Column: 'Diamond in the Rough': The Mutant Behind the Curtain
December 15, 2008 4:00 PM |
['Diamond In The Rough' is a regularly scheduled GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Tom Cross focusing on aspects of games that stand out, for reasons good and bad. This week, Tom explores Fallout 3's strengths and weaknesses.]
Playing Fallout 3 reminds me of many of the difficulties I faced when playing Oblivion, also an open-world RPG by Bethesda, as well as many of the joys. It also makes the deficiencies of that gameplay model increasingly apparent. While Fallout 3 makes some impressive strides, in certain structural aspects it is so backward that it makes other games look revolutionary. Jedi Outcast and The Witcher take an entirely different approach to their worlds—are much less obviously “open”. And yet, their common gameplay and storytelling goals are actually more ambitious and innovative than Fallout’s.
While Fallout 3 meticulously recreates a desolate, expansive landscape that is strangely full of activity and experience, it does so by a very specific and often narrow-minded method. While most reviewers have said that Fallout 3 is one of the most vast, varied and rich games of our time, it is also possible to view it as flat and lacking in the things that actually make a game deep.
Fallout 3 simulates a post-apocalyptic Washington D.C., complete with subway stations, factories, a ruined downtown area, and many other locales to explore. It is consistently impressive, a game that easily surprises me, well beyond the 10 hours plus gameplay mark. It succeeds through its depth and breadth.
It breaks the quest-structure of most RPG’s by introducing random but persuasive and diverting gameplay opportunities in the game’s main transit-space, the blasted wasteland between cities and quest-locations. You’ll be walking along (and you have to spend a lot of time walking), and be presented unobtrusively with what are several obvious opportunities to follow side-paths, whether in the form of quests, monster-killing, loot collection, or just checking out the often-beautiful level design.
I’ll be wandering through the wasteland, aimlessly looking for raiders to kill for ammo, when I’ll stumble across a toxic waste dump. Luckily for me, I have my radiation suit with me. I pop it on, and decide I’ll just wade through the mess, so I can get to what I hope is a ruined town on the other side. Halfway through, a mutated bumblebee attacks me, and amid the hail of gunfire I use to destroy it, I notice a small concrete building near a factory, on a hill nearby. Inside, I find the schematics to a “Railway Gun.” Right on the other side of the toxic dump, I find another bunker, this one containing a stat-boosting bobble head. And this was just from playing for an hour or two this morning.
Everyone says this, but I’m going to have to echo them on this one: I haven’t thought about the main quest in days of playing. Whenever I do think about it, I convince myself that I need to level up before I head into Downtown D.C.
That's Great, But...
In creating these brilliant and unexpected moments—rather, in allowing me to create them—the team behind Fallout 3 has decided to leave by the wayside a very important part of game design: Fallout 3 never tries to make you feel like you yourself are doing the things you are doing onscreen. I would argue that Fallout 3 is a simulator, a brilliant way to accomplish various cool tasks in the wasteland. Other games try to make you feel like you understand or enjoy the goings-on onscreen.
Why is this? Fallout 3 succeeds whenever it tries to present you with the blunt, unimaginative side of its activities: you can kill anything, in tens of different ways, as long as you try hard enough. You can harvest enemies for multiple kinds of items and goods, lay live explosives in their backpacks, cripple their legs with poison, listen to the lost travelogues of a doomed family, discover ancient communication towers, and basically soak up the wilderness around you.
However, what Fallout 3 completely fails to do is make any of these varied experiences feel personal, reliable, or “realistic,” to use a difficult term. I’ve never felt a moment of empathy, understanding, or connection with Fallout 3. I am always oppressively aware of the bounds, possibilities and failures of my world. They stare me in the face, never hidden, disguised or integrated into the fabric of the world. This game flaunts its man behind the curtain, whereas other games try to dress him up or explain him away. Fallout 3 presents me with a boundless, versatile gameplay system, but presents a bounded—or nonexistent—narrative system.
When I play The Witcher, the fiddly bits, the minutiae that so entrance me in Fallout 3, are merely part of what makes me like The Witcher, they are not the be-all and end-all of the game. Instead, what attract me to The Witcher are its core mechanics, and the way in which it depicts my journey through this world. It’s the fidelity with which The Witcher tries to emulate moments of visual, emotional and experiential recognition that I love.
