Three Weeks in the Wasteland

So there is a reason for my lag in posts. Two days after my last post a friend gave me Fallout for my birthday. Not the fancy new version from Bethesda, the original from 1997, which despite my claims as a hardcore gamer I had never actually played. For those of you familiar with the game it's no surprise I quickly become obsessed with getting my own set of power armor. It had been a while since I had picked up an older game and actually got into it without my contemporary standards of graphics and audio getting in the way. It's a testament to how engrossing the process of sculpting a virtual identity is, and how much fun having experiences as your creation can be. I was totally hooked, even after getting my power armor at a premature level 9 character.

The Brotherhood of Steel wants you!

The game succeeds on a so many levels and should serve as a model for anyone trying to design a virtual world that feels both fantastic and believable at the same time. The balance of consistency and variety makes the game both rewarding and challenging. Establishing this sort of flow in an RPG, let alone in a turn-based rpg is an impressive feat. If you haven't played it, it's worth experiencing simply to see how much the design has informed later games. I wound up playing until I beat the game (probably a total of 20 hours spent). I know I didn't explore the whole world, or even take on the majority of side quests, but I played enough though to feel like a genuine fan of the game by the time my copy of Fallout 3 arrived via post...

I was a big sucker for Elder Scrolls: Oblivion - despite some short comings in animation and NPC AI the game was genuinely immersive, and proved that hanging out in town talking with relatively lame NPCs is actually a lot of fun, and definitely less taxing than killing orcs or skeleton warlords . When I found out that Bethesda had taken on Fallout 3, I realized how much potential bridging the best elements of the Fallout universe with Bethesda's RPG model and the Gamebryo engine they employ.


The resulting game is exactly that a swirly mix of an Oblivion style world (expansive, dangerous, full of underground dungeons and fun loving towns) and the aesthetic slant of Fallout (1950's paranoia satire, turn based combat, post nuclear wasteland). I'll write a full review when I finish the game of course. For now I'll close with this thought. If you want a quick education in the history of the industry, the Fallout series showcases the evolution video games have undergone in the past decade. More importantly though, the series shows the that underlying design elements, that make an RPG engaging, haven't fundamentally changed. At the heart of both these games is the process of building a virtual self through design and through action.