Fallout 3: Ethics... Ethics Never Changes

So, this is yet another one of those time cherished PC RPG Franchises that I’ve just never got into. I chalk it up to my misspent youth playing Team Fortress 1, Starcraft and Counter Strike. I didn’t go into this blind – I played about 10 hours of Fallout 2 before the summer ended and I had to get back to work (and newer games) – but I really wasn’t sure what to expect with Fallout 3.

If anything, I now know that the roots of ethical interactivity in RPGs go back way further than BioWare and the Neverwinter Nights/Baldur’s Gate series. But what about Fallout 3? If you listen to the people at No Mutants Allowed, it’s quite literally a digital representation of a piece of garbage. Or, to filter through the rhetoric, it’s perhaps a decent game but not actually a Fallout game. I agree with them in some respects. Avoiding the whole issue of gameplay – the move from isometric to first person, the move from turn based combat to real time combat – the writing just isn’t as sharp as the writing in Fallout 2. Sure, the original Fallouts were perhaps a little too off wall in terms of the number of references to 90s pop-culture, bit the dialog was clever and the plotting was very interesting. Indeed, someone rolled a low Intelligence character and the entire game changes – dialog options and all.

While I understand that Bethesda shouldn’t be burdened with the legacy of Fallout, they did choose to buy the franchise and call their game Fallout 3. But I don’t want to turn this into an X is better than Y discussion – I’ll leave that to the forums. What I really wanted to talk about was their implementation of ethics or “Karma”. Now, I’m really at a point where this is becoming to sound old hat – every single WRPG now uses morality as a way to give the player narrative agency – but there are some interesting things that Bethesda tries out in their game.

Probably the biggest aspect of Bethesda’s morality system is the fact that interacting with the environment itself affects your Karma score. Now, Fable 2 did this by associating an ethics score with various objects you can interact with – eat vegetables and you’re more “pure” or raise rents to 200% and you’re more “corrupt” – but in Fallout 3, your interaction is much more direct. It’s still very simple – if you take an object that’s not yours or “free to the world”, it’s considered stealing and you will lose Karma. The same happens if you hack a computer or pick a lock that someone in the game world owns. Of course, killing a good or bad character in the world will also change your Karma accordingly. Now, it still seems odd that there’s a cosmic Karma counter out in the netherworld watching your every move, but the fact that your actions in the non-narrative or quest part of the game has as much as an impact on your overall morality score is an interesting implementation of a fluid morality system. Essentially, they added a score counter to the stealing and lockpicking mechanic in Oblivion.

Indeed, while I was playing a saintly character that would make Jesus Christ proud, I wasn’t above looting and stealing. The game recognized that my “good” actions in the quests (or narrative section of the game) outweighed my “bad” game play actions in the rest of the world (or the ludic section of the game), but I know that I’ve stolen from a lot of people in my effort to help them. The game doesn't really say anything about your actions either way - I just had to rationalize my actions in the "real world". I think it might have been nice if the game had some dialog along the lines of "I heard that you a good person - why would you steal from me?" or "I thought you were a monster, but you saved my life!", but I suppose that's just something they couldn't account for or implement.

That said, the quest/narrative section of the game is very standard... and perhaps a step backwards from Mass Effect’s more cinematic dialog wheel system. You basically have good, neutral or evil dialog choice options that you choose from a standard dialog tree. And like Mass Effect, for the majority of the official and freeform quests in the game, you can finish the quest in a good, neutral or evil manner. It’s not that the quests weren’t fulfilling or interesting – my playthrough took me 80 hours – it’s just that Bethesda simply didn’t do anything really new with their implementation of ethical interactivity. It’s very clear when you do something morally good in the game, to the point where the game tells you that your Karma has improved.

