I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

Do any of you ever think of skylanders… cause Disney were when they made this one
I’m not a fan of the skylanders thing where you have to buy figures and “ playsets” ( stupid title) as it costs way too much money compared to enjoyment. I don’t care how good a game is 200 or so quid to get everything isn’t worth it.
The 3 different worlds are pretty similar. The stories are alright but basically just a shorter version of the film they’re from with loads of stupid side quests.
The gameplay is enjoyable enough though, and the characters have good variety. It’s kind of like the avengers game if it was better and also made for children.
It’s fun tbf, and a good idea for a video game, but it’s clearly a cheap cash grab and these games are fun for a few hours but let’s be honest unless you were really young you played one world and probably didn’t even complete it.

Oh, god, a bunch of people voted for each video and I can't be bothered to count them.

Hold on, I'm just gonna flip a coin.

Fuck.

It's gone behind my...fucking...desk.

Fallout 3 is garbage, and here's why.

The first two Fallouts comprise some of the best games ever. Virtually nothing else comes close.

Okay, let me be more specific - three games come close.

Oh, wai--what's this? Ignore this, forget about that.

And all three of them are made by people who worked on Fallout!

AND they're also by companies that no longer really exist.

These types of games are very thin on the ground, and don't ever do as well as they deserve to.

I'm gonna talk about what makes the first two Fallout games good a lot in this video.

But it's important to keep in mind that even without comparisons to the previous games, Fallout 3 fails on it's own merits too.

In an attempt to remain balanced, I looked up some reviews by more professional reviewers in the business at the time the game came out.

After carefully perusing as many reviews as I can, I've isolated three key facts about the game.

The VATS system looks totally badass.

No written or video review can shy away from mentioning this, and showing you in graphic detail.

Yeahhhhhh.

Yeahhhhhh!

Wooooooo!

Ooh ooh ooh, murder! Woo!

Eeeee!

Ooooooh!

Nnjnnfff!

Hadjeur...mmm...hmmm

VATS system...still happening...

♪This is all footage from one review♪

♪They just, kept showing it♪

♪This is all there is of Fallout!♪

♪This is the part that people like!♪

♪What about the nuanced storytelling♪

♪Who gives a SHIT♪

There are some audio/visual problems on the PS3 version which also drops frames quite often.

"Jagged edges, washed out lighting, and slightly diminished draw distance of the PS3 release aren't so easy to dismiss."

"We also experienced a number of visual bugs on that platform."

And of course,

No, seriously. The IGN review of Fallout 3 talked about how fucking deep and intricate the morality system is,

and that doing bad things can have dangerous long lasting effects.

He says this over footage of his character picking up a fork.

And, as all the objects on the table bizarrely float around for no reason,

the entire city begins to shoot him to death, for theft.

"...and the game has an awesome climax that we won't spoil for you here."

The IGN reviewer also thinks the ending was good - the one thing literally everyone disagrees with.

If you think the ending is good, you're actually wrong.

You don't.

That didn't happen, you hated it.

Shut up.

"But no matter which system you own, you should play Fallout 3, which overcomes its issues,"

"by offering a deep and involving journey through a world that's hard to forget."

Kevin, you're calling the game deep and involving over footage of you friendly firing your fucking allies for no reason.

That guy shows up to help you,

"...and I had hoped to assist in your rescue."

And he's attacking him...just because!

Taking even the briefest glance at the game criticism industry at the time this game came out,

reveals it's just a cavalcade of fucking crazy people!

Who think that...do you wanna kill a whole town of people or not, is a DEEP QUESTION!

I-I, JSSCHJ, OH MY GOD!

GAME JOURNALISM IS UNETHICAL!

THE WHOLE THING IS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE MESS!

SO WE HAVE TO STOP THEM!

WE HAVE TO STOP

HOW COULD ANYONE THINK THIS ABOUT

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

In an attempt to present fairness, I am going to start by listing out some of the things I liked about Fallout 3.

I'm not against the game being turned into an FPS, a huge portion of the core engine,

(even though I'm gonna complain about it later)

isn't actually all that bad if you strip away the bad things built on top of it.

Fallout 3 has a solid base in there, somewhere.

I like that, I especially like that you can target the weapon in someone's hands, and knock it out. It's a fun strategic move.

If you ever played Perfect Dark and shot a gun out of someone's hand, it gave you a rush no other game could provide until Fallout 3 had it, which was neat.

I still wish you could go for the eyes, though, like in the originals.

I also wish the AI wasn't fucking terrible.

I guess the other guy's gonna take cover, or maybe duck in and ou--

Oh no, here he comes.

"Call the doctor! We got a bleeder!"

I am just holding block with the sword I found on the body next to these people.

I could be wrong, but it looks like the sword is hurting them as much as it's hurting me when they try punching it.

"Will you just... stand still!"

I am!

Yeah, there are some occasionally funny moments or decent bits mixed in with the garbage we're getting to soon.

The robot assuring you that "the bomb is perfectly safe, we promise", before you even know there's a bomb is pretty impressive as an opener.

And it's an impressive closer for Megaton too, if you decide to blow it up.

[DISTORTED] "The bomb is perfectly safe."

Also, the sniper guarding the town who you can't reach without cheats, and seems to know this.

"How the hell did you get up here anyway?"

Hey, wait a minute.

Megaton's a little different from up here.

What is this?

Morrowind?

[CANNED LAUGHTER]

The funniest thing in the game is at Raven Rock, the Enclave base.

You'll notice the mess hall floor is a metal grating.

Well, if you go underneath it, you'll find a ton of knives and forks.

People kept dropping them and losing them down the grating.

That's fucking amazing! It's spectacular!

It's the single humanizing moment the Enclave get in the entire fucking game, and I love it.

If Fallout 3 consisted entirely of moments like this, it would be the best game ever made!

There are some characters I like, not many.

I like Moira.

She's interesting, quirky, has a personality, and she's probably the character you can have the most...uh...varied relationship with.

By which I mean you can, uh...do the quest for her and make her happy.

You can do the quest even better and make her...happier?

Uh, you can crush her dreams by talking her out of her ideas.

Or you can nuke a fucking town, and then say hi to her later and...carry on as if it didn't happen.

That's almost depth.

I like, um...

whatshisname

I like General Jingwei, from the Operation: Anchorage DLC.

He's an incredibly one-dimensional character,

but he is the one permitted one-dimensional character, unlike all the others in the rest of the game,

because he's literally a racist caricature in a simulation created by Americans to train soldiers to want to kill Chinese people.

You can literally convince him, in one sentence, to commit suicide.

Which, unfortunately, isn't far off from how you talk to real characters in the rest of Fallout 3.

But, it's still funny because it reminds you how messed up the creators of the simulation were,

and how obsessed they thought the Chinese were with honour.

And also the line "I'm going to kill you SO MUCH." is pretty funny.

And, um...

That's not it! Are those all the characters...?

Oh, shit, no, wait! The medic armour!

The medic armour from the basement of Old Olney's sewers.

"Listen up you god-damn puke! You are now wearing prototype medic power armor. You take care of me, and I'll take care of you."

That's right, I'm stretching the definition of characters purely to compliment a game I don't like!

That's how seriously I take being fair on a game!

The medic armour is similarly a remnant of a messed up period in American history,

and when you put it on, it starts yelling at you like a cartoon-ish drill sergeant.

But even better, it ruins stealth on purpose.

If you're near an enemy, it speaks.

"Let 'em eat lead!"

And this attracts enemies! It literally makes the game harder!

But, it's an interesting piece of worldbuilding, and it manages to say something about the culture that built it,

the obnoxiousness of violent American supremacy, or whatever.

And, uhh...

Nope.

Nope!

That's it.

So, two characters, and one talking piece of apparel...are good.

And that's it, everybody!

Don't forget to like, rate and subscribe before you eats, shoots and leaves!

But...

If you want to take a more critical look at the problems with this game's design,

and perhaps whittle the act of playing videogames itself to the bare nub of its meaning...

Stay right there.

Let's go...

On an adventure.

Fallout 3 begins with your character's birth.

The...vaginal slit...dila--

that's not what it's called, hold on a second.

[TYPING]

uhhhh

The cervix dilates, and there we are.

The next hour or so is spent making the character, picking their stats, and learning the dialogue and VATS systems,

ironically being hand-holded and treated like a baby with no consequence for our actions, even when our character has turned 18.

Let's think about this for a second.

"The protagonist's literal birth", is the bad joke answer to the question:

"Where should our story start?"

The other problem with this opening is it's fucking boring!

The stat picking process takes ages and corresponds to long scenes of your character growing up,

and nothing major happening, and meaningless hijinks as you learn how to control a first-person video game.

[WHISPERING]
You press the WASD keys to move and use the mouse to

Are you ready to learn you need to click the mouse to shoot yet?

Sorry, push Mouse1?

I dunno, maybe we should fuck around at a birthday party some more.

I genuinely want to know whose idea the opening of the game was.

Give me their name!

The first Bethesda employee to tell me who came up with the opening sequence set in an enclosed space you have zero control over,

in their action RPG about having freedom and making meaningful choices,

gets to live.

But eventually, the game properly starts, and you can finally start acting of your own volition.

Your friend gives you a gun and disappears down the hallway.

And no, that's not a description of how quickly she moves, she's literally gone.

You grab your stuff, and go to follow her...

"There he is! Hold it right there!"

And it was here.

In the first proper room of the game, that I knew Fallout 3 was going to be a problem.

This is Officer Kendall.

He, and all the other cops in the vault beside one attack you on sight as soon as they see you.

Remember how I just said you can finally act of your own volition?

That was a lie.

You can't initiate dialogue at all.

The roaches that attack him rarely kill him for you, and once he kills them, he goes hostile on you.

