Last, Best Hope of Humanity

Once the player completes the control tutorials and character attribute assignment, Fallout 3 immediately demonstrates the weight of the player’s choices to be made. Through the dialogue options that come up with interactions with NPCs, the player is given the “freedom of action [and] the freedom to be moral or immoral… [through] presenting players with complex moral dilemmas that require careful reasoning.” (Schulzke 2009) One of these choices include the option between killing your character’s best friend’s father to escape from the vault, or choosing to talk him into letting the character leave instead. Whilst this main choice does not present much of a choice, all other side quests “can be accomplished in manifold ways [where] you can kill quest givers or they can simply die on their own, even during quests.” (Pichlmair 2009, 111)

The moral implications of these choices can be gauged through the Karma system that Fallout 3 uses. Schulzke (2009) notes that nearly everything the player does affects their karma, through increase or decrease with the numerical value depending on the severity of the morality behind each action. Stealing warrants a minor penalty whilst murdering non-hostile individuals incurs more significant bad karma, all acts that can be gauged beforehand, as the interaction will appear red in colour instead of the standard green. With each deed, the game condemns the bad through incurrence of loss of karma. This is represented instantaneously both visually on the screen with a notification claiming ‘You’ve lost Karma!’ and with auditory cues accompanying, as it does with earning of Karma. These choices that the player is being offered allows for the player to “manipulate their moral identity as though it were any other character attribute… in the same way that one choose their hair color or gender in Fallout 3.” (Staines 2010, 42)

In addition to this, Karma determines the character’s title that is given as the player levels up, depending on whether the Karma numeric places the player in Good Karma, Neutral Karma or Bad Karma. This Karma and reputation system is developed even further in the next installment in the Fallout series, Fallout: New Vegas, where these Karma levels also determine certain locations that can be visited by the player. If a character opposes an enemy faction, then they are welcomed into entry, or if they are allies of an opposition then they will be attacked on sight which increases the replay value of the game as “there is no way to act in the Fallout world without creating new opportunities and closing off others.” (Schulzke 2009) The open nature of the Fallout world encourages the player to explore and make moral choices that, unlike many games, affect the outcome of both the main narrative and side stories that each carry their own moral weight with the decisions made.