luvil
12 reviews liked by luvil
I don't think I'm able to rate this one, in part because I'm eternally torn between the content of the DLC as-is and the numerous statements Joshua Sawyer has made about what went wrong and how much he regrets the final product.
Honest Hearts is a strange DLC. There's simultaneously a lot to chew on and also barely anything. Compared to its immediate predecessor it feels like a brisk walk versus a marathon jog. Normally I'd take it from the top and walk you through it, but... Fuck it let's just go in dry.
HH is more of a metaphorical or ideological tale, not relying on the explicit text so much as the implicit ideas left between the gaps. Contrast Dead Money and it's actually surprising how little there is outside of the chats with Daniel and Joshua.
The core of it is simple: Facing an invasion by the militaristic White Legs tribe, the New Canaanite Mormon missionary Daniel feels that it's prudent to evacuate the Sorrows tribe for Zion National Park. Opposite him is Joshua Graham, the ex-Legate of Caesar's Legion (the Burned Man from NV's various rumours/graffito) and current acting chief of the much more combat-capable Dead Horses tribe. Graham believes that, given the violent nature of the wastes, it's a far more sensible option to have the Sorrows stand and fight - they have, after all, lived in Zion for one hundred years and should defend their home.
It's easy to read this as a white saviour narrative, and I can see why.
It is unfortunately the nature of CRPGs to make the player be the sole determinant in conflicts that arise, which in hindsight explains why so many of them are either milquetoast or involve the player by default. Naturally, to resolve the conflict in HH, you must interface with either Graham or Daniel.
The problem here is threefold: Graham and Daniel are both white men - though Daniel was intended to be an Asian man in development - which gives the setting some surface-level unpleasant implications.
Secondly, they are the only NPCs who have a voice in the story. The two actual tribes are background noise, and while you do get a follower from each they're mostly in their own bubble.
Thirdly, while the developers did take care not to draw influence from real world native cultures, the PS3's god-awful memory limits meant that each of the three tribes had to have the same skin colour, resulting in them being either pale white or very visibly Native American - something Josh Sawyer took responsibility and apologized for.
That all said, I don't necessarily think Honest Hearts is a white savior narrative. Despite accidentally falling into it a few times, I'd say it's definitely making an attempt to deconstruct the trope.
Popular fandom narrative has seen Graham painted as the unreasonable one and Daniel as the reasonable one, which is what the story seems to be doing on the surface, but I've come to disagree.
In the past, Graham paid a single visit to the Dead Horses tribe and inadvertently warped their entire culture. No longer just a tribe, they venerated him as a god and sought to follow in his warmongering ways.
Daniel ostensibly wants to prevent this, but it's also clear if you interrogate him that his actions aren't based entirely in altruism. The player has to antagonize him and finger-wag him for his pacifism, meaning 99% of people probably don't see it, but doing so causes him to flip his lid and reveals more of his motivations. In short, the Sorrows are a vessel for him to seek redemption because he feels he never did enough for the previous parties he attempted to aid.
That last bit, right there, is where I start having issues with Honest Hearts.
The writers for NV are very well-read compared to 3 or 4's, and it shows in the subject matter they bring to the forefront in NV and its DLCs. The problem here, however, is that they're still white Americans. "Write what you know" worked well for them, but with HH they decided to bring Mormonism into the picture. Now, I could go into detail about how that faith is rife with homophobia, sexism and racism, but I'd probably be preaching to the choir.
No, my actual issue is that neither Joshua nor Daniel actually seem Mormon. I don't know if some wires got crossed or what, but the way they're written comes across as distinctly Jewish? You might've seen people over the years reference Daniel's "catholic guilt", but his very specific brand of guilt stemming from his self-perceived inaction in the face of other people's suffering honestly has far more in common with Judaism than Mormonism. Sure, he and Graham talk a lot about righteousness and the Lord, but little attention is given to the idea of the two getting into heaven for their perceived goodness while the idea of cleansing themselves by doing good pops up a ton.
Branching off of that, problems begin to arise due to the tribes themselves lacking any voice in the plot. This following observation is so common that even Youtube Commenters can notice it, but the Sorrows adapt so well to militaristic life that one can't help but answer if they'd been considering it for a long time. This we will never know, because the one major Sorrows NPC is more occupied with her husband than the tribe. While they also adapt well to their new home in the event of evacuation, it's made clear that many of them regret it - but you only find this out in the ending slides.
Conversely, I don't think enough attention is given to the Dead Horses tribe. Sure, the Sorrows are important, whatever, but the narrative doesn't contrast Daniel's interference in their lives with Graham's at all. They're essentially set dressing, and arguably mean less to the plot than individual Sorrows. To even get a smidge of narrative parallel you need to track down the (admittedly excellent) Survivalist's logs
Similarly, the whole framing of the Sorrows potentially 'losing their innocence' for partaking in war has always rubbed me the wrong way. As they lack a voice in the narrative, Daniel pretty much tells you this and you're not really allowed to challenge it in any meaningful way. It comes across as deeply infantilizing, and the tribes themselves frequently using conlang and you-no-take candle speech just makes me raise an eyebrow.
Lastly, while I do so deeply admire the attempt to have a "good vs. good" conflict in a CRPG for once, it runs into a wall because it's phenomenally hard to actually get justifications from Daniel. As I said up above, he only reveals his motives if deliberately antagonized, and said antagonism also requires adopting a pacifistic stance - a ridiculous concept in a game where you kill 50% of all living creatures you see. Otherwise the player is meant to take Daniel's motivations at face value, while Graham is far more upfront about what he wants and why you should do it.
...That all said, however, I ultimately like that Honest Hearts has no unambiguously good endings. The only peace Daniel and Graham can find is if you kill them, and even seemingly 'good' paths lead to them feeling troubled and stricken with regret. My personal favourite is the path where the Sorrows are militarized and Graham is not cautioned on the merits of restraint, for he essentially turns them into another Legion, having come full circle.
I wish I had more to say about Honest Hearts, but coming back to it I'm actually surprised at how little is in it? It took longer to write this review than it did for me to get the Survivalist stuff, do the smidge of sidequests, and beat the main story.
[Wow, I use "that all said" a lot.]
Honest Hearts is a strange DLC. There's simultaneously a lot to chew on and also barely anything. Compared to its immediate predecessor it feels like a brisk walk versus a marathon jog. Normally I'd take it from the top and walk you through it, but... Fuck it let's just go in dry.
HH is more of a metaphorical or ideological tale, not relying on the explicit text so much as the implicit ideas left between the gaps. Contrast Dead Money and it's actually surprising how little there is outside of the chats with Daniel and Joshua.
The core of it is simple: Facing an invasion by the militaristic White Legs tribe, the New Canaanite Mormon missionary Daniel feels that it's prudent to evacuate the Sorrows tribe for Zion National Park. Opposite him is Joshua Graham, the ex-Legate of Caesar's Legion (the Burned Man from NV's various rumours/graffito) and current acting chief of the much more combat-capable Dead Horses tribe. Graham believes that, given the violent nature of the wastes, it's a far more sensible option to have the Sorrows stand and fight - they have, after all, lived in Zion for one hundred years and should defend their home.
It's easy to read this as a white saviour narrative, and I can see why.
It is unfortunately the nature of CRPGs to make the player be the sole determinant in conflicts that arise, which in hindsight explains why so many of them are either milquetoast or involve the player by default. Naturally, to resolve the conflict in HH, you must interface with either Graham or Daniel.
The problem here is threefold: Graham and Daniel are both white men - though Daniel was intended to be an Asian man in development - which gives the setting some surface-level unpleasant implications.
Secondly, they are the only NPCs who have a voice in the story. The two actual tribes are background noise, and while you do get a follower from each they're mostly in their own bubble.
Thirdly, while the developers did take care not to draw influence from real world native cultures, the PS3's god-awful memory limits meant that each of the three tribes had to have the same skin colour, resulting in them being either pale white or very visibly Native American - something Josh Sawyer took responsibility and apologized for.
That all said, I don't necessarily think Honest Hearts is a white savior narrative. Despite accidentally falling into it a few times, I'd say it's definitely making an attempt to deconstruct the trope.
Popular fandom narrative has seen Graham painted as the unreasonable one and Daniel as the reasonable one, which is what the story seems to be doing on the surface, but I've come to disagree.
In the past, Graham paid a single visit to the Dead Horses tribe and inadvertently warped their entire culture. No longer just a tribe, they venerated him as a god and sought to follow in his warmongering ways.
Daniel ostensibly wants to prevent this, but it's also clear if you interrogate him that his actions aren't based entirely in altruism. The player has to antagonize him and finger-wag him for his pacifism, meaning 99% of people probably don't see it, but doing so causes him to flip his lid and reveals more of his motivations. In short, the Sorrows are a vessel for him to seek redemption because he feels he never did enough for the previous parties he attempted to aid.
That last bit, right there, is where I start having issues with Honest Hearts.
The writers for NV are very well-read compared to 3 or 4's, and it shows in the subject matter they bring to the forefront in NV and its DLCs. The problem here, however, is that they're still white Americans. "Write what you know" worked well for them, but with HH they decided to bring Mormonism into the picture. Now, I could go into detail about how that faith is rife with homophobia, sexism and racism, but I'd probably be preaching to the choir.
No, my actual issue is that neither Joshua nor Daniel actually seem Mormon. I don't know if some wires got crossed or what, but the way they're written comes across as distinctly Jewish? You might've seen people over the years reference Daniel's "catholic guilt", but his very specific brand of guilt stemming from his self-perceived inaction in the face of other people's suffering honestly has far more in common with Judaism than Mormonism. Sure, he and Graham talk a lot about righteousness and the Lord, but little attention is given to the idea of the two getting into heaven for their perceived goodness while the idea of cleansing themselves by doing good pops up a ton.
Branching off of that, problems begin to arise due to the tribes themselves lacking any voice in the plot. This following observation is so common that even Youtube Commenters can notice it, but the Sorrows adapt so well to militaristic life that one can't help but answer if they'd been considering it for a long time. This we will never know, because the one major Sorrows NPC is more occupied with her husband than the tribe. While they also adapt well to their new home in the event of evacuation, it's made clear that many of them regret it - but you only find this out in the ending slides.
Conversely, I don't think enough attention is given to the Dead Horses tribe. Sure, the Sorrows are important, whatever, but the narrative doesn't contrast Daniel's interference in their lives with Graham's at all. They're essentially set dressing, and arguably mean less to the plot than individual Sorrows. To even get a smidge of narrative parallel you need to track down the (admittedly excellent) Survivalist's logs
Similarly, the whole framing of the Sorrows potentially 'losing their innocence' for partaking in war has always rubbed me the wrong way. As they lack a voice in the narrative, Daniel pretty much tells you this and you're not really allowed to challenge it in any meaningful way. It comes across as deeply infantilizing, and the tribes themselves frequently using conlang and you-no-take candle speech just makes me raise an eyebrow.
Lastly, while I do so deeply admire the attempt to have a "good vs. good" conflict in a CRPG for once, it runs into a wall because it's phenomenally hard to actually get justifications from Daniel. As I said up above, he only reveals his motives if deliberately antagonized, and said antagonism also requires adopting a pacifistic stance - a ridiculous concept in a game where you kill 50% of all living creatures you see. Otherwise the player is meant to take Daniel's motivations at face value, while Graham is far more upfront about what he wants and why you should do it.
...That all said, however, I ultimately like that Honest Hearts has no unambiguously good endings. The only peace Daniel and Graham can find is if you kill them, and even seemingly 'good' paths lead to them feeling troubled and stricken with regret. My personal favourite is the path where the Sorrows are militarized and Graham is not cautioned on the merits of restraint, for he essentially turns them into another Legion, having come full circle.
I wish I had more to say about Honest Hearts, but coming back to it I'm actually surprised at how little is in it? It took longer to write this review than it did for me to get the Survivalist stuff, do the smidge of sidequests, and beat the main story.
[Wow, I use "that all said" a lot.]
Hey did you know that Fallout 3 never came out? No, not the bad one everyone ignores in favour of NV, I mean the original Fallout 3 - Van Buren, the one that barely anybody is even aware of these days.
Van Buren is something of a fascination of mine. In the wake of Fallout 3’s awfulness way back in 2008, I spent ages poring over the design documents and every scrap of information I could find. Stillborn though it was, seemingly most of the game’s documents had leaked online which provided a robust treasure trove of knowledge.
But alas, they who gain knowledge gain sorrow as well. In plumbing the depths of Van Buren, my feelings of discontent towards Fallout only grew. Try as I might, I couldn’t manifest the revival of Van Buren or Good Fallout Games.
I remember the day I saw that first New Vegas teaser. Watching cold and stone-faced, disinterested and bored. Oh, a robot? Another robot? I killed thousands of robots in 3. I’m sick of robots-
And right there, at that very moment in the memory, young me lay eyes on it: The flag of the New California Republic.
“Could it be?” Thought young Mira. “Van Buren… revived?”
The introductory cutscene only increased the hype. NCR out in full force, the Great Khans having returned for a third time running, Caesar’s Legion in all their rancid glory, Hoover Dam… To say nothing of the reveal that many ex-Fallout 1/2/Van Buren were involved, Josh Sawyer among them.
The day New Vegas came into my life was wondrous. I skipped out on everything to go home and play it for 4-5 days straight.
And… It wasn’t what I wanted! I didn’t hate it, but I did come away feeling lost. I did not get it, nor could I, for I was simply too young. Young Mira wanted Van Buren, which she was [forgive me] """promised""" and felt a bit odd, having a game that seemed to be stuck in Van Buren's shadow but wasn't Van Buren.
Dead Money kinda came and went for younger me. Loved the atmosphere and the inclusion of an honest-to-god BAR but I was again far too young to get anything from it. I was one of those preternaturally annoying chucklefucks that thinks getting all the gold out of the vault "defeats the message".
But both NV and Dead Money were 14 years ago, I've had some time to think. About them, the other DLCs, and about Fallout as a whole.
The ghost of Dead Money hangs over NV, lurking in the corners. Father Elijah’s influence is felt as early as stepping into Helios One, to say nothing of how much his old fellows despise him. Whether the player discovers it or not, they’re traipsing on foundations that Elijah helped lay. That the NCR literally wear the carcasses of the Brotherhood troops they killed only adds to his mystique. Posters for Dean Domino are everywhere, visual white noise that most people pay no mind to. Among them, posters and graffiti alluding to the Sierra Madre as a mystical place where people leave their hearts behind. Dig further into the story and you’ll stumble across the Brotherhood, who spend half of their screen time cursing Elijah for digging their grave and not even having the courtesy to lay in it with them.
As it turns out, though, Elijah has his own grave to dig.
Dead Money isn’t very alluring on the surface. It trades a sprawling Wasteland, impressive locations and factions with distinct aesthetics for a muddy poison-soaked hellhole that’s only barely lit up and is near-exclusively populated by homogenous creeps in gas masks. Add in lots of backtracking, skill checks and fakeouts that explicitly punish
Not to mention the framing. A miserable old dick slaps a bomb collar on your neck and tells you to go rescue three “companions” - insofar as potentially dead weight can be a compatriot.
Everything about Dead Money screams Survival Horror. Shooting isn’t an option half the time and even when it is, ammo isn’t quite as plentiful in the Sierra Madre. There’s a fair share of backtracking and oftentimes the best way to resolve fights is to not get into them. New Vegas gets a bit power fantasy towards the middle-end of the game unless one plays on Hardcore Mode with the difficulty bumped up, and Dead Money immediately throws a wrench into this by stripping you of basically everything. Indeed, the Sierra Madre and its surroundings even call to mind some of the CG art made for Resident Evil: Survivor.
Dead Money isn’t what I’d call a ‘fun’ DLC. Even at its most gripping I can see why most people consider it a snoozefest even if I personally don’t. It’s much slower, more introspective and three times as morose as the other story-focused DLC (Lonesome Road), all while being far less overt with its narrative despite the endless repetition of its four key words: Let Go, Begin Again.
It isn’t immediately obvious how these words apply to Dog/God. Elijah is obsessed with the Sierra Madre, Dean is obsessed with fucking over the centuries-dead Frederick Sinclair, and Christine wants revenge on Elijah. The tragic Nightkin is an outlier at first, and in the intervening years since this game came out I’ve seen even fellow Dead Money enjoyers scratch their heads and declare them an outlier.
What struck me about Dog/God on this replay is how they have more in common than they don’t. Much attention is drawn to Dog’s voracious appetite and bottomless hunger, yes, but God’s fanatical need to control at every given moment is the same kind of gluttony in all but name.
But, relevant to the overarching theme, the most striking part about them is that there’s not really “two halves of a whole” within them so much as they are fragments inhabiting one body. Both of them, in their own way, voraciously pursue their desires while also trying to exert control over the other.
What they have to ‘let go’ of is themselves.
Which is, in all sincerity, deeply resonant. An annoying part of getting old and bothering with that self-improvement nonsense is that you’ll almost certainly come across parts of The Self that’ve accrued some crust over the ages. Beliefs you don’t really hold onto, anger that’s long since lost its target, endless little idiosyncrasies that add up into an odd little rusted automaton in the shape of you. Letting go of that is a bothersome process, albeit a necessary one.
The debatably-best ending for Dog/God is convincing them to let go of their respective Selves and simply embrace the end result. Take hold of the idiosyncrasies and accept them not as “two halves of a whole” but as different shades of the whole. Rather surprising to see such a gentle, loving treatment of DID from a game where - 30 minutes prior to starting this DLC - I got Cass’ infamous Long Dick Johnson line.
But you know what? Let’s skip the 4 protagonists of Dead Money and go back to the 5th: Me.
I think, at some point, everyone who’s young and adores a particular piece of art will inevitably conceptualize something perfect: Their perfect sequel, their perfect adaptation, their perfect spinoff, etc etc.
I’m not going to pretend I was any different, and pertinent to the topic at hand I’d long since had an idea in my head of “The Perfect Fallout”. Indeed, my earliest discontent towards New Vegas stemmed from the fact that it wasn’t that ideal. It was a more introspective and debatably experimental title that was still Fallout but not the Fallout I wanted.