Yes, in The Witcher combat is basically a rhythm game, but every style has different moves, every enemy has different animations. I feel that if I met a Drowner or Alp in the wilderness, I could anticipate how they would look or move. Conversely, if you asked me to describe the motions or feel of a Super-Mutant, I might say something about “big, yellow, orc-like guys.” In Fallout 3, the way one differentiates between experiences is always based upon and predicated by its “gaminess,” that particular element’s very nature as a piece of a fake world. Despite being a rather weird fantasy, The Witcher has the air of reality.
I could make the same distinctions between Outcast and Fallout 3, the same distinctions between what I enjoy in both games. In Outcast, I progress so that I can become a more powerful Jedi, but my rewards are the new ways in which I move and fight. My favorite moments by far are those where I accomplish an especially cool or difficult move in combat. The first time I weakened a Jedi warrior with a saber slash, only to throw him into a pit with the Force, was exciting. I wasn’t thinking of the game as a device meant to provide me with this particular combat experience.
Outcast doesn’t wear its desires and goals conspicuously. I’m not constantly aware that I have just been provided with a new way to deal with enemies. Instead, it’s a process, part of becoming a Jedi. It may be artificial and obvious, but it is not intended to be so. Fallout 3 constantly commits this sin: I understand that it wants me to explore and enjoy its world, but its attempts to reveal itself to me are consistently and blatantly ham-fisted.
To an Outcast player, just as exciting as the various pirouettes and flips that my character expertly performs, are the story and characters. Like Geralt, Kyle Katarn and his plight do nothing but reinforce my belief in his world. Try jumping in Fallout 3, or opening a door, or having a conversation with your father, and tell me that any of it reinforces anything but what you are trying to forget: that what you’re playing is a simulation, and a stilted, painfully mechanical one at that. The people I meet are never people, they’re quest givers, sellers, doctors or enemies.
Enemies and friends alike serve no purpose but to talk to you or attack you. Their lives, such as they are, are completely dictated by your every move. Never do they attempt to trick you into believing in their autonomy or self-sufficiency. When you stumble upon a suspicious underground cult of a “Family” in Fallout 3, you stumble upon a bunch of talking heads: they couldn’t be less like the “Family” they’re supposed to be.
Their existence is such a transparent justification for your exploration and gratification that one has trouble caring for their desires or actions: you know that once you complete their quest arc, they will sit in their tunnels, wandering around and saying the same 3 things over and over to each other.
And Yet It Gives Me All This Stuff to Do
In Fallout 3, it is never the act that excites me, but the overwhelming display of depth and detail. The way one subway station leads me to another, along the way the minor character in the Vampire quest becomes a guy I can sell food to, the way I can constantly upgrade my weapons; these things are my reward. But I would never say that I found Fallout 3 to be a game that made me believe in the genuine tangibility or depth of its fiction.
On the contrary, what is fantastic about Fallout 3 is its ability to create opportunities for me to impress myself, to create my own fiction. I rarely take joy in its art or fluent recreation of human (or other) life, but I am often blindsided by its willingness to give me a ridiculously complete set of my own creative tools. The experience of creating is not like life is, though; the only thing it’s “like,” in fact, is itself—a video game of a very particular kind.
Thus, your appreciation of these two kinds of games stems from what you like more: do you like being provided with an experience to revel in and savor (or rush through), or do you want to be given the tools to create your own experiences?
My argument is not a terribly revolutionary one: Fallout 3, Oblivion, Grand Theft Auto IV, Gothic III and other more freeform games forgo strong narrative and structural boundaries in the favor of player freedom and opportunity. The bountiful variety of their worlds is thought to obviate the need or desire for a world that reacts to my presence and inflicts its will upon me in comprehensible, unobtrusive (upon my sense of immersion) ways.
It’s actually unfair of me to label Fallout 3 lacking in authorial presence or intent. On the contrary, it is a game that in its very openness, freedom and lack of restrictions practically screams out its makers’ intentions.
Perhaps it’s that I’m not as creative as I should be. Some people enjoy taking a more or less blank slate and coloring it in. This is the problem that I had with Dead Space. Despite the fact that its world and plot were very much in line with Outcast’s style of narration and presentation (albeit with cleverly disguised cutscenes in the case of Dead Space), its character presentation and development were more in keeping with a game like Fallout 3. I know that it’s practically a staple now–the silent, barely-seen protagonist–but in some ways it seems like an idea wrongly stolen from old RPGs. We have the ability to flesh out characters as much as, or more than, their expansive surroundings. Why don’t we?
