Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

I finished playing Fallout: New Vegas last Monday night. As so many have said, it's basically more Fallout. I'd put it on par with Fallout 2, where for me, Fallout and Fallout 3 are just a notch above. No major deviations from expectations, but there were a few things I really liked. And if you've played it, the picture above should be a healthy hint.

Obligatory spoiler warning: Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas revelations of a serious calibre follow.

As a technical gripe and preface, I really hope Bethesda either scuttles or dramatically upgrades Gamebryo for whatever they're doing next. The engine is seriously showing its age. It does fine with the environment, but really falls flat on people. Not only are they, at best, individually unsettling but the engine seems very limited on how many of them can be in a space at once. Hitman: Blood Money had a fantastic scene in New Orleans with some extremely dense crowds. And it's over four years old.

In contrast, you hit the Strip in New Vegas and it feels so empty. It's been talked up by countless NPCs on your way there, but the place itself is terribly sparse. Upon entering the club portion of the tawdriest casino, supposedly the Strip's most popular establishment, there were maybe four patrons and the bartender. Oh, and two dancers awkwardly gyrating on a massive stage that totally dwarfed them. All the spaces in New Vegas feel very cavernous. And without sufficient NPCs to fill them, going to the Strip feels more like you're at a Tuesday night concert waiting for the opening act nobody likes to start.

I can't imagine this is intentional, but an engine limitation. And it's really exacerbated in the game's climax, where Caesar's Legion attacks the Hoover Dam. The entire game you're told Caesar has been massing his army for four years, waiting to overwhelm the New California Republic's defenders. But when the attack comes, how vast is Caesar's Legion? Hundreds? Thousands? Not even close. It's maybe 15 legionnaires. Underwhelming doesn't even begin to cover it. It's not even enough guys to field a professional hockey team.

Now I realize it's absurd to think the game could simulate a battle with hundreds of participants, but it also shouldn't tell me that's what is supposed to be happening! It could have been setup that Caesar sent the bulk of his legion across the river, diverting the NCR's forces and then sent in elite commando units to take the Dam under the cover of darkness. But there's not even an attempt to reconcile the tremendous gulf between what the game says is occurring and what is actually happening for the player. I can't say it's anything but disappointing.

And the worst part is, otherwise Caesar's Legion is fantastic. They're a great antagonist, one of the best I've seen in a game possibly in years. They're strong because Obsidian got two things with the Legion right that greatly contribute to them being designed as a strong antagonist. First, they have a real presence in the world and to its inhabitants. People are talking about the Legion (sometimes exaggerated, sometimes not) well before you ever encounter them. When you finally do, you come across them leaving the town of Nipton (a real place in California) after they've killed or crucified the entire populace. Then they disappear and you don't cross paths with them again for hours. It's simple foreshadowing, but so many games have antagonists appear two minutes before you defeat them and they're never seen again.

Second, Caeser's Legion is well realized. Using the Roman Empire provides a wealth of characterization that requires almost no effort at all. And rather than just slap plumed helmets and leather skirts on some NPCs, Obsidian did a good job drawing upon real Imperial Roman characteristics. The use of proper Latin pronunciation, e.g. "v" as "w" and all c's as hard c's (so it's "Wall-ay" not "vall-e" and "Kai-sar" not "Seeser"). Caesar's Legion doesn't have spies, they have Frumentarii (the actual Roman secret service). Even small details, like the description of how the Legion fought at the first Battle of Hoover Dam exactly matches the maniple system the Romans actually used to defeat the popular phalanx used by other powers in the ancient Mediterranean (at least until Marius reorganized the legions again in 107 BC, which ultimately contributed significantly to the downfall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Empire). And Caesar fighting against a corrupt, oligarchical New California Republic and its Senate is hardly a coincidence. Using the Roman Empire as a cultural basis for their antagonist is such a good move for Obsidian because it makes the Legion feel distinct and foreign without needing to create an entire believable culture from whole cloth.

In contrast, The Enclave in Fallout 3 appear almost literally out of nowhere. They're just the Bad Guys that do Bad Things. If you've played (and remember) Fallout 2, you may be a little more aware of The Enclave and what they're about. If you haven't, they just seem like a slightly better equipped version of the Brotherhood of Steel with a tailor that digs the Third Reich. The only foreshadowing at all is the wandering eyebots broadcasting messages from President Malcolm McDowell. And while the final encounter with the President isn't bad, the Enclave really does come out of nowhere and they have little purpose beyond just "Be Evil."

Of course, I've always been into the history of the ancient world and took several years of Latin in undergrad, so I'm probably both an easy sell and more appreciative of the details than others. And I've recently been listening to an excellent podcast that covers the entire history of ancient Rome that I cannot recommend enough.

