Fallout 3's Tutorial is a Masterpiece · 6:34pm Dec 9th, 2018
The fractured fandom on Fallout aside, everyone the video game world over agrees - tutorials suck. They especially suck for veteran players who know the game mechanics already, yet game developers working on the sixth iteration of a game insist on holding our hand for the first three hours explaining to us how to save and equip gear. And then of course there's times when we replay the game and have to sit through the tutorial again. It's why gamers hold onto save games just before leaving Vault 101, or use mods to skip Skyrim's opening, so we can get to the juicy stuff.
However, I think that in skipping Fallout 3's tutorial, we are overlooking what is one of the best video game tutorials I've ever seen, and it's a shame that as a tutorial level it immediately attracts scorn and apathy. So let's take a closer look at Fallout 3's opening sequence again and break down why this tutorial is fantastic; for gameplay, for story, for character, and for world.
Fallout 3 opens with the literal birth of your character, upon which the attending surgeon identifies your gender and names you, and uses a genetic projection screen to see what you'll look like when you get older - thus the player picks gender, name, and appearance, the basics of character creation, and they do so in a way that is organic with the story. At this time your mother goes into cardiac arrest and you are taken out of the room while the surgeon, your father, tends to her.
Three small but important creative touches in this scene. First, your father's race in Fallout 3 is the same as yours, but in this scene he is wearing a surgical mask and is backlit from the surgery lamps, so you never get a good look at his face until the next sequence and his appearance changes to reflect yours now that you've finished defining your own appearance. Second, this scene is not set in Vault 101, but with your focus on the creation, the scene, and the lights obscuring things, you probably won't notice on your first playthrough that the Vault looks nothing like the surgery room and there is no room like this one in the Vault. This room is in the Jefferson Memorial and you can find visit it later. Finally, Dr. Li is helping James with the birthing, but she is never identified by name and you don't get a clear view of her face either. No one ever directly points out Madison is here helping to birth you and you'll probably not recognize her when you meet her in Rivet City many hours later, it's just there for sharp-eyed players to spot on replaying the game.
Second scene, you're a year old and you find yourself in Vault 101, James beckoning you to walk to him. When you do so James tells you he has to step out for a minute and he leaves you. The player figures out how to open the door to their cage and finds the SPECIAL book to pick their stats. Again, all this stuff is organic within the story - the player, as a baby, is learning how to walk, open the gate of their play area, and handle a book. The SPECIAL book is a children's book, written in simple and straightforward rhyming verse, which works to directly convey to players what each stat means and how it will define their abilities. The room also has numerous other children's toys you can mess with to practice lifting and moving objects around.
Third scene you're 10 now and it's your birthday, and for the first time you meet people other than your dad. The Vault Overseer says that now you're of age, so it's time you get your own Pip-boy, and tomorrow you'll get your first work assignment. You're free to mingle here, your first chance to really interact with other characters. Critically, each of them has a different disposition to you - one kid is surprised to be invited, one kid is a bully, there's a kindly old lady, a security guard, your best friend, a technician, and the Overseer.
In filling the room with these radically different people who see you and treat you differently, the developers coax you into actual role-playing by giving you the opportunity to play off of them differently, like being rude to Old Lady Palmer or nice to her. When Butch demands the sweet roll from you, the player is given four different ways to respond - refuse, offer to share, hand it over, or spit on it and then give it to him. Pissing off Butch makes him attacking you, your first instance of combat. You can fight back or not, the Vault guard will break it up, and you can even run to him to get him to step in immediately. Also, in a bit of developer foresight, if you ate the sweet roll before this happens, you can say so in dialogue.
Also, since it's your birthday, you get gifts. Old Lady Palmer gives you a sweet roll, Amata gives you a comic book, Stanley gives you a baseball cap, and Beatrice gives you a poem. The developers have now given you your first items to own, so when that prompt to access your Pip Boy appears, you are motivated to learn how to navigate it to figure out its different functions and how it sorts your items. There are other assorted items in the room you can take if you want, including the party hats which you can actually wear if you want. Eventually Jonas contacts your dad and to go to maintenence for a secret present, a BB gun. After practicing with it on some targets a radroach crawls in and you're told to kill it. First you get stationary targets to hit, then you get your first enemy, but its contained and cannot hurt you.
Again, all these gameplay elements are introduced in logic with the story - the presenting of the Pip-boy, people giving you items as presents, and your dad teaching you how to use a gun and preparing a shooting range to use it at. There's also a small scene where the Overseer leaves the party and talks to a security guard, expressing how he hates you but he felt obligated to come because his daughter is your friend, and he tells the guard to give the party a few more minutes and then break it up. This not only hints at the Overseer's nice facade covering up his true tyrannical nature, but this scene is entirely optional - the developers do not prompt you to follow him and spy, but if the player takes notice of him leaving, they have the option to follow or not if they want to.
