Fallout 3

You’ll excuse me if I’m a day late in posting, but I was busy playing Fallout 3. I pinch pennies like a spindly fingered aunt in a room full of rose-faced children so you’ll have to excuse me if I found 9.99 USD for the game of the year edition of Fallout 3 to be a bit pricy during a summer Steam sale 2 years after release. Ho, that was a mouthful. Anyway, the game is great if you’re just tuning in. Otherwise, sit down and get yourself a nice drink. Fallout 3 is really good. But we already knew that so let’s get down to nitpicking it.

For one, the launcher crashed. A lot.
Fucking-A, Bethesda. I know open ended RPG's are prone to bugs and glitches, but how in the name of sweet zombie Jesus does the fucking launcher crash?

For all the branching elements of the game, there really isn't that much replayability. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff you can do differently. Is it worth playing the whole game over again just to be the evilest dick possible? Hell no. I finished the entire game with the DLC in about 61 hours. Granted, I am an item hoarder and probably lost like 15 hours looking for crap under boxes, but still, it's not worth the investment of time in my opinion. Plus, the story itself is... well it's interesting, but the game tries to make it very actiony... without making it very actiony. The integration of VATS aiming, FPS jumping around like an idiot, TPS movement clunkiness and guns choosing to shoot a butterfly instead of the laser robot if the weapon condition is below perfect is not conducive to awesome. I don't like to admit it, but that's something Mass Effect 2 did right; the gunplay felt fluid because of the cover system, the music was powerful and the guns didn't goddamn break.

As for the story, I ended up waiting until I was maxed out with the best weapons and armor so I could go prancing about like the hero of the Capital Wasteland with my trusty robot companion (rest in pieces, RL-3. You were a great mobile storage unit). And then the story quests felt like busy work. All of the side quests and shit were great fun, but plodding through with Project Purity was basically being railroaded onto a linear story that was kind of fun, but when combined with long, auto-saveless. action segments or wandering around in a vault not knowing where the fuck I was going made the back of my head hurt.

And for all of its RPG strengths I think there's just too many numbers. How many more shots will your gun fire before breaking? How many more skillpoints will you need to pick that lock? How many times will you get shot while VATS takes its sweet time showing a deathclaw's head fly off into the wild blue yonder? Again, this is something Mass Effect 2 did kind of right. Give me some guns, give me some ammo. Don't bog me down with a bunch of guns and supplies I will need and then give me such a restrictive weight limit. Or at least do it in a more organized fashion. The Pip Boy organizes my crap; why doesn't my Megaton house?

Also, a genuine tutorial would have been nice. I didn't know you could repair guns and armor with other guns and armor until I accidentally hit the R key. But this is the last problem I will talk about. Fallout 3's sheer depth is crushing. There's so much goddamn stuff that I felt overwhelmed at times. Granted, the sheer weight of the Fallout 3 world is what makes it so engaging and your lack of knowledge adds to the depth of the lone wanderer, but it honestly is a bit too much at times. Often times, I would get lost looking for a poorly identified objective with only a vague clue given by the compass. Maybe I'm just not good at looking for things that are right in front of my face, but a world is only as engaging as long as I'm willing to tolerate it. After passing through the same dark hallway with the same two super mutant corpses in the same 16 pieces gets tiring after a while. This applies to overworld questing as well (again, usually pertaining only to the primary quests). I guess what I'm rambling on about is consolidation. You have all these pieces, now rip them apart and leave them with enough organization to give hints on how they need to be put back together. How is this done? Hell if I know, but I imagine it would have to be a ground up thing with heavy coordination between the artists, whomever does the layout and the writers. As much as I don't like to admit it, (again) Mass Effect 2 also has this asset down, but to a fault. Things are way too easy to accomplish in that game. The point boils down to balance, but that's not a good answer, so fuck it.

And just once I would like to see a triple A RPG that does not have the world in imminent danger or make the player character "special" in any way other than being a proficient quester. They become great by their own volition and their own ferrous wills.

Still, Fallout 3 good.