If you try to run away, he'll chase you.

He'll chase you through the entire vault!

He is DEDICATED to putting his fingers in your eyes.

No, wait, you can't target those anymore.

Your head, then.

Whatever.

You CAN talk to Butch, the fucker who's been bullying you your entire life.

In fact, you have no choice not to!

He will chase you down to tell you about his mother!

"You gotta help me!"

But you can't speak to this guy, who's been a law-abiding citizen and a nice guy vault cop, who attended your birthday party!

Butch! FUCKING Butch is allowed to have depth and be treated with a range of options.

You can help him save his mother, leave her to her fate, or murder him in the head!

This is the closest the game comes to a series of choices, but the game literally forces you to encounter that choice.

And meanwhile, you don't even get one whatsoever when it comes to Officer Mack.

Is this what Fallout is supposed to be?

A hallway with enemies to shoot?

That sounds fine for your bog standard action game, but isn't this supposed to be about having the freedom to choose what sort of person you are?

Because now, no matter what sort of person I turn out to be, I've already shot a man's fucking head off his body!

Officer Kendall isn't the victim of the Lone Wanderer. He's a victim of bad writing.

Compare and contrast with your first meeting with a hostile human in, say, Fallout 2.

"To continue in your quest, you must defeat me in unarmed combat."

"Why do we have to fight?"

"The path of the chosen one is not an easy trail to walk, Hbomb."

"This challenge prepares you to face another human, look him in the eyes, and know that you may have to kill him."

"I disagree with you. I think that a peaceful solution to any problem is possible."

Yeah, see you in shit, police officer I literally couldn't even attempt a conversation with!

Say hi to your family at your crappy state funeral I had no choice not to cause!

Oh, and it'll be closed casket, because THIS is how firearms work!

Officer Park is intenstines now!

"A lot of games make a big deal out of player choice, but few in recent memory offer so many intricate ways of approaching any given situation."

There are so many options!

Gun!

Bat!

Oh, knife!

having a conversation with the human beings in front of you with thoughts and dreams and

"...and it's this freedom that makes Fallout 3 worth playing, and replaying."

[♪ The Sound of SIlence - Simon and Garfunkel ♪]
Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again

If you aren't Butch,

this one guard,

or the Overseer,

your only meaningful choice is picking which weapon you mash them to death with.

They're treated like the radroaches!

Like I said, the problem with Fallout 3 isn't any one issue.

Having a long sequence where you play as a baby and pick your stats from little books is fine.

But it's this in tandem with the several other long sequences.

The being told how to click a mouse, the escape sequence where most players unavoidably killed a bunch of cops because they weren't given any other choices,

in this game about having freedom of choice.

The character you build is garbage too, they took out all the nuance from it!

They took out the traits system, because traits are scary!

For those of you who don't know, traits in the first two games were special choices with positive AND negative downsides,

which you can start the game with, that radically alter the game.

Like "Jinx", which increases the amount of critical failures everyone including you can get, making the game a hilarious mess of constant suffering!

It's how I make almost every character nowadays, and it adds yet another layer of possibilities to the precedings,

as enemies and allies blow the weapons out of their hands, and your dog does such a bad job of biting someone that his leg spontaneously breaks!

But who'd want to risk having funny things happen at random, or cool risk/reward builds for characters who want to specialize in certain types of skills?

That sounds too fun, and like it would add too much variety!

That would run the risk of making the vault escape sequence even a little different every time you do it.

[SLOWED DOWN] "...and it's this freedom that makes Fallout 3 worth playing, and replaying."

Worth playing and replaying, eh, Kevin?

Hm, I wonder if players agree with y--

No, wait!

They modded the opening out!

That's right! Even players who loved Fallout 3 enough to learn how to make mods for it think this opening is a heaping pile of garbage trash!

When the game's biggest fans are editing the content OUT of a game, that content is probably bad.

Maybe it's wrong of me to harp on the opening so much, because, even at its worst, its an hour of boring, repetitive stuff with no consequence,

and then you're done with it.

But it's not that simple, is it?

The sort of people who thought THIS was an acceptable way to open their game about freedom and choice,

made the rest of the game too!

Whoever it was whose fault is the opening, you can see their grubby li'l piss-stained hands all over the entire game.

So it's worth talking about the opening's problems, because they're a microcosm of Fallout 3 as a whole.

The dad making all the real decisions, who you're just following around, and the throwaway characters you won't have any interest in seeing again,

all prime you expertly for the shitty game to come.

So if you can call 3's opening anything, one word you could call it is 'honest'.

Another word would be 'SHITE-ARSE'.

Fallout 3's engine is fairly solid, but its design is terrible!

Now, I know the lockpicking and hacking minigames are often criticized, but to be honest, I'm okay with them.

But like the rest of Fallout 3, their potential is squandered because they aren't used well.

Hacking and lockpicking should be a skill your character has to bother to develop,

which is then rewarded in the form of extra loot, or the ability to alter a situation, or even bypass a trickier fight.

But let's look at their actual use in the opening.

To access the Overseer's chamber, you COULD pick the very easy almost impossible to fail lock,

OR, you could open the dresser drawer one room away and take the key.

To access the Overseer's computer, you COULD do the hacking minigame,

OR, you could open the drawer directly next to the computer and obtain the password directly.

While this is probably done to teach the player that hacking and lockpicking are useful,

but can sometimes be circumvented by resourcefulness and being aware of your environment,

they impart the far stupider lesson that hacking and lockpicking is pointless, and you'll be able to skip them incredibly easily.

So, players are ingrained with the belief that these minigames can be avoided, and you ought to look for ways to do so.

I think that's why people criticize them so much - not because they're directly bad,

but because the game itself teaches you that you should avoid doing them if you can.

Even when you do get out of the vault, Fallout 3's wasteland is big and very pretty at times, but fails to feel like a world because of some very bad design decisions.

You're simultaneously too free, and have no choices.

I know that doesn't make ANY sense, look, we'll get to it, okay? Trust me.

The world is really open. You can, technically, go anywhere in the world immediately.

The developers seem to have actively wanted this to be the case, so they designed the world around this.

Consequently, all the areas feel roughly the same.

An open world shooter can be structured well, like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.,

which for example put harder and stronger enemies in later areas, because you've become better at playing and found better equipment.

The world is designed so while you can technically come to harder areas very quickly,

simply getting there requires skills or weaponry you will get your hands on on the way over.

No matter how you play S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the game is arranged so that if you're playing properly, you're never in a position where you're at a tremendous disadvantage,

and more difficult areas are discouraged by being harder to do early on, while still being technically doable.

You can assault the army base right next to the start of the game straight away, but you have to be really good to be able to do it.

This creates a sense of friction, and challenge, and fun, where the player's ability is being tested.

Assaulting the army base in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is just great, I love it.

And, it's, it's, it's---aaaaaaaah!

Players don't usually think about these elements of games, especially shooters, but the design of the progression and the pacing is what makes a game fun.

Fallout 3's world is designed for almost every area to be accessible to anyone at any time.

This means that the developers had to avoid making an area the player could go to early,

which, let me remind you, is anywhere,

too hard.

So most, no, let's be honest, ALL enemies and characters in the game have fairly low quality equipment and stats,

and no lockpicks or hacking minigames in your path require much skill to activate.

This practically eliminates any sense of pace, or rising action, or difficulty.

Once you've dealt with a couple of packs of raiders, and leveled up just a little,

or if you stopped off at Moira's for the rocket launcher early on,

90% of the game is a splashy meatfest where nothing can really challenge you, rendering almost the entire game dull.

A good game is like a three course meal.

You have your salad,

your main,

and your dessert.

Fallout 3 is one massive salad,

and you only need to have a little bit of salad before you wish the waiter would bring you your fucking spaghetti!

A ton of popular gameplay mods for Fallout 3 make the game harder in various ways,

with more realistic weapon damage, or harder enemies, or adding more mechanics the player has to deal with to survive,

and this is because past a certain point, you're gonna need that stuff for the game to be challenging in the slightest.

Once again, modders are having to do the developer's jobs for them.

The most popular of these, Fallout 3: Wanderers Edition, also adds the ability to skip the opening, because of course it would!

Whoever designed this mod should have made Fallout 3!

The place where you should be able to expect the enemies and their skills, weapons, and armour to really get more difficult is the main story,

but the developers had no way of knowing what level the player would be when they were doing the main story, and wanted to make sure players didn't get stuck.

So, once the Enclave turn up, not only do they engage you in small enough numbers that they're not a problem even at quite a low level,

but once you encounter them in greater numbers close to the climax, there's invariably something else shooting at them for you,

like Liberty Prime, or the Brotherhood of Steel, or Fawkes, or the turrets in the Enclave base.

So, even the hard enemies aren't hard.

Well, at least the robots are having a fun combat experience here.

It's possible to beat a huge portion of the larger set pieces without firing a single shot,

because your allies are invincible and overpowered in order to make sure the plot gets pushed forward.

In fact, in the final mission, if you're a melee weapons character, the real challenge is to kill anyone yourself.

So, you're totally free to take part in the game's story, but don't ever have any influence over it in terms of story or gameplay.

So, in other words, you're too free, and have no choices.

D'you get it? It all made sense.

There are a couple of areas that are suddenly very difficult.

For example, the Old Olney sewers I mentioned before are a nightmare mess.

The deathclaws are really powerful, making the area the most challenging one in the entire game, and literally impossible if you went to it early on.

The reward is a suit of power armour that's no better than the armour you'd need to be wearing to get to it,

which, by the way, is still overpowered for the entirety of the rest of Fallout 3's world.

If you're gonna have an area like this, you should probably put it somewhere only late game players can get to,

so they don't get murdered over and over expecting it to be like the rest of the game.

