I intended, upon leaving Vault 101, to strike out west in true pioneer spirit. To begin with, I wasn't interested in Megaton and I wasn't interested in hunting down my errant father - I just wanted to push Fallout 3 as far as it would go.
Sadly west wasn't on the menu (Vault 101 backs onto a mountain) so with the less catchy epithet of "Go north-east, young man" ringing in my ears I set off on a post-nuclear hike to see what I could see.
An hour later I was standing on a jut of highway sticking its nose over the lip of a nearby hill, a bombed-out town in the Bethesda district of Washington DC.
I'd come up to peek inside a truck balanced precariously over a 50 metre drop, but stopped to admire the view.
To the south the half-dried up Potomac River meandered past the remnants of the capital, where I could just make out the Washington Monument.
Everything was brooding under an atomic sky while cheery '50s music discussing the prospect of "seeing my sweetheart again" was piped from my wrist-mounted Pip-Boy. In my entire five hours of playing Fallout 3, this was the highlight.
You see, my first reaction to playing Fallout 3 was how empty it felt. There are wandering monsters and pockets of Raiders here and there - but the feeling of stalking through a barren wasteland is like no other.
Bereft of the immersion-sapping load times of STALKER when moving between zones and the near-constant wolf and bandit attacks of Oblivion, this game is draped with a feeling of solitude.
Sure, the tranquillity of my Route 355 vantage point would soon be lost when my attempt to negotiate the descent resulted in a 50 metre fall but, in its early stages at least, Fallout 3 does have that vital feeling of being alone on a brutal and vast frontier.
Power of the Atom
Of course, this chance to capture some me-time has to be balanced with the frequency at which you could be blowing dogs' heads off and seeing their brains rolling around.
As such, even in the wilderness, violence is never all that far away. Cleverly, your UI's compass marks out areas of interest but never gives a clue as to what they are, nor how far away they lie.
You simply know that if you keep on walking in a certain direction at some point you will find something, maybe hidden, that will be entertaining.
Obviously you are not alone. Slavers roam the wastes recruiting strays, Super Mutants wage war with human forces, ostracised sentient ghouls live in an area of Washington known as Underworld and the unorganised Raiders occupy many of the wrecked buildings you come across.
Meanwhile, the Brotherhood of Steel - they of big guns and power armour - return as the world's Knights Templar, forever at odds with the ruling faction, the Enclave.
Last seen at the close of Fallout 2 when their oil rig HQ blew up consigning them to the watery depths, 36 years on the Enclave's political powergrubbers are very much part of the firmament.
With the Washington landscape to play with, Bethesda clearly couldn't resist having the faux-American government return - now led by President John Henry Eden, ably voiced by Malcolm McDowell.
Eden's voice resonates through the wasteland much as Wallace Breen's did through City 17, whether on a looped Enclave radio station or through propaganda-delivering eye-bots that roam the barren landscape.
His stern barks and calls for Enclave-led unity are punctuated by teeth-grinding patriotic music, leaving no doubt as to who the antagonist of the piece is.
With Eden operating out of a mysterious HQ and the Brotherhood of Steel making their home in the remains of the Pentagon, the DC landscape is going to get fairly bloody.
Brass Tracks
Is Fallout 3 Oblivion with guns? No, not really. While it's true that when you enter houses and watch people go about their business it instantly smacks of the last rendition of The Elder Scrolls, it seems that the old Fallout sensibilities and mannerisms are here as foundation not lip gloss.
Character S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats (luck, perception, etc) return as the base numbers for your character, for example. These can be boosted and drained by the full host of addictive stimulants present in the first games, such as strength-harbouring Buffout, the more traditional narcotic of Jet (the factory for which was technically destroyed in the earlier games, if I'm pedantic), intelligence-boosting Mentats and rage-infusing Psycho.
On top of these lie your skills (the numbers you can raise each time you level up, making you better at bartering, small guns, medicine, repair and the like), three of which you can specialise in and gain double the advance when it's gratz-time.
While we're on levelling, it's important to underline that Fallout does address one of Oblivion's biggest foibles: the fact that as you levelled up, the entire world levelled up with you.
