Fallout 3: Chinese Takeout pt. 1

I got Fallout 3 over Christmas when everyone else bought it, but it sat, unplayed, until May because, based on my experiences with Oblivion, once I started journeying in the Capital Wasteland, I wouldn't be coming out anytime soon. That's exactly what's happened.


Fallout 3 has a different quest structure than Oblivion. Actually, it has the same structure for some quests, but different structures for others. Oblivion had quest chains, where you talked to someone, they gave you something to do, you did it and went back to them, then they said, "Come talk to me again when you want something else to do."

When you had a quest, it showed up in your quest journal. You might have subtasks to do on the way to the main task, and those would show up too. That way, if you put the game down and came back after awhile (or just got sidetracked with some other quest chain), you could check your journal and pick up on a quest at any point. If you finished a quest it would disappear from your "Active Quests" page and go to the "Completed Quests" page, and if you didn't want your active page cluttered up with tons of things, you could not take the next quest from the quest giver until you were ready. This gives players a satisfying To-do list at all times, and a feeling of accomplishment as things were checked off. You could even look back through your completed quests to see all the things you had done and get a further sense your progression in the game.

Fallout 3 has quests and quest chains, it has a journal where your To-do list is kept, and it keeps track of your progress in the main quests. It also has many, many things to see and do that aren't listed in any quest chain. It has random encounters that may lead to other discoveries, it has buildings that tell stories, and many of the things you do change the world, just a little bit. It even has real moral choices, but I'll get to that later.

The largest quest I've done doesn't appear on a quest chain. It isn't contained inside a building (in fact, it takes place over most of the capital wasteland). It doesn't appear on any of the strategy guides or FAQs, and I'm not even sure the designers ever intended to make it a quest.


It starts, fittingly, on Memorial Day, while I was over at my friend Joe's house for a cookout. We got to talking about Fallout 3, which he had played, but abandoned because it was a lot of the same thing over and over. He hadn't progressed very far on the main story, he had just been wandering the wasteland killing people and taking their stuff. We ended up at his computer, so he could show me his character build. Basically he could hit just about anything with his sledgehammer and it would explode. He cursed another friend who told him to take the Bloody Mess perk, because he ended up having to scour the landscape looking for bits of his victims in order to take their stuff. In the low scrub covering most of the wasteland, it was a pain in the ass.

He showed me. He happened to be inside a factory full of zombies. He walked up to one as it shot him with an assault rifle, hit it with his sledge, and boom, it was pulp. Other zombies spotted him and started screaming things... in Chinese.

"Is that Chinese?"

"I guess so."

"So these are Chinese zombies?"

"Yeah, this whole factory is full of them."

"Huh."

I didn't think anything more about it. There are a whole lot of weird things out there in the wasteland, and Joe had found a factory full of Chinese zombies. But that day started my quest, even though I didn't know it at the time.

A Final Word on Far Cry 2

I finished this last night and I wanted to talk a little bit about the endgame.

When we think about designing a game, we go through three basic steps:

1. Define what you want the user to experience.
2. Describe a mechanic that will lead to that experience
3. Write the rules that will lead to that mechanic

In the previous interview (scroll down) Clint Hocking said:

However, this high level of power in the mid-game is supposed to be the peak… in the end game, after you get your supply of malaria medicine cut-off, you are supposed to get weaker and the game systems should force you to be more brutal – using more and more powerful weapons and confronting enemies who are more and more easily and frequently wounded.

I never ran out of malaria medicine. The malaria was only a nuisance that either made me stop for a second and pop some pills when I was traveling, or made me randomly die if it popped up during combat. So whatever mechanic you had in mind, Mr. Hocking, it didn't work. Sorry.

But there was another mechanic that did work.

There comes a point in the endgame of any shooter where you have access to all the weapons, you've seen all the various types of enemies, you've fought in pretty much all the terrains, and you're good enough at the game that you're somewhat going through the motions to get to the end. This is why there are boss monsters where none of your normal weapons really work and the rules are changed. This is why you have to push buttons for endgames to set up the big lightning machine, or somehow jump into the giant babyhead, or have some sort of race against time. The normal mechanic of the game has become so repetitive (see enemies, avoid their shots, shoot them) that the designers need to change it up to keep you interested.

I like to call it "shooter ennui."

I think it might have been an accident, but Far Cry 2 uses shooter ennui as part of the story. By the time I got to the endgame, random checkpoints were more bumps in the road than actual challenges. I had an exploding projectile gun on my jeep most of the time and could kill any wandering patrols before they could shoot at me. I had a .50 caliber sniper rifle that could one-shot anyone without a head shot. I rarely even got close to running out of ammo. I started to feel bad for the guys repeating to themselves, "He's just one man. One guy. I can do this. I can get him," before I'd kill them.

I was getting sick of the killing. It seemed pointless. Nothing was going to change. There would always be more guys manning the checkpoints. There would always be another warlord stepping up to fill the shoes of the guy I assassinated. Would it ever end?

Which is exactly what the designers wanted me to experience. I became the world-weary killing machine that was all the character definition they had given me. They did it through increasing the power level of my weapons without necessarily increasing anything about the enemies I was fighting. The game actually got easier in the last third, which seems counter-intuitive for a design, but it translated into the correct user experience.

And then they finally gave me an out. So I took it. I'm not sure if there's a "bad" ending. The ending I had was bittersweet. If I didn't bother finding Jackal tapes and giving them to the reporter would he not be my ally? If I had let the reporter die? If I had gone back for my buddies instead of saving the helpless at the end of Act 1? I think my ending was the best I could hope for given the circumstances of the game. Is there a better one? I don't know, but I'm satisfied with the one I got.

