I mean, think about tit. You are walking around and you see a dude shooting arrows at an archery target, or whacking a wooden dummy with a sword. What do you do? You go and take a whack at it yourself. Tell me you have never done this. Tell me you never fired a few arrows at one of those target things. Tell me you never swung a weapon at a training dummy or never unloaded a few rounds into a neat stack of cans/bottles in Fallout. Unfortunately it does nothing to increase your skills.

Even Fallout 3 has these things.

I was always annoyed at this. Why can’t you train using the training dummies? I mean, this is what they were meant for, no? That’s what NPC’s supposedly use them for. So why not allow the player character do the same? Why not count hits scored against the dummy as “real hits”.

I know, I know – this is probably a game balancing thing. If you could train your weapon on a dummy a lot of people would just stand there for hours and do nothing else. I mean, there are dozens of tutorials and videos out there that show you how to outwit Bethesda leveling algorithms by sneak-walking into the wall in just the right spot, or abusing the master trainers. But it wouldn’t need to be like this. You could put a limit on how much training could be done for a dummy. I can see two caps that could be relatively easily implemented even via mod of some sort:

1. Hit Counter – have a running counter that shows how many hits has the player scored on dummies (any dummy in the game is on the same counter). Once enough hits are scored, deactivate the dummy training script and notify the player via some sort of message. Any hits scored on the dummy do not train the skill, until the counter resets itself the next day.
2. Skill Level Cap – training dummies and targets are great for beginners, but they can’t really teach a seasoned veteran anything new. At some point, you need live combat experience to progress. Thus, a player can only dummy train their skill until they reach a certain level. After that, dummies become ineffective.

Thus a low level character can really get a training boost out of using the dummies, and perhaps gain a few levels quicker than expected. But eventually the dummy training will become useless at a later stage of the game.

Oh, and apparently there is an Oblivion mod for that. I would test it but I don’t have Oblivion installed at the moment. I don’t believe this mod has any training caps like the ones I described above, making it less than balanced. Hmm… Maybe I should install Oblivion and try to figure out how to use that game editor one day.

There is one exception though: achievements that have some sort of in-game effect. The perfect example here are the bobble heads from Fallout 3:

My Bobblehead Collection

As you can see above, I collected all of them. In fact, I cared about them so much, that I printed out the wiki article that listed their locations just to make sure that I didn’t miss any one. Why? Because they had a tangible in game effect. They would permanently boost one of your attributes or skills. Granted, the boost they gave you was very minor but I still didn’t want to miss out on it. Not only that, but your bobble head collection could be permanently displayed in your house (in Megaton or Tenpenny Towers) which was a very nice touch. I suspect I would probably collect all of them even if they didn’t offer the stats boost just to fill the display case. Kinda like I sort-of collect garden gnome figurines and put them all over my in-game house.

So yeah, I eschew the social aspect of the achievements (you can display them to friends) as silly but then I spend hours finding stuff to decorate my virtual house in a single player game. A house that no one else will ever actually see, unless I post a screenshot of it online or something. That’s what amuses me though, and I think sandbox RPG’s such as Oblivion and Fallout 3 should have more this type of stuff. Are you listening Bethesda? Give us more collectible crap!

A lot of games already have achievements for collecting large number of certain items, but he idea is to give these collections some-in game effect. And barring that create some sort of easy way to display the collection in the in-game house/hideout without dragging items and fighting with the physics engine. Here are some ideas:

1. Trophies – allow players to obtain trophies after killing larger in-game monsters. This would involve carrying some special item (hunting knife maybe), using it on the monsters corpse, taking it’s head/tentacle/whatever to your house and then mounting it on the wall. Obtaining trophies of all the critters of a certain type (eg. wolf, gray wolf, snow wolf, dire wolf, super wold, mega wolf, etc…) would give you some minor bonus against this type.
2. Book Collections – collecting all the books by certain author or all tomes of a long book cycle would unlock some minor skill bonus, or extra perk. The house should feature a special book shelf which would automatically sort and display the collection, and give the player idea of how many items are missing to complete each cycle. I know that all Bethesda games have skill books, that will increase certain stats when read. They also have scores of other books – and these seemingly useless ones could be converted into collectibles.
3. Beer Cans – Fallout 3 had tons of useless garbage laying around everywhere. Some common junk items were empty cans and NucaCola bottles. Allowing the player to collect some of that junk and display it on some kind of shelf would be a great touch. Bonus points if the cans could have multiple brands, and player would have to find one can of each brand to complete the collection. The perk for completing the collection could be some minor bonus resistance to alcohol effects.
4. Toys/Figurines – Fallout 3 has bobble heads, but a lot of people also collect stuff like garden gnomes, teddy bears, toy cars, NucaCola trucks and etc. In Morrowind I collected ash statues. Having nice display cases for these items would be enough – even without some in-game perk or stat boost.
5. Artifacts – my brother used to collect everything Dwemer related in his Morrowind game. Then he found out there is a Dwemer museum in Tel Vos. He visited it, and was disappointed to see that it only had few unique items that were not in his collection. Of course he stole them immediately. This is the sort of emergent game play that could be codified using armor racks and display cases where one could store precious artifacts.

I’m pretty sure you guys can come up with some other ideas for this. What sort of collectible items/scavenger quests would you like to see in sandbox games. How would you like these to be represented in the game world. Virtual displays? Stat boosts? Both?

Also, do you usually hunt for the traditional X-box style achievements, or are you like me – more motivated by something that has an impact on the actual game – like a visible display case, a special perk or stat boost?

That’s the problem with these immersive, sandbox games from Bethesda – I tend to lose myself in them completely. I mean I am still not done with Morrowind and Oblivion – there is still lot’s of content I have not messed around with in these games. Fallout 3 is my most recent obsession. And I’m suspecting that it will be the most short lived one. I mean, look at this:

My Bobblehead Collection

I already have all the Bobbleheads! That’s sort of the indicative of my state of completion within the game. I’d take a screen shot of my quest screen or my map but they both only show a fraction of available items. So my bobblehead collection is sort of the only visual evidence of my progress.

I did all the marked side quests in the game. Every single one – I checked. I did most of the unmarked side quests and the ones I didn’t complete, I didn’t really care for to begin with. I was surprised that this was all there was to this game. I mean yeah, there are bunch of locations I still haven’t visited but just wandering around collecting random pieces of loot is no longer so much fun – especially now, when 80% of my weapons and apparel are actually named, unique artifacts which do more damage or have additional rules that make them better than their generic counterparts.

When you play Fallout the way I play it (ie. like Oblivion) you will quickly notice that it is virtually devoid of long quest chains. Or rather there are only two of them in the whole game. The first one is of course the Main Quest™, while the other is assisting Moira Brown in writing the Survival Guide. All the other missions are one-off, stand alone adventures. This means that once you do them and collect your reward, you have to do some wandering to stumble upon more of them.

This is very different from Oblivion and Morrowind which were all about quest chains. These games featured guilds and organizations you could join. Each one of these had 15-20 quests you could do for them. These quests would increase your standing with the given faction, and eventually put you in a position of leadership giving you some neat perks such as weekly income, a safe house, re-spawning generic followers you could hire and etc. This was great because it helped to structure the otherwise free-form sandbox game. You could for example decide to join the Thieves Guild or the Fighters Guild and work on their quests exclusively for a while. Or you could join several organizations and then knock their missions out simultaneously. There was always something to do, and you always knew where to go to get more work.

Fallout 3 doesn’t have guilds or factions and no such structure. When you run out of jobs the only thing you can do is to pick an empty looking spot in the map, and head out there and chase the arrows on your radar to find marked locations where there might be quest starting items, quest giving NPC’s, loot or bobbleheads. Barring that, you just have to hit the Fallout Wiki and look up quest locations.

