Fallout 3: On Walkabout
Travel in Fallout 3 is a bit different than in other games. Like most open worlds, a lot of your time in the ruins of the Washington, D.C. area is spent getting from one place to another. You know how it goes: somebody at Point A wants you to do something for them at Point B, after which they’ll tell you all they know about what’s going down at Point C. It’s a time-honored method of gradually introducing players to the vast world around them by carefully expanding the boundaries of their comfort zone one landmark at a time, and is found in everything from Grand Theft Auto IV to Fable 2. Unlike those games, however, there’s no taxi cabs to take you anywhere you like for a price or system of carriages waiting to haul you between major towns - there’s just you and your feet. Sure, there’s a fast travel option that lets you jump from one place to another via the map screen, but it only works for places you’ve physically been to before, meaning you’re still going to spend a lot of time out walking the Wastes.
To fully appreciate the weight of how it feels to step out in to the wilderness from the safety of, say, a town like Megaton, you need to be familiar with the idea of random encounters. A major part of the first two games as well (and a big part of why they’re so fondly remembered), random encounters are just what they say on the tin - when out in the wide world between plot points or major landmoarks, you’ll run in to all manner of oddities ranging from seemingly pointless meetings to vital clues pointing the way to some great secret. The blip on your compass could be caravan with stock to sell, a sun-stroked scavenger who’ll talk to you just long enough to mention seeing the light and drinking the water with some religious types before falling dead at your feet, or a couple of Raiders passing the time while waiting for their next victim to pass along by telling ghost stories about the monsters out East that attack the unwary in a flurry of claws and death.
There are funny moments, like finding a group of Raiders taking turns whacking a naked comrade with bats while shouting “Feel the pain! Love the pain!”, and some that are more bittersweet, like meeting Uncle Leo, a Super Mutant who remembers something of his life as a normal human and is on the run from his monstrous brethren for suggesting there’s more to life than killing and eating people. While fast traveling certainly has its uses, just like GTA IV’s taxis or Fable 2’s network of carriages between major towns, it also comes with a price in the form of all the random wonders you might be missing. After all the work Bethesda have put in to sprinkling these strange sights across the landscape, it seems more than a little wrong to not take the time to pick your way through the rocks and rubble or walk down one of the lovely ruined roads still criss-crossing the area (which, according to my post-apocalyptic expertise, should be the best best way to get ambushed by Raiders, a theory that I’m always delighted to see the game prove true). The Capitol Wasteland is a living, breathing world like few others seen in games, a place that I’ve easily spent nearly three solid days in and still don’t think I’ll ever see all of. But man, do I certainly intend to try.
Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.