Nitpicking Fallout 3

Whether gamers took Bethesda's advice to Prepare For The Future or not, the long-awaited Fallout 3 was released on October 28 to much fanfare, including midnight openings at hundreds of Best Buy and Gamestop stores around the country. Having never played the first two Fallout games, and being turned off by all the "it's just Oblivion - with guns" preview clamoring by game sites, I decided many months ago that I wouldn't buy it right when it came out, instead waiting until it'd gone on sale and I had no other new games to play. Besides, I was deep into STALKER: Clear Sky, and didn't see myself siphoning off much time for another game.

But, I'll admit it, the awesome ads plastered all over Metro Center for the game got me interested again, and I scooped it up on release day. Rushing home that night to install it and give it a try, I reflected on how much I hoped it wasn't just Oblivion with guns, because although I'd loved Morrowind (possibly due to its being the first real RPG I'd ever played), Oblivion just didn't "do it" for me: sure, it was gorgeous, and huge, and open-world-ish to the max, but there were enough annoyances and lack of originality that my enthusiasm for it eventually waned and made me stop playing (though admittedly only after many months).

Now that I'm five hours into Fallout 3, by my standards (i.e. bitching can be justified with even only a very minimal amount of actual relevant knowledge) I'm more than qualified to point out some criticisms that I have of the game. Here goes:

• Floating objects: this is not a bug, but rather a perpetual artifact of the Havok physics engine which also showed itself in Oblivion. All objects that should be touching, like a plate on a table, are in fact levitating a small distance apart. My guess is that the engine can't handle having two objects touching without forcing some reaction to occur between them; i.e. it is contact between objects that triggers the physics reactions to be applied. In most cases the devs have been careful to minimize this separation distance between objects, but there are times when it is blatantly noticeable and just looks ridiculous. Can it really be that in 2008 we can't design a physics engine to get around this problem?

• When the player's view is moved over a box, crate, desk, closet, or any other object which can be searched, if it is empty, the world "EMPTY" appears over it. Now, I too grew tired of clicking on searchable items in Morrowind and Oblivion only to find them empty, but couldn't the devs have come up with some sort of happy medium between wasting my time and leading me around by the nose only to items that aren't empty? I feel like this is a concession to short-attention-span consolers, which always bugs me.

• Immersion-breaking NPC behavior: for a game that relies so heavily on interactions with NPCs, it boggles my mind at how unrealistic they can behave. I've watched two NPCs stand face to face, trying to walk through each other, for more than 10 seconds before one gets pushed to the side and is able to walk around the other. I've also heard about occasions where a conversation with one NPC gets triggered by the player's proximity regardless of what the player is currently doing - including fighting another NPC, which gets put on hold while the crucially important conversation with the first NPC occurs. C'mon Bethesda - is it that difficult to prevent such immersion breakers?

• While I think the Pip-Boy UI is a cool approach to presenting the player's inventory, stats, and map, I cannot understand why the actual screen area is so small. Taking up the rest of the screen are all the non-functional graphical details of the Pip-Boy: the knobs, dials, and metal frame. As a result, a ton of scrolling through menu items must constantly be done, which gets old fast. Sure, the Pip-Boy looks cool, but how about letting me see more than a handful of items in the lists at a time? Hopefully some enterprising modders will get around this soon.

• Another leading-consolers-by-the-nose element: every NPC in your vicinity is indicated on your compass by a marker showing their orientation toward you: friendly or hostile. This takes some of the 'exploration' impetus out of the game, as you always know when a baddie is around the corner.

• I can't see my body when I look down! While probably a legacy limitation of the Oblivion engine, it's disappointing to not be able to see my torso, legs, and feet when I look down. Most games these days show the rest of your body, adding an element of embodiment of the player into the game, so not having a body noticeably detracts from the experience.

• Wonky animations: while switching to third-person view and zooming out is convenient for running around and exploring - when a wider field-of-view is preferable - the animations are so basic and untailored to the actual player movement that they become distracting. For example if you run forward and then additionally press sidestep, the animation doesn't change at all; rather, your player just slides diagonally. I know, sounds like a minor issue, but when your player's movement over the ground doesn't look right, you notice. Again, seems like an issue not that hard to fix - couldn't more animations simply have been created for the player?

• Having to scroll through dialogue options: again probably a console concession. When talking to an NPC, the possible player responses are listed, but if there's more than about 3, you have to scroll through them to see the rest, even though there's plenty of screen space (at higher resolutions, which most PC gamers would be playing at) to have extended the dialogue box in order to fit them all in. Again, hopefully modders will get around this one by either making the box bigger or the font smaller.

Whew! That's what I've come up with so far. Sure, none of them sound terribly serious, but when you come into the game hoping that none of Oblivion's shortcomings bled over into this one, you can't help but notice how they mostly did. That leads to a game experience that, for all intents and purposes, could conceivably be seen as nothing more than a high-quality total conversion for Oblivion, which for the most part, is a bit of a disappointment.

However, all that aside - and I fully admit this might sound contradictory - I'm really enjoying Fallout 3 so far! That's because, well, all faults aside, an Oblivion total conversion putting the player in a post-apocalyptic world set in and around Washington, DC would have been pretty frickin' cool - and it is. As I get more into it, I'm sure I'll have more to complain about, but this is only because I'm paying such close attention to the game and continue to have such high hopes for it.