Entries tagged with “Fallout” from Things You Don't Care About

(I suppose it would have been more witty to title this Mass Effect: SEXIMULATOR OR ROLE PLAYING PORNOGRAPHY, but that joke has been done to death at this point. :))

A couple weeks ago, the lovely Deidei bought Mass Effect for me as a gift; I'd been wanting to get this for a while, but I'd held off.  Over the last week and a half I've put a lot of time into the game and so far I've been very pleased with what I've seen.  I've beaten the game once in a quick playthrough, much like I did with Fallout 3, and now I'm going back to play through it again.

Similar to what I've done before, this is going to be a two part review; the spoiler-free version will be here and I'll include spoilers behind the cut.

Overall, Mass Effect is an evolution of the previous Bioware RPG, the much-loved Knights of the Old Republic, despite claims that it's some radical new way of storytelling.  It's much more action-oriented than KotOR as well, which I suppose is not surprising since it was very console-oriented in design, even more so than KotOR was.  However, as is usual with Bioware games, it's well-constructed and the storyline is pretty compelling; while I think Fallout 3 did a much better job with it's open-ended, exploration-style gameplay, Mass Effect feels much more like a space action movie where you're the hero.

That being said, it does fall into a lot of the usual traps I've seen in computer RPGs; I think I'll be writing another entry soon on this particular subject, but I'll touch on what I found annoying and unsatisfying with Mass Effect specifically here.  So, similar to my Fallout review, I'm going to highlight the good and bad of the game.

The Good:

• The writing in Mass Effect is excellent.  They've changed the conversation system from KotOR to where you pick the gist of what you want to say rather than the dialogue verbatim.  This allows them to show a bit more interplay between the characters rather than having it sound like a stilted one-way conversation, and I think it keeps you in the game a bit more.  While this does lead to some places where your character could say the same thing even from two (or more) different dialogue choices, but often the intent actually makes a difference.  This kind of subtlety is nice to see actually.  The story, as I'll go into in the spoiler review, is not particularly original, but it is very well-crafted.
  
• There's a fair amount of variation in missions and dialogue based on how you create your character.  Part of the character creation process (which is functionally similar to Fallout 3's, but without the integration into the story that was so interesting in that game) is deciding a few facts about your character's background.  For instance, my first playthrough, my character was someone who had lived in space all her life and had been the sole survivor of an attack on a colony early in her career.  My second playthrough has my character being an Earth native who led a suicide mission in enemy space.  During the course of the game, you will learn various facts about what you did before and talk to people who were involved with it.  You seem to get unique missions based on your background and new solutions for others based on that.  It's nice to see your backstory actually making a difference to the gameplay, and it adds some replay value.
  
• Most of the combat sequences are a lot of fun.  The while the combat system itself is a little clunky and I had some problems getting the hang of it, there's very few places where you feel like you're just fighting some guys because the game decided it was time for it.  It doesn't become too tedious except in a few places, and certainly nothing on the level of the last part of KotOR2.  The cover system, which lets you duck around corners or behind the (many) crates and other pieces of cover, then stick your head out, shoot, and pull back, works pretty well most of the time.  While I haven't really gotten the hang of the many biotic and tech powers available, they do provide a lot of variation in how to tackle combat objectives.
• Background material for the game is very deep and provided in an interesting way; examining certain objects or having certain conversations with various characters add information to your Codex (basically an in-game encyclopedia -- much like the UFOpedia in X-Com).  It's easy to see a lot of work went into developing the backstory for the game, which I always appreciate.  While some of it has some impact on things in the game, sadly a lot of it is just there for flavor; I hope this is built on in later expansions and sequels.
• The music in the game and the cinematics are, for the most part, very cool and definitely in line with the space opera genre.  None of the cinematics are too jarring and they don't pull you out of the game for very long, which is good -- I want to play a game, not watch a movie, after all.  The music is ambient in the right parts and epic in others, which really helps to pull you in.  It's very obviously influenced by space action movies, like Aliens or Star Wars, though the heart of the music is Vangelis' Blade Runner score.
  