Fortunately, I’ve grown out of those behaviours and have become vastly more accepting of flawed works. Indeed, the search for flawless art is at odds with the nature of art as a reflection of humanity - a uniquely flawed species of mammal.
In returning to Dead Money in 2024, in a post-Fallout 4 and post-Fallout TV world, truthfully I don’t even see the text on display.
I see a group of 4 people who’re maniacally obsessed with a perfect ideal to the point of self-ruination. They won’t accept anything less than what their mind’s eye sees, no matter how blind that eye is to the real world in front of them.
I see Fallout fans like my younger self, still clinging to the hopes that one day they’ll get the perfect flawless Fallout title.
And in this, I’ve come to appreciate the ending a lot more.
It may seem trite or overbearing to have your reward for a 4-5 hour puzzle gauntlet be some gold bars that you have to forsake, but on a meta level I appreciate it.
You can’t take all the gold bars with you without exploits or cheats. You have to make a choice: Be content with less, for at least you have something, or leave empty-handed. What was once stupid to younger Mira now feels profound, and for once I felt content to simply leave the gold untouched and settle for my spoils (Namely, the Automatic Rifle) before locking Elijah in the Vault.
I got the perfect ending this time. Told all the companions to just bail and move on with their lives, in much the same way I have to tell people in real life to ditch stupid vendettas/feuds and focus on the things in front of them. It was cathartic this time in a way it hasn’t been before - maybe I have gotten old.
To cap off the metaphor, though: Dead Money lands a lot better now that I’m content with New Vegas and am apathetic to any future Fallout entries. I’ve got my ideal Fallout game, even if it took some time for me to come around to it. Bethesda can turn the series into a playground all it wants; that’s that, and this is this.
Really, the hardest part of being a Fallout fan isn’t liking the games that are, it’s letting go of the games that co- Too on the nose? Sorry, please don’t throw tomatoes. Let me begin again- FUCK.
Van Buren is something of a fascination of mine. In the wake of Fallout 3’s awfulness way back in 2008, I spent ages poring over the design documents and every scrap of information I could find. Stillborn though it was, seemingly most of the game’s documents had leaked online which provided a robust treasure trove of knowledge.
But alas, they who gain knowledge gain sorrow as well. In plumbing the depths of Van Buren, my feelings of discontent towards Fallout only grew. Try as I might, I couldn’t manifest the revival of Van Buren or Good Fallout Games.
I remember the day I saw that first New Vegas teaser. Watching cold and stone-faced, disinterested and bored. Oh, a robot? Another robot? I killed thousands of robots in 3. I’m sick of robots-
And right there, at that very moment in the memory, young me lay eyes on it: The flag of the New California Republic.
“Could it be?” Thought young Mira. “Van Buren… revived?”
The introductory cutscene only increased the hype. NCR out in full force, the Great Khans having returned for a third time running, Caesar’s Legion in all their rancid glory, Hoover Dam… To say nothing of the reveal that many ex-Fallout 1/2/Van Buren were involved, Josh Sawyer among them.
The day New Vegas came into my life was wondrous. I skipped out on everything to go home and play it for 4-5 days straight.
And… It wasn’t what I wanted! I didn’t hate it, but I did come away feeling lost. I did not get it, nor could I, for I was simply too young. Young Mira wanted Van Buren, which she was [forgive me] """promised""" and felt a bit odd, having a game that seemed to be stuck in Van Buren's shadow but wasn't Van Buren.
Dead Money kinda came and went for younger me. Loved the atmosphere and the inclusion of an honest-to-god BAR but I was again far too young to get anything from it. I was one of those preternaturally annoying chucklefucks that thinks getting all the gold out of the vault "defeats the message".
But both NV and Dead Money were 14 years ago, I've had some time to think. About them, the other DLCs, and about Fallout as a whole.
The ghost of Dead Money hangs over NV, lurking in the corners. Father Elijah’s influence is felt as early as stepping into Helios One, to say nothing of how much his old fellows despise him. Whether the player discovers it or not, they’re traipsing on foundations that Elijah helped lay. That the NCR literally wear the carcasses of the Brotherhood troops they killed only adds to his mystique. Posters for Dean Domino are everywhere, visual white noise that most people pay no mind to. Among them, posters and graffiti alluding to the Sierra Madre as a mystical place where people leave their hearts behind. Dig further into the story and you’ll stumble across the Brotherhood, who spend half of their screen time cursing Elijah for digging their grave and not even having the courtesy to lay in it with them.
As it turns out, though, Elijah has his own grave to dig.
Dead Money isn’t very alluring on the surface. It trades a sprawling Wasteland, impressive locations and factions with distinct aesthetics for a muddy poison-soaked hellhole that’s only barely lit up and is near-exclusively populated by homogenous creeps in gas masks. Add in lots of backtracking, skill checks and fakeouts that explicitly punish
Not to mention the framing. A miserable old dick slaps a bomb collar on your neck and tells you to go rescue three “companions” - insofar as potentially dead weight can be a compatriot.
Everything about Dead Money screams Survival Horror. Shooting isn’t an option half the time and even when it is, ammo isn’t quite as plentiful in the Sierra Madre. There’s a fair share of backtracking and oftentimes the best way to resolve fights is to not get into them. New Vegas gets a bit power fantasy towards the middle-end of the game unless one plays on Hardcore Mode with the difficulty bumped up, and Dead Money immediately throws a wrench into this by stripping you of basically everything. Indeed, the Sierra Madre and its surroundings even call to mind some of the CG art made for Resident Evil: Survivor.
Dead Money isn’t what I’d call a ‘fun’ DLC. Even at its most gripping I can see why most people consider it a snoozefest even if I personally don’t. It’s much slower, more introspective and three times as morose as the other story-focused DLC (Lonesome Road), all while being far less overt with its narrative despite the endless repetition of its four key words: Let Go, Begin Again.
It isn’t immediately obvious how these words apply to Dog/God. Elijah is obsessed with the Sierra Madre, Dean is obsessed with fucking over the centuries-dead Frederick Sinclair, and Christine wants revenge on Elijah. The tragic Nightkin is an outlier at first, and in the intervening years since this game came out I’ve seen even fellow Dead Money enjoyers scratch their heads and declare them an outlier.
What struck me about Dog/God on this replay is how they have more in common than they don’t. Much attention is drawn to Dog’s voracious appetite and bottomless hunger, yes, but God’s fanatical need to control at every given moment is the same kind of gluttony in all but name.
But, relevant to the overarching theme, the most striking part about them is that there’s not really “two halves of a whole” within them so much as they are fragments inhabiting one body. Both of them, in their own way, voraciously pursue their desires while also trying to exert control over the other.
What they have to ‘let go’ of is themselves.
Which is, in all sincerity, deeply resonant. An annoying part of getting old and bothering with that self-improvement nonsense is that you’ll almost certainly come across parts of The Self that’ve accrued some crust over the ages. Beliefs you don’t really hold onto, anger that’s long since lost its target, endless little idiosyncrasies that add up into an odd little rusted automaton in the shape of you. Letting go of that is a bothersome process, albeit a necessary one.
The debatably-best ending for Dog/God is convincing them to let go of their respective Selves and simply embrace the end result. Take hold of the idiosyncrasies and accept them not as “two halves of a whole” but as different shades of the whole. Rather surprising to see such a gentle, loving treatment of DID from a game where - 30 minutes prior to starting this DLC - I got Cass’ infamous Long Dick Johnson line.
But you know what? Let’s skip the 4 protagonists of Dead Money and go back to the 5th: Me.
I think, at some point, everyone who’s young and adores a particular piece of art will inevitably conceptualize something perfect: Their perfect sequel, their perfect adaptation, their perfect spinoff, etc etc.
I’m not going to pretend I was any different, and pertinent to the topic at hand I’d long since had an idea in my head of “The Perfect Fallout”. Indeed, my earliest discontent towards New Vegas stemmed from the fact that it wasn’t that ideal. It was a more introspective and debatably experimental title that was still Fallout but not the Fallout I wanted.
Fortunately, I’ve grown out of those behaviours and have become vastly more accepting of flawed works. Indeed, the search for flawless art is at odds with the nature of art as a reflection of humanity - a uniquely flawed species of mammal.
In returning to Dead Money in 2024, in a post-Fallout 4 and post-Fallout TV world, truthfully I don’t even see the text on display.
I see a group of 4 people who’re maniacally obsessed with a perfect ideal to the point of self-ruination. They won’t accept anything less than what their mind’s eye sees, no matter how blind that eye is to the real world in front of them.
I see Fallout fans like my younger self, still clinging to the hopes that one day they’ll get the perfect flawless Fallout title.
And in this, I’ve come to appreciate the ending a lot more.
It may seem trite or overbearing to have your reward for a 4-5 hour puzzle gauntlet be some gold bars that you have to forsake, but on a meta level I appreciate it.
You can’t take all the gold bars with you without exploits or cheats. You have to make a choice: Be content with less, for at least you have something, or leave empty-handed. What was once stupid to younger Mira now feels profound, and for once I felt content to simply leave the gold untouched and settle for my spoils (Namely, the Automatic Rifle) before locking Elijah in the Vault.
I got the perfect ending this time. Told all the companions to just bail and move on with their lives, in much the same way I have to tell people in real life to ditch stupid vendettas/feuds and focus on the things in front of them. It was cathartic this time in a way it hasn’t been before - maybe I have gotten old.
To cap off the metaphor, though: Dead Money lands a lot better now that I’m content with New Vegas and am apathetic to any future Fallout entries. I’ve got my ideal Fallout game, even if it took some time for me to come around to it. Bethesda can turn the series into a playground all it wants; that’s that, and this is this.
Really, the hardest part of being a Fallout fan isn’t liking the games that are, it’s letting go of the games that co- Too on the nose? Sorry, please don’t throw tomatoes. Let me begin again- FUCK.
Fallout 3
2008
I have this annoying problem where, whenever I play a truly transcendental videogame that wows me from head to toe, I enter a state of post-masterwork malaise where even other good games just look worse.
And Library of Ruina was phenomenal. Truly the best game I've ever played, which naturally meant playing anything else was an impossible task.
But I'm old now, and I know how to cure this: I need to play something terrible. Something that, top-to-bottom, inside and out, is just irredeemable. Something not only indefensible, but laughable.
Every brilliant light casts an equally dark shadow, and as Library of Ruina stands at the zenith of gaming, I must look to the nadir for guidance.
Having slogged through the entire game and it's DLCs, I think it's time to put the pin in this journey.
It's interesting to consider just how much Bethesda lucked out with this game.
Soon after its release Fallout: New Vegas would be birthed in a haste at Obsidian's hands, proceeding to dominate the overall population's idea of "Fallout" for a good few years before Fallout 4 came out and the conversation became an eternal NV vs. 4 debate, underscored by endless quibbles about voiced protagonists and that one "yes/yes (sarcastic)/no (yes)/no" meme about FO4's dialogue. In the midst of all this is Skyrim, a game so influential and popular despite its flaws that Bethesda are "The Skyrim People" to a not-insignificant number of people on Earth.
All of this is to Bethesda's benefit, because it means people have forgotten about Fallout 3.
Not me, though. That's my curse; I'm a career hater, I can't forget bad games.
But let’s put 3 on the backburner for a moment.
Let’s talk about Oblivion.
Even a decade on from its end, people are still trying to figure out which games defined the 7th generation of consoles the most. I’m going to throw my 2 cents into the ring:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was, by far and bar none, the most defining title of 7th gen.
Not to say that other titles weren’t influential, of course, but even though we live in a time where the words “Ubisoft open world” have entered most people’s lexicons, I think the progenitor of said open worlds was Oblivion and Bethesda.
Oblivion was a game with a very clear message: You don’t need to meticulously design every part of a game for it to sell well or be beloved. You don’t even need to meticulously design a small part of it. All you have to do is make a big empty bowl, put in some markers that allude to it being bigger than it actually is, and then give it a clutter pass before dotting some reused fortresses/caves/mines into it. There’s no need for a personal touch in every corner, merely the illusion of one.
But I can forgive Oblivion for a lot of things even if it is terrible. It was one of the earliest titles released in 7th gen, and the first of its scale. It took four years to make in a time where that was an incredible abnormality.
Fallout 3 gets no such mercy from me.
In part, because it’s worse.
Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.
F3 opens with you, the player character, being born and causing your mother to die of postpartum cardiac arrest. This is already a horrific indicator of how obsessed it’s going to be with its own unearned sense of profundity and much like the actual act of being born, it gets infinitely worse.
Just to get this out of the way: This sucks. It sucks on a creative level - Bethesda clearly couldn’t figure out how to stoke player investment without giving you a dead mom, a sad dad and showing your birth - but it also just sucks as the opening to a Fallout game?
This observation is so common that even comparatively normal people who don’t engage with Gaming as a culture often make it: Fallout 1 and 2 open with “oh yeah some shit’s fuck, go save your home”. Fallout NV starts with you getting shot in the head, and sends you off after a brief intro.
Fallout 3’s intro, then, sticks out like a sore thumb even compared to its more immediate sequel.
Afterwards you get warped to a birthday party filled with named NPCs who share voice actors and who you don’t care about. After that you get warped to a school test with the same named NPCs who share voice actors and don’t actually speak more than one or two lines, who you still don’t care about.
After that most of them die and the game tries to make you feel sad about their deaths I guess, but it’s moot because you finally get to leave the Vault and I’m incredibly confident 99% of people regardless of age or maturity felt elation at not having to wander through boring, visually bland corridors anymore.
Unfortunately, that’s all Fallout 3 has to offer outside the Vault too.
Over the years I’ve started to take incredible amounts of umbrage with the establishing shot of DC the player is greeted with upon leaving the Vault.
It promises a grand, open world - a reprieve from the suffocating Vault you just slogged through!
Springvale School is just down the road. It looks like this. Walk a bit further and you can find a metro. It looks like this. You can even find some sewer tunnels. They look like this.. Maybe, if you go a bit further, you’ll find an office building. Looks like this!.
Okay. You’ve now seen 99% of locations in Fallout 3.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s just have a little design chat.
I’m not a game dev, but I’ve played so many open world games and developed a fondness for them that I’ve managed to figure out some criteria that helps measure how good these games are on a technical level.
To wit, a ‘good’ open world is dotted with areas where one or more of these applies:
A visual reward, in the form of a lovely view.
A progression reward, in the form of loot that directly makes you stronger.
Something you can’t see or obtain anywhere else in the game world.
Depending on the world structure, it should lead to somewhere else that’s only accessible via a specific location.
At the very least, for more out-there or hidden areas, there should be some acknowledgement that you made the journey successfully.
Right, all that is out of the way.
Fallout 3’s open world is badly designed, but to really dig into why we need to talk about the other parts of the game that’re badly designed, and I think the topic of loot is perhaps the most pressing.
The first shotgun the player can acquire in Fallout New Vegas is the humble Single Shotgun. It does respectable damage for how early it drops, but true to its name it only carries a single round and its short but frequent reloads can leave you wide open against hordes or particularly tank enemies. It also uses 20 gauge shells as opposed to 12 gauge, so while it hits hard early on it ultimately stops being useful fast.
Later in the game’, the player can luck into possession of the venerable Riot Shotgun, an absolute beast of a weapon that boasts a 12-round drum magazine with 12 gauge shells as its primary ammo type, on top of a high rate of fire and respectable reload time.
Meanwhile the first shotgun the player can potentially find in Fallout 3 is the Combat Shotgun). It is, like the Riot Shotgun, a veritable moment that can dish out respectable damage and uses 12 gauge ammo. In the Capital Wasteland, this is an extremely common weapon with an extremely common weapon type - 20 gauge does not exist, so all shotgun wielding enemies are walking topups.
To really illustrate this issue, we need to talk about damage.
New Vegas uses two types of defensive stat: Damage Resistance (percentage-based) and Damage Threshold (flat reduction).
All incoming damage taken is reduced by the DR value at a percentage. So if you, for example, take 100 damage and have 50 DR, you take 50 damage.
Next is the DT value, which is a flat reduction. Seeing as we’ve just taken 50 damage, let’s imagine we have 20 DT. Since it’s just a flat subtraction, all in all we’ve taken 30 damage. This goes both ways.
This hypothetical only involves a single instance of damage. Shotguns, as they fire multiple pellets per shot, have the formula applied to each individual pellet. The end result is that despite high damage stats and seeming to be catch-free, shotguns in NV do a lot less damage than you’d initially think - though, as NV is a competently made game, this can be circumvented with alternative ammo and perks.
Fallout 3, however, only uses Damage Resistance. This is alarming on its own, but it gets worse as you learn that DR in Fallout 3 rarely if ever gets above 40. Most non-humanoid enemies don’t even have any DR stats, just health.
This is where the problem really starts to take shape.
While this does still impact the individual shotgun pellets, the reality is that a 10% reduction applied to 10 damage is incredible miniscule, so the Combat Shotgun becomes a weapon sent down by the gods to smite anything with a pulse.
The Combat Shotgun is incredibly powerful, uses bountiful ammo and is incredibly common. As are the Hunting Rifle, Missile Launcher, Assault/Chinese Assault Rifles, and Laser/Plasma Rifles.
Final result?
Most loot rewards are utterly worthless and incredibly unsatisfying.
99% of Fallout 3’s generic, copy-pasted dungeons end with you getting little more than some sellable stuff, a few caps, a handful of consumables, one weapon which you already have 15 of in stock, and a surplus of ammo that you’re probably already overflowing with. Fuck dude, even a lot of main story stuff just dumps excess on you. The final ‘dungeon’ doesn’t offer anything you don’t already have assuming you’ve bothered to go for a walk between the midgame and then.
I can only really describe this game’s world design as a sort of maniacal creative ADHD. You’ll find a marker or something to gawk at every couple of minutes, yes, but in actuality all of the stuff you find is superfluous gunk that at best rewards you with thirty 5mm rounds and a stimpak.
