Triumph In Blog

Fallout: A Todd Howard Role-Playing Game

We talked about mood in Fallout, so it stands to reason we should approach Fallout 3 in the same way. In a role-playing game with an enormous, open world, the cultivation of a certain atmosphere is more than essential for “player retention,” rather it’s the entire motivation for the game’s design. Players are wandering around place to place looking for little adventures: how will they feel about that? Fallout made far more than an entertaining fantasy from its meandering, using its appeal as a grand, apocalyptic quest to expose a sad, subconscious reality about the country it depicts.

Fallout 3 is a direct sequel to the original duology of Fallout games, so we naturally expect the same care and quality. Part of this is advertising, yes, and our own sort of meaningless expectations–Fallout 3 is more than free to be its “own game,” and hopefully it will be, or else just pedantically retread old ground. You would call a game Fallout presumably because it depicts a post-apocalypse America that provides some sort of insight into how our fantasies of societal collapse are informed by our current culture. Our obsessions with nostalgia, our fascist impulses towards violence, and our sublimated desire to see our social orders reduced to basic power dynamics: Fallout creates a somber, lonely mood that forces us to contend with nothing but these thoughts. A sequel will hopefully find a way to show us yet another side of our cultural expectations, using new ideas and new imagery to create a new mood that has only a loose obligation to be literally related to the previous games.

What is Fallout 3’s approach, then? According to the creators, it is meant to be “faithful” to the original game in that it aims to create the same sense of dour loneliness. A large, open wasteland that beguiles us into exploring it, only to find something grotesque and challenging within that alienates us from context that we understand. Of course, Mr. Todd Howard is nothing if not consistent: regardless of the abstract goals, he, as a game director, has a very rigid style which he intended for Fallout to conform to. His reasons were various, from modernizing Fallout into a more popular format (first-person shooting) to providing a new perspective that didn’t simply ape the original. It was the writers–particularly lead writer and designer Emil Pagliarulo, veteran of Looking Glass Studios–who wished for the game to retain explicit roots to the original Fallout while also indulging the company attitude toward immersion. Both philosophies inevitably came together to provide a new kind of Fallout game that exported a certain, familiar brand of cynicism into a sprawling, simulative dungeon crawler along the lines of The Elder Scrolls; an easy task considering the 4th Elder Scrolls, Oblivion, was developed partially in parallel with Fallout 3.

The player no longer hauls across a map screen in between running errands at sporadic settlements. The fetishistic simulation aspects of 2000s RPG design now put the player in full, constant control of every second of their traversal across the wasteland in first-person. Random encounters with mutated creatures and Mad Max thugs still exist, but they are placed strategically along roads and in-between minor dungeons which the player can explore as a sort of “break” from staring at the dirt. That sense of loneliness does still exist, but only as long as it takes for another deranged robot to appear from the aether and force the player into a bob-and-weave shootout in real time.

Immediately it seems like the original Fallout’s intent has been diminished, in the sense that the game is far more interested in dungeon crawling and combat than allowing the player time to drink in the surroundings. The world the player moves around in is sufficiently, gray, sad, and inhospitable, but every brief moment in-between swatting at giant flies with a stick is spent looting trash cans for weapon repair materials and drugs. Many people, even at the time, have recognized that the slightly more involved combat system and plethora of weapons and enemies make the game feel more typical of other games at the time. It doesn’t really represent the original Fallout’s commitment to simplified, bespoke gameplay systems (which made way for grandiose commentary about expectations) at first glance. That, and the fact that the game is so large and so gray that the game is simply “boring,” it’s enormous physical size containing a low density of detail. Fallout is a rather brief game which doesn’t allow players the time to settle on too many feelings before seeing the final images of the game’s ending, while Fallout 3 expects long walks and inventory management to keep you on the edge of your seat for 100 hours.

Is this really so simple to explain? The kneejerk reaction may not reflect the actual feelings of a player as the game progresses. Though Fallout may originally have been relatively light on dungeon crawls, it’s worth asking how exactly that game’s mechanics would play out in 3D, were we to transfer them 1 to 1. The sense of distance and unease we get from Fallout’s hauls across the map screen, waiting for random encounters to strike: would interrupting the first-person gameplay sections to show us a loading screen feel equivalent? At the ground level, the perspective we play at and the control we have over our own camera puts us in a different mindset. It feels natural to direct ourselves to our locations and make the trek ourselves with full responsibility for our encounters in real time, much in the same way that it feels natural in the original game to move from checkerboard to checkerboard with the world moving around us. It seems like a stretch, but consider what kind of expectations are built up for the player. Fallout 3 gives us more autonomy and comforts us with the knowledge that we control our fate in this game like we do in any other; then, as the player clears their dungeons, progresses to a point of power, and discovers all the locations they could discover, the cold, empty world and its quaint, copy-pasted people are all they have left to contend with. Beyond the main questline of the game, the world is very detailed and varied in a way that incentivizes exploration and rewards a player’s learned impulses (RPGs are not a new concept in 2008, obviously,) up to the point that the level cap is reached. Then, our desire to progress and stockpile armaments is met only with a bland desert full of spongy end-game monsters. Having to contend with this face to face can sometimes be legitimately frightening and upsetting, and will certainly make a player acutely aware of the ultimate futility of their quest to become a hero once the questing is done and the world is still totally dead. If we have stopped the enclave and returned the wasteland to its sleepy suffering, then what of my treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt–my capital? After all this violence, what did I alienate my being for anyway?

