Fallout 3 Impressions
This is certainly in the running for best of show, everything from its amazing presentation and faithful adherence to Fallout trivia, to the VaultTech Assisted Targeting and use of deep dialog trees had me jonesing for this game.
I like RPGs, in my heart I really like that, but I hardly every have the time to fully appreciate them, so I typically I just try to avoid playing them, but there won't be any avoiding Fallout 3, it just won't be possible.
Graphically, i found the settings, the attention to detail, more captivating then the characters. The characters were pure Oblivion with the occasional slightly off-kilter lip-syncing. But the game does so much to make you forget about that, that I hardly think it will be an issue.
For instance, even character creation is hidden behind a bit of gameplay. Creating the look of your character controls what your character's father will look like. Stats are created by reading a baby book and tinkering with what the page says. Once you've decided on your attributes they really won't change, no matter how much you level up. Your skills are selected by taking the GOAT, Vault 101's General Occupancy Aptitude Test, which is a series of questions and answers which automatically decide what sort of person you will start out as.
This niggling attention to detail shows up in the look of the game as well. The developers have done well to capture the world of Fallout. The guns, I noticed had handmade stocks, one looked like it was carved out of a chunk of driftwood. The clothes even have their distinct looks depending on where you are. A big chunk of your interface is located on the Pip-Boy 3000 you were on your arm. The device has a big chunky look to it and all of the buttons and dials actually do things. There's a radiation meter that tracks your current rads and even a radio that can tune in, in-world stations. The developers said that there will be times that you will be wandering the wastelands and you can come across new radio frequencies. All of the music is real, 40s stuff, though it's unlikely you've heard any of it before.
The game also had some odd counters on the side they didn't explain, things like "corpses eaten." I could spend an entire day thinking just about that possibility. And it seems to fit well in with the game's theme of sacrifice to survive. What will you give up to do better?
Instead of letting you run up to any computer and use your hacking skills to do stuff, like sic evil Robby the Robot guards on mutants (which sound a lot like the guy who played the giant cockroach in the original Men in Black), Fallout 3 makes you prove your hacker skills each and every time. To hack a computer you need to log on and then find the password in the computer's files. The higher your skills the easier this is to do. So, for instance, in one example the computer brought up a bunch of garble. Mixed into the garble were ten or so words. You had three attempts to guess which was the password. If you got it wrong it told you how many of the letters in the word you guessed were the correct letters in the correct position. It didn't take much to figure out the early ones, but as the game progresses the passwords become mammoth I'm told.
While I loved the aesthetic and feel of the game, it was the VAT, or VaultTech Assisted Targeting, that really did it for me. You can play through the game's combat as if it was a shooter or you can take a more tactical and probably practical approach and use the VAT. VAT freezes time and lets you expend action points to aim at specific points, from a body part to a weapon. The VAT shows your percent chance of hitting a target and can even show much much damage a weapon can take. Land a shot or two to a leg and your opponent starts limping, land a shot to an arm and they may drop their weapon. The neatest thing is, it does all this and still makes you feel as if you're playing a shooter. There's no moment where you really feel like you've dropped out of the intensity of the moment.
Fallout 3 feels like Oblivion for the rest of us, a game for people who are getting a bit tired of the same old fantasy fare. But it's not just Oblivion apocalypse either, there seemed to be enough different about the game, least of which is the pacing, to separate it from its predecessor.
Personally, I can't wait for this to hit.
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