Aside from the technical shortcomings of the combat interactions with the Legion, the moral ambiguity in their actions is unfortunately torpedoed (yet again) by a heavy-handed, point-based morality metre. These systems make having any kind of grey area impossible. While the Legion's actions are undoubtedly harsh, they are (like the actual Roman Empire) welcoming and fair to those that do not resist Legion/Roman control. And the NCR isn't exactly a paragon of virtue. It's bureaucratic, corrupt and clearly far more interested in Hoover Dam for their own interests than for the Mojave's.

What boggles the mind is New Vegas implemented a faction-specific karma system with surprising nuance. Instead of single good/evil axis, the faction relationships understand the difference between mostly good/a little evil and see you as a "Smiling Trickster" and mostly evil/a little good granting perception as a "Merciful Thug." But the global karma system undermines all of this, especially with regards to Caesar's Legion, where almost every action nets you evil karma. It's unfortunate, because the opportunity to provide some good "ends justify the means" hypothesizing with regard to the Legion could have been very interesting.

One final note: New Vegas does the epilogue right. One of my favourite things about Fallout 1 & 2 is the lengthy epilogue that details the effect the player had on places they visited and people they met. This was jarring absent in Fallout 3 where the epilogue addressed only a few areas and even then, only briefly. The epilogue of New Vegas is remarkably detailed and satisfying.

New Vegas had the ingredients necessary to surpass the excellent experience Fallout 3 provided. Unfortunately, shackled to aging tech and unable or unwilling to scuttle design inertia, things didn't quite bake up right. As far as antagonists go, Caesar's Legion completely outshines The Enclave. I just wish it had improved that much in other aspects. It's still a great time, but is fated to be "Yeah, it's more Fallout" rather than "It's the best Fallout!"

Oh, and I can't believe there wasn't a quest named "Sic Semper Tyrannis." That's either marked restraint or a huge oversight. Not sure which is better.

Telegraphing

Many decisions made in the process of creating a game will be between two equally valid, but irreconcilable, viewpoints. It's interesting watching ebb and flow of those types of opinions in the industry at large. Or quite simply, a whole lot has changed since 1992 and 2010.

Quinns over at RPS wrote a pseudo-retrospective on KGB, an adventure game from '92. I haven't played KGB (although after reading this post, I want to track it down), but what stands out most in Quinn's piece is how content the game is to mislead you or at least provide you with very incomplete information. Back in '92, you could still fail at an adventure game and apparently, you can fail quite often in KGB. Except it might be twenty or thirty minutes before you're fully aware you've failed.

This is something that you'd never see in a contemporary game. An unrecoverable fail state that doesn't resolve for twenty to thirty minutes? Most would criticize that as poor design, and there's some truth to that. But at the same time, Quinns describes what has become an utterly alien sensation in games- not knowing the outcome of your decisions.

The reason we moved away from consequences like this is pretty obvious. It's very frustrating to make a decision, damn yourself and not realize it for half an hour. And it can feel very unfair if a game offers you a choice, but something completely unexpected happens that makes the decision feel meaningless. Even though we're making decisions through an avatar, the decisions still feel personal. If a character in a novel or film makes a decision with incomplete information only to realize the full consequences later, it's less likely to feel frustrating. Or even if the audience has information the character doesn't, it still doesn't feel unusual. But if a game does the same, I think many would feel slighted, like the game was withholding information that should have been provided, regardless of fictional context.

Even inside of a single game series we can see this change in thinking. I've been playing quite a bit of Fallout: New Vegas recently and while I'm definitely liking it, I can't help but notice how explicit all of the decisions are. Many of the decisions are still compelling, but you're seemingly always fully informed of the consequences (almost to a fourth wall breaking degree at times). Whatever the NPCs say will play out almost always will. You know if you choose A, you'll receive X and this group will be mad at you, but if you choose B, you'll get Y and a different group will be mad at you. The outcomes of your decisions are all very well telegraphed.

On the one hand, you never feel like you would have made a different decision in hindsight (because since you can reload and make a different choice, this will encourage probing same & reload behaviour which really diminishes the emotional impact of any particular decision). But you're never really surprised either. Now Fallout: NV does a good job of providing surprises in other ways, so it's not exactly a deficit, but it's certainly not how making decisions in real life works. Decisions in real life are agonizing because you rarely have complete information about the possible outcomes.

This stands in stark contrast to the first Fallout game, where it was possible to lose the game completely. Not in the "I ran out of HP, died and had to reload" sense, but in the complete and utter "you can do nothing to change this, this is The End" sense. And there were actually two different ways this could happen. I guess some spoilers follow, but come on, Fallout came out 13 years ago. You should have played it by now.