I sort of wish there were actual long quest chains you could perform for each of the major in-game factions. Yes, it’s true that the main settlements such as Megaton, Rivet City, Little Lamplight and Underworld do have a high concentration of quest givers. You can pick up a lot of side-jobs in those places – which is great. But these places are few and far in between.

What I would love to see in this game is the good old, faction based quest chains. Which factions you ask? Take your pick. There are plenty of them:

1. The Brotherhood
2. The Outcasts
3. Reily’s Rangers
4. Temple of the Union
5. Oasis druids
6. Dr. Lesko
7. The Family
8. Mr. Tenpenny
9. Abraham Washington
10. Dukov
11. Republic of Dave
12. Daring Dashwood
13. Canterbury Commons

Think about it – all these factions and/or individuals tend to be involved in one or two quests. Some give you a repeatable “bring me lots of X and I will give you Y” tasks but these are very boring. I mean, those are classic MMO quests and no one actually does them in a single player RPG unless they are low level and strapped for cash. If you are high level, it is much more profitable to simply “do moar quests”.

Each of the factions on the list could easily have 5-6 unique, optional quests of their own which would give you some extra loot, benefits or perks. Maybe you could get additional houses in the other towns – or at least free a bed. Maybe you could get free heeling, or free ammo. Or perhaps you would get a unique nickname in that city – people would greet you as their hero, savior and etc… In any case, completing a long quest chain and getting reputation with a faction is much more satisfying than doing bunch of random quests in a single location.

My other gripe was with the main quest. As soon as I started doing it, I was done. It is almost astonishingly short. You see, in my journeys across the wasteland I visited Rivet City and talked to Dr. Lee before visiting the GNR building effectively skipping that part of the quest. I also liberated Little Lamplight kids from Paradise Falls, and visited their caverns before even reaching Rivet city. When I finally started doing the main quest, I merely had to do 6 short quests in order to see the ending animation.

These quests were fun. Tranquility Lane was a trip, Vault 87 was cool, and I had a blast breaking out of Raven Rock. It was also cool following Liberty Prime in the final assault of the enclave forces. But but it was so short and so rushed!

I remember that in Morrowind the main quest would be periodically interrupted and your quest giver would tell you to go take some jobs, and gain a few levels until you are ready. They didn’t want you to rush through to the end of the game without actually getting a taste for the wold and doing some side quests. Both Oblivion and Fallout 3 do the exact opposite. Your main quest is of an utmost importance and the NPC’s keep reminding you that you not to waste any time. However if you follow their guidance and not take on any side quest (time is of the essence after all) you will finish the game in 2-3 evenings. The only way to actually get the value out of the game is to ignore the main quest completely until you have done all your side quests. And there is a lot of value in this game. It’s just less than I expected. Oblivion was much, much bigger and had many more quests you could take. I’m not even going to talk about Morrowind which I’ve been playing for years there are still whole quest chains I have never even touched.

To sort of extend my enjoyment of this game, I got Broken Steel, The Pit and Point Lookout DLC’s the other day. I’m not really that interested in the Anchorage battle so I skipped that particular addon. I will probably comment on these expansion packs at some point. But since you are probably sick and tired of my Fallout ramblings I will likely try to squeeze in another game review somewhere in between.

For example in Morrowind, I had a character with a set of items that gave her constant effect 75 chameleon. This meant that she could run up to the enemy, punch him in the face and then crouch (go into sneak mode) and virtually disappear off the enemy’s radar. They would just look around and then start running away. I also once made a suite of 100 sanctuary which made me invulnerable to all physical attacks (an being a Breton I was also 60% resistant to magical attacks). Not even mentioning my Boots of Blinding Speed hack which allowed me to increase my speed to over 200 without the blindness.

This was one of the reasons why I love that game so much. If your had enough money, and trapped souls (and I always did, thanks to the magic of the in-game console) you could create crazy combinations like that. Oblivion’s enchanting system was much more balanced (or nerfed) but I still found some amusing combos (enchant a dagger with Drain Life 100 for 1 sec, and some damage dealing spell – then run up to an opponent and start stabbing. You can kill just about anything in the game with this combo if you stab fast enough – you can sometimes get 2-3 hits before the initial effect wares off dealing upwards of 300 damage).

Of course, I would never subject the people in my gaming group to such a character when playing regular, pen and paper variety of RPG games. In fact, in most groups we would usually abandon high level characters after they became too powerful or reboot the campaigns if the company would become to famous or to wealthy. Single player Computer RPG’s however do not have a real live GM who could adjust the balance of the game on the fly and improvise. They don’t have other people who actually want to “role play” and have a good time. The game world is set in stone. So part of the fun is to create a character and see how far you can take him. You can unleash your deeply seated munchkin ueges and run with them. Part of the process of building up your character is of course gear management.

Most of CRPG’s have an astonishing variety of weapons, armors and talismans you can equip your characters with. If you play your cards right, you can easily end up with a nasty combination that gives you and edge in combat. The more complex the system, and the more effects are there, the easier it is to abuse.

This is why I was a little bit disappointed that Fallout 3 did not have anything resembling an enchanting system or magic. This is probably due to the fact that Bethseda was trying to be more or less faithful to the previous Fallout games, which is understandable. And I can’t really complain that much, since they did include a large collection of unique named items that are more powerful that the generic versions of the same. Sadly, these artifacts are rather rare, and they offer nowhere near the variety of special effects and bonuses a fully fledged magic item system would.

This got me thinking. How could we emulate such a system in a RPG game set in modern or science fiction setting? Having rare named items is fine, but I want something more. Something closer to the commonly found magic items in a classic, fantasy RPG.

The answer to the question lies in Clarkes third law: we use technology. After all, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Here are some ideas:

DIY Weapons

Fallout 3 had a great idea of introducing weapons you could make using common household items after finding the right schematic. I loved the flaming “Shishkebab” sword, and the dart gun for example. I just wish there were more of them. Fallout only had 5 or 6 different weapons that you could create this way. I’d love to see this mechanic used to it’s full extent – allowing you to create makeshift armor and weapons from random items.

Tinkering and Upgrades

A logical extension of the idea above would be to open up all weapons and armor for upgrades. For example, you could reinforce your flak jacket with armored plates, or install targeting sensors on your helmet. Some fantasy games introduce socketed items into which you can put in enchanted gems. We could use the same idea, just for weapon and armor upgrades.

In fact, this is the exact system Knights Of The Old Republic games used for most of it’s gear. The socket design is easy to implement, easy to grasp and usually opens up lots of upgrade paths and possibilities.

Alternatively you could use a modular design for most of the items. Each weapon could be broken down into 3-4 pieces and each of them could potentially be attached to another weapon. This would allow you to do cool things like refitting your rifle with a longer barrel for increased accuracy, or making your submachine gun shoot high caliber, armor piercing bullets.

Cybernetics

For futuristic settings cybernetics are the next logical addition. Getting performance enhancing implants would be just like collecting enchanted rings, pedants and talismans. And because of Clarke’s Third Law there is no limit as to what kind off effects these things could offer. You could have targeting arrays, reflex busting implants, armor plates underneath your skin, exoskeleton that would boost your strength and carrying capacity or even a hidden flamer that would allow you to shoot fireballs out of your wrists. The sky is the limit.

Nano-Technology

Finally, we have the ultimate magic-like technology – nanomachines. These things are pure science fiction for now, and we really don’t know what could be their limits. What we do know, is that they are tiny, invisible and can manipulate mater at the molecular level.

The characters would simply need to find or buy a small box with the specialized nano-bots inside and open it. The bots would then crawl all over them, and create their own colonies living off the hosts biological waste. It could take them a little while before they are in full operating capacity, and you may need some sort of a skill to be able to control them.

