Fallout 3 Preview
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Fallout 3, the sequel to the 90's RPG classics Fallout 1 and 2, has been in pre-production since Bethesda Softworks purchased the rights to work on the title in July of 2004. The latest sequel has had a bumpy ride even before Bethesda started with its latest production after finishing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The media reception has been nothing short of ecstatic, while discussion across the web shows that there are some doubts among consumers.
All said and done, the game surely has captivated the interest of many. There have already been many previews based on the same demo, but you can never have too much information. So I sat down, pen at the ready, as Pete Hines took control of the demo at the 2007 Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany to show us around Bethesda's imagining of Interplay's classics.
The Demo
Note that this is also the beginning of the Fallout 3 game, so slight spoilers ahead.
For their iteration, Bethesda has chosen to set the game in 2277 on the East Coast of post-apocalyptic America. The game begins with a still-slide intro much like the original games, although the black and white stills are replaced with grainy postcard-style stills as Ron Perlman, narrator of the originals, reads aloud his "war never changes." speech.
As he finishes, the game would normally move into a one-hour tutorial/character creation session which guides the character from birth to his 19th birthday. This is somewhat shortened for the demo, as Pete Hines showed off a few specific segments: the conversations with the protagonist's father (voiced by Liam Neeson), a walk through the vault including a look at a gang of greasers bullying a girl, and the final vault door opening sequence and the escape from the vault.
The primary purpose of this sequence is character creation, as you determine the character's looks and stats in several stages from birth through puberty. It also serves as an introduction to the game's mechanics and structure, in this demo with the example of the choice offered when the protagonist sees the girl being bullied: do you help her or join the bullies? Not exactly a deep moral choice, but it's a choice.
The protagonist exits the Vault after finding out his father has disappeared and the Overseer is looking for him, suspecting that he had something to do with it. In front of the Vault Door lie a few corpses of "people they wouldn't let in" holding signs saying "let us in motherfuckers!" As he exits the tunnel, the glare from the sun temporarily blinds him before offering a nice panoramic view of the desert and ruins surrounding him.
Combat is on show afterwards, as the protagonist runs into a couple of giant ants. Pete Hines shows you can pause combat to pull up a grid-based aiming screen to target separate body parts, with a percentage to hit or miss. Shooting in the leg will slow the enemy down, shooting in the antennae in case of ants can confuse them. Also shown in this ruined town, Springvale, is how the protagonist can shoot a car and make its nuclear engine explode in a mini-mushroom, taking some ants with it.
At this point, the usage of radiation is partially shown. When blowing up the car, the protagonist is slightly radiated. In much the same way the protagonist is radiated when taking a drink of water from a nearby fire hydrant, which also heals him slightly.
The protagonist reaches the town of Megaton, the closest settlement to the Vault. It is "built in the crater of an unexploded nuclear bomb." Its style is much like Junktown in Fallout 1 or Bartertown in Mad Max 3, with ramshackle huts and pieced-together walls - a lot of it built with wreckage from a crashed airline carrier.
After being scanned by a Robby-the-Robot-esque Protectron the protagonist is allowed entrance to Megaton. Dialogue is on display next, as Pete Hines shows the structure and display in two conversations with the sheriff and later with a shady character, Mr Burke. Noticeable is that dialogue looks and feels basically the same as Oblivion, with graphically prettier talking heads. There's a wide choice of dialogue options, all showing full lines of text and some showing a percentage of success in case of lying or threatening. It's also shown how the NPCs react as the protagonist insults the sheriff ("Nice hat, Calamity Jane") or tries to get some extra bottle caps for fulfilling the task from Mr Burke (successfully in this case).
The task, given by the somewhat one-dimensionally evil Mr Burke, is to clear out Megaton by detonating the nuclear bomb in the middle of the town. Why he wants you to do this isn't really made clear, but he does and he's offering money, so Pete Hines decides to take the quest, arming the bomb and running off to travel through the subways to meet Mr Burke at Tenpenny Towers.
The subway tunnels are expansive, ruined and filled with supermutants, so basically the prototypical fantasy dungeons. This portion of the demo is used to show off combat again, as well as taking a further look at the management of guns as you can use parts from one gun to repair another, upgrading its accuracy and rate of fire (adding up to an increased Damage per Second). Pete Hines uses a combination of wild shooting and aimed shots to pass through the tunnels battling of supermutants (which would normally be harder to do, but the protagonist's stats are pumped up).
