Fallout 3 from A to Z

October 28, 9:28 PMNY Multiplayer Gaming ExaminerAustin Walker

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Debut poster for Fallout 3, unveiled at E3 2005

Atomic Bombs and 25 other Alphabetics

If my previous article Virtual Wastelands was about how video games in their mechanics have reflected the post-apocalyptic, than this sister piece takes a look at the other side of the coin: how they can handle the post-apocalyptic setting and themes. In particular, I look at Fallout 3. I was lucky enough to get my hands on the game last Friday, and while I’m not prepared to give it a final score, I can say that it has claimed a spot in at least my top 20 favorites list. 

What follows is a list of 26 letters and words with some explanations as to why you should keep them in mind while playing Fallout. Alternatively, if you're shakey about Fallout and want to know (lots) more before making the dive, read on. Take the following as a sort of first impressions meets survival guide meets reading companion. These are 26 elements of the post-apocalyptic genre that have found their way into Fallout 3, and if after reading this you’re more prepared to deal with them, or even just recognize them as a well done inclusion of a keystone to the genre, then I’ve done my job. With all that said, let’s begin the only way we could.

A is for Atomic bombs

War never changed until the Manhattan project changed it for good. While it's not the only ticket to doomsday, it's the one we are most familiar, oddly comfortable with, and in that comfort find a resonating fear. Plus, it's how Fallout's wastelands war born: in 2077 nuclear war broke out with the People's Republic of China, and by Fallout 3’s opening date 200 years later, the mess isn’t even close to being cleaned up. And let’s not forget, atom bombs lead to...

B is for Bomb shelters

Most of us will be stuck doing the duck and cover when the lights go out for good, but if you're lucky or paranoid, you'll have a handy dandy shelter ready to wait out the radiation in. In general, these range from A Boy and His Dog's Americana-con-Cannibalism to The Twilight Zone's exploration of social responsibility and personal obligation. Fallout's famous Vaults walk the line between 1950s time capsule, Orwellian dystopia, and government sponsored social experiments. You begin fallout 3 in Vault 101, which unlike all of the others bares no distinctive abjuration of design, other than the fact that it was intended to never be opened, acting as a control group for all other vaults.

C is for Cannibalism

The darkest deed is impossible to avoid after the darkest day has come and gone. In The Road, Cormac McCarthty manages to paint those who've chosen to eat their own as inevitable, and for that reason all the more frightening. They hang around in the air, even after they've left the picture: they are a constant reminder of what we are capable of; they are an illustration of just how good we are at rationalizing our evil acts into wobbly necessities. Fallout 3 has it's share of cannibalism for sure. The instruction manual lists the ability to feed on the dead as a high level perk that comes with a hefty penalty to your karma, along with a very certain social stigma. Also, in my time with the game so far, I can say for sure that at least one quest occurs featuring this specific sort of human beast, and it absolutely embraces it earlier evaluation of it's purpose and theme in the setting.

D is for Dog

Maybe the antithesis of cannibalism, it is through our pets and especially through the connections to man's best friend that we can force ourselves to remember that we are still human. From Mad Max's pet friend "Dog", to Vic's wasteland companion "Blood", post apoc knows how to make an unforgettable K9. F3 is no different, with series favorite Dogmeat returning to the game. But can he compete with Fable 2's oft praised mutt? Some trivia: the name Dogmeat is a reference to the same pejorative used by Vic to scold Blood at the beginning of A Boy and his Dog.

E is for Ethics

While you may be familiar with another morality mechanic (in Fable or any of Bioware's stable of games) questioning the morality of your actions in Fallout is a bit different. Unlike these other ethical meta-games, there is no visible quantitative scoring. You simply gain or lose "karma", no amount is shared with the player. On the status screen, a single word summarizes your moral slant. All of this helps to reinforce the fogginess of morality in a world where your very existence is a statistical fluke. On top of the multi-path quests affecting your "karma" the Capital Wasteland has plenty of room for sins and good deeds. In a particularly dark day for my "good" character, I mistook a group of raiders for good natured explorers, and seeing them under attack by a radiated, giant bear, I helped them out. Sadly, it turned out that the bear was owned by a saintly scavenger who had fled when the raiders attacked him. He was unhappy when he learned I'd felled his bear, and in the pursuing conflict I took my first innocent life. So goes another day in the wastes.

