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Coming off E3, Fallout 3 was one of the more highly anticipated games for attendees at PAX 08. Within a few minutes of the show floor opening, the small booth was inundated with players and were it not for the early press access period, I wouldn’t have been able to get close to the booth.
The demo on display began about an hour into the game. After exiting Vault 101 for the first time, I was witness to a bleak, washed-out environment. Your main goal is to find your missing father, though how you go about that is really up to you. The wasteland is littered with small towns and structures just rife with adventure. For an idea of the game’s scope, even the developer who was walking me through the demo was surprised by something he saw.
My adventures took me to a burned-out high school, which has been overrun by a group of thugs. Before entering the school, I first needed to take care of some stat planning. Although it feels like an action game, Fallout 3 is still very much an RPG. Each time you level, you are awarded with experience points which can be distributed among several traits like lockpicking, targeting and explosives. How you plan your character is completely up to you and will change how your character approaches each situation. Given my limited hands-on time, I went for more of a combat-oriented character.
Combat is another of Fallout 3’s major innovations and can be played either as an FPS or via the VATS system. When playing as an FPS, the combat rolls out in a familiar fashion, but VATS lends a completely different experience. VATS, which stands for Vault-tech Assisted Targeting System, pauses combat and lets you choose which part of an enemy you want to target. Each body part has a hit percentage, which directly relates to an amount of ability points you have; harder shots take fewer points, but have a lower hit percentage.
According to the on-hand developer, there are times when one system is better to use than another. Between the two combat styles, I found myself drawn more to VATS for general combat, though the FPS style came in handy when I was surrounded and needed to quickly dodge for cover.
Although I was able to spend a little under an hour with the game, I wasn’t even able to scratch the surface with what the game has to offer. However, based on that short hour, all I can say is that October can’t come soon enough. |