Indeed, before the Broken Steel expansion, the game simply ended and reverted your save once you completed the main questline, which was something every player complained about at the time. Without leaving the player a big, ugly sandbox full of pain and grind to “reward” them for their actions, what is there to learn about said actions? Succinctly, what I’m describing is that Fallout 3 reaches the same abstract analysis of systemic violence as Fallout only from an inverse direction. The player is encouraged early on to seek out their destiny, engaging in war and larceny in order to protect themselves from the obvious threats of a vicious world, only to quell all said threats and realize from atop their throne of looted goods that the world is realistically the exact same as it was when they started. The inevitability of violence that Fallout came to illustrate to the player over time is the starting point for Fallout 3, and the world outside Vault 101 is designed almost entirely to prey on gamers’ known tendency toward power fantasy. Much like the real America in the decade since Fallout, the fictional America inside Fallout 3 has somehow not changed a bit in terms of atomization, mistrust, and bloodlust in the century since the saga of Vault 13. While the game itself can certainly seem a bit facile or unbalanced, the routine of hitting raider camps and flogging the loot for money to buy gear is the exact security necessary to set up the eventual rug-pull on the player. The Todd Howard simulation-oriented design under the hood is proof that even in the most disturbing scenarios, we Americans are made tranquil, complacent, and even fulfilled by slaughter and gore. What may seem very robust in a vacuum can quickly become the simple doldrums Fallout built its original subversion around.

I believe that the gameplay model of Fallout 3 is a mostly successful bijection of Fallout into a new environment. Resigning ourselves to strutting around a tepid, green desert thinking we’re working towards something meaningful is more-or-less the same kind of boring, depressing zen as it was in 1998, only now there are enough new bells and whistles to make us believe that the world is somehow different. I do agree that the first Fallout is more unique and sophisticated, and certainly less bloated in the sense that it requires far fewer resources to make its “point,” as it were. But I believe the feel of Fallout 3 is something that goes underrated in modern analysis. A player may enter a legacy dungeon prepared to gun down hordes of villains, but the swashbuckling adventurer persona in their mind is certainly disrupted by the grotesque visuals, the unpredictable difficulty, the eerie music, and, of course, the eventual dead-silent march back to the entrance. The responsibility of controlling our in-game avatar at all times creates a heightened anxiety as much as it gives us a more direct avenue for player fantasies. Sometimes the game itself sabotages that anxiety by giving us a few too many conveniences, such as the overly generous fast travel system or the hilarious radio system full of racist old lounge music. Yet still, I believe the slow, gnawing sensation that our powers as an RPG hero will eventually have to become so much useless grist is enough to create a fascinating progression as the idiotic story’s lackluster conclusion draws near.

Indeed, it is not any single aspect of the game’s world design or moment-to-moment gameplay that is necessarily “the problem.” The stated goal of providing “entertainment” or comfort with familiar gameplay decisions, such as home-buying in various settlements or forced action sections during the main story–these aren’t unexpected ideas within the Bethesda RPG oeuvre, nor are they totally unthinkable in the classic Fallout games. A lot of the meaning in Fallout 3 is derived from the same underlying fear of entropy that comes with any RPG (hence the existence of “post-game content”,) only in a delightfully specific and cruelly familiar world. But, it has to be addressed how many points thus far have come with the “ignoring the main storyline” caveat. Surely if the world and its gameplay systems are so consistent, and so dead-set on subverting our expectations of progression, the narrative that we begin the game by encountering is designed with the player’s expectations in mind…

…That’s up for quite a lot of debate. The narrative of the game–manifested as a central questline that determines the fate of the two major factions in-game, and the frequency of certain combat encounters in the wasteland–is rather strangely segregated from the rest of the game. Its impact on the player character and the greater world is almost completely transient in terms of actual gameplay, not to mention the fact that its progression is never gated in any way or encouraged to be completed at a certain time within the game. In fact, the player could never complete it, and the game’s world may end up almost exactly the same. Many players have come to pride themselves on having done this over the years, and encourage others to do the same! After the lengthy tutorial segment, the player is simply foisted unto the complete capital wasteland, and given the suggestion of following the narrative path. This path does not bring the player to all areas of the map to aid exploration, does not provide them with any specific tools or items unobtainable outside the quest itself, and there is no permanent faction reputation between the Brotherhood or Enclave that one can build up to influence the story in any way. The story is just that: a story, that you can engage with if you please.