A couple of years ago I replayed Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While that game has many issues, the only relevant one is: Loot scarcity. In a sort of dim, artificial attempt to keep the player ~on their toes~, Deus Ex HR frequently has players break into hidden vaults and armouries only to find at best a weapon they already have and some ammo.
Fallout 3 has both this exact same issue and the opposite problem: Loot excess. Because there’s so little of it, and because it’s all so strong, the simple act of finding things is simultaneously unsatisfying and unneeded. What am I going to do with some leather armor and a knife? I found a weapon to kill god in a bin.
Lastly, there’s a very strange issue running through Fallout 3 wherein loot containers that need skill investment to unlock often have worse loot than random bedside cabinets. In the game’s final dungeon I cracked open a Hard-difficulty terminal, and behind it was… 19 10mm rounds, a Stimpak, some drugs, and one missile. Opposite, in a random footlocker, was a useful amount of money and a significant handful of Microfusion Cells.
Truthfully, though, all of that isn’t the actual problem - New Vegas also has its fair share of dud locations. The actual problem is that there’s a lack of loot progression. You get a Combat Shotgun or a weapon of your choice and you’re basically set for life. Besides Mini Nukes there are no rare ammo types, and caps are plentiful - in part due to loot itself being plentiful - meaning it’s easy to just cycle around each vendor and empty their ammo stock if you need .44 Magnum or .308 ammo.
There are some unique pieces of equipment here and there, but they run into a teensy tiny little problem:
They’re overkill.
Fallout 3’s greatest sin, looping back to that discussion about damage earlier, is that it’s an easy game.
Most enemies rarely have health in the hundreds, and basically everything besides the .32 pistol and the Chinese pistol is capable of outputting that with impunity. Conversely, unless the player cranks the difficulty right up, enemies don’t deal enough damage to be a threat unless they’re in large groups and even then it’s incredibly rare to fight groups of enemies in open terrain. Indeed, the first real swarm most players will find during the main quest is fought with tons of cover and chokepoints to exploit.
It’s not until the DLCs that enemies start appearing with difficulty attached, and said difficulty is little more than them getting a +30-40 extra damage for free. They do have bloated HP, but realistically if you’re at the recommended level for the DLCs then you have enough damage output to ignore that.
In most other open world games where loot is a frivolous, tacked-on system with no merit, usually exploration is its own reward. This sentiment carried BOTW to many people’s good graces, after all.
Fallout 3 has no such luck: The Capital Wasteland is a horrifically unappealing place. There isn't much in the way of landmarks and the ones that do exist are so… American. I suppose it may be resonant and even disquieting if you’re an American with any degree of patriotism but I’m an embittered Scot that views the entire country as a disease that’s gone on too long. The sight of the Washington Monument in disrepair makes me feel about as much as the styrofoam box I get my chips from.
It’s easy to throw up one’s hands and say “Oh, but this is a post-apocalyptic game, Mira! Of course it looks like shit!” which isn’t an entirely unworkable stance, it just ignores that pretty much every other famous piece of post-apocalyptic media - especially the Fallout game released immediately after this one wrapped - managed to nail this while still being ‘ruined’.
I have a relatively good sense of direction, to the point where my friends instinctively put me in charge whenever we need to find somewhere in Glasgow. With that said, I find it incredibly easy to lose where I am on Fallout 3’s map, for once the player leaves the downtown DC region the Capital Wasteland is little more than a grey/brown wasteland dotted with the same 4-5 ruins for miles upon miles. Most of the notable map markers are in the southeast of the map anyway.
Not helping this is that, as opposed to having regional spawn lists to spruce up the act of exploration, Fallout 3 uses a global spawnlist which deposits the vast majority of enemies into the world at random.
Which sucks because there’s not that many enemy types. Humanoids, Radscorpions, Radroaches, Yao Guai, Deathclaws, Botflies, Feral Ghouls, Super Mutants, Centaurs, Dogs, Mirelurks, Mole Rats, Ants, and robots. There, that’s basically every enemy in the game. You will most likely encounter all of them within 20 minutes of following the main path.
Oblivion has a similar problem of dropping random enemies all over the map, but that game’s level scaling is kind enough to replace enemies rather than simply dropping reskinned versions of them with higher HP in the same places.
The enemies, I feel, are where every issue I talked about up above comes to a head. Bad loot variety? Human enemies attack with the same 5-6 weapons. Bad location variety? You kill the same enemies with the same gear in samey locations. Bad quest variety? Regardless of context, you’re hitting the same things in the same gear in the same locations for only slightly different reasons.
And, as is the trend for Fallout 3, enemies being miserable to fight is both a culmination of other issues and introduces its own!
Namely: Combat is, at a very base foundational level, deeply unsatisfying.
Normally I wouldn’t repeat criticisms that other people have said uniformly for decades, however as a career Fallout 3 hater I reserve the right to do so.
It’s accepted by now that Bethesda games lack weight in their combat. Melee feels floaty and impactless, and every gun regardless of caliber or damage feels like using a BB gun. Nobody reacts to damage besides the odd grunt and maybe a canned stagger animation until they die, at which point they either limply collapse like a puppet with severed strings or explode in a shower of gore which is… Honestly, kind of juvenile? And I say this as a certified gore whore.
This in itself is an extension of the game’s nauseatingly childish fixation on gore; raider camps have dismembered corpses impaled on hooks, many areas are filled with random bits of internal organ, and Super Mutants carry entire fishnet bags filled with gore.
But on a technical level, shooting things in Fallout 3 is both deeply unsatisfying and badly designed.
FPS games were some of the first to really crystallize as a genre, and by the time Fallout 3 ripped itself free into the world there were already certain ground rules that not even outsider games dared to break.
If a gun sways, it’s accepted that it should aim where it’s pointing. If a gun’s projectiles have spread, it’s commonly accepted that the gun itself should be steady. Easy enough, right?
Fallout 3, for some asinine reason, does both.
On some level I can vaguely maybe kinda possibly appreciate the attempt to recreate the experience of trying to fire a gun in Fallout 1 with low stats at a target far beyond its effective range, but the problem here is that that experience was temporary until you powered up and here it’s a permanent fixture of gameplay. Weapons have less sway as you increase their respective skill, but unless your Int stat is high (because skill points are asininely tied to it) then that’s a relatively slow crawl - doubly so when there are other skills to increase.
What really hurts shooting is that hit detection is wildly inconsistent. The hitbox for projectiles is seemingly tiny, and it often gets caught on terrain or misses ‘direct’ shots by one thousandth of an inch. Said terrain seems to be poorly constructed, as wafer-thin bits of rebar will obstruct bullets around them and cause them to seemingly clatter off of thin air.
Call of Duty is terrible yesyes but this game came out a year after CoD4 had already introduced the average person to snappy, responsive and satisfying shooting which also lets you shoot through chainlink fences. I have no idea what was in the water to make people believe this game’s shooting was enjoyable.
As a brief aside: I discovered only now that oftentimes projectiles in third person mode don’t even go where you aim them. My metric for how good shooters are at a base level revolves around how good it feels to fight in close quarters, and because of this Fallout 3 feels even worse.
“[Developer] made a competent [genre] and didn’t bother to make the rest of the game” is a phrase that popped up a lot around the late 00s and early 2010s as more and more people began trying to blend genres together. See: Alpha Protocol.
Fallout 3 is unique in this front because Bethesda not only failed to make a competent shooter, but the corpse of an RPG around it isn’t very good either.
Let me just quote myself, from earlier:
Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.
Fallout 3 gives the player a rigid, established backstory and also an annoying rigid, established goal. It’s quite alarming to come across as an NPC related to your father and see every dialogue option be variations on “where my dada :<”.
But even beyond that, there isn’t much room to actually roleplay in this game. The Lone Wanderer as a protagonist is painfully straight forward, and their two forms are “person with human decency” and “guy who condemns kids to slavery.”
Fallout 3, like any other RPG, has quests but I hesitate to call them that. They’re more like guides towards shooting galleries that sometimes stop and ask you if you want to be a nice person, if you want to use a perk/skill to bypass a third of the quest, or if you want to be unfathomably and needlessly cruel.
Even within the main story, there isn’t much framework to roleplay because the Lone Wanderer assimilates their father’s purpose without even giving the player a morton’s fork dialogue choice.
As for the actual main story… I’ve always hated it for the same reasons most other Fallout 3 haters dislike it - it’s flimsy, way too short, has no room for player choice, is entirely linear, etc etc - but as I replayed it, something stood out to me.
Do you know what the Great Man Theory is? In short, and in layman’s terms: The GMT is the belief that Great Men aren’t necessarily nurtured or cultivated, but are simply great from birth. It is these Great Men, and only these Great Men, that are allowed to dictate the course of history. It sucks, I hate it. We don’t use the phrase “product of their environment” for nothing.
I’m gonna take a hard pivot here. Bear with me.
When you think of the word “fascism” you likely have a strong image in your mind. Goose-stepping Nazis, death camps, red hatted Americans screaming in hordes, the most boring European men in suits putting uncomfortable emphasis on the word “superior”, that kind of thing.
Those aren’t invalid. Good on you. Fascism sucks.
But my mental image is defined by a lot of uncomfortably up-close experience with these kinds of people, and it’s boring.
My mental image of Fascism is the dark underside of the Great Man Theory. Of people who believe that, if Great Men are simply born, then Un-Great or ‘Degenerate’ Men are also born. If there are enough Great Men, why shouldn’t they rule? Why should the world cater to Degenerate Men when Great Men can be classified? We should keep Degenerate Men from usurping our Great Men! So on, so forth.
What I mean to say here is that Fascism as a belief system often manifests in incredibly boring ways that’re so banal they often go unnoticed even by people that’re otherwise keyed into such things - at least when they’re not like. Insane.
Fallout 3’s main story is passively Fascist, then.
I don’t think Bethesda Game Studios’ writers are Fascists. I feel you could probably convince Todd Howard to write “1312” on his shirt with a mild amount of transgender Charisma. There’s enough queer people in this IP that I don’t think they hold any real malice for anybody, albeit in much the same way I don’t think they hold any beliefs at all.
But they are incompetent writers, and they’ve accidentally made a story which has awful undertones.
Your first real hints as to the game’s nature come up if you take a walk around DC. There’s a lot of veneration towards the USA Founding Fathers that at first seems quaint and in line with the setting’s propaganda, but…
As the story goes on, it’s made abundantly clear that the player’s father was a Great Man, being the only one capable of rallying a team of scientists and the only one capable of actually putting Project Purity into motion.
When he inevitably dies thanks to the Enclave delaying the ending of my suffering by 2 hours, it falls to you - only you, nobody else - to follow in his footsteps. Because you’re a Great Man too!
In the original version of the game, you die activating the Purifier, and a statue of Thomas Jefferson looks down at you - unmoving, yet seemingly approving… BECAUSE HE’S A GREA-
There’s also the matter of Three Dog’s radio commentary which gets a little… Suspicious, I’d say? It starts out innocently enough, but even a neutral Lone Wanderer starts getting referred to as an actual saviour, with such overdramatic gestures such as Three Dog admitting you cured his misanthropy by being a saint. It’s rather telling that the Very Good Karma icon is a Jesus caricature.
RPGs as a genre do admittedly have a problem with sometimes accidentally stepping into the Great Man shit, it’s just the nature of the genre; to have things occur without the player’s influence or awareness is unsatisfying from a design perspective, so of course things have to be up to you. Wiser RPG devs go out of there way to ensure you’re just an everyman, or you’re woven into the setting in such a way that it avoids such pitfalls.
Fallout 3, unfortunately, leans a bit too into it. Especially with the way Raiders are portrayed, and how often Three Dog talks about them and other wasteland randoms as if they’re actual animals.
It always did strike me as odd that handing total control of Project Purity to the Enclave is rightfully seen as a mistake but handing it over to another authoritarian organization - the Brotherhood - is fine. Yes they’re allegedly benevolent but even in Fallout 3 they show a distinct disgust for ‘wasters’ and it’s stated outright they shoot Ghouls on sight. If you have a more holistic view of franchises (as opposed to my individualistic one), then Fallout 4 confirms they’ll go on to be an actual Fascist organization.
And what better topic to add into this mix than slavery?
In invoking many prominent figures from America’s history, Abraham Lincoln naturally gets brought up a lot, and so do slaves. Slavers make up a decent number of the Capital Wasteland’s population, and they’re everywhere. The few settlements dotted around the map have an eternal fear of them, and their base is perhaps second only to the Brotherhood’s in size + population.
But slavery in this game isn’t really substantial. It isn’t something to be commented on or observed or interrogated, it’s basically another vessel for quests. There’s one liberation faction, and one enslaving faction. Kill slavers, or enslave people. Enslaving people is 100 negative Karma, giving two bottles of water to a beggar is 100 positive Karma. Ethical slavery, yeah!
But even though there is a faction dedicated to the emancipation of slaves, that’s your job - if you want. The slave liberators are tucked away in a corner of the map, easily missable because there’s frankly not that much out that way. Their fate, and the fate of all slaves, is up to you.
I don’t like Fallout 4 all that much but even that game was willing to create the idea that people other than you were working to liberate the Synths.
All of this really compounds the banal and straightforward design: Arguably more than any other Bethesda game, or indeed open world game, Fallout 3 is the one that feels the most static. It is your playground because only You can do anything.
With that all said, there is one part of the game I admittedly think is decent.
Vault 101, the player’s home, is like almost every other Vault in the Bethesda Fallout canon: A social experiment under the guise of a shelter for humanity. Note that this concept basically doesn’t exist prior to Fallout 3; Vaults in 1/2/Tactics/Van Buren were simply shelters.
Vault 101’s experiment was simple: Stay closed. Never reopen. Compared to other experiments in Fallout 3 and subsequent games, this one was incredibly merciful.
Naturally, like other Vaults, 101 faces a violent reckoning when your father leaves - violating the experiment - and the Overseer reacts harshly.
When you return, the Vault has split into people who want to keep the door closed and people who want to go outside.
Uniquely for Fallout 3, there is no right answer here; barring ‘destroy the vault’, each branch of the story offers a degree of good Karma and neither are explicitly better than the others.
You could side with the rebels and open the Vault. They’d be free, and the resources of an active Vault could do good for the surrounding area and settlements… But the Wasteland is filled with a lot of people who’re pure evil, and while you might be able to survive out there there’s absolutely no guarantee anyone else will besides Butch.
Or, you could side with the Overseer and keep it closed. Despite the Overseer being authoritarian, the Vault did run fine until your dad leaves at the game’s proper start and considering future games it’s one of three depicted on-screen that actually were completely fine. Every negative about opening the Vault is a valid reason to side with him, but… It’s quietly brought to the player’s attention that the Overseer’s control over Vault Security isn’t as tight as he thinks it is, and they’re all too willing to take drastic measures to enforce compliance. Not to mention that while he might be able to end the conflict, the Vault still needs a doctor and families have been either destroyed or split asunder.
This is the only quest of its kind in Fallout 3.
Unfortunately like every quest in Fallout 3 even potentially poignant moments are ruined by the voice acting.
I have to commend Jennifer Massey (Dr Madison Li) and Erik Todd Dellums (Three Dog) for being the only voice actors who’re even pretending to give a shit about this script, because everyone else is phoning it in. This game only has a small handful of voice actors and pretty much all of them are audibly reading the script for the first time as they’re saying the lines.
More often than not, the subtitles carry a tone that the actual voice acting doesn’t. It’s marginally improved in the DLCs, but only slightly. In the base game, the same 5-6 voice actors will mumble out their lines with zero enthusiasm or variety. It does, to an extent, turn into accidental comedy when you walk into the Rivet City Market and have three different NPCs greet you in an identical voice.
There’s a somewhat sad irony to the fact that Fallout 3 can be played through New Vegas via Tale of Two Wastelands and yet it doesn’t make it better - it makes it worse. That’s really this game’s legacy, isn’t it? It needs sunlight to grow, but New Vegas is the sky and it won’t be having it.
With everything I've said, observed and read in mind, I'd ultimately argue that Fallout 3 shows more signs of a rushed, ramshackle development than New Vegas. Of the two, it's infinitely buggier, rife with cut/scrapped content and saddled with an omnipresent feeling of "this game isn't done".
As I reach the end of this review, I find myself struggling to answer a question: Why do I keep playing this game every couple of years?
It's not Schrodinger's Game, I don't need to observe it to find out if it's shit or not. Not once has my opinion on this game gotten even SLIGHTLY more positive over my various replays - which, as of writing, is the only game this sentiment still applies to.
But yet, like clockwork, I return to it. I install Fallout 3, then New Vegas, then Tale of Two Wastelands followed by the same QoL/maintenance mods I always get. I boot it, I beat it, I hate it. We're sitting at like ten full replays over the last decade. It defies all sense to me. Is this what a manic compulsion is? Something my body craves but the brain cannot comprehend? It's so very eldritch.
In typing that, I awakened a memory of the day Fallout 3 barged into my life, a week ahead of schedule thanks to a shipping error. My father text me while I was on my way out of high school for lunch: "Yer game's here". Wanting to play a shiny new game and not wanting to read The Cone Gatherers, I opted to make the lunch trip into a trip home.
Having a lot of free time these days, I decided to retrace my steps and walk that route again.
I boarded the train to my old town, and as trains do it came to a stop at the end of the route. I departed and made my way to the route I once took - mercifully, the train stops right behind where I went to school. Following my steps, I did everything as it was; popped into a cafe for a hot roll, got a can of juice from the (still open, yay!) newsagent, and took the long way around to what used to be my home.
I grew up in one of the many, many towns in Scotland whose only real purpose was to house poor people and host an ironworks/coal mine - and those were shut down decades ago. As a result, going back during the quieter hours fills me with the same kind of discomfort one can also vaguely experience in the remnants of Fallout 3's depiction of Washington DC. My old town, too, is a place mostly occupied by shambling zombies and people that might kill you if aggro'd.