They could be used for healing, reinforcing your skin to make it bulletproof, making you invisible by bending the light a certain way, giving you extra sensory perception or a wide variety of buffs and bonuses. You could even be able to temporaroily impart these buffs onto your company members. If I’m not mistaken, Anarchy Online had a system like this – but I have only played that game for about an hour or two so I can’t be sure.

How would you add some magic to an RPG game set in a modern or SF setting?

Tenpenny Towers Terrorist

Tenpenny Tower is one of the few remaining buildings in the wasteland that is still standing. Alistar Tenpenny, it’s owner managed to clean it up very well and the place is surprisingly free of trash, rubble and dirt. It is a lovely place to live, and unsurprisingly it is also very exclusive gated community populated by rich snobs. How do you become a rich snob in a post apocalyptic wasteland? I don’t know, and the game doesn’t tell you.

You can find out that one of the residents is a former slaver from Paradise Falls who swindled out her compatriots out of a huge sum of money. Another is famous adventurer Daring Dashwood who actually has his own radio play on GNR. Others are somehow rich by default. One of the golden rules of this community is “no Ghouls allowed”. Presumably because Ghouls are scary, they smell bad (no, they do) and etc… The game goes out of the way to portray the inhabitants of the tower as bunch of bigoted racists.

That rule was put into effect because a group of local Ghouls wanted to buy their way into the community. They apparently had the money to afford to live there, but were turned away. Their leader, Roy Philips gets really fired up about this and threatens to take the tower by force if he is not allowed in.

The Tenpenny residents take this threat very seriously, and the local security wants to hire someone to make sure Roy is out of the picture. This is where you come in. Your mission is to take out Philips and his gang before they can organize and do something reckless.

When you find Roy, you can talk to him and his accomplices about the situation. The Ghouls that follow him are actually nice and reasonable people. They are however taken in by Roy’s strength of Character and his charisma and are willing to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure their survival.

Philips himself however seems unstable. He is a violent man with a chip on his shoulder. It’s clear that he harbors some deeply seethed grudge against humans, and never misses a chance to insult one. When he is done mocking you, he will ask you to help him infiltrate the tower bu unlocking the underground passages. He plans to let the feral ghouls into the building and simply sit back and watch them butcher the defenseless residents.

We have a name for people like him – Roy Philips is a terrorist. He has no qualms about butchering all these innocent people. Yes, they are racist bigots but that does not necessarily mean they need to die.

At that point you can take three paths:

1. You can side with Tenpenny residents and kill Roy and his friends
2. You can side with Roy and help him attack the tower
3. You can go back to Mr. Tenpenny and negotiate on behalf of Roy

There are no other alternatives. Since I was playing a good character siding with Roy was out of the question for obvious reasons. Killing him also seemed iffy. While I wouldn’t have a problem killing Roy by himself, the quest demanded that I also take out his two accomplices. I couldn’t do that – they were nothing but nice to me. If you do take this path, however the game will award you bad karma.

Therefore I picked the nonviolent route, even though I knew it was not the best idea. The people there did not like Ghouls, and Roy Philips did not like “smootskins”. I knew he would be a problem, but nevertheless I got him inside in exchange for good Karma. I hoped that the tight security in the tower would keep him in check. I was wrong.

As soon as you leave the tower, Roy Philips takes out Alister Tenpenny and then kills all human residents out of the tower. Note that the people who got slaughtered are the same people who agreed to accept the Ghouls into their midst. They were not Ghoul haters – they were far from it. I convinced all the truly prejudiced residents to move out as part of the quest. So Roy slaughtered the same people who have shown him acceptance and hospitality. His friends are just as guilty for allowing him to go through with it (or actively helping him to accomplish the slaughter).

This quest is purposefully set up to result in death of innocent people. No matter which path you take, someone nice will end up dead. In retrospect I realized that killing Philips and his friends would be the lesser evil – at least compared to the mass slaughter of the innocent residents. I especially felt bad for poof old Dashwood who was a genuinely nice guy. But the game punishes you for taking that path, and rewards you for enabling Roys genocidal tendencies.

I don’t know… I just felt like the writers specifically went out of their way to confuse and annoy me on this. What was the message they were trying to get across here? That you are a chump and a pussy for trying to resolve the situation in a non-violent matter?

I think what happened here is that they tried to shoehorn this quest into the good vs evil template a little bit to hard. There is really no karma neutral option here – you either help Roy against your better judgment like a good boy scout would, or you take him out like a hardened mercenary with no heart.

The Oasis

The Oasis is a secluded valley surrounded by high cliffs close to the North edge of the map. It can be difficult to find, which is a pity considering the fact it is actually a good quest. This hidden Valley is actually a lush green paradise with growing trees, green grass and blooming flowers. It exists because of a special Ghoul named Harold. At some point in his life, he entered some sort of symbiosis with a small tree that started growing out of his head. Initially it didn’t bother him so he just kept it there. In the end however, the tree outgrew him and Harold became rooted to the spot and unable to move. As the tree matured however it started creating strange seed pods which gave the start to the Oasis. Each seed would grow into a tree, a bush or a flower even though the soil was arid and devoid of nutrients. Eventually people found the little Oasis that grew around Harold and started worshiping him as a living god (even though he asked them not to).

When you reach the Oasis, Harold will ask you to kill him as he is tired and frustrated of being rooted into the ground and unable to do anything. It is a mercy killing, and he really makes a good case to justify it. However if you talk to his worshipers you will quickly realize it is not as simple as that. For example, a little girl who was born in the Oasis tells you that Harold is her best friend, and that when she has a bad dream she goes to visit him and sleeps between his roots. If you can mercy-kill Halrold after that your heart must be made out of stone.

Fortunately you are given an alternative. There seems to be a schism among the worshipers. Some think that the Oasis should be kept a secret forever and that the growth of the seed pods must be inhibited. Other group thinks that the Oasis is a gift for all of humanity, and the growth of the seed pods should be accelerated so that the lush garden overgrows it’s borders and spreads into the wasteland quicker.

Harold will allow you access to his heart which is located in the underground cavern system below the Oasis. Once you reach it, you will be able to either destroy it (killing Harold), apply special inhibiting sap to it (stopping the production of seed pods) or apply the special liniment (to speed up their production). Strangely enough, you can only do one of these things. For example, if you apply the sap, you won’t be able to destroy the heart anymore.

This is an interesting moral dilemma because unlike the Roy Phillips case (where each choice is wrong) each choice has both positive and negative ramifications. Harold is slowly going insane, and it is not difficult to imagine his suffering. Killing him would be an act of mercy. But it would also negatively affect his worshipers who rely on his guidance. It will probably also deeply affect the little girl who treats Harold not as a God but as a close friend.

Inhibiting the growth of the seed pods will keep the Oasis safe from intruders – or at least safer than before. But it means that the miracle of it’s creation will remain contained locally. And who knows if without constant re-seeding the oasis won’t dry up and be reclaimed by the wasteland.

On the other hand accelerating their growth will expose Harold and his group to outsiders who will follow the traces of green down to the source. Who knows what will happen to them when raiders or super mutants decide to pay them a visit. Or what if someone like Alister Tenpenny finds it and decides to exploit it for profit?

Then again, is it right to contain the Oasis? After all Harold’s strange mutation might one day help to make the wasteland green again. Harold’s condition should be studied to see if it can be replicated. If it would be possible to create more such trees (preferably without a ghoul bonded to them) it would be a great alternative to the illusive GECK technology.

I chose to accelerate the seed growth, and was able to convince Harold to stick around for the good of his worshipers. The quarrel amongst the Treeminders ended an both sides accepted my decision knowing that the Oasis won’t outgrow it’s borders overnight. This resulted in good karma.

I played with other alternatives, and the only time I was punished with a karma penalty was when I set Harold on fire after learning that it was one of his biggest fears. And let’s face it – that was kind of a jerk move.

