So: Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It's pretty rare to have such an apples-to-apples comparison between games and their developers. Fallout 3 was released in 2008 and developed by Bethesda Game Studios; Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, developed by Obsidian Entertainment. They both take place in the same in-game universe, they were both developed using the same engine, and they both ostensibly share the exact same underlying gameplay mechanics and genre. These are games from two of the biggest western RPG game studios around (Bioware's also there, of course), but although both studios sort of share the same philosophy of providing freedom, choice, "open-worldness," and player-driven gameplay, how that ethos manifests in their actual games is actually pretty different.
There's also this divide between the players, and it isn't just that people slightly prefer one over the other; the emotions run higher than that*. Fallout 3 is, I think, going to come to be one of the defining games of the Xbox 360/PS3 era, and for the generation growing up on those consoles, it's going to define what video games ARE, pretty much. And a lot of those people played New Vegas afterwards and found it boring, and restrictive; they thought it didn't measure up. And then there's the people that consider New Vegas one of the best RPGs of the last couple years, who detest Fallout 3 and that hate everything Bethesda did to the franchise (if they played 1 or 2 first). Sure, there's a middle ground, but there's also a lot of people that feel very strongly about this. So what makes Bethesda's Fallout so different from Obsidian's? One of the biggest, I think? Bethesda's games get better as you move away from their games' cities and people, but those are the areas where Obsidian's games excel the most.
That isn't something I think just based off of these two games, mind you. The only other Bethesda developed game I've played is Skyrim, and seeing Bethesda's stabs at truly populated cities makes it clear that it isn't just a one off thing. As for Obsidian, I've never played another Obsidian game, although I'm partly ascribing Fallout 1 and 2 and Planescape: Torment to them, since some of the key creative leads from the companies responsible for those games, developer Black Isle Studios and publisher Interplay Entertainment, also play prominent roles in Obsidian Studios (Chris Avellone, Feargus Urquhart, Chris Jones, more). After publisher Bethesda Softworks bought the Fallout license from Interplay, I think it's interesting to remember what aspects emphasized when doing their first presentations they made to games press and the public of their take on the Fallout series.
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| Fallout 3 - Megaton |
What makes Fallout Fallout, and what drew Bethesda to the franchise? Here's a quote from an article from IGN, " Pre-E3 2007: Fallout 3 First Look" written by Steve Butts:
"The things that initially attracted Bethesda to the Fallout franchise are the same things that make the Elder Scrolls games so appealing. Both allow players to create virtually any type of character they want and then explore a large and detailed world with a nearly limitless degree of freedom. Though you have a tremendous range of choices, your actions also matter a great deal in both series and the worlds will respond to your choices in very realistic ways."
- http://ca.ign.com/articles/2007/07/01/pre-e3-2007-fallout-3-first-look
Megaton works well as a glimpse and a promise of what the rest of the game holds, and as a respite from the unforgiving, lonely wasteland that you've seen a bit of already. It's a ramshackle town that, despite being small, is easy to get lost in the first couple times you try to navigate, but that emphasizes its own haphazard state. There are enough people there to make it feel lived in, and there's a couple other quests there to make you want to spend some time there. The choice whether to blow it up tells the player that they have the agency, the power to affect the world. But before we go further, let's go back to the beginning.
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| Fallout 3: Your first glimpse of the Capital Wasteland |
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| Fallout: New Vegas - Goodsprings |
I generally never play evil in the first playthrough of games with moral choice, so I disarmed the bomb in Megaton. I did a couple other quests there too, then headed off. Someone in Megaton tells you to go to Galaxy News Radio, which is within the heart of DC. The setting changes, as you move from the abandoned suburbs to the crumbled city interior. Raiders and mutants and other dangers lurk everywhere. Bethesda does a great job designing dense, broken environments; they block off areas with fallen buildings and rubble so you can't just go from point A to point B, but they do it in a way that still seems semi-organic and logical. To get to the GNR Building, I headed through the subway system, which again throws a different environment at you, with feral ghouls to fend off. Emerging into the sunlight, I spotted a pack of armed super mutants that meant business. But I wanted to see what was out there. Low on ammo, I carefully picked off their numbers one by one, until I was left with only grenades. I tried to time them to take out a bunch of them at a time, but that didn't work, leaving several angry ones coming after me. Vowing to return, I scurried back into the tunnels. That was one of the most intense, memorable moments I've ever played in a game.
