*cough* Oregon Trail *cough*

And we’ve ALL played it. There’s no excuse for it in Fallout 3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPPmlM02yDU

I’m not so sure about exploration though. Exploration, where you can go anywhere is boring. The fun thing abozt exploration is also to be confronted with places that are hard to reach and then gradually overcome these obstacles. I think survival mechanics can be a great way to create this kind of experience. Think of a desert where you need to pack a lot of resources in order to be able to cross it. When you just make it to the other side, it will feel so much more special.

The question would be if this is the kind of experience that fits to the expectations of a title like Fallout 3. I would argue that it does.

The “tired” debuff you described is similar to the “well rested” system that is already in the game. I agree with you that it could be more developed. I would only add a small correction to the system: Right now you can get the “well rested” status only by sleeping in towns. But “well rested” only lasts for 12 hours. This isn’t nearly enough to reach many of the dungeons. So it means that you rarely be “well rested” when you really need it. I thought that was silly. There ought to be alternatives to get “well rested” outside of towns. A tent maybe?

Where these mechanics tend to work well is in sims that actively immerse you in a realistic life cycle. In Harvest Moon, it’s extremely normal to eat breakfast, or to only go to stores during the day when they’re open, or to go home and sleep because you’re operating in a world where things operate by a “realistic” daily clock and your game routine centers around optimizing that routine. In Lost in Blue survival tasks are entertaining because they’re your primary goal. And in both cases the availability of the things you need to do these tasks isn’t a problem — in HM you have food and a place to rest because you’re a farmer and work out of your farmhouse, in LiB success in your primary tasks is the same thing as getting enough food and tools to survive.

What I think would’ve worked well with Fallout 3 is, instead of actually forcing players to perform these tasks to survive, just denote them using minor but obvious effects (debuffs) so that they weigh on the player’s mind. Give players a “tired” debuff after X minutes of gameplay without “resting” and only allow resting in “safe” locations like settlements. Give them “hungry” and “thirsty” debuffs that food and water remove but replace them with sickness-related debuffs when what they’ve eaten isn’t clean. Make all of these minor in mechanical effect but have them add up collectively to a reasonably large effect; make sure they’re very visible in the HUD, with icons or visual effects or both (so players are always aware of how tired they are), and make sure there’s no way to get rid of them besides the “correct” way (eating and drinking clean water and sleeping.) Then balance the game around the idea that the player will almost always have at least one, sometimes more of these and inform them clearly upfront that this’ll be true.

The end result should be that players both eagerly seek out food and water when they’re available, hoard them when they’re scarce (you want to make sure you can be well-rested and well-fed before a big fight or a major trek into the wilderness), and that they sympathize with other characters who describe their difficulties in eating, drinking, and resting.

Fallout 3 seemed to really appeal to a lot of people I wouldn’t have expected to want to play it, although that may say something about the kinds of people I know rather than its target audience. I enjoyed it but definitely felt let down by the story, which reduced my sense of agency to the minimum required to allow me to feel in control, unless I had given up on the story and just wandered off on my own. With that level of freedom, my only goal would have been progression and collection. As Graham said above, how can it end meaningfully if you abandon the story?

I intend to play through it again when my memories of the game have dimmed, but to make every choice the opposite of my natural inclinations. That said, I fully expect this to make my experience of the game both more difficult and maybe even more hollow, somewhat like the emptiness of gunning down random citizens in GTA. I do look forward to seeing how an incredibly negative karma might affect the behaviour of the inhabitants.

I’m vaguely aware of the vast number of mods available for Fallout 3, so I expect one or more of those would supply an alternative experience which would be richer than just unguided exploration. That might be another approach to getting more out of the game.

Being forced to choose death at the end really was terribly weak. It was almost as though you were being talked into something you didn’t want to do by everyone around you. Like being shown a suit that you really don’t like, with all your family and friends agreeing with the salesman that it’s perfect for you, that it’s your fate to wear that awful suit. In the end you just give up and take the suit so that you can move on. Into the chamber, game over.

I know I could have chosen to do something else, but the game would have made me feel guilty…

I noticed that too tedious sustenance mechanics can scare away some players. But on the other hand, do you really think Fallout 3 is for a wide audience? I thought it was a rather hard-core RPG.

I like your idea with prolonging the survival. I really enjoy this kind of gameplay. It’s kinda funny how the original Story of Fallout 3 also lead to the inevitable death of you character. But since it was scripted and the story was so poor, it wasn’t really meaningful.

I made the mistake of following the quests, even though I knew that might lead to an actual ending. But simply prolonging the game by developing my character seemed a little pointless. An interesting alternative game might be to make death inevitable in the end, either through a lack of resources or eventual radiation poisoning (with accuracy and other stats affected by your increasing infirmity). Survival would then become the benchmark by which a player can be judged when they eventually succumb. That style of play would probably need to jettison the main storyline, so that you might choose your starting location and some stats/skills and see how you long you could last.

Having a more realistic treatment of survival doesn’t have to mean that you will get stuck more often. The effect could be non-threatening, but annoying to the player. For example, you could turn off quicktravelling when your character is hungry or tired. Simply making Stimpacks much more rare so you keep one or two for the darkest hour and live off food otherwise would be probably already enough. I’m merely suggesting that the topic should be addressed AT ALL.

I did two full playtroughs and played the beginning a couple of times. I didn’t find the first two hours boring, on the contrary. I’m curious, why did you find it boring and when did it stop being boring?

I wholeheartedly agree to your final suggestion. The main storyline is pretty weak. The game is by far more enjoyable when you just go out and explore all the random locations and sub-quests. In fact, I found myself deliberately avoiding progress in the main quest in order to be able to explore freely. But it’s a difficult task to design a game like that. The main problem is how to design an ending, how to give players a sense of closure once the wasteland has been explored?

The first 2 hours of the game are -boring-.

Even as it is, you can save yourself into a pinch, and in the world you describe action from many hours of gameplay ago could effectively doom your character, so having the character ‘perma-die’ or ‘lose’ would need to be handled with more grace.

In addition, the first moments of the game would need to be more interesting and varied to support replay.

In fact, I think this would be a great way to approach the content of the game: One thing that bothered me was that “beating” the game took 6-8 hours, but there was all that other content out there. It felt weird to be doing things that weren’t winning. If it was more like, “Go out and live for as long as you can,” ala Roguelikes, and one of the potential routes led to a “good ending”, I think idly exploring the world would have been much more meaningful.