PREVIEW Bit-tech
http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2008/04/19/fallout_3_preview/1
Fallout 3 Preview
Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
Release Date: Autumn 2008
In this line of work, it's very easy to start taking things for granted. Every day it seems like you're being shown another exclusive game or you’re meeting your heroes. Free games come through the post regularly and your workmates practically sit on thrones carved from super-expensive graphics cards. Every day is another battle in the war to keep a sense of proportion.
But, let me tell you, getting to see Fallout 3 before it was released was like a dream come true and, as one of the biggest fans of the series in the world, you can take it as a huge endorsement when I say that the game looks fantastic.
The sequel to Interplay's classic RPGs of the early nineties, Fallout 3 has been a controversial game to say the least. The sale of the game license to Bethesda may have revived the failing Interplay, but it also incensed fans who reacted strongly to the shift of developer and perspective.
Can one company's seminal isometric RPG be another company's first-person sandbox RPG? Never mind the fact that it has shifted to the makers of The Elder Scrolls series – is such a thing even possible?
Yes. Yes, it is.
"There'll be crying babies"
When Bethesda's Pete Hines told us that there'd be crying babies on show in Fallout 3, I have to admit that I got the wrong impression. I started wondering if Bethesda had lost the plot or if I'd stumbled into a press screening for Manhunt 3 by mistake. It turned out though that there was nothing so sinister about the warning and my imagination was the only disturbing thing about it.
After a quick Ron Perlman voiced introduction, Fallout 3 kicks off properly with the birth. And yes, just so we're clear, hearing Ron 'Hellboy' Perlman utter the immortal words “War. War never changes” did make a shiver run up my spine. In fact, as the intro went on and I realised that Bethesda had absolutely nailed the tone of the series. That shiver stopped just running up my spine and started doing laps instead.
The setting is Vault 101 and the person being born is you, the player. It's dark and hard to see, but as the nurse severs the umbilical cord and your Doctor father swims in and out of focus things start to clear up. As the computers scan you, you go through the process of deciding your gender and look.
The game very quickly starts jumping about though and the next thing you know you're a year old and your father is helping you work. When Dad leaves the room for a minute then you get a chance to decide what sort of person you want to be and learn more of the world around you.
It isn't all smooth sailing and introspection though and as things progress there's a very real sense of claustrophobia and being fenced in. Don’t worry though, this is deliberate – there's something very wrong with Vault 101.
If you're a wizened old Fallout fan boy like me then you probably already know the root of this, but if you're a newcomer to the series or just a little rusty with your backstory recollection then let us remind you. Set after a very brief but very devastating nuclear war, humanity was almost wiped clean from the face of the Earth – those survivors on the surface becoming twisted, sterile mutants and ghouls. Yet not everyone perished and many thousands of people escaped to huge underground vaults provided by the US Government.
What very few people knew though was that the vaults weren't there to shelter the weak, but there to study the survivors. Each of the vaults had a very specific defect or flaw that would make life inside a little more interesting and in Fallout 2 you learned more of these flaws. Vault 13 for example, your home in Fallout 1 would run out of water far too soon. Other vaults were populated with only men or only women, while others were never sealed properly.
Vault 101 though, your home in Fallout 3 was sealed a little too well – ever since the door first swung shut nobody has been able to enter or leave the vault. Until one fateful day when your father goes missing...
Makin' Dogmeat
So, your Dad—voiced by the always fatherly Liam Neeson—goes missing and the catalyst for your adventure is introduced. You set out searching desperate for answers – or maybe not desperate at all, this is very much a sandbox after all.
Motives aside, it's inevitable that you'll eventually set forward into the world of Fallout. It's a barren, bare and broken world on the surface – but it's also strangely beautiful too, influenced by a 1950s view of the future despite the contemporary pessimism.
Or, to be put it another way; yes there is background radiation and zombies, but there are big laser guns and impossibly complex computers that run off cassette tapes too!
