Fallout 3 Editorials

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Written by BuckGB on November 14th, 2008

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But as I made my way south I had my first surreal moment. I came upon the Falls Church Metro (subway for those unfamiliar) station. As a rider of the Orange Line, the Falls Church stops were just a natural part of the ride to and from the District. This station in Fallout 3 was outdoors, like the real Falls Church, though it was labeled neither East or West (I suppose the creators are allowed a bit of creative liberty when it comes to mapping space). It was also infested with Super Mutants who promptly ended my journey with their assault rifles and sledgehammers. Clearly I was not meant to be there, but it piqued my interest in seeing more of the Metro. It is interesting to note that my desire to explore was curbed by the kind of level-based barring Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Morie, and Celia Pearce describe in (A Game of One's Own) as a characteristic of male-gendered spaces.

I moved in a more guided direction following that incident making my way across the irradiated Potomac River into the city. I ended up coming across the Georgetown station, going inside, and seeing a familiar walkway but unfamiliar platform. Those who have ridden the Metro system in DC recognize its tall concrete coffered barrel vaulted ceilings, and whatever place I was in was clearly not representative of that definitive architecture. I continued exploring.

Course, that's just my story. PC gaming is rife with this sort of stuff, and normally, issues affecting one man aren't enough to kick up a stink over. But take a look at the game's official support boards. The 360 boards, the PS3 boards, the PC boards. It's not my game that's broken. It's a ton of people whose games are broken, across all three platforms, and they're broken in a variety of places (ie, this isn't a single issue, it's a wide variety of issues).

Now, before we get too down on Bethesda, the same thing happened with Oblivion. Game was all kinds of broken, eventually patches came out, game stopped being broken, everyone got on with their lives. And the same will no doubt happen with Fallout 3. It's just a shame that, over two years on, people throwing down good money on a Bethesda game have had to put up with the same mess all over again.

Unfortunately, it is the main quest where the game shows its true face. Unlike the previous games, the main quest is almost entirely linear and shows shoddy storytelling throughout. Making most of its NPCs immortal and locking areas until you're supposed to encounter them according to the storyline and furthermore offering only one significant choice, which is made only at the penultimate moment in the story.
The exception being the beginning of the quest, which you can skip. If you do this, however, Fallout 3 pretends that you didn't skip anything but went through everything in order, making for some very disjointed and surreal moments.

Equally unconvincing is the setting. It reminds me primarily of Fallout 2 in feel. That is to say: it has its great moments, but what you will mostly remember it for is being very, very inconsistent. Hell, the setting itself doesn't even begin to make sense: it is set 200 years after a devastating nuclear war, but people are still living completely on the scraps of the old society. That is conceptually impossible; for Frith's sake, a tent camp set up by Homeland Security 200 years ago is still up, with a fully functioning computer (!) to read 200-year old logs on. And it gets even weirder when you go through easily-accessible ruins and still find goods in their original places. It makes sense that there needs to be loot, but it doesn't make sense how Bethesda implemented it.

The basic feel of the setting is Mad Max post-apocalypse style with some heavy steampunk influence and it works fairly well, similar in most parts to BioShock but more desolate. It breaks up when it actually starts looking closer to BioShock, like Tenpenny Towers. The feel of brandnewness to much of that place doesn't work. Spots like that or the lush green forest you can run into can only be assumed to have supposed to function as juxtapositions to the wasteland, but they function rather half-heartedly. There's quite a few spots like this, and it doesn't help that some computers and machines in rusty old complexes look brand new and are functional even though they're 200 years old. The net result is that you can't get a clear sense of what stage in the rebuilding process this world is supposed to be at.

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