It looks, my friends, like I have exhausted Fallout 3‘s usefulness. I was enjoying the character interactions – and you’ll get at least one more case study out of me in the form of Tenpenny Tower, which fairly well disembowelled me on Monday – but it seems like all of the missions I now have are in the form of “go to a ruin, fight super mutants, obtain a valuable item”. The exploration aspect of the game was initially charming, but it’s starting to drag.
This is, of course, entirely my fault. I should have paid more and proper attention to the story, rather than wondering why a tiny place like Andale has more interesting characters and stories to tell than the safest place in the world, Rivet City. An open ended game has many devious tools to distract me (and that was ironically my problem with GTA IV: it completely lacked proper or worthy distractions), and distracted I have been.
Basically, what I’m saying is after 35 hours I’m tiring of the experience. It’s all just become so much treasure hunting and I’m going to have to find Liam Neeson and save society so I can go back to watching anime, or playing … Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. That’s right, baby! Set expectation levels to “you’d better not disappoint me, Rare, or else“!
Funny thing is, I was really keen on Oblivion at first, too, and my enthusiasm severely waned when variety gave way to monotonous trips to Hell. At least the people in Fallout 3 don’t have four different voices each. At least I’m not as invested in the whole thing as Shamus. Maybe I really am just terrible at enjoying video games now?
This sort of feeling is exactly what I got from oblivion at about the same point, the realisation that this is all there is. The truly interesting worthwhile quests just weren’t enough, and I ended up dropping the difficulty slider and powering through the main quest just to see the ending before removing it from my computer and selling it at my local second hand games store.
This is one of the major reasons why I will only consider getting FO3 if its very cheap, otherwise I’m setting my hopes on “proper” RPGs (in my own flawed opinion) such as Dragon Age or Age of Decadence. Fingers crossed they are as good as I’m building them up to be…