I will grit my teeth and do everything I can to not draw comparisons to New Vegas, a game that is better than this on literally every front, and instead look at it as its own experience and as a sequel to Fallout 1 and 2.
Nothing you do in this game matters. Nothing. There's no choice that you make that ever has an impact on the story, you just walk a straight line to the end while the writers beat you over the head with their ideas and themes that they want to develop but never spend any time doing so. Bethesda is so terrified that you might not enjoy their story and world, so they trip over their own feet at every turn to make you connected, despite it being completely counterintuitive. A 20-minute long intro that takes you through the first 19 years of your life! Wow, don't you feel connected with your character and the places you see? Don't you love your good ol' dad? Oh no, the Vault is melting down (or something)! Aren't you sad about this? After all, this is where you grew up! I won't go into spoiler territory, even though the "twists" in the story really do not matter, but the examples I gave are just the tip of the iceberg of how much Bethesda grabs you by the back of the head and bashes your face into its story.
So, a lot of people who defend this game would respond to all of my complaints about the main story with a reasonable rebuttal: sure, it's not a good story, but the side quests and world design are pretty great. Alright, that's understandable, and I kept that in mind while I played, but I find that this isn't true at all. Side quests are more than the surface objectives, it's what they mean, to you and to the world around you. Fallout 2 had a quest that was nothing more than going across the street and buying a plow for a Vault City slave, and that had more impact on me than anything this game had to offer. Now, that isn't me being snarky and cynical for no reason, I'm offering it up to make a point; as much as FO3 tries, and it tries very hard, there is never a real connection with the player and the world around them because of how shoddily it's put together. Things exist and happen for no reason, characters are all completely flat, motives make no sense (when they're not blatantly aping the previous 2 entries), nothing in the game feels impactful to you at all. What's the point in me doing side quests if my reward is learning more about this poorly written world from poorly written characters with poorly directed voice actors? There's no sense of satisfaction, because my actions don't mean anything. My dialogue options are nothing more than "kind response", "neutral response", and "mean response". It's almost funny how the other games in the series have been critiqued for having Karma systems that mean practically nothing, when this game goes out of its way to flaunt its Karma system that has even less impact and feels even more phoned-in than the other games. I also want to mention, with regards to the side quests, that you have to find a great deal of them organically, via digging through the world for settlements. On the surface, this isn't a bad idea, but the problem is how segmented the world design is, on both micro and macro scales. Areas are unnecessarily broken up and labyrinthian just to make you have to find byzantine routes around, and said areas are thrown about randomly throughout the wasteland, with very rare instructions pointing you in any real direction. Not only that, but everything blends in visually to the point that you might glaze right over a possible area and side quests just because it didn't grab your eye. I never felt any drive to explore the wasteland because, outside of the quests having no meaning to me, it just never made me feel like the trek to find things would be worth it.
This shouldn't come as a shock, but all nuance and subtext in this is practically non-existent. Again, discounting New Vegas, compared solely to 1 and 2, it is genuinely impressive how much this game fumbles any and all meaning in its text. The Bible verse that is bludgeoned into your head relentlessly throughout the game is the perfect example of this; taking symbolism from the Bible, an incredibly symbolic and metaphor-ridden text, and playing it completely straight. The verse mentions water, and you're bringing water to the wastelands! Do you get it yet? Do you understand that whenever we bring up the water, we want you to think about how clever we are for choosing that Bible verse? Everything else in the game is the exact same way, absolutely zero subtlety and everything that could have even the slightest nuance being played completely straight and blunt. Wow, the guy who traps people in a simulation of the 50s is obsessed with the past and doesn't want things to change! It's so tiring. It is so, so tiring.
With as much as I rip this game to shreds, and believe me, it deserves every ounce, I have to reluctantly give it one compliment. Bethesda did a pretty good job at adapting the Fallout visual and gameplay style to a 3D world, with little details thrown in like Vault layouts, certain weapon and world models faithfully recreated, even the dialogue you tell your companions being similar to the games previous. But, I don't know how genuine of a compliment "you managed to follow the exact footsteps your predecessors laid out" is.
To wrap things up, I want to make my points as clear and concise as they can get, because I know I can get wordy. Bethesda is so terrified at the player not interacting with the story and world "correctly", that they strip away all impact that the player's choices have. This leads to interactions being flat, emotional moments feeling forced, and a general feeling of unimportance. To borrow a line from my friend who I played this game with, you are not the main character of the story; your dad and Doctor Li are, you are on the sidelines spectating the entire time. Your choices have already been made for you, you only get to decide what words will be used. This is the core issue with this game, and what leads to the world being inherently uninteresting and as a result, everything that happens to, and because of, the player feeling like they lack any influence.
