Distinctions!

Okay, I am now far enough into Skyrim (level 45, finished the Companions mission, finished the Thieves Guild mission) to do a side-by-side with Fallout 3.

Now, don’t get me wrong, both games are great and I think you’d be well-served to play both of them so you can experience the various ups and downs of both flavors. The flavors are distinct, however.

Skyrim is probably the game with the absolute most customizability of your character that I’ve encountered in any RPG, like, ever. If you want to play a guy who one-hit-kills with a war-hammer in platemail armor that you made yourself out of the finest materials, that is an option. If you want to play a guy who silently (if not invisibly) stabs monsters in the back one by one by one as you creep through a crowded cave (this is the one I’m doing!), that is an option. If you want to play a guy who throws fireballs, lightning bolts, and javelins made of ice through your enemies between sips of your very own health/mana potions, that is an option. And there’s enough skill points to go around that you can certainly be one of those while having big tastes of the other kinds of gameplay as you go. This has the awesome benefit of thieves going up levels by acting thiefly, mages go up levels by casting spells, and bruisers go up levels by hitting people with things.

Fallout 3 (and the Fallouts in general, for that matter) have the “SPECIAL” stats (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck) as well as skills. You get better at skills by going up levels and then distributing the skill points you get. While you do get a lot of XP by discovering new places or finishing quests, it seems that the lion’s share of XP is given by killing things. This has the oh-so-familiar and yet oh-so-counter-intuitive outcome of you getting better at picking locks or bartering by killing ghouls.

Now, be warned: I’m going to have spoilers for missions. For Skyrim, I’m going to include spoilers for the Companions missions (from “Proving Honor” through “Glory of the Dead”) and for Fallout 3, I’m going to include spoilers for the “The Power Of The Atom” mission. While it’s true that these missions happen early on in the game (like the first 10 hours or so), I think that they both have enough “whoa” factor to put the rest of the post behind a cut.

What’s strange is that while the character creation in Skyrim is so very wide open (I’m pretty sure that I could come up with 3 level 50 characters that played *COMPLETELY* differently from each other), the majority of the quests are pretty danged linear with the only choice being Hobson’s. If you become a Companion, for example, you go through the usual “you’ve gotta prove yourself, kid” missions early on to find, in a pretty awesome in-game scene, that your Companion brethren are werewolves. Shortly thereafter, you’re offered the choice to become blood… and, shortly thereafter, you find out that being blood ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. So you go on the missions to free your brethren from their wolvy curses and, at the end of the quest, you are given the option of ceasing to be a werewolf yourself. And that’s it.

Fallout 3, by comparison, had Megaton… a town built around a live nuclear bomb. It’s the first town you encounter after you leave your vault and, within moments of walking in, you are told by a gruff local that they’d appreciate it if someone would turn the dang thing off and by an urbane vistor that there would be a lot of money in it for you if you’d only blow it up (this latter option is one of the most chilling in-game scenes in any video game, like, ever). Moreover, if you disarm the bomb, you get a *HUGE* amount of Karma points. If you blow it up, you get an even huger amount of Negative Karma points… and people will react to you for the rest of the game as being that guy who saved/destroyed Megaton.

Skyrim? You’re either the guy who is a Companion or you’re not (yet).

There are a handful of other little differences… you seem to roll a die to see if you’re successful at any given act in Skyrim while Fallout 3 has you auto-fail unless you have achieved a certain level of competence at which point you auto-succeed (exception for both: lockpicking… that’s pretty much manual in both but Fallout makes you have a certain level of expertise before being able to attempt more difficult types of locks… you need 25 points in lockpick to unlock an easy lock and 50 points to unlock an average one while Skyrim lets you try to unlock a Master lock even at low levels (you’ll just probably go through 20 picks along the attempt)).

There are good reasons to have 100% linear missions (easier on the writers, programmers, and voice actors for one) and good reasons to allow multiple outcomes for not only the biggest but also the middlin’ and dinky missions, it’s just that, for me, Skyrim’s character creation and levelling system is the best I’ve seen in pretty much *ANY* video game… and Fallout 3 (and New Vegas’s) questing system is equally awesome.

I just wish that they could figure out a way to put both of them in one game!

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

7 Comments

  1. I hear that Skyrim has developed the ultimate grind system. You do not have grind missions, but grind skills. So you sneak everywhere as a thief, etc…

    I have also heard it is the ultimate geek shopping trip in Skyrim. People spending hours to make their character’s look just right.

    • You also have the option of training. You don’t *HAVE* to make 20 rings to go from level 72 to level 73 in smithing (and then make them all rings of regeneration to go up a level in enchanting and then sell all of them to go up a level in speech). You can just take 3K to the guy at the forge and go straight from level 72 to 73.

      The best way to *GET* 3K, though, is to sell a whole bunch of rings of regeneration…

  2. you want an excellent rpg? try magic candle. 😉 I think it has the freedom you’re seeing in Skyrim — except about doubled or tripled.

  3. The Elder Scrolls did have this level of questing back in Morrowind. A lot of times you’d be asked to do something and there would be multiple ways of handling it. Usually this involved warning someone off if you were sent to kill them, but sometimes you could take a quest, find an interested party and sell out the quest giver. This seems to be something that has been decreasing with each new Elder Scroll game, sadly.

  4. Does Skyrim have the same problem with progression as Oblivion, where if you level up without very careful planning combat quickly becomes extremely difficult?

    • I haven’t encountered that… but I played having played Oblivion and specifically putting points into, yes, combat skills.

      However, they’ve gotten rid of “athletics” and “acrobatics” so you won’t go up a level because you’re sprinting and jumping from boredom as you gambol down a paved pathway to a yet-discovered cavern or city. You won’t “accidentally” get a point in a skill the way you did in Oblivion.

    • I’m on my second playthrough and in both cases I found a difficulty spike when you hit your high teens, but in my first playthrough things started to get easier after that.

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