Let me preface this by stating I’ll only dwelve into the game’s negatives in this particular blog. Everyone else has already covered all the good things it does so why repeat all that.
The way I see it there are three core problems that drags this game down, preventing enjoyment:
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First off, my biggest problem is how drenched the game is with unknowable consequences. Right from the start you’re asked to choose between stats you don’t actually know the importance of and the results are often negative. So I would level up, distribute my points, only to come across a door or a terminal moments later that required slightly higher skills than what I had chosen! One extremely frustrating time I was literally around the corner of a terminal that required two more goddamn points in Science. Had I known I would’ve chosen to spend those points no problem. Fuck you for putting me in that position.
NPCs suffer from the same problem. You can say something to a guy that’ll have a permanent, detrimental, effect on your progress, and there’s nothing you can do to foresee it. But, some would argue, it’s exciting and just like real life! If you take away consequences a game becomes meaningless. And indeed they’re right, consequences are good, I’m not complaining about consequences in principle. My problem is with the specific way Fallout does it, when you can’t possibly know how someone might react. Maybe that guy gets angry if you don’t have 100 bottle caps for him now, so next time he asks for 300. Maybe that girl won’t ever talk to you if you say something a bit rude first time you converse. There are many more examples but I won’t bore you with them, suffice to say you just can’t know beforehand. The result is that anyone you meet becomes this unsettling potential bomb of potentialities you might accidentally close off before you even know it. You might want to save before approaching a new NPC just in case they suddenly start shooting at you (I mean c’mon, seriously, I couldn’t even talk my way out of their aggressiveness!)
Ironically, and tragically, all these random consequences have the opposite and catastrophic result of rendering your choices irrelevant. If you can’t know what’ll happen what difference does one choice make over another? If you help a guy will that accomplish anything or make someone else angry? If you shoot him instead will anyone even notice? Sometimes everyone gets mad over a murder, other times they don’t even notice. Choices can be exciting in real life because of the relentless consistency of life, but Fallout is just a game with gaping holes of inconsistencies. <EARLY-STORY SPOILAR!> I certainly couldn’t save my father, though I shot every threat quickly and efficiently. If he had just opened that goddamn glass door I could’ve taken out the people threatening him in a single VATS encounter, argh, why didn’t he just open it? Why couldn’t I break the glass? What could I have done to make the outcome different? Why do I have to accept that as an immutable facet of the story but still be expected to care what happens if I’m rude to some barkeep? </SPOILER>
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On a more practical note there’s another problem with NPCs, how it feels to talk to them. As in, is it a cool experience, are they made well enough for you to sympathize with their problems? Unfortunately no, it’s not very exciting at all. In fact the NPCs are kinda poorly executed. I was quickly reminded of how cool Mass Effect handled their NPC interactions, with superb lively animations and convincing faces and a simple, natural way of choosing between dialog. Fallout on the other hand is incredibly old school, literally pausing the game during conversations and the NPC just standing there staring at you. It’s just like Oblivion, with no animations beyond the eyes blinking and some poor lip-sync. It’s never actually a dialog at all because you never say a word, all you get are the NPCs monologing to you.
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And finally there are problems with the more action-oriented game play aspects. Like, sneaking quickly becomes rote. You’ll sneak up on enemies over and over in the exact same way, because the AI and the environments are simply too static to allow different outcomes. If an enemy actually gets aggressive all they do is rush at you anyway, it’s not exciting the 50th time. I had just played Far Cry 2 the previous week and I have only come to appreciate its level of combat sophistication all the more compared to what we get in Fallout.
I know RPGs aren’t usually expected to have good combat but Fallout is a first person shooter and constantly asks you to make decisions in real-time, so it has to hold up at least a little bit. And while I like its basic flow of using VATS to soften targets and finishing them off in real time it still quickly becomes a stale repetitive affair. The hackable turrets mix things up nicely but I haven’t come across that many places where they’re used.
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All told I’ve pumped about twelve hours into the game, so obviously I think there’s a lot of exciting and interesting things it does right. It just doesn’t last; the positive experience wears off and exposes an underlying mess. I would contrast this to Far Cry which has fundamentally fun and varied combat mechanics but is burdened with frustrating meta-game mechanics such as respawning outposts and constant vehicle encounters. But in Far Cry I can go off-road to lessen the negative aspects, in Fallout I can’t really avoid interacting with NPCs or skip combat…