• The achievement system in Mass Effect is another boost for replayability.  While some achievements don't really do much other than give you bragging rights, most give you some other kind of bonus.  Making 150 kills with the assault rifle, for instance, lets you take the Assault Rifle skill as a bonus next time you create a character, even if the class you choose does not normally get it.  Beating the game taking more shield damage than actual health damage gets you an achievement that rewards you with 10% more shields every time you play.  These can definitely give you an impetus to replay the game with these new abilities.
  

The Bad:

• Well, first off, it's a console port.  That means that it is going to have some limitations which are a bit annoying.  The biggest one for me right now is that there's a bug that keeps crashing the game every once in a while that seems related to the fact that the game wasn't built to handle higher-end video cards.  Thankfully, a patch for this appears to be in the pipeline, but it is quite frustrating.  Another annoyance is the way to pick conversations is to pick a dialogue option from ring -- excellent if you're using an analogue joystick, but not so good for a mouse, where I often spin past the option I want.
• While the backstory (and the main storyline) are very well done, the world building here falls a little flat, especially compared to Fallout 3.  Like KotOR, the main planets you can visit are represented by 3-4 connected zones no larger than the size of a decent-sized building for the most part.  Planets with thousands or millions of inhabitants in their descriptions only seem to have a few dozen at most.  I realize that creating a fully realized giant colony is probably not a logical demand, but I really wish this was developed more.
  
• The "other" planets, where you get missions to, have maybe one or two very tiny settlements and some scattered items of interest; if you're lucky, they might have one or two indigenous forms of life.  The rest of the planet is a bare expanse of fractal terrain (some of it extremely annoying to maneuver, especially in the Mako).  It would be nice if someone could figure out how to replicate the Starflight planet exploration experience, if only on a smaller scale.  The missions that take you to these planets are relatively straightforward -- usually you end up shooting up a bunch of guys, though to be fair on a lot of them there is a nonviolent solution.  Mass Effect is an action RPG though, so it's hard to complain that characters are generally all-combat based.
  
• Speaking of the Mako, as many other people have talked about, it really is a pain in the butt to drive around, especially on the jagged terrain most of the random planets seem to have in abundance.  It bounces around crazily, even when rolling over what looks like a relatively small obstruction; for an IFV, it feels like it is a somewhat heavy Superball at times.  Once you get the hang of it, it's not too horrible, but it can be really annoying trying to get to some of the more inaccessible points of interest.
• Many of the locations in the game feel very similar; there's not a lot of variation in art style.  Most areas are pretty much the same (especially on the random planets) and filled with ubiquitous crates.  Compared to Fallout 3's lovingly crafted locations, it was pretty disappointing.  I hope that in the sequels, we'll get to visit some more exotic locations, with more varied art schemes -- planets populated by the major alien races would be really neat to see.  Probably the most satisfying "planet," the Citadel, is that way partly because it seems to be much more full of people and you get some magnificent vistas that really show how "big" it is supposed to be, even if it's really about the same size as the other major planets.
  
• One of my biggest complaints with Mass Effect is that there are simply too many items to deal with, and most of them are unnecessary.  For each item of equipment (pistol, assault rifle, light/medium/heavy armor, etc), there's basically a dozen or so different "brands," each with seven or eight different "models."  So, an item in the game is usually named something like "Kessler III."  With the model numbers, the higher a model number is the better that item is in comparison; a Kessler III pistol, for instance, is always better than a Kessler II.  However, the Kessler pistol is generally the crappiest thing you can get -- so a Kessler III pistol might be worse than a Raikou II pistol.  
  
