover, due to the above game-y elements, you can always see the stitching that holds the world together. It's the subtle difference between watching a movie and seeing people acting out characters/plots and watching a movie but seeing a story unfold instead.
This next paragraph or two will seem like vicious nitpicking, so let me preface by saying that I love Fallout 3 and I think everyone should at least give it a try. Its problems are ignorable and overcome-able because it is, for the most part, very, very fun and unique. Now, then...

Fallout 3 is an RPG that I don't think was play balanced well. Maybe this isn't as important in single player experiences, but certain aspects of Fallout 3's gameplay systems are broken. As in the previous Fallout titles, certain items, weapons, skills, and Perks are far more useful than others. In fact, it seems like the ones that were essential in the original games are pointless here--I never noticed much difference between leveling up Small Arms and not touching it at all (and yes, I was using weapons designated as being under Small Arms). Worst of all is the Repair skill, though. I wish developers would realize that breakable, fatigue-able equipment and weapons are never fun even if it makes the game more realistic. In order to repair things in Fallout 3, you either need to find/carry around additional copies of said items/weapons or pay NPCs to do it for you. I almost always ended up going with the latter choice, since you are limited as to how much weight you can carry; keep in mind that only certain NPCs can repair stuff, and the population of Fallout 3 is sparse and spread out. You might find yourself needing to backtrack across the map to get your machine gun repaired so it does better-than-crap damage. Sure, the game has a fast travel feature, but backtracking is still backtracking.

I mentioned earlier that some NPCs are unkillable. This may make me sound like a psychopath, but: why is it that I can't kill children in Fallout 3?? I can set off an atomic bomb that wipes out a town with children in it, but when I get to a cavern which is occupied by/run by children, I can't touch 'em. This isn't a function of me being a human monster who gets off on killing kids. No, it's that the children in the town are absolute jerks to you even if you're playing a Good character. You'll quickly get tired of them calling you 'Mungo' over and over at least. If it were a town of adults behaving this way, I'd never finish any quests there because I'd end up murdering them all every time.

As for the other unkillable characters, yes, killing your Dad would cause 70% of the plot to have to be re-written into a different scenario, but Fallout 3 is a game that advertises itself so heavily as about player choice in an open ended game world that it seems like a cop-out. As soon as you're dropped in to Fallout 3's world it quickly begins limiting choices and 'open'-ness. Just as the more similar you are to someone the more the small differences between you seem stark and huge, the more a game approaches non-linearity and freedom the more its limitations and linearity stand out. You can rob people blind in Fallout 3, take all of the things from their house/room which you lock-picked into, yet you aren't allowed to sleep in their bed even if they're dead or gone. Why?? After a certain point in the game, you're forced to work with the Brotherhood of Steel even if you prefer their Outcast counterparts. Why?? In order to see most of the content in the game, you have to wander around aimlessly to discover towns and areas that open up quests you otherwise would never see. Since the only appeal of wandering around is the atmosphere of the wasteland and the hope of discovering something, why not give your character a 'map' of the area but still require him/her to walk there before they're allowed to fast travel?? Yes, it's more realistic if you are walking for five minutes without much to do, but it's not any fun from the player's perspective.

I think I need to rope this review back in because it's become way more negative than I wanted it to be. Let me state again that Fallout 3 is an excellent game and I had a blast playing it through twice. But as good as it is, it has flaws and problems. One assumes its financial and critical success will ensure a sequel. Hopefully Bethesda learned a lot from Fallout 3 and the next one will be as much of a masterpiece as Fallout 3 should have been.

Are We What We Play??

Are We What We Play?
This 1UP article is one of the best pieces of videogame journalism I've read in some time. And it really did get me to think about how and why I play videogames. I've read and re-read the four unique essays contained in the article, comparing and contrasting to my own experience, and it's made me realize two things.

The first is that most Japanese games completely fail at making any sort of player/character connection. I'm trying to think of any Japanese game where I, personally, felt a connection to a character that went beyond a passive, "member of the audience along for the ride" role, but I'm drawing a blank.

