Fallout 3

Fallout 3.

Fallout 1 and 2 were possibly two of the greatest games ever to grace my keyboard. They were funny, immersive, fun to play and had great voice acting. So when it was announced that Bethesda software, makers of the acclaimed ‘Oblivion’  (a game I thought was rubbish –first person melee? Pffff , Pass), Lets just say I wasn’t jumping for joy.

But I’m an open minded kind of guy. So I reserved judgement.

Fallout 3 starts your character from birth, to the point where you witness your own birth from the first person perspective. This is the crux of your character creation and time jumps to different points between birth and your eighteenth birthday. At these various intervals you make decisions that build your character  stats and traits, as well as introducing gameplay elements like combat and karma.  It’s a great ‘starter town’ which quickly helps you get to grips with the way Fallout plays and how it will react to your actions.

Rather quickly you are thrust on to the wasteland with no avenue of return to the vault from which you dwelled.
From this point the choices are seemingly endless. This is the centre point to the game. Choice. Fallout does choice really well.  Without really meaning to, you can effect the lives of some people to such a degree that they are changed forever. The ‘Black and White’ choices often seen in the games at the moment are more shades of grey in Fallout. With more then the obligatory good choice / Bad choice options. This leads to really interesting outcomes and story twists that you just don’t expect. You won’t see everything in one play through, neither would you want to try, it’s more fun to play through again and see ‘what might have been’ and sometimes you might be surprised to what you discover.

Sub quests in Fallout consequently are full and fleshed out. Everyone feels like it has weight, the characters and situations are varied enough that it doesn’t feel like another ‘fetch’ or ‘go kill this thing and come back’ or talk to loads of boring people and listen to them talk to you rather than each other so that instead of fixing there own problem they ask you to do it because they’re to lazy or just to stupid but who cares your getting experience anyway’ quests.

Although I reached the level cap of 20 quite early on in the main story I still enjoyed these quests, I still wanted to find out what might happen to these characters.

Basically storytelling in Fallout is near perfect. To complement the superb writing is a strong cast of voice actors. The cast list could take on some high profile CG movies with actors Liam Neeson, Malcolm McDowell, Ron Perlman, Peter Gil and William Basset. A strong cast who understand the level and tone needed to make this world shine.

In Fallout 1 and 2, the battle system was turn-based, with the option to attack certain body parts for extra AP (action points).  Bethesda Studios have adapted this idea with the VATS system, at anytime during combat you can pause the action and choose a body part to fire at, (unfortunately the ‘grion option seen in Fallout 1 and 2 is omitted but this is likely to do with politics not design) each body part has a percentage to indicate how likely it is you will hit and, depending on how many Action Points you have, you can take multiple and shots queue them up even at different targets.

I have made comment of my love in the past of collecting things in games, Fallout in this regard doesn’t disappoint at all. There is a lot of stuff to collect, alot of it utterly useless, tin cans, teddy bears, lunchboxes… at least I thought they were useless till I discovered the ability to build weapons…

Some of the weapons require strange components, so being the hoarder that I am I collected everything. Some things I discovered are indeed not components at all . . . but ammo. The weapon I’m refereeing to is the Rock-it launcher a device for firing stuff, literally anything lying about, at enemies. Nothing is funnier than firing a teddy bear at a raider’s head and watching said head explode.

Weapons have to be maintained and slowly get more and more damaged as you use them, this is were the repair skill comes in handy, if a weapon is low on condition two options present themselves:

1. Take it to a vendor and get them to fix it – two problems with this, the people of the capital wasteland have a limited   level of repair skill soon surpassed by your own skill (if you level it up) and it costs money.
2. Fix it yourself. This isn’t as simple as mashing a button, it requires another of the same weapon (or armour) the character takes bits from both and repairs the item. Discarding the broken pieces.

The second of these options is quite useful as you can only carry a certain amount of weight, taking four guns of the same type and making them one. Saves weight and is worth more money than the some of it’s parts.
But where Fallout shines is it’s story a RPG would be nothing without a good story. Bethesda have taken the world of fallout and all it’s charm and made a story that twists and turns, surprises and thrills.

There are bits that will frustrate you, the overall world of the Capital wasteland is dull (but justified –it’s a wasteland) but despite the little flaws the overall game is sound.

Fallout 3 is one of the best games of this generation, even if you didn’t like Oblivion give this a try. It’s in a whole other world.