The protagonist sneaks past the next batch of supermutants, takes a drink of water from a nearby toilet to heal a bit and then hacks into a nearby computer to reactive a Protectron ticket-bot. "Hacking" is done via word-guessing game, where you have to guess which word is the password. With each guess the mini-game will tell you how many letters you got right. The hacked Protectron lumbers out of the room and asks the nearby supermutants for their tickets. They're unable to present them and threaten to tear off his arms, causing the Protectron to turn the laser gun in his arm on them, quickly dispatching them.
Exiting the subway, the protagonist gets involved in a gun fight between a group of power armored clad soldiers, identified as Brotherhood of Steel members, and a bunch of menacing supermutants. He talks to the Brotherhood of Steel lieutenant and is invited to tag along, which he does, picking up a laser rifle from a dying BoS member along the way. A lot of time is spent in the following gunfight, the most noteworthy things to say about this struggle being that the protagonist's lack of skill can make him miss the supermutants even when the player aims correctly and that the combat AI didn't seem to be very advanced.
The fight moves on to a square near the Tenpenny Towers building. And just as you think it's over, an endboss tune is heard and two busses are seen exploding in the distance, as a huge supermutant identified as the Behemoth lumbers out. Armed with a car door and a fire hydrant, he wears a shopping cart on his back that stores corpses.
The Brother of Steel members shooting him with their laser rifles doesn't seem to do much, but luckily the protagonist can pick up a "portable mini nuclear bomb catapult" from a nearby corpse. The Behemoth is killed with two well-placed (including one aimed) nukes, causing it to fall down dramatically as a mushroom cloud erupts. Stat-wise, Pete notes that the Behemoth has a ridiculous amount of hit points and does a massive amount of damage (with his fire hydrant), while the Fat Man nuclear catapult does more than 80 times as much damage as a Chinese assault rifle (the weapon of preference for supermutants).
The protagonist climbs up and meets Mr Burke atop the tower. He is handed the detonator, and after pushing the button a huge and beautifully crafted nuclear explosion is seen in the distance, the shockwave of which hits the protagonist a bit later.
The Good
Setting-wise, Fallout 3 keeps quite a bit of the originals intact. The Vault Boy icon, identified by the original developers as one of the original's key elements, is fully utilized. The world crafting is also well-done at points, like the Vault which is an accurate 3D recreation of the originals. The atmosphere outside is pretty bleak, with well-made deserts and ruined towns setting the tone.
Also graphic-wise, not only is the atmosphere quite well-done, but they're simply a notch up overall from Oblivion. The addition of real water refraction and parallax mapping to create more realistic ruins and bullet-holes are some details, but what the average player will immediately notice is that the NPC faces look a lot better than the somewhat ugly faces of Oblivion. Dialogue also looks a bit improved by providing the player with full lines as choices rather than wiki-style dialogue.
Of special note should be the amount of attention paid to some key moments, like the well-executed temporary blindness the protagonist experiences as he leaves his Vault, or the beautifully crafted nuclear explosions.
That's it for what you can see. Beyond that, Bethesda promises a lot of improvements from Oblivion, but it should be noted here that these promises often contradicted what one could see in the demo. Bethesda, like many other developers, doesn't have a perfect track record for what they say will be in the game and what's in the final product, so I leave it up to your judgement how much of this to take at face value.
First is the humour and feel. Bethesda notes it is inspired most by Fallout 1, and less by the "silly" humour of Fallout 2. This means no forced jokes or annoying pop culture references, but more dark ironic humour. This is good news, though no examples are known or visible in the demo.
Fallout 3's real-time with pause (RTwP) combat system, denoted as V.A.T.S., is probably an improvement over enforced real-time running and gunning from the viewpoint of discouraging twitch play. Visually, it looks to play pretty much the same as what BioWare is doing with Mass Effect's combat. No one has had it in their hands yet, so I can't really comment on how it plays out, but it feels like it'll end up pretty close to the concurrent RTwP systems BioWare is known for.
Dialogue and quests are promised to be deep, with big (moral) consequences, hazy choices, gray areas to explore and expansive branching dialogues available. Understandably, the demo is too short to have any of that, though it should be noted that the do-or-don't Megaton quests is more of an example of dichotomic good-or-evil style than of the moral gray areas that are promised.
