How Not to Judge a Fish - Why the V.A.T.S. in Fallout 3 Isn't a Cop-out

V.A.T.S. in Fallout 3 (source: Wikipedia)

According to a quote popularly attributed to Albert Einstein: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Applied to video games this quote is an imperfect analogy. Whether or not people judge Fallout 3 on it’s ability to climb trees, Bethesda probably won't feel stupid given the game received almost universal acclaim with a Metacritic score of 93 out of 100.

However, if you judge Fallout 3 (a fish) on it’s ability to emulate the First Person Shooter gameplay of titles like Call of Duty (ability to climb a tree) you’re missing out on appreciating a truly great Role Playing Game experience.

My biggest gripe is with the widespread belief that the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.)  is a Band-Aid solution for clumsy shooting gameplay. The reality is that V.A.T.S. is the mechanic through which Bethesda managed to fuse first person shooting and turn based combat strategy in the same game - a revolutionary step in the history of action RPG’s

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Fallout 3, as the name suggests, is not the first game in the Fallout series. Although a lot of younger gamers today were probably introduced to the series first through Bethesda’s fallout, the series already had a large cult following and critical acclaim under the control of original developers Black Isle Studios.

The first two Fallouts are third person games with an isometric perspective and turn based combat. Combat worked differently in the earlier Fallout’s: Players had a total number of Action Points (AP) which they could spend to perform actions such as moving, punching, firing weapons and reloading. Once the player’s action points were spent they would need to end their turn and wait for their next turn to perform any more actions.

 Combat in the original Fallout’s turn-based system was very strategic. The player would make choices based on factors such as the AP cost of different weapons, the probability of an attack connecting with the enemy, the damage of the weapons available and the weaknesses of the enemy.

In Fallout 3 your character’s profile is built around the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, the rule set that powers all Fallout games. In the S.P.E.C.I.A.L.  rule set your character has seven attributes: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck.

The number of points you put into these attributes in the initial creation and subsequent leveling of your character throughout the game determines everything from your accuracy, health, disposition of NPC’s, critical hit chance, evasiveness and defense threshold and the number of points in the skill traits of your character such as lock picking, speech, sneak and guns.

In Fallout One and Fallout Two the choices you made in leveling different S.P.E.C.I.A.L traits and character skills had a direct impact on your character’s effectiveness in combat. The outcome of any fight in a turn-based game is partly luck but for the most part down to the choices a player makes: Which S.P.E.C.I.A.L’s and skills are chosen upon leveling up, which gear is equipped, which gun to use at any give in moment in battle, which part of the enemy to aim for or when to use stimpacks (which give you health). The challenge then in games such as the original fallout and fallout 2 was a mental one. It was fundamentally a question of strategy.

Whilst First Person Shooters like Call of Duty definitely have elements of strategy and player choice the pressure to make these choices is compressed down to split second decisions. Even if the player makes the right choice - to aim for one enemy instead of another first, to duck behind a burnt out car instead of underneath a satellite dish - when it comes to the moment of enemy engagement the player still has to have the eye-hand co-ordination skills and nuanced physical control of their character required to make the shot. In other words, the challenge in games like Call of Duty is predominantly a physical one.

So the dilemma then is, how do you translate the turn based strategic combat system of Black Isle’s fallout into the Next gen FPS world of Bethesda’s Fallout. The answer is choice. Give the player the choice of traditional real time FPS combat or alternatively, the choice to freeze time and take as much space as you need to strategically plan out and execute your battle plan.

The ability to freeze time and play out a combat system much closer to the earlier fallout’s turn based system is implemented in fallout 3 with V.A.T.S. In this mode the game is effectively paused and the player has the ability to target specific areas of an enemy. The player programs in a number of attacks, either shots of a gun or strikes of a melee weapon which are then carried out automatically when the player finalizes their V.A.T.S. session. The accuracy of these strikes and the number of attacks able to be programmed into a V.A.T.S. instance are dependent on the stat, gear and perk choices of the player.

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So while Fallout 3 certainly doesn’t have the same smoothness of real-time combat as some other AAA shooters what it does do is manage to merge the strategy and depth of turn based RPG combat with the immersive experience of the first person open world shooter. Bethesda’s implementation of V.A.T.S. isn’t a cop out, it’s a revelation that allows for a deeper level of strategy than is normally present in first person shooters and a synthesis of turn based and real time combat which opens up a whole new world of possibilities for action RPG’s.


V.A.T.S. is also great for watching things explode in slow motion.