What was all the fuss about?

This blog week blog will be the last blog under the heading of game related blogs due to the fact that I have some other topic that I would like to talk about within the coming weeks that I have been putting off for sometime, so let’s get started with this week’s blog.

Now before I start I shall go out of my way to give you guy’s and girls a little bit of a back story behind today’s topic and to some reason why it has taken me so long to get round to play this game.

Now if we go back three years ago I had a lot of friends and family members telling me that I should pick up and play this game along with all the downloadable content that had been released for this game so far. Now back then and to this day I still don’t always have the money I would like spend on new games so when I heard that there was going to be a game of the year edition with all the downloadable content in the box I decided to pick up on the cheap. Now it took a few months before I got round to play this game for the first time, it was also the time in which I discovered that it was the worse time to try and play a game as big this with everything that was going on in my life at the time.

After playing the game for about five hours on the first day I discovered that I didn’t really know what I was doing and decided that it would be best for me to place this game back on the shelf until the time came around for me to sit down and play this game. That time came around in the shape of me being ill at the beginning of September and then having time off work only last week which in turn gave me the opportunity to actually play this game. If you have been unable to guess from what I have said so far I will now tell you that the game in question is Fallout 3.

Now the way in which I will go about talking about Fallout 3 is to first talk about now I went about playing this game and then what I like and dislike about the game with my overall thoughts at the end.

Now when I did started to playing I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing and that it took a few hours for me to realise how all the game mechanics worked. Once I understood how they all worked and what I had to do next I ended up running through the whole story very quickly and actually finding out that the story wasn’t as big the world lead me to believe. Upon getting to the last mission I realised that I hadn’t come across many of the side quest or collectables that. Upon realising this I decided that it would be best for me to go and do those parts of the game before completing the main story and moving on to the downloadable content. By the time I completed the whole game, I had spend just over ninety hours playing this game and almost from the forty hour make on found it hard to care on which was around the time that I had gotten to the last mission.

Now I will try and explain why I had found it so hard to go the rest of the distance and some of the dislikes that I encountered. The game was build to be a first person shooter, with a Role-playing game elements set in a post apocalyptic world. To me this sounds good and would fit the type of game that I would like to play but straight away I discovered my first two problems. One of them being that for you to be able to play the game you need to understand how the VATS system that was created to help you conserve ammunition when there isn’t much around. The system is a very good idea but after a few hours of using this system you begin to get bored of the slow motion animation that comes with the system, by the time I reached the forty hours mark the main story had mostly been completed and the system just felt like a chore which in turn leads me into my second problem.

Role-playing games (RPG’s) as a whole have always been big in every way from story to land and to a some point always running into lots of the side quest. I know that a lot of people don’t like do side quests when trying to complete the main story but I just found that the main story was located to a small part of the map and that I didn’t really needed to spend much time exploring the whole map. I do get that some area’s within an RPG should be found when you do your own exploring and that RPG’s can’t be linear because of the type of game that they are but for you to find some of the side quests you have to go to one location that takes you to another.

The other problems that I have with this game come near the end of the main story it’s self and with the downloadable content pack Broken Steel. First up I will start with the parts of the story that I didn’t like, what I mean by this is that throughout the whole story you are made to believe that the Enclave are the bad guys and the Brotherhood of Steel are the good guys but when you arrive at one point in the game when you are given to the choice to do the Enclaves bidding you already told by the story that you shouldn’t follow them. If you do decided to follow them then everything plays out the same as before but the cut scene at the end of the game changed slightly. The thing that I don’t understand is why give you a choice when the story ultimately tells you what to do and doesn’t change much (There will be a blog somewhere down the line where I look at story telling across all genres).

Now that we are talking about the end and choice this next two parts go hand in hand with each other because when you start the last mission the game becomes nothing more than a cake walk and easy which really annoys me. What I am trying to say is that in last mission you can simply stand back and let Flaks (If you have saved him) and Liberty Prime (The Brotherhood of Steels Robot) do all the hard work for you so you can just sit back and watch it all play out. I just feel get the feeling that the last mission should have been a massive cut screen that panned over the city as the Brotherhood and Liberty Prime made its way to Project Purity because even when I tried to stay close and get into the action Liberty Prime or Flaks had all ready killed them and cleared the path of me so I felt like hadn’t really accomplished anything.

The other part for me was you last choice when you do get to Project Purity, you can chose yourself, Flaks or Lyons to active the device. Giving you these choices I don’t have a problem with but how they affect the final cut scene and the start of Broken Steel. If you go in and active the device yourself, you end up survive and you are class as hero and did what your father did but if you send in Lyons or Flaks you are class as a coward. Now that would be true if you sent Lyons in but how does she not survive the radiation blast when you can. Second if you do decided to send in Flaks the super powered non playable character that can survive high levels of radiation into the chamber you are still classed as a coward when the game has given him to you. I just can’t understand how these two things work which leads me nicely into the problems that I encountered with the Broken Steel downloadable content.

Out of all the DLC that this game created the Broken Steel pack was the one and only that was able to give me a headache due to the fact even though I knew nothing about the pack, I already knew how it was going to play as soon as I was told what to happen. As soon as I was being briefed I knew we were going to be finishing of the Enclave and that something was going to happen to Liberty Prime but for I could happen this. The worse part of the pack was only going to show itself once I arrived at the Air Force Base, the DLC started to crash my console every five to ten minutes which by the time that I got around to finishing the mission I was already fed up the whole thing but the problems didn’t stop there. Once finished I decided to sell me stuff that I had collected from this pack but as soon as a fast travelled it crashed my console again, which at that point I decide to leave the game with the two outstanding achievements.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t hate this game or dislike it but those small things do put me off from carrying on and going back to the game later on. But let’s take a moment to talk about what I like about the game because there were large parts of Fallout that I enjoyed.

One of the best parts that I enjoyed was the way in which the main story was constructed, what I mean by this is that you start off looking for your father not knowing why he has ran away and by the end you feel a connected to him. The way in which I would explain this is that I wasn’t too happy with my characters farther to begin with but when I found out his motives I then could understand why he had done what he had done. Another thing that I did like was that the game did at least give you a few choices when it came to doing some of the side quest but on the flip side there weren’t that many.

The part of the game that I did have a lot of fun with once I got the hang of it was the repair system, every time you used your weapon or got hit your weapons and armour would decrease so you need to make sure that you had space in your backpack to make repairs. This then lead to me making sure that I had enough room in my backpack for double the items that I was using. For example I ended up using the Chinese Rifle and the Combat Shotgun a lot throughout the game.

The last part of the game that impressed me the most was the RPG elements of customising your character to how ever you wanted them. Each time you levelled up you would be give points to place into abilities that you wanted to us and after that you where then given the chance to add a special ability which they call perks. By the time I understood how this perk system worked I was always looking ahead trying to figure out what perks I wanted to get next so that I knew what I could spend my current perk point on now.

While playing Fallout there where large parts of the game that I did really enjoy but at the same time I saw a lot of unused potential within the game and to me this was the reason why in the long run I found it hard to carry on. The downloadable content to this game was good but it did suffer the same problems that the main game itself had and I would still recommend this game to others and worn them that the story isn’t that big.

Until next time.