Hmm, perhaps I ought to give it a look after all

[Michlo]

I admit I haven't looked at the game very much because I was put off by the dark humour which so many seemed to want/enjoy from the first two. I had assumed the third would be in the same vein and that didn't appeal to me.

 

This article, however, quashes that idea and makes me think I may end up taking a look a bit later.

 

http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/10/incomplete----r.html

 

Fallout 3 is not the game that hard-core, longtime Fallout fans are hoping for.

Gone is the series' trademark dark humor, elegant interface and turn-based combat. These have been replaced by a decidedly more serious tone, an unnecessarily complex menu system and combat that resembles a curious mutation of that found in Bethesda Game Studios' The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

But despite the changes grafted onto the game in its jump to three dimensions, Fallout 3 is an incredibly deep, engrossing title that easily ranks as one of the best role-playing games in recent memory.

(Fallout 3 is available for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. We reviewed the 360 game.)

The story in Fallout 3 starts with your birth. Through two short vignettes in which you play a toddler and 10-year-old version of your eventual avatar, you're introduced to the game's mechanics. This sort of introduction-as-gameplay gimmick has ceased to be novel in and of itself, but Fallout 3's version proves entertaining if only by virtue of the gorgeous graphics and sound.

Superficially, the world that Bethesda has created for Fallout 3 seems like Oblivion with a Fallout paint job. It has that same go-anywhere-pick-up-anything freedom, but where Oblivion often felt sparse and desolate, Fallout 3's world is teeming with the sort of mangled life you'd expect from a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Even when roaming the barren wastelands outside major cities, you're never more than a few meters from a burned-out car or a knife-wielding raider. Yes, it's something we should expect from these open-world role-playing titles — yet it's done so well in Fallout 3 that it feels novel and immersive.

Combat in Fallout 3 is also an obvious evolution of Oblivion's, right down to having the exact same delay timing when swinging a melee weapon. The sword combat in Oblivion was equal parts unwieldy and terrible. But applying the same system to Fallout's firearms works much better. It feels much more natural to squeeze a trigger button to fire off a round than to swing a sword, even if the FPS-style real-time combat moves too slowly to properly track your enemies' hyperkinetic sprinting.

But combat isn't all about first-person fighting. There's also VATS. That's an acronym for "Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System," but none of that is important — all you need to know is that it melds the turn-based combat of earlier Fallout games with some gorgeous visual effects.

Once you've encountered an enemy, clicking a single shoulder button will activate the VATS system. The action freezes, and you zoom in on whatever enemy is nearest you. Through a few simple manipulations of the control sticks, you're allowed to select various body parts as targets. Once you've selected where you want your attack to land, clicking the "Accept" button restarts the action. But this time, everything is seen through a serious of action-movie-style slow-motion cuts and altered camera angles.

Not only is the VATS system the only way I would recommend people play through Fallout 3, it also looks intensely cool, as the camera slowly trails the bullet you just fired to its eventual resting place in the head of a Super Mutant 100 yards away.

That's when the gore kicks in. Even the smallest handguns are capable of exploding craniums with a well-placed bullet in Fallout 3, and after the first few levels you'll rarely leave a battleground with your enemies still in one piece.

 

One area where Bethesda abandoned the Oblivion playbook is in the game's leveling system. Everything -- from how you gain experience to how you mold your character -- is pure, vintage Fallout. No longer will you have to bunny-hop across the world to boost your Acrobatics skill.

As in past Fallout titles, the experience and attribute system is classic Dungeons & Dragons stuff, but what really sets the series apart is the addition of "perks." For every two levels that you gain, you're offered the chance to add a new feature to your personality that affects your abilities and how you interact with the world. The "Swift Learner" perk, for instance, gives you extra experience every time you do something useful, while the "Bloody Mess" perk ensures that your foes will always die in the most gruesome way possible (and adds 5 percent more damage to any weapon you're currently wielding).

