Maimy van Buren - or, eating people is wrong (but rewarded by a health boost)

This article on the character of Dogmeat in the Fallout games dovetails with my recent experience of playing Fallout 3, and doing almost nothing else, in the wake of the release of Broken Steel. It's been... immersive.

Many years ago, Bethesda's Daggerfall hit me like the cold virus on a Martian invasion - the combination of an open, explorable world with huge spools of dialogue and world-building more than making up for the basic unplayability of the game. With Fallout 3, Bethesda were in the fortunate position of succeeding a development studio legendary for game-disrupting bugs, so the occasional running on the spot or Gertrude Steiny dialogue choices seemed less egregious, somehow.

That said, when I mentioned to him that I had been cracking through to get to level 20 and move onto Broken Steel, Tom Armitage responded that Fallout 3 had been a disappointment for him because, essentially, it wasn't Fallout - the implication being that it was an Elder Scrolls game with a different star cameo (Liam Neeson rather than Patrick Stewart) and the ability to yank the world suddenly out of real time to eat 20 pieces of food or to specify a shopping list of limbs to target on an opponent as a sop to the Fallout fans who had not previously had to deal with the first-person shooter interface.

I understand his position - in particular, the idea of walking through the empty space from one mission to the next sounded absolutely deathly - but Bethesda seems to have done a pretty good job of balancing the demands of the different communities. As you walk across the wasteland, you find many closely-packed locations, which make up for the limited and repetitious nature of the random encounters and do help to create the sense of an open world, however tightly bounded. At times, the silliness that infected and somewhat ruined Fallout 2 pops up like a weed, but its style and core-quest linearity more closely resemble Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, with a mess of side quests and a focus on providing multiple possible options to complete tasks. This is a good thing, unless you had anything planned for the weekend.

But anyway. This is relevant now, to me at least, because I've downloaded Broken Steel, having reached level 20 and the end of the main campaign at about the same time. My initial plan was to go back to the start and play through again as an evil character, but I had plans for the rest of my life. Instead, I spoiled myself about the bad character choices on the Fallout wiki. And bloody hell. They start with blowing up a town and broadly work from there. It's quite bracing to be playing a game, albeit one set in a fantastic alternate future, where gameplay elements include killing slavers, selling children to slavers, eating human flesh (cooked or on the bone), killing slavers and eating their human flesh, and selling human flesh to children. But not killing children (unless they are in the town you blew up), or indeed selling children to human flesh. I don't even know how that last one would work.

The arguments for making children effectively bulletproof are pretty obvious - it's justified here by the lead designer, in case anyone couldn't already anticipate exactly what he is going to say. It seems like an arbitrary place to draw the line in a world where you can eat people, but from a PR rather than a narrative perspective it makes sense, and it certainly has precedents.

Much like Deus Ex, children and characters who drive the plot are the walls against which the freedom of action bumps hard in Fallout 3. Usually, this isn't an issue in games because you are clearly following a path, and that path is broadly heroic - it doesn't matter so much if you empty a clip into Alyx Vance and she does not flinch, because by turning on her you have stopped playing through the narrative of Half-Life 2 in which you are allies and friends. Also, many games take place in an environment where there are no civilians (either because you are in a warzone or because all the innocent bystanders have been considerately pre-murdered by the bad guys) or where there are quick and easy mechanisms to discourage friendly fire, whether that is lost points or your friends turning on you. Kill too many citizens as Judge Dredd, and the SJS come after you. Kill too many innocents in Bloodlines, and you lose humanity, which makes you fall into murderous and self-endangering rages. These in turn alert humans to the presence of vampires, and lead to attacks first by vampire hunters and then by your own kind, trying to shut you up before you blow the gig (as they say in the Majickale Worlde of Darknesse). In Fallout, though, you are not necessarily a hero - although the plot is linear, the gameplay allows you to be more or less of a d-bag without the game stepping in to stop you. In the Interplay Fallouts, killing children was possible, but led almost immediately to the narrative becoming unplayable in a credible and consistent fashion; nobody wanted to talk to you, and most attacked you on sight. However, the difference between an essentially isometric, low-definition RPG and a hi-res, realistic FPS is undoubtedly important when you're looking at the sort of response you might get in the mainstream media to the sort of gameplay video which, thanks to an enthusiastic and maladjusted modding community, you can now find on YouTube.

This was actually going to be a post about Broken Steel and Games for Windows Live, and why it is a terrible, terrible place, but it's getting as long as Fallout 3 itself. So, fittingly, I'll delay access to that content. Instead, let's ponder whether these games are the best preparation for a post-apocalyptic wasteland.