This quest works because it offers you a tough choice between several alternatives, none of each is clearly good or evil. The writers did not try to shoehorn it into the good/evil template and left it open ended. It is up to you to decide what is best for Harold, the Oasis and the Capital Wasteland itself.

Why couldn’t the Tenpenny Towers quest be structured this way? Why couldn’t we have an extra option to talk Roy out of his crazy idea of living in Tenpenny tower and escorting him to Underworld which is probably the only place a human hater like Roy could live without getting into trouble. We could make that to be the good karma option, and make the other peaceful resolution to be karma neutral. In that context, the death of innocent people wouldn’t cause a bewildering shock and a feeling that the game just pulled a fast one on you. I mean, yeah – it would still be surprising and shocking. But not so much out of place. After all, it would be your fault – you have misjudged Roy’s character and his ability to leave peacefully among humans.

Every time a game includes this feature, the designers always point towards it and say “look, our game is about difficult moral choices”. Bullshit! It is not. If you want difficult moral choices, or modal ambiguity you leave the karma system out of the equation. Awarding good/evil points for player choices strips them out of any ambiguity. There must always be an entirely good and entirely evil choice – and they are fairly easy to identify.

The only games that have any business using this sort of system are those based on the Star Wars license because the light vs. dark side is built into that universe. But there is always more to that struggle than meets the eye. The two sides of the force are really just reflections on how the Jedi choose to harness and focus their powers. Light side powers require concentration, and inner peace – and thus Light Side Jedi are usually serene, detached, zen like monk types. On the other hand, dark side is fueled by raw emotion and so the dark Jedi tend to be selfish, impulsive, short tempered and driven by their passions. The more they give into their emotions and urges, the more powerful they become. It is a feedback loop – a light Jedi will gravitate toward state of perfect serenity and enlightenment until he becomes so detached he no longer is able to relate to normal people. A dark Jedi will be on a downward spiral towards becoming a dangerous sociopath. They are two sides of the same coin, and both are dangerous – though the dark side corrupts one faster and is more seductive.

This is beautifully explained through dialogs and cut scenes in the Knights of the Old Republic games. But when it comes to applying this to a game mechanic, even these games fuck it up and reduce this to a standard: “kick the starving puppy vs. feed the starving puppy” scenario.

I’m still waiting for a Star Wars game which would get this system right. How would I do light vs dark side in a video game? I’d allow the player to learn both light and dark side powers. Then in combat I would give them two pools which they could use to fuel their force powers. One would be something like “rage”, the other would be something like “focus”. You’d start the combat with an empty focus bar and partly filled rage bar. Offensive maneuvers would fill the range bar, while the more defensive would drain it and instead fill up the focus bar. Thus a Dark Jedi would gravitate towards reckless violence and high damage output, while Light Jedi would be cautious defensive.

The game would track how often which powers are used the same way Morrowind and Oblivion did. Each time you cross some threshold your power gets upgraded. At the same time the focus and rage bars are re sized – one grows while the other one shrinks by approximately the same amount. The further you go towards one of the extremes, the more difficult it is to use the powers of the other side.

Then I would start modifying the dialog options based on the difference between the capacities of the two bars. Someone leaning towards one of the sides would lose certain dialog options. Dark side characters would grow more self serving and deranged while the light side players would grow more detached and obsessed with maintaining their inner peace.

Of course this sort of system would make a spontaneous, last minute conversion impossible. But personally, I would be fine with that. IMHO, Vader’s sudden change of heart at the end of RoJ was just bad writing. I always felt cheated when SW games would allow me to press a button, and instantly redeem all my crimes or erase all my good deeds in the final act.

But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about is why games use this sort of systems at all. Some, like Star Wars titles use it for unlocking certain powers and/or items. You must be this good, or this evil to wield particular artifact or cast particular spell. As I have shown above, such a prerequisite system could be easily solved mechanically. Simply let the player choose the powers they like, and then see which ones they train. If they go all out on evil powers, then turn them evil. If they choose to study good powers, they become better people in the process.

Other games use it as a quick and dirty reputation substitute. Your karma score is more like fame and/or infamy – and it controls which NPC’s are friendly and which are hostile to you. This is of course a gross oversimplification. A fully fledged reputation system with multiple factions often allied or at war with each other is almost always more entertaining than division on the good vs evil axis.

In fact, I submit that every time you are itching to add a karma system to your game, you could successfully replace it with a faction based reputation system (well, excluding Star Wars games I guess). Don’t believe me? Let’s use Fallout 3 as an example. How would this game look if we divided it into factions such as Megaton, Rivet City, GNR, etc… Most of these major settlements would be allied with each other so each time you increase your reputation with, say Megaton, you also get some small bonuses with all the other associated factions. If on the other hand you blow up megaton your reputation amongst the Raiders and Slavers skyrockets, but Three Dog will probably badmouth you on the radio all day.

Net result is almost the same, but now we are dealing with something concrete and tangible rather than nebulous concept of karma. People love you or hate you for very specific reasons – because you helped them, or helped their allies. It shifts the focus off the shallow good vs. evil choices to political maneuvering and diplomacy.

What is even more interesting it can be used to introduce realistic and complex moral dilemmas that would be impossible with a traditional Karma system. For example, what if the faction you are currently working for is doing something unbelievably bad. Do you participate in their atrocities just because it pays well and earns you much needed reputation? Or do you do the right thing, turn on them and risk severing relationships with all their allies?

How about alignment based system where certain powers and/or items are restricted for certain characters? That is even simpler. Instead of restricting the powerful uber-artifacts to positive or negative karma users make them faction specific. To obtain them, you must achieve certain status among the people who created them. That probably means that to obtain the Dreaded Sword of Violent Debauchery you will have to do some nasty quests for some shady organization. Once again, the end result is the same (character committing evil acts) but you are not shoving your own moral judgment down the player’s throat.

Of course a reputation based system is more difficult to implement. Instead of a single slider scale that goes up and down now you have few dozens of reputation values, some of which are interconnected. So there is a little bit more work involved, but compared to the total effort that usually goes into making a game, switching from karma to reputation would be trivial. Look at World of Warcraft for example – it has hundreds of interconnected factions, millions of players and it has no problems keeping track of all of them. A game like Fallout 3 just needs to track reputation of a single character with a dozen factions. It is completely doable.

Feel free to defend karma based systems in the comments. Maybe I’m missing something here. Perhaps there are circumstances where they perform better than reputation systems. Star Wars is of course a notable exception, for obvious reasons. Are there other exceptions out there?

The Symptoms

The game worked great while I was in the vault. My issues started when I got out of it. My first crash happened literally seconds after leaving the vault. I turned around to see how the vault entrance looked behind me an BOOM! The game crashed to desktop giving me the extremely descriptive error message:

Fallout 3 has stopped working

Really? It did? Hey, thanks for letting me know! If you didn’t I would be sitting here wandering why Capital Wasteland looks exactly like my desktop background.

Actually, I take that back. This was after all a generic Vista dialog that shows up whenever something really, really fucked up happens inside a program. It means that the game itself crashed hard – it was not an exception or a runtime error that someone forgot to catch. It was a “holly shit, this was not supposed to happen” type of thing.

Whatever – I thought – shit happens. After all, Oblivion used to crap out on me like this every once in a while but it was otherwise totally playable. So I launched the game again, and this time I managed to explore a little bit of the wasteland without a crash. Until, that is, I reached the abandoned school and the game crapped out on me again. This was probably after 20-30 minutes of me aimlessly exploring the wasteland. Same stupid message.

I restarted the game, leaded it, explored the school and went outside and the game crashed again. That was it. After that, every time I would load the game from that auto-save outside the school’s door it would dump me back to the desktop. Something was seriously wrong here.

