As the narration hits its stride and a skull and ribcage half-buried in sand appear in Fallout 3's introduction, I suppress the little voice that's asking, no, begging me to stand up, stride around Bethesda's viewing area Poirot-style with my index finger raised in the air before pointing directly at the game's executive producer and loudly saying: "I put it to you, Todd Howard, that this very scene is taken directly - directly! - from the image you saw when you died in Fallout!"
At this point everyone would have applauded, and Howard would have come down from his control platform and given me a medal for being the biggest, bestest Fallout fan that there ever was. I would then have rolled over to let him tickle my tummy and we'd live forever in a little house on a prairie, where I'd often fetch sticks for him.
NUCLEAR FAMILY It's a strange fantasy (my girlfriend is a patient soul), but one that hit me again, and again and again as I was guided through the newly first person-ised wastes of Fallout 3. And I'm not just talking about the reappearance of Vault Boy's friendly face, or even the PIPBoy PDA gloriously strapped to your wrist. I'm talking about the little things. Within the Vault 101 itself even ventilation shafts, previously a smattering of pixels high that said 'rattle rattle rattle' when you fiddled them, give an almost uncanny sensation of déjà vu.
The same is true top-side as you enter the town of Megaton and a wary local sheriff warns you not to misbehave (as they always would back in the day before you did misbehave); or stand outside the Washington DC HQ of Galaxy News and see the globe that previously spun in intro scenes of previous Fallouts rendered as a glorious 3D statue. Much time has passed, but the whole damn thing just reeks of Fallout. Whoever thought there could be quite so many shades of brown?
The Fallout treatise states that come the year 2077, everyone lives in a very Jetsons-esque future - Mr Handy robots trundle around being helpful and saying "Good day to you sir!", and cars are powered by nuclear fusion. Unfortunately though, mankind still hasn't quite kicked the habit of murdering people, and things, quite spectacularly, fall apart.
A quick cut to 200 years into the future and the world is an arid, irradiated wasteland - peppered with death, decay, rusted-out cars harbouring rather explosive engines and cheery robots who have learned to call you a 'stupid git' as soon as your back is turned.
The game proper, as most things do, begins with a birth: your birth, deep within the loving steel confines of Vault 101. It's at this point that your masked father runs a DNA test on you, letting you choose your basic character details such as race and sex, after which your father will magically remove his mask to show that he shares the same genetic material.
He'll always have the voice of Liam Neeson though, that's a given. Later, as the action skips to your first birthday, old Qui-Gon will presumably blow a party streamer in your face (I didn't actually see this bit) before presenting you with a book called 'You're SPECIAL!' in which you can choose your attributes. Then when you're 16, having presumably warned you of the dangers of unprotected sex, Rob Roy rushes you into a G.O.A.T. test for you to choose some specific skills.
GOING UNDERGROUND 200 years of isolation have bred a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia, with an almost dictatorial leader who has an intense mistrust of the outside world. Indeed, the Orwellian overtones of both the Vault's number and the nearby presence of Washington DC suggests that Bethesda may well be about to get a mite more political than previous Elder Scrolls bouts with Emperor Curious Septic III, or whoever.
Nevertheless your early years are a little less profound - dealing with a gang of Rebel Without A Cause-style greasers called the Tunnel Snakes who habitually pick on a good lady friend of yours (or ignoring them should you wish), and generally getting along with life underground.
Until, that is, your father disappears when you're 19 - and your isolationist Overseer assumes you had something to do with his disappearance topside. You know what happens next.
"That is one big gun!" half-shouts the idiot German journalist who's been sitting next to me as he desperately tries to impress our hosts. I shake my head. He'll never get a medal for being special, not like me.
"That is NOT a gun," affirms Todd Howard from his control platform, as I cross my legs, purse my lips and sashay my lower back and shoulders in the fool's direction. It's actually a gigantic metal key, hanging from the rafters - as any fule kno. It's just waiting for you to hack into the computer system to see it plunge into that beautiful cog door and let in some fresh air to the accompanied screams of Vault dwellers: "He's opening the door! Someone call the Overseer!"
Then it's a brief clamber over long-dropped placards reading, 'Let us in you fuckers!', and a brief ascent into daylight. Now, if we were playing the original games at this point there'd be a half-hour battle with 25 angry rats - so even the most fervent of interweb FO3 naysayers will have to admit that an element of progress has been made...
