I’ve been playing Fallout 3 for about a week now, and I can happily say that it’s probably one of the best games I’ve ever played. When people talk about open-world games, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the Grand Theft Auto series and its legion of imitators, but Bethesda Softworks have been making three-dimensional open worlds since Arena was released in 1994. It was at that time insanely ambitious but successfully set the stage for a series that would become known for its huge, open worlds rendered in lush, beautiful graphics and a completely open and free-form design that could leave some players paralyzed by the bewildering array of possible places to go and things to do in the game.

Fallout 3 is in some ways the logical conclusion of one end of that evolution: the video game as immersive virtual world. Reading the comments by detractors in this thread on LYN for example (most of whom it seems were complaining about a game that they’d pirated since they started playing it before it was actually released), it’s obvious that many of them didn’t get what this game is about. Take for example the complaints about how short the game is. It’s still early days yet in my journey through the wastes, so I can’t fully tell whether this is true or not, but I suspect that if you make a beeline for the main quest and barrel through it to the exclusion of everything else, you’d end up finishing the game in fairly short order.

This misses the point of the game entirely. It’s not even that there are a huge number of optional side-quests. As far as I can tell, there aren’t really that many side-quests though those that are in the game tend to be dense, drawn-out quests that require a significant amount of time to complete. There are no Fed-Ex quests here. No, what really distinguishes Fallout 3 is how superbly it satisfies the gamer impulse to explore, learn and discover. On paper, the land area covered by the game is probably smaller than any of the Elder Scrolls games, but, dear God, it is so dense and packed with interesting locales and set-pieces that I worry about the sanity of obssessive compulsive explorers when confronted by the world this game presents.

It helps immensely that the game is set in the city of Washington D.C. and its environs, now known as the Capital Wasteland. Here’s a school building. There’s an outdoor cinema. Up above a bunch of folks have built a small village that sits on the edge of a collapsed highway. Each location tells a little story of its own without the need to have any quest associated with it. The school building for example was apparently used by a gang of raiders as a base of operations from which to tunnel into the very same Vault the player character emerged from. Unfortunately they managed to disturb a nest of giant ants while digging and were all killed. If there’s any further doubt about what the point of the game is, the fact that you earn experience points for visiting new locations should remove it. There’s even a set of collectible “Bobble-head” toys which confer very powerful bonuses to gamers diligent enough to search through every square inch of the game for them.

I’m very conscious of a couple of ironies here. First, from a game design perspective, exploring a multi-storey office building in downtown DC is really just the same as exploring a generic dungeon in a fantasy game. But the former is satisfying in a way that the latter can never be for the simple reason that these are locations that are familiar to us and that we can relate to. Rooms are laid out in ways that make sense and serve recognizable purposes, helping to dispel the generic McDungeon feel of Oblivion. The world-building here is amazing, creating a real sense of time and place. The world feels alive, purposeful and filled with history.

The second irony is that what Fallout 3 has achieved could only be done by painstakingly crafting and placing content in a logical way throughout the map. This represents a complete repudiation of Bethesda’s original approach. Daggerfall gave players a fantastically huge map to explore, but because most of the area was procedurally generated, the sense of the scale was largely illusory, with vast swathes of empty and pointless wilderness between points of interest. Fallout 3 decisively demonstrates that it’s not size that matters but richness of content. If you want to create an interesting virtual world, there’s no substitute for doing everything by hand.

At least one poster on LYN got all this. He posted that he was in love with the world of Fallout 3 and wanted to stay in it forever. I agree with him. There’s always something new around the corner or behind the next hill and the game rarely disappoints the intrepid explorer. If anyone wants to find me, well, now you know where to look for the next couple of weeks at least.