Maybe, in the end, this article is just a companion to my previous entry. In a world where we can depict a ruined, nuclear D.C., or a simulacrum for the ill-fated Sulaco, why must we settle for characters and worlds that makes The Clash of the Titans look fluid and natural? I love choice, and I love expansive worlds that provide me with a multitude of experiences. But more than that, I want people and things that remind me of their real or fictional world approximates, I want a way of moving through and interacting with the world that strikes me as “natural” or “immersive” (problematic words, those, but for me they describe the promises and goals that Fallout 3 leaves unfulfilled).
Again, it comes back to presentation, and the thickness of the wool covering our eyes: I don’t want to see through the deception, even if it means it’s a rather simple or thin deception. I put up with the more unnatural, robotic worlds like GTA IV’s and Fallout 3’s, because I enjoy the opportunities they provide me. People may laud Nico Bellic’s deep and sprawling city, but it’s a city of robots without lives, with talking heads that emerge from their apartments to partake in terrible approximations of socialization. This may be the inevitable consequence of the kind of freedom GTA IV offers, in some cases—could every citizen of Liberty City have a back-story? But that might be a reason to consider the value in the other side of the trade off, the value of more narrative depth. And it might also be a reason to consider cutting down on breadth of simulation, in some cases, for depth of emulation, even if a game has to play fast and loose with the fullness of the gameworld to do it.
Closer to Vizima than to the Capital Wasteland
I don’t necessarily want a brilliantly told story; I don’t need every game to be Mass Effect (a game that offended me to no end with its boring, barren, uninteresting explorable worlds). I just want a little believability, maybe some actual complexity of character (or just character presentation). I’m not talking about Final Fantasy here. 500 plot twists and a guy who could so totally be a triple crosser does not make for a good narrative, or a good character. Likewise, expansiveness and thoroughness of coverage (in the areas of gameplay options especially) do not make for a lived in, convincing world.
Instead, I long for games that go out of their way to trick me when I least expect it, games that go to unusual, “unnecessary” lengths to maintain the illusion of existing in another world. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few examples: NPCs who talk about something besides “gossip” and quests (Oblivion fails in this case, The Witcher succeeds). Or, as in the new Prince of Persia game, main characters that have personalities and odd habits, like any real person. What I really want to do is play a game without having to censor my misgivings and wishes, my better judgment.
Categories: Column: Diamond In The Rough
8 Comments
I find the fact that you've never felt a moment of empathy, understanding, or connection with Fallout 3. There have been plenty of times that I have, but not necessarily through interacting with characters. Instead, it is moments like going through a bombed out neighborhood and finding two skeletons spooning in bed. It made me feel sad that these two people in love had to die. Or, finding a bathtub with a skeleton and a toaster in it. Thoughts of suicide instantly came to me and I felt sad for the person. Going into kids' rooms and seeing their teddy bears in their little beds. Basically, I go into each area and find and look for the little stories there which are subtle and don't come out and grab you. That fact makes them somehow more powerful.
I also feel bad for the badly burned ghouls (the ones that you can converse with) because they are looked upon badly in this new world. Likewise, seeing D.C. destroyed stirs some emotion in me as well.
The game definitely is an emotional one for me and I think that is part of what makes it great.
The Grue | December 15, 2008 6:48 PM
So, you just briefly mentioned having every person in Liberty City having a backstory, right?
That just reminded me of Dwarf Fortress. If you've never heard of it, it's a...well, it's a dwarf fortress simulator/roguelike. And it's extremely difficult to get into. But what I find amusing (and amazing!) is that the world, while randomly generated, has thousands and thousands of years of history, demons, kings, peasants, you name it. Also, every single person (elf, troll, etc.) has a backstory. It logs pretty much everything that has happened to them in, uh, history.
Now, it's not extremely convincing, no, but it proves that it CAN be done. And I think that a big company making a big game should be able to take the concept, and make it usable.
Anyway, that just kind of popped into my head, thought you'd find it interesting.
TheCube | December 15, 2008 11:43 PM
Good points and not so good points, I believe.
I'm just going to voice my opinion that nameless, character-less main characters have always allowed the player to become immersed in the game experience by putting themselves in they main character's shoes, AS MUCH as that player desires to be. That's the whole idea behind The Legend of Zelda's Link; he is the "link" between the player and the gameplay. Now, if you are looking for a character driven game, perhaps you should not look to sandbox games to give you this experience. Isn't the whole idea behind "sandbox gameplay" the idea of it is what your create out of it?
