I think I like it?

Well this is the article I’ve been casually mentioning writing since mid July (no less than eight months after its release anyway) when I was disenchanted with Fallout 3. I sincerely doubt it will live up to the hype, but here it is anyway! First let’s talk about what took me so long. According to my achievements I started playing Fallout 3 on June 29th and finished it on September 9th. That’s pretty much the reason right there. I didn’t play the living hell out of the game, exploring every area with the utmost care; instead I think I put in around 12 or 15 hours with a couple month long hiatus in the middle there. Over the course of that time I went through varying opinions on the game, and I’m still not entirely sure if I liked it or not, let’s talk about why.

Right from the start I liked Fallout 3, primarily due to changes made from Bethesda’s previous game, Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. I spent around 45 hours with Oblivion, finishing every major quest line and just taking everything in, but I had some serious issues with it. Most importantly the games leveling system, while allowing you to go anywhere right from the start, also had the potential to make progress nigh impossible. In Oblivion, the enemies leveled with the player, but leveling wasn’t just the simple act of becoming better and learning new skills. There were multiple tiers of abilities, and how the lower tiers improved over the course of a level affected how big of a boost the higher tiers would get when leveling. Sound confusing? That’s because it was. It required a lot of skill micromanagement that if done poorly resulted in a character that actually got weaker as he leveled. That character was mine. The way I overcame this was by turning the difficulty all the way down, I didn’t mind too much because I thought Oblivion’s combat system was pretty lame anyway. I didn’t miss the lack of a challenge all that much, for me it was all about exploration.

Now I know the name of Fallout 3 doesn’t mention Elder Scrolls anywhere in the title, but Bethesda even said themselves that Fallout 3 is as much a sequel to Oblivion as it is to Fallout. Anyone who has played both Oblivion and Fallout 3 will definitely notice the resemblance. Why I immediately fell in love with Fallout 3 was because it did away with Oblivion’s tedious leveling system, replacing it with a more traditional one, while still keeping the go anywhere do anything setup of Oblivion. The combat system is also a lot more fun, flawlessly blending real time first person shooter gameplay with turn based combat that almost always ends with hilariously gory results. See the above image if you don't believe me and just so you know, blowing a mans head clean off in slow motion never gets old.

This initial love waned quickly, and within a week I had almost all but given up on Fallout completely. I told myself I’d finish it one day, and I always do, but I put it off for two months. So what happened? Well post apocalyptic D.C. is apparently a lot less interesting to explore than the world of Cyrodiil. In Oblivion I’d often spend my time just wandering around in the mountains, exploring caves, just taking in the awesome world Bethesda created. In Fallout 3 exploration was a lot less interesting. The world they created this time isn’t pretty, and you can’t fault them for that, it’s a wasteland. Still it wasn’t as visually interesting to wander around in. More importantly, wandering around seemed a lot more difficult this time around. Despite the world appearing to be a wide open sprawl of nothing, I quickly ran into obstructions. Even when I had a set path and a specific destination I’d usually end up getting stuck somewhere and have to backtrack around annoying obstacles. Several places were only accessible through dilapidated subway tunnels whose entrances weren’t very well marked. This made exploration a bit more tedious than it had to be.

Also, a certain side quest I sunk a few hours into glitched in such a way that I couldn’t finish it and then completed itself upon reloading the game, which helped to turned me off to everything but the main story. Since I tend stick to the main story in big open ended games anyway, I’ll let that big paragraph I had planned go. This is already getting longer than I’d like.

I had this article outlined back in July and was going to discuss all the various things I didn’t like about it, then maybe question what I missed. Clearly there must have been something, this was several websites pick for Game of the Year ’08, and there were a lot of great games last year, but when I went to finish it a couple weeks ago I think I started to see the appeal. I might even say that by the end of the main quest I was sad to see it end. I decided some of my earlier complaints were unfounded, particularly all the ones I neglected to mention above ;), and that while the game probably wasn’t for me, it’s solid and a worthy sequel to Oblivion. I never played the old Fallouts, but maybe it’s a worthy sequel to those too? This change of heart kind of threw off the whole direction of the originally planned article and like I said at the beginning, I’m not entirely sure if I liked it or not. Anyway, we’re getting a little too far into meta territory now, blogging about blogging, and since you probably don’t need a recommendation to play Fallout 3 almost a year after its release, I’ll just cut this short. Go play it if you haven’t, hopefully you’ll come up with a more concrete opinion of it than me.