Don't get too comfortable if you're a big Fallout 2 fan though – the world of Fallout 3 isn't the same humour filled place as it was in that last proper game in the series. You aren't going to stumble across the Guardian of Forever in the wastelands and Bethesda's Pete Hines made it clear to us that the dev team had taken inspiration mainly from the first game,
“We're not really big fans of the whole winking at the camera thing, to be honest. There's some humour in Fallout 3, but not like in Fallout 2. We looked to Fallout 1 more than anything else,” said Pete as he showed us how Dogmeat, an optional canine companion, could be told to go fetch medicine for the player.
“You aren't, for example, going to find Monty Python encounters in our game. Nothing like that at all.”
As Pete pushed further on into the game, showing us some more of the now-ruined sights that Washington DC had to offer, that much became rather clear. Fallout 3 is, like the first game, a post-apocalyptic adventure. It isn't a post-apocalyptic musical comedy and if you're looking for a game with that 1950s comedy feel then Serious Sam 2 may be more up your street. Here all we have is The Inkspots providing the soundtrack and buckets full of deadpan and gore.
Pushing back to the original, first Fallout is undeniably what makes Fallout 3 feel so exciting because, while Fallout 2’s repeated breaking of the fourth wall and constant Mad Max references made it an arguably more fun game to play, it’s Fallout 1 that started things off. It’s only right that Bethesda should take things back to the roots.
And take things back it certainly has, for much of what made the first games has been kept over. This time though we’re not talking about the tone of the game, the narrator or the soundtracks. This time we’re talking about the very building blocks – the foundation on which everything else is built on. Things like the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats system originally invented by Interplay.
S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is the skeleton on which Fallout is built on; a system of statistics which govern all the players’ attributes and abilities. It stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck and by upgrading or degrading each stat players can create an alter-ego that is truly detailed. One of the classic mistakes that new Fallout players would make is to think that it was just like in Dungeons and Dragons where it only affected player actions – everyone would turn down Intelligence and beef up Strength.
The unwitting result of this tinkering would then be a character so stupid that he could not make himself understood, would struggle to get new quests and have constant setbacks on the route to victory. He’d hit like a sledgehammer dropped from a height though.
How much of this that Bethesda has really taken on board was something we didn’t really get to see and, because the game is still in alpha and filled with placeholder dialogue, Pete was understandably wary of showing us much of the game’s dialogues.
What we can say though is that it has a definite impact on other areas of the game, such as combat and puzzle solving. While we will discuss combat in a little while, it’s the puzzle solving side of things that really seemed interesting and Bethesda has made the controversial choice of using a mini-game to represent players hacking computers – something that was arguably a weak spot of last year’s darling, BioShock. Here though, hacking is more sensibly handled. It’s also just a tad more realistic and theme-fitting.
With a high enough Science skill, players can attempt to hack computers they find on the way, which is done by uncovering the password from within a BIOS dump file. Opening up these files reveals a screen filled with garbled information, including possible candidates for the password. It’s up to the player to choose the right one from the list, with higher skills giving more guesses and the player’s PipBoy companion provides feedback to help narrow down the search – telling you what letter the password ends in for example.
Ok, so it sounds a little rudimentary and will no doubt get dull after a while, but like in BioShock hacking is never mandatory and players always have another option. Unlike Oblivion it’s also possible to crash a system permanently, making the stakes much higher.
The Glowing Truth
Combat in Fallout 3 has been one of the most looked at areas of the game, mainly because as a concept it’s so hugely different from the original games. What was isometric and turn-based before is now a first-person real-time kind of affair.
Well, that’s true for the most part.
Combat in Fallout 3 can actually change depending on how you want to play the game and, while the default is a first-person real-time kind of shooter, it’s not the only option. Players can switch to third-person over-the-shoulder viewing angles whenever they want if that’s their preference and the game can also be switched over to a turn-based mode using the VATS function of the PipBoy computer the player constantly carries.
Switching over to turn-based isn’t permanent though and players have a set amount of action points to use for shooting at enemies before the game reverts back to real-time so the AI can get a shot off. Your action points will then recharge after a few seconds and you get a chance to queue up your attacks once more, unleashing crippling blows however you please.
Oh, and crippling the enemy is something we’d definitely recommend – blasting limbs off isn’t only a possibility, it also gives the player a hefty advantage against the enemy.
