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xannosideI picked up Fallout 3 this past week.
Other reviewers, both major magazine reviews and player reviews, have rated this game through the roof. "Best ever!", "Amazing", etc. etc.
In my case, I was oddly disappointed.
Let's get the good stuff out of the way: the graphics are all-around solid, the environment is mesmerizing, combat is exciting, and the much-advertised VAT system, rather than making it too easy, is pretty much the only way you will survive any combat encounters and more often than not merely emphasizes in clear numerical representation just how totally fucked you are. There's 50 square kilometers of space for you to play in, which is a terrifyingly large open gameplay area. The game goes out of its way to accomodate lots of different styles of play; you can be combat twink, thief/sneaker, trader, etc.
While this game does not have the best presentation I have ever seen (just in the next-gen group Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, and Call of Duty 4 do much better), but it's definitely up there.
This is a high-flying 8 or 9...
...with a big asterisk next to it. Playing this game reminds me a lot of my experience playing Indigo Prophecy (though the gameplay is obviously different). Both games made a great deal of effort in the beginning to demonstrate just what made the game concept different and incredible to interact with. Indigo Prophecy had the diner scene, Fallout has the actual exiting from the shelter into the annihilated landscape of DC. Both set the player up and rev you up to what promises to be an incredible, unique game experience.
And then both, somehow, don't quite manage to deliver, and that failure is only apparent because what makes the gameplay unique also exposes its own shortcomings.
In Indigo Prophecy, you quickly realize that the multiple-choice/consequence method of story-telling is a one-trick pony. You can only do so much before you realize that most of what you can do has no extra consequences and that you can't actually make things go in different directions beyond whether a minor character gets involved at some point or another.
In Fallout, after presenting you with the extraordinarily expansive vista of the post-nuclear DC as your playground, the game funnels you into DC itself (if you follow the plot), which is filled with destroyed buildings and wrecked streets, fought over by gun-toting mutants, Mad Max/Doomsday-style raiders, and radioactive pseudo-organisms.
Sounds awesome, right? Well, it is, up until you realize that you can't scale any of the piles of wreckage, and you can't get in or on top of any of the bombed out buildings besides the special ones that are allowed. Now, this wouldn't be a problem per se, except that it collides head-to-head in a frustrating mess with the gameplay experience up to that point. The freedom of exploration that was also heralded as one of this game's key-points is almost completely undone.
Why? I don't know, though I can imagine the absurd amount of development time that would have been involved with allowing that kind of behavior, but in that case, they should have re-focused their development on taking this into account. Earlier in the game, you get warned not to go to DC because it is a "warzone", the implication being that you will get stabbed/shot/scorched/chopped/slashed/mauled/totally fucked up if you go there. What they do not tell you is that DC sucks because your intrepid post-nuclear explorer will inexplicably become unable to go anywhere except the beaten path, making the whole area substantially less interesting.
As a comparison, GTA4 does not suffer from this, despite being similar in that 99% of all buildings cannot be readily scaled, entered, or otherwise accessed beyond being part of the scenery or a corner to shoot from. The reason why is that GTA went out of its way to not only make sure that there were literally hundreds of areas for the player to interact with otherwise, at any given time, players could shoot/rob/fight/carjack/joyride/run from the law/pick up women/listen to the radio/race/etc at pretty much anytime.
Fallout, however, relies entirely on exploration, but only on its terms.
This is still a great game (I stand by the high 8 or 9), but its disappointing that its own expansive gameplay exposes its shortcomings so clearly.
Other reviewers, both major magazine reviews and player reviews, have rated this game through the roof. "Best ever!", "Amazing", etc. etc.
In my case, I was oddly disappointed.
Let's get the good stuff out of the way: the graphics are all-around solid, the environment is mesmerizing, combat is exciting, and the much-advertised VAT system, rather than making it too easy, is pretty much the only way you will survive any combat encounters and more often than not merely emphasizes in clear numerical representation just how totally fucked you are. There's 50 square kilometers of space for you to play in, which is a terrifyingly large open gameplay area. The game goes out of its way to accomodate lots of different styles of play; you can be combat twink, thief/sneaker, trader, etc.
While this game does not have the best presentation I have ever seen (just in the next-gen group Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, and Call of Duty 4 do much better), but it's definitely up there.
This is a high-flying 8 or 9...
...with a big asterisk next to it. Playing this game reminds me a lot of my experience playing Indigo Prophecy (though the gameplay is obviously different). Both games made a great deal of effort in the beginning to demonstrate just what made the game concept different and incredible to interact with. Indigo Prophecy had the diner scene, Fallout has the actual exiting from the shelter into the annihilated landscape of DC. Both set the player up and rev you up to what promises to be an incredible, unique game experience.
And then both, somehow, don't quite manage to deliver, and that failure is only apparent because what makes the gameplay unique also exposes its own shortcomings.
In Indigo Prophecy, you quickly realize that the multiple-choice/consequence method of story-telling is a one-trick pony. You can only do so much before you realize that most of what you can do has no extra consequences and that you can't actually make things go in different directions beyond whether a minor character gets involved at some point or another.
In Fallout, after presenting you with the extraordinarily expansive vista of the post-nuclear DC as your playground, the game funnels you into DC itself (if you follow the plot), which is filled with destroyed buildings and wrecked streets, fought over by gun-toting mutants, Mad Max/Doomsday-style raiders, and radioactive pseudo-organisms.
Sounds awesome, right? Well, it is, up until you realize that you can't scale any of the piles of wreckage, and you can't get in or on top of any of the bombed out buildings besides the special ones that are allowed. Now, this wouldn't be a problem per se, except that it collides head-to-head in a frustrating mess with the gameplay experience up to that point. The freedom of exploration that was also heralded as one of this game's key-points is almost completely undone.
Why? I don't know, though I can imagine the absurd amount of development time that would have been involved with allowing that kind of behavior, but in that case, they should have re-focused their development on taking this into account. Earlier in the game, you get warned not to go to DC because it is a "warzone", the implication being that you will get stabbed/shot/scorched/chopped/slashed/mauled/totally fucked up if you go there. What they do not tell you is that DC sucks because your intrepid post-nuclear explorer will inexplicably become unable to go anywhere except the beaten path, making the whole area substantially less interesting.
As a comparison, GTA4 does not suffer from this, despite being similar in that 99% of all buildings cannot be readily scaled, entered, or otherwise accessed beyond being part of the scenery or a corner to shoot from. The reason why is that GTA went out of its way to not only make sure that there were literally hundreds of areas for the player to interact with otherwise, at any given time, players could shoot/rob/fight/carjack/joyride/run from the law/pick up women/listen to the radio/race/etc at pretty much anytime.
Fallout, however, relies entirely on exploration, but only on its terms.
This is still a great game (I stand by the high 8 or 9), but its disappointing that its own expansive gameplay exposes its shortcomings so clearly.