Some of these points are known to about every single person who has every heard of Fallout 3 (and especially those who play it). It’s a rant with no purpose but me letting steam out.
I got a Playstation 3. Then I got a couple of games. I knew that Fallout 3 had been released for the Playstation 3, and while my stationary computer is more than capable of running Fallout 3 in terms of hardware, I do not have Windows installed (and no, it’s not an option to install it) — so I got Fallout 3 for Playstation 3. Now, I love the Playstation 3 and can’t wait for people to see what potential it has. The Cell is a kickass processor — read some technical docs on it, wikipedia is definitely not enough.
Before I got the game, I was quite nervous that I would be getting some crappy rip-of of the Fallout franchise so I decided to read some non-commercial reviews (that is by people who are not paid to write nice stories or are too biased towards crappy FPS games) and found two reviews which seemed to be by people who likes Fallout as much as I do. The most important quote from these reviews where
Fallout 3 is Oblivion with guns
Having never played Oblivion, I figured it would be an advancement from Morrowind (which I have played a bit of and kinda liked a bit), so I got the game (still rather nervous).
Now, when I got the game, I looked around in a few shops and found that I could get the PS3 version for 550 DKR (that’s danish kroner) or the Windows version for 450 DKR. Let’s just repeat that — 550 DKR, An increase of 22.22% from the Windows version, for a console where there has yet to be made a single illegal copy of a game This is important because illegal copies has been used time and time again as argumentation for inflating the price of video games (oddly enough only for Windows, never for other platforms), but still the Playstation 3 version is the more expensive one. I would have expected the reverse to be true at best, at worst that the price was the same. Finally I managed to find a shop that gave me a discount so I only had to pay 500 DKR, but the standard price (actually, the only other price I found) is 550 DKR — which includes webshops. They would have given me a discount on the Windows version too, also at 50 DKR (which means the price difference is 25% (500/400)).
Booting the game, I find several fundamental flaws in how the game develops, the basic premises and mechanics and just about anything else. I did say I love Fallout, right? Well, I love Fallout so much, in fact, that I have given a great deal of thought to just why I love Fallout. I have completed Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout: Tactics (which is an excellent tactical game in it’s own right, but is not a Fallout sequal). It all come down to detail. See, in Fallout and Fallout 2 details are only important when they are important. The player is never forced to figure out some detail or play a mini-game unless it’s important. That’s what the character is there for. Instead, Fallout and Fallout 2 are about exploration and expanding your world. You explore a world, which should be completely void of life (since it’s been devastated by several very large nuclear detonation), but instead you find that the world is teeming with life (although rather absurd lifeforms). Oh, and the people in the world are really cooked. Please also note that guns where actually not that important in Fallout or Fallout 2 (though it often was to me). The game spent more time on exploration, dialog and related events than combat (at least it does when I play it). Dialog and quests where often complex and combat was simple.
On anther note, regarding the main character — in Fallout and Fallout 2, the main character is actually rather unimportant. In the first game the main character is picked at random to go out and find a new water chip and in the second game, it was planned for the main character to meet another chosen one, sent prior to the game starting. In Fallout 3, Three Dogs keeps talking about the main character and his father (who seems to be trying to save the world, at least), which brings me to yet another point. Fallout and Fallout 2 have such great stories because they are much smaller than the world, but the world contains a lot of similar sized stories — some stories in Fallout 2 can take as long as the main quest to complete, and can involve more complex dialog and world interaction than the main quest. In fact, the main quest in Fallout 2 can be done in about 30 minutes (with a bit of luck).
In Fallout 3, I find the reverse is true. I constantly have to play stupid mini-games (lockpicking, hacking), combat is almost constant and exploration is almost negligible and dialog is reduce to the most basic form. Combat on the other hand is complex and a shift has been made from turnbased to real time (V.A.T.S. is still real time) and now, players have to repair their equipment (which for some reason requires you to have two of the same type or an NPC which charges money). Fallout 3 is a first person shooter (possible the best one, but still, it’s a first person shooter). V.A.T.S. reduces some of the nastiness of playing action packed games on consoles so I’m not going to bash that too much. V.A.T.S. does have one very large and one minor flaw. The large flaw is damage to gear. In V.A:T.S. you hurt your weapons more than if you don’t use V.A.T.S. (but do more damage) the small one is that combat cannot be exclusively V.A.T.S., because Action Points do not replenish once a V.A.T.S. “round” is complete.
Let’s get back to the price issue again. Like I wrote, I paid 500 DKR for my copy for Playstation 3, paying 22-25% more for a game that cannot (yet) be copied illegally. But wait — that’s not all. I don’t get the same game as the Windows version. See, the Playstation 3 version doesn’t have support for keyboards or mice (which is an absolute must] for games like these), you cannot play multiplayer games, don’t get a G.E.C.K., and (likely) will never be able to use G.E.C.K. modules — that is, you pay more for than alternative versions, and get far far less. I’m not going to talk about bugs, since that’s a completely different issue. Software engineering is not easy and complications (especially for a completely new platform) are impossible to avoid — bugs will exist.
I think Bethesda did a few things wrong here. First of all, Fallout is Oblivion with guns. This, if true (I never played Oblivion), seems rather silly. Why not just make Oblivion with guns if that’s what they wanted? Fallout is not about guns and the game style of Morrowind (which I assume is copied to Oblivion) is not really suitable for the Fallout world. The nice graphics of Fallout 3 are in fact, also not really something that fits too well with the Fallout universe. Fallout and Fallout 2 could have had nice graphics and more realistic animations, but didn’t. I think the style of the graphics fits perfectly with the style of game found in Fallout and Fallout 2, but in Fallout 3, I find that they clash — there are way too many details and too little content.
In conclusion I’d say that Fallout 3 was not made by people who knows and plays Fallout, Fallout 2, or even Fallout: Tactics (which is more of a followup to Fallout 2 than Fallout 3 is).
