I finally began playing Fallout 3 last night. Boy, have I been excited for this one. I played for about two and a half hours -- and I never made it out of Vault 101.
"What's wrong with you, Leigh?" You exclaim, chagrined. Perhaps you gloat like a local bully at my clumsiness, my plodding. "What's taking you so long," you cry? We game writers are supposed to be extra-good at video games, aren't we? Am I living a lie?
Well, for one thing, it took me twenty minutes to decide whether to be a boy or a girl.
This is no exaggeration. Gazing at my father's indistinct face through the blur of new life and amnion, I wrung my hands. I put the controller down and picked up my laptop. I pondered Googling for spoilers, for hand-holding, because before I was locked in I just had to know, just had to decide what elements of play my gender would influence. When I'm choosing "boy" or "girl," what am I really choosing, from a gameplay perspective? And even if it's mechanically irrelevant, are there plot elements that I'd rather appreciate from the standpoint of one or the other?
In certain titles, I'd rather be something close to myself, with all the associated parts, and in others, I feel it's more appropriate from a narrative standpoint -- even when we're just talking my own, imaginary, invented narrative -- to be a male.
"Do you want spoilers?" Said my friend on GChat, who I was "courteously" keeping updated on my first experience with the game.
"No, no," I typed back, I knuckle-bit, wondering things like if I woke up tomorrow morning underground amid a nuclear winter and went into the bathroom, would I want to sit down or stand up?
"It doesn't really affect anything," my friend reassured.
Not really?
At last, though, I decided to be a man -- only to find myself in the throes of paralysis once again when I had to name him. I pushed through, forcing myself to pick quick, and going with "Severin" because I had a Velvet Underground song about sadomasochism stuck in my head. My soft-voiced Dad was so proud at my birth, and here I was feeling like a perv. I resisted the urge to reset.
You can imagine that I put the controller down only a few minutes later when asked to make my first dialog choice -- I don't want to be a wuss, man, but how do you expect me to tell my little friends and family, of humble means, that they threw me a lame birthday party?
The "early childhood" phase of Fallout 3 is so poignant and appealing, if you want it to be, that you are really, really hard pressed to try and "game" it. I want my character to be a bad-ass -- but looking in the eyes of a sweet old lady, guilt-addled and terrified of the later consequences of my actions, hearing my Dad and his friends gently call me "pal," I can't do anything but suck it up and be a sweetie.
"Just be yourself," my friend advised.
But, but, I don't play video games to be myself. I want to be a tough guy, and maybe insulting this lady's gift of a birthday poem is the way to do it -- but how can I, when she's looking at me like that, so hopeful that I will like it?
When taking the exam that would sort me into my ideal career track in the Vault, I received the role of "Shift Supervisor." Because I'm upstanding and responsible?
"Wuss," typed same friend when I told him of my outcome.
So I could tell you that I played Fallout 3 last night, but I spent most of my playtime not playing Fallout 3, and instead being dizzied by the apparent array of options. I wanted to resist thinking of behavioral consequences strictly as game mechanics; I struggled to objectify my character into something "cool," or even "different from myself," even while those around me had the sort of subjective responses toward "me" that made it impossible. I had no problem being a dick in BioShock (although believe you me, I stared breathless at that first Little Sister for a long, long while, too), but these are human beings. The quaint, touching, innocence-evoking '50s nostalgia vibe was not helping, either.
I have written more articles than I can count about the much-lauded "choice in games," but you know? I kind of hate it.
I jest, mostly -- I'm canceling various social plans just to be home with Fallout 3 tonight. That's right, you heard me. But there really does seem to me to be a prevailing conflict taking shape now between characterization and immersion. Game design wants us to believe deeply in our circumstances and the characters in them -- but how can you become anything other than your plain old self when you're confronted with such empathetic, borderline-lifelike people and places?
"A bunch of us got Fallout 3 the first night, and the next day, only two hadn't made it out of the Vault," my friend warned me today.
