Fallout 3

It's been a long time between drinks, my friends. Fallout 2, the classic post-apocalyptic RPG by Black Isle and Interplay, was released in 1998. Not long afterwards, Interplay went out of business. During the last days of that company, Black Isle had been working on a secret project, code named "Van Buren." After the death of Interplay, it was revealed that the Van Buren project was, in fact, Fallout 3. Developement stopped on that game and it was thought that the Fallout franchise would be lost forever.

However, years later, Bethesda Softworks, creators of the Elder Scrolls series, purchased the license for Fallout and on October 28th, 2008 Fallout 3 finally saw life. And a mighty fine life it is...

I want my Wubby!

Set in the year 2277, 200 years after a nuclear war with China, you live in a vault located in the Washington DC area. Vaults are high-tech bomb shelters with a weird 1950s twist to the technology. The game itself begins with a wonderfully designed tutorial. You literally start as a baby. Once the doctor delivers you, you choose your name and gender. Later, you choose your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats as a toddler (these are your attributes, such as strength, perception, etc.). Your childhood is told in a series of progressing flashbacks. As you jump forward in your life, signifcant events occur, such as a birthday party and a special gift from your father. At the party, a friend of the family presents you with your first Pip-Boy. Your father gives you a BB gun, which you can use to learn to shoot. Later, you take the vault's apptitude test, which determines your best fit for an occupation in the vault (I was to be the vault's tatoo artist... don't ask). In reality, the test determines your three highest skills, called Tag Skills, which are selected based on how you answered the test questions. Don't fret, though. Any attributes or skills selected can be edited prior to starting the main part of the game.

It's a brave new world.

At the age of 19, you face a sudden crossroad. Your father will abruptly leave the vault under mysterious circumstances and you'll find yourself leaving the vault to find out why he left and where he went. Upon exiting the vault, the image of desolation and decay is jarring. Bethesda does a fantastic job with the artwork and graphics in the game. In addition, the sound effects and muted music work alongside the graphics to create a world every bit as immersive as Rapture in the game BioShock.

The main quest in the game is to find your father and if you were to follow only that quest line, expect to see roughly 20-25 hours of gameplay before the ending. However, there are a great many side quests and the playable area in the game is massive in scale. To give this statement perspective, I clocked in around 104 hours before I decided to finish the game, and there was still approximately a third of the map I hadn't explored.

The game practically begs you to explore, and the rewards are there for those who poke around. There's no telling what unique weapon or armor might be squirreled away somwhere in a place you'd least expect to find it.

Home sweet home.

Early on, you may find yourself in a position to land a place to call your own. There are two homes, one of which you can get depending on how you handle a certain quest. The benefits are quickly realized as you can safely store anything you can carry in a locker in your home. You also get a 10% experience bonus for sleeping in your own bed. Later on, if you find yourself with a chunk of money burning a hole in your pocket, you can buy furniture and decorate your humble abode. Eventually, you can fill out your house with useful pieces, such as a mini infirmiry, which will heal you and remove any radiation poisoning. 

Initially, it might be a little overhwhelming as you begin to wander the wasteland. While you might be concerned about finding your father, you have other, more immediate, concerns. For example, bottle caps, the currency of the day, are a bit hard to come by, initially. Do you fight using a melee style, or do you risk burning up precious ammunition for your weapons? How you interact with the environment will often determine your best course of action. You'll probably find yourself picking up anything that isn't nailed down so that you can barter things for caps, or other needed items. Cautiously exploring the wasteland will open up opportunities for earning money and equipment.

Attributes, skills, and perks... oh my! 

As I previously mentioned, your character's statistics are made up of attributes, skills, and perks. The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system is named for the attributes you character possesses: Strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck. Each attribute directly affects skills and other statistics. For example, strength determines how much damage you do in melee and also dictates how much weight you can carry before becoming encumbered.

Your character's skills determine how difficult (or easy) it is for you to accomplish an action in the environment, for example, lockpicking. You start the game with three main skills (tag skills) which are rated higher than the remaining skills. As you gain experience and raise a level, additional points are rewarded for distribution towards your skillset. Skills top out at 100. The higher a skill, the better percentage chance you have of successfully attempting an action using that skill.

Perks are a list of special enhancements that you can choose from once every level. They're a popular part of the Fallout system and have hilarious names such as Nerd Rage, a perk that boosts your strength to 10 and increases your damage by 50% whenever your health drops to 20% or less. See? Getting beat up by the popular kids in school does have its rewards!

Building out your character as he/she levels is definitely one of the entertaining aspects of Fallout 3.

Speaking of skills, Fallout 3 does an excellent job of providing multiple solutions to problems encountered in the game. Found a locked safe? Go ahead and try to pick it. Your lockpick skill sucks? Maybe the safe is linked to a computer somewhere. Go ahead and hack the computer to unlock the safe. Bethesda paid close attention to this dynamic and you'll usually always find a solution to a problem.