But, no, it's just sitting there.

Worse off, it's not even leveled to the areas around it.

Right next to it, further away from where you start the game, is the Republic of Dave.

It's a fun little area, with it's own, like, weird democracy thing going on, but there's only five characters in it? It's really fun!

The Republic of Dave is, like Olney, one of the few truly cool areas in the game, but they're the two areas that SHOULDN'T be right next to each other!

They should be on opposite sides of the map!

These areas are two of my three favourites in the game, and they're both shoved off to the side, right next to each other, like an afterthought.

A game that properly paced itself would arrange its map so you encounter the latter very early on, and the former much much later,

when in fact, the opposite happens.

Speaking of badly thought out gameplay,

thanks to the poor visual design and writing, it's often very difficult to know how to get somewhere once you decide where you want to go,

or what exactly to do when you're doing a quest.

The world is so big and full of junk that, for most of the game, if you're doing a story or optional quest, you can't rely on the game to tell you where to head visually.

You have to look at the arrow on your radar.

And down here,

is the biggest travesty in the history of videogames.

Okay, it's not that bad, but it's pretty bad.

A good game can tell you where to go effortlessly through the design of its levels,

or by giving you enough directions that you can put the pieces together yourself.

This is good, because it encourages the player to be aware of their surroundings,

which lets them fully appreciate the worlds the designers have built, and all the neat personal touches to it.

When you build a world centered around giving them a blip on their radar to walk towards in a straight line,

you hamstring not just their own sense of going on their own journey and making their own decisions,

but you've created a situation where the game is teaching you to follow this with your brain.

Your eyes are trained to follow it, to stare at it, to just go where it tells you to.

The levels can often be quite nice looking, with fun little things to look at,

but your eyes are here at all times.

You probably didn't even notice you were doing it, but the game's objective marker slowly turns you into an idiot with no awareness of your surroundings.

Here's a review from 2014.

"Also, like, stuff like, you thought Liberty Prime was sick?"

"I thought it was awesome because he was there the whole time and you never paid attention to him."

Liberty Prime is a gigantic fucking robot!

You have a BUNCH of opportunities to see it!

You cannot avoid seeing it when you walk into the room!

It is LITERALLY impossible!

And yet, somehow, these players missed it until it was the thing you were following for the last quest as it did all the work.

I'm not calling these guys stupid, they're pretty funny and smart.

I'm saying Fallout 3 is so stupid by design that it teaches players not to notice things that are otherwise quite easy just to look at,

and see,

with your human eyes!

In previous Fallouts, if you don't have your wits about you, you're not gonna see what you need to see.

It trains you to develop an awareness of your surroundings, and thus,

A: make you feel awesome when you figure out the way of doing things that wasn't obvious or literally just told to you by the game.

It made you feel like you'd solved a puzzle,

and B: it gave you an appreciation of the design of the world.

Remember the forks under the mess hall in the Enclave base?

How many players do you think noticed that, or realized why?

This is an uncharacteristically cool and funny, and human piece of worldbuilding.

But the game was seemingly designed around making sure you don't see it,

because you're too busy looking at this, the one thing telling you where you're supposed to go.

I remember in the other Fallout games and Planescape: Torment getting given strict directions, like,

"Go down the street and take the second left to get to my friend's house."

You have to navigate a street!

At one point in Fallout 2, a guy gives you directions to some buried treasure, and guess what?

He lies!

You have to navigate the world based on some guy's advice, which might not even be honest!

There wasn't an arrow constantly pointing at your destination.

Conversely, turning this arrow off would render many quests impossible,

because figuring out what you have to do and where without this guide just isn't something the game is equipped to do.

In order to progress the main story, you have to pick up this tape.

So without the arrow pointing you directly to it, how would you ever find it?

It's in a giant base!

The Elder Scrolls games, also by Bethesda, have this problem too,

and worst off, Morrowind, the ancient one, is the one that doesn't have this problem.

The game left navigation to the player, and it resulted in a better world.

I haven't finished any of the last three Elder Scrolls games, but I stuck with Morrowind the longest, because it felt like my adventure.

Not an adventure someone else wrote for me,

and certainly not an adventure someone else wrote for a different character, that I'm just sort of there for.

One are of the main story, Vault 87, DOESN'T give you a place to go.

You have to look around a big facility to find the G.E.C.K.

And guess what? It's by far one of the most interesting areas of the game,

because it had to be designed to lead you where you should look through sheer design, instead of offering very little in terms of direction or worldbuilding,

and relying on a heads up display with an arrow on it.

This forces you to become more aware of your surroundings and causes you to appreciate the game more.

It's a breath of fresh air!

You notice little things, like how the mutants keep a leaf blower on the shelf next to the meat.

That's not sanitary!

Meanwhile, in the rest of the game, players don't notice the giant fucking robot,

because they're too busy following arrows to objectives.

Vault 87 is like an intrusion from an alternate reality version of Fallout 3 that was really, really good.

It's also the one place in the game where you can actually talk to a mutant.

Imagine if you could do that with more of them!

But it's not just the way you're lead around, or the poor visual design of the world, no.

Fallout 3 is geometrically wrong, and we're gonna show our working.

Have you packed your protractor?

Because I didn't, can I borrow yours?

In open world games, players can theoretically go anywhere right away,

but designers (at least, decent ones) do their best to set out a path, and give you a sense of direction and progression.

This applies also to sidequests.

While optional content that doesn't affect the main story is fine, there are good and bad ways to put this stuff into the player's view.

In Fallout 1, when you're looking for the water chip, you start off with literally one thing on your map, just like in 3.

"We marked your map with the location of another vault. Not a bad place to start, I think."

So, you head in this direction.

But what's this?

That's right, on your direct path to your objective is Shady Sands, the first populated area.

Do you see what the game's done, here?

The game has given you one place to go, but on your direct route, it's offered you another one.

You could go wherever you want, wander around, prance off into the wastes.

In fact, you could go to one of the last areas in the game by just walking left.

But, with just this one location, you've actually been shown two places to go.

On top of that, you actually can't get into the vault without a rope.

Luckily, you now know of somewhere where you might find one.

No objective marker needs to pop up to let you know you need to find a rope with an arrow floating over the people who can sell you one.

You go there, you see you need one, and then it's up to you to find it.

This establishes a very important narrative and thematic throughline.

You're told to do something, or go somewhere, but doing that isn't so straightforward.

You have to be resourceful to make things work. The game is saying:

"What you have to do is not going to be obvious."

"Use your head."

This is capped off by how, once you do get a rope and descend to the bottom of Vault 15,

you find the lower levels have been completely destroyed, and you're going to have to search elsewhere.

So, the only instruction you've been given leads to a dead end.

None of the people in Shady Sands have probably ever seen a computer in their lives.

You have to find your own leads from here on out.

The game doesn't hold your hand, but it nudges useful options into your path for you to work with as you see fit.

Now it's just you, the wasteland, and, hopefully, somewhere, a water chip.

Finding out where one is, and figuring out how to get it, forms the basis of the entire first half of the game.

It's a freeform journey you venture on yourself.

Compare and contrast with the search for your dad,

where there's always an objective marker pointing to your next breadcrumb, which'll tell you where to go next,

marked on your radar of course, until you find him.

There's no actual adventuring for the player to do!

I think this is why a lot of players ignore the story for a lot of their time playing the game.

The story's so unengaging, and requires so little effort or thought on your part, that your brain sort of...slides off it,

and you go off to mess about with Tenpenny Tower, or those vampire guys,

or just wander around listening to the radio.

Fallout 1 always makes you feel like you're the hero on a journey,

by straightforwardly putting the onus on the player to connect the dots,

while handing you places to look in an order of increasing complexity and danger based on where players are most likely to go next in their mission.

It's freeform, and yet it's also subtly structured.

You're always searching for the water chip,

always on your guard for someone who might happen to be able to help put some pieces of the puzzle together,

and when sidequests happen, they're also engaging, and they're introduced in an organic, entertaining way.

For example, after you've discovered Vault 15's wrecked,

you remember a guy you talked to mentioning trade caravans that carry water to and from several towns and cities.

So you check out Junktown.

On the way into the town proper, you hear this guy called Killian is the town's sheriff,

and there's a dude called Gizmo who runs a casino and does crime things.

I go see Killian, who is like a shopkeeper as well as a sheriff,

which is a little weird and control-y, but he seems nice enough.

"People usually find what they're looking for."

Oh, I think I already have.

While he doesn't know anything about the chip, or vaults, and actively gets annoyed by vault dwellers, who live lives of safety and complacency,

he seems like a nice person, and has stuff to sell that can help you out.

Then a guy comes in and tries to murder him!

Holy shi--I'm right here!

I've looked into his dreamy eyes!

You can't do that!

Obviously you help out.

Then Killian's like,

"We know Gizmo's behind this, but we're law and order type guys, so we have to follow procedure."

Next thing you know, you're wiretapping Gizmo's office, or getting him to confess to wanting to murder Killian into a tape recorder.

"So, will you do him for me?"

Oh yeah...

I sure will, heh.

Do you see what the game's done?

You've reached a point where you're pulling classic cop show hi-jinks,

and it all happened completely organically from walking into a store to ask about the water chip.

It's badass, and the sidequest is not only entertaining and fun side content,

but despite being technically totally optional, the game almost forces you to get involved from how it introduces it to you.

There isn't just an optional dialogue choice where you ask Killian if he has any sidequests, and he's like,

"Yeah, maybe go to a place and shoot some guys, and bring me back a McGuffin."

You get involved with the story of this town simply in the process of walking into it.

Junktown, and Junktown's completely optional additions to the game are peak game design, because they present themselves to you naturally.

