Prime Junta
RPGCodex' Little BRO
- Joined
- October 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540
"Friends, Romans, countrymen -- lend me your ear. I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him."
I just finished Fallout last night. I had first played it about five, six years ago, so I really didn't remember much and could approach it pretty much as a fresh game. These are my impressions of how it stands against the games of today, and perhaps give some food for thought in the "will F3 suck" discussion and "I haven't played it, should I?" discussion.
To get the obvious out of the way, yes, it is an awesome game, a true CRPG classic if there ever was one, and yes, if you haven't played it yet, you should beg, borrow, or even steal a copy and start now. I enjoyed it much more than NWN2 and at least as much as S.T.A.L.K.E.R., to name two games I've been playing recently.
Freedom Of Choice... With Consequences
Fallout strikes a perfect balance between free-roaming and directed gameplay. Other than FO2, I don't remember playing any game that does this quite as well. You can really go anywhere and do anything at any time, although some of it will get you killed if you do it too early. Yet, even though it gets tenuous at times, you're always motivated and working towards some greater goal.
Consider the first main quest of the game: the water chip. In any normal RPG, you would have a series of "storyline quests" that bring you closer to the water chip, eventually you have some sort of "boss battle" or its equivalent, and then you get it. Not in Fallout. Here, most people just look at you in a puzzled way when you ask about it, until eventually someone drops an aside in a conversation that gives you a hint on where to look, when you get there, you see evidence of one, and when you finally do get it, by force, cunning, or stealth, you really get a feeling of having done it *yourself* -- not by following a script written by the game writers. The entire game is like that: you're presented with a situation, and it's up to you to decide what to make of it. There is a feeling of complete freedom of choice, but the choices always have consequences, often unintended ones. It's an illusion, of course -- it takes utterly brilliant design and writing to create that feeling in something as necessarily limited as a computer game -- but FO manages it like no other game before or since.
This, in my mind, is the essence of Fallout: the illusion of freedom, choices with consequences, sometimes unintended. Almost everything else is subordinate to it: the brilliant dialog trees that play very differently depending on who you are and how you play it, the communities with fleshed-out characters with their own agendas (all done with those selfsame dialog trees), the myriad side quests (hell, the whole game is one big side quest), the massive selection of guns, ammo, and other, often pointless items, and so on. Situations are there, whether you "have the quest" or not -- walk into the wrong house and some bodyguards will attack you; after the dust settles you may end up with a jewel necklace and a feeling that it all means something although you don't know what (but could perhaps find out, if you look into it).
Just Say No To Isometric...
A'ight, so much for the high praise. Time for some bashing.
I hate the isometric perspective in FO. It means that lots of important stuff that your character would see, you can't. Like, a big ol' bruiser of a chaingun-wielding supermutant just because he happens to be standing next to a front-side wall. Not to mention smaller stuff dropped by these critters as they die, or left there by the game designers. A NWN-style, full-3D isometric perspective would work, where you could rotate the camera according to where you stand. That would still put some significant constraints on the types of environment you can construct, though, so I'm not a huge fan of this type of camera either.
...And Turn-Based Combat
In 1997, well-done real-time combat wasn't easy to do in computer games. There were the Prince of Persias, Microsoft Close Combat was just out, and there were some street fighting games, some with guns, most without. It would certainly have been a pretty tough call to demand that *in addition to* the marvelous role-playing elements, the FO team would have managed a ground-breaking new real-time combat mechanic. So they made the best of what they had, and I don't blame them.
But the combat is still tedious as hell, yes, even speeded up. Your party members are suicidal idiots with automatic weapons, the only maneuver the AI does is the newbie rush, and fighting mobs is a *grind.*
Turn-based, abstract combat can work. Consider chess, for example -- two thousand years old and still fun. However, turn-based games need a strong tactical element to remain interesting. FO doesn't have it beyond a couple of very simple maneuvers you can attempt. To qualify as tactical, combat should include the triad of "pin, flank, and ambush," and ideally different types of pieces (the tank, the sniper, the grenadier, for example).
What's more, tactical combat in computer games works great in real-time. Microsoft Close Combat did it brilliantly around the same time as Fallout, in a style that would have suited the FO environment wonderfully.
So, I'm not one of the people pining for the glory days of turn-based combat. Good riddance, I say, and bring on the real-time stuff -- whether it's first/third-person hero/squad based, or isometric RTS-style. If it's well done, I'll take it.
The Spirit Of Fallout
I would love to see the spirit of Fallout live on. For me, this means that delicate balance between directed and free-form gameplay, the choices that preclude other choices and sometimes have unintended consequences, the fully fleshed-out characters and communities that live through the lively and genuinely branching dialogs, the dark humor, the retro-futuristic graphic design. Take all this and drop it into a fully modern game design that's viscerally fun to play, and I'll be ecstatic.
Will Bethsoft do it? So far, they've been making mostly the right noises, and if they've found the talent to be able to pull it off, I will be mightily impressed. And if they don't, somebody else will, although it won't be called Fallout. Don't mistake the design choices forced by the state of the art at that time with the design choices that truly make it great. Because as great as it is, Fallout is still a 1990's game.
