Or: what happened to Bethesda Softworks?  A mystery adventure!

When I was eleven or twelve, my best friend who still plays paintball and Left 4 Dead with me installed a DOS game on my aging 486 because—get this, dude—it has literally thousands of towns and dungeons and shit.  My first experience playing Daggerfall almost resulted in a glorious Fatality as dozens of quarts of blood fled my loins and shot straight into my cerebral cortex, or whichever part of the brain it is in sullen preteen boys who are really too intelligent to like Isaac Asmiov as much as their parents that’s responsible for really, truly believing that they’d like more than anything in the world to live in Middle Earth.

I am paralyzed by this game's ineffable charm.

Mostly this was because the first dungeon is so labyrinthine and confusing: a big mess of practically unmappable 3D space, it looks like two octopi mating from a bird’s-eye view, and represents a gleeful disregard of 2D norms and an ecstatic, if haphazard, exploration and exploitation of space that characterizes a lot of early 3D games, from Tomb Raider to Warhawk.  No tutorial popups here, and many a Daggerfall neophyte has quit the game in frustration, never to return—defeated by the legendary Privateer’s Hold.  What’s more fantastic?  There really are thousands (or maybe just hundreds, or just a couple hundred, though who am I to count?) of towns and dungeons and shit, even though they’re mostly indistinguishable, aside from the three big capital cities of the game’s twenty or so provinces.  And more fantastic than that?  Every dungeon is more mind-bogglingly complex than the first—and each is unique, though you’d never be able to tell.

Daggerfall is a game that is eternally satisfying, without pause, for hundreds of hours and unlimited decades, right up until the point when you lose your virginity.  It is bright and cheery even in its drabbest holes, a kind of primary-color, low-res 2.5D wonderland that is the illegitimate lovechild of Wizardry’s graphic design and Doom’s architecture.  As a coherent gameworld it doesn’t make a damn lick of sense, and there’s bizarre glitches and weirdness all over the joint, but it’s the same free-roaming kind of fun that kids born after 1990 must feel in their bones when you mention Grand Theft Auto 3.  What I’m trying to say is that the game isn’t perfect by any reliable barometer, but when you get right down to it the gigantic barrel-chested brass balls it possesses (thousands of towns, in DOS, in 1996!) sweeps you over the gaping holes in its design, prompting that virgin brain to fill in all those holes with the bursting confetti of imagination.  After you reach manhood, in whatever way you need, it seems a little vacant and samey, though hell if it still isn’t two liters more fun than Oblivion.

Bethesda grew up with us with the release of Morrowind.  By taking the same amount of love and gumption and constricting it down to a tiny island nation, a mere part of one of the provinces of which there had been two dozen in Daggerfall, we were rewarded with an atmosphere so thick that it stuck to your face just walking from the first town to the second, like a cobweb made of Big League Chew.  As in modern Rome (the real one), there are layers of culture stacked upon layers, each represented by an aesthetically distinct architecture.  Vvardenfell maintains a rich and legitimate and unique history, one that isn’t at least totally directly ripped off from the Tolkien estate, nor any particular real-world, lecture-class bullet-point mythology you care you wiki.  And if the combat was a little sterile and the voice acting a little C-grade and some of the design decisions a little bird-brained, well, you could forgive.

One small facet of Vvardenfell's architectural wonders.

Then came Oblivion.  I don’t know, precisely, what the fuck happened with that, although it has something to do with the XBox, and Halo maybe (which, contrary to popular belief, I don’t hate, or at least I don’t hate people who like it), and a chance for a Little Developer with Heart to finally Make It in the Big City if it could only buckle down and loosen up its simple, backwards country Principles a little bit.  At any rate, you can read the fine review by Tim Rogers right on this here site, with which, as a man who has The Elder Scrolls in his blood the way Mr. Rogers has Dragon Quest in his, I agree to the letter.

The ugliest Patrick Stewart.

That just about brings us to Fallout 3, which is nothing more and nothing less than Oblivion 2 in a Fallout wrapper, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t played enough of one or the other.  The discerning reader will notice I’ve made a big show of talking about Elder Scrolls games but haven’t even mentioned the Fallout series.  The discerning reader is free to draw his own conclusions.

