Review: Fallout 3

If you couldn’t tell by the weather that it was autumn you can tell by the avalanche of new blockbuster games. Today marks the North American release of Fallout 3 – a highly anticipated game having already won numerous awards before it was even complete. We first got hands on this game at X08 in Toronto earlier this year and were excited by what we saw even in that early and limited demo build.

The original Fallout by Black Isle Studios won a lot of awards too and is still recognized amongst the best games. This sequel has seen the franchise switch developers to Bethesda Softworks – the same developers of the much celebrated Elder Scrolls series. With a pedigree like that this post-apocalyptic RPG certainly has a lot of expectations to live up to.

Introduction
There is a lot going on in Fallout 3. For some people that will be a great thing to hear. For some other people that will become problematic. Fable 2 is a highly accessible Action RPG where as Fallout is significantly different. They may both be in the RPG genre but they are at decidedly opposite ends of that genre’s spectrum.

This game is really quite deep. There is just so much to explore, so much to see and do, so many decisions to make. One gets the idea that they have infinite possibilities before them in this vast landscape populated by mutants, robots, and other predictable antagonists. The presentation of this vast landscape is also very well done with great ambient audio and visuals with wonderful lighting through the day-night cycle and surprisingly good, though subtle, use of colour considering the landscape is a thousand shades of gray.

Story
You start out with a first person perspective of your own birth then progressing through pivotal moments in your childhood as you grow up, fast-forwarding here and there with handy audio-montage. This really helps shape your character and lets you develop a back-story and relationship to characters in the game. You won’t have to save ‘your girlfriend’ or ‘the princess’ or anybody else for whom you – the player – has no emotional attachment from some castle in this game – this time you get to develop some attachment to them or at least see why your character should.

Fallout 3 really goes a long way towards immersing you in to your role and to get you actually to care about your various quests. With fallout quests you have some investment in them and lots of choice in how to accomplish your goals. These are mostly your goals too – not some other characters. This makes Fallout much more immersive as you have some authorship in what your character is up to and you don’t feel like you’re doing someone else’s chores herding their escaped chickens and whatnot.

Style
The game is set in a fictional retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic Washington, USA in the year 2277. The retro part involves the fiction of the game taking place 200 years after a globally devastating nuclear war. This war was possibly caused by the USA attempting to annex Canada – let that be a lesson to you all. The styling of every thing in the game combines 1950s styling, with retro-futurism and paranoia with a post-apocalyptic Mad Max varnish. It is very successful in combining these influences of both a fictional past and future, skipping over our own time entirely. This time, after all, was a time of nuclear winter. Even the music is lovely 1950’s Jazz like Billie and Ella. Good choices.

Interface
Some of the problems when playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on a console were serious usability and interface problem. While the interface in Fallout 3 has a lot in common with oblivion, there are a lot of tweaks to help with usability. You can zoom around your equipment and inventory screens a lot more easily now for instance. It seems a lot more suited to consoles unlike Oblivion which seemed to be shoehorned in to your living-room. A great feature you don’t see often and hear about even less is that Fallout lets you remap your controller, letting you decide for yourself which buttons perform which actions, rather than just picking a preset. After a few tweaks things can feel pretty natural no matter what you’re used to.

The main thing to mention here is that Fallout 3 has much better usability than any of the previous console based titles from Bethesda. The interface for this game is much more refined than we’ve seen in the past, even going so far as to making loading screens actually informative as to both what you’re loading and what you’re trying to accomplish. Surprisingly too, the game never breaks character. Even the game’s initial loading screen as you boot it up is designed around 1950s technology such that everything about the game stays in character, weather you’re just checking your stats, starting the game, or even just loading a new area. This really helps with immersion and avoids ever breaking the illusion.

Conclusions
The game is beautiful and really epic in scale but it’s certainly not for everyone. It can be intimidating for some. It can be too much of an investment for others. If you do want a rich, deep experience in which you can get heavily invested and if thoughts of exhaustive exploration as you traipse across a wasteland don’t scare you off then maybe this is the game for you. A lot of people won’t be able to handle Fallout 3. It’s not for the faint of heart or for casual game players but those who are ready to sign their life over are going to love this game to bits. Though it is not perfect and could use some of the ideas from other recent RPGs (notably the fluid conversation and cinematic qualities of Mass Effect) Fallout is everything it promised to be and wonderful example of the refinement and polish the console RPG genre has made possible.

[Fallout 3]
[Bethesda Softworks]