"It's like... Bethesda is a bakery, and the visual designers do the frosting, while the writers make the cake. And the writers can't bake a cake to save their fucking lives, so the only thing the visual designers can do is make it look really nice on the outside and hope you don't notice how bad the inside is. It's not their fault that the end result is unenjoyable, they did the best they can." - aforementioned friend
Nothing you do in this game matters. Nothing. There's no choice that you make that ever has an impact on the story, you just walk a straight line to the end while the writers beat you over the head with their ideas and themes that they want to develop but never spend any time doing so. Bethesda is so terrified that you might not enjoy their story and world, so they trip over their own feet at every turn to make you connected, despite it being completely counterintuitive. A 20-minute long intro that takes you through the first 19 years of your life! Wow, don't you feel connected with your character and the places you see? Don't you love your good ol' dad? Oh no, the Vault is melting down (or something)! Aren't you sad about this? After all, this is where you grew up! I won't go into spoiler territory, even though the "twists" in the story really do not matter, but the examples I gave are just the tip of the iceberg of how much Bethesda grabs you by the back of the head and bashes your face into its story.
So, a lot of people who defend this game would respond to all of my complaints about the main story with a reasonable rebuttal: sure, it's not a good story, but the side quests and world design are pretty great. Alright, that's understandable, and I kept that in mind while I played, but I find that this isn't true at all. Side quests are more than the surface objectives, it's what they mean, to you and to the world around you. Fallout 2 had a quest that was nothing more than going across the street and buying a plow for a Vault City slave, and that had more impact on me than anything this game had to offer. Now, that isn't me being snarky and cynical for no reason, I'm offering it up to make a point; as much as FO3 tries, and it tries very hard, there is never a real connection with the player and the world around them because of how shoddily it's put together. Things exist and happen for no reason, characters are all completely flat, motives make no sense (when they're not blatantly aping the previous 2 entries), nothing in the game feels impactful to you at all. What's the point in me doing side quests if my reward is learning more about this poorly written world from poorly written characters with poorly directed voice actors? There's no sense of satisfaction, because my actions don't mean anything. My dialogue options are nothing more than "kind response", "neutral response", and "mean response". It's almost funny how the other games in the series have been critiqued for having Karma systems that mean practically nothing, when this game goes out of its way to flaunt its Karma system that has even less impact and feels even more phoned-in than the other games. I also want to mention, with regards to the side quests, that you have to find a great deal of them organically, via digging through the world for settlements. On the surface, this isn't a bad idea, but the problem is how segmented the world design is, on both micro and macro scales. Areas are unnecessarily broken up and labyrinthian just to make you have to find byzantine routes around, and said areas are thrown about randomly throughout the wasteland, with very rare instructions pointing you in any real direction. Not only that, but everything blends in visually to the point that you might glaze right over a possible area and side quests just because it didn't grab your eye. I never felt any drive to explore the wasteland because, outside of the quests having no meaning to me, it just never made me feel like the trek to find things would be worth it.
This shouldn't come as a shock, but all nuance and subtext in this is practically non-existent. Again, discounting New Vegas, compared solely to 1 and 2, it is genuinely impressive how much this game fumbles any and all meaning in its text. The Bible verse that is bludgeoned into your head relentlessly throughout the game is the perfect example of this; taking symbolism from the Bible, an incredibly symbolic and metaphor-ridden text, and playing it completely straight. The verse mentions water, and you're bringing water to the wastelands! Do you get it yet? Do you understand that whenever we bring up the water, we want you to think about how clever we are for choosing that Bible verse? Everything else in the game is the exact same way, absolutely zero subtlety and everything that could have even the slightest nuance being played completely straight and blunt. Wow, the guy who traps people in a simulation of the 50s is obsessed with the past and doesn't want things to change! It's so tiring. It is so, so tiring.
With as much as I rip this game to shreds, and believe me, it deserves every ounce, I have to reluctantly give it one compliment. Bethesda did a pretty good job at adapting the Fallout visual and gameplay style to a 3D world, with little details thrown in like Vault layouts, certain weapon and world models faithfully recreated, even the dialogue you tell your companions being similar to the games previous. But, I don't know how genuine of a compliment "you managed to follow the exact footsteps your predecessors laid out" is.
To wrap things up, I want to make my points as clear and concise as they can get, because I know I can get wordy. Bethesda is so terrified at the player not interacting with the story and world "correctly", that they strip away all impact that the player's choices have. This leads to interactions being flat, emotional moments feeling forced, and a general feeling of unimportance. To borrow a line from my friend who I played this game with, you are not the main character of the story; your dad and Doctor Li are, you are on the sidelines spectating the entire time. Your choices have already been made for you, you only get to decide what words will be used. This is the core issue with this game, and what leads to the world being inherently uninteresting and as a result, everything that happens to, and because of, the player feeling like they lack any influence.
"It's like... Bethesda is a bakery, and the visual designers do the frosting, while the writers make the cake. And the writers can't bake a cake to save their fucking lives, so the only thing the visual designers can do is make it look really nice on the outside and hope you don't notice how bad the inside is. It's not their fault that the end result is unenjoyable, they did the best they can." - aforementioned friend
BlazingWaters
9 months ago