Fallout, despite being made in the 90s before games went mainstream and simplified themselves for a wider audience,

is incredibly good at getting people into it.

That's why it's so beloved by so many people.

Let's contrast with the first town in Fallout 3.

You go to Megaton because your game's objective marker tells you to.

You walk into a bar and a man says "I knew your dad and I'll tell you where to go if you do a thing for me",

but if you hack his computer or talk to his employee for five seconds, you don't need to do that at all.

The most freedom you have in your journey to see your dad is how much pointless busy work for other people you have to do.

Instead of the options put in your path being different rewards for different actions,

most of the rewards are how much side content you want to skip.

After that you go to Galaxy News Radio and see Three Dog, because that's where the objective marker says,

and then eventually Three Dog tells you he knows where your dad went,

but first, would you like to do an optional quest for me?

No? Okay, well he went to Rivet City.

Alright.

So, you go to Rivet City.

They say he went somewhere else.

You go there, you clear out the mutants there, your objective marker takes you...

"If you were worried about the story, don't be. It's very well structured and focused."

And then you go there, blah blah blah, you're still following this one fucking guy's trail!

Which brings me to the game's biggest single narrative AND gameplay problem:

The main character is never the main character.

Your DAD is the main character for most of it, doing his own thing for his own reasons.

All the game's truly big decisions,

the decision to abandon his life's work and raise his son,

the decision to leave and try again,

the decision to kill himself in order to prevent the Enclave from taking over...

You spend too much of this game watching your dad have a much more intricate story.

So, uh...

I'm also here.

God DAMMIT, Janice, what did I tell you about walking into tables in the middle of a fucking cutscene,

the real main characters are talking here!

But even when your dad dies, you're not left to pick up the pieces and make things work for yourself.

Doctor Li immediately takes over and starts giving you the orders for where to go next.

"We've got to evacuate now!"

"Don't wander off. We're going to need you."

Jeez, Madison, you don't have to be rude, I'm standing right here!

This guy knows what's up!

Or, uh, he knows something.

Are you alright?

Mate?

hello darkness my old friend

Here she is convincing the Brotherhood to let you in.

"Lyons! I know you're in there! I know you can hear me! You open this goddamn door right now!"

I guess I'm also here, I'm just the player, but,

ppppppppp

And then, when the time finally comes to take back the memorial and kick the Enclave out,

who gives the triumphant speeches and leads the charge?

Not you!

"When we're done with this, everyone can have a nice cold glass of water on me."

"Pride, move out!"

Hey guys, how's it going!

I literally can't even move!

I have to watch this play out exactly how the developers want it to.

The biggest effect you can have on the final mission is,

if you bring an ally in with you,

Lyons can't get past them and it takes longer for them to get out of the room.

The final mission is you walking in a straight line assisted by the Brotherhood as they kill everyone for you,

and you're all following a robot as he kills everyone else.

I spent a huge portion of this mission trying to score kills of my own, and I think I got about three.

Aw, come on, guys, no kill stealing.

That's just rude.

So, apart from a few brief flashes of brilliance, like Vault 87,

the entire main story the developers wrote for their game is total garbo,

and barely even actually qualifies as a story.

You're basically a camera with legs who watches a story happen at you.

This makes the player constantly aware that they aren't really taking part in a story.

They're just playing a video game.

Like, I can already imagine an angry comment saying:

"he's complaining that people are treating the game like a game, LOL"

but bear with me here.

Games, especially roleplaying games, are focused on creating a sense of not simply being in a game,

but of being immersed in an interactive story.

They're emergent from tabletop games like D&D, or in Fallout's case, GURPS.

If someone invited you to their weekly sessions set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland,

and the story was not only weirdly railroaded where your character's dad,

(who was immortal until his heroic sacrifice)

and some lady in power armour and her pals did all the real work,

and the only way to interact with the other stories in the world was to ask where the sidequests are because you aren't introduced to them organically,

you're not really gonna be having a good time, are you?

Core concept, bottom line:

Fallout 3 fails as an RPG,

because it fails to make you feel like a person in a world.

What does Fallout 3 have to make up for it?

Well that's easy!

The rocket launcher!

This weapon was touted hugely before it came out,

a physics gun that shoots stuff at people.

How fun!

I'm not saying the rocket launcher's bad, it's not an inherently stupid thing to add to a game,

but is it the sort of thing you should be adding to your game before the writing, or storytelling, or game design?

One last big design problem.

Speech.

As a concept.

Fallout 3 broke it.

In the first two games, dialogue had a lot of sneaky behind the scenes stuff going on.

If your character wasn't smart enough to know something, you couldn't say it in a conversation,

and even then, if you didn't have high enough speech, the smarter, more convincing options weren't available.

You didn't even see you could make them, and when they were available, you had to actively choose them yourself.

You were shown a list of options,

and it was up to you to discern what the best, most persuasive thing to say might be to the character in question.

It was subtle, and awesome.

As always, Fallout 3 ruined everything.

For one thing, they're always openly visible to any player.

No longer is having high speech a nice surprise that either causes a cool new option to open up and surprise you,

or a backing thing adding to your list of possible options.

The high speech options are always just sitting there, unsubtle as a gun that shoots junk.

Furthermore, it's not a simple test of your character's skill levels, or player ability to decide the best answer,

but rather a percentage dice roll based on your skill.

It even tells you the percentage, so you can specialize in speech but not roll properly,

or someone else who didn't bother gets lucky with it.

Or you can just reload over and over, which completely defeats the point of having speech checks at all.

Cumulatively, this is a huge problem for the game as a whole.

Conversation is the fundamental medium through which you experience the Fallout universe,

and the speech ability is perhaps the most useful and unique thing Fallout ever brought to the table.

Messing this up, this badly, is a GAME CRIME.

Even without relating to the previous games, it makes this world feel like it's made of tissue paper, where,

if I pass a dice roll, I can totally alter a person's worldview.

It's unsubtle and completely ill-fitting for a game series ostensibly based around the nuanced frictions between people.

Now, let's talk briefly about the weapon degradation system.

It's bad.

No, wait, that's not fair, I'll explain why.

Okay, so, I can see what they're going for.

There's quite a good deal of thought going into the system and their execution, but,

like with the way the main quest plays out, and the general landmarkless look of the wasteland,

it isn't quite done right.

The idea is that your weapons are old and breaking, and need to be repaired,

not just to continue working, but because their condition affects their damage.

A fully functioning pistol is better than one that's falling apart.

You have a repair stat that allows you to take two of a weapon and turn them into one better weapon,

but you need to get your stat higher to get things beyond a certain quality threshold.

This means that as your character progresses, you don't just get stronger by having more points in guns,

but you also end up with higher quality weapons that improve your damage output even further.

This, so far, is fine.

But there's another layer of design that has to go into the game when you add this system in.

Since weapons break and can't be used until they're repaired if they hit zero condition,

the developers can put more powerful weapons in early game areas in order to give you a taste of the direction the game's gonna go,

or, give you something powerful, but that you can only use a few times so you can save it for more difficult moments.

So, lots of powerful weapons can be discovered early on and give you a taste of things to come, but have to be used sparingly.

Wait.

Can you see the contradiction here?

Powerful weapons being given to you early in low condition, because they can't be used too much,

and weapons that get weaker when they're in lower condition.

These two things don't go well together.

This means the game ends up handing you a weapon that's about as weak as all your other weapons.

You can find laser pistols in the mart outside Megaton, but guess what?

At this point, you probably haven't put much points into energy weapons because you haven't even seen one yet,

and they're in such low condition that they're equivalent to the weapons you were already using.

I've conferred with friends on this, and several of them were lead to believe that laser weapons were useless,

because the ones they found were garbage.

This isn't just me and my weird pals, either.

The internet is really unsure what to think about energy weapons, because the first ones you encounter are terrible.

Plus, the repair system wasn't great.

Because you can only repair a weapon if you had another of the same weapon,

a lot of rare and supposedly powerful weapons could rarely, if ever be brought up to a fraction of their actual power.

The only weapon that really survives this ridiculous damage curve is the Fat Man,

simply because it's so over the top powerful even in a near broken state.

The weapon degradation system is yet another pretty good idea hamstrung by crazy poor execution.

Oh, and by the way, shooters already had a mechanic for limiting your ability to use a weapon that was more powerful than your current area.

It's called ammunition.

This is a gameplay feature that's been used in games like Doom, and the Resident Evil series for decades,

without, pardon the pun, shooting itself in the foot,

by also making the weapons hot garbage equivalents to what you were already using.

They simply rationed out the bullets you were using with them.

Anyway, where were we?

This video's already going to be super long, so instead of talking at length too much about the morality system,

I'm going to use Vault 101's microcosmic nature to illustrate the larger problem with Fallout 3's morality on the whole,

and then maybe extemporate for a little bit too long anyway about the stuff.

The closest the game really comes to a meaningful decision in Vault 101 is whether or not you kill the Overseer, who, by the way, wants you dead.

He doesn't openly initiate combat with you, he just calls for your death.

In the middle of me fighting to protect myself from guys I can't talk down,

he engages you in conversation, and you finally have the chance to tell someone you don't want to kill them.

If you kill him for being a dick, Amata is upset at you.

"Oh my god! Daddy!"

The game is using the Overseer's death as a teachable moment.

Killing people makes people sad.

Aww.

Maybe killing people's wrong.

"Who appointed you judge, jury, and executioner?"

But just wait one backflipping moment!

(my mum watches my videos i can't swear too much)

That's the lesson I should take from this experience?

Amata, not to be rude,

but do you have any idea how many cops died because he ordered them to attack me on sight, and innocent people too?

There's something...insidious and fucked up to Fallout 3's approach to morality.