He added, "We still make fun of 'em."
[Note: Thanks to Stephan and Wolf_Dog who were so sick of the meganekko SVGL banner that they sent me a new one. Sick of SVGL banners? Send me nice ones at leighalexander1 at gmail dot com.]
38 comments:
Just wait until you get further into the game. I restarted four times before settling in on a character I could beat the game with. Now I have three saved game files that I feel guilty about. How could I leave those characters behind?
This is why I had to play Mass Effect multiple times. Knowing I could play as a jerk the next time around made it much easier to commit to one personality at a time.
I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to pick a hairstyle for my female vault-dweller whom I dubbed Amy. But I always always play as good a character as I can when I play these sorts of games, so I didn't have a hard time getting through the beginning.
An interesting role playing experiment that I'll probably do on my next playthrough is to start out good in the vault then slowly turn to the dark side as the ruthlessness and horrors of life out in the wasteland corrupt me. Having the beginning of the game take place during childhood especially makes that a more realistic character arc in my mind.
I find that the gender I've chosen for my character has had more real-life implications than in-game ones. Depressingly, and perhaps tellingly, I keep forgetting that I'm playing as a woman. When I switch perspective or use VATS, I'm often to surprised to see Marie's feminine face and slim figure.
When others have watched me play, they have asked why I'm playing as a woman.
I had similar experiences when I first played Oblivion, or Mass Effect, and definitely with the original Fallout. I don't think it's paralysis per se, but getting the feel of the world before really setting a course.
I think it's something that most conscientious RPG players do. We begin a game and wring our hands at every large decision, from gender to dialogue to stats to equipment, and crawl through the game to feel out how it wants to be played.
Does the game care how I look or what I eat? Will I be punished for killing the people who attacked me first? If I focus on Stat A to the exclusion of Stat B, will the game seem unfair? Do I really enjoy playing Class A or Class B? If I'm friendly to everyone, will the game react in a meaningful way, or are those options just there to tickle my feelgoods?
In most cases, I explore the game for a few hours (or a few levels, or the length of a quest). By that point, I've got a real sense of how I want to play the game, and what sort of character I want to play with that experience. Then I restart and play without concern about whether my decisions are right or mechanically optimal - as long as I'm playing the character I want, whatever decision I make is the right one.
But I still make a lot of backup saves. Y'know, just in case I have a sudden attack of regret... or curiosity.
(Also, glad you're enjoying it so far! Hope you get a chance to see the rest of the world tonight!)
Fred, I am having a fit of giddy that you commented :D
I'm actually torn on how to deal with early RPG decisions.
If I play the game for a few hours to get a feel for what my choices might mean, well, oft times it takes away the magic of the choices. I can see under the hood and there is no narrative drama in my choices because I have already translated them into different gameplay mechanics.
"I will answer this way on this exam because I want a skill point bump in bartering" -- not exactly immersion inducing.
And this is only made worse when I realize that the choices are meaningless and have no affect on either game play or narrative experience. (Fallout 3 is pretty good in this respect.)
Of course, if the game play mechanics are too hidden and indirectly affected by our choices, one will begin to have the sense that the game is arbitrary and that nothing we do matters.
Finding that balance is, I think, the key to a great RPG. As much, or more important, than the narrative.
I'm the opposite of what you describe. I've only played Fallout 1, I'm still playing it,and I'm loving every minute of it. Unlike you, I find having all of those options quite fun and also liberating because when I make a choice I know it might have a big impact on the game, but not on me, so I get to see what happens if I just chose the first thing that I think about doing, unlike IRL.
While playing the game just "go with the flow" and remember that you can always play it all over again... someday.
Why so many hard decisions???
In my case I am a complete RPG virgin in some ways. I really dont like RPG's.
Except Fallout 3.
I play it like Me. I named my own character after me, I made him resemble me...somewhat.