Not only do the perks offer players new ways to improve their virtual lives, they also offer a huge amount of character customization. Want to play as an evil contract killer? There's a perk for that. Want to be a smooth-talking charmer? Yup, there's one for that, too.

Fallout 3's story seems like a similarly well-crafted re-creation of the classic tales of the first two Fallout games, at first, but after a few hours longtime fans will realize that the whole thing feels a bit off. It took me nearly 15 hours of gameplay to figure out what exactly felt wrong.

And then it dawned on me: Nothing in Fallout 3 is funny.

Certainly, you'd expect a post-apocalyptic wasteland to be depressingly bleak. But what the first two Fallout titles did so well was to show that even in the darkest of times, the irreverent human spirit remains. Interplay was very good at crafting a number of fun in-jokes and meta-references — the encounter with Dr. Who's TARDIS, for instance — that elevated the series above the average RPG.

Fallout 3, by comparison, is much darker. In the first hour of gameplay I encountered no less than three drug addicts -- not including my own character, who picked up a nasty Jet addiction. As if to drive the darker theme home, Bethesda even included a side quest where you're given the option of becoming a vampire. This kind of thing is quickly becoming a trademark of the publisher's titles, but in a futuristic world it seems out of place.

Fallout 3's story isn't bad. Actually, it's incredibly deep and nuanced, and stands up against any recent RPG's. But it just isn't as good as those of past Fallout games. It's not enough of a flaw to deduct points from the game's score, but longtime fans should be aware of the issue.

Another complaint: Outside of the leveling system, the menus in Fallout 3 are unforgivably complex and lack a necessary amount of user-friendliness. To wit: After specializing in the use of "Small Guns," I was curious as to what exactly qualified as such. Nowhere in a weapon's description does it specify whether it happens to be a "Small Gun," "Large Gun" or "Energy Weapon," and after e-mailing Bethesda I was told that the only way to know which weaponry you should use is to carefully read the description of the specialization you choose.

So if I want a "Small Gun," do I pick the Combat Shotgun or the Scoped .44 Magnum? As it turns out, both qualify as "Small Guns," despite the size and weight difference in both the game and in real life.

Despite the clunky menu system and nearly useless real-time combat options, the biggest complaint I can level at Fallout 3 is that it isn't by the original developer, Interplay. But since we'll never see that game, Bethesda's take on the series is a very acceptable substitute.

Images courtesy Bethesda

WIRED Stunning graphics and sound, nuanced post-apocalyptic setting, innovative turn-based combat adaptation

TIRED Unnecessarily complex menu system, poor real-time combat options

$60 (console), $50 (PC), Bethesda Softworks

 

 

 

______

 

Hmm, I'm not sure I like the combat mechanics though. Won't it become rather tiresome to have to pause each time you want to initiate a fight?

[WrathOfDeadguy]

You don't *have* to pause and use VATS- you *can* just play it as a traditional shooter in combat. However, you'll never get the spiffy cinematic sequences that go with the use of VATS. I can see myself doing a bit of both- there were times when the turn-based combat in Fallout 1&2 was annoying (like when 10 or more different NPCs were on the screen at once and each had to be given a turn, even if only three of them were combatants), but there were also times when it was positively brilliant... you could set up groups of enemies to act as meat-shields for you against tougher foes, as well as budgeting APs for healing and reloads so that you were certain to be healthy and prepared right before the most powerful enemy's turn.

 

There were a few bits of silliness in the classic Fallouts, but those were easter eggs- the actual humor in the games was far more subtle than crashed UFOs, Godzilla footprints, and the TARDIS. The dark humor everyone refers to isn't really what that reviewer seems to think it was. The humor was buried in dialogue and details- addictions were part of it (esp. the Nuka-Cola addiction), as were certain weapons and damage effects (especially the gorier death animations), the two-headed mutated cattle (Brahmin), and even the use of bottle caps (something of negligible value by any standard, especially in a world where the only standard of value would be how useful a thing could be) as currency- all things which Fallout 3 retains. What Fallout 3 *apparently* lacks- and this seems to be what the reviewer is up in arms about- is the generous helping of pop-culture easter eggs that the original games both had. If he's not laughing, it's because his sense of humor wasn't dark enough to "get" the jokes to begin with.