F is for Futility

What is done is done. In most cases there just is no coming back from what has gone before. There isn’t a way to de-mutate, or to cure the zombie virus. Crops aren’t growing, and even if they were they’d be too dangerous to eat. Your actions are effective only in the microcosm, never in the world at large… And that’s ok. In perhaps the grimmest of all thematic devices inherent in the setting, we also find the most positive lesson it has to offer. There is no way to control the world around us, let the chips fall, and do your best to keep yourself and the people you care about happy.

Even in video games, which are by and large tests of skill and filled with goals and progress, these settings don’t tend towards saving the world. In the first Fallout you save your vault by fixing its water supply problems, and presumably stop the Master’s army of super mutants from putting the world in his control, but even after doing that the wastelands remain. It would be fair to say at this point that Fallout 3 could go either way. Without spoiling the story so far, I’m willing to say that just because it hasn’t been done yet doesn’t mean that people in these settings have to stop trying to fix the world. That said, there is plenty of misery to be found in the small towns and outposts: Fending off today’s super mutant attack and finding a couple cans of beans is the best day a guy can have, and that’s just the way it should be.

G is for Guns

Weapons are a commodity. They provide your post apocalyptic protagonist with defense from the wild (hey, not all of the giant radiated bears are domesticated good guys), and allow you to strike further into the capital city, fighting back mercenaries and super mutants on your way. This is why they have value. They are a commodity, though, because other people want them too. It isn't rare to part with a nice gun in trade to a wastelander in exchange for life saving stim-packs. On top of this, weapons break through use and damage  taken. You can fix damaged weapons by sacrificing others like it for spare parts. Plus, if you find schematics for them, you can construct a whole slew of improvised weapons, including the debris flinging Rock-it Launcher.

H is for Hunger

An army is only as good as it's supply chain, and the same goes for any former-vault dweller. Just like countless other post-apocalyptic scavengers, players in Fallout 3 need to keep a steady supply of food to eat. Food is a healing item in the game. It takes a lot of it to heal up all the way, but some times a little canned goods will go a long way, keeping you alive long enough to find a medic or bed to rest in until better. More importantly, using food to heal lets you save the “real” medical items like the limb-healing stim-packs for the worst case situations (like concussions and broken legs, both of which having unique game altering effects.) The problem with food, though? Radiation poisoning of course! With each bite of food, your radiation goes up and eventually that takes its toll… If only there was some way to treat your food… hmm.

I is for Information

Knowledge is rare in the Capital Wasteland. Many quests revolve around clearing up misinformation, figuring out who’s side of the story (if anyone’s at all) is really right. One of the longest quest lines is entirely about gaining information: a resident in one of DCs outlying settlements hires you to assist in the authorship of a Survival Guide, giving you tasks that deal with local wildlife, finding supplies, and dealing with the man-made dangers of the post-apocalypse. Archiving old info is also the Raison d'être of the ever-present Brotherhood of Steel. Keepers of knowledge, these post-apocalyptic, steampunk-y knights have distanced themselves from the politics of the age with two goals in mind: keeping humanity alive, and making sure that ages of accomplishments weren’t wiped out entirely when the bombs dropped.

