Fallout 3 Preview
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While they showed a lot more afterward, the sensation's most apparent in the opening sequence. The game's central plot - though it allows you to ignore it completely and go and do your own thing - is your Liam Neeson-voiced dad disappearing, and you being sent out into the wastes to try and find him. While having that particular voice be your dad buys significant sympathy, you can easily see this failing to engender enough motivation if you start the game and are given a plain order to Go Get Pops. I don't know Pops! Why should I care?
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It's at your birthday party, and you've just received your Pip Boy wrist terminal and promised your first work detail, but between the amusement of robots ruining birthday cakes, you get your initial conversations. The first one is standard enough (though it introduces the concept of lying), but the next one we're shown is with a bullying peer by the name of Butch, where you appear to have at least six cake-related options available; everything from a diplomatic, sharing-it-fifty-fifty option, to the openly perverse provocation of spitting in it and then giving it him. Bethesda's Pete Hines, demoing, stresses that these options will all play out differently down the line. The point is to show that we're a long way from the "Yes, I'll help you"/"Yes, I'll help you for three pounds fifty and a cheeseburger"/"I WILL KILL YOU AND TAKE YOUR STUFF" conversation options with which most modern RPGs satisfy themselves. Hines and co. have talked about the game being a much more dense conversational game than Oblivion, and this is them showing how they're walking the walk as well as talking the post-apocalyptic talk. About talk.