Of course, if the changes in perspective weren’t enough, there’s also been controversy coming from the other side and after Bethesda’s Oblivion, many fans are worried that the enemy themselves will be spoiled. On that note we have both some good and some bad news.
The good news first then – enemies don’t level with the player. From the start of the game all the enemies are fixed, unlike in Oblivion. You won’t run across lowly raiders in Super Power Armour, and nor will rats get harder and harder to beat as you play more and more of the game. There’s none of all that.
On the downside, it does seem like Bethesda has polarised the enemies a little if you ask me. One of the things that made Fallout stand out was that there never was a true sense of right and wrong as such things as chivalry had long died in the wasteland.
On the one front, Bethesda has mirrored this once more by using Karma to track the player’s actions and popularity, but on the other you won’t be finding any friendly mutants like in past games. Pete confirmed with us that all the Super Mutants are dead – “Once a creature, always a creature.”
While that definitely makes the game a lot simpler and more accessible to players who want to boil Fallout 3 down to little more than a shooter, it does kind of feel like some of the greyness has been lost as a result. A world of black and white and clearly defined sides isn’t bad, but it is a little less involving.
Early Thoughts
You should be able to tell by now that we already love how Fallout 3 is shaping up. It’s grim and visceral, keeping close to the good source material and barely dealing with the lamentable spin-offs that later ruined the Fallout name.
The best thing of all though is that we’ve barely scratched the surface of the game – in fact, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the Alpha build of the game which is growing by the second. The ending, which is designed on the same branching model as in the first games, has grown further now too so that there are now around 500 endings on offer.
You may think that that is too many endings. You may be right. If that’s your line of thinking though then the people you should feel sorry for are the Xbox 360 Gamerscore addicts like Jamie – Pete reckons it’ll take at least three or four playthroughs to get all the achievements on offer.
And yeah, that does sound daunting – but personally I can’t wait to give it a shot
PREVIEW VIDEOGAMING247
http://www.videogaming247.com/2008/04/18/fallout-3-baseball-fields-and-roadside-diner-encounters-revealed/
Fallout 3: Baseball fields and roadside diner encounters revealed
April 18th, 2008 @ 12:00
Speaking to videogaming247 in London yesterday, Bethesda marketing boss Peter Hines spoke for the first time about a newly added instance involving some post apocalyptic sports fans.
There’s stuff like baseball fields, just little places to come across that you would normally find if you were out exploring a DC suburb,” he said.
“There’s old roadside diners that you can find, and just different stuff like that. The baseball field is one we haven’t talked about, but you’ll find guys out in the wasteland with baseball bats that’ll attack you.”
Hines showed us both outdoor and “dungeon” style encounters in buildings, and confirmed that the two will be treated differently.
“The outdoor is seamless, so the entire world is non-loading: it’s just one big world to explore,” he said. “The indoor environments we treat separately, so whenever you enter buildings or locations you get a load screen.”
The number of encounters is yet to be fixed, however, and it sounds as though there’s still plenty of “fiddling” going on.
“I don’t actually know how many [encounters] we’ve got, partially because we’ve been adding them and moving them around, and like, this area feels too cluttered, this area needs more stuff to do,” he said.
“We came up recently with new types of random locations to put in the world, just different stuff to come across… The number’s still a bit fluid, but all told there’s just a ton of different locations to find and places to explore.”
Fallout 3 ships for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 this autumn.
PREVIEW CVG
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=187244&site=cvg
Bethesda Softworks' main PR man Peter Hines has denounced suggestions that the company is using extreme violence as a main selling point of Fallout 3.
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When questioned over the extreme violence seen in screenshots so far, Hines responded: "We don't want it to be the focal point of the game, but it is what it is. It's a violent world, and so the combat should be violent as a result.
"I think we've done it to the extent that it's not realistic. It's a bit more tongue-in-cheek. It's Quentin Tarantino. So it's not storming the beaches of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan, where it looks like it's actually happening. It's more Kill Bill. It's violence that's a bit more over the top so it's more comical than disturbing."
Covering all bases, Hines concluded, "It's definitely a game for grown ups. It always has been. I think we've been very clear about that. This is a mature title for mature audiences. It's not a game for kids."
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