The Bad
There're some issues in consistency of vision apparent from the demo. "True classics" often drive on having a strong and consistent vision of what you want to do and where you want to go in a setting, expressing one strong idea visually. A good recent example is BioShock, which can be criticized for a lot but not for a lack of attention to detail or clear vision in the way Rapture is crafted to represent the vision and will of Andrew Ryan juxtaposed with the fallibility of man.
Fallout 3, on the other hand, is working with a pre-made setting, created by Interplay over 10 years ago. This setting, crafted on dark irony in juxtaposing the harsh reality of post-apocalyptic life with the idyllic world-vision of 50's America, is seen in spots in Bethesda's Fallout 3. But there doesn't seem to be much drive in this vision, so it ends up very spotty and inconsistent, not providing a steady "feel" but ripping you right out of it with silly jokes or ill-placed modern elements (the soldier cliché language of the BoS soldiers).
This lack of vision is also seen in how eye-roll-inducingly cliché some of the game's elements are. For instance, the supermutants look quite a lot like standard evil mutant enemies, and act the same too. Sure, on the other hand we have the Protectron, a great unique-looking robot that truly smells of 50s science fiction. But these kind of great elements aren't consistently there.
There's a slight obsession in the demo itself with juvenile behaviour. From chuckling about a mutant's head exploding to having a snicker at a Mr. Handy robot referring to the protagonist as a "stupid git", the demo is a rollercoaster ride of cheap laughs. One can only hope this is only for demo purposes and luckily Bethesda affirms that this is so. I really don't see this type of humor working for an entire game.
There are some questions to be asked about the main plot, which involves you chasing down your father for no other reason that an assumed deep emotional tie and fighting supermutants, with it being unclear what kind of backstory or depth we can expect. How well this plot can offer the kind of freedom and choices the originals did is an open question.
The Ugly
There're few things as ugly as the reaction this game has garnered from the traditionalist Fallout fans. And considering that most of their worst fears came true, it's not so much a question of whether or not Bethesda's Fallout 3 so far lives up to their standards of a sequel, but more of what one can ask from a sequel like Fallout 3.
Is it fair to directly compare a sequel to its 10-year old predecessor? That's not a question I can answer here except in saying that in calling it Fallout 3, Bethesda is calling forth these expectations themselves. Like SeanMike of GamersInfo.net says:
On the other hand, Fallout 3 is being called a sequel to Fallouts 1 and 2, and I think that's a disservice to the games. While, technically, it is a sequel to the Fallout RPGs, it's not a direct sequel. It's set in a different area, with different characters, a different time, a different engine and a different style of RPG gameplay.
One could argue as Sean does that Bethesda is creating expectations by calling it a direct sequel. They are creating an atmosphere in which the fans of the originals fell they can expect this game to be approached much like the originals were, an approach that is pretty well-documented, most noticeably in the "A history of Fallout" article on NMA.
But if you feel you must judge the game by these standards (and it really is an open discussion if you should), Bethesda's Fallout 3 struggles. To name a few examples; it uses a RTwP combat system while the original TB combat system was chosen to "exactly represent" pen and paper roleplaying, its supermutants look more realistic than the original hulkish supermutants, the BoS soldiers are represented as "saviours of the wasteland" as opposed to the monastery-like xenophobic BoS organization, the 50s feel often seems sprinkled on rather than inherent of the setting. There are more details that they got wrong", but in a nutshell I can't help but agree with SeanMike that this is not close enough to warrant the moniker direct sequel, as it falls a bit more on the side of a spin-off.
There are two kinds of people in the world...
The game is still the game no matter what you call it, but how you approach it might have an effect on how much it fits your expectations more than the average game. A lot depends on whether or not you care if this game is a spin-off or a direct sequel. The debates surrounding this game are sure pitting groups of people against each other. If I have to give my idea of whom this game is being made for, well then...
Did you like Oblivion? Well, Fallout 3 is promised to be a much-improved version of that game, and with no significantly different design approach is almost guaranteed to be at least enjoyable by fans of the previous Bethesda game.
Are you a big fan of the recent evolution of RPGs? Well, the sand-box action-filled Fallout 3 might be right up your alley, though this will depend on how well the combat system plays out and how much Bethesda is able to fix its own vision of the game.
Are you a big fan of Fallout and did you expect a sequel to hold close to the originals design in both setting and gameplay? Set it and forget it.
