Fallout 3 (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
Finally, the ultimate in personalized help is snagging a party member. Your first one will always be Dogmeat, a trusty canine from the previous games.
In a genre that has way too many dragons and dungeons, a game taking place in a postnuclear future was a fine breath of fresh air. Fallout is easily one of the best role-playing games ever made, as it deftly combined a fresh setting, player choice, a great character system, and solid gameplay. Bethesda, the developer behind the Elder Scrolls franchise, is taking over the reins for this next installment, and here's a quick rundown for those of you who might have spent a bit too much time in a fallout shelter and therefore haven't heard much about this game.
You make yourself special. The game begins with your very birth, seriously. You pop out of your mother, then select a gender and customize your face. Interestingly, the face of your father (who is voiced by Liam "typecasted as teacherly" Neeson) is in shadow, but when you finish designing your character, he steps into the light, showing that he bears similar features to you. Alas, your mother dies, and the screen fades to black. Fast-forward to a year later, where you learn basic movement controls. As a one-year-old, you find a children's book called "You're special!" and allocate your points among the core statistics of strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck. Then you fast-forward to your tenth birthday, where you learn about basic combat (by playing with your new BB gun) and about the dialogue system. Your father also gives you a Pip-Boy 3000, which will be your trusty quest/character/inventory interface. After that is your sixteenth birthday, where you take the Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test, a multiple choice questionnaire that determines what skills you excel at (such as small guns, speech, big guns, etc).
Your overall goal is to find your father. When you turn 19, the game's actual story begins. Your father is simply not in the Vault one day. The developers wanted players to spend a fair amount of time in the Vault, as previous Fallouts always started with you leaving the Vault without much context. You go on a quest to sneak out and look for your father. But that's the last you'll hear about any story details, as Bethesda is keeping the main quest under wraps; anything you read from this point on is purely sidequest material and is not part of the main tale.
The world is a vast wasteland. Just as Oblivion had you open a sewer grate and emerge into the massive landscape of Cyrodiil, Fallout 3 gives you a similar revelation when you walk out into the Capital Wasteland. The Capital Wasteland is essentially the whole of Washington D.C., and parts of the north and west areas beyond (Rockville, MD, the very location of Bethesda itself, is a location in the game). Expect to see dilapidated versions of places like the Durwich building and the National Museum of American History, which tend to serve as dungeons. Because the land is mostly ash and desolation, there are very few towns; we've only seen Megaton (a town built around a giant undetonated bomb) so far. If you think that means there won't be a lot of quests, well, don't forget that your Pip-Boy 3000 has a radio that can pick up random signals from the wasteland.
The wasteland is a dangerous place. Watch out, for there are creatures like radscorpions and deathclaws about. Beyond those, there are quite a few supermutants--slobbering freaks that wander around and kill people for the heck of it. There's also the supermutant behemoth, a gargantuan mutant that runs around swinging a lamp post as a club. Ghouls also make a return from previous games, but now there are three different types: ones that can still think and talk (like Harold from previous titles), feral ghouls that simply act on an instinct to kill or eat you, and "glowing ones." The last type is heavily irradiated to the point that their presence can make you sick and heal any other ghoul nearby.
A boy and his dog, wandering the Capital Wasteland.
A Brotherhood of Steel member delivering the business.
You have friends in the wasteland. While you might panic at the thought of running into three supermutants at once, help could be around the corner. Perhaps the mutants are already engaged in a skirmish with a platoon from the Brotherhood of Steel (a secret order of technologically equipped badasses) or a squad from the Talon Company (a mercenary outfit). Maybe you've hacked a robot who will politely ask a mutant to produce a subway ticket before opening fire on it. Finally, the ultimate in personalized help is snagging a party member. Your first one will always be Dogmeat, a trusty canine from the previous games. You can't directly give orders to Dogmeat during battle, but he'll do his best to keep up with you and help fight. Additionally, you can give him orders (via the dialogue menus) to search the area for weapons or items and retrieve them for you. At the moment, the developers are still tuning the party members; you'll likely just have two at a time, and whether they join you in the first place is dependent on your karma rating.
GAMETAP RECOMMENDS: Planescape: Torment, Deus Ex
Shoot to kill, pause to think. What we've seen of combat is pretty straightforward first-person action-RPG mayhem. You can salvage weapons off of baddies, or even combine items to make your own (such as a makeshift antipersonnel explosive made from a lunchbox filled with bottlecaps). For those of you who miss the turn-based system of the previous games, there's the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. VATS uses a combination of your weapon skills, perception, agility, and luck to let you pause combat and target specific parts of your enemy. Take out an arm to make him less effective, cripple a leg to maintain distance, or end it all with a headshot. After selecting where you want to shoot, the game unpauses and calculates whether you actually hit your target, and then presents the results. One interesting side detail: A Bethesda representative was demonstrating the combat and had power armor equipped. While he was basically a nigh-impenetrable tank, his visibility was cut down, so the perception stat had a significant penalty--one that made VATS nearly impossible to use, which was just one example of the hard tactical decisions you'll need to make.
Choose wisely: Much like both the previous Fallout titles and the previous Bethesda games (Oblivion, Morrowind), player choice will be significant. Quests will have multiple methods of completion, and these methods can also translate into karma ratings for your character, which determine how people perceive and behave towards you. An early example involves a man who wants to destroy the town of Megaton; do you follow his orders and nuke the town, or do you turn him in to the sheriff? Maybe you can pretend to follow his orders, but tell the sheriff anyways. Or maybe you lie to both and screw everyone over. Up to now, the developers have shown mostly combat, as that is infinitely easier to demonstrate than dialogue and quest solutions, but the simple fact that you can decide whether a town stays on the map or gets wiped out is already exciting enough to tide us over until the next time we see Fallout 3 before its fall release.
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Feral ghouls are all about snacking on you.
VATS will let you pick specific parts to shoot at. Alas, no more groin option.
Just as you learn to love the Vault, you gotta leave.
