Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

I picked Fallout 3 up the night before I had surgery with the thought that I'll have tons of time to myself to plug through an RPG. We (a friend that was helping me out at the time and I) logged a good amount of play time, if I can find a way to find out exactly how much I'll edit the post to reflect that, during the next week while I was off from work. Having just hit two possible endings tonight, I felt it was time for a review.

Note: I will keep this as spoiler free as possible, however if you really don't want to learn anything, walk away now. I will give basic geographical/plot background information, and some limited meta information about endings, nothing about the endings themselves.

The Setting
The background of Fallout 3 (FO3 from here on out) is set in the DC area, in 2277, 200 years after nuclear war ravaged our country, and the world. However it is not a pure futuristic setting, the story takes life as it was in the 1950s, and says "What if this is how we stayed". So you have a juxtaposition of 1950s technology and culture with the knowledge that you're hundreds of years in the future. In some places those differences are obvious, maybe a computer file dated in the future, but the computer is just a terminal connected to something the size of a room.

Everyone that has survived has done it one of two ways. The nicest is they were in Vaults at the time of the attack, bomb shelters designed to be communities. This is where you come from, Vault 101. Those not lucky enough to be in Vaults, or those who left after the attacks lived in the wild, or ad hoc communities together. If you're lucky, these 'wild' people you interact with are human.

As far as the physical setting goes, I felt they nailed DC. Having grown up in this area I know it fairly well, and there were many times wandering around the Wastes when I'd stumble across a place I knew, or a street I actually recognized. Its cool. More than being recognizable, its different enough to be the future. There's, for instance, buildings all the way up to where the Cherry Blossoms should be, and an aircraft carrier that came into port.

As far as graphics go, they're what you'd expect from Bethesda. On the high-def TV I just got they're downright gorgeous for sweeping landscapes. If you stand on the steps of the Capital around Sunset, and look south to the Washington Monument, it's pretty. On the other hand, wandering around the Wastes at midnight and realizing you're in the middle of a minefield, just as scary as the previous scene was beautiful. But no matter what you look at its missing that exactness, something just feels off,since the landscapes are just so big and the GPUs are just so finite.

Initial Reactions
I liked the start of the game a lot. The character creation is pretty decent, tied in with the story. From the get go, you're making decisions that affect your character, which is something I like. While you are somewhat protected for the first bit, you can set the tone for your character already... there's no specific 'newbie time' where you're just learning controls and that's it. Actually, I suppose there is, but it gets drawn out through this time when you can affect your character.

I did feel just a bit overwhelmed stepping out of the Vault initially, when I caught a glimpse of how big the Wastes are.

The Grind
However, once we got into a grind, mainly doing side quests or just exploring to steal as much as we could and sell back in town, I felt a bit bored. The quests themselves are pretty good, the usual "Run around and do X, Y, and Z," types (I won't enumerate the full types of the quests, just so no one feels cheated) but with good writing, some humor, and a freaking HUGE area to explore.

Honestly, the worst part was filling up my inventory every 20-30 minutes. In a well populated area this would happen more like every 10 minutes. Even with a follower (Yer the man, Cheron!), which I believe more than doubles your capacity, this would happen to us. When it happened, we'd have to get out of combat, back out of whatever dungeon or building we were in to get back to the Wastes, fast travel back to a town and sell the stuff off. This worked decently well in the beginning, but by the end I was bringing in a good 4,000 caps (the currency is bottle caps) per run, and unable to sell it all in one town. In fact, I'd go between three towns and barely clear my inventory. Even then I was stopping by my house and dropping a lot of parts off. This started to wear on me the last few days I was playing and I started just not clearing my corpses, nor searching for items that weren't obvious while I was exploring.

The End
So I got to an ending tonight. I say 'an' because like all good RPGs, there's more than one. FO3 has, according to the developers over 240 endings (I'm not responsible for spoilers from following that link. Take my word for it if you don't want to know). This is possible because of how they do the ending, which I really liked. I also found at least one other choice just before the ending that is sort of another way to end it... I created about 5 saved games just from recognizing the spots where I'd have a game-deciding choice and saving just before I did, will go back and replay them all the other way sometime next week.

The one question I have about the endings is if you can keep playing after getting to it. The ending I chose resulted in seeing the Main Menu again, so I'm very interested to know if I can keep playing after a better choice, or if we've got another Fable on our hands.

