Oblivion & Fallout – How I Became a PC Gamer

For as long as I’ve been a gamer, I’ve been a consoletard. We weren’t an Amiga or Commodore 64 family, my first computer was a Compaq in 1993 or so. To me a “video game” was something contained in a cartridge that you played with a controller on your television, and that remained my definition up until recent years (well except that part about cartridges maybe.) Sure I always played The Sims on my computer, and brief stints of Myst and the original Alone in the Dark, but that was about the extent of it.

Then came Bethesda. Bethesda gets a lot of crap from the gaming populace but no one can deny the sheer insane scope of their games. The freedom their games offer, the size of their sandbox worlds, and the countless sidequests are unrivaled by most other developers. Where their main plot lines may be average or lackluster their ability to tell stories within stories in their various sidequests or even just paint some unspoken scene within the level design is what keeps me so entertained.  Not to mention their games are like goddamn CRACK to me. They’re basically all the fun of MMOs only with a plot and without the monthly fee, the grind, or the other players to bother you.

If there’s one thing I always liked to do in games is explore. This has been true ever since I was a child. I would try every path, scour every nook and cranny, eager to see every little thing in the game’s world. And it’s always disappointing when one’s fevered exploration goes unrewarded. I also am quite enamored of character customization, feeling more invested in a character I’ve sculpted myself. I also like action games with RPG elements. You can see where this is going.

This all started when I rented Fallout 3 for the 360 earlier this year. Now let it be known I never played the previous Fallout games (and Fallout 3 doesn’t resemble them at all gameplay-wise), I had no idea what it was about. But the Mad Maxian lawless future, the dry humor, the incredible amount of places and things to see and do drew me in immediately. But after the rental the price tag kept me away.

So then I thought “Well Oblivion’s only 20 bucks now for the game and the expansions, if it’s like Fallout but in a fantasy setting, I’d like it even more!” And like it I did, although admittedly the stilted voice acting and hilariously dated graphics turned me off at first, but once I started ignoring the main quest and joined the Thieves Guild I found I was basically playing a game that catered to my whims, I was making the game my own.

But it wasn’t long before I wanted to take that a step further and started to fantasize about how the game could be improved with mods. As a Sims player I’d long been familiar with how huge a mod community could get, and the talent that can grow within them. I love modders, I really do, here are people who will spend 3 months programming a solution to some petty annoyance in a game and then will share it with others. So I bought Oblivion for the PC and got to work.

As usual I crafted a “good” character and an “evil” character. My good character (if you can call a habitual thief “good”) was a version of one of my own characters, Terith, because given the fantasy setting how could I resist? I did however select his main traits a bit more wisely than I did on the 360 as I had by then gotten the hang of the leveling system in the game. I even used Bethesda’s own Elder Scrolls Construction Set, a program created to assist modding, to make him delightfully short. My evil character was a custom race, a hot demon chick with a body mod and player-made clothing who joined the Dark Brotherhood and who I constantly godmode with.

But it’s strange, as big a whore as I am for fantasy games, I kept coming back to Fallout, finally renting it again recently on the 360 and making the decision to get it on the PC, mostly for the prospect of mods. I recreated my character from the console version (though similarly with a better understanding of the leveling system by now) and got to playing. The interesting thing about Fallout is I find it deeply effective story-wise. Maybe it’s the familiar settings, seeing Washington DC in a hypothetical bombed-out future (and the series has so many locales and so much to work with I’m eager for future sequels.) There’s also something about seeing everyday objects repurposed in a tribal-like post-apocalyptic society that always tickles me. Not to mention the kind of surreal nouveau-retro 1950’s aesthetic the pervades the game’s vision of pre-war America despite the fact this nuclear holocaust took place in the year 2077 (which is still a great theme as America had its worst nuclear scares in the 50’s and 60’s.) Sure the narrative creates some problems: will all computers really regress to running on DOS by 2077? Why is it every lock in the future can be opened with a bobby pin and a screwdriver despite the fact electronic locks are widely available even now? How is any of that food still edible 200 years after the fact, will we create some really kickass preservatives by the 2070’s? Oh well, some suspension of disbelief won’t kill you.

I did download at least one mod to curb an atmospheric pet peeve I have. There’s a mod called Fellout that changes the sky and air of the game so that everything isn’t dusty and green all the time giving you sunny days, overcast days, starry nights, and everything in between. I mean really, the dust in the air would have settled after 200 years, and frankly I think this look is more eerie. Running around Fallout on a sunny day is like a reminder that the Earth will go on with or without humanity. The end of the world is never the end of the planet. Now I’m getting a bit too serious but really sometimes it’s like the game can’t decide if the nuclear fallout happened 10 years ago or 200 years ago.

But what I find most odd is how much I find myself caring about characters in Fallout. You wouldn’t think a game of this nature would allow for that, and it probably doesn’t for some people, but even on my “evil” character I felt bad for blowing up the town of Megaton (one option you have in a particular quest.) Hell the first time I played the game I saved and reloaded 3 times until I managed to save Lucas Simms from getting shot by Mr. Burke.

Needless to say my main character on both the 360 and PC, Sylvia, is basically Wasteland Jesus. I can’t help myself for some reason, I even set out to be a little more evil playing her PC incarnation and failed. Usually my first time around in these types of games where you have sandboxing and good or evil choices I end up as a sort of chaotic neutral (if you’ll mind the stupendously dorky term.) Of course I still don’t bat an eye at blowing away raiders and I always have an overwhelming compulsion to steal things and lockpick in these types of games, but that barely puts a dent in Sylvia’s saintly Karma. Though I couldn’t help but wonder what James thought seeing his little girl blow a raider’s head off and then immediately run over to loot the body.

But still, I find myself caring about the narrative, about characters, about everything in this game. And one of the most powerful moments I’ve seen in any game came right at the end. Warning this is going to be kind of a spoiler:

The main story surrounds Project Purity, the life’s work of your parents that was built in and around the Jefferson Memorial. At the end of the game you have the choice to sacrifice yourself by stepping into a highly irradiated chamber to turn the machine on before it explodes from pressure, thus purifying a large body of water and allowing for a source of clean water for the people living in the barren wasteland of what was once Washington DC. As your character collapses the water behind the glass in front of them clears and a figure emerges. Your character’s last sight before they succumb is the perfectly preserved statue of Thomas Jefferson.

Of course with the Broken Steel expansion your character is saved and awakens in the care of friends which kinda lessens the impact but hey, you get to keep playing the game and cover any sidequests you missed (no freeplay after the end of the game was just a little retarded, Bethesda.) I actually spent the whole game wondering what became of the statue, I was a bit galled at the thought the scientists had knocked it down to create the facility or that it had been destroyed. Maybe it only had that effect on me because I’ve actually been to the Jefferson Memorial and Thomas Jefferson is totally in my top 5 favorite historical figures, who knows.

I’m probably going to get Fallout: New Vegas on the PC when it comes out next year and between Spore, Sims 3, Oblivion and Fallout I have a total of 4 PC games I actively play, that doesn’t sound like alot but it’s unprecedented for me. I’ve even been memorizing console commands, customizing the controls on my keyboard and abusing quick save and quick load. There’s no turning back, I think I’m becoming a PC gamer.

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