BLASTER-THON So we're out in the wasteland - where the Bethesda buzzword is that post-Oblivion, 'destruction is the new trees'. Blasted rocks, a frazzled petrol station and simple burnt desert make up your initial impressions of an area roughly the same size as that of Cyrodiil - albeit with far less (yet far more interesting) inhabitants.
It's here that, rummaging around in your Vault-issued and numeral-emblazoned boiler suit, you'll get the first taste of combat - against the giant ants, rad-scorpions and general irradiated critters of this new frontier.
SHOOT TO KILL The simple way is to aim the hollower end of your weapon towards an oncoming foe and click your old friend the left-mouse button, but thankfully it isn't always that simple. Your V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) means that, should you have enough action points, time can be frozen and specific shots or swipes made - with each potential hit area outlined in a fetching green timbre with percentage likelihoods for your attack hitting home depending on your skills and attributes.
A leg-shot might result in your enemy limping, an arm-shot might result in a dropped weapon, an antenna-shot might result in an extremely confused giant ant and a head-shot might result in a slo-mo bullet camera-chase and a satisfying burst of meaty chunks and claret. What with action points regenerating over time, it's a nimble way of merging the old school with the new school. Ending up with middle school, I suppose; only with even more swearing and violence.
FALLING DOWN Any caveats so far? Well, I'm a huge Fallout fan. You don't really get much bigger. (Well, you do but I guess I'm the smiling face of an unhappy bunch - one far less susceptible to throwing furniture at the walls or squatting atop my swivel chair, holding my knees, hopping up and down and hooting balefully at the internet.) I was just slightly concerned by the emphasis on spectacle and high-intensity action on show at my sneak-peek's climax - namely picking up a Fatboy missile launcher and firing miniature nukes at a goliath super-mutant behemoth.
Now, I'm just as aroused at the thought of running through a wrecked Washington DC with the famed Brotherhood of Steel as the next man - but for me, Fallout should be more subtle, almost like a cinematic Western in its approach. Games developers often throw in as much eye candy as humanly possible into their early presentations because they assume games journalists are stupid and only respond to the loudest and most blatant stimuli. And I honestly hope that this is the case here and that, as it was in the earlier games, the absolutely stupid big guns only come out in the end-game.
The same stand-off between spectacle and subtlety is perhaps true of the BIG DECISION laid forth with Megaton - essentially choosing whether or not to vaporise it. Megaton itself is a lovingly constructed little area - a place which, having had my threat level assessed by robot law-enforcer Deputy Weld, opened itself up through the machinations of an ancient airplane engine and fuselage.
Here, happy cult members (helpfully indicated by a direction sign marked 'Local Cult') worship an unexploded bomb, while townspeople go about their business - all of whom seem to have similar voice-actors to Oblivion by the way, even if they are far more expressive in looks, sounds and motion this time. Oh, and I'm sure that Megaton Sheriff looks just like one of Cyrodiil's Redguard guard models.
WHICH TO CHOOSE But let's not drown ourselves in little details - we're talking life or death here. Radio-detonate the bomb at the behest of a stranger and watch the pretty mushroom cloud, or dob in the bastard to the local constabulary. Or just kill him and blow it up anyway?
The choice, as they say, is yours! It's this kind of final decision-making, actions after which there is no going back, that are key to Fallout 3 - and indeed, its previous incarnations. The explosive format of the decision itself is a little extravagant for my tastes, but hey - at least it's there.
But what else haven't I told you yet? The neat hacking mini-game in which you spot words in a wall of computer code (far better than BioShock's effort, I reckon). The fact that drug addiction and jet abuse is still rife in the wastes. The delightful way in which a re-energised and rather officious underground-train bot will demand tickets from super-mutants ("tickets please!", "stupid robot!") before rating them as a 'threat level Omega' and blasting them into chunks. The return of the two-headed brahmin.
The way your PIPBoy can play holodiscs just as it could before, and pick up radio stations to boot - a DJ on one of which can give you missions, then talk about you between songs. The fact that one of the bits of Washington DC you visit is called Chevy Chase. Is that a real bit of the American capital or Bethesda making a joke? It's funny either way.