In New Vegas, heading out of Goodsprings, I followed the highway. I came across some towns along the way, I'm sure, and there's stuff to do there, too, but I don't remember the specifics. New Vegas isn't about the wasteland, isn't about exploration, at least not in the same way Fallout 3 is. The desert is mostly empty, and there's a major highway system that will take you past most of the major locations in the game. You can wander off the beaten path, but you're not really meant to. You want to be in the cities and towns, meeting folks and doing quests. I don't remember much of this part of the game, in the small settlements with their small problems. I remember a prison, and a town where you could affect who runs the place (I recall choosing a sheriff-bot). But there isn't really a choice of where to go here; you can ignore the people and the quests, but most people playing the game is going to go through the exact same towns you will; Obsidian puts impassable mountains and high-leveled monsters to try direct you where they want you to go.
Meanwhile, in Fallout 3, going to Galaxy News Radio gives you another quest to fix a satellite dish. The DC locale gives Bethesda the opportunity to use some major historical landmarks in their game, and the GNR quest takes you to the middle of it. Here, amidst the various museums and monuments that encompass the densest section of Fallout 3, I found a treasure hunter named Sydney, my favorite character in the game. She's a temporary companion in the game, and you can help her steal the Declaration of Independence for her boss in Rivet City. That's also where the next step in the main quest to find your father will take you, but I didn't head there for a long time; instead I spent a lot of time exploring the urban environment, rescuing some rangers from a hospital (my favorite quest in the game), finding the ghoul city, carefully picking my way through the subways and rubble-filled streets, and doing whatever and going wherever curiosity took me, with Sydney at my side.
Traveling through the small towns of New Vegas, I picked up the two companions that'd be with me most of the rest of the game: a sniper, Boone, who you get if you finish a pretty involved quest helping him find out what happened to his wife, and ED-E, a broken drone which you can fix if you have high enough science skills. These two make combat in the rest of the game laughable, a combination of ED-E's long range sensors which detect further away enemies and Boone's long range sniping skills. There was no danger; trips through the desert between settlements consisted more of looting the corpses of dead enemies more than even seeing live ones. Occasionally, I'd be walking along, and then the screen would cut to a Giant Ant's head being blown off; I wouldn't even know my companions had run off again to murder things. With them alongside me, I followed the roads and the main quest markers, and soon found myself at the bright lights of the New Vegas Strip, where the game begins proper.
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| Fallout 3 - Rivet City |
In Fallout 3, I spent a long time exploring the DC downtown districts (or its remnants, at least), before I finally decided to continued the main quest, heading off to Rivet City with Sydney beside me. Rivet City is a settlement of people on a huge aircraft carrier. And... it's boring. This is the biggest, most important civilian city in the region, the next major step in the main quest, a place the main story will return you to a several times more, and there's nothing to do there. It's nothing but cramped and monotonous ship corridors, a pitiful looking marketplace, and people milling about that you have to squeeze past, with full names first and last but nothing much to say. I thought this would be a major hub in this world with how other characters had built it up, with lots of people to meet, where I could acquire cool new weapons and gadgets and skills, a real jumping off point for a bunch of involved, deep, sidequests. There's a guy possibly hiding on the ship somewhere, there's a quest involving an android, and that's pretty much it. I dropped off the Declaration of Independence to Sydney's boss, and it turns out I'd also be dropping off Syndey too; she wasn't a "real" companion, just a temporary partner for that sidequest, so she wouldn't be coming with me. In the science lab on board, I talked to Doctor Li (she was also a decent NPC), who knew your father, and she says some expository stuff then sends you right out again in your quest to find your father. So I went back into the wastelands, by myself. None of the "real" companions I got later (Charon and Fawkes) were as interesting as Sydney was. But Bethesda didn't really want you exploring the Capital Wasteland as a party. They want that desolation and solitude as you make your way through the urban decay. The game only ever refers to your avatar as "Lone Wanderer," and that right there is what Fallout 3 and what Bethesda games are about. A solitary adventurer in an open world, just wandering, seeing, encountering. I get the feeling that the quests, the companions, the leveling systems, and even the enemies are there primarily in Bethesda games just because those are the conventions of the RPG genre. But it doesn't really matter what weapon you carry in your hand, which skill points you invest in, or whether you choose the good or evil choices. The only role you ever play is "adventurer."
