Fallout 3 Magazine Preview
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"You can definitely play it just as an FPS if that's your thing, though it's certainly going to be a lot harder," says Todd, describing how the VATS systems fits in. "We've had a focus test to see how well our tutorials were working, and in the initial run-through we forgot to tutorial VATS. People were playing without even knowing it existed and they just played it as a first-person shooter. That's reassuring."
"The initial design for VATS was the following pitch I made to people: "I don't know how it starts, but the end of it looks like Burnout's Crash Mode, but with body parts," Todd explains, with a gigantic grin. "We wanted them to be able to go into a room and go boom, boom, boom, boom and see views of their character blowing guys away from crazy angles."
Even before building the world and characters, the very first build of the game was named the Guns Build, built to make sure guns felt heavy and powerful. Then followed the Destruction Build to work out what happens when bullets hit things and people. Finally came a dedicated Combat Build, where the dummies from the destruction build fought back.
Even once the guns were suitably beefed up and noisy, the team faced tough decisions about just how much the RPG-levelling elements should play into the action. As Todd explains, "We struggled for a long time with how shooting would work in a role-playing game. How good am I at shooting and how good is the guy on the screen at shooting?" Bethesda settled on a system where your level considerably affects damage but only marginally affects accuracy. At low levels your bullet spread is larger than you'd find in a regular first-person shoot-'em-up, but as you grow, your accuracy will sharpen and your death-dealing power will increase.
Fallout 3 is about the little details, and they're everywhere. While much of Oblivion was generated procedurally using software designed to create a credible landscape, Bethesda's follow-up is a genuinely hand-made game, where every burned book, ruined home, and story told by the ruins themselves was carefully designed, as Istvan explains: "The art team went cell-by-cell. There's not a single piece of the game that hasn't been touched by hand. It's not procedurally generated - we didn't want to do that this time. Every rock you see, every tree, was placed by hand."