So many characters are utterly disposable.

Throughout the game, all sorts of people will shoot at you without a second thought,

and you will kill them,

or you'll run away,

or you'll die.

That's the extent of your moral interaction with a huge portion of the game's characters.

The game could've had a more nuanced perspective where the player is at any point made to consider that all these people had friends, and parents, and children,

But, instead, being nice is reserved for a couple of specific people, who're often the most responsible for the problems you experience.

How nice of Bethesda to occasionally let me specifically be nice to one person.

Worse than not even giving any option of being decent to these guys just doing their jobs,

the game has a fucking pop up tell you when it deems an action is the right or wrong thing.

Yeah, that's right. Let's talk about the amazing karma system.

I kind of feel like any game which can measure your morality with a number is kind of problematic,

because it means A: it thinks it is the arbiter of when something is a right or wrong decision, in no uncertain terms,

or B: the game is stupid and so lacking in depth or complexity in its writing that you really can boil things down that far.

You only really lose karma for stealing, or for actively killing people who weren't shooting at you first.

But, some people you do gain karma for openly killing, because they're apparently just that bad.

So, you can walk into a bar,

and do this:

But because he's a bad guy, everyone just sort of ignores it.

You gain karma for shooting a man in the face in public!

I did a good thing, there!

Meanwhile, with a few specific characters, often leaders of the groups that are trying to kill you,

the ones who initiate the whole thing,

all of a sudden, you're supposed to consider the importance of human life.

The Overseer is the first in a long line of people who you can spare, or convince to change their ways, or give up or whatever,

but who accidentally make the fact that you kill your way wantonly through so many people to get to them fall completely flat.

The player is required to only think about the human effects of their actions once the game decides it's time to stop and think.

Yes, you can be nice, and spare the Overseer.

But that guy's FUCKED.

Worse than not even giving you a chance to really be a good person, the game doesn't even really let you be a bad person either.

And by bad person, I don't mean "whoa hey let's kill all these people for no reason"

"whee! i'm so edgy!"

"My name is not important."

"Wheeeeeeeeee"

[COUGH]

I mean as in the game never, and I do mean never, puts you in a situation where the lines are blurred,

or where both sides in a conflict have a point, or are both equally wrong and can be opposed by a superior idea,

or where only you benefit from the arrangement, but in the long run this might be better for the world as a whole, because you are, after all, the main character.

You're only ever really being nice,

or being fucking, murder man!

That's a job in Fallout!

Comparatively, in a good game, for example, Fallout 1,

there's enough of a texture to the problems that are put in your path that you can kind of see either side being justifiable.

If you side in Junktown with Gizmo, who's quite straightforwardly a self-interested dick who wants the sheriff dead because it's bad for his business,

"I want him dead because he cramps my business."

Junktown gets better.

It grows and becomes a far more successful town than it could've been before.

While I don't personally think it's a good choice,

there's enough room here that I could see someone with different sociopolitical beliefs than me making a convincing argument,

that Gizmo's version of Junktown is a more prosperous one, that's ultimately better for the people in it.

That's right! Fallout 1 managed to give you options where the right answer can depend on what you personally think is best for humanity!

And speaking of the towns made of junk that you encounter in the beginning of the game,

Fallout 3 attempts a similar choice with Megaton.

You can either make the bomb safe and help the people a little, or,

blow the whole town to fucking smithereens!

Wait, WHAT?

That's right, Fallout 3's version of a nuanced moral choice is:

Do you want to kill a bunch of innocent people,

or not?

Is killing people for no reason okay? Hm, what a complex question. How deep. Ten out of ten.

The nuke really well illustrates my whole problem with the game's moral system.

You walk into a town, and a guy motions you over and says:

"Hey, you wanna kill everyone?"

"I know you have no reason to want this, and to be honest, neither do I,"

"and to be even more honest, neither does the guy I work for, his reasoning's really poor, but..."

"you'll feel like you're having an effect on the world, right?"

And since Megaton's a town that can theoretically be blown up very early in the game's story,

none of the characters in it actually matter very much. They aren't allowed to!

Like in other shitty games with bad writing, characters who might optionally die are often bad characters,

because when they live, they can't be permitted to do anything useful or relevant to the story,

because then you'd have to write the version where that doesn't happen, and that can require a lot of re-writing to account for both versions and so on.

In Mass Effect 1, for example, you have the ability to let the entire Council that's been giving you orders the whole game die.

In the sequel, the Council barely even comes up, whether they lived or not.

This is because accounting for the deaths of the most important people in the political system

is actually really difficult if you then also have to account for them not dying.

By the time of Mass Effect 3, BioWare fucking gave up on the idea of players having freedom,

and if you killed the council, they get replaced by almost identical looking copies who are virtually no different.

You're essentially getting to choose what outfit the Council is wearing.

So it becomes a decision that's ultimately set dressing for what some of the people you talk to on the space telephone look like.

Much like that decision, Fallout 3 renders its first town practically meaningless on purpose,

because nothing of value can be at risk of having an effect on the wider story.

Even your dad doesn't get that mad that you blew up a town and killed a bunch of people for no reason!

"You're still my son, and I love you, but I can't begin to tell you how disappointed in you I am."

"We'll talk more about this when there's time."

Wh--what do you have to do to get this guy to hate you?

Ironically, the most nuanced and interesting character in the game to me, Moira, actually does survive this incident.

Presumably because the developers put so much effort into her long and varied quest,

that they didn't want to risk players missing out on it.

So, effectively, walking into Megaton and shooting Moira in the head,

has worse consequences for your future options than blowing up the entire fucking town with a bomb.

Nice job, Bethesda.

Hey Moira, if you can hear me I found that landmine you wanted! I'll bring it over!

Keep working on the survival guide!

They could have built an area that arguably deserved to be destroyed.

Maybe because it relied on slavery, and was planning on expanding and causing more harm to others.

The player would have to weigh up the cost of invoking the nuclear option,

the innocents and slaves caught in the crossfire, and possibly explore alternatives and live with those choices.

But instead they build a normal town and say, "hey you wanna blow it up for no reason?"

The "be good or be history's greatest monster" choice is the only consistent set of choices you're given in the game.

Towards the end you have the option of putting a virus in the wasteland's water,

that purposefully makes it so that every mutant is probably going to die.

And the person who gives you this option doesn't give you anywhere near a decent justification for this being a good idea.

We're gonna come back to this later, but the specific and consistent issue in this game,

is that you can't really be a good person or a bad person,

because there are no situations in which you have to decide what you think is best.

There are only objectively good or bad decisions.

I've chosen to play as a good guy this time.

Ooh! I wonder what being a murderer is like?

"You leave the safety of your vault into this world, you know,"

"it's your big decision, am I gonna help these people or am I gonna, you know, do my own thing, serve my own selfish needs."

Help people, or do my own thing.

Those aren't real choices.

What about giving the player different ways of helping people, with downsides, or risks, or wider effects for the rest of the world?

There's no Junktown scenario, where you have to at least stop to consider,

that giving Gizmo the power to pursue his business will pull more people into the town and make it stronger,

than the guy who runs the town's police and can be kind of iron-fisted about his ideas of what's moral.

YOU have to pick a side.

The end result is, the player doesn't feel attached to the world of the game because there's nothing that demands any real moral consideration on their part.

If you've decided to be good, here's all the tips I can give you.

Don't nuke the town, and shoot the bad guys.

Fallout 3 reuses and references tons of aspects of the previous games,

which is normally fine - it's in a series.

But it reuses all this stuff on a constant basis as a crutch, and it never really does any of that old stuff the justice it deserves.

There are so many things that appear to have been brought back simply so the game looks more like a Fallout game,

not because they actually needed to be there.

Similarly, the super mutants are back.

I expected this because they've been around since the first game, but I didn't expect them to be so poorly done.

Fallout 1's mutants are dumb and violent, but they have a purpose and a goal, and a set of beliefs about themselves and the world.

"The Super Mutant is the next advancement in human evolution."

"Soon everyone in the world will be converted, and peace will reign."

They have a moral code that they believe will lead to peace.

You don't get the chance to spare any mutants in the first game,

but you're given ample opportunities to explore why they can't be, and why they wouldn't listen to you.

In 2, the mutants are far less relevant, but the final boss is technically a super mutant in power armour.

Otherwise, the mutants you do run into are all a little more chilled out.

"You're talking a long time ago. The world's moved on."

People are racist towards mutants for things that happened a long time before, and the mutants secretly still believe that their master plan could've worked.

There's a texture to them, especially to Marcus, who will happily claim he thinks his best human friend would be better if they'd been turned into a mutant.

"What a great mutant he would've been."

There are tensions, and yet there isn't any reason for hostility.

It's just people with different views and appearances learning slowly to get along.

"Time to die!"

In Fallout 3, the mutants are...orcs.

They run around killing people for seemingly no reason, they're dumb, they yell and scream about murder,

they keep bags of human gore lying around...

There's no master plan, no explanation, no justification.

They're raiders, but tinted green.

They're something for the Brotherhood to be fighting against,

and we'll get to the fucking Brotherhood.

The mutants are the most interesting characters in the series to me.

They live a long time and have a lot to think about.

Turning them into this is abysmal!

They needed something for the super mutants to do, and they needed more things to shoot, so...

fwsssssssssssshhhhh

But it's not just the mutants and the ghouls, all kinds of things make a reappearance for seemingly no reason.

Harold, the mutant who appears in the first two games is back.

The G.E.C.K. is back, because coming up with another McGuffin is too much work, and everyone know the G.E.C.K., right?

Oh, the Enclave are back, 'cause people remember them. They're still evil, wow! Now you have guys in power armour to shoot!

