Fallout 3 Previews
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I've seen it argued that it's impossible that Bethesda could really understand or love the Fallout franchise, rightfully viewed by PC gamers as a special piece of history. Why abandon the isometric view for (choke, gag) a first-person perspective? Why use something similar to the (choke, gag) Oblivion engine? Why isn't Troika or Black Isle involved??CVG offers the full preview from PCZone's Will Porter. Like PC Gamer's Dan Stapleton, Will had 5 hours with the game and thus has a lot more impressions and details to share.
Well, judging from the reaction of my pal KouAidou, of many a comment section, these people are idiots. Kou went with me to the show to help out, eat good Korean food near our hotel, and also to serve as my Fallout Expert (by which I mean "person who has played Fallout before"). While I never got to play the originals, owing to my cheap parents, Kou cut her teeth as a PC gamer and has talked fondly about Fallout 2 for about as long as I've known her. If Bethesda got any part of the setting wrong, if anything wasn't note-perfect, I was pretty sure I'd hear about it. Meanwhile, I could judge how fun and accessible Fallout 3 was to the rank n00b.
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.
