Fallout 3 - Wrap Up

The DLC Point Lookout was somewhat notorious for its implausibly powerful hillbillies. That was the one thing I went into the story knowing about. So, I guess I was expecting a more hillbilly-themed adventure. Sure, there were these weird "tribals" that were constantly attacking me, a power-armored killer wielding a gatling laser, despite being armed with axes, knives, or at best shotguns, and sure, they were implausibly difficult to kill, but it turns out they simply weren't as important as their outsized reputation would have you believe. In the end, the DLC's story was slight to the point of virtual non-existence. An asshole ghoul and an asshole brain in a vat hate each other, and each wants to use me to destroy the other. The ghoul winds up dying in the final battle and I use a captured hillbilly shotgun to shatter the brain's vat.

I think they knew each other before the War, and potentially there is quite an interesting story there about America's internal politics, and they way powerful individuals, working on agendas of narrow personal interest, nonetheless created an environment of global catastrophe that no particular individual desired as an emergent property of their intersecting schemes, but unless there were some data terminals I overlooked (always a possibility - I tend to be less systematic about these games as time goes on), this was not that story. I barely understood what the two antagonists' relationship was, and never, at any point, felt that I had enough information to make a good decision about who to side with.

I think the "good" choice is Desmond, the ghoul, simply because if you side with Calvert, the brain, he winds up betraying you. I guess I should have seen it coming, because he also treated his tribal followers like shit (but then again, it's not as if Desmond treated me with gratitude and kindness). Honestly, I don't have an especially strong emotional reaction either way. My overall opinion of Point Lookout - it was good to see a new, wilder environment in the Fallout universe, but this faded resort town near a coastal swamp was still too dominated by the game's grey and brown color palate, and while the story was pleasant enough (if forgettable), it was a real disappointment, after fighting mutants and power-armored soldiers, to get my ass handed to me by hillbillies. In other words, a solid C+ effort.

But what about Fallout 3 as a whole? To me, it has an interesting place in the Fallout canon, because Fallout 2 was the game that made me fall in love with the universe and Fallout: New Vegas is my favorite game in the series, so this one, wedged as it is between two absolute titans of my personal gaming landscape, is often overshadowed in my affections. Yet there was a time when it was the Fallout. As near-perfect a game as Fallout was, and as subtly radical a leap forward Fallout 2 represented, they were still, at the end of the day, isometric 2-d rpgs. The very nature of the design keeps you at a certain remove. Fallout 3 is a 3-d experience. It creates a world rich in detail and draws you in.

Many people have derogatorily referred to it as "Oblivion with guns," and, snark aside, I think it's an apt description. The thing that animates it even more than plot or action or character optimization is bringing a complicated setting to life. Oblivion gives you Tamriel and Fallout 3 gives you the capital wasteland. And while the latter is not as lore-heavy as the former, it does exceed at giving you little moments of background that don't draw attention to themselves, but do a good job as sketching out the world. Things like advertisements, the placement of  random items, and the position of skeletons can suggest events and flesh out a culture without explicitly stating anything. These little moments of discovery reward exploration and make the world feel larger and more lived-in (well, died-in, but you know what I mean). It's this ambient storytelling that marks Fallout 3's primary innovation over the Elder Scrolls games (previous Fallouts did have some of this, but it was very inconsistent), and I'm pretty sure it's something that carried over into Skyrim.

All-in-all, I'd say Fallout 3 carries itself like a reboot. It attempts to capture the essence of the series and bring it into a new technological context, and in that regard, I think it's successful. It doesn't quite work as a sequel to Fallout 2 because staple enemies like the super mutants or the Enclave don't make a lot of sense transported across the country. However, if you view these things as originating in the Capital Wasteland, they work fantastically to create a perilous and exciting sci-fi world. So, really Fallout 3 wants to be the first Fallout game you've ever played. And I kind of envy those for whom this is true. Coming into it, as I did, with the baggage of the rest of the series, I "merely" got sucked in for more than a hundred hours back in 2008 and almost 40 hours in the past couple of weeks.

Maybe it is a classic after all.