Are you feeling serviced, fans?

"Ah, face to face at last."

Did you think having a conversation with a computer was an original idea?

Zax in the basement of the Glow in Fallout 1 was a talking robot, and you could play chess with him,

and discuss what it means to be human, and evolution, and mutation, and the nature of artificial intelligence,

in infinitely more detail than any conversation you can have with John Henry Eden.

Zax might seem like a minor point, but it speaks volumes about the difference in writing quality,

that while in Fallout 1, you can have longer and more philosophically interesting conversations then,

that take place anywhere in Fallout 3 with an optional character I'll bet a huge portion of players never even found.

And then we have the Brotherhood of Steel.

Let's go back again.

In Fallout 1, you barely see much of them for most of the game,

but their face is looking right at you when you open it.

They're coming.

They're coming, oh boy.

And when you do meet them, and you wanna join, they send you on a suicide mission that they intend for you to die on.

In fact, when you get there, you find the corpses of the previous people they sent.

You learn they hoard technology and they're kind of isolationists,

who believe in keeping track of technology and science, and knowledge in order to preserve it for the future,

so that the best of humanity can be restored in better days.

Even though you can gain an understanding of them, and convince them to help you a little, they ultimately remain hidden underground.

That's their choice.

The beautiful, capital B Beautiful thing about the Brotherhood of Steel is that they're so human.

They're likable, they're cool, they're smart, they're powerful,

and they're wrong.

Fallout 2 is the story of their failure to truly help the world or themselves, as they wither away into nothingness.

The title screen of 2 is an Enclave soldier - the Brotherhood have been replaced as the strongest faction in the wasteland.

And a loading screen features a tribal in the same pose as the knight from Fallout 1's title screen, wearing a desecrated Brotherhood helmet.

That's some pretty powerful imagery right there.

Especially for a loading screen.

They were never really the good guys, but they did care,

and you kind of feel sad for their mistakes.

In Fallout 3 the Brotherhood run around shooting mutants because they're the good guys now.

And no, I'm not saying "waaah i'm a big baby you have to do the brotherhood this way",

no, they can be any way the writer wants them to.

They could not even be in a Fallout game, because they all died.

They could be six guys holding on after the end of their whole way of life.

They could be exactly the sort of group they are in Fallout 3,

but whatever they are, they have to be done well.

None of the Brotherhood are given sufficient levels of characterization or writing, or relatability.

You never really understand these people.

They feel like props.

The majority of your interaction with them is part of the main story, which we'll get to,

or just kind of uninteresting busy work?

There's a central area with some generic guys shooting at targets, some rooms off to the side with a couple of people you can talk to a little,

but...there's nothing you can really gain from them, nothing really happens here.

It's like a Brotherhood of Steel themed attraction at a park.

It doesn't feel like a place, and the Brotherhood doesn't feel like a cohesive group.

In Fallout 1, the Brotherhood of Steel was a place you could get quite invested in learning about, with a multi-faceted membership.

The Brotherhood weren't just a place you could get guns and plot.

Fallout 1 has talking heads, where when you talk to someone, occasionally you get a big shot of their face, and ooh they mouth at you.

"What the bloody, bloody, bloody hell are you doing here!"

There are four of the game's what, ten? talking heads in the Brotherhood base, and all of them have a distinct personality from the moment you walk up to them.

"Greetings. It's a fine day for learning."

You have Cabbot, the obedient, nice, but kind of dumb door guy, who does the real work of defending the place and hefts the big guns.

You have Vree, the head scribe, who privileges knowledge and invention.

"Speak to the knights. Ask them to show you one of the latest laser pistols I designed."

That's right, in Fallout 1, new things are being made.

They're not just salvaging old technology, in stark contrast to 3,

where all characters are doing nothing but salvage old discarded shit, and creating nothing of their own.

Ironically the same attitude the developers had.

Vree specifically doesn't think history itself as important,

she's more interested in researching the sciences and discovering the future, than in the past.

You have Head Paladin Rhombus, a gruff and no-nonsense guy who doesn't really want to talk to you,

and directs you to Vree if you ask anything science-y or that requires a long-winded explanation.

"Talk to Vree in the main library."

He represents the militaristic nature of the Brotherhood, and their descendance from the US Army.

"I could teach you how to fight...if you had any ability."

You have General Maxson, the High Elder, who manages to have a sense of humor and friendliness,

but also a sharp wit and an openly militaristic discipline streak to him.

You can tell just from how he's written that he was a fighter himself before he was given command.

He's a leader who embodies a nice mix of the traits of the other three characters.

This gives you a sense that the Brotherhood at its core really is a brotherhood,

a fraternity of people who take care of each other and are ultimately very close-knit.

Not just visible in their constant worrying about the missing knights who went out on an expedition, whose trail you can pick up on and eventually rescue,

but in things as simple as how their leader comprises a mix of all of their attitudes and beliefs.

The Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 1 gives a convincing impression of a functioning mini-society,

creating a sense of a vast group of different intersecting personalities within their halls,

and it does it with four faces.

Every single member of the Brotherhood in Fallout 3 has a face,

but they barely have one personality between them.

"The Brotherhood is at your service."

[SLIGHTLY DIFFERENTLY THIS TIME?]
"The Brotherhood is at your service."

You can shoot them into tiny pieces of carefully modelled meat, but you can't have a meaningful conversation about science with them.

It's very clear that Bethesda wanted to do their own versions Maxson, Rhombus, Vree and Cabbot,

either as yet another reference, or because they genuinely had no ideas of their own,

so, here's a test of these new characters.

What's this guy's name?

What sort of personality does he have besides "generic door guard"?

Cabbot's name has been burned into my brain since I played Fallout 1 about 14 years ago.

He had a lovely, unassuming nature, a uniquely shaped head, and represented not only the Brotherhood's defensiveness, but their inner kindness to one another.

I wanna take Cabbot for a walk on the beach, and just talk about stuff for a while.

Fallout 3 was a chance to show a chapter of the Brotherhood that had redeemed themselves,

where they saw the result of their foolishness coming, and decided to help the people of the wasteland form a better society.

But instead, they're a confusing mishmash of their presentation in the first two games,

being rude to outsiders, not letting anyone in, with cookie cutter "maybe being nice to people is a good thing" nonsense mixed in with it.

None of them offer any real justification for this change, and even as characters in themselves,

none of them even say anything as flavourful and character-establishing as:

"It's a fine day for learning."

So there, I hope that makes me seem not against changing the Brotherhood on principle,

just against changing it badly and not giving them enough characterization or justification for why they are how they are.

Just like how I'm not strictly against the idea of there being a Mega Man cartoon, but that doesn't mean that I'm okay with...

[SINGING ALONG WEAKLY]
Super fighting robots...Mega Man...

[WEEPILY]
SUPER FIGHTING ROBOT

The re-use of old concepts smacks, like with the opening birth scene, of hasty attempts at storytelling and worldbuilding.

It's as if the developers were handed the rights to 3, and they knew they had to make a game, but not what should actually go into it,

resulting in a cobbled together mishmash of whatever original ideas they came up with in some initial meeting,

and ideas borrowed from the other games but given no real thought.

The Fallout series is characterized largely NOT by adherence to a core set of concepts, but by change.

War never changes, but the world the war is fought in does.

In Fallout 2, things changed.

The super mutants weren't trying to conquer the world in the name of progress, they were survivors of a dead ideology,

and the ones left were trying to do good, or at least have some peace,

living in a town founded on the site where a Brotherhood knight and super mutant fought for so long that they realized how pointless it was,

and sat down and started working together.

That sort of concept was unthinkable in the world of the first Fallout.

Things didn't stay the same just for the sake of being like the old one.

Even the money changed!

Fallout 3 didn't know what it wanted to be, or how to grow or shift or change these things,

so it ended playing like a cliff notes version of the ideas that were popular or well known in the previous ones.

Caps are back, because caps are a pop-culturally remembered thing from Fallout 1.

The mutants are here, but they're just generic bad guys

The Brotherhood of Steel has changed, but rather than an interesting or meaningful or fitting change,

they're boiled down to such goody two-shoes heroes of the wasteland with no depth that they fail to actually progress the Brotherhood thematically.

They're like a misremembered version of the Brotherhood from the first two games.

If you boiled it down, really really far down, you could have called the Brotherhood the goodies in 1 and 2.

So, that's what got translated over.

It's like playing a game of telephone!

Ring-ring!

[QUESTIONABLE IMPRESSION OF TODD HOWARD]
Hello?

[QUESTIONABLE IMPRESSION OF TODD HOWARD]
What's that? I'm a bad game designer?

[QUESTIONABLE IMPRESSION OF TODD HOWARD]
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Todd Howard doesn't sound like that!

But the one thing that makes Fallout truly special is its themes.

Its wider story about humans and the problems we face within ourselves, and how we conquer them and progress to new ones.

Everyone likes to pretend that their favourite game has "ooh it's an internal struggle" but Fallout gets it REAL, man.

Despite being open world games where the player can go anywhere,

and with stories over which the player has a tremendous amount of influence,

the original games managed to be incredibly well structured and paced.

You start small, getting sucked into the squabble in Junktown, and then you find yourself inexorably drawn to the Hub.

Each game begins with relative chaos, in which everything's up for grabs, but there isn't much to grab,

and you're skirmishing with small groups over petty issues, and things are messy and difficult and almost seem to lack a moral dimension,

because you're still making your way, and figuring out what's going on, and getting the equipment you need to save your vault.

Then, as you get more educated, you discover areas with complex but identifiable moral problems.

Entire populations are at stake if you execute an idea poorly, or take the easy option.

Getting the water chip can doom the ghoul community of Necropolis if you don't help them fix their own water problems,

and their community has members who could do with getting rid of too.