One you're aware of at the beginning of the game and is totally explicit. Your Vault has 150 days of water left and if that counter goes to 0, you lose the game. But even after you fix the water chip, another invisible counter will begin later. After a certain number of days, Super Mutants will find your Vault and kill everyone inside. I have no idea if the timeline is always fixed or if other things can influence it, but once its course is set, it cannot be altered. And the game does not tell you when this is going to occur or what it will even occur at all.

I actually had one game of Fallout (not my first playthrough, thankfully) become completely unwinnable. I had two save slots that I'd alternate between and had made some expedition to The Glow. One save was made going in, the other was coming out. Maybe one or two days travel out from The Glow, I hit the game-ending date. Even reloading my original save, I couldn't get back to civilization in time to change anything. Without any other save slots, the only thing I could do is start the entire game over again.

Imagine a game shipping with such a feature today. It would be lambasted! The thinking of both creators and player is that players should be provided with nearly or fully complete information and allowed to make a well informed decision. And while I'm amenable to this thinking and believe it's good for players to have more agency, I can't help but read Quinn's piece on KGB and think that "I'd love to make a decision and be surprised by the outcome." I'm not exactly sure how one could adopt that sensibility into a modern game, but I think it could be done. It wouldn't be through failing half an hour after the decision was made, of course. But the feeling of tension and suspense in making those kinds of decisions can be very satisfying. We just need to figure out how to remove some of the frustration without removing the unknown. Do that and I think one would have something very compelling.

Level 20 Gunslinger

Red Dead Redemption may be one of the best RPGs to come out this year.

Stop and think about it for a minute. When it comes to creating a place that feels legitimate and tangible, it's pretty hard to argue with New Austin's expanse. And RDR certainly has characters and dialog in spades (no poker pun intended).

If you really consider it, what differentiates an "RPG" from another kind of game? In days long past, when we were measuring Final Fantasy against Contra, having a large, free-roaming world was a novel and unique feature. Obviously that's no longer the case. Sandbox games may have actually surpassed the majority of RPGs in presenting a large, freely navigable continuous space.

Similarly, nearly all AAA single-player games are character-driven now. It used to be that the only RPGs contained characters that would speak to each other in nothing but the most cursory of fashions. Again, those days are long past. While the stories might not always have been well-crafted, they're certainly prominent in nearly all big-budget titles. Even the notion of player choice (nearly always good vs. evil) has been used in all manner of games.

With world and story no longer domain of the RPG, what remains are mechanical distinctions. The most prominent mechanics, i.e. level, hit points, etc., were inherited from tabletop RPGs. Stat-modifying equipment is a natural consequence of this, but not really a distinct feature by itself. Some RPGs have focused intensely on this portion of the genre, most notably Diablo and its more modern offpsring, Torchlight. Of course, as is evidenced by Modern Warfare (and seemingly every other yet-to-be-released shooter), experience and levels is a system that can easily be co-opted by other genres.

Another large distinction is being able to control a party of characters, rather than just a single one. However, we have seen this diminish as of late (especially in western RPGs) from having full, symmetric control of all the characters to embodying a single character and directing AI companions. Some recent RPGs, like Alpha Protocol and Demon's Souls offer no companions at all.

Having a robust dialog system with many conversation options is part of the western RPG tradition, but rare in Japanese RPGs, so this may only count for half. This quality is shared with adventure games as well.

There is something of a question of content and setting, given that many RPGs skew toward wizards-and-orcs style fantasy. I'd consider this also a result of their tabletop heritage rather than anything intrinsic, especially when some of the best RPGs around explore different territory.

With all that boiled away, what then is the difference between Fallout 3 and Red Dead Redemption? Is it just statistics and a dialog tree? I think there is one final difference, also inherited from the tabletop ancestry, that's most important: classes. While their specific implementation may vary, the high-level goal of providing distinct playstyles is pretty fundamental to the RPG. The classes may be spread amongst characters (in Japanese RPGs) or a choice offered to the player, but they're almost always there.

I'd say this is really the heart of the RPGs. Playing Red Dead Redemption, the player is always John Marston. When you're placed in a situation where you have to shoot, you shoot. When told to race, you race. When told to mosey and rustle, well, you get the picture. The player has very little choice in how to address a situation. Even with the greater freedom afforded in a game like Just Cause 2, sooner or later, you're going to be blowing things up. It's just a question of whether or not to buy two grenade launchers or steal a helicopter.

