I liked Fallout 3 in the same way that I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. PB&Js aren't duck confit, but I still like eating them, and often times I'd rather eat a PB&J over duck confit. But, at the same time, I wouldn't publish my PB&J review in a Bon Apetit magazine, or something.
I think that the fact we're still talking about how secretly bad Fallout 3 was, 12-years after it's release, is a testament that Bethesda actually got a lot right in that game. It's not a worthy successor to Fallout 1 and 2, it's not a good RPG, it's a terrible shooter, it's unbalanced as hell, the story can be laughably hysterically bad for 95% of it, but there's enough that's good that it made in impact on enough people to still be worth talking about. Nobody really talks about how good or bad Call of Duty: World at War was, or Gears of War 2, or the Legend of Spyro. I really liked some of the light touches in the game; I liked the lore tucked into far away places that you could completely miss, the mini-story lines that you'd organically discover by wandering into a building and following through a 20-minute "dungeon" That has a complete story to it, beginning, middle, and end. I liked wandering the wastes and discovering a manhole cover which led to a cave which led to a secret Chinese hideaway with a spy in it from the Great War who had become a skeleton sitting at his computer. It's campy and silly, but I liked it. I liked the sidequest about the underground railroad and if synthetic humans were slaves or not, and how that tied into the Lincoln Memorial, it was campy, but there was a comfort to it.
Overall, I spent 100 or so hours playing Fallout 3, and for the most part, I really liked 80 of those hours; kinda liked 10 of them; was kinda meh about 5 of them; and then hated 5 of them and stopped playing the game at that point. This is my 'Bethesda Game enjoyment curve,' and if you keep playing Bethesda games beyond the curve taking a dive, the more you'll hate them.
Video is 90mins, will watch most of it.
Yeah, "missing family member," "family member in peril," "old friend in peril," etc are some of the laziest narrative push tropes in gaming, but because there's a ton of lazy narrative tropes in gaming, they're also the most popular. The sheer number of games where you need to find, save, or rescue your son, daughter, father, mother, wife, girlfriend, or what have you, is staggering. It's just the go-to for, "We want to move the player through a story and we have to give the player some reason to care about going through the game, so what's the lowest common denominator to provide motivation for the character that every player will understand......? YOU HAVE TO SAVE YOUR DAUGHTER.'" Even great games fall into this trope. There are a handful of games that I give EXTRA CREDIT for because they don't use that trope -- GTA:SA, GTA:VC, RDR2 come to mind. But, both RDR and most of GTAIV ("coooouuuuussssiiin") and many parts of GTAV fall into it (although in such a bizarre way because fuck all Michael's family is horrible and I can't imagine anybody wants to protect them). But even otherwise great games do it too. The Last of Us like, they give you the swerve at the beginning -- "This game won't be about saving your daughter [your niece] ... Even though you thought it was... PSYCHE SHE DIES IN YOUR ARMS!" Fast forward 5 minutes of game footage, "oh here's your new daughter avatar, the motivation for the game for you, player." Even some of my favorite games, like Dishonored 1, can't help but motivate the story through saving a child. It's just the go-to for lazy player motivation.
Kinda like how in movie tropes, "The Gun" is introduced in act 1 and is fired in act 3, if there's a son, daughter, mother, father, girlfriend, aunt, uncle, best friend, or whatever, introduced in the first 30 seconds of the game, that thing is going to face some calamity, and then after 10 minutes, that's going to be your motivation of a significant portion of the game: Solve your relationship-avatar's calamity.
Bethesda's games seemingly can't help but fall back on "WE NEED TO FIND YOUR SON" or "YOUR FATHER" or "YOUR FATHER IS YOUR SON."
SO for the games that move along without instantly relying on "you're here to save the avatar of your child/wife/son/father/whatever," I give them more credit -- New Vegas, for instance. New Vegas' motivation is entirely about discovering who you are, and I think that works especially well for a "Lone wanderer" gimmick in a game, you're making who you are while also discovering who you are, and it just fits. It's a shame that both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 have to go to the well.
