Rann:  Possible spoilers ahoy! Basically, just wanted to share some of the thoughts I’ve had while I’ve been playing Fallout 3, since I know you’re all just dying to hear them.

Rann:  Look, I know it’s a tired gag, but it’s standard blogger shorthand for “This is just something personal I thought about, but I think it’s at least noteworthy enough to possibly start conversation or at least fill some space on the front page, so I’ll just lampshade that it’s quite possibly irrelevant to anyone but me”.

Rann:  First off, the game seems to have a preoccupation with trying to drive home what a hellish, barbaric, dangerous world you’re living in out in the wasteland by constantly referencing the safety, if stagnation, of the Vault you were in. One of the game’s primary theme songs is an old-timey ballad about homesickness, how home is the greatest thing ever, and repeatedly bemoaning “I never should have left the homestead”. When you meet some of your father’s colleagues, they talk about how you following him out into the wasteland would have been the last thing he wanted, that he was trying to keep you safe and alive. Basically, trying to enforce a sense of “Yes, it was rather fascist and dull, but you weren’t going to be eaten by a mole rat or raped to pieces by the Hulk”. Probably as some meta-textual comment on trading freedom for security, and that while it’s not all that great you can see the point of it.

Rann:  The problem is, this requires you to forget that you left the Vault to save your own life. That it wasn’t safe down there, that the Overseer was trying to kill you; those 10mm bullets Vault security were firing at you weren’t exactly set on stun. The guards were not calling “Surrender!”, they were shouting “There s/he is!” and trying to put a bullet between your eyes. This wasn’t a situation you were going to be able to talk out, specifically because the game needed an impetus to get you out the Vault door into their miles of lovingly-rendered wasteland. Your father was being an idiot to leave you there without telling you anything, and he almost got you killed, not saved. So the hammering home of “He just wanted you to be safe and you ruined it!” is almost enough to turn you off a Good Karma game in favor of putting one between his eyes.

I think this is, in part, simply one facet of the larger problem with the game’s approach to story and subtext. The game repeatedly tries to present various issues to the player, and often makes at least some token attempt to present both sides of the issue. The problem is, which side the developers were on is very, very clear.

Rann:  Relax, I’m not actually going to go into the whole political side of it. I’m just talking in broad strokes, mostly. The thing is, this is such an annoying trend of a lot of media. The statement or visible intent is “We’re presenting both sides in an attempt to be fair”, while one side is presented with such weakness and skewed nature that it’s almost more disdainful than just being completely one-sided would have been. A good comparison would be Marvel’s editorial statement that both sides in Civil War were supposed to have valid reasons and have readers be able to side with them, while in actuality the pro-reg side was presented as being the new Nazis, and the only readers that were siding with them were the ones who, y’know, go on image boards and say how cool Nazis are.

It’s giving you a big, cheerful smile to your face while pissing on your shoes. It would have been less annoying without the smile.

Other than that, the only real annoyances are the ones most people have already mentioned. Invisible walls over rubble you you should otherwise be able to scale, everyone around you snapping at you like some sort of criminal if your cursor even passes over something that provides red text. Basically, every last person in the game turns into an asshole at the slightest provocation… well, then again, it is DC, so I guess that’s fairly accurate.

One thing I’ll add that just smacks of the illogical and silly, and again probably reflecting the devs’ own opinions on what’s good and what’s not, is cigarettes. The value of those fucking things should be through the roof. There’s a reason you can trade them for protection in prison… the rarer cigarettes are, the more valuable they are. And they’re clearly a trade good… you can’t stuff them in the Rock-It launcher, you can’t use them for anything I’ve found so far, unless they’re some component in a weapon. But they’re practically worthless, and I say this while playing with a decent Barter skill. Apparently, after the apocalypse, people will drink irradiated water, they’ll eat iguanas, they’ll worship unexploded atomic bombs… but those anti-smoking campaigns really worked!

Now, on to some of the good stuff.

Rann:  Pffft. Yahtzee is just proof that you can bitch about something in an amusing fashion and people will ignore you, but bitch about it really fast with a cheeky British accent and actually admit you’re avoiding saying anything good about what you’re talking about, and you can become an internet idol.

The aforementioned Rock-It Launcher may be the best weapon ever. Sure, it doesn’t work for shit from any kind of distance, and I was actually statted for small guns (and melee, before I realized that melee sucks pretty hard for both damage and for avoiding collateral damage), and it takes up a ton of action points in the auto-attack system.

But, dude… I actually made a raider’s skull explode. By shooting him in the head. WITH A SKULL. That is the most badass thing in the history of badass.

Rann:  Oh, like I care. I destroyed someone’s head with someone else’s head, I don’t care who you are, that’s awesome.

I guess though that does bring me to another bit of a gripe I had. The skill system is just way too huge. It covers everything, and with things like lockpicking and computer hacking, it’s redundant. The actual minigames challenges of hacking and lockpicking get tougher when the lock is tougher… so why the fuck do I have to have a minimum skill in them to even try? I mean, if it was just having the skill and getting to open it, I get that. Or if it was just the minigame, I get that. But to do both, where you have to invest your skill points AND not fuck up the minigame? It’s like a video game designed by the kind of sadistic anal-retentive asshole D&D dungeonmaster that makes you roll to walk across the room to see if you trip and fall on your face. In D&D, you often have to pick one thing to be good at, a couple things to be okay at, and one thing to be bad at. With Fallout 3, you basically have to pick whether to pretty much suck at everything, or be okay at one or two things and really suck shit at everything else. It wouldn’t piss me off so much if seeing “You must have a Science of Fifty” or “You must have a Lockpicking of 100” every five minutes didn’t feel like I was being punished by having half the game denied to me for not minmaxing to the utility stuff and being crap at the combat, which comes up very often and only gets more common the more you level up.

Eh. I’ll cover more later, maybe. I’ve got some stuff that’s more philosophical about the gameworld and less gameplay-related, but I’m really not feeling too good, so I’m gonna wrap this up for now and concentrate on getting through the workday.