I placed my character skills in what in perceive to be my own strengths and weaknesses...yeah my character's not too bright...sigh, lol
I love playing like this. It felt so incredibly personal. I made decisions the same way I acted when i was a kid. I was nice to my elders, pretended to appreciate my gifts. Fought dirty against the bullies.
I specifically avoided making choices that were unlike my own, even if I knew I would get better results.
Thats what's making this my favorite game and my first RPG :)
-Eddie
ps: Apperently I'd make a good marriage counselor so if you need counseling...
I used to be almost as bad, always worried if I'd miss something if I played a certain way, and totally paranoid about which little bits of information about me the game was recording and would comment on at some future point.
As my free time decreased I found I was less able to think this way as it generally resulted in me never getting anywhere for hours. At some point I stopped worrying so much about what I might be missing or how I could “best” play and just picked character archetype and tried to make all decisions “in-character”. It has lead to some interesting situations that I don’t think I’d have encounter if I was taking my time with every decisions. There’s something about just letting yourself “go with the flow” that feels oddly liberating. Missing things, making mistakes and seeing how it all plays out is what makes role playing games such a fascinating genre.
Truth be told, it took me roughly 2-3 days to leave Vault 101.
Like you, when choices are presented to me in a game I want to know the outcome of every decision to feed my insatiable curiosity. What's probably closer to the truth is that my feelings are more akin to a borderline joygasm, having been given concrete choices that effect my virtual self and the people/society around me.
That said, I made multiple game saves so I could learn how dialogue and choice work in the game. I did this especially because this is my first Western RPG exp.
What can I say? I'm a sucker for a good JRPG... =\
This always happens to me. And when they ask me to name something, man, I can stare at that text box for hours. I also can't bring myself to be bad. Even when I think it'll be cool I start to think of the consequences and then drop the idea completely. The further I got in the game, though, the easier it was for me to make choices. I still save every few seconds like my life depends on it "just in case."
The first character I made was supposed to be an evil bitch but when I stumbled inside Megaton and I walked around to everyone I kinda felt bad for wanting to blow up the town. So I just a new character and made her a good girl.
But the explorer a darker side I also made an evil guy who just goes around doing anything for caps.
Those choices games are a great way to explore different facets of your own personality when you try to get into it.
I tried to play the bad guy but I just couldn't. It felt wrong to be a dick to the people in the vault. Well, except the overseer. He's fuckin' dick if ever I saw one.
Here's the trick that got me through Mass Effect: my first time through, I roleplayed as my wife. That took some of the weight off of trying to decide who "I" was the first time, whether "I" was "me" or some ideal.
For Fallout 3, I suggest asking yourself at every turn: What Would Tom Waits Do?
The longer you spend inside the Vault, the more jaw-dropping it is when you finally emerge. My initial bewildered walk through Springvale made me feel like I literally had spent my entire youth sealed in a vault.
So yeah, you're in for a treat : ]
That is exactly what I do!
I haven't gotten Fallout 3 yet, but it took me almost 2 hours to make my first character in Oblivion. And then I didn't want to make any rash decisions, so I ran around hunting deer for another 2 hours.
I played through Fallout 2 about a month ago as a leadup to Fallout 3 and I must say that the wrangling over character choices is definitely a Fallout thing. There's no dump stats, all are good. There's no dump skills, all are good. There's DEFINITELY things you won't be able to do purely because you don't have the stats / skills.
The liberation I found was to let go an accept there is no perfect choice. Go with you gut and enjoy the ride...
Now that I think about it, making moral and conversational choices didn't really present much of a problem for me. However, when I leveled up and had to choose a perk, I agonized of that every single time. Whether it was a previously available perk, or a brand new one, I found it extremely difficult to choose. Excluding perks you get from certain quests, you are only able to choose 1 perk per level out of something like 60 total perks. While a few were easy to disregard without much thought, almost all of them were genuinely useful and something I wanted. That choice caused me repeated stress throughout my playtime.
