The Avid Coder

I am not a fan of the original Fallout games. I suppose by the time I got around to playing it, too much time had passed since its release and comparing it to other games in terms of graphics and controls was just too tempting. I could never get used to the turn based action point style of play: for me it somehow removed an element of fun and immersion from the games. So when I heard that Fallout 3 was officially in production I was not all that excited; that is until I heard that Bethesda were the ones developing it. Suddenly I started imagining the Fallout background and the post-nuclear-holocaust setting combined with the technology and gameplay behind Morrowind and Oblivion. Suddenly the tables were turned – Fallout 3 could turn out to be a great game.

Since I never completed the original Fallout games, some of my gamer friends feel that there is a very large, gaping hole in my gaming education. That may very well be, but in the case of Fallout 3 this might play to my advantage. The Fallout fans are pretty hardcore fans. They love “their” game and have always been extremely critical and demanding of any attempts to create a new game in the series. Fallout 3 may be spoiled for a hardcore Fallout fan on the smallest of issues (mainly inconsistencies with the previous titles, or the fact the Fallout 3 is full 3D or some such nonsense) where as someone who has not played the previous Fallout games will judge Fallout 3 purely by its own merit.

Fallout 3 has one of the more … colourful character creation sections that I’ve seen as of late. Basically you see the birth of your character in a first person perspective… As you are being born your father asks some questions or makes some statements. The answers to his questions or completions of his statements shape your character. After the birth section you play through some formative moments in your childhood in Vault 101. These include a birthday party where you receive your first PipBoy, your first work assignment and you get your first weapon.

The game really starts once you’ve completed the childhood sections. You’re character is woken up one evening by a long-time childhood friend, who informs you that your father has left the Vault. This is of course a massive breach in regulations and the Overseer wants to detain you for questioning. I don’t want to go into many more details about this, since the story of this game is best left to be explored by you, the player. Suffice it to say that from the beginning of the game you have quite a bit of freedom in the way you want to play. You can be good, evil or somewhere in between. You can follow the story mode or just explore the quite large and detailed world.

Fallout 3 is set in Washington D.C. The team at Bethesda did an excellent job at creating a post-apocalyptic metropolis with its surrounding suburbs and smaller towns. The world is richly populated, with more than enough areas to explore, adventure and enemies to fight.

Fighting, lets discuss that for a bit. Fallout 3 has a real-time combat system. Mostly you will prefer to fight from the first-person perspective with one of the many weapons that can be found in the world. Here the game plays a lot like your average first person shooter, with yourself and some enemies maybe being able to take a bit more fire than usual. The action point system of old is gone from the standard combat and has been converted into the new VATS system. The VATS system allows you to pause the game and target specific areas of an enemy. Obviously if you hit the enemy in the head it takes more damage than if you hit it in the torso, but it takes more accuracy to hit an enemy’s head. Also every action you perform in VATS costs action points. These points are replenished with each kill you make. Targeting the head generally costs more action points than targeting an arm or torso. After you have made your target selections and start firing in VATS, the action is shown is slow motion. This can lead to some very gory and bloody deaths for your enemies, or to frustration for you if your character keeps missing…

The difficulty level of the game adjusts as your character increases in level: this is to ensure a challenge throughout the game. Since the game is open ended one player might be 5 levels higher than another when you reach the end of the game, so such a system is important. Unfortunately, in my experience with the game at least, it lead to enemies that were always just slightly too weak. I would just fire up VATS for every single section of combat, and pick of the enemies one-by-one like shooting fish in a barrel. This definitely spoiled some of the fun for me.

In Fallout 3 you can also have one NPC henchman or ally. This is cool initially as it can help in some of the tougher combat scenarios you might find yourself in, when your character is still ill-equipped or at a fairly low level. Later, however, there is a certain NPC that is almost unstoppable. As soon as you have this guy following you, you just have to start a fight and then sit back: he will kill everyone, quickly. This diminishes quite a few of the challenges in the game.

Fallout 3 has such a large world with so many quests and stories to discover, that I cannot discuss even a tenth of them. Even though the scaling difficulty levels and NPC system are not that great, this is still a great game, with a good story (except for the ending, I hated that) that deserves some serious play time from real-time RPG fans and Fallout fans alike. I think it is probably close to the best Fallout 3 that could have been made and it is definitely a lot of fun to play.