You're perhaps expecting me to admit that returning to Fallout 3 is secret nostalgia, right? That I hold a soft spot for it and have been denying that?
No, I still think it's terrible, but I did find out why I keep coming back to it.
On my walk I passed by a bus shelter that, in my day, was little more than a standing rail encased in bricks with a sheet metal roof. Nowadays it's been renovated, with a bench, windows, and a bus timetable.
Looking back at it, I recalled a discussion I once had at that old bus shelter with a good friend of mine who we'll call Gary. We'd been out that day for quite some time, poking through forests and trails with our friends. It was a long day in the middle of a mild Scottish summer, something we no longer experience. By the time we were due to go home, both of us were exhausted.
Exhaustion, for teenagers, is often the harbinger of naked sincerity. The kind you can only really experience in that time where your 'golden years' are in their twilight and their end seems closer and closer every time you turn, trembling, towards the horizon.
I offer to walk Gary to his bus and he accepts. On the way, our chats are about normal things, nothing heavy. When we sit down, though, the silence around us creeps in. A busy town center, now without a soul save for the odd car. We sit by ourselves, wordless, as the last breaths of sunlight choke and die beneath the coming night.
I whip out my iPod Nano and, on the screen, is the last thing I was listening to: A song from In Flames' 'A Sense of Purpose', which at that point was two years old.
Gary scoffs, and we begin the ritual that teenage boys do where we rib one another for our tastes over and over.
But we're both tired, it's just past 8pm, and we were kinda enjoying the silence. The jabs and japes soon end without much fanfare, and silence falls in.
The bus was late. This I remember clearly. So late that Gary, a jovial and relatively stoic lad, was getting antsy.
Apropos of nothing, he turns to me.
"Mira," He asks in a surprisingly cold voice. "You know, I hate A Sense of Purpose, but I love it at the same time."
This so dumbfounded me, it did. My thinking was so very binary back then: Things I liked were good, things I disliked were bad. How and why would one love a bad thing?
"Gary, that makes no sense." I croak out, bewildered.
"Aye," So he says, like he just confessed to a murder. "Wanna know why?"
Of course I did, and nodded in assent.
"Things keep changing, and I'm scunnered [tn: tired] of it. But that album," He nods to my iPod as though it were a child - not a creature of sin, but innocently misguided. "That album is always shit. No matter how much time passes, it's always shite. I like that."
I didn't have an answer in me, much as I wished I did. It was my first introduction to the concept of 'terrible but I love it'. We sat in silence for another few minutes before the bus pulled up. I wished him well and we saw one another off.
Coming back to this memory 14 years later, I get it.
Fallout 3 and A Sense of Purpose were both 16 years ago.
In the intervening years, my tastes have changed. My top 25 from 2019 looks alien to me, the same list from 2015 utterly unbelievable. My walls are no longer adorned with band posters and game memorabilia, but shelves and stuffed rabbits I collect. While I once longed to work in the IT field, experience has made me pray that I never wear a shirt and tie again. I no longer live in the old mining town, the sun does not hit my face from the same angles while I rest. When I exit my house I do not see fields of green and distant towns, but endless houses, apartment blocks and industrial estates.
It is, suffice to say, rather obvious that not only have I changed, but so has the world around me. Indeed, I often wonder if I'm the same person as the one in these memories, or if they were simply taken from another when I was constructed at the age of 21. The changes I describe have occurred over what is now half of my entire lifespan, a period of so many years that not even my pristine memory can keep those years from occasionally blending together or faces from getting blurred.
But Fallout 3?
Fallout 3 never changes.
And Library of Ruina was phenomenal. Truly the best game I've ever played, which naturally meant playing anything else was an impossible task.
But I'm old now, and I know how to cure this: I need to play something terrible. Something that, top-to-bottom, inside and out, is just irredeemable. Something not only indefensible, but laughable.
Every brilliant light casts an equally dark shadow, and as Library of Ruina stands at the zenith of gaming, I must look to the nadir for guidance.
Having slogged through the entire game and it's DLCs, I think it's time to put the pin in this journey.
It's interesting to consider just how much Bethesda lucked out with this game.
Soon after its release Fallout: New Vegas would be birthed in a haste at Obsidian's hands, proceeding to dominate the overall population's idea of "Fallout" for a good few years before Fallout 4 came out and the conversation became an eternal NV vs. 4 debate, underscored by endless quibbles about voiced protagonists and that one "yes/yes (sarcastic)/no (yes)/no" meme about FO4's dialogue. In the midst of all this is Skyrim, a game so influential and popular despite its flaws that Bethesda are "The Skyrim People" to a not-insignificant number of people on Earth.
All of this is to Bethesda's benefit, because it means people have forgotten about Fallout 3.
Not me, though. That's my curse; I'm a career hater, I can't forget bad games.
But let’s put 3 on the backburner for a moment.
Let’s talk about Oblivion.
Even a decade on from its end, people are still trying to figure out which games defined the 7th generation of consoles the most. I’m going to throw my 2 cents into the ring:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was, by far and bar none, the most defining title of 7th gen.
Not to say that other titles weren’t influential, of course, but even though we live in a time where the words “Ubisoft open world” have entered most people’s lexicons, I think the progenitor of said open worlds was Oblivion and Bethesda.
Oblivion was a game with a very clear message: You don’t need to meticulously design every part of a game for it to sell well or be beloved. You don’t even need to meticulously design a small part of it. All you have to do is make a big empty bowl, put in some markers that allude to it being bigger than it actually is, and then give it a clutter pass before dotting some reused fortresses/caves/mines into it. There’s no need for a personal touch in every corner, merely the illusion of one.
But I can forgive Oblivion for a lot of things even if it is terrible. It was one of the earliest titles released in 7th gen, and the first of its scale. It took four years to make in a time where that was an incredible abnormality.
Fallout 3 gets no such mercy from me.
In part, because it’s worse.
Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.
F3 opens with you, the player character, being born and causing your mother to die of postpartum cardiac arrest. This is already a horrific indicator of how obsessed it’s going to be with its own unearned sense of profundity and much like the actual act of being born, it gets infinitely worse.
Just to get this out of the way: This sucks. It sucks on a creative level - Bethesda clearly couldn’t figure out how to stoke player investment without giving you a dead mom, a sad dad and showing your birth - but it also just sucks as the opening to a Fallout game?
This observation is so common that even comparatively normal people who don’t engage with Gaming as a culture often make it: Fallout 1 and 2 open with “oh yeah some shit’s fuck, go save your home”. Fallout NV starts with you getting shot in the head, and sends you off after a brief intro.
Fallout 3’s intro, then, sticks out like a sore thumb even compared to its more immediate sequel.
Afterwards you get warped to a birthday party filled with named NPCs who share voice actors and who you don’t care about. After that you get warped to a school test with the same named NPCs who share voice actors and don’t actually speak more than one or two lines, who you still don’t care about.
After that most of them die and the game tries to make you feel sad about their deaths I guess, but it’s moot because you finally get to leave the Vault and I’m incredibly confident 99% of people regardless of age or maturity felt elation at not having to wander through boring, visually bland corridors anymore.
Unfortunately, that’s all Fallout 3 has to offer outside the Vault too.
Over the years I’ve started to take incredible amounts of umbrage with the establishing shot of DC the player is greeted with upon leaving the Vault.
It promises a grand, open world - a reprieve from the suffocating Vault you just slogged through!
Springvale School is just down the road. It looks like this. Walk a bit further and you can find a metro. It looks like this. You can even find some sewer tunnels. They look like this.. Maybe, if you go a bit further, you’ll find an office building. Looks like this!.
Okay. You’ve now seen 99% of locations in Fallout 3.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s just have a little design chat.
I’m not a game dev, but I’ve played so many open world games and developed a fondness for them that I’ve managed to figure out some criteria that helps measure how good these games are on a technical level.
To wit, a ‘good’ open world is dotted with areas where one or more of these applies:
A visual reward, in the form of a lovely view.
A progression reward, in the form of loot that directly makes you stronger.
Something you can’t see or obtain anywhere else in the game world.
Depending on the world structure, it should lead to somewhere else that’s only accessible via a specific location.
At the very least, for more out-there or hidden areas, there should be some acknowledgement that you made the journey successfully.
Right, all that is out of the way.
Fallout 3’s open world is badly designed, but to really dig into why we need to talk about the other parts of the game that’re badly designed, and I think the topic of loot is perhaps the most pressing.
The first shotgun the player can acquire in Fallout New Vegas is the humble Single Shotgun. It does respectable damage for how early it drops, but true to its name it only carries a single round and its short but frequent reloads can leave you wide open against hordes or particularly tank enemies. It also uses 20 gauge shells as opposed to 12 gauge, so while it hits hard early on it ultimately stops being useful fast.
Later in the game’, the player can luck into possession of the venerable Riot Shotgun, an absolute beast of a weapon that boasts a 12-round drum magazine with 12 gauge shells as its primary ammo type, on top of a high rate of fire and respectable reload time.
Meanwhile the first shotgun the player can potentially find in Fallout 3 is the Combat Shotgun). It is, like the Riot Shotgun, a veritable moment that can dish out respectable damage and uses 12 gauge ammo. In the Capital Wasteland, this is an extremely common weapon with an extremely common weapon type - 20 gauge does not exist, so all shotgun wielding enemies are walking topups.
To really illustrate this issue, we need to talk about damage.
New Vegas uses two types of defensive stat: Damage Resistance (percentage-based) and Damage Threshold (flat reduction).
All incoming damage taken is reduced by the DR value at a percentage. So if you, for example, take 100 damage and have 50 DR, you take 50 damage.
Next is the DT value, which is a flat reduction. Seeing as we’ve just taken 50 damage, let’s imagine we have 20 DT. Since it’s just a flat subtraction, all in all we’ve taken 30 damage. This goes both ways.
This hypothetical only involves a single instance of damage. Shotguns, as they fire multiple pellets per shot, have the formula applied to each individual pellet. The end result is that despite high damage stats and seeming to be catch-free, shotguns in NV do a lot less damage than you’d initially think - though, as NV is a competently made game, this can be circumvented with alternative ammo and perks.
Fallout 3, however, only uses Damage Resistance. This is alarming on its own, but it gets worse as you learn that DR in Fallout 3 rarely if ever gets above 40. Most non-humanoid enemies don’t even have any DR stats, just health.
This is where the problem really starts to take shape.
While this does still impact the individual shotgun pellets, the reality is that a 10% reduction applied to 10 damage is incredible miniscule, so the Combat Shotgun becomes a weapon sent down by the gods to smite anything with a pulse.
The Combat Shotgun is incredibly powerful, uses bountiful ammo and is incredibly common. As are the Hunting Rifle, Missile Launcher, Assault/Chinese Assault Rifles, and Laser/Plasma Rifles.
Final result?
Most loot rewards are utterly worthless and incredibly unsatisfying.
99% of Fallout 3’s generic, copy-pasted dungeons end with you getting little more than some sellable stuff, a few caps, a handful of consumables, one weapon which you already have 15 of in stock, and a surplus of ammo that you’re probably already overflowing with. Fuck dude, even a lot of main story stuff just dumps excess on you. The final ‘dungeon’ doesn’t offer anything you don’t already have assuming you’ve bothered to go for a walk between the midgame and then.
I can only really describe this game’s world design as a sort of maniacal creative ADHD. You’ll find a marker or something to gawk at every couple of minutes, yes, but in actuality all of the stuff you find is superfluous gunk that at best rewards you with thirty 5mm rounds and a stimpak.
A couple of years ago I replayed Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While that game has many issues, the only relevant one is: Loot scarcity. In a sort of dim, artificial attempt to keep the player ~on their toes~, Deus Ex HR frequently has players break into hidden vaults and armouries only to find at best a weapon they already have and some ammo.
Fallout 3 has both this exact same issue and the opposite problem: Loot excess. Because there’s so little of it, and because it’s all so strong, the simple act of finding things is simultaneously unsatisfying and unneeded. What am I going to do with some leather armor and a knife? I found a weapon to kill god in a bin.
Lastly, there’s a very strange issue running through Fallout 3 wherein loot containers that need skill investment to unlock often have worse loot than random bedside cabinets. In the game’s final dungeon I cracked open a Hard-difficulty terminal, and behind it was… 19 10mm rounds, a Stimpak, some drugs, and one missile. Opposite, in a random footlocker, was a useful amount of money and a significant handful of Microfusion Cells.
Truthfully, though, all of that isn’t the actual problem - New Vegas also has its fair share of dud locations. The actual problem is that there’s a lack of loot progression. You get a Combat Shotgun or a weapon of your choice and you’re basically set for life. Besides Mini Nukes there are no rare ammo types, and caps are plentiful - in part due to loot itself being plentiful - meaning it’s easy to just cycle around each vendor and empty their ammo stock if you need .44 Magnum or .308 ammo.
There are some unique pieces of equipment here and there, but they run into a teensy tiny little problem:
They’re overkill.
Fallout 3’s greatest sin, looping back to that discussion about damage earlier, is that it’s an easy game.
Most enemies rarely have health in the hundreds, and basically everything besides the .32 pistol and the Chinese pistol is capable of outputting that with impunity. Conversely, unless the player cranks the difficulty right up, enemies don’t deal enough damage to be a threat unless they’re in large groups and even then it’s incredibly rare to fight groups of enemies in open terrain. Indeed, the first real swarm most players will find during the main quest is fought with tons of cover and chokepoints to exploit.
It’s not until the DLCs that enemies start appearing with difficulty attached, and said difficulty is little more than them getting a +30-40 extra damage for free. They do have bloated HP, but realistically if you’re at the recommended level for the DLCs then you have enough damage output to ignore that.
In most other open world games where loot is a frivolous, tacked-on system with no merit, usually exploration is its own reward. This sentiment carried BOTW to many people’s good graces, after all.
Fallout 3 has no such luck: The Capital Wasteland is a horrifically unappealing place. There isn't much in the way of landmarks and the ones that do exist are so… American. I suppose it may be resonant and even disquieting if you’re an American with any degree of patriotism but I’m an embittered Scot that views the entire country as a disease that’s gone on too long. The sight of the Washington Monument in disrepair makes me feel about as much as the styrofoam box I get my chips from.
It’s easy to throw up one’s hands and say “Oh, but this is a post-apocalyptic game, Mira! Of course it looks like shit!” which isn’t an entirely unworkable stance, it just ignores that pretty much every other famous piece of post-apocalyptic media - especially the Fallout game released immediately after this one wrapped - managed to nail this while still being ‘ruined’.
I have a relatively good sense of direction, to the point where my friends instinctively put me in charge whenever we need to find somewhere in Glasgow. With that said, I find it incredibly easy to lose where I am on Fallout 3’s map, for once the player leaves the downtown DC region the Capital Wasteland is little more than a grey/brown wasteland dotted with the same 4-5 ruins for miles upon miles. Most of the notable map markers are in the southeast of the map anyway.
Not helping this is that, as opposed to having regional spawn lists to spruce up the act of exploration, Fallout 3 uses a global spawnlist which deposits the vast majority of enemies into the world at random.
Which sucks because there’s not that many enemy types. Humanoids, Radscorpions, Radroaches, Yao Guai, Deathclaws, Botflies, Feral Ghouls, Super Mutants, Centaurs, Dogs, Mirelurks, Mole Rats, Ants, and robots. There, that’s basically every enemy in the game. You will most likely encounter all of them within 20 minutes of following the main path.
Oblivion has a similar problem of dropping random enemies all over the map, but that game’s level scaling is kind enough to replace enemies rather than simply dropping reskinned versions of them with higher HP in the same places.
The enemies, I feel, are where every issue I talked about up above comes to a head. Bad loot variety? Human enemies attack with the same 5-6 weapons. Bad location variety? You kill the same enemies with the same gear in samey locations. Bad quest variety? Regardless of context, you’re hitting the same things in the same gear in the same locations for only slightly different reasons.
And, as is the trend for Fallout 3, enemies being miserable to fight is both a culmination of other issues and introduces its own!
Namely: Combat is, at a very base foundational level, deeply unsatisfying.
Normally I wouldn’t repeat criticisms that other people have said uniformly for decades, however as a career Fallout 3 hater I reserve the right to do so.
It’s accepted by now that Bethesda games lack weight in their combat. Melee feels floaty and impactless, and every gun regardless of caliber or damage feels like using a BB gun. Nobody reacts to damage besides the odd grunt and maybe a canned stagger animation until they die, at which point they either limply collapse like a puppet with severed strings or explode in a shower of gore which is… Honestly, kind of juvenile? And I say this as a certified gore whore.
This in itself is an extension of the game’s nauseatingly childish fixation on gore; raider camps have dismembered corpses impaled on hooks, many areas are filled with random bits of internal organ, and Super Mutants carry entire fishnet bags filled with gore.
But on a technical level, shooting things in Fallout 3 is both deeply unsatisfying and badly designed.
FPS games were some of the first to really crystallize as a genre, and by the time Fallout 3 ripped itself free into the world there were already certain ground rules that not even outsider games dared to break.
If a gun sways, it’s accepted that it should aim where it’s pointing. If a gun’s projectiles have spread, it’s commonly accepted that the gun itself should be steady. Easy enough, right?
Fallout 3, for some asinine reason, does both.
On some level I can vaguely maybe kinda possibly appreciate the attempt to recreate the experience of trying to fire a gun in Fallout 1 with low stats at a target far beyond its effective range, but the problem here is that that experience was temporary until you powered up and here it’s a permanent fixture of gameplay. Weapons have less sway as you increase their respective skill, but unless your Int stat is high (because skill points are asininely tied to it) then that’s a relatively slow crawl - doubly so when there are other skills to increase.
What really hurts shooting is that hit detection is wildly inconsistent. The hitbox for projectiles is seemingly tiny, and it often gets caught on terrain or misses ‘direct’ shots by one thousandth of an inch. Said terrain seems to be poorly constructed, as wafer-thin bits of rebar will obstruct bullets around them and cause them to seemingly clatter off of thin air.
