Virtuality 2: Fallout 3

Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?

William Gibson, Disneyland With The Death Penalty

To my surprise and disappointment, I've just reached the conclusion of Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3, the current version of the Fallout game franchise.  Based on my reactions, you might think that I didn't enjoy the game, but my surprise and disappointment were at the fact that the plotline of the game had reached its climax - in my mind, I was far from finished playing. 

In the first post in this series, I mentioned virtual realities and the fact that millions of people now spend a lot of time immersed in some digitally manufactured world or another.  For the last couple of months, I've been one of those people as I crept through the wreckage of Washington DC in 2277, and wandered the blasted landscape that surrounds it.

Fallout 3 is set in a future that results from an alternative America, an America that seemed to have stopped developing culturally in the middle of the last century.  There's a 50's aesthetic to everything: buildings, weapons, robots, even hairdos.  It's especially noticeable in the wrecked cars that dot the landscape, which explode if shot, leaving behind a legacy of radiation - apparently they're powered by uranium rather than premium unleaded.  This design aesthetic is matched somewhat by the cultural feel of the game, with its rampant anti-communist sentiments and reliance on justice from the end of the gun.

In this world, it's a war in 2077 with the Chinese communists which has led to the downfall of society. The player controls a character who has been raised in a fallout shelter, Vault 101, but who leaves at the age of 19 to follow his father out into the unknown radioactive world outside.

And that was the part of the game that impressed me the most, the almost endless blasted wasteland that the area around Washington has become.

For any readers who are unfamiliar with the basic first-person shooter paradigm, the action generally takes place in what is generally referred to as a dungeon-based system, derived from the venerable Dungeons and Dragons tradition. It's basically rooms - admittedly, rooms of differing sizes and dimensions, with stairs or hills or elevators or windows or walls, but essentially rooms.  You walk in HERE, and you exit THERE.  Games like Halo have expanded the landscape, but essentially one follows the path laid out by the designers.  You kill everything in the way, find the exit, and you're on to the next set of rooms, never to go back.

Fallout 3 has its share of "dungeons" in the form of caverns, subways and buildings, but they're all part of a huge area known as the Capitol Wasteland.  The Wasteland is a vast, sprawling interface between locations, marked by burned buildings, collapsed freeways, pools of toxic radioactive waste, giants scorpions, and the occasional distant thud of a boobytrap explosive being triggered.

The scenery is marvelous.  The game takes place over time, and so the player sees the Wasteland at all times of the day, from dawn to midnight, and the lighting effects match all of these time perfectly.  If you come over the crest of a hill, the sun will get in your eyes and blind you, and the night time landscape is a flat mix of bluish grey that effectively conceals all sorts of dangers.  Dustdevils swirl over the shattered pavement, and the wind stirs the dried grass as you walk through it.  Streets and buildings are littered with the detritus of the American Way of Life:  lawnmowers, cups, empty bottles, and a thousand and one other items to be salvaged and sold for the currency of choice - bottle caps.

It's not an endless landscape, one does eventually discover the borders, and a critical eye will spot that there is a library of stock elements that sometimes repeat - note the identical mirror-image trees to the left in the picture above.  But even with its limitations, the Wasteland is an astonishing creation in terms of size, variation, and unpredictability.  Roving bands of mutants or raiders can appear at any time, and it's never possible to return to a location without the possibility that the enemies that were disposed of during your last visit have been replaced by new and different challenges.

The other element of the game that really set it apart for me is the moral compass that it presents. From the very early stages in Vault 101, every action and interaction, every choice and decision, has its consequences in terms of karma.  Are you polite or rude at your 10th birthday party?  Do you speak with Old Lady Palmer or ignore her to harass people for gifts?

This approach continues when you enter the outside world and are faced with more significant moral challenges. Most empty houses are unowned, and as such the possessions therein are up for grabs.  Enter someone's home or business, and you can still take things, but your karma diminishes and you may be shot by someone - or you can shoot them and take whatever you want.  If you find a bound captive after killing some cannibal mutants, do you free them or ignore them?

Apparently I'm quite a good person at heart.  I killed hundreds of people, but they were all evil.  I looted scores of houses and buildings, but they were all empty and ownerless.  I freed slaves, refused to become a hired killer, and gave water to the beggar outside of Megaton, the town built around an unexploded atomic bomb - which I defused to save the inhabitants from radiation poisoning instead of blowing it all up for 500 caps.

Having finished the game with a ranking of "Saviour of the Wastelands", I'm a bit tempted to go back and play it again as an absolute bastard.  If nothing else, I'd like to find out what the consequences are - it would sadden me deeply to discover that it really doesn't matter.

- Sid