Not to mention the mutants standing right there!

Unfortunately for them, we can see in isometric.

Not every decision is easy, but you develop a sense of how to make things right, and a consideration for the wider effects of your actions.

You fight larger and stronger groups, and by this point you're assisted by a crew of your own.

You get better weapons and armour and more allies. You get smart.

Then, in the final act, you get access to amazing technology and an incredibly in-depth understanding of why the world is the way it is,

from speaking to scientists, and Zax.

The tensions keep rising, but all the distractions scale back.

The fate of the world is at stake.

Not because the crosshairs are manually on people like before, but because you're getting confronted with the questions that lie at the heart of the world,

and having to come up with a solution to them, or everything is fucked.

Concepts solidify and sides are taken, the true motivating forces behind the problems the world face are made known, and then...

Finally, you go to meet them.

You make contact with the Followers of the Apocalypse,

a group that has infiltrated the cathedral built on top of the vault where the Master, the leader of the mutants, is residing.

They send a lot of help with you, and you descend into the corrupted vault, covered with proto-Lovecraftian ooze and swarming with mutants, monsters, and psychics.

The final fight is very difficult.

The mutants are numerous, which doesn't go well with the incredible danger even one of them can pose.

They eventually thin out, but so do your allies.

This fight seems specifically designed so it's a struggle even for the strongest possible character, and no-one who enters with you will leave alive.

But eventually...

The enemies thin out, paring away until you're alone in a hallway.

And at the end is one person.

The entire game is preparing you for the moment where you and the Master,

who's been in charge of the entire mutant problem that threatens the world with domination this whole time,

stand in a room together, and talk.

This final hallway tenses me up EVERY time.

It's a confrontation with a comprehensive belief system that so far has been doing really well for itself,

and you have to stop it, or mankind is probably done.

You've gone from fighting scorpions to get an antidote so someone will sell you a rope,

and slapfights with casino owners over their business practices,

to sitting next to the arbiter of the world's doom, and trying to explain what is wrong with their plan,

and it happens seamlessly!

"So what shall it be? Do you join the unity or do you die here?"

Everything has been pushing you towards the moment where you have to tell the man who thinks he has the solution to the problems you've been facing,

that he's wrong.

These are the crowning moments of Fallout,

They're the culmination of their story, their themes, their ideas, and all of your character's choices too.

Do you just wanna fight them?

Are you unprepared, making a fight unavoidable and difficult?

Do you try to talk to them, and maybe, just maybe, change their mind?

The conversation with the Master is nuts.

He wants to know where your vault is and has a compelling reason you should tell him.

It's a chance to assure the mutants can be strong enough to survive the wastes where mankind has and will not.

"As long as there are differences, we will tear ourselves apart fighting each other."

Because there are no obvious speech options popping up with percentiles, there's no way of telling what the best way of attempting to talk him down might be,

except for your own judgement.

You have to engage him as a reasonable person,

The best thing is, it's impossible for him to be talked down on moral grounds.

He doesn't care about mankind's survival or killing people, because for him, the mutants are the future of mankind, and the ends justify the means.

The only way to talk him down is to explain why the plan wouldn't work.

This isn't just a speech check.

To do this, you have to ask everyone about the mutants, about what makes them what they are.

Eventually, you can find through Vree that the mutants are sterile, and she gives you the evidence that proves this is the case.

The Master rejects this as a forgery, anyway.

You have to get him to ask his own mutants if any of them have gotten pregnant before he realises the truth.

"But it cannot be. This would mean that all my work has been for nothing."

"Everything that I've tried to...a failure!"

"It can't be. Be. Be. Be."

"I...don't think that I can continue. Continue? To have done the things I have done, in the name of progress and healing."

"It was madness. I can see that now. Madness. Madness? There is no hope."

"Leave now. Leave, while you still have hope."

The final speech he gives is sad, amazing, and deeply humanizing for such a monstrous character.

Video game characters rarely have good voice actors, and the Master has two, playing about four different voices.

Jim Cummings and Kath Soucie both make great performances that contribute to one of the best moments in video game character history.

After that, all that's left is to fight your way through an army of his men, and escape the base before

THE GAME CRASHES

I mean before the base explodes.

Outwitting the Master feels like you've genuinely contended with an apocalyptic ideology and beaten it with intelligence and reason,

not simply the strength of your gun, or some cookie cutter heroic speech.

By the way, the male voices of the master are by the same man who voices Winnie the Pooh.

I just thought I'd let you know that.

Fallout 2 does a lot too--

Fallout 2 does a lot as well,

Frank Horrigan is a similar culmination of that game's themes, but if I talk about now I'll be here for another hour, so I'm just gonna skip ahead, okay?

It's good. It's good! Play Fallout 2, play it! Please!

The part where you have a short talk to the man in the room who embodies all the problems you've faced is the best part of those two Fallout games by far, to me.

They tie everything together.

Fallout 3 pits you against Colonel Autumn.

"You again."

[♪ Through the Fire and the Flames - Dragonforce ♪]

Autumn has been a dick to you personally,

but he doesn't represent any major flaw in the world of Fallout 3.

He isn't the culmination of the problems you've seen, he just sort of turns up halfway through.

He's just a guy, standing there saying "Well I guess it's time for us to fight now"!

And in the space of three lines of conversation, if you pass a speech check, you can talk him out of fighting,

and he just fucking walks out!

Colonel Autumn doesn't really stand for anything, he doesn't want anything, he doesn't represent any core concept you've had to face over the course of the game.

He's a wet fart on the face of Fallout storytelling,

he's a piss in the mouth of philosophy,

he's a sledgehammer to the balls of the inner child of the mind of thought, he...

H-He...

This character has broken my brain!

The ending, this final room, COULD have made everything about the game come together and make sense.

It would be difficult, but it could've happened, and at least put a nice bow on things,

but instead, it's EXACTLY the ending you would fucking expect from the rest of Fallout 3,

and yet that somehow still feels disappointing.

Worse than that, this game had two chances to get this right, there were two men in rooms!

When you meet President Eden, you're in a similar scenario.

Eden wants to convince you to enact his genocide, but unlike with the Master or the Lieutenant, or anyone,

there's no explanation, no underlying motive, it's just:

"I am bad guy, we need to kill mutants, genocide good."

"Super Mutants and ghouls must be purged[...]we need to clear the way for humanity to rebuild the wastes."

The Master had a comprehensive explanation for why the human race needed to be converted into mutants, now.

Bethesda can't come up with a single compelling explanation for why this is actually a good idea beyond the platitude of:

"We need to undo mutants, do you get it, I'm a racist."

There's no philosophical struggle.

It's impossible to even attempt to reason out why this philosophy is right or wrong in a rational manner,

because it's so fucking stupid that it defies rationality!

You can't show him that the mutants aren't the real problem, that the real problem is something even the Enclave are a part of,

the all too human need to continue to make unending war and death.

How do you talk him down, then?

Well, you get a "please kill yourself" speech option,

and then you say, uh, you know, "don't be bad, it's bad. Aren't you tired of being bad?"

and then he says,

"Okay!"

"Yes, I suppose it is. Very well[...]I'll put an end to the Enclave."

And he does!

This should be a joke!

Like, "wow, President Eden was poorly fucking programmed", or "the Enclave are fucking idiots all the way up to the top"!

But because there's no real discussion or struggle or philosophical point to be made by any of the factions or characters in this game,

it becomes strikingly clear that this really was the best Bethesda could do, and that's just sad!

Speaking of stupid, one-dimensional choices,

after dealing with Autumn, you get one more moral choice.

Someone has to save the purifier, but they will die trying in the radioactive chamber.

This choice fundamentally decides your ending.

If you do it, you're a hero.

If you let the real main character who's been making the real choices, leading the charge, making the speeches,

and literally has been putting her life on the line the entire time to do it,

you're a coward!

You can be good, or bad.

It's exactly the moral choice Fallout 3 would give you.

That's it! No nuance, no change to argue, "hey, maybe these heroic people who love helping people and being nice could do it".

If you pick Lyons, regardless of your reasoning, you're basically objectively a coward.

And then it's over.

You get your fucking slideshow,

and "war never changes",

and goodbye.

Which one of you did this?

WHICH ONE?

Wait a second, I brought Fawkes with me, he's immune to radiation,

in fact, earlier in the game, he...did that! Why doesn't he just save the world and let us all live?

"No."

OH, WELL THAT'S JUST FUCKING GREAT!

The developers created an ending choice so stupid within their own fiction that all of a sudden,

the fucking hyper-intelligent mutant has to develop a sense of destiny to fear denying you!

They wanted to pick the most generic hero/coward choice possible,

and to do it they deliberately had to make sure the far better option wasn't available, for no reason!

Do you wanna do this stupid thing, or this stupid but evil thing?

What about this clear third option that's actually better than either?

No.

If you are writing an open-ended RPG about choice and morality, and there is a clear option the player could decide to take,

and you put the option there, and you tell them "no"?

You fucked up!

But you didn't just fuck up the ending, because the sort of idiots who would make this decision made the rest of the game too.

Those same shit-stained fingerprints are all over it.

Pick a cartoon character, or kill them both.

Nuke a town for no reason, or don't.

Ask Tenpenny Tower not to be racist, or fucking murder a bunch of innocent ghouls for no reason.

I don't even know what Autumn wanted, he was against Eden's genocide plan.

Seemingly all Autumn wanted was for the Purity Project to have an Enclave sticker on it.

When it isn't clear what the final boss's plan is, it's time to do a re-write.

No, wait! I didn't mean that!

No! Nooo--

Do you get it? It's a reference to the name of the
final...whatever.

We all knew I was gonna cover this. Everyone hated the ending.