My first instinct was to google the error message but as you could imagine it was pretty much like searching for a needle in a haystack… of other needles… at night… blindfolded… and wearing mittens. Everyone has seen this message and wrote a blog/and or forum post about it. Adding “fallout 3” to the search query didn’t really improve the results.

It did give me back a lot of forum discussion threads but I quickly realized it is one of those vague problems that everyone talks about on the internet but no one has a solution. It’s like that damn irql not less or equal shit which can be triggered by just about anything – hardware, software, the phase of the moon, or the color of your underwear.

It was clear to me that I was not going to find a solution this way. So I decided to dig deeper. So I opened event viewer and almost immediately found the culprit:

Fallout 3 Error Message - check out the DLL

If you can’t figure it out from the screen, let me spell it out for you. This error log, clearly implicates the file called nvd3dum.dll as the one causing or facilitating the crash. The naming convention seems familiar, isn’t it? Who would name their DLL’s with an nvd prefix? Why nVidia of course – the maker of my video card.

So I found the reason for the crash – my video card driver and Fallout 3 were not playing nice. Armed this information I did some more googling and came up with a solution.

The Solution

Using the name of the DLL in my research yielded much better results than before. For example, this forum threadwas extremely helpful in pinpointing the exact issue.

This is what helped me:

1. Start Fallout via the FalloutLauncher.exe
2. Go to Options
3. Click on Advanced
4. Change to the Water section
5. Set Water Multisampling to Low

Presto! No more crashes! Well, for the most part. The game still sometimes bugs out in V.A.T.S. but it is very rare now. I have no clue what Water Multisampling is but I’m assuming it makes the puddles and rivers in the game look more liquidy and watery. There is something in the way they go about it though, that causes Fallout 3 to crash to desktop.

Interestingly enough it only happens with the recent drivers. So if you have an older card and an older driver you will be fine. Downgrading the drivers also works. But I found it easier just to crank that feature down to low and enjoy the game without it. Frankly I can’t tell the difference so the multisampling effect was evidently lost on me anyway.

Now the million dollar question is, who to blame for this. Is this yet another Bethesda bug? Or is this yet another case of a badly written 64 bit driver? Initially I assumed it was a bug in the game code. Now I’m not sure.

Either way, if you are experiencing this crash, the way to get rid of it is to disable that multisampling feature. I hope this will get indexed by google and will show up in search results where people can find it and get on with their game.

Fast Travel is Better than in Oblivion

Fallout 3 uses a fast travel system that works similar to the one in Oblivion. As you explore the wasteland locations of interest are marked on your map. At any time you can instantly “jump” to one of those map markers. An appropriate amount of in-game time passes by, but for you the trip is instantaneous. As in Oblivion you cannot jump from withing a building, when encumbered or while in combat.

There is one significant difference though. When you first start the game you don’t get any map markers. By default Oblivion opened up all the major cities for you allowing you to jump to any of them right from the get-go. A lot of people (including me) thought that this was a bad move as it really cut down on initial exploration and robbed you of the feeling of achievement when you discover these places for the first time.

Fallout 3 avoided this issue, and finding places such as Megaton, Tenpenny Tower or Rivet City is fun and rewarding. In fact, the Fallout 3 map doesn’t really reveal any useful information at first. It does have shapes, and outlines and you can sometimes guess that the lighter areas signify denser ruins – which may or may not contain human settlements (but are also likely to be Raider and/or Supermutant heavens. The map is vague enough to require a bit of guess work when you are just blindly exploring – but detailed enough to navigate properly when you know where you are going.

The Minigames

Apparently all the new Bethesda products are required by law to include mini games. Similarly to Oblivion, Fallout 3 includes two of them. One is for picking locks, and the other one is for hacking terminals.

I previously mentioned that I consider these things to be idiotic. Once you figure out the lock-picking game in Oblivion for example, you can open any door or container even at level 1. This made the skill associated with that activity redundant and unnecessary. It also forced Bethesda to introduce plot driven doors that would open only after certain conditions were met.

It seems that Bethesda understood the error in basing lock picking solely on player skill rather than character skill. Fallout 3 combines the minigame with a simple skill check. This means that some locks and computer terminals are inaccessible until you get better at cracking them. This is a far superior approach. Sadly this didn’t remove plot driven doors – but greatly decreased their number.

I have to admit that the lock picking game is done well. Instead of being a nuisance it actually adds to the game play a bit. It is a great example of a mini-game done right. It’s easy to learn and intuitive – you instantly know what to do. Best of all, it does not feel like a random logical puzzle – actually looks and feels like lock picking. I mean, look at this picture:

Lockpicking

The hacking mini game on the other hand is endlessly pointless ant tiresome. It’s essentially “guess the password in 4 tries or lose” exercise. If you fail the terminal becomes locked and you never get to use it again. Rising you science skill does not make it easier – it just gives you access to more secure terminals where you get to play this game with a longer list of words to choose from.

The only reliable way to beat it is to exit the terminal after 3 guesses and start over. The word list reshuffles and the password changes so you are sort of back to the square one of course, but at least you get another crack at it. If you are lucky, you will guess it on a first try. If you are not it will take you multiple trials.

Hacking Mini Game

The worst part is that it is not really a bad representation of “hacking”. It’s almost as if you were searching through the page files or live memory dumps for recently used strings to uncover the password. Still, it’s just a luck based guessing game. There is really no way to get good at it. And if you can’t improve your game over time, why even bother with it and waste your time? Just replace it with a dice roll and have it over with.

I have no clue how could they get one mini game so right, and the other one so wrong.

The Level Cap

Capping your character at level 20 is downright criminal. It means you don’t get to pick over half of the interesting perks. One of the DLC’s raises the cap to level 30 which is still quite low. I mean, I barely started playing this game and I’m already level 14, which means I only have 4 level ups to go.

Fortuntely there is this mod which I plan to apply as soon as I hit the level cap.

The Karma System

Did the old Fallout games have a Karma system? I haven’t played them so I don’t know – but I assume they didn’t. I mean, I always hear people talking about “The Original Fallout” with reverence. Therefore they couldn’t have had a morality system.

Here is the problem: no one has ever implemented a karma system that was not stupid. It’s just that morality can’t really be put on a scale and measured or distilled down to points. If you want to make a game that is morally ambiguous, and which forces the player to make difficult decisions then you can’t hand them out good or evil points each time they make a decision. If you doing so reduces the choices available to the player and dumbs down the moral dilemmas to simple black and white choices.

You either play a knight in shining armor or a homicidal maniac. Fallout 3 is like this too. You see a wounded man bleeding out in some ditch and when you click on him you have two options:

1. Heal his woulds, give hims some of your supplies, one of your guns and some money
2. Steal all his stuff and set him on fire

There is nothing in between these two extremes. Sometimes you get a third option which is to just walk away. But you can’t always do that – sometimes the game forces you to make that choice in order to complete a quest objective.

In Morrowind and Oblivion I always used to play a very morally ambiguous characters. I would generally help people out if they seemed to need help. I would defend the poor, rob the rich (and give to myself), and kill the wicked. It was fun – and I was able to set my own boundaries.

Fallout 3 sort of forces your hand. If you want to get good karma you need to do things certain way. Your own moral compass be damned. Sometimes it’s not even clear what is the “good” choice. Case in point, the infamous Tenpenny Tower quest. It offers you 3 alternate resolutions: and as Shamus demonstrated in the linked article, the lest reprehensible one yields bad karma, while the morally correct (according to the game system) one has very disturbing repercussions.

I will give you another example where this system breaks down. You can try this if you want and I promise there are no spoilers in this little experiment. Simply visit the Tenpenny Towers and go to the balcony where the owner of the establishment (Alister Tenpenny) usually hangs out. When I first met him I decided to have some fun and jump off the balcony. So I saved my game and then decided to really go out in style and shot Mr. Tenpenny in the face with my combat shotgun before I jumped. To my surprise the game awarded me positive karma for this action.

