Fallout (PC) review"I’ve found Fallout to be enormously irritating. It’s a grotesquely unfriendly game. Its interface is convoluted and confusing. Wandering through the desert early on will almost certainly get you killed by foes you’re totally unequipped to defeat... yet wandering through the desert is the only way to progress. You can complete some fairly menial tasks in order to become strong enough to tackle them, but - well - they’re fairly menial." |
War... war never changes. But games do. And I think I might have done, as well.
Once, I might have bemoaned change. But trudging through the original Fallout, some thirteen years after its release, is an interesting experience. Here we have an inescapably dated roleplaying game, blocky and isometric, featuring basic turn-based combat and FMV cutscenes. It’s relatively unguided, frequently very difficult, and often frustrating. And it isn’t alone, in any sense. Return to almost any ‘90s RPG you’d care to mention, and you’d be able to say the same sort of thing. Many of these games are classics. But, my goodness, I’d never again call them timeless.
I’ve found Fallout to be enormously irritating. It’s a grotesquely unfriendly game. Its interface is convoluted and confusing. Wandering through the desert early on will almost certainly get you killed by foes you’re totally unequipped to defeat... yet wandering through the desert is the only way to progress. You can complete some fairly menial tasks in order to become strong enough to tackle them, but - well - they’re fairly menial. It’s a slow game. The story takes ages to hit its stride. Unless you click on a specific item of interest, even your character ambles along in a sort of stilted, hexagonal shuffle.
I’d be fascinated to see how people received it today, were it to be released as new, even with an updated engine. There’s something that feels fundamentally ancient about Fallout, something that stretches beyond the capabilities of yesterday’s technology. It’s a roleplaying game from an era before roleplaying games merged with other genres, and certainly before they stopped aggressively masking their dice-rolling mechanics. RPGs have changed, and players have changed. I can’t help but look at Fallout, and feel that it helps me to understand why.
Quite reasonably, Fallout gained an enormously dedicated following. It’s one that’s remained strong to this day, and features a whole bunch of people who viciously disliked Bethesda’s new Fallout direction. In its move to full-3D, a first-person perspective and a real-time action element, they said, the franchise had lost its charm. The atmosphere had been drained, the challenge reduced, the subtle dark comedy banished from this post-apocalyptic world.
I hate to be cynical, but I can’t help but feel it’s all a case of those good old pink spectacles. When nostalgia rears its compelling little head, it’s all too easy to start talking nonsense.
What I’m getting at is that if you brush aside the design maturation, Fallout really didn’t change as much as everyone suggested. Go back to the original, and you’re left with a game that feels old, sure, but instantly familiar to anyone who played Bethesda’s update recently.
The game is set, of course, in a nuclear-blasted future infused with 1950s culture. In Fallout’s fiction, after the Second World War, a huge foot of conservatism crushed down on everything other than technology. Computing began to advance at an astonishing rate, but the arts stayed rooted in place. Rock and roll never really took off. Architectural design remained elegant but static.
Then came disaster: a nuclear war. The population flooded underground into huge radiation shelters - the Vaults - where it stayed for generations. Your place of birth, and the only place you’ve ever seen, is Vault 13. But there’s a problem with its water purification system, and there’s only 150 days until there’ll be no drinking water left. And so you head out into the great unknown, topside, where no one you’ve ever known has ever been before.
It’s a great setup - introduced a little too abruptly for comfort and with the sort of exposition you might expect from a ‘90s game, but immediately intriguing. The atmosphere often defies the ancient visuals, too: despite the muddy pixels and not-entirely-brilliant audio quality, Fallout’s Vaults and the wasteland between them feel threatening, foreboding and lonely. Enormous mutated scorpions, or bears, or worse, all roam the dusty planes of this destroyed world, while small human settlements gather in fear of what might be lurking in the darkness. Elsewhere, less morally upright folks take advantage: bandits and raiders attack with selfish purpose. There’s no denying that Fallout paints a vivid - if unpleasant - picture of this worrying world.
In fact, often, the art design works sublimely well with the low-tech engine. Its monotone style, all browns and greys and generally unsettling drabness, would almost lose some of its effectiveness if rendered in the highest tech of the 2010s. That Bethesda would go on to pull off the art style sublimely speaks wonders of their achievements.
One thing Fallout definitely retains over not just Fallout 3 but indeed all of its successors is an absolutely wonderful script. It’s written with conviction, but revels in its subtlety: in its wry jokes, its slightly offbeat style, and its refusal to drop into science-fiction or roleplaying cliché. Marvellously, for an expansive and almost fully-voiced RPG, the acting stays strong throughout. Bethesda could have done to have gone back and taken note of Fallout’s dialogue, certainly.
Yet the prevailing feeling I came away with was that, in pretty much every other way that matters, Bethesda took Fallout’s soul and presented it for a new generation of gamers. And I can’t get behind the idea that this is a bad thing.
It’s funny. Fallout’s is a story of resistance to change in the face of astounding technological breakthrough. I can’t help but feel many of its more conservative fans are akin to those in Fallout’s fiction who created this idealised place for themselves, then angrily rallied against any advancements that society might want to make. And in so many ways, Fallout 3 went on to become representative of its own universe: a place where the tech may have sped on forwards, but ultimately, the soul remained the same as ever.
Fallout was an important game, don’t get me wrong. But aside from the dialogue - which really is better here than in its second full sequel - I can’t think of anything Bethesda did which was noticeably worse. In fact, so many things were altered for the better, and for ease of use. Fallout’s combat is the most irritating kind of turn-based, for example: the sort where tactics seem to play only a small role, and instead it’s entirely a numbers game. You’re given a number of action points, and different attacks or processes deplete them at a different rate. Which would work if the variety were wide enough, or if there were any way to really work the system. As it stands, it’s a game of chance, not skill. And okay, fine, that’s what traditional roleplaying is all about. But only because of restrictions of the form. If the technology’s there to work around the issue, why not make use of that?
And the enemies, who in Fallout - if you’re not levelled up enough - stand as basically impossible obstacles blocking your path, forcing you to take another route to your goal, or artificially slowing you down on this massively important quest of yours. Why not have enemies level with the player, or at least per location, so that even the biggest challenges are surmountable if you put your mind to it?
It’s infuriating. And it’s infuriating because the soul of Fallout, and the sparks of brilliance that introduced the series, are clear for all to see. This is a smart, atmospheric and often forward-thinking RPG, with some great open-ended quests, an imaginative universe, and spectacularly good writing. But it still feels old. That’s fine: it is old. Just please, I beg of you, accept this as fact, and let it grow old gracefully. It was once an absolutely immaculate RPG, but games... games change all the time.
Freelance review by Lewis Denby (December 17, 2011)
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