I think my bigger problem with the game (and with games of this sort) is that there is absolutely no compelling reason to play an evil character other than to see how the story might unfold if you make evil choices. Even the first big choice in the game is rendered moot by the game play – having a home in the game is essential to survive the early stages and the quickest way to get a home is to disarm the bomb in Megaton. If you are trying to make life easier for yourself in the game rather than roleplay a bad character, there’s absolutely no reason to destroy Megaton and take the penthouse suite at Tenpenny Tower. The one location in the game where bad characters thrive – Paradise Falls – is still open to good characters that complete a quest or bribe the guard, so it’s not as if there are sections of the game world blocked off if you choose to play a good character. In fact, I would argue that the game is substantially easier in the early to mid stages of the game if you play a good character simply because the majority of the NPCs in the game won’t hate you the moment they meet you.

I will say that the world itself is almost lovingly constructed. Strolling through the Mall and going through the museums and the Capitol building was a breathtaking experience for someone who has never been to Washington DC. The detail in the rest of the Wasteland is just as astounding and the way that some buildings are constructed tell a story without relying on exposition. You might come across a room with children’s toys scattered across the floor with a couple of skeletons holding each other and even though you don’t know what happened, you can pretty much imagine that it was a mother holding her child as nuclear bombs exploded around them. Of course, the 50s aesthetic is alive and well in the game – to the point where a typical 50s suburb is lovingly recreated in a virtual reality simulation – and it serves the game really well. There’s something amusingly surreal about killing a super mutant while listening to music from the 40s over the radio (although they should have tried to license more music). I’ll agree with the assertion that a lot of the towns/cities feel completely empty – one “town” only has two people in it – and it’s probably my only criticism with a game with otherwise excellent set/art design.

As for the actual narrative part of the game? Well, there’s really not much to say. You are funnelled down a story much like Mass Effect or Fable 2 and while you can make moral choices throughout the main quest, the overall end game remains the same. Also, there’s almost no nuance in the game when it comes to the two main factions that appear – the Brotherhood of Steel is good, the Enclave is evil. You don’t necessarily know why the Enclave is evil... you just have to take the game’s word for it. There also isn’t a “huge” interactive moment in the narrative that stands out – there isn’t a Spire or a Virmire or any other similar set piece – and it makes the story somewhat forgettable. Yes, the first time you encounter a Behemoth and the ending sequence where you have to go to the Jefferson Memorial are very exciting moments in the game, but these are moments where you do more "watching" than "playing". It’s not that I didn’t enjoy those sequences – it’s just that they didn’t challenge my preconceptions of narrative in games the way that Mass Effect or Fable 2 did.

Ultimately, Fallout 3 falls under that cliché of “iteration, not evolution”. It’s a great game that could have been much better if they tried to push the narrative storytelling that much further. That said, there really is nothing else like it in the single player RPG realm other than Bethesda’s previous game, Oblivion. Not surprisingly, Bethesda is expanding the game with three expansion packs due out in early 2009 and like the Oblivion expansions, this DLC will add new locations for the player to explore but will probably not do anything new in terms of storytelling. The Fallout universe is a rich world however, so I just have to hope that they try to do something more interesting with the narrative in the inevitable sequel.

May 29, 2009 edit!

So, I was listening to the May 29, 2009 episode of Listen Up! and one thing came up that I found really interesting - it's possible to completely break the "linear" narrative and skip ahead several steps just by exploring. I think the discussion happens around the 1:05-1:10 mark.

Garnett had a problem with the fact that he could find Doctor Li right from the get go and essentially skip the first 5 missions of the game. And yes, this is true... but as Brad pointed out, the game essentially reflects reality back at the player. In "real life", if you sometime tells you to go to Home Depot to buy a widget but you choose to search a junkyard to find the same widget, haven't you achieved the same objective?

I believe that this only happens at the beginning of the game and that after you find your father, you are essentially stuck in a fairly linear narrative... but it's interesting that you could skip a large part of the early game if you wanted to.

And come to think of it, this happened to me during an early playthrough... but being the achievement completionist that I am (at least in RPGs), I just had to reload and earlier save. But I guess achievement hunting and how that affects agency in games is another discussion.