Will Porter of PC Zone had some hands-on time with Fallout 3 — five hours worth. His thoughts? He was kind enough to transcribe them here.
Most of the gaming world seems worried that it’s going to be too much like Oblivion (see the comments in this RPS thread), but I’m on the other end of the spectrum — I’m worried it won’t be enough like Oblivion. Cuz, you know, I kinda liked Oblivion a little.
However, it’s starting to sound like it might be a nice balance of the two. While the world doesn’t level with you like it did in Oblivion (Porter calls this a “foible”, but I completely disagree — it was an excellent feature as it didn’t restrict your freedom to explore everywhere and everywhere, no matter what your level), the enemies in the main quest do level with you so it’ll provide you with a suitable challenge no matter what level you are. The rest of the world is level-static and there are areas that will kick your ass unless you’ve leveled before you take them on.
And the VATS system, which Fallout fans are eager for, sounds like it’s remained intact. Personally, it kinda feels like a gimmick to me — slowing down the action so you can watch in third person as your bullets shoot off an enemy’s feet or elbows or ears or whatever. I think I’d rather just have straight, real-time combat, but everyone who gets to try it seems to genuinely enjoy it, so perhaps I’m completely wrong on this count.
As I mentioned recently, I never played any of the Fallout games, so I’m not carrying around a lot of expectations and hopes that it lives up to the originals (and also why I don’t get all the VATS excitement). In one respect, I get where Fallout fans are coming from– if, for instance, Portal 2 was being made by Blizzard instead of Valve, I’d worry that Blizzard was going to somehow turn it into World of Warcraft. Not that it would definitely be bad, as I understand Blizzard makes good games — just that it would be a very different game than I was hoping for. I’d be nervous and skeptical no matter how good the previews sounded.
At the same time, some die-hard Fallout fans sound like they don’t want Fallout 3 at all — they just want another Fallout 2. Nothing changed, nothing improved, nothing new, just the same game in a different box. That’s a little strange to me, in the same way it’s strange that more people still play Counter-Strike than Counter-Strike: Source. Yeah, it’s different, I guess, but different doesn’t always mean worse.
At any rate, Porter makes the game sound pretty darn good for Fallout fans and Oblivion fans, so who knows, perhaps we’ll both wind up happy.
27 responses so far ↓
1 Duke // Jul 22, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Chris, looks like you have no idea what hardcore fallout fans are eager for. VATS is fix added by Bethesda to make the game less FPS. True fallout games have turn-based combat.
Anyway, strange of you to make decisions based only on 1 hands-on review. During the last few days there were dozens of them… jhust check NMA…
2 Niteowl // Jul 22, 2008 at 2:20 pm
FIRST POST!!
3 Niteowl // Jul 22, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Well. shit.
4 >_ // Jul 22, 2008 at 2:33 pm
This was always a strange dynamic with these types of games and gamer.
“I want turn-based combat! Bethesda better put it in, or I am going to call tham on my rotary phone and address my concerns on the forums in an hour after my modem dials a connection and I after I format my floppy disks wipe the dust off CRT and reorganize the open folders in Windows 3.1 and back up everything on my tape drive.”
5 Pixi // Jul 22, 2008 at 2:33 pm
To the little fine cs comment you just HAD to have in there - NO.
No, no, no.
Counter Strike Source and 1.6 can NOT be compared at all.
6 >_ // Jul 22, 2008 at 2:34 pm
@Pixi: They are the same shit.
7 Soundwave // Jul 22, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Pixi. They’re the same damn game.
8 Jimmay // Jul 22, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Chris, as a fan of Fallout 2 (never played 1) and a fan of Oblivion (started playing right around the time I found ole’ Nonny), I can see why people are worried. I mean, I don’t really understand it, but I can see why. People want something new, but familiar. Fallout 3 is new, but doesn’t look much like Fallout did. Personally, I thought turn-based combat was fun, for a while, until it started to annoy the crap out of me whenever a Radscorpion got a little too near and my combat mode kicked on leaving me to slowly walk up to it and slowly blow its brains out… slowly.
I think Fallout 3 is going to be a great revamp of the series, and I think VATS keeps the spirit of turn-based combat while getting rid of the tediousness that it always came to.
What I’m worried about is the NPCs. As Yahtzee said, the characters in Oblivion looked like they resided in the Uncanny Valley, but I thought it was okay due to the cartoony nature of the game. Fallout 3 is going for real-realism, and a bunch of creepy and unbelievable characters running around would ruin that for me.
9 Scolex // Jul 22, 2008 at 2:56 pm
If Fallout 3 didn’t have an option for turn-based combat, it would be like Half-Life 2: Episode 3 dropping real time FPS action and opting for turn-based combat.