Call of Duty is terrible yesyes but this game came out a year after CoD4 had already introduced the average person to snappy, responsive and satisfying shooting which also lets you shoot through chainlink fences. I have no idea what was in the water to make people believe this game’s shooting was enjoyable.
As a brief aside: I discovered only now that oftentimes projectiles in third person mode don’t even go where you aim them. My metric for how good shooters are at a base level revolves around how good it feels to fight in close quarters, and because of this Fallout 3 feels even worse.
“[Developer] made a competent [genre] and didn’t bother to make the rest of the game” is a phrase that popped up a lot around the late 00s and early 2010s as more and more people began trying to blend genres together. See: Alpha Protocol.
Fallout 3 is unique in this front because Bethesda not only failed to make a competent shooter, but the corpse of an RPG around it isn’t very good either.
Let me just quote myself, from earlier:
Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.
Fallout 3 gives the player a rigid, established backstory and also an annoying rigid, established goal. It’s quite alarming to come across as an NPC related to your father and see every dialogue option be variations on “where my dada :<”.
But even beyond that, there isn’t much room to actually roleplay in this game. The Lone Wanderer as a protagonist is painfully straight forward, and their two forms are “person with human decency” and “guy who condemns kids to slavery.”
Fallout 3, like any other RPG, has quests but I hesitate to call them that. They’re more like guides towards shooting galleries that sometimes stop and ask you if you want to be a nice person, if you want to use a perk/skill to bypass a third of the quest, or if you want to be unfathomably and needlessly cruel.
Even within the main story, there isn’t much framework to roleplay because the Lone Wanderer assimilates their father’s purpose without even giving the player a morton’s fork dialogue choice.
As for the actual main story… I’ve always hated it for the same reasons most other Fallout 3 haters dislike it - it’s flimsy, way too short, has no room for player choice, is entirely linear, etc etc - but as I replayed it, something stood out to me.
Do you know what the Great Man Theory is? In short, and in layman’s terms: The GMT is the belief that Great Men aren’t necessarily nurtured or cultivated, but are simply great from birth. It is these Great Men, and only these Great Men, that are allowed to dictate the course of history. It sucks, I hate it. We don’t use the phrase “product of their environment” for nothing.
I’m gonna take a hard pivot here. Bear with me.
When you think of the word “fascism” you likely have a strong image in your mind. Goose-stepping Nazis, death camps, red hatted Americans screaming in hordes, the most boring European men in suits putting uncomfortable emphasis on the word “superior”, that kind of thing.
Those aren’t invalid. Good on you. Fascism sucks.
But my mental image is defined by a lot of uncomfortably up-close experience with these kinds of people, and it’s boring.
My mental image of Fascism is the dark underside of the Great Man Theory. Of people who believe that, if Great Men are simply born, then Un-Great or ‘Degenerate’ Men are also born. If there are enough Great Men, why shouldn’t they rule? Why should the world cater to Degenerate Men when Great Men can be classified? We should keep Degenerate Men from usurping our Great Men! So on, so forth.
What I mean to say here is that Fascism as a belief system often manifests in incredibly boring ways that’re so banal they often go unnoticed even by people that’re otherwise keyed into such things - at least when they’re not like. Insane.
Fallout 3’s main story is passively Fascist, then.
I don’t think Bethesda Game Studios’ writers are Fascists. I feel you could probably convince Todd Howard to write “1312” on his shirt with a mild amount of transgender Charisma. There’s enough queer people in this IP that I don’t think they hold any real malice for anybody, albeit in much the same way I don’t think they hold any beliefs at all.
But they are incompetent writers, and they’ve accidentally made a story which has awful undertones.
Your first real hints as to the game’s nature come up if you take a walk around DC. There’s a lot of veneration towards the USA Founding Fathers that at first seems quaint and in line with the setting’s propaganda, but…
As the story goes on, it’s made abundantly clear that the player’s father was a Great Man, being the only one capable of rallying a team of scientists and the only one capable of actually putting Project Purity into motion.
When he inevitably dies thanks to the Enclave delaying the ending of my suffering by 2 hours, it falls to you - only you, nobody else - to follow in his footsteps. Because you’re a Great Man too!
In the original version of the game, you die activating the Purifier, and a statue of Thomas Jefferson looks down at you - unmoving, yet seemingly approving… BECAUSE HE’S A GREA-
There’s also the matter of Three Dog’s radio commentary which gets a little… Suspicious, I’d say? It starts out innocently enough, but even a neutral Lone Wanderer starts getting referred to as an actual saviour, with such overdramatic gestures such as Three Dog admitting you cured his misanthropy by being a saint. It’s rather telling that the Very Good Karma icon is a Jesus caricature.
RPGs as a genre do admittedly have a problem with sometimes accidentally stepping into the Great Man shit, it’s just the nature of the genre; to have things occur without the player’s influence or awareness is unsatisfying from a design perspective, so of course things have to be up to you. Wiser RPG devs go out of there way to ensure you’re just an everyman, or you’re woven into the setting in such a way that it avoids such pitfalls.
Fallout 3, unfortunately, leans a bit too into it. Especially with the way Raiders are portrayed, and how often Three Dog talks about them and other wasteland randoms as if they’re actual animals.
It always did strike me as odd that handing total control of Project Purity to the Enclave is rightfully seen as a mistake but handing it over to another authoritarian organization - the Brotherhood - is fine. Yes they’re allegedly benevolent but even in Fallout 3 they show a distinct disgust for ‘wasters’ and it’s stated outright they shoot Ghouls on sight. If you have a more holistic view of franchises (as opposed to my individualistic one), then Fallout 4 confirms they’ll go on to be an actual Fascist organization.
And what better topic to add into this mix than slavery?
In invoking many prominent figures from America’s history, Abraham Lincoln naturally gets brought up a lot, and so do slaves. Slavers make up a decent number of the Capital Wasteland’s population, and they’re everywhere. The few settlements dotted around the map have an eternal fear of them, and their base is perhaps second only to the Brotherhood’s in size + population.
But slavery in this game isn’t really substantial. It isn’t something to be commented on or observed or interrogated, it’s basically another vessel for quests. There’s one liberation faction, and one enslaving faction. Kill slavers, or enslave people. Enslaving people is 100 negative Karma, giving two bottles of water to a beggar is 100 positive Karma. Ethical slavery, yeah!
But even though there is a faction dedicated to the emancipation of slaves, that’s your job - if you want. The slave liberators are tucked away in a corner of the map, easily missable because there’s frankly not that much out that way. Their fate, and the fate of all slaves, is up to you.
I don’t like Fallout 4 all that much but even that game was willing to create the idea that people other than you were working to liberate the Synths.
All of this really compounds the banal and straightforward design: Arguably more than any other Bethesda game, or indeed open world game, Fallout 3 is the one that feels the most static. It is your playground because only You can do anything.
With that all said, there is one part of the game I admittedly think is decent.
Vault 101, the player’s home, is like almost every other Vault in the Bethesda Fallout canon: A social experiment under the guise of a shelter for humanity. Note that this concept basically doesn’t exist prior to Fallout 3; Vaults in 1/2/Tactics/Van Buren were simply shelters.
Vault 101’s experiment was simple: Stay closed. Never reopen. Compared to other experiments in Fallout 3 and subsequent games, this one was incredibly merciful.
Naturally, like other Vaults, 101 faces a violent reckoning when your father leaves - violating the experiment - and the Overseer reacts harshly.
When you return, the Vault has split into people who want to keep the door closed and people who want to go outside.
Uniquely for Fallout 3, there is no right answer here; barring ‘destroy the vault’, each branch of the story offers a degree of good Karma and neither are explicitly better than the others.
You could side with the rebels and open the Vault. They’d be free, and the resources of an active Vault could do good for the surrounding area and settlements… But the Wasteland is filled with a lot of people who’re pure evil, and while you might be able to survive out there there’s absolutely no guarantee anyone else will besides Butch.
Or, you could side with the Overseer and keep it closed. Despite the Overseer being authoritarian, the Vault did run fine until your dad leaves at the game’s proper start and considering future games it’s one of three depicted on-screen that actually were completely fine. Every negative about opening the Vault is a valid reason to side with him, but… It’s quietly brought to the player’s attention that the Overseer’s control over Vault Security isn’t as tight as he thinks it is, and they’re all too willing to take drastic measures to enforce compliance. Not to mention that while he might be able to end the conflict, the Vault still needs a doctor and families have been either destroyed or split asunder.
This is the only quest of its kind in Fallout 3.
Unfortunately like every quest in Fallout 3 even potentially poignant moments are ruined by the voice acting.
I have to commend Jennifer Massey (Dr Madison Li) and Erik Todd Dellums (Three Dog) for being the only voice actors who’re even pretending to give a shit about this script, because everyone else is phoning it in. This game only has a small handful of voice actors and pretty much all of them are audibly reading the script for the first time as they’re saying the lines.
More often than not, the subtitles carry a tone that the actual voice acting doesn’t. It’s marginally improved in the DLCs, but only slightly. In the base game, the same 5-6 voice actors will mumble out their lines with zero enthusiasm or variety. It does, to an extent, turn into accidental comedy when you walk into the Rivet City Market and have three different NPCs greet you in an identical voice.
There’s a somewhat sad irony to the fact that Fallout 3 can be played through New Vegas via Tale of Two Wastelands and yet it doesn’t make it better - it makes it worse. That’s really this game’s legacy, isn’t it? It needs sunlight to grow, but New Vegas is the sky and it won’t be having it.
With everything I've said, observed and read in mind, I'd ultimately argue that Fallout 3 shows more signs of a rushed, ramshackle development than New Vegas. Of the two, it's infinitely buggier, rife with cut/scrapped content and saddled with an omnipresent feeling of "this game isn't done".
As I reach the end of this review, I find myself struggling to answer a question: Why do I keep playing this game every couple of years?
It's not Schrodinger's Game, I don't need to observe it to find out if it's shit or not. Not once has my opinion on this game gotten even SLIGHTLY more positive over my various replays - which, as of writing, is the only game this sentiment still applies to.
But yet, like clockwork, I return to it. I install Fallout 3, then New Vegas, then Tale of Two Wastelands followed by the same QoL/maintenance mods I always get. I boot it, I beat it, I hate it. We're sitting at like ten full replays over the last decade. It defies all sense to me. Is this what a manic compulsion is? Something my body craves but the brain cannot comprehend? It's so very eldritch.
In typing that, I awakened a memory of the day Fallout 3 barged into my life, a week ahead of schedule thanks to a shipping error. My father text me while I was on my way out of high school for lunch: "Yer game's here". Wanting to play a shiny new game and not wanting to read The Cone Gatherers, I opted to make the lunch trip into a trip home.
Having a lot of free time these days, I decided to retrace my steps and walk that route again.
I boarded the train to my old town, and as trains do it came to a stop at the end of the route. I departed and made my way to the route I once took - mercifully, the train stops right behind where I went to school. Following my steps, I did everything as it was; popped into a cafe for a hot roll, got a can of juice from the (still open, yay!) newsagent, and took the long way around to what used to be my home.
I grew up in one of the many, many towns in Scotland whose only real purpose was to house poor people and host an ironworks/coal mine - and those were shut down decades ago. As a result, going back during the quieter hours fills me with the same kind of discomfort one can also vaguely experience in the remnants of Fallout 3's depiction of Washington DC. My old town, too, is a place mostly occupied by shambling zombies and people that might kill you if aggro'd.
You're perhaps expecting me to admit that returning to Fallout 3 is secret nostalgia, right? That I hold a soft spot for it and have been denying that?
No, I still think it's terrible, but I did find out why I keep coming back to it.
On my walk I passed by a bus shelter that, in my day, was little more than a standing rail encased in bricks with a sheet metal roof. Nowadays it's been renovated, with a bench, windows, and a bus timetable.
Looking back at it, I recalled a discussion I once had at that old bus shelter with a good friend of mine who we'll call Gary. We'd been out that day for quite some time, poking through forests and trails with our friends. It was a long day in the middle of a mild Scottish summer, something we no longer experience. By the time we were due to go home, both of us were exhausted.
Exhaustion, for teenagers, is often the harbinger of naked sincerity. The kind you can only really experience in that time where your 'golden years' are in their twilight and their end seems closer and closer every time you turn, trembling, towards the horizon.
I offer to walk Gary to his bus and he accepts. On the way, our chats are about normal things, nothing heavy. When we sit down, though, the silence around us creeps in. A busy town center, now without a soul save for the odd car. We sit by ourselves, wordless, as the last breaths of sunlight choke and die beneath the coming night.
I whip out my iPod Nano and, on the screen, is the last thing I was listening to: A song from In Flames' 'A Sense of Purpose', which at that point was two years old.
Gary scoffs, and we begin the ritual that teenage boys do where we rib one another for our tastes over and over.
But we're both tired, it's just past 8pm, and we were kinda enjoying the silence. The jabs and japes soon end without much fanfare, and silence falls in.
The bus was late. This I remember clearly. So late that Gary, a jovial and relatively stoic lad, was getting antsy.
Apropos of nothing, he turns to me.
"Mira," He asks in a surprisingly cold voice. "You know, I hate A Sense of Purpose, but I love it at the same time."
This so dumbfounded me, it did. My thinking was so very binary back then: Things I liked were good, things I disliked were bad. How and why would one love a bad thing?
"Gary, that makes no sense." I croak out, bewildered.
"Aye," So he says, like he just confessed to a murder. "Wanna know why?"
Of course I did, and nodded in assent.
"Things keep changing, and I'm scunnered [tn: tired] of it. But that album," He nods to my iPod as though it were a child - not a creature of sin, but innocently misguided. "That album is always shit. No matter how much time passes, it's always shite. I like that."
I didn't have an answer in me, much as I wished I did. It was my first introduction to the concept of 'terrible but I love it'. We sat in silence for another few minutes before the bus pulled up. I wished him well and we saw one another off.
Coming back to this memory 14 years later, I get it.
Fallout 3 and A Sense of Purpose were both 16 years ago.
In the intervening years, my tastes have changed. My top 25 from 2019 looks alien to me, the same list from 2015 utterly unbelievable. My walls are no longer adorned with band posters and game memorabilia, but shelves and stuffed rabbits I collect. While I once longed to work in the IT field, experience has made me pray that I never wear a shirt and tie again. I no longer live in the old mining town, the sun does not hit my face from the same angles while I rest. When I exit my house I do not see fields of green and distant towns, but endless houses, apartment blocks and industrial estates.
It is, suffice to say, rather obvious that not only have I changed, but so has the world around me. Indeed, I often wonder if I'm the same person as the one in these memories, or if they were simply taken from another when I was constructed at the age of 21. The changes I describe have occurred over what is now half of my entire lifespan, a period of so many years that not even my pristine memory can keep those years from occasionally blending together or faces from getting blurred.
But Fallout 3?
Fallout 3 never changes.
Yeah, it's bad. Who'd've seen that coming, right?
Arguably even more of a theme park ride than Operation Anchorage, in part because it doesn't even pretend you need to have leveled skills for it.
Weapon skills too low? Don't worry, the DLC has its own ammo type which you get thousands of and the weapons given to you deal so much damage. Just shoot away!
Medicine too low? Don't worry, Alien Biogel is everywhere and regenerates a load of health - you can even beg the local twunk to upgrade it!
Repair too low? Don't worry, Alien Epoxy is found by the bucketload and it'll repair your weapon for you!
Need money? No you don't! But just in case there's a ton of Alien Crystals lying around for you to sell in the Wasteland!
The other DLCs are badly designed, I hesitate to even imply this one is designed at all.
It's so very nakedly a cynical loot dump, the closest you'll get to a cheat DLC. It reminds me of XCOM: Enemy Unknown's much-maligned Slingshot DLC.
There isn't much substance on display here. Fallout 3 is already a dim and unwieldy corridor shooter but here it's doubling down on the corridor bits. Even the other DLCs let you use stealth sometimes but here? All combat, all the time.
You'd think that with the vast array of pulp fiction influences in Fallout they'd dig a bit deeper to make their alien mothership look cool but it's mostly just colour-coded hallways and doo-dads. There's not a lot of visual consistency either; the main aesthetic is something you'd find in a PS3 FPS game that nobody remembers, the weapons are distinctly 50's sci-fi, the drones look like they're from XCOM, and there's a bunch of 70s sci-fi stuff thrown in for good measure. It's a very uncoordinated and bland mess of stuff that makes me wonder if the devs gave up towards the end so they could go work on Skyrim.
Also, this isn't a Mothership Zeta exclusive issue, but it did exacerbate it:
I think I'm starting to suffer from Murder Fatigue in my RPGs.
It's really prominent in base Fallout 3 due to its relative lack of settlements and overabundance of trash mobs/shooting galleries, but it's also alarming to me that it's the sole method of engaging with the DLCs.
There's just not much going on here besides killing, and more tools to do more killing. Fallout 4 at least innovated on it by trying to make it enjoyable, but here in Fallout 3? Handles like ass, so the endless violence is even more of a slog.
I must be getting old.
Arguably even more of a theme park ride than Operation Anchorage, in part because it doesn't even pretend you need to have leveled skills for it.
Weapon skills too low? Don't worry, the DLC has its own ammo type which you get thousands of and the weapons given to you deal so much damage. Just shoot away!
Medicine too low? Don't worry, Alien Biogel is everywhere and regenerates a load of health - you can even beg the local twunk to upgrade it!
Repair too low? Don't worry, Alien Epoxy is found by the bucketload and it'll repair your weapon for you!
Need money? No you don't! But just in case there's a ton of Alien Crystals lying around for you to sell in the Wasteland!
The other DLCs are badly designed, I hesitate to even imply this one is designed at all.
It's so very nakedly a cynical loot dump, the closest you'll get to a cheat DLC. It reminds me of XCOM: Enemy Unknown's much-maligned Slingshot DLC.
There isn't much substance on display here. Fallout 3 is already a dim and unwieldy corridor shooter but here it's doubling down on the corridor bits. Even the other DLCs let you use stealth sometimes but here? All combat, all the time.
