I’ve long been a fan of the Fantasy genre, with its swords
and magic, strange creatures attacking scantily clad damsels, and thinly veiled
erotic allusions hosted by aged wizards in pointy hats. Video games, especially
RPGs, have long been home to the newest and most stunning incarnations of this
imaginative realm of fiction. One might even say that there’s an over-abundance
of fantasy games in existence. I would never complain, there’s precious little
I love more than picking up a sword, hacking down an evil Necromancer and
saving the day (except maybe BEING an evil Necromancer).
Despite that, my first and truest love will always be
science fiction. To me, aliens and nuclear zombies will always be more
fascinating than wizards and dragons; though science fiction doesn’t seem to
lend itself so easily to epic, story driven gaming the way that fantasy does.
By comparison, there are so few sci-fi games that have a story deeper than
“Kill ‘em all”, let alone RPG epics. So when Fallout came onto the scene back
in 1997, it definitely caught my eye.
My favorite sub-genre of sci-fi might just have to be the
Post-Apocalypse genre, and here is a game set in just that era of humanity’s
bleak future. It has a story, strategy elements, blood, and a black sense of
humor. What more could I have possibly asked for?
Fallout 3 promises to answer that question for me Q4 of
2008… I might just poop myself.
While I’ve unfortunately not gotten my hands on a demo copy
of the game (though Bethesda could always be nice enough to correct that one of
these days *cough cough, nudge nudge*), plenty of excited preview articles have been swimming
across the Internet since the demo video was released at E3. If you haven’t
taken the time to check them out yet, don’t worry, I’ve tried to pull the best
tid-bits out for you right here. This is a taste of what is sure to blow the minds of PC, 360, and PS3 gamers at the end of the year.
While the complete story remains under tight wraps, from the
demo we can piece together its framework pretty easily. The game takes place
decades after Fallout 2, when your character is born in Vault101, a secret and
secure zone deep underground, away from the ravages of the nuclear fallout above.
Fallout 3 seeks to chronicle the life of your character from birth to death in
a way no other game has.
The game starts, literally, as you emerge from your mother’s
birth canal. Yikes. It’s at this instant that you choose your gender, which
your father exclaims excitedly. Your father whips you over into a complex piece
of machinery, which you learn will show him what you will look like in the
future. This is where you can craft your character’s face to look however you
choose, or use a preset from the game’s talented artists. Dad turns you around
and, holy crap, he looks kinda like the face you just made. Also, hot damn,
Liam Neeson voices him! I wish Liam Neeson were my dad. Then mom dies…shit.
Jump ahead a year later, and Dad’s got his hands full at work,
so you get locked in your playpen while he’s away. It’s at this point, crawling
around your pen, that you learn how the basic controls work. If you get stuck,
you can cry for Dad, and he’ll come give you fatherly advice about how to work
the buttons. Kids’ books around the room help you pick and choose your
attributes, which still use the game’s SPECIAL system (Strength, PErception,
Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck). Those are a young person’s
formative years, after all. Don’t choose your key attributes lightly. This time
around, developers promise each attribute will be of equal importance, as
opposed to the previous games’ reliance on strength and agility. Perception,
for example, allows you to see targets from further distances, and will warn
you of attacks from outside of your field of vision with greater speed.
jump ahead to your 10th birthday party. This is an important event,
as you are given your own Pip-Boy, a device which will function for the rest of
the game as your Radio, Quest Log, Map and flashlight. You also learn how to
use the dialogue trees, and make a few friends and enemies among the other
children of the vault in the meantime, and receive your own BB gun, which teaches
you how to use the game’s combat system.
Don’t blow off those interactions, either! How you act at
the birthday party heavily determines your Karma score. Karma is a new addition
to the franchise that determines how people in the world view you and interact.
Being a nice guy can get you into trouble, but you’ll find more people willing
to help you, or in need of your help also. Being a badass will get the basic
rabble to scamper away from you, but other toughs will seek you out, hoping to
take you down a few pegs and make a name off of your misfortune. Certain NPC’s
will only interact with you based on your position on the sliding
“Passive-Neutral-Aggressive” scale. Everything you do, or don’t do, in the game
will move you up and down the scale.
