Fallout 3: Looking Back

I beat Fallout 3 last week. Wait, I need to repeat that: I beat Fallout 3 last week. We'll come back to that point latter.

Fallout 3 was at the top of my list of missed games this last Fall. I picked it up for my birthday and spent the better part of February exploring the vast wastelands of post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. In the end, I spent about 120 hours with the game which is about half of what I spent in the world of Oblivion. Since I had not played any of the previous Fallout games, Oblivion was my point of reference for what to expect. This may have tainted my early experience.

Right off the bat, I was trying to play the former like the latter and it just didn't work for me. In Oblivion, my character was a brutal yet stealthy melee attacker. I struggled with this at first until I reconciled with the V.A.T.S. system. It felt like the game was forcing me to play a first-person shooter or a ranged character from Oblivion (which I hated for the most part). As I grew more accustomed to the new system, it felt more natural and lent itself to more strategy even if I couldn't sneak up on many enemies. It helped that my character quickly leveled up rather quickly as well.

But at first, locales seemed far and few between in the beginning. Traveling the vast countryside most definitely captured the essence of a barren, oppressive and bleak world, almost to game's detriment. Playing in small chunks of time, about an hour, I was struggling to get from placed to place in one sitting due to sheer distance required to be traveled. Going back to the Oblivion comparison, there were always areas to explore between story checkpoints, I didn't have this experience in Fallout 3. And again, I reached a point where I abandoned the story quest and found myself exploring the wastes with great joy, moving from place to place rather quickly.

The story was largely forgettable (but Oblivion's was as well), involving some annoying fetch quests to advance with a few rather jolting turns. Which made switching gears from saving the world to just wandering the lands so much more appealing. It really becomes an open-world adventure when the player is left to their own devices and adopt the life they want to live, hopping from place to place, inserting himself into the lives of others and changing them for the rest of their lives. On one hand, I would almost like to see a game like this drop the player in a world with no story and just let them create their own way. On the other, the story provides structure but there is no way that the game should end just because the main quest is over.

These quibbles with the game may be due to the way I played and every one's experience will be different, but it still leads me to believe that the pacing was wrong throughout the game. There are abrupt shifts between nothing to do and too much to do or struggling against the enemies to feeling like a one-man, unstoppable army. But then again, I spent 120 hours with the game. I clearly enjoyed it, right? Well, of course I did. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped due to the sheer joy and satisfaction I garnered from Oblivion. Fallout 3 was a solid experience with a few hiccups, but left me longing for the return of the Elder Scrolls series.