You'd think that with the vast array of pulp fiction influences in Fallout they'd dig a bit deeper to make their alien mothership look cool but it's mostly just colour-coded hallways and doo-dads. There's not a lot of visual consistency either; the main aesthetic is something you'd find in a PS3 FPS game that nobody remembers, the weapons are distinctly 50's sci-fi, the drones look like they're from XCOM, and there's a bunch of 70s sci-fi stuff thrown in for good measure. It's a very uncoordinated and bland mess of stuff that makes me wonder if the devs gave up towards the end so they could go work on Skyrim.
Also, this isn't a Mothership Zeta exclusive issue, but it did exacerbate it:
I think I'm starting to suffer from Murder Fatigue in my RPGs.
It's really prominent in base Fallout 3 due to its relative lack of settlements and overabundance of trash mobs/shooting galleries, but it's also alarming to me that it's the sole method of engaging with the DLCs.
There's just not much going on here besides killing, and more tools to do more killing. Fallout 4 at least innovated on it by trying to make it enjoyable, but here in Fallout 3? Handles like ass, so the endless violence is even more of a slog.
I must be getting old.
Being the "least bad" Fallout 3 DLC is a bit like being the "most moral" person in a trial at the Hague, but given how bad everything Fallout 3 related is it needs all the accolades it can get.
Point Lookout isn't really more than a pocket-sized other Wasteland to explore, a brief main quest that doesn't have much to it beyond you killing ~tribals~ in droves, some decentish sidequests aaaand some loot. Yay.
The main quest isn't anything to write home about. A guy named Desmond conscripts you to kill and infiltrate some Tribals which are just... Uncritically placed into FO3's setting with all their uncomfortable tropes and occasionally you-no-take-candle style of speech in all its offensive. You get part of your brain removed (this doesn't mean anything) by a boatman and then you kill more tribals. Then you kill a lot of tribals. Then you kill a brain in a jar.
The only emotion this stirs in me besides apathy is mild annoyance, because on my main Fallout site circa 2009 I knew a guy who made Desmond his entire personality and was really annoying about it.
Desmond is an English pre-war ghoul who swears a lot and is a massive dick despite being good-aligned. I didn't really find him funny back then because the Bit is very one-note and nowadays I mashed through his dialogue after reading the subtitles because hoho wow this is some immature humor even for Fallout.
The main sidequests aren't going to make any Best Sidequests Ever lists but they're servicable compared to 3's.
One sees you taking up a Chinese spy's mission to destroy evidence of their espionage long after their death, and while it's not exactly rife with choice or even combat it's a nice little vignette with a decent tone to it - also it gives the Backwater Rifle, one of the game's better 10mm weapons.
The other is a thinly-veiled Lovecraft reference that's not very deep but it is relatively atmospheric and does utilize the scenery well. Apparently it was meant to be a lot deeper and better, but as is the norm with Bethesda games this was cut super late in development.
But I'll admit PL's setting does kind of irk because it's very superfluous. Like sugar candy. The parts near the pier honestly don't look much different from the Capital Wasteland and while the idea of setting a Fallout story in a swamp is neat, the terrain is incredibly repetitive and not very interesting.
Same goes for the Swampfolk, inbred cannibal killers, who were very obviously inspired by The Hills Have Eyes - such was admitted outright. They even used to be called Hillfolk, c'mon.
They're very much just there, making effigies and killing outsiders because that's what they do I suppose. The Lovecraft-lite quest gives the vague insinuation that they do it because this is supposed to reference Shadow over Innsmouth, I guess. Happy to see people from Cumbernauld show up in a game though!
Outside of the main quest and two big quests, though, Point Lookout just isn't very interesting. It's the first of the DLC maps to be nice and ~open~ but it's also so small that it only took me 3-4 hours to clear it of meaningful content.
Considering Mothership Zeta is next, let's just call this calm before the storm.
Point Lookout isn't really more than a pocket-sized other Wasteland to explore, a brief main quest that doesn't have much to it beyond you killing ~tribals~ in droves, some decentish sidequests aaaand some loot. Yay.
The main quest isn't anything to write home about. A guy named Desmond conscripts you to kill and infiltrate some Tribals which are just... Uncritically placed into FO3's setting with all their uncomfortable tropes and occasionally you-no-take-candle style of speech in all its offensive. You get part of your brain removed (this doesn't mean anything) by a boatman and then you kill more tribals. Then you kill a lot of tribals. Then you kill a brain in a jar.
The only emotion this stirs in me besides apathy is mild annoyance, because on my main Fallout site circa 2009 I knew a guy who made Desmond his entire personality and was really annoying about it.
Desmond is an English pre-war ghoul who swears a lot and is a massive dick despite being good-aligned. I didn't really find him funny back then because the Bit is very one-note and nowadays I mashed through his dialogue after reading the subtitles because hoho wow this is some immature humor even for Fallout.
The main sidequests aren't going to make any Best Sidequests Ever lists but they're servicable compared to 3's.
One sees you taking up a Chinese spy's mission to destroy evidence of their espionage long after their death, and while it's not exactly rife with choice or even combat it's a nice little vignette with a decent tone to it - also it gives the Backwater Rifle, one of the game's better 10mm weapons.
The other is a thinly-veiled Lovecraft reference that's not very deep but it is relatively atmospheric and does utilize the scenery well. Apparently it was meant to be a lot deeper and better, but as is the norm with Bethesda games this was cut super late in development.
But I'll admit PL's setting does kind of irk because it's very superfluous. Like sugar candy. The parts near the pier honestly don't look much different from the Capital Wasteland and while the idea of setting a Fallout story in a swamp is neat, the terrain is incredibly repetitive and not very interesting.
Same goes for the Swampfolk, inbred cannibal killers, who were very obviously inspired by The Hills Have Eyes - such was admitted outright. They even used to be called Hillfolk, c'mon.
They're very much just there, making effigies and killing outsiders because that's what they do I suppose. The Lovecraft-lite quest gives the vague insinuation that they do it because this is supposed to reference Shadow over Innsmouth, I guess. Happy to see people from Cumbernauld show up in a game though!
Outside of the main quest and two big quests, though, Point Lookout just isn't very interesting. It's the first of the DLC maps to be nice and ~open~ but it's also so small that it only took me 3-4 hours to clear it of meaningful content.
Considering Mothership Zeta is next, let's just call this calm before the storm.
I don't like the descriptor "self-obsessed" to describe art.
Both because I think the mere act of creating art requires a little bit of benign self-obsession, and because it's often used by luddites to shout down art they perceive as 'pretentious' or somesuch nonsense.
With that in mind, Fallout 3 has a moderate problem with being self-obsessed.
It is a game that mostly consists of hallway shooting galleries, quests where the moral choices are "basic decency" and "laugh in a child's face after tricking him into putting on a bomb collar", and doesn't really possess much in the way of clever jokes beyond pop culture references and human suffering- hey wait
It's juvenile, to put it briefly.
But between the constant invocation of the Bible, the main story rapidly becoming about some grand purpose, your birth and childhood being the introduction, Three Dog endlessly praising a good/neutral player for being the singular hero that'll save the day, and thousands of other little tidbits, it's clear as day that the writers have an overinflated sense of how profound they think this is.
Before we continue, I think it's prudent that I go back in time for a little bit, and talk about both myself and the game at launch.
I'm a very old Fallout fan. So old in fact that I can't even talk about the sites I visited in any depth; they're all still around and their history entirely public - it'd be tantamount to doxxing. My opinions on the series are coloured by about 17 years of discontent and relative loathing for Bethesda Fallout as a creative force.
Fallout 3 dropped in October 2008 - exact date is beyond me - and it was much beloved by everyone except me and my fellow embittered old fans. At first this discontent was merely "they changed it!" but for me, at least, it's only grown due to far more valid complaints.
There is, however, one complaint that Fallout 3 fans and haters alike had back in the day.
See, it's profoundly difficult to stumble upon the base version of Fallout 3 these days. Microsoft sell the GOTY edition for cheaper than the basegame on Xbox, and on Steam it's the only option available to buy. If you purchase Fallout 3, there's a 99% chance it's the whole package.
From the game's release until it's 1st anniversary, Broken Steel did not exist. Without it, the game's main story simply ended. This seems inoffensive on the surface and when spoken so plainly the idea of it being contentious must seem ludicrous.
The catch here is that Fallout 3's story is very short. If one decides to dabble in it, they can easily reach the end in a couple hours potentially by accident. This in itself often poses a problem, as it's entirely possible to be locked into that ~endgame state~ and corresponding building just by chasing the main story as a diversion.
It's the story itself that's the draw here, though. Fallout 3's writers were obsessed with how grandiose, spiritual and hashtag epic the story was, so it ends with either you sacrificing yourself to turn on a water purifier or making someone else do it as the token evil option.
If you use social media a decent amount and are either in or adjacent to game circles, you might've seen the companion reactions to being asked to go into the Purifier. They're bad, and the radiation-immune companions give the most asspull reactions possible.
About a month or two after Fallout 3's release, Bethesda announced a trio of DLCs: Operation Anchorage, The Pitt and Broken Steel.
Broken Steel drew a lot of curiosity pre-release for one simple reason: A promise of being able to play past the ending.
It's somewhat "common knowledge" that this was Bethesda violently backtracking and while we'll never know the truth, I personally make it a point to remind people that Fallout 3's DLCs were planned before release and the development only wrapped the same month it released.
Broken Steel, for me, is a bit of a morbid curiosity. I would love to know more about it and I'm eternally sad that the developers at Bethesda are so culturally and creatively exsanginuated, for it makes finding out their influences/objectives/desires so much harder compared to, say, New Vegas characters.
To break it down for you: I don't know what the fuck Bethesda were thinking with this DLC.
Sure, Fallout 3's base ending is terrible. It's incredibly overdramatic for the game it's in, utterly defies and resists any attempts to interrogate it, reeks of Great Man Theory, and railroads the player in an already railroad-y game.
But when you swing for the fences and hit manure, the most noble thing you can do is commit. I have respect for plenty of creatives who make something terrible, stand their ground and go "Fuck you. This is what I wanted to make." It's why I take few potshots at indie projects and millions at Bioware.
Broken Steel's greatest sin is its existence: It's a backtrack. It's Bethesda flinching. It's a wordless apology. Cowardice in megabyte form. Doesn't matter if it was a planned move or a reactive one, because it simply is, and that's the worst part. There is simply no winning here: If it was planned, then surprise! Bethesda don't really care about the products they make and will cynical lobotomize them to sell DLC. If it wasn't planned, then within a month of release they hastily scrabbled to lobotomize their game so they could scramble to regain the mild amount of goodwill they lost.
...But you know what? Even if we ignore that it's ideological wafer, or that I'm an ornery old Fallout fan who's distrusted people with Enclave avatars since before my nieces and nephews were born, Broken Steel is just... bad on a design level.
For starters, it adds three new enemies to the Wasteland: Feral Ghoul Reavers, Super Mutant Behemoths, and Albino Radscorpions. These are... Remodelled and higher level variants of the three most common enemy types in the Wasteland. They have significantly higher health pools (the largest behind Behemoths) and get a passive +35 to their damage output that bypasses all of your armor. Besides this they're not very engaging to fight. You either kill them fast or they kill you fast. Riveting.
The 'main story' of the DLC is horrifically grim even by the standards of Fallout 3's own main story. Having given up all pretense of even telling a story, the player is shoved into a military campaign against the Enclave which moooooooooostly just manifests as more hallway shooter segments and another lackluster, somewhat cringe section with Liberty Prime. If you've not visited Old Olney yet, the second main quest awkwardly pushes you there to collect the associated loot. After that, another shooter segment that's even easier than the ones from past DLCs because it's 80% open fields - and the game hands you an absurdly powerful weapon that uses ammo so plentiful even casual players can amass thousands. Bang bang bang, make a 'moral choice' (nuke the Enclave or the BoS) and off you go.
That's... Basically it? Besides some inconsequential side quests, some loot that's mediocre for how late it appears, and the level cap increase, Broken Steel really isn't all that substantial despite the implications of its name.
Maybe the real Broken Steel was the antipathy we made along the way.
Both because I think the mere act of creating art requires a little bit of benign self-obsession, and because it's often used by luddites to shout down art they perceive as 'pretentious' or somesuch nonsense.
With that in mind, Fallout 3 has a moderate problem with being self-obsessed.
It is a game that mostly consists of hallway shooting galleries, quests where the moral choices are "basic decency" and "laugh in a child's face after tricking him into putting on a bomb collar", and doesn't really possess much in the way of clever jokes beyond pop culture references and human suffering- hey wait
It's juvenile, to put it briefly.
But between the constant invocation of the Bible, the main story rapidly becoming about some grand purpose, your birth and childhood being the introduction, Three Dog endlessly praising a good/neutral player for being the singular hero that'll save the day, and thousands of other little tidbits, it's clear as day that the writers have an overinflated sense of how profound they think this is.
Before we continue, I think it's prudent that I go back in time for a little bit, and talk about both myself and the game at launch.
I'm a very old Fallout fan. So old in fact that I can't even talk about the sites I visited in any depth; they're all still around and their history entirely public - it'd be tantamount to doxxing. My opinions on the series are coloured by about 17 years of discontent and relative loathing for Bethesda Fallout as a creative force.
Fallout 3 dropped in October 2008 - exact date is beyond me - and it was much beloved by everyone except me and my fellow embittered old fans. At first this discontent was merely "they changed it!" but for me, at least, it's only grown due to far more valid complaints.
There is, however, one complaint that Fallout 3 fans and haters alike had back in the day.
See, it's profoundly difficult to stumble upon the base version of Fallout 3 these days. Microsoft sell the GOTY edition for cheaper than the basegame on Xbox, and on Steam it's the only option available to buy. If you purchase Fallout 3, there's a 99% chance it's the whole package.
From the game's release until it's 1st anniversary, Broken Steel did not exist. Without it, the game's main story simply ended. This seems inoffensive on the surface and when spoken so plainly the idea of it being contentious must seem ludicrous.
The catch here is that Fallout 3's story is very short. If one decides to dabble in it, they can easily reach the end in a couple hours potentially by accident. This in itself often poses a problem, as it's entirely possible to be locked into that ~endgame state~ and corresponding building just by chasing the main story as a diversion.
It's the story itself that's the draw here, though. Fallout 3's writers were obsessed with how grandiose, spiritual and hashtag epic the story was, so it ends with either you sacrificing yourself to turn on a water purifier or making someone else do it as the token evil option.
If you use social media a decent amount and are either in or adjacent to game circles, you might've seen the companion reactions to being asked to go into the Purifier. They're bad, and the radiation-immune companions give the most asspull reactions possible.
About a month or two after Fallout 3's release, Bethesda announced a trio of DLCs: Operation Anchorage, The Pitt and Broken Steel.
Broken Steel drew a lot of curiosity pre-release for one simple reason: A promise of being able to play past the ending.
It's somewhat "common knowledge" that this was Bethesda violently backtracking and while we'll never know the truth, I personally make it a point to remind people that Fallout 3's DLCs were planned before release and the development only wrapped the same month it released.
Broken Steel, for me, is a bit of a morbid curiosity. I would love to know more about it and I'm eternally sad that the developers at Bethesda are so culturally and creatively exsanginuated, for it makes finding out their influences/objectives/desires so much harder compared to, say, New Vegas characters.
To break it down for you: I don't know what the fuck Bethesda were thinking with this DLC.
Sure, Fallout 3's base ending is terrible. It's incredibly overdramatic for the game it's in, utterly defies and resists any attempts to interrogate it, reeks of Great Man Theory, and railroads the player in an already railroad-y game.
But when you swing for the fences and hit manure, the most noble thing you can do is commit. I have respect for plenty of creatives who make something terrible, stand their ground and go "Fuck you. This is what I wanted to make." It's why I take few potshots at indie projects and millions at Bioware.
Broken Steel's greatest sin is its existence: It's a backtrack. It's Bethesda flinching. It's a wordless apology. Cowardice in megabyte form. Doesn't matter if it was a planned move or a reactive one, because it simply is, and that's the worst part. There is simply no winning here: If it was planned, then surprise! Bethesda don't really care about the products they make and will cynical lobotomize them to sell DLC. If it wasn't planned, then within a month of release they hastily scrabbled to lobotomize their game so they could scramble to regain the mild amount of goodwill they lost.
...But you know what? Even if we ignore that it's ideological wafer, or that I'm an ornery old Fallout fan who's distrusted people with Enclave avatars since before my nieces and nephews were born, Broken Steel is just... bad on a design level.
For starters, it adds three new enemies to the Wasteland: Feral Ghoul Reavers, Super Mutant Behemoths, and Albino Radscorpions. These are... Remodelled and higher level variants of the three most common enemy types in the Wasteland. They have significantly higher health pools (the largest behind Behemoths) and get a passive +35 to their damage output that bypasses all of your armor. Besides this they're not very engaging to fight. You either kill them fast or they kill you fast. Riveting.
The 'main story' of the DLC is horrifically grim even by the standards of Fallout 3's own main story. Having given up all pretense of even telling a story, the player is shoved into a military campaign against the Enclave which moooooooooostly just manifests as more hallway shooter segments and another lackluster, somewhat cringe section with Liberty Prime. If you've not visited Old Olney yet, the second main quest awkwardly pushes you there to collect the associated loot. After that, another shooter segment that's even easier than the ones from past DLCs because it's 80% open fields - and the game hands you an absurdly powerful weapon that uses ammo so plentiful even casual players can amass thousands. Bang bang bang, make a 'moral choice' (nuke the Enclave or the BoS) and off you go.
That's... Basically it? Besides some inconsequential side quests, some loot that's mediocre for how late it appears, and the level cap increase, Broken Steel really isn't all that substantial despite the implications of its name.
Maybe the real Broken Steel was the antipathy we made along the way.
Fallout 3: The Pitt
2009
Okay nevermind my Operation Anchorage review.