At the age of 16,
your character takes the GOATS test, which determine what kind of skill sets
you have, and what kind of job you have in the vault.
How incredibly in depth is all that creation? This all takes
place over about the first ten minutes or so of the game, and really puts a
personal spin on the character creation format. Seldom do you see such thought
go into making character build such an intrinsic part of the game. But don’t
relax when it’s done. At the age of 19, your father goes missing. No one has
ever left the vault before! With nary a Sith Lord in sight, Liam Neeson’s
disappearance is pinned on you! Its up to you to exit the vault and find your
dad, in an outer world you’ve only dreamed of until this day…
While those are all the story details Bethesda
will release, they have given some other visuals about the world players should
come to expect, as well as the game mechanics that will lead them through that
world.
You emerge into the war-torn remnants of Washington
DC, and travel through the metropolis, and
wasteland that remains of the Eastern seaboard. You’ll quickly find that the
nation’s former capitol is still, so many years later, the site of a power
struggle between super mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel, with various
mercenaries trading blows to both sides. The ruins of national monuments and
libraries still litter the horizon, but are now husks brimming with irradiated
ghouls and gangs looking to steal your supplies, or maybe just dine on your
flesh. Some of these ghouls are still glowing with radiation they’ve soaked up,
and those are particularly dangerous. They sicken you, heal other ghouls, and
particularly potent ones can blast you with radiation which stuns you, showing
you their last living moments before the bombs fell.
While the game can be played as an unusually story heavy
first person shooter, the series was originally an RPG, and its roots show. If
you feel overwhelmed by the hordes of mutants and mercenaries on your tail, or
just prefer a turn based combat, you can access the VATS (VaulTec Assisted
Targeting System) to help. This system pauses the action, and gives you a
breakdown of which body parts on your opponent you have the greatest chances of
hitting and doing damage on. You can spend action points to then auto attack
your foes. These don’t guarantee an auto-hit or kill by any means, but action
points do regenerate every round, so if you really suck at manually aiming,
VATS can turn the tables.
With all of the mutants and gangs roaming around, with ammo
in short supply, and an extremely limited carry capacity, how does a lone man
survive in this wasteland? Well, help is just a whistle away, with the return
of fan-favorite, Dogmeat. Dogmeat seems to be the lone surviving canine in this
cesspool, but he’s still man’s best friend. He’ll help you in combat, attacking
and distracting foes, he can be sent out of the way to hunt down meds and ammo
for you, and he can even bark out some answers to questions about the area. But
be careful with your doggy buddy, because once he dies, he’s gone forever, just
like any other PC who might offer to help you along the way.
Most interesting about Dogmeat’s hunting ability is that he
actually hunts. Rather than randomly
generating items for you, Dogmeat patrols the area, hunting down real items
from the countryside, and he can be gone for hours. That’s just one of the
game’s many details. But then, what else would you expect from the makers of
Oblivion? Critical decisions are everywhere, what ammo to take with you, what
supplies to take off of dead foes. Your character has access to curative
alcohol and performance enhancers, but can become addicted to them. Even the
loading screens are packed with statistical and level progression information.
And many of these details and choices will have an impact on
your character’s final fate. Bethesda
promises to have 500 possible different endings to the game. Some of the
details of those endings are sure to be minor alterations, but your choices
have major impacts on the landscape. One revealed mission gives you the choice
to save, or destroy, the town of Megaton,
built over a dormant nuclear bomb. You have the option to detonate the whole
town, wiping it, with its characters and missions, right off the map.
Man’s future: a bleak, war-torn wasteland. Luckily, Bethesda
will make sure we’re all equipped with chain-guns, power-sledges and mini-nukes
a plenty to survive the massacre.
Goddamn, it’s exciting. Finally, I too, can be a Road
Warrior.
