Vault-Dweller No More
Fallout 3 has arrived, bringing with it an epic adventure, but can it live up to its predecessors?
Published: October 28, 2008
Fallout 3 really is Oblivion after someone dropped a big ol' nuke on it. There, I said it. Oh, there's more to the game than that, sure, but everything from the interface to the way the world was created smacks of Oblivion and the more of Fallout 3 I played, the less I could be distracted away from the similarities.
The characters move with the same stiff, almost robotic animations. Their mouths hardly move and are obviously synched up automatically with the speech. The third-person camera only makes it more plain that this game was never meant to be played from the old Fallout games' perspective. Multiple areas of the game suffer from copy-and-paste-it is, resulting in a feeling of déjà vu that's downright palpable. You can just about touch the Oblivion-ness of it all.
And yet, despite the interface being almost identical and the quests being a series of elongated fetches and daisy-chained point-to-point tasks, I still felt myself getting far more sucked into this world than I ever did when it was painted with a high fantasy set of brushes. Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland just interested me more than Cyrodiil ever did; the characters were more entertaining, the dialogue choices presented were far, far better and the world just felt more entertaining, all despite the fact that it takes place across terrain that is almost completely devoid of life.
It's an incredibly bizarre feeling, being torn like this. On the one hand, I want to absolutely rip the game apart for being such an obvious descendent of the Elder Scrolls games, but I have such a love affair with anything post-apocalyptic and liked the storyline so much, spent so many hours just running around (probably close to 50 now, all told) that I can't let the feeling of sameness get in the way of what the game offers, which is, simply stated, a whole hell of a lot of fun.
There's a reason why Bethesda didn't want any of us press folks playing through the story missions of the game: it's actually a pretty short trek. Were one to know what they were doing, it'd probably be possible for even a normal user to breeze through things in about five or six hours. Luckily, in those five or six hours, you're going to get a great storyline -- arguably Bethesda Game Studios' best yet -- and of course at nearly every single point in the game, there's always a lingering kind of tugging feeling, an urge that can't be denied to just run out into the world and blow shit up.
It's something that Oblivion had too, of course, but the way the world was set up to basically let you run anywhere and everything would be scaled meant almost none of the traditional risk/reward setup of trying to tackle something that was obviously meant to be fought hours later in the game. This time around, you're encouraged to actually poke and prod at the world, flipping over rocks and ducking into the irradiated skeletons of dozens of settlements and structures, and, if you're doing it enough, chances are you're going to run into enemies that will absolutely smoke you. That's fine, as you can go somewhere else and come back a few hours later, beefier and more combat-ready than you were, and then it's your turn to spank those formerly powerful threats.
The characters move with the same stiff, almost robotic animations. Their mouths hardly move and are obviously synched up automatically with the speech. The third-person camera only makes it more plain that this game was never meant to be played from the old Fallout games' perspective. Multiple areas of the game suffer from copy-and-paste-it is, resulting in a feeling of déjà vu that's downright palpable. You can just about touch the Oblivion-ness of it all.
And yet, despite the interface being almost identical and the quests being a series of elongated fetches and daisy-chained point-to-point tasks, I still felt myself getting far more sucked into this world than I ever did when it was painted with a high fantasy set of brushes. Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland just interested me more than Cyrodiil ever did; the characters were more entertaining, the dialogue choices presented were far, far better and the world just felt more entertaining, all despite the fact that it takes place across terrain that is almost completely devoid of life.
It's an incredibly bizarre feeling, being torn like this. On the one hand, I want to absolutely rip the game apart for being such an obvious descendent of the Elder Scrolls games, but I have such a love affair with anything post-apocalyptic and liked the storyline so much, spent so many hours just running around (probably close to 50 now, all told) that I can't let the feeling of sameness get in the way of what the game offers, which is, simply stated, a whole hell of a lot of fun.
There's a reason why Bethesda didn't want any of us press folks playing through the story missions of the game: it's actually a pretty short trek. Were one to know what they were doing, it'd probably be possible for even a normal user to breeze through things in about five or six hours. Luckily, in those five or six hours, you're going to get a great storyline -- arguably Bethesda Game Studios' best yet -- and of course at nearly every single point in the game, there's always a lingering kind of tugging feeling, an urge that can't be denied to just run out into the world and blow shit up.
It's something that Oblivion had too, of course, but the way the world was set up to basically let you run anywhere and everything would be scaled meant almost none of the traditional risk/reward setup of trying to tackle something that was obviously meant to be fought hours later in the game. This time around, you're encouraged to actually poke and prod at the world, flipping over rocks and ducking into the irradiated skeletons of dozens of settlements and structures, and, if you're doing it enough, chances are you're going to run into enemies that will absolutely smoke you. That's fine, as you can go somewhere else and come back a few hours later, beefier and more combat-ready than you were, and then it's your turn to spank those formerly powerful threats.