I just finished Fallout last night. I had first played it about five, six years ago, so I really didn't remember much and could approach it pretty much as a fresh game. These are my impressions of how it stands against the games of today, and perhaps give some food for thought in the "will F3 suck" discussion and "I haven't played it, should I?" discussion.
To get the obvious out of the way, yes, it is an awesome game, a true CRPG classic if there ever was one, and yes, if you haven't played it yet, you should beg, borrow, or even steal a copy and start now. I enjoyed it much more than NWN2 and at least as much as S.T.A.L.K.E.R., to name two games I've been playing recently.
Freedom Of Choice... With Consequences
Fallout strikes a perfect balance between free-roaming and directed gameplay. Other than FO2, I don't remember playing any game that does this quite as well. You can really go anywhere and do anything at any time, although some of it will get you killed if you do it too early. Yet, even though it gets tenuous at times, you're always motivated and working towards some greater goal.
Consider the first main quest of the game: the water chip. In any normal RPG, you would have a series of "storyline quests" that bring you closer to the water chip, eventually you have some sort of "boss battle" or its equivalent, and then you get it. Not in Fallout. Here, most people just look at you in a puzzled way when you ask about it, until eventually someone drops an aside in a conversation that gives you a hint on where to look, when you get there, you see evidence of one, and when you finally do get it, by force, cunning, or stealth, you really get a feeling of having done it *yourself* -- not by following a script written by the game writers. The entire game is like that: you're presented with a situation, and it's up to you to decide what to make of it. There is a feeling of complete freedom of choice, but the choices always have consequences, often unintended ones. It's an illusion, of course -- it takes utterly brilliant design and writing to create that feeling in something as necessarily limited as a computer game -- but FO manages it like no other game before or since.
This, in my mind, is the essence of Fallout: the illusion of freedom, choices with consequences, sometimes unintended. Almost everything else is subordinate to it: the brilliant dialog trees that play very differently depending on who you are and how you play it, the communities with fleshed-out characters with their own agendas (all done with those selfsame dialog trees), the myriad side quests (hell, the whole game is one big side quest), the massive selection of guns, ammo, and other, often pointless items, and so on. Situations are there, whether you "have the quest" or not -- walk into the wrong house and some bodyguards will attack you; after the dust settles you may end up with a jewel necklace and a feeling that it all means something although you don't know what (but could perhaps find out, if you look into it).
Just Say No To Isometric...
A'ight, so much for the high praise. Time for some bashing.
I hate the isometric perspective in FO. It means that lots of important stuff that your character would see, you can't. Like, a big ol' bruiser of a chaingun-wielding supermutant just because he happens to be standing next to a front-side wall. Not to mention smaller stuff dropped by these critters as they die, or left there by the game designers. A NWN-style, full-3D isometric perspective would work, where you could rotate the camera according to where you stand. That would still put some significant constraints on the types of environment you can construct, though, so I'm not a huge fan of this type of camera either.
...And Turn-Based Combat
In 1997, well-done real-time combat wasn't easy to do in computer games. There were the Prince of Persias, Microsoft Close Combat was just out, and there were some street fighting games, some with guns, most without. It would certainly have been a pretty tough call to demand that *in addition to* the marvelous role-playing elements, the FO team would have managed a ground-breaking new real-time combat mechanic. So they made the best of what they had, and I don't blame them.
But the combat is still tedious as hell, yes, even speeded up. Your party members are suicidal idiots with automatic weapons, the only maneuver the AI does is the newbie rush, and fighting mobs is a *grind.*
Turn-based, abstract combat can work. Consider chess, for example -- two thousand years old and still fun. However, turn-based games need a strong tactical element to remain interesting. FO doesn't have it beyond a couple of very simple maneuvers you can attempt. To qualify as tactical, combat should include the triad of "pin, flank, and ambush," and ideally different types of pieces (the tank, the sniper, the grenadier, for example).
What's more, tactical combat in computer games works great in real-time. Microsoft Close Combat did it brilliantly around the same time as Fallout, in a style that would have suited the FO environment wonderfully.
So, I'm not one of the people pining for the glory days of turn-based combat. Good riddance, I say, and bring on the real-time stuff -- whether it's first/third-person hero/squad based, or isometric RTS-style. If it's well done, I'll take it.
The Spirit Of Fallout
I would love to see the spirit of Fallout live on. For me, this means that delicate balance between directed and free-form gameplay, the choices that preclude other choices and sometimes have unintended consequences, the fully fleshed-out characters and communities that live through the lively and genuinely branching dialogs, the dark humor, the retro-futuristic graphic design. Take all this and drop it into a fully modern game design that's viscerally fun to play, and I'll be ecstatic.
Will Bethsoft do it? So far, they've been making mostly the right noises, and if they've found the talent to be able to pull it off, I will be mightily impressed. And if they don't, somebody else will, although it won't be called Fallout. Don't mistake the design choices forced by the state of the art at that time with the design choices that truly make it great. Because as great as it is, Fallout is still a 1990's game.
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540