  This is where the confusion creeps in.  Finding out which weapons are the best to use and which to toss out takes practice, and in the mean time you end up cluttering you inventory with a lot of crap that ends up being useless (and going through your inventory to weed stuff out is a pain).  While for some items, there's a real trade off -- one brand might have better accuracy but worse damage, for instance -- that seems to be the exception more than the rule.  I hope for Mass Effect 2 they realize that having a ton of items in and of itself does not make a game better.  This is a trap a lot of games fall into, but Mass Effect seems to do it worse than most.
• The combat system is clunky, or at least a little hard to get the hang of.  My first playthrough was as a soldier, which is probably the most straightforward class -- you don't get many powers that do anything other than make you tougher or able to do more damage with your guns.  My second playthrough has been as the dual tech/soldier class, and it's been a lot tougher.  Not only am I weaker physically, but it can be hard to get the hang of the tech powers; feedback for them is a lot more subtle.  Tech and biotics seem to be targeted like grenades too, rather than powers in KotOR; this means that unlike in KotOR, ducking behind cover can actually protect you from a biotic or tech attack.  Considering that the attacks also take time to reach their target, against fast moving enemies this can be a little frustrating.  Companions seem to run into this problem too; I haven't really done much with directing their attacks myself (most of the time they seem to do a decent job), but I see some of their effects getting stuck on pieces of cover.

That's a long list of things I am disappointed by, but don't get me wrong.  I do think Mass Effect, overall, is a very good game, and for $20 bucks from Steam it's well worth picking up.  I just hope Bioware goes back to the drawing board and works on some of these niggling issues for Mass Effect 2.

A bit of a postscript on the Mass Effect DLC, Bring Down The Sky: basically, BDtS is just an extra planet to explore, and not a heavily developed one; better developed than one of the generic sidequest planets of the original game, but not as fleshed out as any of the main planets.  For free, it's not a bad addition; if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't spend more than a few bucks on it.  It's a nice bonus for people who bought the game, but it's really nothing special.  It's not even really integrated into the game very well -- it's just tacked on.  You never hear about the problem at all unless you go to the new planet.  It would have been nice to have the DLC add a new NPC in the Citadel, or a distress call sent to the Normandy, or a news story to hear on the Citadel elevators, to point you to it.  It also feels a bit unresolved, so I hope there's some more DLC coming to show you what happens later.

If companies really want to extend the life of properties through DLC or episodic content, I think they really need to come up with a better model than most games seem to be doing it currently.  If I could be assured of getting a new DLC level like BDtS every three months, I'd gladly plunk down 10 or 15 bucks a year for a DLC subscription.  If it was longer -- if I basically bought a new planet to the level of the storyline planets -- I would have been willing to pay 5 or 10 bucks for it.  If you want to drive sales of your original title with DLC, you need to make it a bit more regular than once every year and a half and/or you need to make it free (Valve's attitude towards DLC -- especially for Team Fortress 2 and the upcoming Left 4 Dead DLC -- seems to be the way to do that).

Okay now -- on to the spoilerific section.

The first time I went to GenCon, back in 2003, I went to a presentation by a game designer from Interplay who talked about how to break into the game design industry and what he did; during the question and answer period, he was bombarded by questions about Van Buren, the not-so-secret codename for Fallout 3 in development at the time.  He couldn't talk much about it (even though you could tell he sort of wanted to), but it was easy to see the enthusiasm in the room.

Not long after, Interplay abandoned development of Van Buren and sold the rights to Bethesda.  For a lot of people, including me, this was followed by a sense of dread; Bethesda's games, to that point, had a reputation for being very wide open, but pretty shallow in many parts.  Now they were taking over what was one of the most beloved franchises in computer RPGs, something with a reputation not only for having a huge world, but one with an incredible amount of depth.  Trying to fill the late, lamented Black Isle's shoes would have been a tough job for anyone, but Bethesda's games had been very different -- first-person instead of isometric, focused on world-building instead of depth of writing.

Still, as the years wore on, things began to leak out that gave me some hope -- the first panoramas of the crumbling Capitol Building and the aircraft carrier that is Rivet City, the first trailers, Prepare For The Future, and other bits that made me think "hey...these guys might just get it."  I allowed myself to be cautiously optimistic.  I wanted to see what they finally made.

The game came out shortly before I left for Iceland, and so I had to sit through my brother and friends talking about it on IRC while I was busy elsewhere.  Knowing that the game was sitting on my kitchen table did not help relieve the anticipation.  When I finally got home, I didn't waste any time installing the game and jumping into it.  And for the last two weeks, I have poured dozens of hours into the game.  In short, the game is nearly everything I had hoped it would be.  It is not perfect, and the ending falls incredibly flat, but up until that last minute or two, the game fires on all cylinders and it is just that good.  I'm going to take a look at the nonspoiler pros and cons here; I will put spoilers for the plotline behind the cut, so if you want to be surprised by some of the story's twists and turns, just read this front part.

