After years and years of development, beginning its life as Project ‘Van Buren’ under the skillful hands of the illustrious designers at the Black Isle Studios (later to be cancelled by Interplay), Fallout 3 found new life again when it was licensed to Bethesda Softworks.
In the intervening years, Fallout fans (I among them) have jostled and argued over the fate of their sacred cow. Most fans are deeply concerned that the developer of The Elder Scrolls series (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion) will misuse the license and produce a bastard Fallout-Oblivion hybrid unfaithful to the original series.
On the other end, the folks over at Bethesda face the pressure of developing a game that simultaneously satisfies the whims of rabid doomsayers, doubting thomases, FPS fans, hardcore role-players, post-apocalyptos, apathetics, ambivalentés, and Bethsoft believers. After the early fanatical hype and later discord of TES: Oblivion, Bethsoft has a lot to get right this time around the may-pole.
Rather than a simple, Carmackish, “It’s done when it’s done”, the folks over at Bethsoft have been surprisingly candid with their experiences of developing the game, have tried to maintain a positive relationship with the ardent Fallout fan communities, and have pushed hard in the last few months to hit every major online and offline publication with the latest preview of their game.
The hype has been all over the place. People who’ve played it for a few minutes seem to love the graphics and atmosphere. The developers are fanatical about the “VATS” pseudo-turn-based targeting system. FPS lovers are intrigued by the freeform exploration and stunning apocalyptic vistas. Other gamers are up in arms over the same issues: the world looks like Oblivion dipped in mushroom gravy, the gore is gratuitous, VATS is a shoe-horned hack, epic vistas and scenery aren’t the focus of the Fallout universe. Every celebrated feature for one person is a potential disaster for another. The hubbub reminds me of debates that raged when David Fincher’s Alien3 made its debut and forever transformed the face of the Alien series.
Although all aspects of the game seem to be staked out, there are a couple of details that have remained ominously silent in most publications. In this article I take a quick peek at the Writing and Music of the Fallout series, and what it might mean for Fallout 3.
Writing/Dialogue/Story
Although often left neglected, one of the key aspects of the Fallout universe (excepting Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, which is not a role-playing game) has been the writing quality. The Fallout series shares much with Planescape: Torment, insofar as text-based dialogues that can take minutes and sometimes tens of minutes to explore. Ethical choices and moral predicaments are common to both games, and Fallout does an outstanding job of presenting the player with imaginary temptations. And like Torment, characters are written from the perspective that each “has their own story to tell” and the player is invited to join in on that story and carry it along for a while. At every turn the story feels handcrafted and personal, and encourages the player to continue assisting in telling the story until the end. The Fallout world is one lived-in through its stories.
This stands in sharp contrast to The Elder Scrolls series which has always celebrated a technical-minimalist approach to writing. Dialogues are composed of randomly-generated phrases, characters are generated on-the-spot, and NPCs only tell their stories in order to enable the player to increase statistics, gain items, or pursue combat. In many ways The Elder Scrolls grew out of the “roguelike” school of thought: create enough algorithms and the player has limitless freedom and combat opportunities. Specifically, Daggerfall and Oblivion both suffered from writing that was too generic, too loosely coupled to its universe. Stories just don’t matter a lot for the TES games.
Music
Fallout’s score has often been overlooked, perhaps because of its minimalistic and ambient tenor. Mark Morgan’s composition is atmospheric and often tugs at a sub-conscious experience of the game. Thinking of my first tenuous step into Fallout’s “Necropolis” (ghoul city), Morgan’s score – full of distorted strings and warped buzzing steel saws, was petrifying. The track (listen to it here) is tense and terror-inducing… the musical equivalent of taking a midnight walk down a deserted subway track in zombie territory. At other times Morgan brings a more earthy, tribal tone that hints at a melody but never breaks into it (listen to it here). There is something wonderfully atmospheric about the score in the Fallout series that subliminally cranks up every scene a notch or three without dominating or distracting from it. The music is absolutely central in the game.
Sidenote: If you’ve seen P.T. Anderson’s There Will be Blood, Johnny Greenwood’s score shares much with the scores composed for the original Fallout games (try the “Henry Plainview” track here for a sample).
The Elder Scrolls scores on the other hand have always tried to emulate the modern epic sound – string-heavy, choir-heavy, brass-heavy, and brutally unsubtle (listen here). The scores for Morrowind and Oblivion could have been ripped straight from blockbuster Hollywood grand adventure or fantasy films such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. While technically sufficient and comparable to film scores, the music never quite gives these games an identity. The scores are something tacked on to the game as an afterthought, and bear no constitutive relationship with the gameplay, character interaction, or emotions of a scene. Like the writing, the music is sufficient, generic, and non-intrusive. The music simply doesn’t matter much.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
The last thing that the Fallout universe needs is another opinion on Fallout 3. While visual art direction, compelling combat, and freeform world exploration are fundamentals of the Fallout series, it disturbs me that other I daresay more important aspects of the game go unmentioned. What I’ve tried to do here is open up the debate on these two aspects with the hope that we can begin to understand why Fallout 3 will be very much unlike Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.