The groove of wasteland marauding the player derives meaning from (the inversion of classic Fallout’s expectations that provides a certain sense of numbness,) is not changed by some offhand dialogue claiming that the water that NPCs theoretically drink is now cleaner than it once was. The player only sees a handful of remarkably short joke quests after the completion of the story (with the Broken Steel expansion only) pertaining to this new water supply, none of which actually provide anything to the player. In fact, even if the player chooses during the story’s quests to side with the enclave (during the player’s single non-hostile interaction with them,) the effect of their moral treachery is simply flavor dialogue on the in-game radio. The large Broken Steel quest itself that gives the player a new weapon and a new dungeon crawl, the kind of quest that would theoretically give this plot a chance to shift some weight onto the world, still pits them and the brotherhood’s big, kick-ass robot against the evil fascist enclave in a dull, FPS shooting gallery.* Choosing to betray the brotherhood again at the end of this quest is the singular time the game’s story directly affects gameplay, making brotherhood soldiers hostile all across the downtown area of the map–a surprisingly small detail considering one must deploy a nuclear weapon in the middle of a populated area to achieve this effect.

This largely constitutes an issue for the game–a significant contradiction. To design a gameplay experience around the expectation of personal freedom and the sad reality that comes with it is certainly an idea with fertile soil. It is more than worthy of Fallout to, as described earlier, tackle a different aspect of the American subconscious by subverting it with complex juxtapositions. Why, then, would you pester the player with a generic, hero’s journey narrative that encourages them to act unabashedly noble and chivalrous, despite the incongruous and amoral world around them (a world which YOU designed, purposefully,) which is mostly unaffected by their involvement in said narrative? And why would you pay for Liam Neeson to be in it?

The story’s meaninglessness in gameplay terms is less insulting, though, than its meaninglessness on its own terms. Consider the primary factions. The enclave is such a cartoonishly evil force, making no real excuses for their genocide and terror, claiming only that they wish to kill every mutant ever and enslave everyone else, and probably kick puppies or steal ice cream from children while they’re at it. The brotherhood, once the deranged, isolationist doomsday preppers from New California, have come to the east coast and suddenly decided to become morally impermeable holy knights, determined to stop the enclave at all costs and protect everybody in the wasteland from raiders. The righteous brotherhood in their shiny gray versus the evil enclave in their angry black: what on earth are we getting out of this? These factions are such streamlined parodies of their former selves that the ethical dilemma between them is simply non-existent. Setting up this kind of hilariously stupid “civil war” could potentially have some intrigue were the player given the freedom to join the enclave; perhaps joining the pointlessly cruel side because you like their costumes better could teach you something about the use of aesthetics in fascist idealism, were there some follow through. But, as established, the player cannot join the enclave in any way that matters, and will end up gunning them all down and blowing up their base at all costs, even when they betray the brotherhood for good!

The brotherhood’s own “outcast” sub-faction is also not followed up with in any narrative sense, despite having their own expansion,* and the player’s conduct in the main story does not have any influence on their activities or rapport. The super mutants, who have returned from the original games, are still present but are given a new, bespoke backstory and serve only as fodder to shoot during quests where we need a break from regular people with guns. To avoid being too tedious, the bigger picture is that the game’s entire approach to the lore of Fallout, to the established world it seems to be built on, ends up being a very poor excuse to implement a very shallow morality system. There must be variables in place to praise or admonish the player at all times based on preconceived judgments of their conduct. A new gameplay system called “Karma,” adapted from the minor mechanic of similar name from classic Fallout, was expanded into an omnipresent moral kiosk, providing notifications to the player after every possible action that they have either done good or done bad. It was not enough that the player have to adjudicate their own actions or simply interact with the large variety of fleshy, intelligent characters in the game to draw their own conclusions.

This was incredibly trendy at the time of the game’s development, but by now many players have recognized the folly of this kind of mechanic. By what actual metric are we being judged? And why are we immersing ourself in this world, in this representation of reality (which in Fallout’s case is closer to home than most games,) just to have the writers, whoever they are, cross their arms and scowl at us? Do we need to be told how to think? It inadvertently drives players towards certain conclusions when every time they choose to do something that the game has cajoled them into doing, a little red popup tells them they are a bastard for it. Why give them so much control if there are certain things you don’t want them to do? It encourages a player to think less about what their real decisions are, and more about what may influence the game’s variables directly. “Oh, that decision gave me negative karma, perhaps if I reload a previous save and try again I can get good karma!” “Maybe on my next playthrough, I will aim for only negative karma to see what it does!” To encourage experimentation with the game’s systems is one thing, but to do so inorganically is another. This is what “organic” means in the case of a dense RPG like Fallout: players should want to experiment with the world they care about and see how it makes them feel, not play with the toy until they see all its features. A lot of the game’s subversion revolves around letting players live out their apocalyptic survivor fantasies, only to see them rapidly become wastes of time. How much sooner will they reach that conclusion with these constant suggestions? How much less of the game’s rich world will they want to interact with?

