Vault-Dweller No More
Fallout 3 has arrived, bringing with it an epic adventure, but can it live up to its predecessors?
Published: October 28, 2008
It's one of the core tenets of the role-playing genre: spend the time grinding and you'll be able to walk all over enemies that used to give you problems. It's why I love these kinds of games, because all that hard work pays off in a satisfying display of increased prowess. Also, in this particular instance, there is nothing more satisfying than re-entering one of the many Metro stations that were so creepy and dangerous before, seeing an enemy far off and just letting loose with a rocket launcher and watching them explode into a literal bloody mess (thanks perk!).
That the game rewards exploration and side questing so much is one of the reasons why I was able to pour so much time into it. At multiple points along the game's development timeline, I was able to spend hours just running around and doing stuff, and I'd say maybe 10% of that was actually replicated with my final two runs through things. Think about that for a second, a good 50 hours of playing and almost none of it was repeated. That, superfriends, is how you build a game with longevity, and it's available in spades here -- provided you don't mind talking to someone, spitting back a smarmy response and then spend a few hours traipsing across the Wastes looking for your target.
If not for the fact that the story missions were so interesting (and the final one is an absolutely epic showdown that has to be seen to be believed, though it too highlights the shortcomings of the engine; stiff animation, a lack of things like inverse kinematics to make all those slopes and bumps and such a little more believable, etc.), I probably could have spent another 20 hours just running around. As it was, I only hit the level cap once, and even then there was stuff to do.
At times, though, the game didn't make it easy. During that final mission, the game crashed on me. Multiple bugs with character pathfinding or just getting them to appear (one character in Megaton just up and disappeared, never to be seen again) cropped up. I realize it's a huge game, and the Radiant AI that let all the characters go about their business can create weird scenarios, but it did kill some of my buzz for the adventure. Other little things, like companions not causing what would normally be bitter rivals to do so much as bat an eye felt odd too.
There's also the issue of performance. While the game runs well enough outside and even in most indoor situations when there are few characters on the screen (Megaton is a good example of just how big the levels can be), as soon as a half-dozen or more are all standing around, the framerate starts to dip. It'll happen too when things are being pulled from or stuffed into the game's seamless swap file (an absolutely brilliant bit of tech that doesn't require an installation time), creating little hitches and fits as the game struggles to keep up. Texture and geometry pop-in, weird graphical glitches that required a full restart and more all plagued what was an otherwise enjoyable visual experience. And hey, at least the people don't look like freaks -- at last not unless the game wants them to, and it does. Plenty.
The audio is a bit more consistent. I had some issues with the voices not coming up enough with the default mix, but because the game tries to use 5.1 to solid effect, just spinning around and letting the back channel speakers carry things helped just about everywhere but the audio recordings that you can pick up. Voice work this time around is generally better than Oblivion too, though I still wish that Bethesda had managed to coax just a bit more dialogue out of Liam Neeson and Ron Perlman, both of whom offer fantastic deliveries. Neeson's holotape recordings in particular were peppered with some great emotion.
To cap things off, Inon Zur's score is absolutely wonderful, at times invoking feelings of wonder, fear and anger. There's a kind of melancholy, heavy feeling to the music that plays while running around the Wastes, and as I talked with some fellow reviewers after we'd finished the game, there was an inescapable feeling of... oddness that takes hold after spending so many hours in this world. I've little doubt that a significant portion of that came from Zur's score. The rest of the effects, from the plinky sounds of weapons firing under the slo-mo effect of V.A.T.S. to the booming, bass-rich explosions all round out the audio perfectly.