Only Africa won.

Storytelling in Far Cry 2

I've now spent a lot of time with Far Cry 2 (not finished yet), and the story generation is still linear. The first half of the game is very open, but around halfway you are sent to a second map where stories are set up via linear terrain. Here, look at the maps.

Note the path from one map to another, that's a classic gate. Then look at the lower map (which is the second one). Note the very linear valleys in the lower right. I guarantee you that's the climax of the game right there. Note that what you've got on both maps is a hub and spokes structure. Most of the time you get a mission from the middle of the map, and you can see that there are very definite paths outward (to whatever objective), so each mission becomes essentially linear, though you have choices on how you're going to get there, but that's really just how many shootouts you're going to get into on the way.

So while they were touting some sort of emergent story, what they've really got is 5 types of missions:

1. Main story missions which advance the plot and get money
2. Buddy missions to build "history" with your buddy and give you perks at safe houses
3. "Good" missions to get malaria medicine
4. Weapons missions to unlock better weapons
5. Tower missions for lots of money

The player mixes and matches and the particular mix they choose is the "emergent" story. They talked about doing too many Buddy and Tower missions giving you "infamy" so the "Good" missions dry up, but in practice players mix and match the missions just to give themselves some variety (that's what I did, because the Tower missions are always assassinating someone, and the Weapons missions are always blowing up a convoy, which get boring if you do them over and over). In comparing my experience to others, the main story plot points are all the same. The people who give me the missions may change, but the missions themselves remain the same.

Two things from a recent interview with the designer back me up:

From Game Informer Online:

GI: Why did you split the map up into different sections?

Hocking: The game world was divided into a Northern and a Southern region for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was to allow for a progression in the story and a place for the player to be ‘exiled’ to after the coup by the leading faction at the end of Act 1. It also allowed us to have a broader architectural and environmental art palette and to show a progression in the look and feel and mood of the game over time. The Northern region is more ‘spotted’ in the way the jungle, woodland and grassland environments overlap, and is dominated by shanty and industrial architectural features. The Southern region obviously has the lake and larger sections of desert (especially in the north of the Southern region) – it also features more indigenous and colonial architectural elements. The Southern region also includes the so-called ‘Heart of Darkness’ – it’s own natural environmental art palette. Needless to say, with all the streaming going on, we were not able to have all of these environments and architectural styles in close proximity to one another, and so in addition to using these styles to show a progression, it allowed us to control the technical problems of streaming much more effectively.

GI: It seems like the game is at its hardest early on, before you get decent weapons or allies. Was that intentional?

Hocking: We wanted the game to seem difficult at the start when you are sick with malaria and vulnerable in combat (and you have crappy weapons and few allies) – and then for you to get rapidly more powerful through the mid-game as you get new weapons, allies, equipment, and your symptoms fade and your reputation increases. However, this high level of power in the mid-game is supposed to be the peak… in the end game, after you get your supply of malaria medicine cut-off, you are supposed to get weaker and the game systems should force you to be more brutal – using more and more powerful weapons and confronting enemies who are more and more easily and frequently wounded. In the beginning, you should be fighting to survive because you don’t have a choice, in the middle, you should be enjoying the luxury of good health, a moderate reputation and fairly good weapons… you should be able to use an ‘appropriate’ level of aggression to solve the game challenges. In the end, the game systems should be almost forcing you to be as aggressive and brutal as possible. In short, the game should first teach you to be brutal, then force you to be brutal. The difficulty should be shifting from a technical difficulty of reflex skill and resource management to a psychological challenge that asks you how far you are willing to go to achieve your ends. I’m not sure the extent to which we succeeded with that, but we tried.

So despite all the talk at last year's GDC, Far Cry 2 is still a mission-based sandbox game that is closer to GTA than, say, The Last Express.

On Context

This is quite possibly the silliest game ever. It's a little flash game where the words "candidate01" through "candidate05" come floating out from the center. The player controls a crosshairs and must locate and click on as many candidate02's as he can in one minute. The best I've ever done is 24 zaps in the minute. One person online claims to have gotten over 100, but I think he's lying as I don't see how that's possible given the speed of the words and the number that pop out in a minute.

Reason dictates that I should play this for about five minutes and be done with it forever, yet I keep going back to it. Why? Because I want to prevent an election from being rigged.

You see, this little game is part of an alternate reality game surrounding the Heroes TV show. The show hasn't been on TV for over a month, but the internet has been alive with a conspiracy. One of the heroes is running for congress, and we've (that is, those of us dealing with the ARG) found out that the villain has rigged this election. Everytime we zap one of those candidate02's, we're getting rid of a fake vote. If everyone manages to zap enough (and we have no idea how many are enough) then we will change the outcome of the election.

So I click and click, and after every session, I enter my email so I'll get credit for the 20 or so votes that I've zapped. I want to change the world. I want to be a hero. In the larger context, zapping those votes means I can.

On the other hand, I worry. There's no proof that I'm actually getting rid of bad votes. I could be helping rig the election. I don't zap votes for "Petrelli," I zap "candidate02." Who is he? I don't know. So while I've been told that I'm fighting for the good guys, there are too many layers of abstraction for me to be sure.

This game is remarkably similar to one of the first videogames ever invented for the home TV. On Ralph Baer's brown box, you could set up a game where one player controlled a red box, and the other player controlled a white box. The white player chased the red player around (using early joysticks) and tried to catch him. The game was over when you got caught, then you would switch.

35 years later we're still playing the same game.