Blue Man Sings The Whites

You may recall my mentioning in the dim and distant past that Bethseda’s first-person action-RPG Oblivion consumed well over a hundred hours of my life, most of which were spent either picking flowers or running backwards away from wildlife that I disturbed whilst picking flowers. There was some minor world-saving involved somewhere in amongst it all but I tried not to let that impinge on my adventures in extreme floristry.

So given the grip that Oblivion took on my life, it’s only with a certain amount of trepidation that I acknowledge Bethseda’s new game to be even better.

Fallout 3 is set in and around Washington DC following a nuclear exchange that’s left the area predictably devastated. Your character has grown up in an underground bunker in which generations have been raised completely cut off from what’s left of society and as the game proper starts you emerge blinking from the tunnels to try and find your way in the wider world by way of your wits, your charm and/or your shootiness.

Guess which one I went for.

Oblivion was and is one of the best-looking games ever made. A lush, larger-than-life world of rolling hills, thick forests and fanciful architecture, it made you feel like you were wandering around the cover of a high fantasy novel. It’s a playground of adventure, the natural habitat of characters with too many apostrophes and consonants in their names. Fallout 3 is beautiful in exactly the opposite way. It’s got the same rolling vistas stretching away as far as the eye can see in any direction, but rather than being grand and exciting it’s oppressive and melancholy, all bare trees, yellowed grass and gutted buildings. You wander through deserted towns filled with sad little Marie Celeste reminders of a society that was destroyed forever in the space of a handful of seconds – a children’s library full of ruined books and rusted toys, plates laid out on the counter of a diner, a charred skeleton in a hotel room’s bath. The largely-empty wilderness contrasts with the crumbling, claustrophobic concrete towers and broken tarmac of DC proper, which is packed to the gills with people and things that won’t think twice about killing you and taking all your stuff if you’re not prepared to do the same to them first. It’s a desolate, desperate place to live and one of the more atmospheric gameworlds in recent memory.

Pity that the NPCs aren’t generally as good as their surroundings. As in Oblivion the dialogue is generally iffy, the voice-acting is worse and the limitations of scripting often make characters’ behaviour odd at best and immersion-breakingly bizarre at worst. Fortunately other irritations have been resolved – the bonkers way everything in Oblivion’s world levelled up at the same time you did making you relatively speaking no better off for your increased experience is out, for example. There’s a new damage system which means you can pick on specific parts of your enemy’s body and opens up new tactical options – shooting the arm of a Super Mutant to stop him minigunning you to death, or wounding the antenna of a giant fire-ant to cause it to frenzy attacking its nest-mates or, best of all, a sniped headshot kill of an enemy who never knew you were there. To balance that, the AI is much more aggressive – in Oblivion most of the time if you missed or your opponent didn’t see exactly where your arrow came from a few moments after they were shot they’d go back about their business, clearly not wanting to make a fuss about the bloody great pointy stick that was jutting from their jugular. Miss your target in Fallout 3, or not realise that he’s got a bunch of mates hanging around, and you get a band of raiders in the face. And hurrah for that.

For all Fallout 3’s improvements over its stablemate, for me the bulk of its appeal still comes back to the world, though, the thoroughly impressive sense of place. You really wouldn’t want to live in the Wasteland, but my God it’s a fun place to visit.