In the wasteland, as in the original Fallout games, the further you stray the more dangerous things get - as I discovered during my lonesome trudge into the glorious north-east and was increasingly battered by the mole rats, bloatflies and Raider bases I came across.
However, enemies that lie along the plotline will be levelled to match you so that the difficulty curve is kept to Bethesda's heel.
Whereas Oblivion hid away many of its stats, or at least let you batter away in mindless ignorance, in Fallout Bethesda have pulled the link between player experience and player statistics closer to Black Isle's model.
As in the original games, your skill specialisations not only give you options in conversation (my medical bent would later lead a doctor to confide a patient's medical history to me, for example), or show themselves concretely in percentage strike-probabilities during V.A.T.S. combat, but are integral to your performance - such as when I disarmed the century-old nuclear device threatening the town of Megaton, having guzzled Mentats to make me extra brainy.
Having played the game for only five hours, and with many of the hang-ups people had with Oblivion only becoming apparent after 50, I can't be definitive about this - but in terms of building a modern game on the systems of one that's now 10 years old, it's hard to think of how Fallout 3 could have been tied closer to what has gone before.
Crazy Wolfgang
Before launching into a discussion of Fallout 3's combat, perhaps we should take on an isolated moment of mindless violence as a case study.
When I finally rocked up at the gates of Megaton after my lengthy sojourn in the north-east, I may have seen a lot but I wasn't the most tooled-up road warrior the apocalypse had ever seen.
In my journey so far I had come across the rusted, water-filled underground hulk of Vault 106, stared at a bearded trader jabbering insanely about "the great one" and a "green mountain" before he collapsed on the spot, and I had ferreted around a burnt-out school shooting punks and collecting charred books.
What I certainly didn't have was many decent armaments apart from a purloined sniper rifle with no ammo, a crap hunting rifle, a dodgy Chinese pistol and a machine-gun that was gradually breaking down, becoming increasingly ineffective.
At this point I didn't know I could cannibalise parts from weapons I picked up and use my repair skills to fix my guns. I had been, what we call in the business, somewhat of a noob.
So it was with great joy, then, that I met Crazy Wolfgang and his Travelling Junk Store - a man willing to barter with me for a shotgun (one of my favourite Fallout weapons).
Fallout 3 runs on a similar cash/trade system to the previous games, meaning that on top of the currency of bottle caps you can throw your possessions into the bargain.
Sadly, my ploy of wandering around radioactive Washington poking things hadn't been all that lucrative so far - and I can only imagine that outside of the bartering screen my offerings of pool cues, burnt books and pistol ammo was roundly sneered at by Herr Wolfgang.
It was at this point that I decided to kill him with a grenade.
I watched Wolfgang and his guard wander off, away from the guarded gates of Megaton. I then chased after them, stuck myself in sneak/crouch mode, approached the German-monickered rag-and-bone man from the rear and performed a good old-fashioned pickpocket.
Rather than pick stuff, and undoubtedly get caught, I slipped an armed grenade into his trousers and backed off.
Wolfgang turned towards me and frantically began to slap at his legs to find the offending article, but unfortunately had become a shower of body parts before it was discovered.
So happy was I at this event that, having rushed forward and taken his shotgun, stimpacks and schematics for the Rock-it launcher I forgot about his companion, who fired his rifle from point-blank range at my head - causing a critical, blurring my vision and leaving me near death.
I staggered behind a rock, got out my handy Pip-Boy PDA, injected several stimpaks straight into my head and knocked back a bottle of Nuka-Cola Quantum to raise my number of action points.
Then I reappeared - entered the V.A.T.S. combat system and discovered that my skills allowed for enough points to enable two blasts to the guard's head, each with a 43% chance of hitting due to his proximity. As it turned out, I only needed one. His headless corpse fell to the ground in slow-motion.
Of course, I could have not bothered with V.A.T.S. - and just aimed for the head without any of the precision or pause in action. But the truth is that the V.A.T.S. system is way, way more fun - letting you feel tactical power when shooting off a giant ant's antennae so that it goes crazy, getting a critical in a feral ghoul's leg to cripple it and slow it down, or firing into a Raider's noggin at point-blank range.