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| Fallout: New Vegas - The New Vegas Strip |
What's the biggest problem with Rivet City? It's Megaton. And it's the same problem with every other "town" in Fallout 3: they never get any more interesting than that first one, or the vault you start off in; they're only about the same or worse. Every settlement in Fallout 3 is a gimmick town built off of an elevator pitch, that tries to stand out not through the NPCs you meet there or the quests you partake in there, but through some oddity about it; the city built in the crater of an un-exploded atomic bomb, the city on an aircraft carrier, and the ghoul city are the three most "normal" wasteland settlements, ones I found pretty early on in the DC downtown area, and they only get more baffling from there as you move further outwards. Bethesda took the absurdist retro/futuristic/apocalyptic juxtapositions of Fallout 1 and 2, and built whole towns out of them; they're memorable and distinct yeah, but not really in a good way. There are barely ever any people to even look at in them, let alone talk to; populations of these places almost never reach double digits. The hostile raider camps you come across are bigger and more populated than these civilian "settlements." These towns don't build the world up, they just create dissonance with the grim wastelands surrounding them; you can't take these places or their occupants seriously, with their cartoonish backstories and binary choice simple quests. You can blow up Megaton, but the town's so self-contained that it doesn't much affect anything else, and that's fine for the beginning, but that's how it is for most every quest you get, as you keep delving further into the wastelands. I couldn't really care about the sparse handfuls of people here and there, or the ones in Rivet City; the wasteland is where the action is and where the heart of Fallout 3 lies. Not the living settlements, but the dead ruins. And that's not what Fallout 1 and 2 were about (although that's not necessarily a bad thing).
Fallout 1 and 2 were about the cities. To travel, all you had was an overworld map. Traveling between places is just watching your dot move and fighting randomly encountered enemies. There was no in between, in between the settlements; the wasteland had little to offer, and although you could just randomly do sweeping walks across the map, hoping to randomly stumble onto a new location, that wasn't really how you were supposed to approach either game. Everything you do starts off in the cities, and from there you had to talk to people to know where all the other locations were, and to get the quests which would send you into other places, and to the caves, the abandoned vaults, and all the other locations there were. In a 3D game, you can't just build cities, but the places in between too, and the scale has to be different, because without the abstraction of the overworld, distances have to be travelable and have STUFF there. Fallout 3 focuses mainly on those distances, and fills it with dilapidation. New Vegas, too, can't do as many cities. Instead, there are smaller settlements and one big one, and a focus on factions and politics more than societies, but even that comes at the price of the in between that Fallout 3 was so great at. New Vegas also puts more emphasis on the protagonist and the main questline more than any other Fallout game than 1 and 2, and while I remember criss-crossing the map and re-visiting cities constantly in 1 and 2, the 3D gamespace would mean that that would've translated into a lot of monotonous backtracking if Obsidian tried to do the same in New Vegas. So Obsidian tries to keep nudging you forward more, and the game feels more linear as a result. 1 and 2 were never as directed, and in that regard 3 actually skews much closer to the first two; the main quest is only a suggestion that pushes you out into the wasteland, one that will fade into the background as you find other stuff to do. You could get your fill of these games without ever really touching the main directive. In New Vegas, though, that's where all the best stuff is. Fallout 3, too, eschews backtracking, always pushing you, but it's not forward so much as Elsewhere. More than other games, even other open world games, Bethesda games push you towards the unknown, and you're never really supposed to familiarize yourself with any of its spaces.
Fallout 3 struggles when it has to do anything more linear or more explicitly narrative-driven, but it shines when it can do something through world-building, which is Bethesda's expertise and passion. The best moments of storytelling in Fallout 3 have nothing to do with your father, or a specific "do this" type quest for someone else. The best stories are told environmentally, in the grim tableaus spread about the wasteland: the skeletons huddled together, the hidden shelters, the terse journals, or places like the vaults or the Dunwich Building. Stories about the dead. The dead only have backstories; they don't have personalities anymore, and because Bethesda's good at the former but not the latter, their dead seem more interesting than their living.