Coming back to it as an adult with a fully formed brain and an actual belief system, The Pitt is my least favourite FO3 expansion by a country mile.
In part because while the others are bad, The Pitt is both bad and actually offensive.
Fallout 3 already has problems with invoking the imagery and motifs of American Slavery - a very real thing that scarred entire generations for about three centuries, killed hundreds of thousands of very real people and ruined tons of very real countries - while attempting to be impartial and ~nonpolitical~.
Fallout 2 is a dogshit-ass game that I have little love for, but when it brought slavery into the equation it had the correct idea of not invoking the Civil Rights Movement and associated iconography.
Fallout 3 had no such wisdom, which means you use an "underground Railroad movement" to free uh... A white man. Hey fun fact, the black leader of the escaped slaves - Hannibal Hamlin - is white in his ending slide
The Pitt doubles down on this in the worst way possible: By trying to Both Sides slavery.
Let's just lay out Ishmael Ashur's whole deal, right?
Ashur is an insane but erudite ex-Brotherhood religious zealot who, upon seeing a city dominated by endless hordes of cannibalistic murder-rapist Raiders, decided it would be best if he built a manufacturing empire out of its corpse. This empire is built with slave labor. Lots and lots and lots of slave labor. Slave labor that, given Ashur buys from Fallout 3's slave labor, almost certainly includes children too. These slaves die at such a rapid pace that external slavers are struggling to fulfill the shipment quotas thanks the horrific meat treadmill Ashur runs.
This regime is enforced by a system of eugenics (wherein slaves aren't allowed to have children), propaganda (in which Ashur promises all this is a "temporary measure" and that slaves can "earn" their freedom in brutal gladiator battles) and a caste of ex-raiders who - despite Ashur's alleged reformation - are still murderous rapists that are far too eager to torture, kill or maim slaves.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand The Pitt wants you to consider him a valid choice against his opponent.
Wernher is a bit of a dick, he's blunt and to the point at all times. He doesn't really care about the slaves but is entirely willing to free them for his goals. All he asks of you is that you steal a baby.
"WHOA!" Said most of the gaming landscape and also all of FO3's writers. "Stealing a baby is fucked up. This is such a morally grey choice."
But to take The Pitt's main dilemma as a morally choice is to not at all interrogate the seting, which is a really embarassing thing to happen when you wrote it.
Let's just interrogate it right here, shall we? Fun teambuilding exercise.
The core conceit of this allegedly "morally grey choice" is that Marie, as a literal baby, is innocent of the sins of her parents and thus shouldn't be subject to harm as a means to punish them. This is fair on its own, but to take that at face value means either deliberately or incidentally having major blindspots.
First of all, despite Wernher declarig he doesn't give a shit about Marie's health, it's also stated more than a few times that Midea - her carer if you side with the slaves - is looking after her during the experiments... Experiments which also happen if you side with Ashur.
Secondly, The Pitt naturally doesn't bother depicting child slavery - ostensibly due to developer cowardice - even though it's abundantly clear that's a thing given the connection between Paradise Falls (a place that sells to The Pitt and has numerous child slaves) and The Pitt, plus The Pitt is infinitely larger than is depicted ingame. With that in mind, one has to ask: What makes Marie more entitled to safety than the child slaves that're almost certainly a part of Ashur's great 'empire'? Sure, she's a baby, but this machine has already trampled over the corpses of children.
Third, and perhaps the most impactful question: What happens to the children born of Ashur's slaves? I like this one because there's no answer that makes the slavers look good. If the children are enslaved, then there's the obvious caveat; they're enslaving children. If the children are free, then the slavers steal children from their parents to be indoctrinated as brutal, amoral raiders. How is it worse, then, to steal a baby away to relative safety? It may not be squeaky clean, but no liberation movement ever was and the opposition are hardly innocent angels.
Ashur's sole defence when confronted with his crimes is that this is a "temporary, necessary measure" on the road to "emancipation" for everyone, which... does not work. At all.
To buy into this is to believe that Ashur's Raiders, with all their brutality and slavery and their entire arsenal of systemic oppression, would relinquish total control over The Pitt and elevate the slaves to a position of equality.
I regularly lay into Bethesda Fallout for being overly cynical garbage written by people who're emotionally still 14, but in the case of The Pitt I feel that cynicism has dug a grave for the story pre-emptively. If you take Bethesda Fallout at face value, it encourages the player to view things cynically and bitterly. Why should The Pitt get an exception? Nothing about this DLC stokes optimism.
It feels like this DLC was made by and for people who think Malcolm X was bad because he advocated for violent resistance, or think that any social movement is only valid so long as it remains entirely peaceful, quiet and out of mind. The core dilemma just falls apart entirely if questioned or interrogated at all, so while it might appeal to people who say the words "thinking too hard" about people who take videogames even slightly seriously, it must be pure brain poison to people who actually use that wet sack of meat inside their skull.
In other, less kind words: This DLC sucks doodoo shit and the writers should find jobs working as janitors in a kitchen - not chefs, because they clearly can't cook shit.
The only slightly redeeming part of this DLC is the Steel Ingot collectathon; a treasure hunt where you can scavenge up to 100 ingots in a map that's relatively well designed and may be the only cell in FO3 with any real thought in it. It's not very long if you, like me, have memorized the route, but the area it takes place in is relatively atmospheric and also conveniently disconnected from the overall conflict.
That the only good part is entirely detached from the rest of the DLC should be all the review you need, honestly.
Coming back to it as an adult with a fully formed brain and an actual belief system, The Pitt is my least favourite FO3 expansion by a country mile.
In part because while the others are bad, The Pitt is both bad and actually offensive.
Fallout 3 already has problems with invoking the imagery and motifs of American Slavery - a very real thing that scarred entire generations for about three centuries, killed hundreds of thousands of very real people and ruined tons of very real countries - while attempting to be impartial and ~nonpolitical~.
Fallout 2 is a dogshit-ass game that I have little love for, but when it brought slavery into the equation it had the correct idea of not invoking the Civil Rights Movement and associated iconography.
Fallout 3 had no such wisdom, which means you use an "underground Railroad movement" to free uh... A white man. Hey fun fact, the black leader of the escaped slaves - Hannibal Hamlin - is white in his ending slide
The Pitt doubles down on this in the worst way possible: By trying to Both Sides slavery.
Let's just lay out Ishmael Ashur's whole deal, right?
Ashur is an insane but erudite ex-Brotherhood religious zealot who, upon seeing a city dominated by endless hordes of cannibalistic murder-rapist Raiders, decided it would be best if he built a manufacturing empire out of its corpse. This empire is built with slave labor. Lots and lots and lots of slave labor. Slave labor that, given Ashur buys from Fallout 3's slave labor, almost certainly includes children too. These slaves die at such a rapid pace that external slavers are struggling to fulfill the shipment quotas thanks the horrific meat treadmill Ashur runs.
This regime is enforced by a system of eugenics (wherein slaves aren't allowed to have children), propaganda (in which Ashur promises all this is a "temporary measure" and that slaves can "earn" their freedom in brutal gladiator battles) and a caste of ex-raiders who - despite Ashur's alleged reformation - are still murderous rapists that are far too eager to torture, kill or maim slaves.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand The Pitt wants you to consider him a valid choice against his opponent.
Wernher is a bit of a dick, he's blunt and to the point at all times. He doesn't really care about the slaves but is entirely willing to free them for his goals. All he asks of you is that you steal a baby.
"WHOA!" Said most of the gaming landscape and also all of FO3's writers. "Stealing a baby is fucked up. This is such a morally grey choice."
But to take The Pitt's main dilemma as a morally choice is to not at all interrogate the seting, which is a really embarassing thing to happen when you wrote it.
Let's just interrogate it right here, shall we? Fun teambuilding exercise.
The core conceit of this allegedly "morally grey choice" is that Marie, as a literal baby, is innocent of the sins of her parents and thus shouldn't be subject to harm as a means to punish them. This is fair on its own, but to take that at face value means either deliberately or incidentally having major blindspots.
First of all, despite Wernher declarig he doesn't give a shit about Marie's health, it's also stated more than a few times that Midea - her carer if you side with the slaves - is looking after her during the experiments... Experiments which also happen if you side with Ashur.
Secondly, The Pitt naturally doesn't bother depicting child slavery - ostensibly due to developer cowardice - even though it's abundantly clear that's a thing given the connection between Paradise Falls (a place that sells to The Pitt and has numerous child slaves) and The Pitt, plus The Pitt is infinitely larger than is depicted ingame. With that in mind, one has to ask: What makes Marie more entitled to safety than the child slaves that're almost certainly a part of Ashur's great 'empire'? Sure, she's a baby, but this machine has already trampled over the corpses of children.
Third, and perhaps the most impactful question: What happens to the children born of Ashur's slaves? I like this one because there's no answer that makes the slavers look good. If the children are enslaved, then there's the obvious caveat; they're enslaving children. If the children are free, then the slavers steal children from their parents to be indoctrinated as brutal, amoral raiders. How is it worse, then, to steal a baby away to relative safety? It may not be squeaky clean, but no liberation movement ever was and the opposition are hardly innocent angels.
Ashur's sole defence when confronted with his crimes is that this is a "temporary, necessary measure" on the road to "emancipation" for everyone, which... does not work. At all.
To buy into this is to believe that Ashur's Raiders, with all their brutality and slavery and their entire arsenal of systemic oppression, would relinquish total control over The Pitt and elevate the slaves to a position of equality.
I regularly lay into Bethesda Fallout for being overly cynical garbage written by people who're emotionally still 14, but in the case of The Pitt I feel that cynicism has dug a grave for the story pre-emptively. If you take Bethesda Fallout at face value, it encourages the player to view things cynically and bitterly. Why should The Pitt get an exception? Nothing about this DLC stokes optimism.
It feels like this DLC was made by and for people who think Malcolm X was bad because he advocated for violent resistance, or think that any social movement is only valid so long as it remains entirely peaceful, quiet and out of mind. The core dilemma just falls apart entirely if questioned or interrogated at all, so while it might appeal to people who say the words "thinking too hard" about people who take videogames even slightly seriously, it must be pure brain poison to people who actually use that wet sack of meat inside their skull.
In other, less kind words: This DLC sucks doodoo shit and the writers should find jobs working as janitors in a kitchen - not chefs, because they clearly can't cook shit.
The only slightly redeeming part of this DLC is the Steel Ingot collectathon; a treasure hunt where you can scavenge up to 100 ingots in a map that's relatively well designed and may be the only cell in FO3 with any real thought in it. It's not very long if you, like me, have memorized the route, but the area it takes place in is relatively atmospheric and also conveniently disconnected from the overall conflict.
That the only good part is entirely detached from the rest of the DLC should be all the review you need, honestly.
My least favourite FO3 expansion is ironically the one I enjoy talking about the most because it's uniquely terrible.
On the surface it's (ostensibly - I may be putting too much faith in the writers) a straightforward parody of what was, at the time, every shooter on the market: You are simultaneously a nobody and a legend, the entire US military cannot do anything without you, and there's no real way to engage with the world beyond murdering people in linear, grey hallways.
This is only aided by the in-universe notes/audio logs that make it obvious the simulation is massively detached from reality at the behest of an insane, sinophobic American general. So it's an in-universe parody as well an out-of-universe one.
There's just one big stinky winky dinky problem:
The parody doesn't work because the core of it is what Fallout 3 already is.
Fallout 3 at its core is a game where you walk through unwieldy shooting galleries in boring environments, endlessly massacring nearly everything you come across in areas that're 99% of the time either linear hallways or intersections that lead to linear hallways.
The only meaningful difference between OA and the game it's bolted onto is that Fallout 3 very occasionally pretends to be an RPG and lets you talk to someone. Even then, 9/10 times you either kill them or having a big prompt that lets you do so.
Perhaps what makes OA so much worse is that it's a thinly-veiled excuse to deposit some loot on you. Your incentive to do the DLC isn't "see this cool place", "free some slaves", "finish the main story" or "aliens, right?", no. You're told in no unclear terms that you should do this DLC for the loot that's in the vault. That's it.
I'll speak on it in more depth when I finish the actual Fallout 3 review, but the actual rewards you get really compound the game's overall issue with loot being meaningless. Namely, OA is perhaps the only part of FO3 that features a reward dump that isn't shit. The stealth armor, winterized T-51B, shocksword and gauss rifle are all excellent regardless of one's build, and given how easy OA is they're functionally free.
But there's a lot in the vault that I can only describe as nothing more than shelf-filling garbage. Upon slogging through OA and opening it, you'll be met with uh... A Chinese Assault Rifle, some ammo for it, and a Missile Launcher, alongside lots of mines and grenades. All incredibly common loot in the wasteland, to the point where I don't blame anyone for thinking the vault is bugged when they see so much trash loot.
And, all things considered, it probably is bugged or at least unfinished. As is the norm for Bethesda games, there's a bevy of cut content for this DLC and the vast majority of it is stuff that'd fit in the loot vault - most noticeably reskins of the sim weapons but without the bloated HP. Which would still be unremarkable, but at least it'd be unique - that simulation exclusive Chinese Assault Rifle looks gorgeous.
The extra 0.5 of a star rating only comes from me having played this through Tale of Two Wastelands, which makes it less of a slog (due to your armor's DT/DR outclassing that of your enemies) and fills the vault with all the aforementioned cut content - plus some other goodies.
The only saving grace to this DLC is that it's perhaps the first and only time I've agreed with people who're fans of Bethesda's Fallout: They hated it at release, so do I.
They still hate it in 2024, and so do I.
On the surface it's (ostensibly - I may be putting too much faith in the writers) a straightforward parody of what was, at the time, every shooter on the market: You are simultaneously a nobody and a legend, the entire US military cannot do anything without you, and there's no real way to engage with the world beyond murdering people in linear, grey hallways.
This is only aided by the in-universe notes/audio logs that make it obvious the simulation is massively detached from reality at the behest of an insane, sinophobic American general. So it's an in-universe parody as well an out-of-universe one.
There's just one big stinky winky dinky problem:
The parody doesn't work because the core of it is what Fallout 3 already is.
Fallout 3 at its core is a game where you walk through unwieldy shooting galleries in boring environments, endlessly massacring nearly everything you come across in areas that're 99% of the time either linear hallways or intersections that lead to linear hallways.
The only meaningful difference between OA and the game it's bolted onto is that Fallout 3 very occasionally pretends to be an RPG and lets you talk to someone. Even then, 9/10 times you either kill them or having a big prompt that lets you do so.
Perhaps what makes OA so much worse is that it's a thinly-veiled excuse to deposit some loot on you. Your incentive to do the DLC isn't "see this cool place", "free some slaves", "finish the main story" or "aliens, right?", no. You're told in no unclear terms that you should do this DLC for the loot that's in the vault. That's it.
I'll speak on it in more depth when I finish the actual Fallout 3 review, but the actual rewards you get really compound the game's overall issue with loot being meaningless. Namely, OA is perhaps the only part of FO3 that features a reward dump that isn't shit. The stealth armor, winterized T-51B, shocksword and gauss rifle are all excellent regardless of one's build, and given how easy OA is they're functionally free.
But there's a lot in the vault that I can only describe as nothing more than shelf-filling garbage. Upon slogging through OA and opening it, you'll be met with uh... A Chinese Assault Rifle, some ammo for it, and a Missile Launcher, alongside lots of mines and grenades. All incredibly common loot in the wasteland, to the point where I don't blame anyone for thinking the vault is bugged when they see so much trash loot.
And, all things considered, it probably is bugged or at least unfinished. As is the norm for Bethesda games, there's a bevy of cut content for this DLC and the vast majority of it is stuff that'd fit in the loot vault - most noticeably reskins of the sim weapons but without the bloated HP. Which would still be unremarkable, but at least it'd be unique - that simulation exclusive Chinese Assault Rifle looks gorgeous.
The extra 0.5 of a star rating only comes from me having played this through Tale of Two Wastelands, which makes it less of a slog (due to your armor's DT/DR outclassing that of your enemies) and fills the vault with all the aforementioned cut content - plus some other goodies.
The only saving grace to this DLC is that it's perhaps the first and only time I've agreed with people who're fans of Bethesda's Fallout: They hated it at release, so do I.
They still hate it in 2024, and so do I.
I was supposed to do a "quick replay" of this so I could use it as a refresher before I come here and gush about it. I then proceeded to 101% the story, smash each Cup Race on Hard, and get the Master Wheels over a weekend. Oops.
My various musou reviews may have clued you into this fact already, but let me make it plain: I love genres that most people don't pay much mind to. Kart racers are one of them.
And CTR is the best, in my eyes. Nitro-Fueled just made it better.
The core difference is in the boosting. In most other kart racers, you drift to build up a 3-stage boost and then release to go flying forward.
CTR hands you more direct control: You drift, yes, but you boost manually. While this might seem like a straight boon, much like open-book exams, you need this control. Boosting becomes a game of timing; hitting the boost button as your brakes stir to speed up, doing this three times consecutively for a bigger boost.
Somewhat ironically, due to its ability to drift in a straight line, Speed types - the 'hardest' engine setup - are the easiest to use.
'Boost' as a state of being is also something that, at higher level play, must be maintained at all times. On some maps this is easy, as there are multiple boost pads that will immediately put you in maximum boost state and refresh that invisible timer. On some maps, ironically the 'easiest' maps, it becomes a test of pure skill more than anything.
Similarly, boosting is deeply tied into the map layout. Most maps with shortcuts have at least one that requires you to be going as fast as possible unless you'll miss it, which means this is an entire game of "The Best MK8 maps".
Likewise there's a decent amount of movement tech that allows for some not-quite-intended skips (that Beenox willfully kept in). Once you learn that releasing the accelerator and holding brake in mid-air increases your turn speed, you enter a whole new level of skill.
...Which does lead me to this game's only mechanical downside, even though this downside benefits me specifically:
CTR is a very unforgiving game. Not so much against the AI, for they'll crumple even against an Acceleration engine, but kart racers are best enjoyed socially and this one... isn't. Having access to emulators means I can now play most of my dumped Switch library with friends, but CTR is never an option because the gap between myself and everyone else is country-sized.