J is for Jacket

The image of Mel Gibson in his black leather jacket riding down the highways of the Armageddon is almost synonymous with the post-apocalyptic setting. A similar jacket could be found in both Fallout 1 and 2, though I’ve yet to see it pop up in play through Fallout 3. That’s not to say that other armor pieces are distinctive though. Fallout uses a single body slot for a full outfit of equipment, and while this definitely lacks the complexity of previous Bethesda efforts like the Elder Scrolls series, it does allow for polished and purposeful costume aesthetics. On top of the body slot, there’s a head slot where you can wear hats and helmets and hoods, and a face slot for glasses and goggles and the like. Most (though not all) wearable items give some skill or stat bonus (a 1940s style fedora granting a plus to sneak and perception, a lab coat giving a plus to medicine, etc) presumably because in Fallout the clothes really do make the man.

K is for Kiss

Some people might not think that the barren deserts of the post-nuclear age might not make for romance… and you know what, they’d probably be right. While intimate companionship has certainly been a part of previous Fallouts, most of those have been in direct connection to the oldest profession, or the sort of instance that makes for one hell of a shotgun wedding. Post-apocalyptic settings in general tend to treat romance as a thing dead to more important concerns, like eating and putting a roof over your head. Love is truly a rare thing in a world filled with radiation, or zombies, or both. So far in Fallout 3, I’ve run across one pseudo-romantic relationship for the player to engage in, but have stumbled across the tatters of many NPCs who’ve learned that love is only an option so long as the wasteland wills it to be so.

L is for Levity

“Well she, I’d say she has marvelous judgment, if not particularly good ‘taste’”, says one famous post-apocalyptic character after its suggested they’ve eaten the former lover of a dear friend. After the narrative leading up to that line, you can’t help but laugh – the sort of cold cynical laugh that is an admission that sometimes awful puns and raunchy jokes are all you have left. And Washington D.C. after the bombs drop is definitely one of those “sometimes.” Fallout 1’s humor was dark, but universally praised. The sequel’s was also well regarded, though some fans felt that it was too scatological and too referential to match the true originality of the first. Fallout 3 has provided me with a number of chuckles, but simply not as many as the games that came before. That said, the laughs I do get tend to come from absurdity of situation, and I don’t mean that the things that happen are “unbelievable.” The world is consistent, and again and again it sets up situations that are grin inducing. Much of Bethesda’s strength comes from their attention to detail, and they know that all it takes to put a smirk on my face is a well placed prop or some witty signage.

M is for Mutation

The sort of radiation that comes along with mutually assured destruction is bound to change the survivors, and in Fallout’s world that means giant ants, double-headed cows, and ghouls (Former humans who’ve been mutated into awful, melted effigies of themselves.) That’s not the only sort of mutation here though. In Fallout 1 the primary antagonist of the game, The Master, used what he called the forced evolutionary virus (FEV) to quickly force a group of humans he’d kidnapped to evolve into beings ready to face all the dangers of the wasteland. They were super strong and super hearty, resting the rampant radiation (and even basic disease). However, they were sterile as could be, meaning that more mutants could only be created by applying the FEV to more humans. The mutants in Fallout 3 are plentiful, and they range in strength from mostly-manageable to the gigantic behemoths, which act as bosses through the game, forcing you to use tactics and your biggest guns to take them down. Now I wonder, what would happen if you got a little mutated?

N is for Navigation

Finding your way across the ruined frontiers of the future can be difficult. That’s why you have your PipBoy 3000’s map function! Navigating the rubble of D.C. and the wastelands of (presumably) Maryland and Virginia, is done with the CRT-monitor inspired PipBoy, which automatically updates your map as you travel with checkpoints for all of the major landmarks. Once you’ve visited a location you can automatically “fast travel” back to it (so long as you’re on the outside world, and not in one of DC’s many metro stations or sewers which act as dungeons for the world.) The way D.C. itself is laid out consists of dozens of small hub areas which are connected either directly through passages through the ruined city, or through the aforementioned sewer/tunnel systems. This makes the navigation tricky some times: the map shows the place you’re going to as just around the bend, but the natural passage through the street is blocked off with rubble. Always follow your map’s suggested route to get to a checkpoint you’ve selected, it will lead you to the tunnels necessary to get there every time.

