Fallout 3: Completion

What better way to ring in your 30th birthday than to plow through some Enclave soldiers and beat the main storyline in Fallout 3? This also marks the fourth Fallout post in four weeks: Fallout Friday seems to be official, but without a main quest to journey through, I can't imagine there will be many more. Then again, there are a number of expansions...we shall see. I've already installed Broken Steel; apparently it was the first expansion released and for good reason as it's the only way to continue the game after beating it. It goes like this: once you start the very last quest, there is no turning back. You complete it, credits and video roll, and you are booted to the main menu. You can reload a previous save, but you can't really exist in the world after beating it. Broken Steel continues - so to speak - the main quest and if you have it installed, the game continues and the world is your plaything.

Broken Steel also raises the level cap from 20 to 30, although after just a few hours more of playing I am now at level 22. I was at level 20 and not thinking I was close to the end of the game when I was very near, which speaks to the length of the main quest. It's short. I spent 55 hours traversing the Capital Wastelands and only doing main story here and there, surely there had to be more, right? Not so much; the quest was interesting, but not difficult (thankfully). In contrast to the 150 hours I put into Oblivion, you could ask what's missing here? Well, all I can say is that Fallout 3 is tighter. Exploration is not as tedious, and the side quests seemed more relevant. Those guild quests from Oblivion can feel like grinding, as they just seem to go on forever without much variety.

So what else is there to say about the finish? This game has me in complete addiction. Do I want it to end? There are a few things I want to do, many of which just revolve around the achievements. Earlier this week I collected all the bobbleheads (I had about 12 throughout most of the game - there are 20 in total). I finished a couple of side quests and I'm starting to install the other packs. From what I understand they are not incredibly long, which is nice. This means tighter gameplay and story. Remember Shivering Isles? It was good, yes, but I could live without trudging through a mushroom infested multi-colour cave again. I don't feel that same attachment as I did in Oblivion, and you can blame that on the world. Nobody wants to live in the Wasteland; Cyrodill looked pretty appealing: colourful, lush and vast. Oblivion was a world I wanted to go back to; I have no urge to play through Fallout in its entirety again, but I will be very eager to jump into a Fallout 4.

Fallout 3: Difficult Times

One of the things that prevented me from getting into this game when it first came around was The Hump. There's not better way to describe this than to say that for a time, you will be frustrated out of your mind. This happened in Oblivion too. It's strange: you're at a level, and because the game scales the levels of enemies to match your own awesomeness. But sometimes, they up the level of the enemies to a point where you just have a rough go at beating them. You can't explore the vast wonder of the world without fear of dying over and over again. This happened for a bit as I travelled to Rivet City for the first time; now granted, that was an ambitious journey, and required lots of saving, but I made it.

But The Hump reared it's head and I couldn't go anywhere without dying, and reloading. And I found it was getting in the way of my enjoyment of the game; I love going to new places, seeing how the world has evolved and to a lesser degree, meeting some interesting characters. I've been immersed in this game for nearly forty hours now and the major thing that almost prevented me from continuing on was The Hump. But even when I could trudge my way through the environment, ammo and health were always dangerously low. I was saving every minute, fearful of the next dark corner. You never know, you could hit a land mine and have three of your limbs crippled. At that point, it's easier to load instead of going through the "proper" way. You're supposed to use stimpaks, see doctors and whatnot.

So, here's what I did: I put the difficulty down to "easy." Some would consider this cheating, and to that, I must argue. There is some technical fault there: the setting is in the game, so why not use it? Would increasing the game to "hard" be cheating too? Rock Band gives you the no fail option, providing you the option to just play through the music. For some people, that's all they want to do. I just want to play through Fallout, enjoy the story, the world. In some games you may be penalized, or motivated - depending on the way you look at it - to play on harder difficulties through the awarding of achievements and various in-game items. I certainly don't feel like I'm getting less of an experience here, and I'm not feeling guilty for doing it. There are plenty of games to test the challenge: remember in Goldeneye, where you started off on the easiest difficulty? You couldn't tell while playing, until after you beat the level and opened up the harder difficulties. But here's the real key: not only did your enemies get harder, but you had more objectives. More things to juggle, and to me, that should be the de facto standard for difficulty scales.

When you beat a game like that, you feel accomplished, then you can go back and play more becase there are additional objectives to reach. They are harder, but there is that compulsion to do them. The difficulty slides up at a nice rate, not making impossible leaps; this keeps you coming back. Rogue Squadron did the same thing, and in doing so, increased re-playability greatly. Will lowering the difficulty increase re-playability on Fallout? Will I be compelled to go through the game again? The sheer number of hours is enough to dissuade me from such an act, but I can see the appeal for some: go through the game with different stats, do quests in a different order and choose different outcomes. Unfortunately, that's not for me: I want to go through the game once and move on: there's a backlog of games waiting to be enjoyed.

Fallout 3: Rivet City

Last weekend was a marathon; borderline addiction, perhaps, but it happened. I just need to say that my personal life (what little there is of it) did not suffer. I may have added eight hours onto the time spent clock on Saturday alone. More hours would follow; as of this writing (Tuesday night) I just surpassed twenty five hours.

The focus here though is about Rivet City. Early on in the game (early being relative here, I guess) I had two quests pointing me to the floating city. One involved searching for my father, and the other was finding a rogue android. Now, as I was prepared and heading out of my home in Megaton, a lady got my attention and provided me with an android component that would prove the rogue was dead. Seems simple enough.