Fallout 3 is still not the holodeck from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, though damn my eyes if it isn’t a baby shuffle-step closer.  It’s amazing what that shuffle-step represents, which is to say a huge leap forward in entertainment: for instance, the combat is actually fun compared to Oblivion’s tick-tock grandfather clock monotony, owing mostly to VATS, a competent adaptation of Fallout’s turn-based tactical battle system in realtime 3D.  Press a button, and the action freezes.  Target body parts of your enemy, the number of shots to be determined by the size of your Action Point pool and the AP cost of a single shot with the weapon, press GO, and watch in cinematic slo-mo as your character chugs round after round into that crazy half-armored irradiated wastelander, spent shell casings flying, limbs exploding and careening about the landscape.  It’s satisfying in its way, and never wearies, and you have to do it the old-fashioned FPS way while you’re regenerating your AP.  Generally, this means you’re striking a balance between using your AP wisely and taking potshots while regenerating it in realtime (the game is too clunky and choppy for the realtime FPSing to be any more than a stopgap), which is a nice bit of design, short of, you know, taking out the VATS thing entirely and just making the God damned combat God damned Halo 3 already.

Here I shall be nice to the game: Much of the voice-acting is better (though only marginally, and only relatively).  The main plot is not stupendous nonsense, although the pacing spirals out of control there in the last third and the ending is stupendous nonsense.  There are children in the world, even a whole townful of precocious ones who will shoot you, which is more or less required for Fallout Fans but nevertheless cheering in a 3D game, a format marked by almost universal childlessness.  Faces run the gamut from “fairly ugly” to “maybe attractive” instead of “disgusting” to “hideous.”  Some of the architecture is truly inspired: the skeletal Washington Monument, the headless Lincoln Memorial, the shredded outer rings of the Pentagon that arouse fleeting mental images of 9/11.  There’s a nameless little bunker in a random part of D.C. that was obviously occupied by someone who went clearly insane, with neat geometric book-stacking, plungers stuck to the wall Darkwing Duck-like, and retail mannequins and lawn gnomes arranged in compromising positions.  The game never sends you to this bunker, nevermind giving you a big glowy tutorial text-box telling you to do so.  There’re a lot of little atmospheric, unobtrusive touches like this, and along with the slightly-more-satisfying combat, it adds up to a marathon’s worth of miles beyond the glossy dead New Zealand travel-brochure-space of Oblivion.

For all that, though, Fallout 3 is the goofiest little big game I’ve ever played.

Fallout 3 is a living, breathing gameworld of infinite possibilities because people poop.

By “goofy”: when you arrive at a place called Big Town, a guard stops you at the front gate to give you a little talking-to and intimate heavily what the Main Quest for This Town shall be (a common trope).  It seems Super Mutants are continually attacking Big Town and carrying off its citizens to who knows what fate, and the villagers (Big Town is, ironically, not a big town) have little will or training to fight; they are demoralized.  Within the town is a goth girl named Bittercup, who despises the townspeople and keeps lukewarm a depression of constant, feigned profundity.  She informs you that, sometimes, she goes wandering out in the ruins, scavenging.

In a lesser game—say, a common JRPG—this statement would amount to little, either flavor text or at most a pretext upon which Bittercup would offer you trinkets for sale.  But every time you visited Big Town, there Bittercup would be, tooling around in the same tight circle like a dog on a chain, never to be seen out in the wastes that she allegedly explores.  Fallout 3’s NPC Schedule (or whatever the term for it is in the Oblivion engine) is cleverer than that, though: lo and behold, you can find Bittercup out wandering the ruins, and at night no less, which makes a certain satisfactory sense given her vampiric (meant in jest, not to be confused with Fallout 3’s actual vampires) predilections.  (Of course, a truly great game would see Bittercup actually scavenging the wastes, such that the little ammo boxes and medical kits you find improbably lying around would progressively be depleted as the game world spun.  This lack, though, is something I don’t quite fault the game for; it represents one or another ultimate goal of the “freeform Western RPG,” for better or worse (can you guess which?), and I can’t bring myself to criticize a game made before the Mayan apocalypse of 2012 for not overcoming what’s essentially a technical limitation.)

This is all very nice, of course, unless you happen upon Bittercup out there in the wastes before the first time you enter Big Town—since all the dialogue remains exactly the same.  Not only does Bittercup refer to “here” and “this place”—meaning, of course, Big Town—while standing in the middle of what may as well literally be nowhere, but what’s worse, your dialogue options clearly make contextual reference to the Situation in Big Town, the one you don’t know about because the guard of the front gate hasn’t yet given you the handy cliff notes version of his people’s woes.  It’s a sloppy oversight, and all the goodwill and aesthetic capital the game may have built up erodes, not instantly, but quickly in its wake.  Instead of the lonely feeling of scraping by in a post-apocalyptic hellhole, I’m on a badass, 22^nd-century Pirates of the Caribbean ride, with real live synthetic humans replacing those stiff foam-rubber automatons, but one of them has a malfunctioning speech chip and keeps saying the Declaration of Independence over and over again.  (Giddily, this is more or less sort of the culmination of an actual quest in Fallout 3.)  What is there to feel but whimsy, and perhaps a wisp of melancholy?