Now, in most societies shooting an unarmed man in the face in cold blood would be considered amoral and downright evil thing to do. I mean, if the guy is a vile criminal such an action may be justified. If he is unpredictable and dangerous it could be argued that killing him is a benefit to society as a whole. But I wouldn’t describe it as “good”.

In the Fallout 3 universe though, Allister Tenpenny is flagged as an evil character and murdering him gives you no the same type of good karma as healing a dying man, saving Supermutant captive and refusing the reward or sending an orphaned kitten to college.

Some quests are so one sided that it is hard to imagine why anyone would even want to choose the evil alternative. The Power of Atom quest is a prime example. You get hired to destroy a prominent town killing all of it’s inhabitants. Why? Because some dude wants it gone. It’s obstructing the view from his balcony or something.

Can you see Megaton from here?

I mean, it’s awesome that I can set off a dormant nuke and destroy a whole fucking town in this game. Seriously, it’s great. But why? Motivate me to do it! Make it worth while. On one hand I have a really good town with lots of shops and bunch of quests associated with it. That in itself is an incentive not to blow it up. What is my incentive to destroy it? I don’t know… Explosions are cool? Dude, I accidentally the whole town? Really? That’s it?

That’s not even evil! That’s is Chaotic Lazy! I mean yes – I sometimes like to destroy things or kill important NPC’s just for the shits and giggles. But I usually reload the game after I get that stuff out of my system. It’s nice to have that option, but it just doesn’t seem like a valid game choice. There is just no reason to do this. I mean, Fallout 3 is supposed to be an RPG. That means we are at least in some way role playing our character. Both good and evil characters need motivations. No one is evil for the sake of being evil, save for cartoon villains – and even those usually have their own reasons for doing what they do.

I accidentally the whole A-bomb

Not all quests are this bad. Quite a few of them start with an interesting investigation/information gathering process. But whenever the writers try to make you a moral choice the whole built up intrigue falls on it’s face and turns into a shallow nice guy/evil jerk choice. But I can’t just blame the karma system itself.

Bad Writing

The Tenpenny Towers and Megaton quests I mentioned above are just examples of bad writing. They are both good ideas that were doomed by poor execution. One They could have worked – if someone sat down and really fleshed them out taking stuff like character motivations into account. Perhaps if Mr. Tenpenny had a real reason to want to blow up Megation his quest would make more sense.

The Roy Philips quest would probably work better if it was happening in a karma free system. Then the choice between aiding a dangerous terrorist vs working for rich capitalist would be just that – you’d pick sides based on your moral compass. But the game insists on handing out karma points for these choices and they can be immersion breaking disappointments.

What ticked me off the most however were some the dialog choices. Out of all Bethesda games I played Morrowind had the best dialog system. Instead of putting words in my mouth it simply gave me a list of topics to choose from. You would pick one (eg. The Fighters Guild) and the NPC would give you a longer or shorter monologue about it. IMHO it worked well. It was more like reading a book than playing a game – you could skim though the conversations or read them slowly at your own pace.

Oblivion traded the long winded, descriptive conversations for short deeply nested dialog trees. To sweeten the pot a little bit they introduced the voice acting. The system was mostly serviceable – sadly most of the lines were read by the same 3-4 actors making it a bit surreal expereience.

Fallout 3 reintroduces the same type trees and introduces more voice actors. Sadly the lines they read mostly insufferable. It is not even about bad voice acting. It’s just that the lines themselves are bad. You know who is the worst offender though? You! The worst lines in the game are the ones that show up as options in your dialog trees.

Half the time your lines are rude, crude and unrefined. The other half they are just plain insulting. And it’s not like I was playing a speech impaired warrior type. I’d expect that. But my character was rather refined. I was consistently pumping points into my speech skill at each level up hoping to unlock better dialog options. But alas, that was not what this skill offered. Even after my speech was over 70 I sounded like a halfwit most of the time. The high skill level did unlock new dialog options but they were not any better.

Fallout is Oblivion with Guns

Time to wrap up this overly long review. I know I haven’t said anything about the ending – that’s because I didn’t get there yet. This means that I have more to say about the game in the future.

I feel that Fallout 3 is to Oblivion what Oblivion was to Morrowind. A little smaller, shallower game that nevertheless has some improvements over the original. You have probably noticed that throughout this review I treated it an Oblivion sequel. That’s because it’s exactly that in my mind.

It is a flawed game with many shortcomings – like the silly karma system, particularly bad writing in several spots and a long list of game breaking bugs. It does have some great improvements over Oblivion though. The inventory interface and fast travel are done right, the lock picking game is huge improvement over the the previous annoyance. The radio stations add incredible amount of flavor to the game world – even if they keep looping the same content over and over again. The combat is bloodier and more visceral than before and the ability to blow off people’s limbs with particularly well aimed shots makes for much more cinematic battles than the simple rag doll physics of Oblivion. The V.A.T.S. system brings the much needed serenity and strategy back into real time combat situations. The setting is great too – the unique mix of humor, seriousness, overexerted violence and the retro atmosphere make this game an incredible experience.

Not only that but Fallout 3 is a sandbox game first and foremost. The world you will be exploring is huge and there are hundreds of interesting locations to see and visit – and most of them are tied to some sort of a quest line. If you take your time to explore and do the side missions you will get hours upon hours out of this game. As the previous Bethesda games it contains an incredible amount of original playable content that can be unlocked and experienced in any order or skipped altogether. This makes it an incredibly attractive offer compared to the torrent of disappointingly short video games hitting the market these days. You will definitely get your money’s worth here.

All these things help to balance out the flaws, creating a game that is at least as good and as enjoyable as Oblivion was (and one that crashes just as often). I really liked Oblivion and really like Fallout 3. I’ve been playing it for several weeks now, and I’m nowhere near being done with it – and nowhere near being bored. If I didn’t enjoy it so much, I wouldn’t spend 4 long posts complaining about it. Fallout 3 gets my thumbs up, with one caveat: if you played the original Fallout you should simply consider it a “Fallout Flavored Oblivion” – rather than fully fledged sequel. From what I heard Fallout 3 is to Fallout 1 and 2 as Planet of the Apes remake with Mark Whallberg is to the original movie with Charlton Heston. Some people went to see that movie and like it. Some people hated it with a passion. Others went “WTF, that’s not even Planet of the Apes“.

Fallout 3 is the same way – it is not exactly a spiritual successor of the original, but it does have a good deal of an entertainment value in and off itself.

The Followers

Both Morrowind and Oblivion had a follower system that allowed other characters to join your party and assist you in combat. In both of these games this was an endless nuisance. The followers would constantly get stuck on terrain features and be incredibly trigger happy. Very often the character you were supposed to be escorting would detect an enemy you haven’t even seen yet (for example, a monster hiding behind a corner) and recklessly abandon you and run to fight it. This usually happened when you were looking the other way.

The only reliable way to deal with followers was to tell them to sit tight, scout ahead, clear the area of enemies and then come back for them.

Fallout 3 seems to worked out several kinks out of this system – at least for some of the follower characters. As far as I can tell the human followers still act like idiots most of the time. But they hardly ever clip on the terrain and become stuck – at least from what I checked. If they do get stuck, all you need to do is to travel to a new cell (ie. exit or enter a building) and they will get magically transported to you – kinda like in Oblivion.

Fallout 3 introduces something new though: a pet follower. This is something that was done in countless mods to previous Bethsheda games. Clearly, people always wanted to have a dog following them around on their adventures. Now you can. Fallout 3 features a pet follower called Dogmeat. I believe he was featured in the previous Fallout games as well. He is a non-hostile NPC that you can meet around the scrapyard area.