Clearly, all this can happen outside of the system but non-V.A.T.S. combat in Fallout doesn't have the clean precision of shooting a weapon in your standard FPS.
How could it though, when so many stats and probabilities are factored into your shot? The nature of the game means that this was never going to be Operation Flashpoint - and the fact is that I have never had so much fun with a first-person roleplay system: it's better than Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, it's better than Oblivion, I will even go as far as saying (with the caveat that I haven't played enough stealth combat in Fallout 3) that it's better than Deus Ex.
V.A.T.S. combat is so gritty, so weighty and so endearingly brutal (just wait until you put three pistol bullets into the temple of a leaping mole rat just before it lacerates your chest with its prominent Gnipper-style tooth) that you often can't wait to fire it back up again.
I do have a concern that the magic spinny-aroundy camera tricks the game pulls when shots are fired might interrupt the flow of battle (which still rages on around you in slow-motion) but otherwise it's great, great fun.
Go Here Now
Those expecting a succession of run-of-the-mill 'go here, fight these men or monsters, kill this particular man or monster, bring something back' Oblivion-type missions may well be in for a pleasant surprise too.
Fallout 3's missions - perhaps with thought being given to the originals' over-arching quests like "find the water chip" - are more long-running and convoluted than in Bethesda's previous works.
One character in Megaton (the first hub town you're directed to, whose interior is like some multi-layered, nightmare vision of the Swiss Family Robinson's treehouse) wants you to find her family, and points you in the general direction of far distant Arefu.
Once there, before you know it, that same quest has morphed into a tale of a local populace beset by a group of Brahmin-killers called The Family, and the missing characters are revealed to be in any one of three locations, so you're off on a chain of subquests that could take hours to complete.
To add subtlety and texture, meanwhile, smaller quests aren't flagged up in your Pip-Boy. Leo Stahl, son of a local family who own one of the two Megaton bars has a drug problem and hangs around the water treatment plant at night snorting Jet - as you discover either through sharing an affinity with medicine with the local doctor, or by hacking into the Stahls' computer at night and reading their personal logs, while simultaneously opening up their safe and stealing all their worldly goods.
Then, when found, you can gabble at him that you're a drug fiend too and you want to buy off him, or you can very patiently explain how his vices are upsetting his family and persuade him to give up his nighttime pursuits.
And incidentally why doesn't he just give you the key to his stash for safe-keeping and/or destruction?
The dialogue and voice-acting throughout seems fine - good even. You shouldn't go in expecting the reams and reams of dialogue that could present itself in Fallout of old, but you should expect the same variation, number of replies and tone.
Can I vouch for it being better, worse or "Argh! So much worse!" than the old games? No, as I haven't met enough people or delved deep enough into their characters (sorry, nma-fallout.com) but I can scientifically state that both acting and dialogue are at least a bazillion times better than Oblivion's. They can put that one on the posters.
Although there's a woman called Moira who sends you off to research her book by stealing food from the Super Duper Mart and disarming mines who does sound a mite irritating.
Fears then? Well enemy battle chatter in the build I played was a bit duff, but is apparently up for a spot of re-recording, and you do have to suspend disbelief from the rooftops to believe the fact that no bugger had fixed an armed nuclear bomb in the century or so before a spunky 19 year-old and a packet of Mentats appeared on the scene.
Desolate Future
My biggest raised eyebrow probably swings around the token of appreciation given to you by the Megaton populace if you decide to save their necks.
You essentially get a house, complete with Wadsworth the robot butler who can cut your hair and a place to store your foraged Vault Boy miniatures. You can then customise said shack in a variety of different styles through the local store - with themes like Raider, Science, Pre-war and Love Machine to choose from.
To me, this seems incongruous to the post-apocalyptic setting - it may have worked in the prosperous boroughs of Cyrodiil, but you honestly feel that in Fallout you shouldn't be able to order in much more than a rusty bucket and a blanket.
Away from all the technical combat palaver and the frothing one-way debates over authenticity though, my enduring memory of Fallout 3 is simply exploring the wasteland.
Just standing atop a muddy-brown peak, flipping between radio signals - perhaps Galaxy News reporting the latest on my endeavours before playing catchy '50s music or endlessly cycling haunting transmissions from long-dead triumphant conquerors or desperate survivors. This is a very different game, a very special game, and one I simply cannot wait to contaminate myself with come Autumn.