Who wants some?

The combat system in Fallout 3 is a hybrid of real-time and paused targeting. When you encounter an enemy, you can press the V key to bring up the V.A.T.S. system: the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. This displays a close-up view of your enemy and enables you to target specific body areas, such as head, torso, etc. It shows the percentage chance to hit the area, and depending on the amount of action points you have, you can choose to attack with your equiped weapon. Once you've used up your action points, you confirm your choices and then the game displays your actions in a cinematic slow-motion view similar to the Matrix movies. Honestly... it's pretty cool, especially if you do a critical hit. Mass damage ensues and body parts fly like the swallows at Capistrano. Throughout the entire game, I never grew weary of watching the action.

Your action points slowly regenerate in real time, so if you haven't killed your enemy after your V.A.T.S. attack, you'll have to finish him off in FPS old-school mode. Your character's stats do come into play when aiming, so if you really suck at big weapons, don't expect your accuracy to be great, even if you are a champion FPS player.

Embrace your inner Ghandi.

Fallout 3 tracks your actions with various NPCs around the world, and depending on your decisions, your karma increases or decreases accordingly. Your karma may affect how people treat you and it will open certain scenarios to you as you play. Also, the game provides you opportunities to pick up a side-kick along the way, but if your karma doesn't match theirs, they may refuse to join you. You also risk the possibility of losing a companion if you perform an act that is in opposition to their karmic alignment, so try to restrain yourself from kicking dogs if you happen to be strolling the countryside with Mother Teresa.

Dude... where's my car?

There's no mistaking the fact that the Fallout 3 interface was designed with consoles in mind. Everything from inventory management to tracking quests is handled through your Pip-Boy. This involves bringing it up and then clicking around to find your stuff. It's not as aggravating as the system in Mass Effect, but it's not PC-friendly. Does it ruin the game? Certainly not... but allowing you to hotkey screens in your Pip-Boy would have helped a great deal. So... with realizing the cold hard reality of playing games in a console era, I just have to accept the fact that developers will tend to design for the majority and as hard as it is for me to say this, I'd rather play a game on my PC that has a gimpy interface, then not be able to play it at all. Having said that, I'm not advocating a blank check to stupid developers, either... So, your tolerance may vary...

Dude... where's my story?

We had some internal debate over the story in Fallout 3. I've given it some thought, and I can see where it was weak. The dialogue is dicey at times, and there are moments that defy logic. So much, in fact, that the game was in danger of sliding to a 4 score, instead of 5. Ultimately, this is a highly subjective area in a review. Part of my perspective is that the diaglogue/story never pulled me out of the immersive nature of the game. In the end, that is what matters the most. Even if I was asked to do something that seems totally ridiculous now, I was perfectly fine with it while I was in the game. Plus, some of the side missions were really well designed.

And...thank God the voice acting is a lot better than in Oblivion. They actually have more than 3 actors this time around.

Creepy, creepy, creepy.

The graphics and textures for the monsters in the game are top quality. We're getting to the point where computer graphics are becoming very realistic. When faced with an enemy, the minute details are astonishing. In fact, in some cases, you can spot a grenade hanging off the belt of an enemy and actually target it. Needless to say, it's just an explosion of fun when it's hit.  

Whether it's giant radiated scorpions, or mindless ghouls (hapless humans who've mutated due to massive amounts of radiation), this is not your father's Washington DC. It's Mad Max on steroids. If the critters aren't trying to kill you, the environment is. Radiation, hidden land mines, swinging dead cow traps (I'm not kidding), there's no telling what you might blunder into if you're not careful. And you know what? That's exactly how I imagine it would be.

Famous landmarks are either severely damaged, or simply gone. Even the various mundane buildings occasionally contain insight into the fates of their inhabitants. Sometimes, you'll come across the final notes or journals people have left for their loved ones. If you're Mr. Sensitive, Pony-tail Guy, you'll find this all incredibly sad.

Fortunately, I didn't feel a lot of preachiness in the game. Bethesda remained true to the spirit of the previous Fallout games and did not give into the temptation to lecture on the evils of nuclear weapons. If the bunch who did Fable 2 worked on this game, I'd probably get some quest to give the nuke in Megaton a hug and tell it that "It's okay to be a bomb." Bombs are bad... mmmkay?

The bottom line.

Fallout 3 is not without flaws. It's not perfect... but the sum of its parts make up a truly immersive and entertaining game. After waiting for so many years to see the release of Fallout 3, it's nice to be able to dive in and immerse ourselves in the Fallout canon that has become such a classic world to romp around in. I'm looking forward to the next release of Fallout and fully expect it to be even better.