Fallout 3

The first time I played Morrowind, I picked up everything that wasn't nailed down. I completed the character creation interview and immediately started pilfering flatware. I was halfway through the grain sacks in the basement of the first house in the game when I was informed that my stealthy thief character was overburdened and unable to move.

It was the first game I had ever encountered that did so much for the cause of immersion. I had, of course, played Grand Theft Auto's contemporary incarnation, but this was different. I felt as if I had entered a virtual world that was even more open than the GTA sandbox, not to mention it had a vocabulary wider than "run, steal, kill." That first session lasted hours. I was awestruck with the extent to which I could improvise. There may have been drooling.

In Morrowind, I had no fewer than twelve different characters. Each one had a different set of skills and attributes, they had different allies and enemies and went through the game in different ways. I also gave them personalities, but that was just for me.

I'm probably crazy.

Morrowind is perhaps the earliest success in a genre I like to call "RPG fusion." You see, as video game technology progresses, the old turn-based, random battle-plagued, attack-magic-item, Final Fantasy-style RPG becomes less and less attractive. The modern personal computer or gaming platform is capable of so much, it's not easy to sell a title where the players have to wait their turn. In response, many designers have started adding RPG elements to other forms of gaming.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It's progress. Back in the day, the RPG was distinguished from its rivals by being immersive, persistent and by granting each player a unique experience, even if the story always ended the same way. These are good things, and they live on in the many RPG fusion titles. Granted, they still make old-school RPGs, but honestly, I'm done with them. I like steampunk, I liked the premise, but I could not play Lost Odyssey. Maybe I was a more sophisticated gamer back when I was into Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, but I also lived in a basement and didn't know anything about girls.

I consider Fallout 3 to be a successor to Morrowind by way of Oblivion, at least as far as the technical construction of the gaming world is concerned. It differs from its predecessors in that the setting has changed and ranged combat is far more important, but the general formula is the same. Although there have been many shooters which incorporate RPG elements, I don't think I've seen it done as successfully as Fallout 3 since Deus Ex: The Conspiracy.

The inherent problem with merging the shooter and RPG genres is that the player's combat effectiveness in a shooter is based not on levels or attributes or dice rolls, but on sheer twitchy aiming skill and an understanding of each weapon's strengths and weaknesses. These two gaming styles are fairly disparate, and Fallout 3 makes it work using V.A.T.S. It stands for Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System and I refuse to put all those periods in there every time I type it, so just get used to VATS.

A Fallout 3 character can specialize in a variety of skills that allow him or her to interact with the world, but the wasteland is a rough place. Sooner or later, you are going to find yourself looking at a charging super mutant, and they are seldom impressed by your hacking skill, Junior. It's an action game, so you need to be able to defend yourself. Naturally, a gamer who favors shooters is going to have an advantage here, but VATS lets you pause the game and queue up a series of shots the quantity and rate of success of which are determined by the character's agility and level of familiarity with the gun in question.

The catch is that at the bottom end of a gun's skill level shots will occasionally go wild even if the player decides to eschew VATS altogether and go with pure first-person shooter skill. I know this will ruffle some feathers, but I for one will not kowtow to the Red Bull- swigging, trigger-happy, homophobic FPS purist demographic and I'm glad Bethesda didn't either.

VATS does a good job of smoothing out the edges where FPS action meets RPG character-building. Unless the character you've created is Numbnuts the Fingerless, Who Knoweth Not Which End of the Gun is Dangerous, then most of your shots will hit their target when you pull the trigger, but if you're taking a time-out from World of Warcraft and you prefer to let your numbers do the talking, VATS takes you by the hand and kills the mean old rampaging mutated bear for you (if you've got the skills, that is).

It's like Footprints in the Sand for simulated violence.

As I've come to expect from Bethesda, the quests and general world design are fun and inventive. The game is a bit shorter than the Elder Scrolls titles, but there seems to be quite a lot of ancillary game material and you could spend hours or days just messing around exploring the map.

Lest I forget, there is an upcoming expansion which will allow your character to explore post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh. The core story could be a big steaming turd and it would still be worth it just for that. Can you say "easy supplemental review?"

Here's the problem. I practically shit my pants as I grasped how vast the game Morrowind was. That feeling was tempered by disappointment when I started Oblivion because I realized that they had dumbed the system down a bit to attract a wider audience. I still played it, because the graphics got a serious bump, the melee combat was superbly visceral, and the physics engine made the setting immersive enough to forgive the more limited stats and abilities aspects. However, it still infuriates me that a good game could have been a great game if it wasn't for the fact that sixty dollars from the wallet of an imagination-deficient simpleton is worth the same as my sixty dollars and I hold a grudge for that. Oh yeah, and I preferred the aesthetic in Morrowind to that of Oblivion. Where the former takes place in a unique alien landscape, the latter was the same castle-and-cottage tripe that makes me throw up into my mouth a little bit when I try to read traditional fantasy.

Fallout 3 is basically just an Oblivion clone which substitutes the Elder Scrolls' original leveling system for the more traditional one found in Fallouts 1 and 2 (presumably to reduce the frequency of crazed Fallout fanboy assaults on their studios), and takes place in a nuclear wasteland other than a cut-and-paste medieval fantasy world. Right off the bat they get points for the new setting, hell, they get points for just doing what they do because nobody else makes games like these and I'm thankful that they do.

But Morrowind was innovative when it was released in 2002. Since then, its progeny have seen changes, some good and some bad. However, that openness that allowed my first Morrowind character to fill her pockets with junk until she couldn't move has remained fairly constant. Now, I don't like to think about how much time I've spent in their games because during that span I could have learned a marketable skill, trained in some exotic fighting style, or collected a really intriguing assortment of sexually transmitted infections, but the point is that there's a very strong draw to letting the players go their own way and I was hooked. What I want to see is Bethesda (or someone else) take this to the next level. Yeah, I can break into someone's house and re-arrange their personal possessions while they sleep. And yeah, that is as innovative as it is utterly pointless and completely balls-out insane. However, couldn't that energy have been put to better use making the world a little more dynamic? I understand that, unlike my paranoid fantasies about reality, everything in a video game is put there for my benefit. I'm also fully aware of just how daunting it is to fill a virtual world with enough stuff to even make the sandbox, non-linear thing worth doing at all.

The problem is that it's all about stuff. I had really hoped to see major improvements in the area of social interactions and AI, but it's more of the same. I like the game, but I feel like it's capable of more. Maybe I've just spent too much time with Bethesda titles. I know where the walls are already, and when I looked for them in Fallout 3, they were right were I left them when I pulled myself away from Oblivion.

My advice for you, dear reader, is to play Fallout 3 if you haven't already. It's charming and fun and utterly unique. If you've never played Morrowind or Oblivion because you think you're too cool or whatever, this advice goes double. You can vacation in Fallout 3, but playing the Elder Scrolls series is a lifestyle choice.

My advice to Bethesda is to do away with the central story in these games. I'm serious. The biggest selling point for me, the thing that made me run out and buy Morrowind way back when was the fact that I could ignore the story, strike out into a fantasy world and weave my own tale, even if it involved random acts of pointless vandalism, petty theft on a massive scale and public indecency. This should not be a sideshow to the game, it should be the game. Will Wright already proved that you can sell a game without grand goals, you can just build things and dick around. I'd like to do that in an inventive, dynamic fantasy world. I don't know what this would look like, but I honestly believe you can do it.

And please do it before Peter Molyneux takes another stab at it because it's getting so embarrassing to watch him try I'm tempted to remake The Office and set it in Lionhead Studios.