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From Zach:
After getting caught up in the Fallout 3 hype, I went back and replayed Fallout 1. While, I’m not going to disagree that the Elder Scroll series were weak in the dialog area, Fallout isn’t that great either. Two things jump out at me-characters that function as information wells and inconsistency.
Information well characters are what I’m calling characters who exist purely to describe the PC’s current location and usually give an idea where quests exist in the area. Sometimes they are blessed with more than a sentence describing who they are but most of the time they could be replaced with signposts. This begs the question why some towns have almost everyone in the town fit this dialog model.
The second issue I found is that Fallout can’t seem to decide what kind of voice it wants to give the player. In one town the player is given a choice to be anything from the selfless champion to a single minded survivalist through dialog, in another my interaction with a major quest NPC is sarcastically accept quest, sarcastically ask for information, and end dialog. While not every game can be the masterpiece that was Planescape, I think Fallout is getting a bit too much a free pass in the dialog experience department.
In terms of music you are spot on. The orchestral track style is overdone and unsubtle music becomes unbearable after around 10 hours.
Overall, I’ll give Bethesda some credit in that they recognize that the dialog in the Elder Scrolls was lacking. In my mind, though, Fallout level dialog is not an unobtainable goal and could use some improvement while they are at it.
From chris:
I agree with you that the dialog in Fallout is inconsistent at best, and I suppose that my comparison to Torment is over-the-top in retrospect. Fallout, to me, feels like an unfinished symphony… at times the game feels polished and tight… and at other times screams incompletion and hollowness. I can specifically remember that several of the towns are full of “information well” characters (terrible!). But those are often outshined by the more fleshed-out characters. Of note are the (sometimes) more complex relationships between the characters that add to the intrigue, such as Killian Darkwater and Gizmo in Junktown.
But keep in mind, these are mere irritants, in comparison to Oblivion, where cookie-cutter dialogs comprise 99% of the game.
As for the second issue, again, I suspect that the game suffers from a lack of polish. Torment pulls so much further ahead in the sheer bulk of interaction.
I do think, though, that Bethesda is still worlds apart in terms of writing, and given almost
2015 years of making TES games .. they still rely upon the same story mechanics as they did in Arena and Daggerfall. I agree that Fallout-quality writing would be easily attainable (and improvable!) – but only with the right writer. I’m not sure that Bethesda has that person.Either way – your comment has given me quite a bit to think about. I’m planning on giving Fallout another play-through before the summer’s over. Thanks much for your thoughts!
From Nur-ab-sal:
There actually is careful writing in TES, but it’s in the books rather than the dialogue. The Imperial Library (http://imperial-library.info) transcribes and analyzes (to a ridiculous degree, in many cases) the texts of TES’ books. It’s still not a story in any way–much of them are just random fantasy short stories, some are more worldbuilding/cosmology type stuff–but I just wanted to point out the existence of decent writing in TES.
Personally I always found Morrowind much more interesting than Oblivion in terms of everything except gameplay (which is why I ended up playing Oblivion more and mostly just reading Morrowind via the above site); Morrowind does have a fairly well-crafted story (well, backstory, but that’s common in RPGs), although the dialogue still sucks.
From chris:
A visitation from the all-seeing Nur-ab-sal.. !
(couldn’t help myself, sorry)
Good point. I had forgotten about the in-game literature. Those do make a difference for background/story arc/the world. Indeed, I’ve never had a complaint about the TES world… I find it a fascinating re-take on typical RPG fantasy. There is much to value in the TES games – especially Morrowind and (surprisingly!) Daggerfall. It’s just too bad that the same kinds of qualities never seem to make it into the interactive writing.
From Denis:
As Zach pointed out, the dialog can be rather spotty in the games, but I do agree with you that this is something that is mixed in with shining examples. It is an issue that hasn’t been discussed, and in their decision to keep the Radiant AI, I wonder how much this will also affect the conversation trees.
It is somewhat bothersome (though understandable from a writing perspective) that conversations NPCs have with each other do not offer dialog options when the character goes to speak with him/her.
However, those character wells did grow particularly frustrating the last time I started (two months ago, then was distracted by Oblivion again). Especially as so much seemed filler.
Now that I said I loaded up Oblivion, I will say I flinched as the intro movie played and I felt I was in Lord of the Rings with the orchestral music blaring and the slow panning of the Imperial City. There are many games where I turn off the music after the initial listen because I’d rather set my own mood (ooo, implementing my own options). However, I feel this is normally because the soundtracks don’t really feed into the game in the same manner.
Ah well, already preordered my Collector’s Edtion–I want that lunch box and will be using it. Thankfully, working in a Design department that enjoys discussing games, I expect to be the envy of the office.