 

Oh, and "small guns" vs. "big guns"- it's really just "standard weapons" vs. "heavy weapons," and the categories are handled in pretty much the same way as they are in any other game- "small" (standard) guns include basic pistols through assault rifles and combat shotguns, while "big" (heavy) guns include miniguns, rocket launchers, flamethrowers and the like. I'm not quite sure how the reviewer didn't pick up on that.

[Michlo]

You don't *have* to pause and use VATS- you *can* just play it as a traditional shooter in combat. However, you'll never get the spiffy cinematic sequences that go with the use of VATS. I can see myself doing a bit of both- there were times when the turn-based combat in Fallout 1&2 was annoying (like when 10 or more different NPCs were on the screen at once and each had to be given a turn, even if only three of them were combatants), but there were also times when it was positively brilliant... you could set up groups of enemies to act as meat-shields for you against tougher foes, as well as budgeting APs for healing and reloads so that you were certain to be healthy and prepared right before the most powerful enemy's turn.

 

There were a few bits of silliness in the classic Fallouts, but those were easter eggs- the actual humor in the games was far more subtle than crashed UFOs, Godzilla footprints, and the TARDIS. The dark humor everyone refers to isn't really what that reviewer seems to think it was. The humor was buried in dialogue and details- addictions were part of it (esp. the Nuka-Cola addiction), as were certain weapons and damage effects (especially the gorier death animations), the two-headed mutated cattle (Brahmin), and even the use of bottle caps (something of negligible value by any standard, especially in a world where the only standard of value would be how useful a thing could be) as currency- all things which Fallout 3 retains. What Fallout 3 *apparently* lacks- and this seems to be what the reviewer is up in arms about- is the generous helping of pop-culture easter eggs that the original games both had. If he's not laughing, it's because his sense of humor wasn't dark enough to "get" the jokes to begin with.

 

Oh, and "small guns" vs. "big guns"- it's really just "standard weapons" vs. "heavy weapons," and the categories are handled in pretty much the same way as they are in any other game- "small" (standard) guns include basic pistols through assault rifles and combat shotguns, while "big" (heavy) guns include miniguns, rocket launchers, flamethrowers and the like. I'm not quite sure how the reviewer didn't pick up on that.

 

 

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. :)

[worm82075]

And another thing the reviewer was off on was the perks. You actually choose a perk every level it's just that the available perks are level 2, 4, 6, etc.... Different perks have a different number of ranks so you could have 19 total rank one perks or a rank 10 perk with 9 rank one perks.

[flowover]

Interplay was the original developer? I thought they were only the publisher.

[Guest]

Interplay was the original developer? I thought they were only the publisher.

 

You're right. Black Isle Studios (Baldur's Gate) was the developer, but they weren't known as Black Isle back then. They were a subdivision of Interplay though I think.

 

I agree with most of that review and also Deadguy's comment. One thing I don't really agree with is the reviewer saying that the game has stunning graphics and sound. While sometimes the outdoor daytime scenes can look rather nice, I was particularly put off by the sub-par animations and sometimes downright ugly character models (although being a long time fan of the Elder Scrolls series I came to expect that). The sound effects are pretty decent but I thought the background music was really lack-luster. I also thought the night time scenes looked rather bright but now I'm just nit-picking. Really though the game looks and sounds just fine, I guess I tend to be hyper-critical of games that I really like.

 

The game may not live up to my perfectionist desires, but it really is worth buying and should keep you busy for a week or two (and longer if the SDK ever comes out).

 

Oh, and one more rant... what is with the gratuitous decapitations in this game? I like video game violence as much as the next guy but it kind of takes the magic out of it when every third shot from my pistol is popping someone's head off like a cork!