So I, like every other red-blooded gaming American, spent some time in the last few weeks playing Fallout 3. I haven’t spent much time with the first two fallouts, having only discovered PC games much after their youth. I did pick up the first Fallout something over a year ago, but a combination of poor saves, old graphics, and outside distraction kept me from playing it much, even though I know it’s in the cannon of Good Games Every Serious Gamer Should Play. I still feel a little bit secretly guilty that I wasn’t so enraptured with it at first blush that I was drawn, nay, compelled to run back to it, finish it, and emerge the other side feeling like I had started as a girl, and left a woman. Fallout causes these kinds of delirious reactions from gamers. Given this, with Fallout 3, I felt like I had a chance to redeem myself. To make up for past Fallout related sins, and to finally, for once, play the same game everyone is playing without skulking away half way through “because it isn’t pretty enough” or “the combat is too hard, and who wants to shoot everyone anyway”.
Alas.
In my defense (or perhaps Fallout’s, maybe both), it WAS damn purdy. It helps that Dave and I have super shiny new computers and that we can FINALLY run new games on the highest settings. It also helps that my standard of graphic excellence is WoW with allllllll the sliders down to the lowest mark. ANYTHING can look pretty after that. Regardless. I did enjoy the 1950s thing. I have always enjoyed the style of Fallout. I was able to make a female avatar that didn’t make me wince. All these are good things. This part is easy.
The next bit is harder. I… I don’t know quite where things started going wrong. Part of it is that I am now of the generation of players who are soft. We never got hardened up by years of no quick-saves, of poor decisions ruining hours of your efforts, of machines fritzing out and losing your saved games, of pixel perfect accuracy and the reaction time of a ferret on uppers. I am the squashy new breed who expects auto-saving, respecing, do-overs, and rainbows and puppies in my inventory, which, by the by, should be more or less bottomless. kthks. I know this. I was not so naive as to go in to Fallout not expecting that I was going to make irreversibly bad decisions with my points. I knew going in that part of the nature of the beast is doing it wrong the first time so you can go back and do it more better the second. However, it turns out that knowing and expecting a thing is not the same as then enjoying doing that thing. So the fact that I muddled along with a poorly constructed character for the whole thing is no one’s fault but my own.
But given all that, I think the thing that broke me finally is how VERY NEARLY Fallout 3 was to being a game I really wanted to play. It was just that the rest of the game kept getting in my way. Like, you know, the shooting. And the dying. Mostly, I wanted to run around and talk to people and sneaky-sneak in to locked areas and get fun things to sell and… uh… decorate my house. (sigh). I wanted to make the silly recipes and be a do-gooder and talk my way through everything so I didn’t have to go shoot stuff. I also wanted to keep my damn puppy alive. He refused to let me do this. So I have the added guilty weight of having killed my pet OVER AND OVER AND OVER again until I finally abandoned his poor, fluffy corpse in the wasteland. Bethesda, don’t make me kill my dog. I know pathing is hard. I get it. But please. Also, do not set him on aggressive. I’m trying to sneak. And, if I want to send him back somewhere safe, just magically teleport him or something, rather than have him run in to a wall in his feeble attempt to get from point A to point B and get killed in the trying. All this would be swell.
Anyway. So, when I was able to do the stuff that I liked, like pick locks and get gear and sneak around and chat with people and use my superior powers of conversation to talk them in to giving me free things and talk them out of needing me to go shoot stuff, I was having a blast. I could do that all day. And I’m not unrealistic; I don’t mind a certain amount of combat. Especially with VATS. I play WoW after all. I’m even a DPS class. I like the pew pew. That said, it is always a means to an end for me, and I was excited that in Fallout there were so many ways to build a character outside of just being the strongest guy with the biggest guns. I didn’t realize though, that you still really, no really, need to keep at least one combat style up. Sneaking does not replace dmg. Sneaking is in addition to, and modifies the style of, your damage. Oops. Dur.
And this is all fine and good, right up until it stops being fun. Which, for me, were the fire ants. I managed, through a series of poor auto-save timings, and even poorer real saves, to get myself more or less stuck in the caves with the ants, with dozens above me that I’d have to fight through to get out, and dozens below me that I couldn’t kill to complete my quest, with 2 stimpacks, crappy small guns skill, a handful of shotgun shells, and what little ant meat I could get off of what few ants I was able to kill. Four hours later, having completed the quest once and then dying to an unlucky shot before saving (sigh), and then retrying and failing a quadrillion more times, I turned off the game and went and cried. Ok, I didn’t actually cry, but I wanted to. I was left with the worst taste a game can leave in your mouth, that of having TOTALLY wasted precious leisure weekend hours.
If I didn’t like Fallout at all, this wouldn’t have been a problem. I would have made a rude gesture in it’s general direction and proceed to feel superior to it. But I do like it. I want to play lots more of it. And, I now feel kind of betrayed by it. Like it was this really nice guy I was seeing, who I thought was totally sweet, and then one night he flips out and hits me. And I can kind of rationalize away the hurt, but do I really want to go back to an abusive relationship? No, not really. He’ll just make me feel bad about myself again. But not going back and giving it another try, this time with appropriate protective gear and the ability to shoot the shit out of people, well, that just seems petty. Ok, this analogy is going from bad to worse. But do you know what I mean? I want to earn my gaming chops, and I keep hoping that a sort of mainstream, single player PC game is going to do it for me. And I worry that I’m just not hard-core enough, and that my tastes are way more biased by my experience of gender than I want them to be, and sigh. I just really want to ace this game and not whine about why it wasn’t fun. And yet here we are.
In addition (because this isn’t quite long enough), I think it’s interesting that I kept noticing, over and over again, what a Guy game this is. I think it was so obvious because in many ways, it’s very close to being, well, less Guy. The RPG aspects and the exploration almost ALMOST take off that edge that, to me, says “developed for a key market audience of men ages 18-30″. I almost felt like it was developed for, well, me, for example. And then little things would happen and, oops, nope, we’re back in solid dude territory. Things like pronouns being wrong in text and audio. Things like the only sexualized character in the game being a woman who interacts with all gendered characters the same. And mind you, I have no problem with a little lesbian love in my games. But I do have a problem when that means that all male characters can only be straight, and all female characters are lesbian. Give me a male hooker npc too; have him respond the same to male and female characters. Because that would be awesome.
So, if you made it to the end of my rant, here we are. I don’t know. Fallout has broken my heart a little, and it’s at least partially my own fault. I’m not sure whether I’ll go back to it. I’m just left feeling confused. Are the reasons I didn’t have fun with it legit? Should I try harder? Am I missing the point? Do I just have horrible taste? I’m not sure, and I don’t know how I feel about a game that’s causing me this much of an existential crisis either. But I can say honestly that I’m glad I tried. I’ll let you know if I take a second stab.