Bethesda are so focused on building outwards, but they don't build up enough; there aren't enough peaks and valleys to the experience, so after a while a lot of it starts hitting about the same. What's more, they don't know where to focus; the rest of the Capital Wasteland is never as interesting as the cities and subways I fought through in my first foray between Megaton and Rivet City. The scavenging that seemed to vital near the beginning becomes busywork; at some point I checked my inventory and found I was carrying something like 900+ rifle bullets on me. So I switched to a hunting rifle instead, and I didn't find combat particularly different, despite the disparity in my supposed skill between the energy weapons I'd been heavily investing proficiency points in, and the small guns category I'd completely ignored. Combat kept getting easier. My inventory was full of specially named weapons, so loot stopped being gratifying, and what use was selling stuff for money? I pored through the list of perks I could choose when I leveled up for much of my playthrough, but as the game went on, with how frequently you got them and how few of them there were, I stopped caring, because the only ones I had to choose from by then were ones I had no interest in. The downtown DC ruins started becoming samey, but the rest of the map just had those small towns. All of this, is when the game seemed to be signaling to me to wrap it up. I'd seen everything the game was going to offer.
With New Vegas, Obsidian has to build on what Bethesda had with Fallout 3, reusing a lot of the same assets and base mechanics. Bethesda built their game on the Gamebryo engine (which they'd used before), and translate the old isometric turn-based combat of 1 and 2 into a more modern combat system (which I'm in favor of; I hated the combat in all the Black Isle games I've played). Obsidian, meanwhile, had to learn how to use this engine in a shorter amount of time, and also apparently had deadlines pushed up, resulting in cut content (Caesar's Legion was going to have a bigger role) and bugs. But they also made some tweaks, too, to the system: they introduce the reputation system and with that a bit more nuance to how you relate to the world; they space out the perks so you only get them every third level, instead of every single one, and they modified some of the skills, so it mattered more what skills you chose to invest in. Boone and Ed-E, and later Veronica and Raul and Rex, are all companions with personalities that make them worth spending time with, who can even react to and affect some of the quests and the choices you make. The quests are more complex, and present you with choices that can really affect the future of the Mojave Wasteland and its inhabitants. So you want to spend that time in the cities, talking to people and doing quests for and against them. Much of the wastelands of New Vegas are as boring as you might imagine a desert would be; it's the people there that give the game purpose.
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| Fallout: New Vegas - Talking to Mr. House |
Back-ending a game is considered bad by most everyone, Final Fantasy XIII being the go-to example with its 20 hours of preamble before the game opens up. After the brilliant beginning of Fallout 3, the muted start to New Vegas can't help but disappoint. Everything before hitting the New Vegas Strip is overly linear, and muted. But for me, Fallout 3 sort of has the opposite problem. The time I spent in the Capital Wasteland before I reached Rivet City is maybe my favorite time with a video game ever. And yet, by the time I finished the main quest, I was sick of it; I had no interest in any DLC, and I don't have much interest at the moment in Fallout 4, which is coming out this year from Bethesda. The promise of Megaton, the first town I see and the first town Bethesda showed off in previews, it's never built upon by the rest of the game. Meanwhile, the world of New Vegas keeps expanding, as you move from the small towns to the big players on the Strip and elsewhere. And yet, you might've noticed I don't give as many specifics when describing New Vegas, and that's partly because I don't want to get into spoiler territory for the latter half of either game, but it's mostly because it's not nearly as memorable.
What Fallout 3 does, though, as does Skyrim, is build on another promise, the promise of the 3D Open World. Games like GTA and Assassin's Creed are so much about the mission markers and collectible icons on a map, while in Fallout 3, the 3D space itself is the focus and the open world is for exploring more than navigating; it's not about going from point A to point B, and in fact the game actively tries to distract you from that. New Vegas retains more of Fallout 1 and 2's structure, so it's more quest-driven, and the stuff you do still revolves around other characters. Both Fallout 3 and New Vegas are Open World RPGs, but 3 offers the better open world and New Vegas is the better RPG. Both games were still more than worth playing, in my mind (although I maybe could've stopped playing Fallout 3 sooner).
So I guess the divide comes down to this: after the bombs fall, which one are you more interested in: seeing how people died, or seeing how they're going to survive?
Do you want a world worth exploring, or one worth saving?
* People arguing about which Fallout they like better:
http://www.gamespot.com/forums/games-discussion-1000000/why-i-think-new-vegas-is-a-much-better-game-than-f-31258832/
http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/fallout-3-vs-fallout-new-vegas.206592656/
http://www.falloutfacts.com/other/fallout-3-or-new-vegas-which-is-better.html
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/959557-fallout-new-vegas/71320582
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/2qa5ha/fallout_3_vs_new_vegas/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/1qtnvz/fallout_3_vs_fallout_new_vegas_this_is_a_long/
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