I'm not convinced that the low-level mechanical trappings of RPGs are what make them interesting and special. I don't think Morrowind or Arcanum would be poorer games if they didn't have levels. In a single player game, the notion of level is largely illusory anyway (and in the case of Oblivion, barely an illusion). The numbers get bigger, but the game rarely becomes radically more difficult as you advance in level. It works at conveying a sense of progress, but there are other ways to do this. But the choice afford by the best of RPGs is unparalleled.

Are we going to see a convergence of RPGs and sandbox games? Perhaps. Take away the leveling and we're more than halfway there, I'd say. Imagine a game with the playstyle freedom of Deus Ex and the grand, sprawling world of Just Cause 2. Sandbox games with rich, emergent worlds succeed in providing small moments unique to each player. Great RPGs offer the ability to make large scale decisions that fundamentally alter how the player approaches the game. Putting those things together would be quite the challenge, but the payoff would be astounding.

I'm not sure who would make that game, but I cannot dispute that I would play the everliving hell out of it.

Fallout and The Procedural Skald

To many, the appeal of games is being able to meaningfully interact with a world, making decisions with lasting consequences. Unfortunately, providing this is a very difficult challenge for developers. The combinatorial explosion that even a small number of decisions creates requires providing outcomes for all possible combinations of decisions. Just creating that content is a tremendous amount of work; creating it in such a way that all outcomes connect harmoniously and do not feel unnatural is realistically impossible.

Commonly, developers address this issue either by providing small, isolated pockets of agency that do not interact or by providing choices that are largely illusory, with the core story hitting on the same beats regardless of the player's specific decisions.

Interestingly, Fallout 1 & 2 addressed this issue cleverly, but Fallout 3 abandoned that device for a weaker solution. If Fallout 3 had augmented this instead of abandoning it, I think it could have represented a more significant step toward minimizing the complications of these issues.

Most areas in Fallout 1 & 2 provided a number of different outcomes to the player's decisions, but these outcomes were almost always isolated from each other area. Beyond adjusting the player's abstract reputation (karma), events in Shady Sands don't change what happens in The Hub. Unlike other games that adopt that model, however, Fallout remembers the outcomes of various decisions the player makes. At the end of the game, the player sees a substantial epilogue that describes the impact their actions had on the people they met and the places they visited.

Fallout 3 provided a minimal version of this, describing in binary terms how the player acted at maybe a half-dozen locations. To be honest, this disappointed me far more than the content of the ending itself. Instead of an epilogue, the bulk of response to player actions comes from the game's procedural skald, Three Dog.

(As a note, this construct came from some comments made by Marc LeBlanc at his Game Design Workshop at GDC this year. He used "procedural bard," but I'm going to use the term "skald," as being a tabletop RPG veteran, "bard" has some degree of baggage.)

Three Dog serves as a dynamic skald, providing disc jockey poetics of the player's decisions. This gives the player's actions context, demonstrating clearly that their decisions are not made in a vacuum. Karma serves a related purpose, but responding to the player's actions with a real, human voice has the potential to be more poignant. The nursery scene at the beginning of the third act of Bioshock does the same.

Similarly, this allows for the world to reaction to generally immoral acts without just making all NPCs hostile. Given the reward structures of most games (rewards being experience points, money and/or equipment), making some number of previously friendly NPCs hostile really just gives the player relatively guilt-free access to resources. This only serves to further incentivize immoral actions, rather than causing the player to reflect.

Finally, Three Dog provides live feedback, instead of only at the end of the game, as the epilogue in Fallout 1 & 2 did. I understand that some didn't connect with Three Dog, but hopefully the value of a procedural skald construct is clear. The skald doesn't necessarily need to be a specific person or even a person at all either.

As I mentioned above, the lack of a substantial epilogue in Fallout 3 left the ending feeling quite unsatisfying, and many others felt the same way. Fallout 1 has a very strict time constraint, and Fallout 2 only loosened this somewhat. Without the strict time constraints and very pronounced goals of Fallout 1 & 2, exploration is at the heart of Fallout 3. As the end of Fallout 3 terminates any further exploration (until the Broken Steel DLC, at least), without any kind of epilogue that gives the player's actions greater context and meaning, I can understand why many found the end so unsatisfying.


Players seek the ability to affect change in the worlds they inhabit. Providing meaningful outcomes with cascading consequences explodes into an uncontainable number of stories. Even the most dynamic stories still must collapse to a few certain story points. But by using both epilogue summary of decisions and active in-game feedback, we can make the player's decisions feel more substantive and influential. As our procedural skald tells epic poems of the player's actions, they're providing what many players seek. They are saying something to the world and it will speak back.