I begun the journey and was quickly blocked by a group of raiders living under a bridge. I must have died four times before clearing the group out, and continuing my journey. Time are tough: no stimpaks, a little bit of food and barely any ammo. I was only halfway there. I ran across the Brotherhood of Steel's Citadel but they offered no assistance. This is the point in the game where I realized that I would need to save often. Now I have hundreds of them, and they certainly came in handy.

Reaching Rivet City was great; once I got in, I began exploring and felt some stability. Previous to this, I wasn't sure how the game would play out, but now I was in a structured environment, with lots of characters and things to check out. Dr. Zimmer got a hold of me early on and I gave him the component, proving the android was dead (although he really isn't) and getting my good karma and achievement points. I would later discover that I missed a big component of the quest: there was a perk that I could have gotten if I chose another route. Well, this was upsetting, but also a testament to the many avenues available to you in the game. You can end the quest early, getting very little reward (50 caps in this case) or go full out and get some pretty nice things.

Now I had a decision: load up a previous save and replay two hour of game, or just keep going? As it turns out, it was an easy decision and I reloaded an older save and started playing. One thing is for sure though, it did not take long to catch up as you don't have to go through every conversation choice and didn't have to root through every container. I would jump off the end of the sip and swim through irradiated water, fight giant lobster-creatures and work my way through booby-trapped halls. But the reward was there: I got a great plasma rifle that absolutely vapourizes enemies, and a nice perk to add to my skills. I have to step back and wonder, in the grand scheme, if the time spent doing this was worth it. Depends on how far you scale back, but I may be missing the point: is anything you are doing, that you are having fun with, a waste of time? The Replicated Man was a nice quest, and really got me into the game. It proved that Fallout is not screwing around, it has depth and interesting things to do. It's full of interesting characters, and little back stories. Rivet City seems to have some decent history, and the world you're in is extremely rich.

Fallout 3: Big Town

It's a little pre-emptive to post about a game that I'm only seven hours into, but do you really want to wait until I'm done a hundred hours before posting? Also, I'm late to the party: the game has been out for quite some time and I'm just getting around to playing it now. Why is that? I blame Oblivion: the game I sunk 150 hours into, and was so addicted to (emotionally too) that I'm afraid to get into another game that offers up similar gameplay.

Of course, you know the same studio has done both series, and the similarities between the two titles are prevalent. But the environment is so vastly different, and it's because of the world itself, I'm not sure I want to continue playing. To say the world you are exploring is bleak would not be doing it justice, but it's rather fitting and accurate. This is how a post-apocalyptic world would look. Ruined buildings, decaying roads, no plant life: just shades of grey and brown. Hardened people, wandering gangs and towns built out of junk. The graphics are amazing, but depressing. It's a different experience to Oblivion's lush, green landscapes and clean people.

But perhaps what really got me was some of the difficulty: I had animals randomly attacking me and killing me. I don't stand a chance. What hope do I have on a mission to rescue people from super mutants? I don't even feel like trying. Because I spent so much time with Oblivion, I had forgotten that similar things happened: you are, for a time, very underpowered. It takes patience and some skill to "get good" and take on the more daunting tasks. Keep in mind you just have to punch through missions, save often and you will be rewarded. At this point I'm completely hooked, and actively looking for trouble; it only took a few hours.

Now, before I delve into other game aspects - to be done in other posts - I like to share some in-game stories. This blog started as a Halo 2 online storytelling sesssion, and if I was into blogging at the time, Oblivion would have dominated and generated posts every day. I'll try not to do that with Fallout 3, but you can expect some stories in the next little while.

I went exploring, and discovered this sad sack of a town called Big Town. There were only a few residents, including Pappy, who greeted me at the gate. Everybody is down on themselves and they have accepted death by super mutants or raiders, both of whom have been terrorizing them for a while. I meet Bittercup, who doesn't accept my advances, and accept a mission to go rescue some kidnapped townspeople from a settlement of super mutants. The people don't hold out much hope that I'll be successful. I don't either.

Once I left the town and headed north a short bit, I was attacked by my first super mutant. He was tough, and I barely scraped through the battle. My right arm was crippled, and I was out of stim packs. I ate terrible food but it wasn't enough. Immediately upon looting the corpse, I was attacked by another mutant, who seemed to be shooting grenades or rockets at me. Forget about that, I run. I run back from the direction I came from, and run right past the towns gates. I can hear the guard from Big Town shooting at the super mutant, but I kept running. I looked behind me, and I was no longer being chased, but I could hear the people of Big Town fighting this super mutant. Pillows of smoke erupted from behind the buildings as the mutant slammed explosives into the town. I paused, and thought of going in for the rescue, but I know I would not survive. Surely, if I kept going Big Town would be ok; the game wouldn't kill those people whom I just accepted the mission from, right? I kept walking.

It would be quite some time later, after doing some other quests, before I returned to Big Town. Things were grim, and I knew, through my inaction, I had failed them. Pappy was in pieces at the front gate. The guard's limbs were sticking out of the water. Another fellow lied dead in the centre of town. All the town members, save Bittercup and somebody in the infirmiary, were dead. I felt responsible. Immediately I set out to lay waste to the super mutants responsible. And to my surprise, I was able to complete the mission; at this point I was powerful and skilled enough to weave my way up to the old police headquarters and rescue two Big Town residents. We traveled back to Big Town where they were re-united with what remaining villagers were there. There was a glimmer of hope but so much had been lost already; I feel bad, and that is the trappings of these games: the odd emotional attachment we get to these digital characters.