People hated Bethesda so much they wanted to shit themselves inside out.

They were made of piss!

There isn't enough hyperbole to explain how mad people were with the stupid ending.

Then Bethesda released the Broken Steel DLC.

So, now you survive your heroic sacri...fice...

[SIGH]

While being able to carry on is arguably a straightforward improvement, it speaks volumes that the developers either:

A: Didn't think of that in the first place in the years it took them making and playtesting the game, during which they claimed to have played the originals.

[QUESTIONABLE TODD HOWARD IMPRESSION]
Hmm, maybe we should make a version of Fallout 2 that's missing a key feature and hope the player has a save before the ending started.

[I DON'T KNOW THIS GUY'S NAME]
Great idea, Todd! And while you're at it, let's add more companions who are immune to radiation but refuse to fix the purifier!

[I DON'T KNOW THIS GUY'S NAME]
By the way Todd, you don't sound so good, are you okay?

Or B: They really believed in the finality of their project, of giving the Lone Wanderer a semblance of a complete arc going from birth to death,

then walked back on it the instant people complained!

Or C: Did this deliberately so players would buy the DLC that lets them carry on playing the game.

You'll notice there's no footage from Broken Steel in this video.

That's because, back when it came out, I found myself wondering why I would pay to play more of Fallout 3.

I had already accidentally slipped and hit the button that buys Operation: Anchorage,

a ten quid costing corridor full of generic enemies you can't talk to, terminating in a general who gives up if you say one thing to him.

In other words, a microcosm of the actual game.

Players had to fix the beginning, the developers had to fix the end,

and that leaves only a middle consisting of hollow nonsense where you shoot the bad guys until they die and collect Fallout-themed McGuffins.

It's no surprise that players who have the most fun are the ones who traipse around on their own kind of adventure,

shunning the garbage experience poorly planned for their perusal,

flicking on the radio and just doing whatever they like!

A friend who is way smarter than me has played Fallout 3 for a very long time, and still does,

because they essentially just walk around, taking very little interest in the experience the world had planned for them.

The best way to have fun with the game is to view the whole thing as something to take a walking tour through,

purposefully carving out your own journey almost in spite of the game itself.

These people aren't playing the game wrong for not focusing on the story.

They're proving how wrong the game is, by showing how differently the game has to be approached in order to be enjoyed.

It is a story-driven action RPG, in which to have fun,

you have to avoid the story on purpose.

For a long time, like, years,

I was pretty sure that Fallout 3 wasn't just bad, but that it was proof you couldn't make a nuanced 3D game of its scale without it being bad.

There wasn't enough time to make it good, there was too much manpower involved.

I thought that maybe the future was dark for RPGs.

When New Vegas came out, I didn't play it for about two years.

I'd been burned before.

But then, one day in university, I did.

Fallout: New Vegas is the fourth game on that list.

It fixed everything.

The opening isn't seven million hours long populated with unavoidable murder.

You walk over to a machine, pick your stats, sit a short personality test and you go on an adventure!

Traits are back!

The mutants and Brotherhood and Enclave are treated differently from their appearances in 1, 2 AND 3,

and their changes are explained and justified and understandable, while not distracting from the main story,

which concerns the threat posed by an entirely new faction, because the creators knew how to come up with new ideas!

And the new faction is a group of seemingly unjustifiably genocidal fascists,

but when you sit down with their leader, he gives a meaningful and legitimate criticism of democracy itself,

and starts talking about the Hegelian Dialectic!

When that happened the first time I played, I cried the only two tears I have ever wept playing a video game.

I-I am not embarrassed to admit that even a little.

Conversations are fixed! Not only are speech checks no longer just a fucking dice roll,

you can use skills besides speech, especially barter, to get an edge,

but if you don't have enough, you get a joke option that automatically fails just for fun!

You can repair weapons using other stuff, making the laser pistol you find in the first room of the game an immediately useful option!

That's right, the weapons work in Fallout: New Vegas!

The game's writing and acting is so nuanced, you can tell what a character's stance is on Caesar's Legion, based on how they pronounce the name Caesar!

The world's design is paced, so the game actually gets harder as you go, and you actually need all the crazy explosives you pick up on the way!

The only problems I can identify are:

the game crashes when you try to resurrect yourself, which seems ironic given how the game starts with you doing that,

and that I can't seem to uninstall the giant bouncy breasts mod a friend installed on my computer at a party years ago,

despite making fresh installs on several computers.

That is a true story.

It is a true story, and I have healthy beliefs about women, and...

Just cut this part out, really, they're not gonna belie--

Fallout: New Vegas, for me, is...

the best...

game.

But for me, it's somehow even more than that.

It proved that you could tell a good story and make an amazing world just by actually bothering to design and write and pace it properly.

It fixed everything wrong with Fallout 3, literally everything.

I can't even go into detail about all the ways that it improves upon its predecessor, because we're already an hour and twenty minutes in.

What else can I even say? I ju--

There isn't enough time left, and we're gonna eventually have to stop.

Just trust me, and give it a shot for yourself.

If for some reason you haven't played New Vegas perhaps because you were burnt out after playing hours and hours and hours of Fallout 3,

maybe now is a good time to give it a shot.

Although, Fallout 4 just came out so I bet everyone's burned out on that t--whatever.

They also seem to have seen the same problems with 3 that I have, at least, based on the attitude they have towards it and its fans in the making of documentary.

"A lot of people liked Fallout 3."

That little smirk, that's just such a beautiful moment.

Gonna be honest: the reason why I decided to play New Vegas was because I saw him do that.

I saw that smirk, I thought, "yeah, he knows!"

"He knows!"

Josh Sawyer is what would happen if you dipped Todd Howard in the vats, he's just...he's better!

I would do a lot of dark shit to try and get a Fallout 4/New Vegas type situation happening, but to be honest,

I kind of like the idea of Obsidian doing their own thing.

Almost one of the core messages of New Vegas and what it does with the Fallout mythos is show you that it's okay to do things differently,

and in a way, it's truer to the spirit of that by letting them just make their own thing, not even having a Fallout name on it.

In a way, Black Isle getting shot in the head, and Obsidian rising from their grave,

made them truly free to do whatever they want without being attached to any pre-existing property.

Meanwhile, Bethesda's just become this franchise zombie, just making more Fallouts and more Elder Scrolls,

and they published the new Doom and Wolfenstein as well.

If you asked me which developers are gonna come up with the better, fresher, more interesting and unique ideas...

We--you don't need to ask me, it's fuckin' obvious!

You can say what you like, but this, for me, is the defining moment of Fallout 3.

It's the most telling portion about the priorities in the game's development, and the most straightforward expression of all its problems and mistakes,

and it's about ten seconds of gameplay.

You walk into the final chamber with the water purifier.

Autumn's here.

He plans to kill you with his gun, because he wants to...

uhh

be the guy who...

has the water purifier that's gonna exist anyway and purify all the water regardless of anything.

In the course of three sentences you talk him down from his desire to do this, he gives up, and goes to walk out.

On his way I remember this guy doesn't deserve to walk out of here.

I have an obligation to stop him.

I killed all his guys, I'm gonna let HIM go?

The guy upon whom this entire conflict can be blamed?

The guy who my dad killed himself trying to stop and yet miraculously survived?

I'm g--fuck that guy, I'm gonna shoot him in the face with a butter knife I stole from his own base.

Look at this frame for a moment.

The creators of this game modeled the individual 3D pieces of a face exploding.

The eyes, the brain, the skull, the fleshy, gooey, splashy matter erupting from a gaping hole in his neck.

This is a complex rendition of a head actually being crushed apart into disparate shapes and leaving behind a gory hole.

They probably had to look up diagrams and do research for this, model every individual piece and make sure it spawned correctly where the head once was.

They wanted to make sure that when you shot someone in the face with a gun, it exploded in the perfect blend of satisfying, hilarious, and grimly visceral.

The character stands for nothing, he turns on a dime

He's flat, he's not written well in any of his appearances. They didn't write a character you could have a real conversation with.

You either say "time to die", or "give up and walk out now, please".

The creator's time was apparently better spent on something else.

Planet Xbox 360 gave Fallout 3 a 9.8, saying:

Presentation.

That site now redirects to a clickbait site, because it turns out game reviewers really did at some point get purged the way I said they should earlier.

Archive.org saved the site.

The review is mostly fluff talking about how many enemies there are to kill,

how pretty the blood explosions are, and how cool VATS is and how much it reminded them of Oblivion.

The images are missing from the archive, but it's no big loss.

I've seen enough pictures and video from enough other reviews to know they'd probably be more shots from VATS of the player shooting someone else.

AKA

Slight variations on this frame.

The developers spent their time on the presentation.

On this.

Not on the writing.

Not on making you care whose face it was and why it's exploding.

But it doesn't matter now.

This un-nuanced, barely even written, confusing motived man, is very definitely dead.

But Lyons doesn't think so!

"I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you'd let him just walk away."

Lyons, you--

You are not good at this.

Go into the water now, please.

Just go, just g--

Oh god!

OH GOOOOO

I'd also like to thank:

I'd also like to apologize.

I split the people I was thanking per video in half because I thought I was gonna get the other half thanked in this video,

and then I went way over the end of the month.

Everyone who backed me last month will get thanked this month in the two videos coming up soon.

This one just took a lot longer than I thought, and I had to help with a funeral, it was a whole thing.

Next time I do one of these I kinda of wanna talk about the philosophy of Dark Souls II, or why Bloodborne is the best designed Souls game in terms of introducing it to new players.

Click on...oh, I dunno how to do those.

Just let me know in the comments which you prefer.

Or suggest a new thing, y'know, I don't mind.

I'm out of ideas.