14 DAY TRIAL // 
Fallout 3 is the best Oblivion mode so far. Wait a minute, that didn't come out right but after seeing the short demo from Bethesda at Leipzig I just couldn't shake the feeling that something is amidst. I'm sure most of the old-school gamers remember Fallout for the enthralling experience and the younger ones? well, they can't remember anything but they all must have heard about the legend.
The two months old build I saw was pretty impressive and even if the game is not what someone might expect, being played from a first person perspective, it still raised some eyebrows in the conference room. The game opened with a complete intro (not the teaser from which everyone remembers the hula-hula girl) and plunged the player into the post-nuclear holocaust world. I found the main theme (the old one), even if a little too clich?, kind of sticky and trapped in my brain, constantly banging the back of my eyeballs: war never changes. Usually I don't pay too much attention to stuff like that, but I have to admit the cinematic intro really made me believe (for just a second) that human beings are the best at destroying each other and that in the end "there can be only one" or better yet "in the end only one will be only one."
Story From the info I've gathered, the story goes like this: before the nuclear holocaust some people managed to take refuge into some fallout shelters. After the dust settled most of them returned to the surface with one exception: Vault 101. The people inside chose not to return to the madness outside and stayed cooped up in there for a measly 200 years, turning slowly into gene-controlled freaks. Unlike games outside Vault 101, from the real life, Fallout takes the player and throws him into battle before he is even born. You can choose his sex and genes, determining the stats and other constants right from the start and now we choose to ignore the resemblance with Oblivion although we need to give them some credit for the original idea.
At the age of two, the child (the player) is asked to choose a present. Thus he gives the player the possibility to select different skills and at the age of 16 you'll need to take the GOAT test (Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test) which will determine another set of stats. All this fuss is for your character to better suit the player and not the other way around. At the age of 19, your father (played by Liam Neeson) suddenly disappears from a vault where no one enters and no one leaves. In order to find him you need to follow his steps through the bunker and find the same exit as he does. To accomplish all that, the PIP Boy Model 3000 (for the younger ones, a sort of personal PDA) has everything it takes to make your life easier, with personal information on the skills and stats, quests and a ton of other stuff that flickered too fast on the screen for me to record it visually.
Concept and Gameplay Once the player is out of the vault, the entire world is open for exploration with no limitations whatsoever. Even if Oblivion was and still remains one of the best looking games on the market, Fallout 3 looks and makes you feel better. The HDR is not so pronounced and the occlusion parallax implemented made the guy introducing the game really proud. What this function practically does is allow the bullet decals to actually have depth and real shape, not just some marks on the wall. It also makes the world a lot curvier and nice shaped with few straight edges. The guy didn't mention anything about antialiasing but I couldn't see too much of a difference. Don't forget that Oblivion was probably the biggest reason in recent years for people to upgrade as it had ridiculous requirements and I suspect Fallout will probably have the same effect.
Let's stop wandering in the never-ending land of graphic engines and get back to the actual gameplay. The game is pretty much as we imagined it and it doesn't really bring anything new, except maybe for the VAT system which we'll discuss a little later. The main theme is not saving the world (and making it a better place), it's sacrifice and survival. Finding your father is a tough task and the player will have to travel a lot, also fighting with moral issues, like destroying an entire city or not. Even if the moral boundary is not too grey in this situation, the destroyer of nuclear towns (like an Overlord's jester would say) will get its rewards in experience points that later will be distributed into the player stats. Other usual sources for experience points are quests and killing monsters, just like in other RPG type games.
It's a little too late to worry about drifting the topic of this article so I'll get right back into the action. Getting out of Vault 101 is nothing compared to the outside world and the first town encountered in the demo. Megaton is what you would expect from a town with an undiffused nuclear weapon (the guys from Massive Entertainment have a really nice alternative name to it - Big Fword Bomb) in the middle of the city. The sheriff is not the friendliest face in town and the guy playing managed to get him kind of pissed off. Therefore we didn't really have any information about the city in question except for some nice foul language that will probably get Mature rating which is goooooood, even if the kids won't enjoy the game. As we progress through the town, the first quest found involves some guy that has a thingy (fusion pulse charge) which can activate the Bomb. I'm not sure a normal dude will follow this particular way of action as it will probably result in genocide, but what the hell, it's just a demo.
After upgrading the tech skill with some mentat drugs (apparently legal now) we'll be trying to mess with the warhead. Once it's armed, the only safe place left will obviously be the sewers and I dare you to find a serious game out there without a sewer level. Unlike other titles that usually feature big, shi*ty, filthy rats, the sewers host only mutants with huge guns and an appetite for kids that don't meet the age rating. I promised I would explain the VAT system (which stands for "blah blah" targeting limbs and other vital parts while pausing time without Einstein's permission) and it works like this: you can enter VAT at any point during the game and the time will pause, giving you stats of all damageable parts of enemies in range, like head, limbs and torso.
It will look like cheating at first glance, but you should know that the probability to hit and have a real impact on the enemy is restricted by tons of variables from strength to agility and even the condition of your rifle. What's more interesting is that this complex system works in real time, with less accuracy so if you are just looking for lots of action without too many interruptions then you can shoot away and never have to worry. On the other hand, if blowing mutant heads and limbs is not your way of doing business and you want to take care of them in a more sadistic and voyeuristic way, alternate routes will be provided in some cases like the one presented in the sewers. Here we can reprogram a robot than will politely ask the guys with scrambled DNA to present some tickets, which they obviously don't have, hence the following blood bath.
Anyhow, the sewers level ended quickly and we soon reached the Galaxy News Radio which was the meeting point for our BFB quest (with nuclear bomb). The round market looks ready for a boss fight and guess what? A super mutant showed up, bent on finding out why I had had the audacity of helpingthe NPCs and with what right I had asked for tickets when there has not been one freaking train for 200 years. After annoying it with a Chinese AKM bee-bee gun, the Fat Man came into play (portable nuclear rocket launcher) and two "atomic mushrooms" later the mutant was no more. As I said before, the guy from Megaton was waiting on top of the building with the best seats to one of the most beautiful explosions I've ever seen and which concluded the best Oblivion mode so far.
Other neat stuff that didn't fit the article above but I considered worthy of mentioning: there are no magic pills or potions to fill the life gauge and the only substitute is water which is always irradiated at some degree. In a franchise that allowed toilets to be blown to bits it's only natural that in Fallout 3, the only water that doesn't drive Geiger counters crazy is from miserable toilets. Some neutral aspect that will split gamers into two different groups is the level of blood. Some guys can stomach a couple of f words but they're no match for a couple of litres of harmless plasma thrown at the screen. I guess we will have to wait and see how this will play out in the end.
Conclusion The only thing that actually bothered me beside the obvious Oblivion resemblance given by the shared engine is the lame car explosions which always involve an atomic mushroom cloud. I can understand the Fallout theme but this is simply ridiculous. I have mixed feelings about this title and most of the gaming community will have a cat fight about it, but I'd love to provide the oil for that. Unfortunately it's too early in the development process to make any kind of judgment, although I have the feeling it will sell just because it's a Bethesda game.