Ive gotta stop reading stuff about this game. Every singkle sentence i come across makes me go crazy with excitement. At this rate its gonna be a let down for me cos of the hype. I dont usually go in for all the hype but i cant help it with this.
Having never played Fallout before i'd have preferred an Elder Scrolls 5 but I have to admit this game sounds fantastic. I always planned on getting it, and after reading that article I doubt it will change.
its obvious the game is going to be great, am gonna stop reading these articles about it now and just get it when it comes out, don't want to ruin the experience with all these awesome hands on reports.
They better not water-down, simplify, or try and casualize this game because it is on console.
They should also make the PC version the main version and not dumb down anything because of the 'mass-market' audience this will enjoy as opposed to the niche targeted originals and F:Tactics.
I had to stop reading once they made the comparison to Bloodlines and Deus Ex, that was good for a laugh. Bethesda have always seemed like an average dev house to me. Morrowind was great. Oblivion was a step backwards instead of forward, but an ok game. I think this game is a rental for me still, while dragon age is a definite purchase.
A few years ago my friend got Morrowind and I got fallout 2. Watching my friend playing Morrowind I would say "you know I have been playing Fallout 2 and I think it's got more freedom, it's got more hours of gameplay" etc etc. And he would look at me like I was mad. If this game is anything like Oblivion it will be one of the biggest gaming disappointments of my life. Preview sounds excellent.
I like the screenies, i did'nt realise those super mutants were so big they're awfullly scary. As for the preview im just gonna try and forgett anything written untilll the autumn.
So, when we will hear about the specs to run this game. Not creditworthy enough at this moment to aquire a quad based gaming rig. The ps 3 or xbox 360 is looking sweeter every day....
So, when we will hear about the specs to run this game. Not creditworthy enough at this moment to aquire a quad based gaming rig. The ps 3 or xbox 360 is looking sweeter every day....
Hmmm I don't see any mention in the preview about Non-US copys of Fallout 3 being Censored... come on guys research!!!! :wink:
That aside, I think Fallout 3 will be a good game compared to whats been spewing out the last year or two in whats now a heavily console orientated market, but as far as comparing it to the likes of Deus Ex and the original fallout 1 & 2.... Well I guess the verdicts still out on that one, but flashy blood effects and "ZOMG IZ SHOTZ 'EM IN TEH HED!" doesn't make for a great RPG, it just makes for a great temporary eye candy diversion, that is quickly forgotten as a 'Well it was fun for the weekend I spent playing'. :lol:
Personally I got fed up with 1 weekend hit wonders years ago, but it seems for whatever reason those types of games are now labeled as "Gold" or "Classics", guess the era of the E-penis ruling over longitivity is still far from over.
Have you seen the gameplay footage from E3? From what I saw it appeared that the vats system is nothing more than a glorified instant win button. I saw Todd Howard consistently take called head shots and never missed... also it seems as though if you make any shot in vats it is an insta kill/crit. I don't know if it was set up that way on purpose for the show or not. I still wish they kept it turn based, it would have stayed closer to the originals then and it would have helped it stand out more from everything else coming out now.
was enjoying reading the preview right until the writer starts going on about how saving the people of megaton and gaining a house etc made him feel less immersed in the game! come on its a game!!!! i suppose the fact that a nucleur holocaust with zombies mutants etc. is fine!
This in my opinion as a fallout fan is not fallout 3 why is it this game gets compaired to oblivion and not fallout 1 and 2 it is FALLOUT 3 not oblivion 3 .
This is just a reskinned oblivion with guns its anoys the crap out of me that in every dam pre view (besides this one)i see of this game there is not one mention of previous fallout games and the things there not putting in the game that made fallout out the cult hit it was ! :shock:
as a teenager i dreamed of surviving a nucular holocaust in a bunker,lol man was i deranged but.This looks like it could do it for me played oblivion and liked it but got no real replay value to it.Wonder if this will be the same just have to wait and see.
really looking forward to fallout 3!! played 200 hours + on oblivion and looks like this will be just as good, if not better :) love the VATS combat system :)