What stands out as good?

• Character creation.  Character creation is done in a way that is a bit like an evolved version of the questionaire you fill out in Jagged Alliance 2 -- in other words, it's integrated into the actual tutorial and gameplay.  You start out designing how you look, as a "DNA projection," and then move on through time to being an infant, where you pick your attributes, then you have your 10th birthday party where you get your Pip-Boy, then your 16th birthday, where you take a very JA2-like test to determine your tag skills.  During each of these stages, you also interact with the other inhabitants of Vault 101, and the way in which you do so can impact events much further into the game.  Then the game fast forwards to when you are 19, and the game really begins.  However, just before you leave the Vault, you have the option to go back and change everything but your appearance, just in case you changed your mind about something.  The game also autosaves at this point, so if you want to start over, you don't have to go through the entire character creation process (unless you want handle some of the stuff in Vault 101 differently).
• The art direction.  Fallout 3 feels like a Fallout game.  The Capital Wasteland feels like a barren wasteland.  Yes, it's mostly brown and dirty colors, but that's how Fallout has been from the start.  Irradiated craters are scattered about the wastes, and crumbling buildings (including a battered Washington Monument) are everywhere, many with the retrofuturistic art deco style that is a hallmark of the Fallout franchise.  The ads you run into in the game, for everything from Nuka-Cola, to Vault-Tec, to Captain Cosmos serials, evoke that style perfectly as well.  And Washington DC locations, while they might not be placed quite right (the world is somewhat compressed), for the most part look like their real-life analogues, down to the ceiling tiles in the Metro stations.  It's not really a surprise, I suppose, when you remember that Bethesda is based, well, in Bethesda, so most of these locations aren't more than 20-30 miles away from their offices -- but it is still good to see.
• The music and sound design.  The ambient music for the game is very similar to the music used in the earlier Fallout games (a bit less guitar than in Fallout 2, though), and the noises for the monsters and other inhabitants of the wastes are good as well (the ant noise is particularly memorable, for some reason), when you can hear them (a bit more on that later).  The in-game radio stations, including the two "big" stations, Enclave Radio and Galaxy News Radio, and the various other beacons and minor stations, are well-done and era-appropriate (GNR, for instance, includes a variety of 40s and 50s tunes, such as The Ink Spots).  The only complaint I can register about them is that they do get a bit repetitive after a while -- even the "news" that GNR talks about, which gives you feedback on how your reputation is going and plot hooks, repeats a bit much after you've been playing the game for hours and hours (but it hardly seems fair to criticize them for not providing dozens of hours of radio content).
• World-building.  Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland feels like a living, breathing world.  It's not just the art and sound design, but the open form of the game world that makes this a strength.  In the previous Fallout games, the world was subdivided into zones; you traveled between them using a separate interface, and if you ran into something along the way, it was basically a random chance and spawned a special randomly-selected "zone" that was basically there for a one-time event (with a few exceptions, where the event would remain there in the game world).  In Fallout 3, the whole game world is continuous, so there's much less of a feeling that everything is on hold until you arrived there.  People come and go during the day and night, and you can watch them through their daily routine.  Trade caravans move between towns on routes that you can wait on and have them run into you (or follow, if you'd like).  People have their own (albeit short and generally shallow) conversations that you can overhear when you're near.  When you run across a super mutant fighting a radscorpion, it doesn't feel like a randomly generated encounter -- it feels like you happened to run into two independent entities that also chanced into each other.  There are tons of little scenes that tell a story, even though it's just a collection of objects.  A wrecked Nuka-Cola truck, overturned outside a town.  A long-abandoned relief camp outside a decrepit police station.  A bathtub with a skeleton and a toaster.  Each one tells you something about what once happened, even if there's no written record (and when you do find written records, it's often heartbreaking to read).  They all feel unique, for the most part -- it doesn't feel like someone said "okay, we have to put something here -- let's spin the wheel and throw down a random shack."  It's very well done, and gives you tons of stuff to explore that has absolutely nothing to do with the main storyline.
  
