Anomalous Anomaly

Well, I just finished Fallout 3. It’s an interesting game, and I greatly enjoyed a large portion of it. I especially appreciate how Bethesda built Fallout 3 on the same game engine that Oblivion is based on. Some things, however, really bug me.

One, a majority of the game dialogue is bland and unexciting. This is particularly bad for the stat-checked dialogue. For instance, there’s one marked “[Intelligence]“, which is supposed to be a point in which you impart some keen insight. Unfortunately, the “insight” is actually quite weak, and tends to merely restate the obvious. A tag like “[Captain Obvious]” would be far more true to the actual insight given. Another problem with the dialogue is that non-player characters are so easily swayed. A non-player character could be steadfastly against something, but as long as your Speech skill is high enough, you can convince them to jump off a bridge. Dialogue that involves convincing an NPC about something goes something like this:

Player: You should do this.
NPC: No! It goes against the way I have been brought up, and against everything I believe!
Player: [Speech 100%] You really should do this.
NPC: OK.

I wish this was a joke, but it really is this bad.

Two, the open-endedness seemed far too limited. In TES IV: Oblivion, you could finish the main quest and still have many, many hours of enjoyable gameplay left, largely because of the sheer number of quests. Not so in Fallout 3. You finish the main quest and it’s game over, regardless of whether or not your character does the noble self-sacrifice thing.

I would have liked a better conclusion to the Trouble on the Homefront quest, which really is not very well written. In the way I ended the quest, the player character’s lifelong friend Amata becomes Overseer of Vault 101. Unfortunately, her character does an about-face and basically takes on the personality of her father (the previous Overseer), and exiles the player from Vault 101 forever. I would have liked to see a better conclusion to this quest. Amata’s stated goal, before her character’s about-face, was to open the vault for trade and so forth. With the way the quest ends, she closes the vault for the remainder of the game. It would have made much more sense to me that Vault 101 would be closed for an in-game week or two, to allow her to restore order and bring the vault back to its former state, and eventually open, allowing the player to revisit the vault, old friends, etc. It would also have been more interesting to see residents of Vault 101 visiting Megaton or other nearby places for supplies. Other people have noted their disappointment for their results for the quest as well.

Despite these negative points, I found Fallout 3 to be generally enjoyable. The graphics were superb and the landscape was exactly what I would expect from a post nuclear holocaust environment. The sounds were nicely done as well, and it’s nice to see that Bethesda got more than a handful of voice actors for Fallout 3.

I think Fallout 3 had a lot more potential, and I’m hoping that the downloadable content packs will add something substantial to the game, unlike, for instance, this.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.