I’ve been a longtime Fallout fan. I must have played through each of the two Fallout games half a dozen times. The first Fallout game has been one of the defining gaming experiences for me, only surpassed by Everquest.
Recently, Fallout fan-site Now Mutants Allowed managed to get their hands on an early tech demo of Black Isle’s cancelled Fallout 3 (project name “Van Buren”). It’s a glimpse at what could have been. NMA produced a short video of it:
An isometric 3D Fallout made by the guys who gave us Fallout 1 & 2. That’s what I wanted. Instead we’ll get a Fallout 3 done by Bethesda, the company that brought us Oblivion and Morrowind, two dumbed-down turds posing as CRPGs.
I don’t think Bethesda has what it takes to make a good Fallout game that is true to the spirit of its predecessors. Bethesda are the Jerry Bruckheimers of RPG game developement: all flash but little substance. Bethesda couldn’t even produce a good RPG if someone put guns to their heads. Their track record speaks for itself.
Fallout has always been about meaningful choices and consequences, an element that is almost completely absent from Morrowind and especially Oblivion. It doesn’t matter what you do and how you do it. Nothing has an impact on anything. There simply is no choice in these games. There is exactly one way to solve a quest and that’s it.
Fallout has branching conversation trees that produce different outcomes. In Oblivion, dialogue serves no other purpose than triggering lines that provide quest information. In Fallout, the choices you make during character creation and how you develop you character has an impact on how you approach the game and solve problems. In Oblivion there are no meaningful character choices, all that changes is the way you kill.
Your actions and the sides you take affect not only the enviroment but also the ending you get in Fallout. In Oblivion, nothing matters. You can close three Oblivion Gates, no one will ever take notice. You can become the Arena Champion, no one will give a fuck. You cannot choose to betray anyone, you cannot sell out the Thieves Guild to the guards, you cannot do anything that could possibly produce different outcomes. Bethesda’s games are sandboxes with bad game mechanics and a bunch of linear quests thrown in.
Another thing that doesn’t bode well for Fallout 3 is the fact that the game is going to be cross-platform, which means that gameplay will be tailored to consoles. Don’t get me wrong, I think consoles are great – for sports games, car racing games and shitty emo Japs RPGs with tons of teen angst conveyed by hour-long cutscenes. For more sophisticated games they suck.
For PC users that means that Fallout 3 will have a crappy UI and bad controls. Plus, the huge font sizes needed to make things readable on TV screens pretty much rule out complex branching conversation trees, but I guess such an “old school” feature isn’t “next-gen” enough for Bethesda anyway.
But there’s more evidence that Bethesda will rape Fallout. Listen to the FO3 game music sample on their teaser site. Yes, it’s another version of Jeremy Soule’s usual pompous and overwrought fantasy dreck. This epic-as-fuck orchestra shit just isn’t Fallout. Hey, Jeremy, it’s F-A-L-L-O-U-T, not Guild Wars, not Harry Potter, not TES V: Noobsauce. Did Bethesda think at all before contracting Jeremy Soule to churn out Generic Fantasy Soundtrack #63?
Fallout’s minimalistic soundtrack set the game’s mood. Seperated from the games, the soundtracks of Fallout 1 & 2 are pretty much unlistenable. There isn’t a lot that qualifies as “music”. There are some tunes but most of it is really just strange noises. It cannot be overstated how much of an impact the soundtrack has on the general mood and feel of the two original Fallout games. Clearly, Bethesda doesn’t understand this.
And then there is Bethesda’s big announcement that Liam Neeson will be featured as the voice of the player’s father who “will appear prominently throughout the game” in a role that “was written with Liam in mind, and provides the dramatic tone for the entire game”. Ok, so the protagonist’s father will “apear prominently throughout the game”. Gone are the day of being a loner who picks his allies and appears out of nowhere to leave his mark on the world. We now have to deal with a father figure. Woohoo.
There’s nothing wrong with Liam Neeson but does anyone actually give a shit? The role was “written with Liam in mind”? What does that even mean? His voice? His personality? A stereotype of who Bethesda’s writers think Liam Neeson is, based on his movies? It makes no fucking sense.
Wouldn’t the money be better spent on a larger number of professional voice actors? I guess it’s all about the hype that celebrity voice actors generate on game websites, not about making good games. Oblivion proves that you can produce shit and sell three million units if you have the right combination of graphical bling and Captain Picard spouting a bunch of lines.
I know that Bethesda’s Fallout 3 going to be a fucked-up travesty. A travesty that will rake in 90% ratings from retard reviewers who wouldn’t know a good CRPG if it crawled up their ass and died. It will be hailed as a “next-gen” reimagination of an “old school classic”, i.e. a game that is so streamlined and devoid of choice, meaningful dialogue and good storytelling that even Xbox Tards and Playstation Kiddies can enjoy it. It’s gonna be the greatest act of game design faggotry ever since Shadowrun bastardized the Cyberpunk genre by introducing Orcs, Dwarves, Dragons, Fireballs and fucking Elves.
That leaves the Fallout MMORPG, the game on which the dreams of Herve Caen, CEO of Interplay, rest. Caen plans on somehow convincing investors to pour $75 million into his defunct company so he can build up a design team from the scratch to produce a Fallout MMMORPG by mid-2010 that will gain 1 million subscribers. I’m not kidding. Needles to say that I have very little confidence in whatever this guys does. I don’t think the Fallout MMO will ever see the light of day, and if it does, it will suck.
All there’s left is hoping that Fallout 3 fails so badly that Bethesda will sell off the Fallout IP to Obsidian or some other company that has the talent to produce a good Fallout game. Slim chance for that, though. If Oblivion sold 3 million copies, Oblivion With Guns probably won’t sell much less.