Fallout 3 introduced V.A.T.S. to the Fallout series. Was it a good addition from Bethesda? Or did it irreversibly make the series worse? The answer may (not) surprise you…

Transcript

I have a love/hate relationship with VATS. Don’t get me wrong, I think VATS is cool, but it might have introduced some unintentional problems into the modern Fallout formula. Let’s talk about that.

Welcome to System Review. And this… is Fallout’s V.A.T.S.

Just to refresh everyone’s memory, Fallout 1 and 2 were isometric and turn-based. It was no surprise that when Bethesda started work on Fallout 3, that they’d make it in the vein of Morrowind and Oblivion. A first person adventure set in a fully rendered 3d world.

Put yourself in Bethesda’s shoes back then. How do you make a 3d first person RPG feel like it belongs in a series known for turn-based combat?

For the most part, Fallout 3 is a first person shooter in real time. You point your gun at an enemy and press a button to shoot. How well you do in combat depends on a lot on your aiming skill. There’s no taking turns like the previous games in the series. How do you adapt that into a real-time game?

Bethesda came up with the Vault-Tech Assisted Targeting System.

V.A.T.S.

You press a button and time freezes. Your screen zooms into an enemy and you pick a part of their body to shoot. Each part has a percentage chance to hit and you can queue up a few shots depending on your character’s build.

This is almost wholly pulled from the original games.

You could spend your turn shooting at the enemy as a whole, or specifically target one part of their body. Their head, their right arm, their… ooh.

That system opens up a lot of options for the player. Getting a lucky shot in the eyes will often be an instant kill. Crippling someone’s arms prevents them from using their weapon properly. Shooting someone in the legs will inhibit their movement. You get the idea.

That returns in Fallout 3 under the name VATS. You just hit the VATS button, time will freeze, and you have time to make a perfect shot. You can still technically shoot someone in the leg yourself, and that’ll cripple them, but it’s easier to do it through VATS.

I bet whoever came up with VATS felt pretty good about themselves. I remember a Fallout 3 trailer showing off VATS A LOT. The last part of it is basically VATS money shots.

VATS feels great. It’s cinematic. So many little presentation tricks are being used to make these moments feel orgasmic. The camera will pull around to some weird angle, time slows down, a deep gunshot bellows out, and the enemy’s head explodes into a billion chunks.

It’s a shot you’d see in a game’s trailer. But you’re the one doing it.

VATS doesn’t necessarily open up options to the player like it did in the isometric Fallouts, because you can shoot those body parts yourself, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier. Aiming with a controller is hard and VATS helps those players out a lot.

I’m left to wonder though… is VATS secretly doing some heavy-lifting for the game? Stick with me here.

Shooting in Fallout 3 and New Vegas… sucks. Not just because I like to play these games with a controller, but because of how weapons feel.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out the year before Fallout 3, and those two are in different leagues when it comes to the feel of the weapons.

Look at how the assault rifle just aimlessly slides from side to side as I fire. It’s obviously some attempt at a spray pattern, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like the player’s arms are moving the gun, not the other way around. Now look at the jitter of the M4A1 in COD 4. The character’s arms are sturdy, doing their best to hold the weapon on target. None of Fallout 3’s weapons have weight.

VATS makes it so you don’t notice that.

You WATCH the player character shoot someone compared to you shooting them yourself. I very much appreciate VATS in that I don’t have to deal with the awful weapon feel when using it… but… it kinda creates this divide in the gameplay.

Modern Fallouts admittedly have a bit of an identity crisis.

Do they want to be action-filled shooters where you go through buildings aiming at every single bad guy yourself? Or do they want to be thoughtful RPGs where you carefully craft your character’s stats so you have the highest chance to hit an enemy in VATS?

So much of the original Fallouts were about planning and builds. You have to go into battles with the right gear or you’d get demolished.

Modern Fallout games don’t really feel like that. As long as I got ammo and a dozen stimpacks, I’ll make it through any fight. There’s all kinds of buff items from previous games like Jet or Psycho to give you the edge in battle, but I never used those. Did you? I feel like they’re not needed AT ALL.

I’m not sure what to make of that.

Bethesda turned Fallout into a shooter. VATS is their one little connection to the original games in terms of mechanics, but it feels surface level. In my years of playing Fallout games, I’d often find myself going entire encounters without even thinking about VATS. It feels contradictory to what the game is pushing you to do.