O is for Oppression

While this certainly strikes a more dystopian tone than post-apocalyptic, you’d be hard pressed to convince me that the two aren’t in many ways similar. In an Orwellian dystopia, man purposefully turns the world into bland, gray surface with no place for art or love or freedom, and in post-apocalyptica, the actions of man have turned the world into a bland, gray surface where art, love, and freedom all hold no weight. Considering the dog-eat-dog nature of the world after the bombs drop it shouldn’t be surprising that those who rise to the top bring with them fairly extremist views.

Entries into the previous Fallout included Vault Overseers who neared totalitarian natures, and the famous Vault City from Fallout 2 was effectively a fascist state. Most important for Fallout 3 though is the Enclave. Growing from the remnants of the former United States Government, the Enclave were the masterminds of the social experiment Vaults to begin with, and saw the entirety of Armageddon as an opportunity to seal their total control over the world. Early into your time spent outside of the vault, you’ll definitely run into one of the Enclave’s “eye-bots” which hover about spewing colonial era Americana fife tunes like Yankee Doodle along with wonderfully sinister monologues by the self-appointed President John Henry Eden. It will all go a long way to remind you that yes indeed, your panopticon big brother is watching.

P is for Parenthood

Fallout follows the example of Cormac McCarthy’s modern post-apocalyptic classic The Road in assigning parenthood an especially important role in their narrative. In both instances, the relationship between a father and his son is at the center of the story. The difference is telling: In The Road, the unnamed duo go through dozens of near-death experiences, each one bringing the pair closer and the son closer to intellectual and emotional maturity. Their bond is everlasting, and the father truly takes a mythological, arguably deific position in the son’s mind. The opening gambit of Fallout 3 ends with your father abandoning you in an underground, sealed off vault filled with people quite literally gunning for you. If the driving force of the son in The Road was to emulate his father and earn his respect, the driving force of the player character in Fallout 3 is to find out what the hell was so much more important than their wonderful, safe lives in Vault 101.

Q is for Quarantine

Vault 101 is, in fact, safe. It is the safest of all the Vaults we’ve seen thus far in the Fallout universe. It isn’t missing a water chip. The door closed and locked tight, no giant monsters clawing at the doors. There aren’t even any puppets! It’s so safe that it is in fact basically social quarantine. The idea of post-apocalyptic quarantine isn’t new, it in fact starts at the same point that the setting began: in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. As mentioned before, plagues are among the ways to reach this particular stage in history, and quarantine shouldn’t be anything new.

But the ide of social quarantine is often over looked by people only loosely familiar with the genre. The Vaults are there to keep out radiation and disease, certainly, but they also prevent social progress and communication. With the controlled birth rates, limited cultural media, and (in Vault 101’s case) permanent lock out of the outside world, the state at which this bunker began is much the same as where it is when you begin playing the game. The 50s are in full swing, with golden era comics, early 20^th century music, and leather jackets all in effect. The question has to be asked: What’s it like when something gets in, or in the case of Fallout 3’s player character, out? Bethesda is ready to answer.

R is for Radiation

Effectively the most devastating effect of Fallout 3’s Great War of 2077, the radiation that spread out after the bombs hit the world’s major populations centers are what finished most of the rest of. Those that survived still have to contend with radiation (and its aforementioned effects on the fauna of the future.) Every bite of food, drop of water, and every step towards a locale still glowing with radioactive material comes at a cost: your radiation increases. The higher it rises, the more penalties to your stats you incur, eventually culminating in death. Throughout the game you come across radiation reducing and negating drugs and equipment, all of which you will learn to conserve the same way you do your ammo and stim-packs. Again, Bethesda makes the game a lesson in economy: what is really more important to you, your current health, your ability to defend against attacks, or the radiation that will eat away at you no matter how well you’re armed. In this mechanic more than any other they have encapsulated the inevitability inherent in the setting.