Next sequence is the GOAT exam to determine what career you're best suited for. After talking to your dad a bit you're told to go take the test. You bump into Butch and his friends harassing Amata in the hall and have the option to go along with it, talk his friends in leaving, talk Butch into leaving, or fighting them to get them to back off. Again, the developers give you the opportunity to approach a situation in different ways for role-playing. You enter the classroom and sit down to begin the GOAT. When you hand in your test Mr. Brotch gives you your result based on your answers, but also admits the test is pretty bogus and lets you pick your answers to get the result you want. This is how the game determines your Tagged skills, and the player can go along with the GOAT answers, pick as they like, or skip the test entirely by talking Brotch into letting them use the answer cheat before the test.
More story bits here include the other kids finding out their results, and checking your dad's computer for more character insights and hints about Project Purity. Dad's dialogue here, and other small pieces of dialogue throughout the tutorial, hint at the reveal that you and your Dad came from outside the Vault, but it isn't overt.
Finally, the escape sequence. You grab your stuff and time to run. You'll have to deal with Butch asking you to save his mom - you can refuse, go save her, or give Butch a weapon to save her himself. Eventually you find Amata being interrogated by the Overseer and Allen Mack. If the player earlier refused Amata's offer of a pistol for defense, she'll use it here to free herself. Otherwise, the player will have to kill Mack and then confront the Overseer, and there are several ways this conversation can go, including killing him, threatening Amata to make him hand over his terminal password, pickpocketing it from him, or trying to surrender in which case he takes your weapon and attacks you. In the office Amata speaks to you depending on how you resolved the confrontation, and you use the Overseer's escape passage to get to the Vault entrance and leave. As you approach the door the game gives you one final chance to modify your character sheet.
Fallout 3's tutorial is so brilliant because the introduction of the many game mechanics are gradual and in developing flow with not only the story, but your character's growth - you pick gender, name, and appearance when you're born, pick basic stats and learn to move objects as a toddler, get access to the inventory and weaponry when you're ten, and then pick Tagged skills when you're 16. Along the way there are numerous character moments that will be continued in later parts of the tutorial as well as later in the game, some foreshadowing things that will happen in ten minutes, others foreshadowing things that will happen in ten hours. You're given numerous chances for conversation with persons of different personalities and relationships to your character and you're allowing to answer in various ways, providing roleplaying chances, and teaching you that actions have consequences, like provoking fights or talking down opponents, or how Butch and Amata deal with their problems during the escape depending on how you interacted with them earlier. You even get some early skill checks with Speech, Lockpick, Sneak, and Science.
What Fallout 3's tutorial does not do is shove a character sheet in your face and tell you to spend five-ten minutes filling it out before you can play the game, which so many video games do, and it's so lazy and dull. Imagine booting up Fallout 2 and the player has never played a Fallout game before, leaving them no clue what all these stats and numbers are and what they mean. Fallout 3 not only gives it to you gradually, but gives them to you contextualized in-story so you can understand what you're doing. Bit by bit you piece your character together, and in each sequence your world within the vault and your relation to its residents solidifies. Then comes the escape sequence where you put it all together, with dialogue trees, combat, skill checks, exploration, and inventory management. And now that you've had the chance to actually try out your character, you can respec them before you leave the Vault.
Fallout 3's introduction is a great way of integrating gameplay tutorials into the story in ways that make sense, easing players into the game without alienating them with too much exposition of story or mechanics, and leaving breadcrumbs of story and gameplay decisions that will intuitively teach players how to roleplay even if they don't realize it. It was such a good tutorial that New Vegas blatantly tried to copy its formula but condensed it down into five minutes of talking to a doctor with less in-story contextualizing for the choices he prompts you to make.
As annoying and tedious as tutorials can be, let us all give credit to Fallout 3 for coming up with a fantastic one.
Well said
Excellent points
Indeed, Fallout 3 is possibly the best tutorial level ever.
In defense of New Vegas, there is second layer of the tutorial, centered around the initial town, which will teach you how to shoot and so on. But considering how your character has been roaming the wastes for a while at that point, it doesn't make much sense.
4978998
Yeah. The doctor stuff makes sense with him checking to make sure your faculties are in place, but the set-up falls apart from there. Why is a middle-aged package courier who has travelled the wasteland for years and knows the Mojave is an active warzone, traveling through it with only a handful of stimpacks and a handgun?
Great point. I remember thinking how much fun a start that tutorial was all those years ago. Still sad I couldn't actually join the Tunnel Rats.