EDIT: I've googled around, and it looks like there's going to be a downloadable pack that will allow you to play after the main quest is done. So make sure you have good saves if you think you're anywhere near the end!

Balthazar
I went a different route for my character than I normally do (Snarky). This guy was Balthazar, who I aligned heavily with one town where my house was, and played every other interaction to my benefit. If this required being nice, I was nice, and if it required ruthlessness, I did that as well. In most cases I would help out those who needed it, then clean out their houses while they're out celebrating.

The two noble causes in Balthazar's life are his father and his country. Anytime anyone spoke poorly of my father, they were dealt with immediately, and swiftly. In the grander scheme, any time I could work a "for the good of the nation" into a quest, I'd do it. Anything designed to better the lives of the American citizens was carried out, though in a few cases that requires some heavy thinking to sort out who really wanted what for whom.

The Morals
And that brings me to the morals in this game. One interesting thing is that anytime you steal, even if you're not caught, you lose Karma. This means that by the end of the game, even though I only had 5 pick pockets, my Karma was the lowest possible level. People were almost spitting on me in the streets. If you want to play a good, or neutral, character, you'll either have to never steal, or make sure you pick up every possible 'helping' quest there is.

Beyond this obvious moral lesson, the ending of the game raises excellent moral questions. To a certain degree I saw them coming throughout the game, but I was actually struggling with my ending because I really wasn't sure if I was on the "Good guys" side. While I dislike games that preach on certain points (the favorite right now is privatized warfare... I'm looking at you Metal Gear Solid 4) and use it as a political platform, I still enjoyed the mental exercise these endings required.

The Scoring
So, how would I rate this game?

Graphics: 4/5. Clearly above par, but due to system constraints they're not going to look lifelike.

Plot: 5/5. I enjoyed it, I really did. Especially towards the end if you work on just playing the main story line its great.

Gameplay: 4/5. The controls are ok, but certain things, like the fast weapon switch, just don't feel very snappy. Of course, I was able to pick the controller up the first time and know where everything was, points to them for not changing something that's not broken. Gameplay throughout the game is very linear in difficulty, there's no new tricks to pick up after the start (that I can remember).

Repetitiveness: 3/5. As I mentioned above, the game can get good and repetitive. Go to X, clear out whatever you find, go sell. My problem with non-linear games is I get lost just trying to discover everything and bring everything out, someone more focused might not find this an issue.

Ending: 5/5. Why rate the ending? Because this is why you played the game! To have a game (*coughFablecough*) be exceptionally good gameplay, and then have a very anti-climatic ending ruins any fun you may have had. Conversely, a mediocre game with an excellent ending will leave you thinking the world of it. This one was well done, enough to make up for the repetitiveness around the middle.

RPG: 5/5. Its a good, solid RPG. Simple enough to pick right up and have an idea where you want your character to go, but complex enough that you could replay 5 or 6 times with unique builds easily. Googling for Fallout Characters should show you some examples of what people have made, everything from a Freddie Krugar specializing in Melee weapons, to paladins who refuse to use firearms, to pyromaniacs bent on making everything explode. I initially gave this a 4, but changed my mind because I can't think of the last RPG I enjoyed to this extent.

Stability: 3/5. Maybe my biggest complaint. I believe I hung my PS3 a good three or four times in FO3. While this has happened with other games, it might have been once in Resistance 2, to happen multiple times to a game is just wrong. I had to do hard reboots but flipping the power switch in back for at least two of these hangs. This irks me because the other 8ish games I've owned haven't given me problems (other than R2 once... maybe), and I feel that since everyone's on the same platform, it should be easy to test for these things ahead of time. That said, I've logged a good amount of time in FO3 straight, and heat may have been a factor, I'm unsure. Also, the glitches weren't reproducible, so they could be things that legitimately were missed by QA.

Overall: 4/5. While it might start to drag in the center, pushing on to the ending is more than worth it. Its missing the 5 here because I feel a 5 should leave me feeling "Nothing could possibly be changed here", and there's a few things that could be changed in FO3. The stability is the other major issues preventing a 5.

All in All
If you have a PS3, and you enjoy RPGs, buy it. Maybe do GameFly if you're unsure, but I feel like this will be a keeper, and I'll play through another character (going to *try* for a pure good character, probably have to make him/her really naive to pull that off, but oh well) next summerish.