Fallout 3 Previews

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Written by BuckGB on August 5th, 2008

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Hacking, for example, is one of our biggest worries. Why? Because it functions around a minigame. Not one as bad as BioShock's plumbing minigame, true but still one of dubious worth. It's basically a mastermind-clone, where you see scrambled code and have to guess the correct password from listed candidates within three or four guesses. Hm. Great.

Minigames are fickle beasts though and while the hacking minigame doesn't live up to the impossibly simple yet effective time-out bar of Deus Ex (which compares favorably to everything in my mind, admittedly) , the lockpicking minigame does at least come close. It's much more realistic, requiring players to force the lock open but without all that cheating, side-on rubbish.

Combat too has a few flaws. While the VATS method for taking down enemies is fun, get into a big fight and you'll be unable to keep the slow-down effect going and will fall back to the real-time point and shoot mechanic which isn't bad per se, but suffers a little when compared to other FPS games. Running and gunning is ostensibly fine, but does at time feel a little bit unsatisfying and it can shine through that Fallout 3 is an RPG first and FPS later.

At the end of it though, these are minor problems for most gamers and it's likely that an awful lot of these issues will be eliminated as the game progresses through the beta stages and moves closer to the release later this quarter. Fallout 3 is, when all the hype and '˜OMG not as good as originalz!!one' rhetoric is laid aside there is a stonkingly good game by the looks of it, combining the best of The Elder Scrolls with the best of Fallout.

As I walked among the debris and the civilization that has risen from it in the 200 years since the disaster, it's easy to see what he means. Signs jovially inform the naïve population what to do in the event of a nuclear disaster and so-called bomb shelters house charred bones, becoming coffins. And while the world may change, humanity, it seems, doesn't. Among the people I encountered, familiar human traits of greed, violence, discrimination and religious fanaticism loomed large.
So while the political message in Fallout 3 is clear and intelligently defined, it's still a videogame that allows the player to have fun and play in their own way. "We don't shy away from being called an RPG." says Hines, referring to the game's stat-based core, "But from a certain standpoint it limits what the game is really about, to define it by saying 'you're just this genre' sort of says you can't ever be more than that. It's a big sandbox and you get to be whoever you want and do whatever you want."

I am slightly curious though. Will we see any of the strange pop-culture references that adorned Fallout 2 and that appeared to be homaged in Bioshock? Pete's quite adamant that there isn't a chance.

(No fucking way. Absolutely not. With our experience on RPGs like Elder Scrolls, things like Lore and Canon we hold very dear. We get anal about which buildings should be in Washington DC, with giant piles of books on architecture on DC and we ask what year buildings were made. 1955? It's out it wouldn't have been in this universe. If we're going to be anal about the landscape in this game, we're certainly not going to make jokes about stuff that would not have been part of this world at all.)

You'll be glad to hear that Bethesda is demonstrating the same visual prowess in Fallout 3's game world that they did in Oblivion's. Cast your mind back to those expansive fantasy vistas of forests rolling across hillsides, a castle sitting on the horizon, and lakes glistening in the sunlight. Now replace the forests with barren hillsides, the castle with the ruins of a city, and the lakes with shallow pools of radioactive water. Keep in mind, though, that Bethesda has not lost any of the vast expanses and epic scope of their game world in this apocalyptic Fallout universe. It may be a lot bleaker in appearance, but it's still as visually appealing to the gamer as Oblivion was, if not more. What's more, Bethesda has incorporated the visual style of a paranoid 1950s/60s America - that was present in the original games - in everything from vehicles to advertising banners. It's just a shame that there are loading screens between some portions of the game world.

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