Me and Dogmeat

Rather than being a nuisance however, Dogmeat actually adds to the game play. For example, he is very good at spotting enemies but he doesn’t usually run up and charge them. Instead he stays at your side and growls at them which is an excellent early warning system. I can’t tell you how many times this has saved my skin. Ever since I met this dog, I have never been ambushed from behind by an enemy I didn’t see.

When you do get close enough to the enemy and engage him, he will swoop in for a kill. This is usually desirable since it will usually provide a great distraction. It allows you to actually run up to the enemy as it is preoccupied fighting off an angry dog and get a point-blank head-shot with a shotgun or other high powered weapon. I especially liked having him around during the stupid fire-ant mission. He would engage the ants head on, and I would flank them and kill them from close range without getting barbecued.

Dogmeats life regenerates in between combats so you actually don’t have to worry that much about his maintenance. You can however give him a stimpack by talking to him if his health is getting low during a prolonged fight.

You can also ask him to search for items such as chems, weapons, ammo or food. This can sometimes be useful when you are trying to locate something specific. If he is getting in your way (or you are on a mission that requires stealth) you can always order him to go back to Vault 101 location and pick him up later.

His path finding algorithm is pretty good and he is usually able to follow you just about everywhere. Then again, when I was doing the Germantown mission I chose to enter the fenced off area from one direction while the stupid dog ran all the way around and entered it from the opposite side engaging the two supermutants that were patrolling the area. In the end it worked out fine since it created a great diversion. Still, it shows that the much improved path finding does not always work.

The Combat System

The combat in Fallout 3 is similar to what I was used to from Oblivion. Only now it has guns. One great addition to it is the V.A.T.S. system which allows you to pause the action and take carefully aimed shots. Each of them takes several action points which regenerate over time.

Some people hate this system, but I personally like it very much. It makes the combat less about frantic circle strafing and more about tactics. For example with V.A.T.S. you can try to disarm the guy with the bazooka by shooting at his arms. Or you can conserve your precious ammo by shooting Mirelurks in the face instead of bouncing bullets off their hard carapace.

The V.A.T.S. System

Also, it makes for some fun, cinematic events. Whenever you kill someone in V.A.T.S. mode their death will be shown in a slow-motion closeup and more animated than normal. Great example of this was battle with the sniper in Minefield town. I hid behind a rock, took a V.A.T.S. shot at the crazy guy at the top of the ruined tower with my hunting rifle and… His head fell off in slow motion. It was almost like a bullet-time animation with the spinning camera following my round as it exited the barrel of my gun and hit the target. How awesome is that?

When you are out of V.A.T.S. the combat is still fairly fun. Melee feels just like Oblivion with the RMB used for parry. When using a firearm, RMB is the “aim down the sight” mode that many FPS games employ these days. It zooms in at the target a little bit and gives you better accuracy but it makes you move slower.

The Setting

When I first emerged from the Vault all I could say was “Wow!”. The Capital Wasteland is positively stunning. There is a certain sublime beauty to the desolate, ruined landscape you see at the begging of the game. And it only gets better from there.

The Capital Wasteland

The game looks and feels much different from the Elder Scrolls titles that preceded it. It has a bit of a Mad Max vibe, a little bit of modern Scifi and metality and definite retro style making it a unique mix. All the the robots look as if they were taken out of old TV shows such as “Lost in Space” for example. The music that plays on the radio is a collection of old classics which are almost perfect for this settings – especially the very apropos “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” track which was so effectively used in the trailers for this game.

I don’t know – there is just something unreal about walking around a burned ruins of DC, carrying your laser rifle and fighting with supermutants while that song plays in the background. It is something that must be experienced.

Ruins of DC

I’d say that this game is worth playing just for the experience. There are the stunning vistas of ruined cities, the old music on the radio, the modern sounding DJ who comments on your actions and completed quests, the retro robots, the post apocalyptic setting, the funny Fallout Boy graphics, the humorous signs and billboards. It is an incredible and unique mix. Soon after I started playing this game, I got sucked into it’s atmosphere and totally forgot all of it’s flaws.

Capitan Cosmost FTW

I can’t say how much does the game deviate from the setting portrayed in the two original Fallout games since I haven’t played them. From what I heard it is rather shallow and only exposes a fraction of this fascinating setting. Still, I love it nonetheless.

Setting wise, this game somewhat reminded me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. It featured similar irradiated wastelands and combat situations. The two are actually very different. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is modern, gritty and serious, while Fallout 3 is retro and often campy and/or funny. It is also much more polished with better interface, better map, better NPC interaction and a world that is much more open.

Ruins of Washington Monument

Fallout 3 has almost no insurmountable waist high fences but it does make a liberal use of rubble and ruins and occasional un-scalable chain link fence. The walls around some of the towns (like Big Town or Paradise Falls) often look as if they were about to fall over but at least they are tall enough to give you an idea that scaling them is probably not going to be easy. That said, with some careful well timed jumps you can often bypass these artificial walls.

Once you start visiting the DC area however things change. The whole city is designed as dozens of cells that are interconnected by ghoul infested metro tunnels. It took me hours to find the radio station because I was trying to find a surface route there. There is none. To get to some parts of the city you need to hit the tunnels and/or sewer systems. It’s difficult to navigate this maze, and you will be lost a lot. Fortunately after 3 or 4 hours of aimless wandering you will find enough DC based map markers that your quest destination areas will be at most one tuner crawl away from a fast travel point.

Another thing that bothered me in this game was the fact that the world was so full of loot. I’m not complaining or course – I was happy to find ammo and food strewn all across the floor in each building and ruin. I mean let’s face it – the game takes place 200 years after the nuclear war. As far as I can tell no one is really producing anything and yet canned goods, bottled beverages and ammo is can be found literally at every step. Where does it all come from?

You are telling me that despite the fact that most people in the Capital Wasteland live of scavenging, the ruins are still full of edible food? I’d expect the people of the wasteland to live mostly on iguana meet, fried squirrels, dogs, rad roaches and occasional brahmin meat. But hardly anyone eats these things. Instead every household has at least couple of unopened cans of Spam, Pork & Beans and bunch of Nuka Cola bottles – despite the fact these items were out of production for two hundred years. It’s baffling, really.

Similarly, the car wrecks that litter the streets still explode when you shoot them. How the hell do they still have gas in their tanks after 200 years? I’d think that someone would siphon it out shortly after the war – and if they didn’t it would simply evaporate over time.

For comparison, try reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It describes a similar post apocalyptic setting – a burnt out, desolate wasteland. His story takes place only few years after the (nuclear?) apocalypse but finding supplies is already a problem. When his characters find a new town they realize that every abandoned building been meticulously searched by hundreds of people before them. The best they can hope for are scraps that others passed by or missed. In fact, the food shortage is so severe many communities turn to cannibalism. In Fallout 3 food and ammo is so plentiful that no one even bothers farming, and only few people keep livestock (if you can call a single brahmin tied to a stick a livestock that is).

This doesn’t detract from the game play of course. It was just a minor thing that kept bothering me initially. I learned to tune it out though.

I think I only have one more post in this series. I still have to complain a little bit about the writing, the karma system and give you my conclusion. All of that should fit in a single post – so those of you sick and tired hearing about fallout can rejoice.

Character Creation

Just like in Oblivion and Morrowind the character creation process takes place in many stages during an extended tutorial that introduces you to the game mechanics. This is naturally a good idea since it eases you into the game and postpones making big decisions (such as which skills to invest into) until you get a handle on how the game works.

In Oblivion this intro level seemed a little forced and silly and pretencious in how it paired you up with Jean-Luc Picard the emperor of Tamriel himself, who proceeds to die in your arms and begs you to avenge the world and save his death.

