Fallout 3: The 50s sucked anyway

Well, hello again. I hope your week was pleasant, gentle reader. It is time now for us to discuss, once again our (my) poignant observations of the week (and by “discuss” I, of course, mean that I am going to talk at you and you are going to listen and like it).

As you can see from the title of this post, I have finished Fallout 3. I say finished not only in the sense that I reached the end of the game, but also in that I have no intention of ever touching the damn thing again.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good things happening in Fallout 3. The V.A.T.S. system that lets a player stop the combat to choose what body-part to shoot at complete with a display of the chance to actually hit that part is pretty sweet. The game also features an hugely open world to explore and plenty of missions to undertake, meaning that one can spend massive amounts of time enjoying the game and never play any story missions (which is exactly what I did).

There's some other shit in there that damn infuriating, however. At the beginning of the game, the player picks his or her stats for the rest of the game. Those stats only change with a few perks, but for the most part, they are what they are. You never get to increase those stats when you level up. This wouldn't be so bad if there had been a sign somewhere that said “WARNING: You're stuck with these stats for the next 50-100 hours.” I got about half-way through the game before I realized that I should have just dumped all my points in Charisma and Intelligence into my Strength and Dexterity (I played as a combat character). Rest assured, reader, min/maxing is what you have to do. If you try to play an evenly-balanced character, you will quickly come to a point where you can't do anything. The enemies will be too tough for you to fight, but you aren't good enough to sneak past them. You won't be able to pick any locks nor hack any computers because your skill just won't be high enough. There is some good in the specialization it forces you to take.

There are some good points to the character creation system, though. The skills the game gives you are pretty varied and the player chooses three to be higher than all the others at the start, which means that if the player knows what kind of character he or she wants to play, he or she just has to use the appropriate stat configurations. I played a combat character, so I put mine into Small Guns, Melee, and Repair, but as the game went on, I also gave myself plenty of points in Big Guns. Other characters might want an assassin-type character which would need Sneak, Lockpick, and either Melee or Explosives. There are plenty of other archetypes to go off of as well. One might decide to take Big Guns, Science, and Medicine and make a supervillain.

What really angers me, however, is the end. I played a good character and at the end I was given the option of sacrificing myself for the greater good. I took that option, but I couldn't find the button I was supposed to push to save the world. So there was an explosion and I was shown the ending cutscene where I was a great hero who failed in the end. Pretty disappointing, eh? I saved right before I went in there, of course, but as I understand it, I need some type of code that I guess was plastered to some arbitrary wall somewhere as I strolled passed. Even if I had the code, I still don't feel like bothering to boot the game up just to see. I'm tired of Fallout 3. It was fun for a while, but it felt like I was just wandering through the story, doing whatever I was told by the people who know what the fuck is going on, but I never felt like I was getting the whole story which meant that I didn't have much stake in it.

In the end. It never felt like my character got any better. My statistics go up, but he still played just the same. Part of the appeal of an RPG is that the player-character become ridiculously awesome in ways that simply cannot be imagined. The closest thing that I came to that was getting a perk that made people explode.
So thanks, Bethesda. It was a good try, but maybe the problem here is that your game is too damn realistic, and I just don't want realism. I want awesome-ism.

Did I really just say “awesome-ism?”
Zac