Items in particular aren't very well balanced, and this game lacks any great equalizers like Mario Kart does. If you gain the lead in CTR, it's often hard to actually lose it unless you really fuck up or you're playing with players of a similar skill level.
Don't get me wrong, equalizing items do exist, but they either provide a negligible bonus that won't get a last place player to the front, or they have bad tracking that's easily avoided by taking a shortcut.
Okay, that's the CTR portion of this review done. Let's talk about Nitro-Fueled.
The base unupdated NF package includes the entirety of CTR, as well as every course from Nitro Kart and all of that game's characters. Plus, kart customization is a thing and there's a whole bunch of alternate karts/tires/colour schemes available, cool.
But as you may have heard, Activision live-serviced the shit out of this game via free monthly battle passes/seasons.
And... it was good. No, really. I know saying the words "live service", "battle pass" and "good" might make you wince, but I mean it when I say this was the only game to benefit from live servicing.
The seasons were easy to max out and mercifully kept the shop from overflowing. Casual play could see the season maxed out and all the goodies earned within about a week or two, and sweats like me could get it even quicker. Completing seasons gave you a ton of free stuff, as well as wumpa coins to buy out the store eventually. The actually appealing parts of each season were in the battle pass to boot, which was oddly out of character for Activision.
Add in all the free tracks, that AMAZING update that allowed people to select engine types independent of character, brand new time trials, a new mode specifically for addicts like me, and other small but meaningful updates, it was a pretty good deal.
The new tracks were fantastic by the way. A fantastic blend of fanservice, seasonal concepts, callbacks and good map design made them all memorable, and near the end I was arguably more excited for the free tracks than anything else.
And speaking as a Crash megafan, a lot of the scrimblo character picks were deeply surprising but not unwelcome. I can't poke fun at people who wanted utterly no-name picks for Mario Kart 8's booster pass when I was out here excited to get Komodo Moe, Pasadena O'Possum and Yaya Panda of all characters.
...
So.
You might've noticed a lot of past tense there, maybe not.
Either way, it's not coincidental. See, like all good things, CTRNF ended, and the state Beenox left the game in actually made me miss the live service shit.
With seasons now gone, all of their rewards have returned and are available permanent... ly in the shop. The Fortnite-esque shop with a rotation.
See, during the game's lifespan, the Fortnite shop was contentious, yes, but truthfully there wasn't much in it. Rotations were player-specific, meaning anything you bought would be knocked out of the pool. Wumpa coins came in at such a good rate that, as I alluded to up above, it was fantastically easy to buy out the shop and see it empty until the next season.
But nowadays the shop is stuffed with 8 seasons worth of stuff + the basegame items + some post-season reskins that most people have agreed were designed to be shop filler. What's worse is that despite the developers adding endlessly-resetting challenges that provide Wumpa coins, earning them isn't quite as easy anymore. Both because the seasons are over, and because playing online - which confers a massive bonus - is harder thanks to the deadened playerbase.
Now, ultimately all of this is kind of meaningless to the actual experience; no tangible content is hidden behind seasons or shops, and if you just want to play the best kart racer ever made you don't even need to glance at the store. The story, the tracks, the modes, they're all available from the getgo. This is, after all, why it's a 4.5 and not a 2.5.
Fortunately there is a Switch mod that unlocks all the shop stuff, but I know not everyone has either a hacked Switch or an emulator.
In the end, despite my woes about the current state of the game, it is still the king of kart racers to me. The game it's based on turns 25 this year and to this day it's never been dethroned.
My various musou reviews may have clued you into this fact already, but let me make it plain: I love genres that most people don't pay much mind to. Kart racers are one of them.
And CTR is the best, in my eyes. Nitro-Fueled just made it better.
The core difference is in the boosting. In most other kart racers, you drift to build up a 3-stage boost and then release to go flying forward.
CTR hands you more direct control: You drift, yes, but you boost manually. While this might seem like a straight boon, much like open-book exams, you need this control. Boosting becomes a game of timing; hitting the boost button as your brakes stir to speed up, doing this three times consecutively for a bigger boost.
Somewhat ironically, due to its ability to drift in a straight line, Speed types - the 'hardest' engine setup - are the easiest to use.
'Boost' as a state of being is also something that, at higher level play, must be maintained at all times. On some maps this is easy, as there are multiple boost pads that will immediately put you in maximum boost state and refresh that invisible timer. On some maps, ironically the 'easiest' maps, it becomes a test of pure skill more than anything.
Similarly, boosting is deeply tied into the map layout. Most maps with shortcuts have at least one that requires you to be going as fast as possible unless you'll miss it, which means this is an entire game of "The Best MK8 maps".
Likewise there's a decent amount of movement tech that allows for some not-quite-intended skips (that Beenox willfully kept in). Once you learn that releasing the accelerator and holding brake in mid-air increases your turn speed, you enter a whole new level of skill.
...Which does lead me to this game's only mechanical downside, even though this downside benefits me specifically:
CTR is a very unforgiving game. Not so much against the AI, for they'll crumple even against an Acceleration engine, but kart racers are best enjoyed socially and this one... isn't. Having access to emulators means I can now play most of my dumped Switch library with friends, but CTR is never an option because the gap between myself and everyone else is country-sized.
Items in particular aren't very well balanced, and this game lacks any great equalizers like Mario Kart does. If you gain the lead in CTR, it's often hard to actually lose it unless you really fuck up or you're playing with players of a similar skill level.
Don't get me wrong, equalizing items do exist, but they either provide a negligible bonus that won't get a last place player to the front, or they have bad tracking that's easily avoided by taking a shortcut.
Okay, that's the CTR portion of this review done. Let's talk about Nitro-Fueled.
The base unupdated NF package includes the entirety of CTR, as well as every course from Nitro Kart and all of that game's characters. Plus, kart customization is a thing and there's a whole bunch of alternate karts/tires/colour schemes available, cool.
But as you may have heard, Activision live-serviced the shit out of this game via free monthly battle passes/seasons.
And... it was good. No, really. I know saying the words "live service", "battle pass" and "good" might make you wince, but I mean it when I say this was the only game to benefit from live servicing.
The seasons were easy to max out and mercifully kept the shop from overflowing. Casual play could see the season maxed out and all the goodies earned within about a week or two, and sweats like me could get it even quicker. Completing seasons gave you a ton of free stuff, as well as wumpa coins to buy out the store eventually. The actually appealing parts of each season were in the battle pass to boot, which was oddly out of character for Activision.
Add in all the free tracks, that AMAZING update that allowed people to select engine types independent of character, brand new time trials, a new mode specifically for addicts like me, and other small but meaningful updates, it was a pretty good deal.
The new tracks were fantastic by the way. A fantastic blend of fanservice, seasonal concepts, callbacks and good map design made them all memorable, and near the end I was arguably more excited for the free tracks than anything else.
And speaking as a Crash megafan, a lot of the scrimblo character picks were deeply surprising but not unwelcome. I can't poke fun at people who wanted utterly no-name picks for Mario Kart 8's booster pass when I was out here excited to get Komodo Moe, Pasadena O'Possum and Yaya Panda of all characters.
...
So.
You might've noticed a lot of past tense there, maybe not.
Either way, it's not coincidental. See, like all good things, CTRNF ended, and the state Beenox left the game in actually made me miss the live service shit.
With seasons now gone, all of their rewards have returned and are available permanent... ly in the shop. The Fortnite-esque shop with a rotation.
See, during the game's lifespan, the Fortnite shop was contentious, yes, but truthfully there wasn't much in it. Rotations were player-specific, meaning anything you bought would be knocked out of the pool. Wumpa coins came in at such a good rate that, as I alluded to up above, it was fantastically easy to buy out the shop and see it empty until the next season.
But nowadays the shop is stuffed with 8 seasons worth of stuff + the basegame items + some post-season reskins that most people have agreed were designed to be shop filler. What's worse is that despite the developers adding endlessly-resetting challenges that provide Wumpa coins, earning them isn't quite as easy anymore. Both because the seasons are over, and because playing online - which confers a massive bonus - is harder thanks to the deadened playerbase.
Now, ultimately all of this is kind of meaningless to the actual experience; no tangible content is hidden behind seasons or shops, and if you just want to play the best kart racer ever made you don't even need to glance at the store. The story, the tracks, the modes, they're all available from the getgo. This is, after all, why it's a 4.5 and not a 2.5.
Fortunately there is a Switch mod that unlocks all the shop stuff, but I know not everyone has either a hacked Switch or an emulator.
In the end, despite my woes about the current state of the game, it is still the king of kart racers to me. The game it's based on turns 25 this year and to this day it's never been dethroned.
Despite my love for it, I don't have much to say about this one in depth.
Feels like stepping back in time to 2016-2017 where every game was obsessed with setpieces, and given the game started development under Platinum it's not unlikely some older DNA bled into this game.
Granted, unlike AAA titles from the 2010s and Platinum's mediocre back catalogue, setpieces are used cleverly in GBFR and they don't ever repeat.
The first turret section is the last, and the one time it reuses the rising lava gimmick setpiece it's as a ludonarrative character capstone to make you go "OH SHIT".
The story is, at its core, the most quintessential JRPG-ass JRPG ever made, which fits given it's a Granblue Fantasy game and its parent title is mostly the same. It's a breath of fresh air in its simplicity, not shooting for the moon but instead the familiar horizon and all of its hits land because of it.
In an era where Naoki Yoshida and other big JRPG franchises are ashamed of sincerity and keep making edgy ~subversive~ bullshit, it's doubly nice to see something sincere without being an obvious 'tribute game' like the other side of the Modern JRPG Coin.
If you've ever seen a Shonen Jump movie you'll be familiar with GBFR's format: It's not an adaptation of Granblue's story, it's an original work sandwiched between existing arcs with a cast of fan favourites and wholly new supporting cast. Arguably it works better for games than movies, for while the One Piece movie villains are boring as hell I think Lilith might be in my top 5 Granblue characters alongside Vira, Apollonia, Shalem and Belial. Yes, I'm gay, what made it obvious.
There isn't much to spoil because it's so straightforward, and while I think simply calling it "good" defeats the purpose of even having a backloggd, it is. The emotional beats land, it doesn't waste any time, it managed to turn FF1's "go kill these primals" plot into an excellent GBF title, Narmaya is there. Perfect all around.
Gameplay is the star of the show though and wow. It's like a mirror into a world where Platinum Games regularly make titles that aren't garbage.
Their influence is clear, aye, but with GBFR having 19 characters it's opted to sprinkle mechanics onto each of them to keep it fresh.
You're baited into assuming this is yet another piece of licensed Platinum slop by Djeeta/Gran's boring Dynasty Warriors-esque combo mechanic only to stumble into Narmaya's infinite stance combos, dodge cancellable iai draw attacks, and butterfly stacking mechanic.
Or Siegfried, who plays like Hi Fi Rush and actually made me better at that game due to having a rigid but reliable timing mechanic that can actually be dodge offset.
Or Secret Character, who has a devil trigger.
Or Lancelot, whose attacks are centered around mashing and also gave me a minor RSI which still hurts a few days later.
Trash mob fights are almost always you and your party trouncing them while dodging ranged attacks. Fine enough, but the boss battles are the star of the show and their focus in the postgame is why you'll see other reference Monster Hunter. There's an excellent blend of mechanics and spectacle on display here that, again, puts other character action games to shame.
If you've ever played FFXIV you'll likely be right at home dodging AoEs and yelling at your party for something that so very easily could've been negated. God, I hate Siegfried mains who refuse to use his hyper armor.
They're all very lovely to look at, and towards the end of the story the spectacle starts approaching levels heretofore unseen in the character action genre besides Bayonetta (the one good Platinum duology). The final boss was just... Mwah.
On the presentation side, Cygames have long since been the kings of gacha presentation and with GBFR they're expanding that to the action RPG genre. Everything about this game is beautiful. Areas, outfits, characters, Narmaya's narmaya's, music, you name it.
The music deserves special attention though. Tsutomu Narita is one of the greatest game composers of our time and he's applying his decade of composing for GBF mobile to this game. The returning compositions are gorgeous yes, but the new ones for the original fights are jaw dropping and the final boss theme had me pause the game just to let it wash over me. It is some divine work, I hope they keep Zero (a 13 minute prog metal song) when Lucillius debuts in the next update.
Post-game is an amazing encapsulation of the browser game and I'm frankly astounded they managed to keep the experience intact but without the gacha/live service stuff. You grind to build up weapons, buff grids and other stuff ad nauseaum while tackling harder and harder fights that you meet with stronger and stronger characters.
Characters tend to really come into their niche here; you can get by with flailing before post-game, but if you're a Zeta main and you can't land your timed hits you gotta go play Percival or something. Buffs go from being useful accruements to utter gamechangers and I swear to fucking god if I run into another Cagliostro who's afraid of Phantasmagoria I'm gonna flip.
In short: The Monster Hunter comparisons are valid.
All in all... Psh, I really do wish I had more to say. I had the time of my life playing this game, man. I haven't loved a JRPG this much since Yakuza 7, and it's a nice reminder of what the genre can be like when it's not helmed by Naoki Yoshida's eternal shame at having made JRPGs in the past or endless nostalgia bait.
I wish Lilith was real. Happy that Maggie Robertson got to voice act in a game that wasn't terrible.
Feels like stepping back in time to 2016-2017 where every game was obsessed with setpieces, and given the game started development under Platinum it's not unlikely some older DNA bled into this game.
Granted, unlike AAA titles from the 2010s and Platinum's mediocre back catalogue, setpieces are used cleverly in GBFR and they don't ever repeat.
The first turret section is the last, and the one time it reuses the rising lava gimmick setpiece it's as a ludonarrative character capstone to make you go "OH SHIT".
The story is, at its core, the most quintessential JRPG-ass JRPG ever made, which fits given it's a Granblue Fantasy game and its parent title is mostly the same. It's a breath of fresh air in its simplicity, not shooting for the moon but instead the familiar horizon and all of its hits land because of it.
In an era where Naoki Yoshida and other big JRPG franchises are ashamed of sincerity and keep making edgy ~subversive~ bullshit, it's doubly nice to see something sincere without being an obvious 'tribute game' like the other side of the Modern JRPG Coin.
If you've ever seen a Shonen Jump movie you'll be familiar with GBFR's format: It's not an adaptation of Granblue's story, it's an original work sandwiched between existing arcs with a cast of fan favourites and wholly new supporting cast. Arguably it works better for games than movies, for while the One Piece movie villains are boring as hell I think Lilith might be in my top 5 Granblue characters alongside Vira, Apollonia, Shalem and Belial. Yes, I'm gay, what made it obvious.
There isn't much to spoil because it's so straightforward, and while I think simply calling it "good" defeats the purpose of even having a backloggd, it is. The emotional beats land, it doesn't waste any time, it managed to turn FF1's "go kill these primals" plot into an excellent GBF title, Narmaya is there. Perfect all around.
Gameplay is the star of the show though and wow. It's like a mirror into a world where Platinum Games regularly make titles that aren't garbage.
Their influence is clear, aye, but with GBFR having 19 characters it's opted to sprinkle mechanics onto each of them to keep it fresh.
You're baited into assuming this is yet another piece of licensed Platinum slop by Djeeta/Gran's boring Dynasty Warriors-esque combo mechanic only to stumble into Narmaya's infinite stance combos, dodge cancellable iai draw attacks, and butterfly stacking mechanic.
Or Siegfried, who plays like Hi Fi Rush and actually made me better at that game due to having a rigid but reliable timing mechanic that can actually be dodge offset.
Or Secret Character, who has a devil trigger.
Or Lancelot, whose attacks are centered around mashing and also gave me a minor RSI which still hurts a few days later.
Trash mob fights are almost always you and your party trouncing them while dodging ranged attacks. Fine enough, but the boss battles are the star of the show and their focus in the postgame is why you'll see other reference Monster Hunter. There's an excellent blend of mechanics and spectacle on display here that, again, puts other character action games to shame.
If you've ever played FFXIV you'll likely be right at home dodging AoEs and yelling at your party for something that so very easily could've been negated. God, I hate Siegfried mains who refuse to use his hyper armor.
They're all very lovely to look at, and towards the end of the story the spectacle starts approaching levels heretofore unseen in the character action genre besides Bayonetta (the one good Platinum duology). The final boss was just... Mwah.
On the presentation side, Cygames have long since been the kings of gacha presentation and with GBFR they're expanding that to the action RPG genre. Everything about this game is beautiful. Areas, outfits, characters, Narmaya's narmaya's, music, you name it.
The music deserves special attention though. Tsutomu Narita is one of the greatest game composers of our time and he's applying his decade of composing for GBF mobile to this game. The returning compositions are gorgeous yes, but the new ones for the original fights are jaw dropping and the final boss theme had me pause the game just to let it wash over me. It is some divine work, I hope they keep Zero (a 13 minute prog metal song) when Lucillius debuts in the next update.
Post-game is an amazing encapsulation of the browser game and I'm frankly astounded they managed to keep the experience intact but without the gacha/live service stuff. You grind to build up weapons, buff grids and other stuff ad nauseaum while tackling harder and harder fights that you meet with stronger and stronger characters.
Characters tend to really come into their niche here; you can get by with flailing before post-game, but if you're a Zeta main and you can't land your timed hits you gotta go play Percival or something. Buffs go from being useful accruements to utter gamechangers and I swear to fucking god if I run into another Cagliostro who's afraid of Phantasmagoria I'm gonna flip.
In short: The Monster Hunter comparisons are valid.
All in all... Psh, I really do wish I had more to say. I had the time of my life playing this game, man. I haven't loved a JRPG this much since Yakuza 7, and it's a nice reminder of what the genre can be like when it's not helmed by Naoki Yoshida's eternal shame at having made JRPGs in the past or endless nostalgia bait.
I wish Lilith was real. Happy that Maggie Robertson got to voice act in a game that wasn't terrible.