In Fallout 3 your reason for adventuring is a little less grandiose. Your dad skips out of town (and by town I mean hermetically sealed vault where no one enters and no one leaves) and in the process pisses off a lot of people who then decide to take their frustrations up on you. It is all explained in detail, and the extended tutorial actually allows you to get to make a few friends and few enemies inside of the Vault, get the lay of the land and etc. The game starts literally at the moment of your birth when you pick your gender. Then your dad rolls in the “Genetic Age Projection Machine” aka the Face design tool.

The design tools are similar to those used in Oblivion. You get bunch of interlinked sliders that make certain features bigger and/or smaller. Sliding one of them will often reposition several others which makes me wonder why haven’t they consolidated them. It is fairly flexible but similarly to Oblivion the haircut choices are atrocious – especially if you choose to play a lady (for a dude you can always go with a buzz cut or a bald head and call it a day).

I must ask a question here. Is there a reason why Bethesda forces us to design our characters in a murky artificial light setting? In Oblivion you were in a dungeon lit only by flickering torches. In Fallout 3 the machine interface uses a retro CRT display that dims in and out. Both games give you a finely tuned control over your skin tone, shading, blush, eye shadows and etc. Sadly, the light conditions during character creation are poorer than the ones you will be experiencing 80% of time during the game. A face designed in that light may look very different in full sunlight. Some skin tones and shading choices that seem fine in the murky twilight look horrible under proper lighting. Is being able to design your facial features in a bright environment really that much to ask?

Fallout 3 Character Designer

Since you take control of your character at different ages (11 and then 16) there is some sort of reverse aging algorithm that tries to figure out how your face would look taking what you designed as a base sample. The results are usually pretty…. Creepy. While it worked pretty well for NPC’s the reverse aging plunged my character deep into the uncanny valley. Fortunately this was only a temporary inconvenience.

The System

The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system that governs the skills, attributes and perks is very different from the one used by Morrowind and Oblivion. I believe it was transplanted directly from the previous Fallout installments with little or no modifications. It is an old school approach that has you earning XP points for doing quests and killing things and then picking up skills points and perks when you level up. You can spend these points however you want. For example, you can earn a level by running around and shooting things, and then pump all the earned points into skills such as science and medicine. I sort of liked the advancement system from previous Bethesda games that increased skills that you were actively using. It made sense to me. I’m not complaining though – Fallout 3 is standard approach seen in hundreds of RPG’s and it works well.

The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Screen

The perk system is a little silly though. Each time you level up you get to pick up one special bonus or ability. There is a wide range of interesting perks to choose from, but to me they all seem like inherent talents, or character background stuff that you would pick at character creation rather than as you advance. For example, perks like “Dady’s Boy/Girl” (gives you bonus to science/medicine skills) or “Educated” (get more skill points on level up) seems like stuff you would have picked up in your childhood rather than during your adventures in the wasteland.

But that’s just my opinion. The perks are a carry over from the previous fallout games and are part of these series’ flavor I guess. I don’t dislike them – I just find them a bit odd.

The Inventory Interface

Morrowind had a great inventory screen. It was mouse+keyboard driven and most actions could be accomplished via drag/drop actions or hot keys. Your stats, inventory, map and magic were all opened in separate windows that could be repositioned, re-sized and pinned to any area of the screen. You could arrange them the way you wanted and most importantly you could have all this information on a single screen. So for example, you could observe how your stats change when drinking potions or equipping items.

Oblivion inventory on the other hand was designed to be game pad friendly. It spread the information across multiple tabs and minimized the amount of information displayed on the single screen. A console player can navigate such menu very rapidly – the left analog stick flips through tabs. The right one scrolls the screen up and down, and buttons initiate different actions. Navigating it with a mouse however is tedious. A simple action such as equipping a magical ring and then checking how it affects your stats takes at least 4-5 clicks and switching through 2-3 different screens.

Fallout 3 continues this tradition and gives you an interface divided into many screens, sub-screens and sections. It was clearly designed with console players in mind and as a die-hard PC gamer and mouse enthusiast I should hate it with a passion. But I don’t.

The Pip Boy Screen

The best thing about this interface is the style. The sheer awesomeness of seeing my character raise the arm-mounted Pip-boy screen to her face made me completely forget how awkward and difficult to use it really is. The interface has clunky retro buttons with that characteristic “old electronic device” snap. It uses a green monochrome screen that flickers each time you press a button. The whole thing sometimes sways up and down or side to side as your character moves her hand. It has a genuine look and feel of a classy retro hardware – and you can almost write off the awkwardness of the interface as an inherent design feature of the Pip-Boy. This is how you turn a flaw into a feature.

The Leather Jacket of +5 to Mele

Let’s talk about the inventory system itself. I noticed that with each game Betsheda reduces the amount of clothes and armor your character can wear. In Morrowind you could mix and match clothing (shirts, pants, skirts) and armor components for each body part (chest plate, helmet, greaves, two gauntlets, two plaudrons, etc…).

Oblivion simplified this prohibiting you from wearing normal clothing under the armor, making plaudrons integral part of the chest armor, and making gauntlet pairs inseparable. It also introduced one-piece armors that covered all body areas except for the head.

This concept returns in Fallout 3. There are only two types of clothing in these game: head gear, and full body costumes. You really don’t get to mix and match different clothing items which is little disappointing. I was sort of looking forward to making an unique looking mad-max style combination of battered armor plates, street clothes spikes and etc.. This is not possible – you only get one piece suits. Granted, there is a variety of them in the game (for example Riders have 4-5 different armor variants) but it is a little bland.

On the upside, Fallout 3 implements something that I talked about in one of my previous posts: it makes wearing the right clothes for the right job beneficial. You see, each type of clothing offers different bonuses. For example wearing a lab coat will boost your science skill. Wearing a business suit will boost your speech and barter skills. Wearing hockey mask and a leather jacket will make you better in melee.

This means that visiting the local merchant while wearing your combat armor is less profitable than strolling in a nice business suit. It makes you want to keep all these different pieces of clothing that you’d normally sell and discard as you get better armor from looted foes.

Bussiness attire boosts your barter skill

Sadly, the clothing still has no impact on how the NPC’s treat you. For example I was able to stroll into Megaton wearing looted Rider gear and was greeted by the locals with open arms. These locals then proceed to warn me about the evil Riders in the wasteland who wear armor that looks just like mine.

So we are still not there. As far as I can tell, none of the recent RPG games uses clothing to modify how NPC’s react to you. I’d really love to see someone implement this.

Hidden Features

This post is already running a little long, but let me mention another “feature” of the interface: hidden functionality that is never explained in the game. During the tutorial you are taught how to use the Pip-Boy and how to interact with the game environment. Three important lessons were somehow omitted:

1. Repairing Items
2. Holstering your weapon
3. Using the flashlight

Repairing your items is important. The merchants charge you an arm and a leg for even minor condition improvements. Using their services is really just a huge waste of money. If you pump a few points into your Repair skill you should be a able to keep most of your gear in shape by yourself.

Sadly no one ever tells you that you can open the repair screen in Pip-Boy by highlighting an item and pressing R. This is mentioned in the manual booklet but not in the game itself. This is problematic, since no one ever reads the manuals anymore. I mean, this game has like an hour long, un-skipable tutorial section. You’d think that reading the 15 page manual wouldn’t be necessary after that. Sadly it is.

Same goes for holstering your weapon. No one ever tells you that you accomplish it by pressing and holding the reload button. Manual mentions this off-hand when it talks about yielding but if you gloss over that section, you will never know.

Finally, the flashlight which is activated by holding down the Pip-Boy key. It is never mentioned in the manual, never even alluded to in the game and not listed in the key-binding menu. It is a genuine hidden feature. Go figure.

That’s all I have for today. Next time I’ll talk about the followers, the setting, the quests and the writing.