2.5 hours to leave the Vault?
It took me ten minutes standing in front of the shelves just to decide whether to get the regular or collector's edition at the store. I even had to walk away and come back.
I left the soft or hardcover game guide decision (all Bethesda games require game guides. They're amazing) for a later date, or I would have never left the store.
If it makes you feel any better, I went through the exact same series of anxieties. I actually played through the vault 101 section twice because I was unsatisfied with my character building choices the first time around.
I always play as females when given the choice, though. As the saying goes, who wants to look at a dude's ass for the next 50 hours of gameplay?
Though, with regards to the gender thing, I realized pretty quickly that, being a bethesda game, all it would mean is that sometimes you'd get an alternate voice-acted pronoun directed at you. Actually though, if you play as a girl, you can get an ability that gives you occasional unique dialogue choices with males, as well as combat bonuses against them. I figure they have something similar for male characters, though...
Hope that doesn't count as a spoiler!
I actually hate choices like this because it feels so unnatural. In real life, we engage in various actions and those actions shape us into the person we are.
But in most RPGs, you have to choose the kind of person you are (either at the start, like you are describing, or as you play by assigning stats) and that shapes the actions we can take.
Perhaps that's why I'm generally not big on RPGs but I am loving Fable 2. It's so much more like real life in this respect.
Oooh, I dig the new banner!
My girlfriend literally spent 5-7 hours creating her character in Oblivion. No joke. Naturally, she's now addicted to Spore :P I let her create my Fallout 3 character, but the generic guy they start you out as already looks like me, so we didn't spend long with that.
I'm warning you: the more you play Fallout 3 the more you're going to want to re-play it to see what else it has to offer.
But luckily for you, you'll have PLENTY of chances to be a bad-ass in the game. So be a little sweety while you're in the vault, because, well, once you're out, you adapt or you die.
War... war never changes... but you do. And enjoy ;)
Luv,
~Savid
p.s. Wow, I don't think I've seen so many responses on your blog so quickly.
These really are excruciating choices because in the back of the mind - even though you know you've got the power to go back and change things later on in another play-through or save - you know you probably won't because it will be such a pain in the ass to get back to where you were.
So you make touch choices and live with the repercussions just as you would in real life. One of the game's best accomplishments is managing to stick you with those feelings of latent regret and self-doubt.
I went ahead and beat the game last night. MY OCD kicks in differently for an RPG like this. I'm intent on that irresolution, it helps to create the illusion of the world Bethesda tried to create. I can't obsess over the choices I'm making because it takes away from them being choices in the first place, so I'm methodical about it. I just beat the game with my first character last night at about 70 hours. I played pretty close to my own personality, which is what I described as a "civil assassin". I wasn't a total asshole, and my karma kept me in the good-to-very good range. I DO have morals...just maybe not ones that hold in tune for the rest of the world.
I just started a new game with a girl these time who will play roughly the same, but a little more evil. I don't have any need to just "play evil" or "play good". It doesn't mean enough to me to see Megaton nuked.
I hated the vault to tell you the honest truth, it was so miserable to me on a number of levels, and it almost made me think the game wasn't for me when I was first starting it out. I also can't spend too much time in the customization screen. It could either take me ten minutes or ten days. Either way, the creation tools just aren't enough to make character whose going to look just the way you want. It's better than Oblivion's but that's not saying much.
This kind of makes me wonder how my ex is playing this game, she couldn't chose black or white to save her damn life...
Keeping multiple saves helps too, it's also a requirement in a game that's so technically buggy.
The vast amount of possibilities almost kept me from playing Fallout 3 too far beyond leaving the vault. My indecisiveness is probably, scratch that, definitely going to force me to play through the game a second time. I feel like my dude, who is just about to hit level 14, is spread too thin. Jack of all trades, master of none. So to combat this, I decided to make a character-planning Excel spreadsheet that allows me to plot out my skills, specials, perks, etc. so that I have a very clear and focused path on how I want to level up my guy. Also, he is going to be evil, since my first one is a saint.