Do I want to unload a clip into this guy myself? Or do I want to hit the VATS button, wait for the game to load for some reason, fiddle around with the controls to try and select the guy I want, back out, reposition and press the VATS button again, select the body parts to shoot, then watch a flashy cinematic? Only to retreat and wait for my points to refill so I can do it again.

It’s a flow breaker.

I wanna stay immersed in the world and shoot the bad guys myself. Not astral project and watch my body do all the hard work.

I will fully admit though, that’s just my preference. Fallout 3 and later Fallout games appeal to a lot of different playstyles. But as someone who prefers real-time shootouts, I feel neglected. They prioritized all these cool scripted sequences in VATS over making the actual shooting of the weapons feel good. Thankfully weapons felt a LOT better in 4, so I’m not as left out with the newer games.

Another problem I have with VATS, is that it feels too powerful. Not quite in a damage sense, but in an informational sense.

I have spent… so many hours in 3, New Vegas, and 4, just walking around the wastes… spamming the VATS button.

If you press the VATS button and nobody’s around, it’ll just play a little click sound effect. But if someone is near you, then it’ll zoom in on them for you to shoot. Pretty early on, I started using that as a defensive tactic. If I’m on a long walk somewhere, I’ll press that button every half second, so I know the INSTANT an enemy is near me.

That feels… cheesy. I’m completely subverting the compass and its enemy presence detection mechanic. The Perception stat becomes a lot less useful, as it increases the range at which a little red pip will appear indicating an enemy is nearby.

Walking straight ahead while spamming the right bumper allows me to shut my brain off and the picosecond I’m in danger, the game pauses and lets me know what enemy I have to deal with.

Is this a bad way to play?

Personally, I’d prefer if the player wasn’t able to do this.

I really enjoy the simulation aspect of Bethesda games. I love the modes that add hunger, thirst and tiredness. I talked about this a little bit in my video on Daggerfall, I love to get immersed in these types of games. To really put my feet in the shoes of my character and treat it like a real world.

VATS kinda goes against that.

VATS is a twist on the fast sharpshooter trope you often see in media. Some guy will perfectly shoot a ton of targets in a row insanely fast and the audience is wowed at his skill.

But how do you replicate that in a video game?

A human can only aim so fast in real time, especially with a joystick or mouse. So instead of making the player aim quickly… they slow the game down. It’s a perspective shift. Dead eye from the Red Dead Redemption games conveys that perfectly.

It feels like the devs are being too charitable with the power fantasy here, letting the player target enemies from incredibly long distances. You probably won’t be able to actually hit them, but the information itself is valuable. It makes the player too powerful.

Should the game point out an enemy a country mile away from you?

I kinda like the idea of unknowingly stumbling upon a powerful enemy. You’re forced to actually pay attention to the game and look for outliers in the scenery. And if you want an edge, you can put some more points into the Perception stat to let you know there’s an enemy in this general direction, but that’s it. You don’t know what enemy type and what level they are, but you can sense something off in that direction. I like how that gives you SOME information but not enough to have full knowledge of what you’re stumbling into.

If I were to have my way and try to quote “fix” that quote “problem”, I’d make it so that pressing the VATS button enters you into the time-frozen screen regardless of enemy presence.

That way you still have access to the body-targeting stuff but you can’t really spam it to detect enemies anymore. It’s still a bit of a power fantasy but you don’t feel like a god with perfect vision.

I’ve been kinda harsh on VATS, but I think Bethesda did a pretty good job by it.

They had an incredibly difficult job ahead of them back then, translating an isometric, turn-based RPG into an FPS RPG hybrid. And props to them for trying to maintain some mechanical through-line in the transition.

VATS has some great and bad parts to it. On one hand, it’s a spectacle you can’t take your eyes away from. It is SO satisfying taking a shot that has a low percentage to hit, you hit despite that, and the enemy’s head turns into mush.

On the other hand, it’s representative of Fallout 3’s identity crisis. Does it want to be this fast-paced shooter? Or does it want to be this methodical shooter where you take your time and plan out where you want every one of your bullets to go?

I don’t know, maybe I’m thinking about it too much.

What I’m not thinking about too much… is how I KNOW you’re going to like this video on Daggerfall. I brought up earlier how I’m really interested in the life simulation part of Bethesda games and I really get into it in that video. I put it out right before more of Starfield was shown off and it seemed like a lot of my wishes might come true for that game.

Thanks… for watching? See ya next time.