I think it was in Paradise Falls. A girl was coming at me with a sword while wearing a pink dress. I had power suit armor and was blasting her away at point blank range with my minigun as she was hacking away mindlessly. And yet she was doing more damage than I was. That's about when I realized what a dumb f9cking game I was playing.
I just finished this, and I'm not going to bother with the black text. Major spoilers follow.
This game has zero plot, zero story, zero substance. It's not like an open-ended game that seems to have an infinite number of possibilities - this game has nothing close to that. What is the story again? Something about purifying water? It's about as interesting as Indiana Jones final revelation: "The treasure is knowledge! Knowledge is the treasure!" And an evil computer that's taken over an army to eradicate the wastes? And put the trusty ol' recycled FEV in the water supply? That's it? After all this, just a recycled F2 plot? I just careened through the end of the game post-Vault 87 in about 30 minutes or so - what a miserable act 3.
As a shooter, this fails. There are a billion better dumb mindless shooters out there whose game mechanics, graphics engines, and AI are far superior to this. So obviously I'm not playing this for a shooter. There must be something more to it, perhaps some level of intelligence?
Complaints:
1) No towns larger than the starter, Megaton (don't even try to suggest DC is a town) (Things that make you go "huh?" #1)
2) Why do I have to find an unowned bed to keep going back to sleep? Why can't I just [censored] sleep anywhere? And why, when I "wait," doesn't it count?? (Things that make you go "huh?" #2)
3) If this is so open-ended, why can't I kill everyone I feel like? For example, in real life, when that douchey little kid tells me I can't come into the Lamp Light caves, I'd blow his f8cking head off.
4) Why do quests seems SO unfulfilling? Perhaps it's because of the zero sum gain you get out of it. My favorite miserable quest ending is when you find out that Lucy's brother ATE HER FAMILY (Things that make you go "huh?" #3,4,5,6,7) because he's got some sort of psychological condition, and has since joined a vampire clan, except they're not actually vampires, and they're not that bad either once you come to a deal, though it's important to note that they can only guard that town on the bridge when the sun is down, meaning they're pretty much useless (things that make you go "huh?" #8,9,10,11)...After all this, Lucy's final response is: "Holy Christ, my f9cking brother ATE my [censored] family? Holy God, life has lost all meaning!" Just kidding, of course. "Thank you for helping out. You've made a real difference." WHAT????
5) Religious fanatacism that's NEVER fleshed out. Those worshipers only exist in Megaton? Wow, creative. Just like the cults in F1 and F2 that presented a major adversary in addition to the main enemies.
6) Major, major PC version problems. The dumb game crashes all the time.
7) Was anyone really surprised when the president turned out to be a computer? I was waiting for my character to wake up and go "What a horrible nightmare!"
8) Horrible horrible AI. My favorite experience was when the ultimate major huge enormous Super Mutant outside the radio station couldn't figure out how to get me as I shot him from under the platform, and just kept running at me like a runner on a treadmill. His expression was almost one of anguish at having to follow the terrible coding.
9) A main plot that is thoroughly 1st draft. You're game is only as interesting as your antagonist. I have no idea why the Enclave is bad. Oh, sure, if I played F2, I'm fully aware how horrible and xenophobic they are, but in this game, you're basically asked to assume that the guys kidnapping you are bad. It's sort of like in Tomb Raider the movie, when the Illuminati want that bizarre clock-slowing-down device, but it's never explained why it would be bad if they get it. Oh, sure, they're they're Illuminati, and we know from past experience that the Illuminati generally want to do bad things. But is it that difficult to remind us how evil they are? Frankly, the Enclave doesn't seem to bother anyone but me throughout the entire game, and I can be pretty annoying at times.
10) What the hell happened to thinking mutants? Besides Fawkes, the game is devoid of them.
11) Could anything be more mindnumbling boring than the DC run? Ground level, random supermutant attack, enter subway, random ghoul attacks, exit subways, run three blocks, random super mutant attack, down in the subways, random ghoul attacks, up above again, random supermutant attack....REPEAT TIL YOU SNAP GAME DISCS IN HALF.
12) If you're going to make a game without a single likable NPC, can you at least give us the ability to kill them?
13) Zero mystery. There is no mystery in this game whatsoever. You never get hints that something insidious is going down. You don't see the enclaves effects slowly building up across the wastes. Every single boring, mindless shoot-and-loot quest could have been made infinitely more interesting if there had been a connection to some greater whole. If the slavers were afraid of the enclave, for example, and were being hired to round up people for tests. Or if the supermutants were progressively getting more perfect as you get closer to the source. Nope, instead, it's a stationary world where nothing changes. Even the random tidbits on computers were generally boring. Never thought I'd say this, but the computer entries you occasionally read in Doom 3 were insanely more intriguing than anything in F3.
14) I die at the end? Wow, nice and cliched. I don't even fully understand why I ran in and turned on the purifier. I mean, couldn't this wait? Couldn't we just take a breath, kill off every one in the enclave, make sure the water purifier is secure, get a decent radiation suit, and turn the thing on WITHOUT dying? And if this is the case, why couldn't I just send Fawkes in? He owes me one, right? What a dumb, dumb ending.
15) Why is the BoS so ghetto? They feel like a group of stragglers who seem to have slightly better tech than other people. Boring.
Fallout 3 reminds me of a low budget movie that was written around a location. For example, let's say a bunch of students are given a warehouse to shoot in. The movie's OK, and the warehouse looks great, but after a while, you start to realize that the whole reason the movie exists is because of the warehouse. In the same way, the whole reason Fallout 3 exists is the art design. It's like the writers were handed a bunch of amazing conceptual drawings and told to write a story. It's hard to do this, which is why you come up with silly water purifier plots. So much of the game was wasted, from the History and Tech museums, all presidential monuments...
Games should not be written by the art department; it generally results in beautiful vistas and amazing landscapes with zero narrative substance.
This game really killed me. It has nothing to do at this point with it NOT being F1 or F2. Frankly, when the game started up through when I left Megaton, I was actively looking forward to Fallout 4. Screw it. Bethesda did the same thing with Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (beautiful environment, horrible horrible story), and they should be ashamed.
There is NO reason why this game wasn't Half-life 2. Frankly, Doom 3 was a way better sequel. It's sort of like when President Eden (or was it Autumn?) says "The good guys won..." except we all know that by "good," he actually means bad. The bad guys won on this one, and it's pretty depressing.