• VATS.  When I found out Fallout 3 was going to be first-person, I was very apprehensive.  My previous foray into first-person RPGs (Deus Ex) succeeded in frustrating me immensely because it felt like the RPG skills element was making me much worse at the shooter elements than I was used to.  Fallout 3 strikes a much better balance; in non-VATS mode, I don't feel completely ineffective, and my FPS skills seem to translate fairly well, while in VATS mode, my characters skills are an advantage, rather than a detriment.  I never felt like I'd be better off not using VATS.  The things it lets you do -- snipe, destroy weapons, cripple limbs -- are very cool to watch yourself pull off (blowing the grenade up in someone's hand is especially fun).  It's a perfect way to integrate the original Fallout aimed shot system into shooter-style combat.
• Set pieces.  There are a few action sequences (not cinematics) that I really liked.  I'll give more info in the spoiler section of the review, but there are two sequences (probably largely scripted, I'm sure) where you really feel like you're in an epic action movie.
• Kitbashed items.  The weapons that you can build in the game, like the Rock-It Launcher and Railway Rifle, are pretty cool contraptions that are a lot of fun to make and use.  Assembling them out of the junk you find on the road seems very fitting for a post-apocalyptic game where people are just scraping by, and I hope that in the upcoming downloadable content they add more things you can build to the game.

Where does the game fall short?

• Well, by far the most disappointing part is the ending -- even more than the ending of KotOR2, it feels like it was tacked on and railroady in the extreme.  It's only the last two minutes of the game at most, and the sequence up until that point is hilariously awesome -- but the end of the game makes it very hard to really feel happy with how things turned out.  You also don't get the ability, as in previous Fallout games, to keep playing and further explore the world, and the hallmark of the Fallout ending sequence, Ron Perlman's voiceovers telling you what happened in the various locales of the game, is only there in a vague and somewhat unsatisfying form.  However, the fact that there is downloadable content being released which apparently continues the story makes me wonder if that is going to be changed.  We'll see, I guess.  The ending also comes up very quickly; I finished the game without really realizing I was that close.  Vault 87 marks the beginning of the end, and you don't get much of a chance to deviate from the main plot after that point.
  