I'm currently--slowly--making my way through Persona 3: FES. This is one of those Japanese games where your character is, essentially, a blank slate. You determine their "personality" with responses you give and the decisions you make. However, the closer a game gets to non-linearity, the more stifling and obvious the limitations become. I was playing the game as if I were the main character. How would I act in these situations?? Well, it turns out that I can't fully play the game like it was me, because I'll never finish its plot if I do. If I had my way, I'd never go into the game's dungeon. Instead, I would focus on studying, the track team, and playing the game-within-a-game MMORPG. Yet every month you are forced into a story scene in which you have to go fight enemies and then a boss in a mini-dungeon. If you neglect leveling up your characters too much, you might get completely stuck and have to start over. Meanwhile, your interactions with the characters in-game don't seem to have much effect other than letting you make new and better Persona fusions. If you ignore people or never talk to them to begin with, they don't hinder your progress or try to poison other people's opinion of you. Instead, you just won't be able to make the Persona fusions that their friendship would grant you.

It's not like I have a choice, pretty boy.

This isn't to say that Persona 3 is a bad game, because it's not. It represents a very unique RPG that combines a dungeon crawler with a dating/life sim. However, it is an odd beast in that it's a Japanese game where you help shape the main character but none of those decisions feel important or game changing. Sure, Western developed RPGs with moral choices and more-open-ended character develop will ultimately condense into totally good/in between/totally evil archetypes, but at least it's something you do. When I'm an anti-social jerk in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or Fallout, my decisions have real consequences both for the story and the world I'm inhabiting. You are always saving the world in Persona 3 and almost every other Japanese RPG. You are always the good guy in Persona 3 and almost every other Japanese RPG. Again, this doesn't make them bad games. It just nudges them further to the "fun games" side as opposed to "games I can relate to and/or take meaning from" side.

Oh, I haven't left the Light Side...yet.

The second thing I want to talk about is World of Warcraft. You aren't making decisions in the game that effect the story or your character's personality. The quests you take--which ostensibly are the story--don't let you decide whether your character is evil, good, or in between. However, everything else about it will do this, whether you know it or not. Do you gank other players?? Do you heal and buff random people while running around?? Do you never group with anyone?? Do you take advantage of your guild, if you have one, or are you the person who's always selflessly giving up items and money to help others?? At the same time, which class you play reflects your personality in some way. While it is fun to try all the classes--and I have--it's worth noting that which one(s) you stick with can say something about you. Are you the 'take charge' type?? You're probably a Warrior, the class that almost always leads when your group is doing dungeons. Are you the helpful, support-oriented type?? You're probably a Priest, the main healers/buffers. Are you the "I can't commit to just one thing and want to be flexible" type?? You're probably a Druid. Or perhaps it goes the opposite way: you play in the game what you wish you were in real life.

Moreover, all of these things help create the story for you. For me, and I'm sure many others, the "story" of the game isn't the quests. I would wager that 98% of WoW players completely skip the lore and explanation that accompanies the quests and just want to get to killin'. There has been a lot of the talk recently about how games tell stories and how they should tell stories, and I think this game is of a mind with the "the environment you inhabit and the choices you make create the story" viewpoint famously put forth by Ken Levine, the main mind behind BioShock. The story of my Dwarf Hunter's journey to level 70 wasn't the story of the quests, but the story I experiences in the places I went, the players I helped or harassed, the silly stuff I did in towns (naked, drunk dancing and boxing in Ironforge is always fun), the dungeons my guild ran and the funny/frustrating events that transpired there, and so on. I would actually say that WoW requires a lot of imagination from the player, because when I'm in the ruins of some Troll temple, the explanation I come up with by looking around me is always better than the lore/quest text that accompanies it. Just as things are always more terrifying when you can't see them and/or have no knowledge of what precisely they are, the setting and story of a game is (usually) better when you are making it up yourself.

Yeah, I posted the screencap I took when I hit 70. Deal with it.

The odd thing is, when I play Western style RPGs, I tend to go down the "total jerk" path, and I think that might be as much a reaction to the "goody two shoes" path I'm railroaded down in Japanese RPGs as much as it is my own inner dark tendencies. I say this is odd because when I play WoW, I'm actually altruistic, because I feel that the things I do in the game will reflect on me in real life. I know some of the people I play with, so I play the game like it's really me. Which is stranger yet, because in my mind I think of myself as a selfish prick but I'm always giving away items to guild members or helping them with difficult quests.

So, maybe it's not so much a case of "we are what we play" as "what I play can be who I am or what I want to be."