I just met you, sure I'll fiddle with the atomic bomb in the middle of your populous village. (Choices.)

The game is unfortunately full of such moments.  Here’s another, from the same questline even: having rescued some of Big Town’s captured citizens from the Super Mutants, you are thanked, but then complained at: the Mutants will be back in short order, and the villagers will suffer the same fate without help.  At the time, the game offered me the following options in response:

• [Science] I could help you fix up those broken combat robots to fight off the Mutants.
• [Small Guns] If you have guns, I could train you how to use them and defend yourself.
• I’ll fight off the Mutants myself, and they won’t bother you any more.
• Go fuck yourself et cetera, evil option.

Aha! said I.  That’s nice.  The game is allowing me to use my character skills, normally useful only in baldly game-mechanical situations (combat, electronic lockpicking), to represent the kinds of things my character knows and can use to help these people, along with the requisite good and evil choices for people without the proper skills (can’t let anyone not complete every quest just because of a stupid thing like what choices they made).  So I chose the Science option, which sees little enough use otherwise.

From then on, each person in town gives you the same canned lines, without even opening the dialogue dialog: “Are you going to teach us how to use the robots?”  “The robots are in the junkyard, in case you’re wondering.”  They even helpfully stroll over to the aforementioned junkyard, loitering there, awaiting your robot-reviving magic.

It’s only maddening, you see, because there are no robots in the fucking junkyard.

“Are you going to teach us how to use the robots?”

“The robots are in the junkyard, in case you’re wondering.”

Fuck each and every one of you little shits.  Did I mention how cathartic it is to slo-mo bullet-decapitate folks in VATS?

The whole God damned game is halfway.  There’s the beginnings of all these good ideas, but not a one of them is completed.  It’s such a big game, you say.  They can’t have gotten everything.  And at least it’s better than Oblivion, which didn’t have the beginnings, ends, or middles of any ideas except purely terrible ones.  It’s a step forward, no doubt, but the “big game” excuse lost its luster after I lost my virginity and tried playing my hundredth game of Daggerfall.  Rockstar solved the problem by actually spending the trillions of teeth-aching dollars to fill each and every inch of their humongous quasi-New York with fleshy, intricate detail.  Bethesda themselves solved the problem by just making a smaller game, the lovable and satisfying Morrowind.  Somewhere in between the last two Elder Scrolls games, the lure of the money of the kind of people who loved Bioshock led Bethesda to this place of public obscurity and muddy madness.

I’ll tell you what: it’s consoleification, is what it is.  The seemingly inevitable march of the home consoles into PC gaming’s market share has been the cause of a lot of consternation on the part of fragile-testicled nerds who seem to think that designing a game for a control pad instead of a keyboard means that it will be less “complicated.”  They will go on to describe a “complicated” game as one “where you can do anything you want, man.”  Let’s forget that this distinction, once moderately true, is barely breathing these days (Grand Theft Auto 3, standard-bearer for an entire generation of consoles, retains more of the free-form spirit than even the best efforts of the old guard of simulationist PC designers—Freelancer, I’m looking at you).  In this one case, it’s all CRPG and wargaming nerds’ worst fears come to life: UI marked into pointless subdivisions for analog-stick navigation; less complexity; less writing; more direction; no subtlety.  There’s no reason any of these regressions had to occur on the shift of focus to consoles—Morrowind, the brow-furrowed hero of this article, was also released on XBox to wide acclaim.

Because BIGGER is MORE EPIC.

No, it’s the sheer bigoted fear of Bethesda executives, or designers, or Bethesda somebodies, that made this game and its prequel Oblivion into these mishmashes of nonsense.  Turns out, Bethesda is fragile-testicled as well; they took the unfounded fears of the PC nerds to heart and made them the distasteful platform upon which to build Western RPG Console Supremacy.  Let’s be clear about this: the creators of Oblivion and Fallout 3 used message board complaints of the PC hardcore as marketing data, and then created a game based on this “data.”  A self-fulfilling prophecy of shit.

Bethesda: I understand that you want a piece of that XBox action.  That’s cool.  It’s a new age, man!  Games can release simultaneously on PCs and on consoles and be great on both.  When you do so, please stop imagining “PC gamers” and “console gamers” as two distinct “demographics”; please stop imagining that you can only please one to the mutual exclusion of the other; and please, for God’s sake, stop deciding that the one you stand to make the most money designing for is represented entirely by hat-backwards former high school wrestlers.  All the data I’ve been able to collect suggest that those people don’t even exist.  I promise that if you make a good game, instead, people will still buy it.

All images property and courtesy of Mobygames.

Tags: bethesda softworks, consoleification, daggerfall, fallout 3, free-form, gamer demographics, morrowind, oblivion, western rpgs, xbox