The role-playing game was something that, up until a few years ago, had been largely impenetrable to me. As much as I loved the idea of creating a character and carving their path through a rich open world, I could never overcome the more mundane aspects of the genre.
The inventory management, the text-heavy menus and the slow rate of progression always proved too big an obstacle for my feeble, impatient brain to overcome. Hardly surprising when you consider that it had predominantly been fed simple platformers and sports games in the past.
The idea of my decisions adversely affecting the game world always intrigued me, but I could never stay interested in an RPG long enough to experience those moments for myself. Fortunately, Bethesda, whether consciously or not, remedied this by forcing the player to make such a decision during the early stages of one of their huge open world RPGs.
That RPG was Fallout 3 and it gave me my first taste of true consequence.
