The choice of blowing up or saving Megaton in Fallout 3 is often cited as an example of bad game design, but it's actually just fine. It is usually criticized for being not morally complex enough, being just a choice between being good or being evil for next to no reason, but this assumes the only role of a moral choice in games is to offer the player a neat little morality puzzle to solve.
Let's, for argument's sake, imagine an alternative FO3 from a parallel universe, where instead of it being a choice, it was just a normal quest of you saving a town from exploding. Maybe the guy even shows up to tell you to blow it up instead, but there is no way to actually do it. Wouldn't the experience of saving Megaton be lesser in this game?
Being able to destroy Megaton makes you saving it feel more meaningful, as a moral good only exists in relation to a moral evil, and making the choice real makes the game better.
It's still a pretty shit game otherwise, though.
Here's my opinion
The choice itself is fine, it's how Bethesda handled it that makes it bad
Tenpenny wanting to nuke Megaton off the face of the Earth because it spoils the view is an excellent example of a petty evil decision
But...
If you nuke Megaton, you don't receive any real consequences from doing it. Your dad being slightly disappointed in you for literally killing one of the only real towns in the Capitol Wasteland isn't a consequence. You don't even lose the biggest quest you get from Megaton (Wasteland Survival Guide) and nobody ever treats you any different.
Hell, you can even get away from the karma hit by giving water to random thirsty people.
It should have been a deliberate, heavy decision on behalf of the game ala becoming a child killer or joining the slavers in Fallout 2, something irredeemable that marks you through the entire game as someone who can't be trusted by decent folk.
Yeah, they should have given you a perk that comes with negatives.
Who's this Tenpenny person? I just blew it up immediately because the crackpot preacher was getting on my nerves.
Guy who owns a tower for rich people at one of the edges of the map and is really bigoted to ghouls.
fallout 3 hot take: i will never understand people who say fallout 3 is a terrible game and fallout new vegas is a masterpiece. :same-picture: it's basically the same game
In terms of gameplay it's basically the same game (though not entirely, NV added a few mechanics). But the writing is on a whole different level.
Also, the way level scaling worked in 3 makes combat much less engaging even if the mechanics are otherwise the same.
all I'm saying is it's unlikely a masterpiece of a game would inherit 90% of its gameplay mechanics from a 'bad and boring' game
When people call NV a masterpiece, 99% of the time they're talking about the writing. The gameplay is pretty much universally (IME) held up as Just Fine
The way people talk about video games is so damn inconsistent. Have good writing, but shite gameplay? 10/10, best game of all time. Have great gameplay, but zero writing? 10/10, best game of all time. Have above average writing and gameplay, but not the best in either category? 7/10 average game.
It's almost like video games are complex and people enjoy them for a variety of different reasons
I just wish there was a more holistic view taken. A twenty hour story can be fine, but if it's paired with really boring busy work then it drags the experience down.
Well, that's the thing though. "Boring busy work" isn't necessarily and inherently bad. Pathologic 2, for example, is a game that is intentionally miserable to play. A friend of mine calls it a "survival game that's harder than real life." It's a terrible experience, you're practically scrounging in the gutters for pennies you can use to buy bread so you don't starve to death after 12 hours without food.
But it works. It serves a purpose in the game. It's a boring, terrible, miserable gameplay experience but that's a good thing in this case.
That's why games are so difficult to discuss, because things which would be obviously terrible in one game can be done well in other games.
Your example is exactly the kind of holistic view I have in mind. Pathologic's gameplay, story and tone all come together to make an experience like no other.
But there are a lot of games that aren't trying to do that, but which have equally tedious game mechanics paired with a story or tone that don't match them at all. Final Fantasy 7 is about a bunch of punk rebels saving the world, but requires watching numbers go up for twelve hours while the same music loops in your ears over and over again. In that case and in many others, people will ignore the massive dissonance between the story and the gameplay and judge it purely based on what it does well.
It honestly really depends. Games are a very diverse medium, and it's possible for gameplay and writing to matter in varying amounts depending on what the game is. I don't play Tetris or Geometry Wars expecting a story of any kind, let alone a well written one. And I don't play visual novels expecting to have a deep level of control over my actions.
But when I play an RPG which is ostensibly about player choice and expression, I don't care as much about the gameplay, but expect that I will be able to make meaningful choices within the story- not necessarily in the sense of choosing an ending or choosing a faction, but there should be a way to roleplay as something other than the bestest boy or the worst piece of shit who ever lived. I expect that the player character has some agency- again, maybe they don't do so in such a way that everything hinges on them, but I expect them to do more as a character than "look for my dad and then do that thing my dad was gonna do, and then let this other NPC lead the fight in the end while I'm just there"
trying to mechanistically put everything on a scale always looks pointless to me
It also helps that you can mod the game-play mechanics to a point where its actually fun, then you have good writing and good game-play.
Definitely wouldn't call 3 "bad and boring" that's definitely an overstatement IMO. It's just a lot less enjoyable to play once you've played through NV a couple times.
I do have a slight softspot for 3 as I prefer some of the music
That's fair? Nobody here is saying "stop liking Fallout 3 or you're not a socialist"
That is a hot take! I want to play through 3 now to see if it's as boring as people say, now that I'm NewVegaspillef
Being able to destroy Megaton makes you saving it feel more meaningful, as a moral good only exists in relation to a moral evil, and making the choice real makes the game better.
This is actually an interesting point since people cite this reason for why being good in Fallout 1/2 actually feels good, as you're given plenty of opportunity to be a right bastard. It's also something to point out how the game itself (particularly in the ending) is aware of this and doesn't try to frame it as some complex moral dilemma. Just an action taken by someone who was molded by the "necessary" cruelty of the wasteland.
Still, I'm going to lazily echo someone else here and say the "choice" itself is fine, the consequences however aren't. Destroying one of the only centers of human settlement left in the wasteland for some petty rich fuck should cast a dark shadow on everything else you do, no matter how "good" you are after the fact. Also, Fallout 3 is a much easier game than the first two, so the decision to be evil feels less like selling your soul to save what's left of yourself and more like something arbitrarily cruel, when you can just cruise the game easily as a knight in shining power armor.