Building the entire game around these inconsistent and frankly stupid moral choices is what makes Fallout 3 frustrating, and is realistically the best reason for it to be considered inferior to Fallout. The original game was incredibly nuanced, letting players reach their own conclusions and dig themselves into ethical dilemmas with no guardrails. Players came to love a repulsive, repugnant world built completely from scratch because of the feelings it transcribed, and the experiences it spoke to indirectly. How does Fallout 3 actually make use of the unique continuity it spawned from? As we have seen, it treats the lore as an excuse, making existing factions into vehicles for simple “Good A or Evil B” moral choice scenarios that only pan out as lame dialogue changes or the occasional inability to hire a bodyguard. The rock-solid gameplay and the atmosphere around it remains the same start to finish, only using references and images from the actual Fallout lore as padding for the stupid moralizing which only detracts from that gameplay. The lore of Fallout is not sacrosanct, nor is it built up in service of itself as “worldbuilding,” as if the historiography of Fallout is meaningful for any other reason than to draw parallels to reality. Why use it as a flat background for the trendy Bioshock mechanics, or the superfluous story that we don’t even have to play? What difference is there between, say, the super mutants in Fallout 3 and your standard orks in any high fantasy setting? Why reduce these things that contain multitudes into simple tools, and retrofit them into the formula we already know?

Again, subversion of expectations is a lot of Fallout 3’s strength, but in the sense of presentation: why did it need to be a Fallout game? This is what is most confusing about the game in the end. The borrowings from the original games start and almost end at visual design, not only ignoring the original intent and purpose of nearly every detail in Fallout but also going so far as to come up with new designs and new lore ideas that are very fascinating in their own right. The central contradiction of Fallout 3 that makes it feel like it’s “missing something” is as simple as the title. The debts allegedly paid to the original games do nothing but disrupt a system that would evidently rather be serving a far less original, far less provocative game, and yet the confused style we end up with turned out to be incredibly special and memorable. The once-in-vogue karma system is a total failure, and the idea of crowbarring so much filler into the game to keep it afloat, only to then make that filler entirely ignorable, has left a bad taste in players’ mouths for decades. But the far less trendy gameplay systems–the legacy dungeons, the awkward gunplay, the quiet walks through sandblasted suburbs–all go to great effect to make us uneasy about what we want out of a Fallout game anyway!

There is a certain uniqueness to how the game seems to be a patchwork of disparate ideas. Perhaps Fallout 3 is a series of accidents, or perhaps its simply too big for its own good. Whatever the case, it is clearly more dunderheaded than its predecessors, obsessed with railroading players through preachy setpieces it thinks are exciting, but apologizing for its own zeal by allowing them to simply walk away from the railroad. Later, it would be proven pretty thoroughly that a more complete removal of Fallout’s influence would spell even bigger disaster for the quality of the games, in Fallout 4. Fallout 4, a game which no longer even cares to acknowledge the most basic anti-fascism and social commentary of the old games, trading the striking art deco and grotesque horror for cutesy, marketable raygun gothic and quippy television characters. In fact, a few steps beyond Fallout 4 is the Fallout TV show, an even more craven example of a mostly unrelated thing lazily stealing branding from the original games and ignoring its implications beyond simple marketing. Below, we will discuss that a little more.

*Most expansions of Fallout 3 emphasize linear FPS style gameplay through simple environments, as partially successful experiments with making the RPG-oriented engine into something more explicitly an “action game.” Point Lookout and The Pitt offer a bit more freedom but to mixed success, as every large form narrative in the game is designed around the basic, anemic moral binaries that serve the karma system. To discuss each expansion is tedious and a little out of scope, but for amusement I will add that I personally believe Point Lookout is the best-designed of the 5 in that it doesn’t act as a “break” from the main game’s atmosphere. The other expansions are radically different and, in a sense, very “sci-fi,” but point lookout is thoroughly sad and disgusting. It encourages exploration through a hideous, radioactive swamp and uses a morally grey B-movie plot revolving around mad science to keep the nerdy, goofy obsessions hidden underneath a brown, filthy surface. Something about the fun being remanded to secrecy in order to emphasize drug-fueled mutant violence feels like a sufficiently honest Fallout tableau.

Special thanks to Matt K. for editing and consulting on this piece.