S is for Scavenge

From the moment you leave Vault 101 you’ll understand what it’s like to be a vulture. Unlike recent competitor Fable 2, there are no mini-game driven side-jobs that can net you nearly infinite money. Money is rare, and even if you had it the shop owners in Fallout 3 aren’t exactly wells of plenty when it comes to supplies. Sure, you can grab the .32 bullets and a fair amount of stim-packs from them, but the rarer the equipment the less likely it is they’ll have it on hand for sale. And if you know anything about RPGs something being rare means that it’s probably good.

If you’re a Bethesda fan coming into this game then you’re likely used to digging through crate after crate, picking locks on random closets, and looking for hidden goodies in hard to reach sections of level geometry. What you may not be used to is the fact that it feels so right. Of course you’d be digging through the rubble to find your equipment, it’s the post-apocalypse! Also, when Bethesda went from Morrowind to Oblivion they devalued all of the inconsequential items in the world (like cups and plates) because they thought that players were too eager to stockpile little 1 and 2 gold items to make money any way they could. Here it feels like a conscious inclusion: every can of peas and every loose fork should be worth money, they are after all artifacts of a forgone age. Plus, it’s a way of playing a game of weight management: is that power armor helmet that you aren’t trained to use yet really more important than carrying around 20+ pounds of goods you could trade with? A tip: Bartering with cartons of cigarettes is a particularly effective tactic (and a reminder of one of Phillip K. Dick’s best novels, Dr. Bloodmoney), as they are low in weight and high in price.

T is for Technology

Or what’s left of it, anyway. In recent post-apoc flick Children of Men, the lack of ready-at-hand technology is what requires Clive Owen’s Theo to transport his miraculously pregnant charge over a battered landscape, through enemy territory, and towards the hope that a group of scientists can figure out the secret of her genetic abnormality. Likewise, if technology existed in 2277 as it did in 2077 before the Great War, fixing things up in Fallout wouldn’t be so hard. Great technology still exists, here and there. Energy weapons, anti-radiation devices, even a whole load of robots (all with Fallout’s distinctive 1950’s style) exist in the D.C. Metro area – the trick is getting your hands on some of it. Hmm.. maybe the Brotherhood of Steel, sworn to be protectors of all things scientific and old, have a line on some of it?

U is for Underground

Here I don’t mean the sort of underground freedom fighters that might come to mind (though there is a particularly enjoyable quest that involves a group as such), I mean literally the area under the surface of the world. Beneath the streets and rivers is a whole mess of interlocking and over-passing tunnels. The sewers and the D.C. Metro Subway system act not only as travel routes, but also as the game’s major “dungeons”, similar in nature to Oblivion’s daedric ruins. If heading into the hell-gates of Oblivion sent a shiver down your spine, just wait until you go through the more familiar act of walking down a few stairs into an eerily empty subway lobby, light steps off in the distance reminding you that even in the age of the after-bomb, you’re never really safe.

V is for Violence

…which is in turn aided by another V, V.A.T.S. (the Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System.) I’d be entirely remised of my position as a games critic if I didn’t discuss the mechanics of combat in Fallout 3. Especially because it plays such a vital role. Post-apocalyptic combat is supposed to be brutal and fast, carried out by amateurs who haven’t learned grace, but have learned how to kill. Bethesda certainly nailed this, for better and for worse. The real time combat is frenetic, and often inaccurate. You shouldn’t come to this table expecting the tight gunplay of Call of Duty 4, but you also shouldn’t forget that with the ability to stop time, take a breather, and pick out specific targets using V.A.T.S. can get you out of some series messes.

Anyone who attempts to play the game all the way through using only V.A.T.S. or only the real time FPS mode is missing the point. The two systems support each other in a very appealing way. The game ends up feeling a bit like an action film, a lot of fast action with a few slow motion scenes of your character pulling of essential shots. All of this action ends in some of the goriest gaming I’ve seen. Whether or not blood and guts is your bag, you have to admit that if Fallout 3 had gone bloodless it would’ve really been off kilter to the tone of the rest of the game. With brutal circumstances comes brutal results.