GET YOUR SHADES ON With solo role-playing now condensed by the required mega-budgets into rare high-impact releases, next year is looking pretty hot. With BioWare offering Dragon Age and (in all likelihood) Mass Effect, and Bethesda doing the Vault Boy dance come autumn, the stage is set for us to pump a huge amount of hours into fantasy, space and apocalyptic future alike.
Will the rubric of Fallout 3 reach the depth that the fanboy inside me demands? It certainly has the potential to. It's a tried-and-tested stonker of a game concept, in the hands of some genuinely passionate people who have adopted the licence as if it were one of their own. The wasteland seems to want us back, and I for one can't wait for the first bomb to drop.
Im a huge fallout fan i hope they dont mess this up, i never was a morrowwind fan i hope it isnt just a reskinned oblivion. And im not to crazy about the fps view for fallout i loved seeing myself in the diffrent armor sets in fallout1/2 i hope there is an option to play in 3rd person.
It would be so nice if for once a major publisher with a AAA title could release the PC version first, or at the same time as the console version(s). I am a little fed up being a second class citizen when it comes to games that were originally PC only classics and yet cannot come out on PC first or even at the same time as the console versions!
Whoever decided that it would be a good idea to employ the same voice actors as they used in Oblivion should be painfully excuted, immediately.
After 130hrs of listening to those chumps (and then yet again in Shivering Isles) the last thing I want is more dialogue from "elf voice guy" and "red-guard voice guy". For the sake of all that is good - get some new voice actors in!
(I was surpised they didn't get new voice 'talent' in for the Shivering Isles expansion, but this is a entirely new title for god's sake!)
OH NO! The same voices as from Oblivion?! Oh my God - now I have to decided if I want this game! Sob sob! Why do publishers keep 'm'ucking it up for goodness sake!
I couldn't get my head around Rome Total War because of the Australian accents - it just killed the immersion. Anyone who has played Oblivion to death will immediately be thrown out of any Fallout immersion for the same reasoning! You just can't do this to us Bethesda - any more than Creative Assembly, just because they used their Australian office should have thought for one second to use Australian accented voice actors for a game based around Rome, Italy and Europe! No wonder Rome is one of the least well selling Total War games in the series!!! I hope Bethesda don't go down the same road of using the wrong voices and end up with a dud -because then we would pay the price for their error causing no more Fallout RPG games! Grrrr!
You know the review says he is a massive fallout fan but he hasnt to mention that they wont be putting the things into fallout 3 that made fallout FALLOUT !
They will not be putting: Groin shots / eye shots into the game No Children are in the game. No drugs < no addiction / alcoholic effect > No brothels / whore's. And more will be sure to follow
Bethsda i wonder why they even bother to make a fallout game if there not going to make the real deal which made fallout such a hit.
Erm, as it says "The fact that drug addiction and jet abuse is still rife in the wastes." in the article I would assume that there will be drugs and drug addiction in the game. And considering so many games make drinking alcohol affect you these days (off the top of my head with a poor memory I can think of Stalker, Oblvion, BioShock and Deus Ex? Not sure about the last one it's been so long since i've played it. the point is, lots of games!) I don't see why it wouldn't be included!
Also, Is there any chance that people could say something more constructive than "Don't f*ck it up or i'll die and/or kill you all" how does that help anything? The franchise hasn't been continued by the original dev, get over it, s*** happens. Bethesda made a very good, while not perfect and a little dumbed down in comparrision to the others Elder Scrolls game. It was different to the original's do you know why? Because markets change! I would have liked it to be more involved but if they had then they probably wouldn't have sold enough to justify the huge cost of making such a game these days! Which is the fault of the average consumer and (not to point fingers..) EA!!
On the subject of the voice actors, don't panic! I read somewhere (though I can't remember where) that the creative director was very annoyed with how the voice acting in Oblivion went. The problem was that nobody told the voice actors what inflections to put on the phrases, so they just sounded wrong! And think about it, if the direction is better and they got even 5 more VA's in then considering how few people there are in Fallout 3 you probably won't notice.
I may have waffled a bit so in short. If all you're gonna do is make unconstructive complaints then shut up cos you sound like a broken reckord (cliches are fun!). And thanks Will for writing an article that balances info, anticipation, worry and a general annoyance at the lack of depth in the current market!
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