My Actifit Report Card: March 5 2022

Let myself sleep in and try to recover, so I felt better today. Took it pretty easy. I went out for a walk and did some laundry, but other than that, I didn’t do anything other than the usual daily stuff.

Gave myself the first “weekend” in a while, since I was cramming on Consoles and Controllers last weekend and I’ve been still pushing myself pretty hard over the last couple days. I need to make sure I’m still being productive, so I got a little work done on Kenoma (setting stuff, because inspiration struck), but I’m not making myself hit a quota today.

Cybrine Dreams is going to be a problem if I don’t start putting more time into it soon. I’m not sure how much stuff it’ll wind up getting, since the setting’s almost done and I just need content and finishing up the rules.

Still going through Kotkin’s biography of Stalin. It’s interesting because he definitely wants to do some analysis but doesn’t jump in places where he can’t know things, so you’ll get an intimation of some point he wants to make and then pulls back or provides multiple possible interpretations for.

Been playing some Fallout 3 again. It’s kind of an odd thing to do right now, I know, since it’s been out practically forever. I’m not doing a Tale of Two Wastelands install, either, so it’s just OG Fallout 3.

It’s surprising to see how much games have changed in the past decade and a half. Technically, Fallout 3 came out in 2008, so it’s not that old, but a lot of things really stand out.

It’s a much more sparse world than I recalled. That’s not to say that it’s entirely empty, but I found myself feeling like it’s not very dense compared to what I’d expect from later open world games. A lot of ruins with very little to do goes a long way, and I realized that it’s probably the first time in a while when I’ve been playing an open world game and felt like I was just schlepping to and from places. I had a little of that in Horizon, but the difference was that I wanted to get to the next story beat and felt like it was going to take a lot of non-story stuff to get there, not that I’d literally just be navigating empty terrain.

And I’m playing a modded setup that’s supposed to add some more stuff to the wasteland, too.

The interesting thing is how much it feels like things are just missing compared to what I’m used to. It’s all stuff that I just find absent on returning after playing other games in the series, not stuff that I remember missing back when I first played Fallout 3 on my ancient laptop that had to mash all the textures down to tiny little placeholders.

Most interestingly, I’ve often held the perspective that Fallout 3 is quite strong as a game, but now I’m not so sure that it holds as much merit.

One of the complaints that people make about Bethesda is that they dumbed down their games to reach a mass audience.

Now, with the Elder Scrolls, you have a series of highly regarded games that did generally become more mainstream over time. Arena and Daggerfall are explicitly niche by modern standards, while Morrowind makes no bones about what it is. Oblivion lets you play the game in a more user-friendly immersive simulator style, instead of a hardcore RPG style, and by Skyrim you have very much more of an action game feeling with strong RPG elements, but still less than you’d have gotten in the earlier games.

Fallout 3 is interesting because I think it actually does represent the original 2d Fallout games better than people give it credit for. The mechanics are more closely aligned, though it can be hard to realize due to how different it feels, and that gives it a certain charm and vibe.

Unfortunately, I find myself wishing that it had more of the comforts of modernity. It’s not too hard to get used to the crosshair aiming, though I had to install a bullet-time mod because my reflexes are shot and I can’t stand VATS.

It’s an interesting thing to look at as a game designer, because it shows how much tastes and preferences change over time. Of course, a lot of the criticisms that can be leveled toward Fallout 3 are a consequence of the sort of game it is and the limitations of the system, but then you can compare it to Cyberpunk 2077 and realize just how much better these things can get without simplifying the systems driving them all that much. In fact, Cyberpunk 2077 probably has equal or more character complexity than Fallout 3 has, though every choice you make in 2077’s got a lot less impact on the final character (whereas Fallout 3 really shines at making your choices stand out).

Fallout 3 always had a few rough edges, and it really is amazing how awful the characters look. There’s something unique about the way the Fallout 3 rendering pipeline works (New Vegas kept this, but did a better job with what it had) and it makes all the characters look like abominations. I feel the same way about Oblivion to a lesser degree, but Oblivion at least looks good if you get a good graphical overhaul, but I have graphical overhauls and Fallout 3’s characters are still awful.

This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io

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