W is for Wasteland

The wastes are broad and lonely, but they are not empty. Recent previews and a few reviews have claimed that the wastes feel “crowded,” with events and NPCs around every corner. On one hand, there have been a few instances of multiple encounters leaving me winded. But even with this in mind I have to disagree with them here. Besides the switch to first person, one of the core differences between Fallout 3 and its predecessors is that you travel every inch of space in between settlements. While you can fast travel to a place once you’ve added it to your map, general exploration happens in real space. Traveling without any activity would bore most players, and I really feel that Bethesda nailed the amount of encounters balanced against feelings of loneliness in the wastes.

 I may veer towards “reviewing” the game here, for those of you familiar with Oblivion know this: the middle “rim” between interior D.C. and the far reaching outlands feels safe, the way being in the cities of Cyrodil did. Everywhere else feels like you’ve passed through the threshold and have entered the hell-dimension of Oblivion itself. While the harsh oranges and deep reds are no where to be found, the threat of danger here is tangible. In fact, and let me be entirely unequivocal here, the fear of what-could-be felt in the canyons of metro D.C. and the rolling, burnt hills of the outer wasteland outweighs any tension felt in Oblivion, ever. It is amazing.

X is for Xenophobia

“For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized” says Rod Serling, creator and narrator of the classic television show The Twilight Zone. The episode that this epilogue follows is called “The Shelter.” In it, the air raid sirens blare and a town struggles with itself to decide which of its members deserve to live, and which must face the blinding flash of the atom bomb. Once friends, the town members act as strangers to each other, culminating in an action that each and every one of them would regret. It is this paranoia that is taken to the extreme, caused by the fear for ones life that causes us to irrationally charge others with crimes and intentions they are innocent of. Once the lands and flattened and cracked, what was once just suspicion becomes full out Xenophobia.

In Fallout 3’s case, this comes in many varieties. Early on in the game you meet up with Mr. Burke, who despises the undead-like Ghouls for no reason other than that he finds their existence repulsive, and wants all of them wiped off the face of the earth. The factions throughout the Capital Wasteland are constantly fighting against each other for territory and just because they think the other is uglier than they are. Raiders beat each other up, even inside of their own groups. Slavers roam the wastes looking for stragglers that they can snatch up and sell to the highest bidder. And, after all, the entire situation was caused by the a war between the Chinese and the Americans.

Y is for You

That’s right, you! The most important part of Fallout 3 isn’t the bomb, it isn’t the weapons, it isn’t even the story. It’s you. While you can identify with protagonists from any genre, there is something special about following the story of a man left alone in the ruined world. You can’t help but feel familiar with someone who is unlike anyone else around him, and the same is certainly true even in the somewhat populated world of Fallout 3. You are the only one in the world, besides your father, who came from a Vault and now faces the challenges of the outside world. And you do it the way you want to. It isn’t just a matter of dialog options or quest endings. The game is such that even the way you carry out your desires is unique to the player. So you want to kill a guy? Do you shoot him in the streets? Plant a live grenade on him? Set a series of traps to lead him into? Lure him towards the wild beasts of the wastelands and watch as he’s torn limb from limb? The possibilities aren't "endless", but they are entertaining, and varied enough to call for multiple play throughs.

Z is for Zombies

Don't worry, I didn’t forget about everyone’s favorite undead antagonists. I’ve mentioned the Ghouls throughout this article. These once-humans are mostly still cogent and relatable, but their 28 Days Later inspired Feral Ghouls are not. Running at you full speed ahead in the tunnels of D.C., you can’t help but act the same way you would if they were zombies. In my case, that involves a shotgun and aiming for the head. The most important, though, is where these more aggressive, mindless kin of the regular Ghouls came from? In previous Fallout titles the ghouls could be aggressive, but they were never truly Living Dead style Zombies.

Wait, I take that back… The most important question is “Do they eat brains?”