Indecision in Fallout 3 is causing me to severely abuse the 'save game' function.
Almost every time I know I'm likely to face a choice, I stop and save. I realize that I ought to go with the flow and simply face the consequences, but the thought that I'm going to miss out on something cool - some perk, some piece of gear, some really clever bit of dialogue - makes me cling to the security blanket of my saved game.
It's a real problem. I may need to join Indecision Anonymous.
And it's not even really the moral choices that stymie me. I'm playing through first as a goody two-shoes. Next time I'll be ruthless bastard. That's been my pattern since the first KOTOR. Somehow I feel less bad about ruining everyone's lives if I know that, in a parallel universe, I've already saved them all.
I haven't had a chance to play the game yet, but I was flipping through the manual and came across one "Child at Heart" which gives you special dialogue options with children. I know that once I start playing I'll want to rush to get it so that I don't miss a line of unique dialogue. I had the same problem with Planescape: Torment and three playthroughs still haven't assured me that I've found everything and experienced the game fully.
I completely relate to this. I have incredible trouble making these kind of decisions, and (stupid though it is), I find myself wondering over every little detail and its consequences.
Though Wolf_Dog's comment did made feel better - I always play very much like 'myself,' no matter what kind of character I try to create, so why not just put a very similar guy into this situation? Sounds like fun.
I don't have the game yet, but many articles like this one are making me want to get it.
There's this moment in Megaton where you make an on-the-fly decision, and unless you're really, really fast with that V.A.T.S. button, someone turns his back on someone else and gets shot in the back.
When it happened, I asked myself, did I do something wrong? I almost went back and replayed the scene to prevent the character from taking a bullet in the first place, but then I decided to let the story play out. Tough decision for me -- I usually want to save everyone in these games.
I did the experiment sean was talking about. I started out good in the Vault and slowly my character became a scourge of humanity.
Originally I hadn't planned it out that way. I was toying with the idea of going bad, but once I found out how much bad karma you rake in from doing a certain quest I figured the hell with it and played it out like that. Now I am absolutely the worst kind of human being.
It's a lot of fun being a dick to everyone. Well most everyone. You have to be nice to some people to get a quest.
I unequivocally create stylish amazon women whenever I can in games, which I suppose is unusual for an average height male. I guess such characters are unusual in games and I end up being unusual in life, so there you go.
When it comes to making decisions, I can't seem to think on the same track as the developers or general audience since some of my attempts at responding moderately inadvertently result in my character being perceived as an asshole.
"...someone turns his back on someone else and gets shot in the back..."
Well, I did try and it didn´t work: the death you are talking about seems to be scripted from the moment the conversation starts, so no matter how fast you react the other guy is already dead even if no shots are made :(
It's definitely not scripted, I've saved him. It helps if you stand between the two of them. Preferably while shouting "Noooo!!!!"
Good post. Fallout 3 is a great game for making you pause to consider your options - though I can say with certainty that I didn't quite pause as much as you did!
My normal disposition with a game that features gender choice and 3rd person view is to opt for the girl, so that's what I did. It made the sequence just before the test all the more funny when I successfully managed to cripple one of the bullies!
I just play the game and deal with the consequences of my actions. My tagged skills were Science, medicine and Speech, three which I would never have chosen in the first two games. But I went with it, and haven't regretted it for a moment. In fact, I've already had several options open up to me that I wouldn't have had without those tagged skills.
Playing as a woman has it's advantages with the gender specific perks.
New dialogue options is one among them.
Wow what an article, it takes a while to get use to fallout 3, but just like any first person shooter.
Still perfer cod and halo best too first person shooters
Hey check out my article Top 5 Fallout 3 PC Mods
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