Fallout 3 is a first-person shooter / RPG hybrid. You get experience by killing things and doing quests. You also go up levels by getting enough XP, and every time you level up you get some skill points to spend any way you want and you can pick any perk for which you are eligible.
By: Simon "Soulrift" Ludgate
Published: Nov 8, 2008
Updated: Sep 2, 2010
War may never change, but Fallout certainly has. The game has come a long way from a turn-based, top-down RPG to its new real-time first-person shooter interface. But Fallout 3 is still S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and the fine folks at Bethesda haven’t blown their Karma on this title.
I have to admit, when I first heard that Bethesda, the people behind the Elder Scrolls series, were going to be giving Fallout the Oblivion treatment, I was really worried. I feared a game of Fallout where you level up only by using the skills and where you’d have to repeatedly arm and disarm your own landmine for a few hours to boost up your trap skill. Thankfully, Bethesda didn’t let Fallout fans down, and the core game ended up staying very true to its roots.
Fallout 3 is a first-person shooter / RPG hybrid. You get experience by killing things and doing quests, and you go up levels by getting enough XP, and every time you level up you get some skill points to spend any way you want and you can pick any perk for which you are eligible. That’s good old RPG in my books. The game employs the same SPECIAL system from the original Fallout RPGs: SPECIAL stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck, the seven attributes in the game. Furthermore, there are a number of skills, ranging from small guns to big guns (and lots of other stuff, but it’s always more fun to solve a problem with a big gaping wound, right?), each of which can be raised from 1 to 100.
Combat in Fallout 3 was handled, to say the least, in a very fun way. At first, it plays like a standard first person shooter. Put your targeting reticule over your enemy and pull the trigger. But one of the fun features of the first two Fallouts was a targeting interface where you could shoot your foe’s body parts: hit him in the legs to cripple his movement, his arms to reduce his accuracy, and so forth. Fallout 3 re-incorporates this system by not only allowing you to manually aim for different body parts during real-time combat, but by adding the new VATS: Vault-tech Assisted Targeting System.
When you turn on VATS, the game pauses and you can target different body parts of different enemies. You’re sown the percentage chance to hit each target, capped at the traditional 95%.0 The number of attacks you can make are dependent on the number of action points you have, again hailing back to the turn-based Fallout 1 and 2 where you used action points to perform all your actions. Once you’ve queued up the attacks you want to make, you hit the go button and watch the bullets fly! The camera follows each attack in cinematic slow motion, as you watch your bullet fly from the barrel of your gun, clean across a crowded battlefield, until it strikes the enemy!
VATS was one of my favorite parts of Fallout 3, and it really added a great RPG feel to the real-time shooter nature of the game. Often, you really had to make that critical hit, and VATS let you do it, even when you just couldn’t line up the shot on your own.
However, I should note here that the accuracy you have in game is actually still based on the very same statistics: you don’t actually shoot down the barrel of your gun, your targeting reticule is only for picking the target you want to shoot at. If you aim at the target’s head, you’ll probably find an inordinate number of bullets spraying at odd angles out of your gun, because the game’s calculating your percentage chance to hit and causing that many hits to actually hit the target. First-person shooter players will probably find this very disconcerting when they first play Fallout 3.
Like Oblivion, Fallout 3 features a huge, open wasteland for you to explore. There’s also a very interesting main quest line to follow. Putting these two together is very difficult, yet the Bethesda team has done a remarkable job of meshing them together. The sheer number of places to go and things to do give this game a tremendous potential for a first-time or even second-time play through. But the openness, unfortunately, makes the end all that much less satisfying.
I’ve heard a lot of people complain about the end of the game. And, after finishing it, I think I understand their claim. It’s not so much that the ending is bad, but that it’s unsatisfying.
It’s like this: remember the movie The Truman Show? Where, after living in this incredibly realistic re-creation of the world in a dome, he sails off, endures the worst the weather system can throw at him, and then, right at the end, his boat just bumps into the edge of the dome and he walks out a service door? In the case of the Truman Show, it’s a satisfying ending because you want him to leave the dome. The problem with Fallout 3 is that what’s in the dome is so good that you don’t want to go out. You want to stay in the dome.
But ultimately, Fallout 3 is a limited game. Eventually, you’ll have seen every sight to see, killed every foe, gathered every treasure, and completed every quest. It’ll take a long time, mind you, and probably more than one guide, but it’s possible. Still, until you reach that point, the game feels endless. You just want to keep going. I suppose there was a certain point in the game’s design, where the designers were asking themselves if they should let the player keep playing after finishing the storyline. Honestly, the answer that they picked was the right one. There was no good way to keep playing without making the game get old really fast. By drawing everything to a close, by putting a definite terminating point, the story wraps up, however painful it is to say good-bye.
Of course, you don’t HAVE to beat the game. You can advance the story right to the very end, then walk away and go back to exploring the wasteland. The power to finish everything is in your hands, however awkward it is that everyone sits there and waits patiently for you to return some days or weeks or months later.
{slot15}But look, enough about the end of the game, you’ll get there when you get there. And you WILL get there, because once you start playing Fallout 3 you won’t be able to put it down until you play it all the way through. So go check it out for yourself, it’s this season’s must-play game.
Score: 9.8/10
Editor's Note: One aspect that out team noticed with Fallout 3 was the lack of graphical difference in the Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 versions. The PC version seemed to have the best graphic quality but that is also based in large part to the equipment on which it's played. So those of you who may feel that they are "settling" on the Xbox 360 version and have concerns that the PS3 version is the better buy, take heart as there was very little difference between the two in any of out testing. They are both good and you will enjoy the game no matter which platform you play it on. So enjoy it! -Mav
You can share this Review news story with your friends or family from our PS3 section. This article can be shared through e-mail or sent to online social Web sites including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others. You can choose from one of the options below.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Welcome!