PC Game Fun Time

On Thanksgiving, I arrived at my parents’ home a bit earlier than the rest of the family, so I had quite a bit of free time. I used most of it — four hours worth — to read Cormac McCarthy’s excellent post-apocalyptic novel The Road straight through in one go. It narrates a couple of months in the life of a father and son who have survived an unspecified apocalypse, but every description in the book — from bright flashes on the horizon during the incident, to the dusty, sunless world, to the skyscrapers in city centers whose metal frames were melted and then solidified back into torturedshapes — left me believing that this Armageddon was of the decidedly nuclear variety.

Naturally, on the day after Thanksgiving, I started playing Fallout 3, which is (as if you didn’t know by now) set in a post-nuclear-apocalyptic future. I must say, reading The Road was a great thematic introduction to the environment in Fallout 3, even so much as dealing with the some of the same tropes of cannibalism, scarce resources, and morality in a survivalist world that no longer has a place for it. Walking along decrepit ancient highways in the barren Capital Wasteland, with its gloomy skies and shattered landscapes, and picking through the wreckage of a former civilization, I couldn’t help but feel as if I was walking the same road as the main characters in the novel.

I will give The Road more points for being realistic, because just one decade after the apocalypse pretty much everything scavengeable is gone and the only food remaining is the occasional canned good or fellow human. Fallout 3, despite taking place two centuries further out from the apocalypse, is still full of pre-apocalypse goods, such as the bizarrely ubiquitous Nuka-Cola vending machines that still contain product. Oh, and there’s the mutants. But I’ll let this slide — The Road’s intent is to be a good novel, while Fallout 3’s intent is to be a fun game. Some concessions to gameplay are necessary and acceptable.

I’ve only reached level 5 so far (after quite a bit of time put into the game), but my overall impression is very positive. I pretty much agree with Grokmoo’s take on the game, and could potentially see myself playing it as much as he has. The game is superbly put together, and thanks to auto-travel, there’s never a boring moment (I’m looking at you, Far Cry 2). It’s also not too easy — I’ve had to make use of quick load on quite a few occasions — which is something I appreciate because most of the games I’ve played recently I’ve been able to steamroll through without much of a challenge at all.

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Now this will be interesting if it holds up to further scrutiny: A gamer has managed to get his hands on an early copy of Fallout 3, and reports his impressions that it is eerily similar to Oblivion. Fallout 3 was created by Bethesda Software, the same studio responsible for Oblivion, and they heavily reused code from Oblivion in creating Fallout 3 (basically the entire game engine, if reports are to be believed). As a result, Fallout 3 apparently feels a lot like Oblivion, just in a different setting and with (thankfully) different level-up mechanics.

So the real question is — is this a good thing? Now I’m not going to accuse Bethesda of being lazy, because, as a software developer myself, I know how important code reuse is, and if I have a perfectly good engine sitting around, I’m going to adapt it for use with a new task rather than create something new from scratch. And I did play Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls IV a fair amount, and I did like it. So that isn’t automatically a negative on Fallout 3. What’s really at issue here is if you spent a lot of time playing Oblivion to the point that you got bored with it (like Grokmoo did): are the similarities with Fallout 3 going to be a negative? I could see an eerie sense of deja vu developing.

Still, I’m eagerly looking forward to the release of Fallout 3, and I’ll report back here regarding whether I find it disconcertingly similar to Oblivion.