On paper there’s a good case for calling it the best game of 2008. But for all the impressive things built into ‘Fallout 3′, what’s left out prevents it from being as satisfying as its potential.

Fallout 3 should have been my favorite game of the year. The post-war wasteland provides an amazing setting, and it’s rendered with attention to every burned-out, abandoned detail. Each quest delivers a unique story, touching on all manner of people trying to carve out some kind of life in the desolation. Fallout’s version of Washington DC an immense, complex, and imaginative universe, with countless interesting things to do and see; taken as a whole, it ranks among the best-realized game worlds out there. Scores of reviewers and players have already professed their love for Fallout, making it a must-try at the very least. Objectively, it has everything going for it, and on paper there’s a good case for calling it the best game of 2008.

If I was a slightly different person, it would have been. But for all the impressive things built into this game, what’s left out prevents it from being as satisfying as its potential.

……….

The best thing about Fallout is discovering the bizarre ways each remaining pocket of humanity has dealt with the end of the world. I’d hate to spoil anyone’s surprise, but without getting into specifics, I met a cult of cannibals, battled giant ants, and tried to reason with a robot who thought he was a founding father. When I stumbled into Tranquility Lane, my jaw dropped — spoiling that moment would be criminal — and at times like those I thought, “This is a spectacular game”. Instead of carefully crafting a blockbuster from beginning to end, the team at Bethesda designed a world in which every seemingly innocent errand uncovers a fascinating story all its own. Fallout does things that are truly unique among the games in my library, and for that they deserve the level of acclaim they’ve received.

The unfortunate side effect of setting your game in a wasteland, however, is that wastelands are both sprawling and uninviting. Traveling to new places across the barren expanse is dull, dreary, and dangerous until you stumble upon those chestnuts of story. Normally, walking those long distances toward a destination is not a problem, because you’re doing it with purpose. But seeing something in the distance, slogging several uneventful minutes to get there while having occasionally fatal encounters with local fauna, only to find an abandoned power station with a few treasure chests? This does not encourage further treks into the unknown. So my approach shifted. I started only going places when other characters or events gave me a legitimate reason for my trouble.

This is where the construction of the game battles itself to a degree. In an open world dotted with trigger points, a well-made game shouldn’t merely rely on an assumption that as a gamer I will scour every inch in order to find all the morsels and ‘complete the game’. The designers share the responsibility to motivate me to explore. Especially when you’re facing a hostile world, the human, emotional reasons to traverse the game space make all the difference — a pretty girl asked you for a favor; a scared child needed your help; a likable guy with a good sense of humor hopes a friendly stranger will give him a hand. The scenes that do play out this way feel so organic, they reward you for your actions not just with fame and fortune, but a sense of being part of a living world.

So in the instances the system ran flawlessly, I did start to love Fallout. But as I approached the end of the game, I realized there were huge chunks of the map no one had ever pointed me toward, and I’d been so happily involved with the quests I did get that the game was over before I knew it. An ending which, for all the strange, twisting stories that play out during the game, was so abrupt and anti-climactic that it made me wonder if I had done something wrong, and tainted the whole rest of my experience. Not only that, but once it’s done it’s done; there’s no going back to explore and find out what you may have missed — a huge strike against the basic premise of an open, living world.

……….

The argument might be that it’s meant to be played more than once, but to be honest that’s unfair to the player, and me specifically as an adult with a normal life. Going through once took me a month as it is. It’s presumptuous of a studio to ask me to dedicate another month to see the rest of their creation, with so many other games out there to play, much less the other demands on my time besides playing games. It’s equally unfair to the people who labored over the great moments I never got to see. Doing a little reading after the fact, I found out that I actually missed out on some of the coolest things in Fallout 3. There was a town with dueling super-heroes? Vaults filled with clones and insane hallucinogenic drug users? A cult of people who worship a living tree-person? I wanted to play those parts too. But either through bugs in the system or just neglecting to talk to the one person who would have pointed me in those directions, I didn’t see any of them.

Had they built in more interlocking pieces that point players toward the stories they crafted to fill this world, I wouldn’t have finished the game feeling like I’d only played half of it. Or an even simpler fix would have worked, if at some point earlier in the game they orchestrated a run-in with a cartographer character who provided a map with points of interest. Either way, I would have known where to find these narrative treasures. But at no point did I get a real sense of where the rest of the game was, and that’s what’s missing from Fallout that kept me from fully loving it. It’s a sad waste of compelling game content, and could have been avoided with just a few more bread crumbs along the way.

……….

In no other medium is it possible to technically consume an entertainment product from beginning to end, and yet miss out on large chunks of its experience. You don’t have the option of seeing Hamlet without the encounter with the gravedigger and the unearthing of Yorick’s skull. There’s no version of the Godfather where Michael doesn’t go to Cuba and decide to have his own brother killed. Part of the growing up of games as a medium will be figuring out how to allow freedom for the player, but not at the expense of entire chapters of the stories their creators are telling.

So while some critics absolutely adored Fallout 3, some have hesitantly admitted they weren’t so crazy about it. The dividing line could be attributable not to whether it was a good game or not, because there should be no question that it’s a fantastic achievement. In the end, it really comes down to playing style. If you’re inherently motivated to see everything there is to see in the world of Fallout, you probably can’t help but be bowled over by all it has to offer. But if, like me, you need a little prodding from within the game to unearth its pleasures, you may not even realize what you were missing until it was too late. Then you may be embarrassed to admit that the supposed game of the year was only ‘pretty good’, not as amazing as everyone seems to be saying. If you feel that way, don’t feel guilty — it’s not your fault. The pieces were there, they just left out some of the connective tissue. Maybe we can all revisit it later and catch up on what we missed. If you have yet to play this game you really should, because it’s one of the best out there. One suggestion though: be thorough, or you might only end up playing half of a masterpiece.