Fallout 3 Preview
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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.
