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Thursday, June 18, 2009

Some thoughts on Fallout 3 and the immersion factor

12:39 PM / Games / No Comments

The other day, I completed my first playthrough of Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3, which I previously discussed just under a month ago when I first picked it up. Because of a myriad of other commitments, including my university work and the redesigning and relaunching of this site, I played it in fits and starts, but my overall impression is that, in spite of the sprawling, somewhat open-ended nature of the game world, it didn't take me very long to complete. Certainly, I sank far more time into the likes of Planescape: Torment and the Baldur's Gate saga which, along with the first two entries in the Fallout series and Bethesda's earlier Oblivion, make up this game's rather tangled DNA. Even Bioware's Mass Effect, which actually shares a great many similarities with Fallout 3, and which some have criticised for its brevity, took me longer to complete, and it was rather less free-form in terms of the progression of its storyline.

Then again, maybe that has something to do with the speed at which I barrelled through Fallout 3. Games such as these are, I've found, best experienced if you really immerse yourself in the world and storyline, soaking up all the seemingly unimportant details in order to fully bring it to life in your head. In Planescape: Torment, a player who poured over every screed of text would have a vastly richer experience than one who just waded in, fists a-flaying, skipping through the numerous (and let's face it, at times unnecessarily long-winded) dialogue encounters. Planescape: Torment, however, was a top-down 2D game, and had to rely on its descriptions and dialogue in order to convey everything beyond the bare essentials. In the highly detailed three-dimensional worlds of Fallout 3, Mass Effect et al, you don't need to make your way through multiple screens of text in order to get a feel for your surroundings or the character standing in front of you. You can take in, in an instant, the visual information that would previously have had to be conveyed via multiple paragraphs of written description. Put simply, I didn't feel compelled to explore each and every dialogue option with each and every character, because most of what I needed to know about the world was readily apparent.

Bioware's lead writer, David Gaider, talks about this phenomenon in a recent interview with Gamasutra in reference to the studio's upcoming Dragon Age: Origins:

This seems like the first thing BioWare has made in several years that has that really traditional BioWare feeling in terms of its setting and subject matter. With those intervening years, how does it feel to be getting back to that? And are there new things that you have to keep in mind when making that game in 2009?

DG: There's the obvious 2D to 3D difference. The 2D levels we were able to make back in the 2D days were like paintings. Part of me wishes we could go back to that. I don't know how much of a market there would be, but I would think there would be something. I always found that very beautiful and evocative.

However, we're quickly reaching that place with the 3D games as well. We have access to facial animations, expressions, body animations. We no longer have to tell a story through words only.

That can be done well -- [Black Isle's] Planescape: Torment is an example of a game that was told primarily through words, but maybe it wasn't entirely accessible to everyone because not everybody can deal with this wall of text, which is very sad. I wish there were more willingness to do that.

But now we no longer need to do that. There was a transition period where we had 3D art, but not the ability to be emotionally evocative with it. With Mass Effect, we were feeling our way out a little bit with the ability to use facial expressions.

I'm trying to deal with this as a writer. I worked on Baldur's Gate II as my first game, becoming used to telling stories through words primarily. Normally, you'd have to write something like, "I am very angry." Now, you can have him look mad. I may not need him to speak at all.

I was extremely impressed by the extent to which Mass Effect used the conventions of film to tell its story. Normally, I tend to find the games industry's aping of the movie industry pretty tiresome, mainly because it usually amounts to little more than designers stealing their favourite shots and clichés from the latest sci-fi blockbuster (the opening FMV to Space Siege, for instance, includes shots that are lifted verbatim from Joss Whedon's Serenity). With Mass Effect, however, the developers actually paid attention to how to use the camera, lighting and so on to achieve the desired dramatic effect, and realised that more can be said with fewer words. They weren't all the way there, but they were certainly on the right track, and from what I've seen of Mass Effect 2, due out later this year, they're continuing to up their game (pun unavoidable).

In terms of cinematic storytelling and the immersion factor, however, Fallout 3 is at least a couple of generations behind anything in Mass Effect. Characters stare blankly at you like mannequins, making only the most routine gestures and barely altering their facial expressions. Every dialogue encounter follows the same pattern of the person you're speaking to standing dead in the middle of the screen and staring directly at you. No filmmaker worth their salt would ever stage a conversation like this! Even "talking head" documentaries are more imaginatively composed. Ironically, this actually feels like a step backwards from the text-driven nature of older PC RPGs. Back then, at least you could use your imagination to fill in a character's facial expressions and body language. Here, their artificiality is continually rubbed in your face.

Look, Geppetto, I'm a real boy!

There is, in many ways, a lack of cohesion to the game world. One reason for this is that, for all the designers' attempts to immerse you in it via the first person camera and intricate environment details, it doesn't really feel alive. Another is that the game is filled with inconsistencies and irritating bugs, many of which Shamus Young has amusingly catalogued. While I can't say I ran into any software-stopping crashes, I did on a number of occasions find myself thinking "That character shouldn't be saying this given that X just happened" or "Why the hell has the guy who was supposed to be adventuring with me vanished without a trace?" That said, I'm willing to allow for a certain degree of latitude in that, to an extent, you can attribute these bugs to the game's free-form nature: the more possibilities you leave open to the player, the greater the chance of an unexpected combination of events occurring and revealing a glaring inconsistency that the designers could never have predicted.

With that said, I enjoyed my jaunt through Fallout 3, despite being unable to shake the impression that the whole thing was being held together with sticking-plaster. In fact, now that I've shambled through it myself with a character not best suited to my play-style, I'm considering rolling a fresh character and starting from scratch, this time with a walkthrough by my side so I can make sure I don't miss out on anything. In summary, Bethesda pulled off some impressive work with this game, but the kings of the story-driven RPG remain Bioware and the dearly departed Black Isle Studios.

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