• The game seems to need some work in balancing the pace of advancement.  The level cap is easily attainable well before getting close to the end, assuming you do even the smallest bit of exploring.  It seems like it would have been better to adjust this so that you don't hit the level cap unless you do more exploring; that would encourage people to have a look around the world a little more, instead of going headlong down the main quest and missing most of the rich world that they've developed, like some people seem to have done (and then complained about how short the game is).
• If you're playing a good karma character, it's rather difficult to get a companion until quite late in the game.  There's one character you can get towards the middle (at a hefty price), but after that there's no way to get one until the last third of the game.  This is in contrast to evil characters, who can pick up an ally in the very first town you visit.  It'd be nice if there was a bit more parity -- after all, in the first two games it was fairly easy to pick up a friend early on, and it's very nice to have one watching your back, though at times they can run off to engage an enemy upstairs or somewhere "close" but not easily accessible.  This can result in them being trapped and killed while you hunt frantically for them.
• I'm not sure I liked the escalation of equipment in the game.  In Fallout 1 and 2, you had to suffer with your 10mm pistol or a double-barrelled shotgun for a while in the game, and getting better armor took even longer.  In Fallout 3, I managed to get a hunting rifle or an assault rifle pretty early on, and didn't have to wait too long to upgrade to combat armor either (thanks to the mercenaries coming after me).  It almost seemed a bit too easy, and once you are running into super mutants you rarely have trouble keeping your weapons in good shape.  Ammunition can be tight -- assuming you don't do much exploring.  Once you find a couple bandit camps or hidden stashes, you won't have too much trouble finding ammo for small guns (assuming you have a couple different kinds on hand, just in case).  I would have liked to feel like I was in trouble a bit more, stuck with pistols and sawed-off shotguns instead of assault rifles and combat shotguns.
• Some of the quests can get a little bugged if you do them out of sequence; for instance, early on you are told about Rivet City, which is in the downtown DC area.  However, if you go there before completing part of the main quest in the middle, you end up breaking one of the set-pieces, forcing you to fight a super-mutant horde all by yourself, among other things!  You can also pick up some quest items before actually getting said quest, and then get dialogue options to ask characters about the quest even before you know to ask them about it, which is a little weird.  These are a relatively minor issue, but can be annoying; my advice would be to not delve into downtown DC until the main quest actually sends you somewhere in there, since that is where most of the problematic quests come up.  There's plenty to explore outside the city anyway.  The worst part about this problem is that you can end up missing out on a ton of good content without even knowing!  I suspect for some people who've played the game and thought it was too short or unfulfilling, this may be their problem.
• Some of the extra dialogue options you get from having high attributes or skills don't seem to make much sense, and while it's nice that you're rewarded for having a high Speech skill in many places, the fact that you can bypass entire parts of the game simply from making a Speech check or having certain perks is a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, you can progress along the quest faster -- on the other hand, you're missing out on some pretty fun game content that way.  This could use a little work later -- Speech checks should give you an advantage, or a new way to finish the quest (a la the final showdown with The Master in Fallout 1), but I don't know how I feel about it basically cutting out an hour of the game.
• Your situational awareness at times is not the best.  While your Perception stat determines how far away enemies (and locations) will pop up on your radar, if they aren't in front of you, you won't see them.  Some of creatures don't seem to make any noise until they are right on top of you (notably Yao-Guai, Giant Radscorpions, and Deathclaws, some of the most dangerous creatures in the game).  This means that you can be charged from behind and not know it until you're getting battered across the ground by giant paws.  At times, I ended up sneaking everywhere, because at least then you get a "[CAUTION]" or "[DANGER]" warning when someone is shooting or coming after you, even if you can't see them.  It'd be nice if you could hear the 700 pound mutant bear running through the grass behind you.  This is one of the reasons I liked having a companion, because Dogmeat will growl or your other friends will say they hear something when there's hostiles near, giving you a chance to look around.
  

There's some continuity issues with the rest of the Fallout series too, but I was so absorbed into the game I didn't really care that much.  It does, as someone on RPGnet pointed out, feel like the Great War was much less than 200 years ago; on the other hand, I liked Fallout's setting much more than Fallout 2's setting, largely because it was much more bleak -- for that reason, Fallout 3's tone sits right with me even if it might not be completely in line with what you might expect after 200 years.

For all its flaws, Fallout 3 is probably one of the best games I have played this year -- it is an impressive feat of world-building and its plot, while it may not be the best ever, is strong enough to carry the weight of the expectations that have been placed on this title.  You will feel like you have been dropped in a post-apocalyptic wasteland when you play and leave the real world behind -- it's one of those titles where you will look up at the clock and wonder where the time went.  And really, that is all you can ask for from a game like this.  Just do yourself a favor and don't rush through the main plot; take your time and explore, as the game is meant to be played; once you enter Vault 87, you sort of hit the point of no return -- so keep that in mind.

My spoiler-inclusive review of the plot is behind the cut, so if you want to know more about that, keep reading. 

...I thought it might be neat to mention a website that a friend of mine so helpfully pointed out today where you can get the first two Fallout games for cheap (six bucks a pop).  Good Old Games is a pretty spiffy new place where you can buy old games for cheap, download, and install them with no launcher, no DRM, and they work on XP and Vista (which was a problem for the old Fallout games).  It looks like they are just rolling out, and their catalog is a little limited so far, but if it catches on, I can definitely see myself spending quite a bit collecting some old games this way.  One of the best parts is that, like with Steam, you can always go back and download the game again if you have to reinstall or if you want to put it on another machine of yours (still with no DRM).

And while the catalog is small, the fact that they have the three older Fallout titles (1, 2, and Tactics), as well as the Freespace games (the best space sims ever) is a good sign.  If you have never played those games, you should definitely look into grabbing them.