I finally completed Fallout 3 yesterday. By “completed,” I mean I got the platinum trophy, and I got 100%. Note that the former doesn’t necessarily imply the latter; you don’t need to get all the trophies from the DLC packs (all five of which are included in the Game of the Year Edition) to get the platinum trophy. But you know, I felt this need to really experience the entirety of the game, subplots and miscellaneous quests and all.
It was exhausting, to say the least. It took me well over 100 hours, and that’s just the in-game clock, which doesn’t include all the time I lost from dying and having to reload my last save. To be honest, near the end it was becoming a bit of a slog, just trying to get through the last DLC. Looking back on it now, though, how do I feel?
Well, I have mixed feelings. There is no question that the game is epic in scope. The world is huge and detailed. There’s so many places to explore, each location with detailed environments and tons of things to look through. They’ve packed the game full of side quests, apart from the main storyline, and each one is so detailed, with their own stories, their own unique characters.
The detail doesn’t stop with the environment. The interactions with other characters have so many different possibilities. You can choose to be good or bad, and all these different responses come with different dialogue, and it’s just amazing how you can really change your experience in the world through your choices.
But even with all that, there was something tedious about the whole thing. Looking through desks, drawers, shelves, rubble… there were times when I wish I could just get on with the story. But there’s important items in random places. I spent hours looking through the detailed scenery, which I suppose is more realistic, if you’re trying to make it feel like you’re actually a person in a post-apocalyptic United States looking for a way to survive. I just wish there were a better way to do that, one that didn’t involve rifling through random things for hours.
And then there’s the first-person shooter aspect of it. I know, I’m an idiot for buying a shooter game when I don’t particularly like that type of game. But it’s so often called an RPG, when it’s really mostly a shooter/adventure game with some RPG elements, I thought. So maybe I was just doomed to begin with. I suck at shooters.
There’s also something about these western RPGs where you assume the role of this character that you can customize to your heart’s content. Since you choose your own dialog (and even your appearance), the character you control is basically a projection of yourself in the game. So whatever happens to him/her, it’s hard, at least for me, to have any emotions about it, because, well, it’s just you. Contrast that to most Japanese RPGs, where the character you’re controlling actually is a character, with his/her own personality. You control mechanical things, like their actions in battle, their statistics that define their power, but they take on a life of their own because their actions and reactions in the storyline are written by somebody else. For me personally, I prefer that kind of experience, where I experience someone else’s character. Like reading a book.
So all in all, the game was impressive technically, with this really huge world and amazing detail. I just didn’t have the most enjoyable of experiences, because of some of the tedious aspects of the game that come with its attempt to be incredibly realistic, and the overall genre was perhaps not one that’s for me.