Fallout 3

As we wander the shanty-style town of Megaton, we find a mutated cow, a two-headed Brahmin tethered to a post. Pet, beast of burden, livestock? Jon chips in with his fateful suggestion. “Punch that cow.” Pandemonium ensues. Those Megaton folk love their Brahmin. We were just trying to make some Wagyu beef: in the future, that’s a capital offence. We practically had to run away, kill the pursuing sheriff, and steal all his stuff. Welcome to Fallout 3, the grim future vision where is the only thing that’s sacred is the cows.

I feel I should add that I'm not playing much Fallout 3 myself, just watching my housemate play it. He's enjoying it, because he likes to explore and look under rocks for bugs: Zelda: ALTTP is his favourite game, and Fallout 3 lets him indulge that taste in a big way. Bethesda promised us something other than a post-nuclear Elder Scrolls, but I'm not convinced that's what we've got.

First off, since this a game design blog: VATS. It's a good gimmick but sits awkwardly with the normal combat, which resembles an FPS. Reviews suggest that people play it largely with, or without, VATS but with radically different results. Taking a few free shots before running away to charge APs (VATS fuel) isn't the thrilling combat experience I expected. In fact it becomes too much the RPG, with monsters steaming toward you and exchanging shots until someone (them) dies.

It is part of the appeal of traditional / fantasy RPGs that combat resembles a pillow fight with huge swords and fireballs. It doesn't work for a 21st-century / near-future game where most of the weapons are firearms and many of the enemies are humanoid. Perhaps I wanted something more tactical, with more interesting terrain positions to take up than visible / not visible, and with movement as well as firing measured in APs. That could be considered too complex for a big release: there is plenty going on under the hood of Fallout 3 as is, compared with the Halo, Killzone and Gears-type shooters that the adverts conveyed.

I assume the purpose of the slo-mo animations is to make you feel powerful, magnify your actions: there is, however, something about watching a man take a round in the face, nonchalantly expel some blood, then run up and hit you with a baseball bat that really pricks your balloon. It looks great when it shows a cool kill - perhaps the slo-mo would be best saved for deaths. It's ultimately over-used to add false weight to the combat, but it does throw up the occasional spectacular moment. You'd best not be bored of guns tearing heads off at the neck, though. There's also not much point in aiming for any location other than the head (for damage) or chest (for accuracy). Crippling the leg of people with powerful melee weapons, or shooting the arm of the guy with the biggest gun are ineffectual tactics. A missed opportunity.

The world looks great, absolutely amazing, except it's all brown, as is the fashion of the day, but startling nonetheless. I'm not convinced by a post-apocalyptic world with no working cars but a egregious surplus of robot servants, but that's an objection to the peculiar Fallout setting rather than this specific instalment. There isn't much point to a post-apocalypse world if it wasn't, pre-apocalypse, much like ours. Building a town right next to an unexploded nuclear bomb with no explanation? None at all? It feels like an aggregation of a thousand images, atomic weapon test sites and scrapyards and broken bridges and insect close-ups and the fifties - all the fifties clichés at once. No, not sold, but it certainly looks great and they've filled it with things to make and do. Hats off.

My problem, I think, is that the world feels like an installation for my amusement. I don't believe that the world exists when I'm not looking. For example, there are two ridiculous superhero-styled combatants in one town, duelling unsuccessfully for control. You are encouraged to side with one or the other, or to destroy both. I do not feel, however (and this is about the feel of the thing) that the battle would ever be resolved without my intervention. In fact it doesn't appear that they actually, you know, fight. If I gave one a rocket launcher, it wouldn't tip the balance - there isn't a balance to tip. There are just two characters, issuing mutually-exclusive kill quests.

This is Bethesda's style, mastery and yoke. To use an analogy, their games resemble paintings of machines that, if real, could not work or do not move. Though filled with interesting elements and characters, they don't move in interesting ways. It's not a real machine: it's just a painting, a fake. While I accept that all games that depict worlds are in essence fakes, the game can go some way to suspending disbelief, to resembling a real machine, a genuine system. Fallout 3 never looks like a real post-aftermath world: just a matte painting in the background of a film of one.

Bioshock

My house played through Bioshock last year, but I didn’t post about it here because I played very little of it myself. However I did watch a lot of it and play just enough to get a feel for it. Lots of nice things have been written about Bioshock, most of which it deserves. It's a handsome and sumptuous FPS with a distinct style, a real sense of intent behind its visual design (which could have lapsed into generic steampunk), and a strong sense of horror borne of its unsettling enemies. While its success in exploring the philosophy of Ayn Rand is open to question, the verve of its attempt is not, and we must applaud all attempts by a game to tackle something substantial. In particular, my housemates were impressed by the tension, suspense and raw fear this game generated in them as they played – the equal of any classic horror film.

However, from the perspective of game design, there is a single error that undermines most of the good work: the Vita-Chambers. Player death leads to resurrection at the last Vita-Chamber activated, but all damage done to enemies remains, so that by persistence all obstacles may be overcome. All sense of peril was extinguished for me within an hour, after my first player death. What's the point of a difficulty level? What’s the point of any difficulty or peril at all? Why control my access to ammunition when the Vita-Chamber can fire an endless stream of clones armed with wrenches?

The failing, then, is this: games should always present some method of last resort to progress, and it should be the worst choice available, such that the player never wants to take it. It should guarantee success in some manner, so the player can always advance. Unfortunately, the method of last resort in Bioshock is tedious, and undermines any suspense the game can generate. If you can disregard it, you will enjoy Bioshock: if you can’t, you can’t.