For instance, when I am walking through a ruined building and I find a small room with two skeletons huddled together. There is so much story there in that room while there is so little physical objects to tell it. Yet, you can have an entire narrative in your head from that simple image. When you explore a small bunker and find a small skeleton and a larger one, with toys and empty vodka bottles scattered about, it screams a sad tale of survival in the wasteland. These are the things that are yours for the creating! If you want your narrative written for you so that you don't have to make it up yourself, there are plenty of other games on the market being made for the purpose.
Secondly, I think it would be truly awful to have a huge amount of text dropped on you every time you talked to an unimportant NPC. To quote a writer at Bethesada:
"At Bethesda, we call them "lore bombs" -- you talk to an NPC, and they just drop 50 lines of dialogue on you. That's not the way to tell a story -- even in an RPG, with a lot of text. "
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3775/revitalizing_a_heritage
_the_.php?page=3
I don't care how Jane Doe's mud farm in the middle of nowhere is doing and every other insignificant detail of her life is by talking to her, when I could easily look around her house and possessions and infer the exact same thing WITHOUT the huge text block.
So, my points are thus: It depends on the player what genre of storytelling he/she wants out of a game, and not all games should have the same delivery method of this. Characters have just as much "character" in them through speech AND the environments they have chosen for themselves; that is to say, they have as much depth as what the writers have given them to say and the environment the designers have placed them in.
And one more thing: If you don't think Fallout 3 has rich characters, try the Tenpenny Tower quest and realize the futility of the main character's own actions when one side seeks to destroy the other. And make sure to connect, really connect, with Dashwood.
Jake Romigh | December 16, 2008 7:24 AM
The Witcher really impressed me with how it handled narration and character development. Geralt (main character) is developed through player choice, but he is far from the blank slate that game developers keep going back to. He has a real personality (and maybe not the greatest, but compared to most games, he is DEEP). Unfortunately, I think the voiceless character model is hear to stay, because it is easier to write for. It is not about making a vessel for any player to step into (and be yourself), because that is just not possible if your character does not talk; it is just a holdover that is much easier to write and code for.
The game industry desperately needs to take writing more seriously, though, regardless of approaches (voiceless of otherwise). And this does not mean pages and pages of dialog and text: a real writer knows how to get a lot of info into a little space (with the visuals being what they are now). I want to care about the awesome looking stuff on the screen, and without a coherent/meaningful story and characters I just don't feel like hanging around in these massive game worlds anymore.
Steve | December 16, 2008 7:48 AM
I agree with Jake's points.
I love FO3 and think it's an amazing game. On top of this, and this may sound odd, but my recent reading of 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy makes Fallout 3 a better game. Regardless of what my missions is, the narrative becomes "I have to scavenge in this wasteland regardless of the risk because I have to survive."
brad | December 16, 2008 1:42 PM
Jake: Interesting levels (such as the skeletons in bed etc). Doesn't solve the problem of shallow characters.
Soyweiser | December 18, 2008 4:49 AM
The landscape - DC itself - is the truly great character of Fallout 3. The landscape, the level design, the decor - it all tells a profound and deeply sad story about loss. And it's the most moving story I've encountered in a game in a long, long time.
The other characters you run into along the way are secondary. They serve a purpose, but I would argue that they are secondary to the experience of the world itself.
Also, these two sentences:
"I’ve never felt a moment of empathy, understanding, or connection with Fallout 3. I am always oppressively aware of the bounds, possibilities and failures of my world."
...are contradictory. If you're aware and oppressed, guess what: you've connected with the game on exactly the level it was trying to reach you.
SR | December 19, 2008 5:41 PM
I think the question posed by this post is one thats been salient since the first Ultima; story or openness? And more importantly, how do you write a storyline for a baker in a fantasy world?
The reality is that there is a finite amount of effort that can be poured into a game, and despite what someone mentioned in another post, Bethesda is not actually a "big" developer. To make the kind of indepth world people are talking about here, you would need a team the size of a summer blockbuster movie; the profit model of videogames does not, as of yet, support this. Writing backstory, crafting scripted interactions, takes not only time on the front end (Developing it) but also on the backend (testing it) a fact that has ballooned out the number of bugs and errors in modern games.
This is not to give companies a pass for piss-poor stories, or to excuse blatant errors (such as the autosave crashing in Witcher for instance), but it is to point out that there are realistic limits to what people can expect out of games and the teams behind them. Considering the relative immaturity of the medium compared to other things (such as movies) its amazing that we have what we do.
Sean S. | December 24, 2008 12:40 PM