10 Niteowl // Jul 22, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Does this “Fallout better have TBC” discussion sound eerily similar to “TF2 BETTER HAVE GRENADES AND BHOPPING IT’S THE CORE TO THE GAME!”
11 Josh S. // Jul 22, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I don’t know what to think about this game. but that article sounds like good news all around. Most of my friends were Fallout 1/2 fans so they were HEAVILY skeptical about the new game.
12 Koslov // Jul 22, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Why I believe you are correct with that statment Niteowl.
I played Fallout 1 and 2 and Tactics, and I’m looking forward to the new version. It sounds intresting and it normally doesn’t hurt to try new things.
13 friccish // Jul 22, 2008 at 4:06 pm
BTW, According to the newly updated steam player stats page, CSS now has more people playing than CS (and CZ combined some of the time).
14 Scolex // Jul 22, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Who here can honestly say they would be happy with a turn based Half-Life 2: Episode 3?
15 nmanguy // Jul 22, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Wait, what happened to s.p.e.c.i.a.l.?
16 Eathanu // Jul 22, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Eh. I hated the leveling system in Oblivion, and I’m glad it’s mostly nixed for Fallout.
17 rammingspeed42 // Jul 22, 2008 at 5:51 pm
No more comical tags, Chris? There goes half the reason I read this blog…
18 Generic Name // Jul 22, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Bleh…
I love me my Fallout because it was an Arr Pee Gee with a much more interesting and unsettling atmosphere than generic medieval areas or irritatingly advanced technological eras and dark, humor; it was a perfect mix, and had combat that was slow enough to relax with (as I should be with entertainment) but fast enough to get into and keep me entertained. And it was an RPG, and I want to be “in character” to “role-play.” I don’t want a twitch game to kill that, and I don’t want some system that blends FPS’ and TBC to make some bastard child that removes any want I’d have for an FPS OR an RPG.
I just want an RPG with a system I know is good and lets me sleep at night so I can have fanboy wet dreams a la Christmas, and not an FPS that sounds iffy. Why is it that people find it so hard to understand that? :(
To round off the various abbreviations to 10, OMG BBQ.
19 Tiler // Jul 22, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Ahh, Fallout fans. Despite my general ignorance of the game itself, their reputation has preceded them.
From what I hear, ‘unpleaseable’ is to a Fallout fan is to ‘unhappy’ is to a jihadist.
Tread carefully.
20 neamos // Jul 23, 2008 at 3:54 am
Yeah, what’s with all the fallout fan hate on Oblivion? Piss off, fanboys!
Well hello there!
I saw a mudcrab today. Horrible creatures!
Goodbye.
*starts to rake floor*
21 Scolex // Jul 23, 2008 at 4:15 am
For the record, I love Oblivion. However, I don’t want to play Oblivion, I want to play Fallout. When you take away the writers, the designers, the camera style, and the combat system, then put the Fallout and setting on it, it just isn’t Fallout.
22 Lack_26 // Jul 23, 2008 at 4:53 am
As much as I’m looking forward to Fallout 3, I, having played some of Fallout 1 and 2 (never owned them, but used to play it at other peoples houses) and loving every minute of it, am also really quite sceptical, there are a lot of features from the original that I would like to see maintained.
But I also loved Oblivion and hope that a healthy mix of the two is maintained.
23 Blaze // Jul 23, 2008 at 6:41 am
I agree with you there, especially about Counter-Strike. People who refuse to simply adjust to CS:S’s changes weird me out.
Oh no! The arc you throw grenades at has been changed! I’m never playing CS:S again!
24 Ojive // Jul 23, 2008 at 9:01 am
“Wait, what happened to s.p.e.c.i.a.l.?”
It’s still in. They don’t talk about it so much, but it is confirmed to still exist. Having played Fallout 1/2 and Oblivion extensively, I am looking forward to this game more than any other this year. Although it is different from Fallout 1/2, it looks to be surprisingly faithful to the source material, given how long it has been since Interplay died. Some of the complaints I have heard are just absurd, too-I recall one poster ranting about how Bethesda invented the Enclave.
25 Will // Jul 25, 2008 at 7:23 am
Fallout was never about the combat for me. As much fun as beating a man to death by punching out his arms, then his legs, then his eyes could be, it usually got pretty tedious.
But Fallout is about the writing. Morrowind (I never played Oblivion) has a passable story, but it never made me laugh or mad or feel in control of my character’s destiny the way Fallout did. In a perfect world, there’d be some sort of joint thing, where the combat and art and boring crap were done by Bethesda, and all the writing and plot and missions were done by those brilliant folks at Obsidian.
26 Gufu // Jul 26, 2008 at 8:26 am
Well, I don’t see why did Bethesda wants to make an FPSRPG. Alike quiet a few of the games fans, I just want a fallout with better graphics and the other side of the entire story - so, Washington side of US is acceptable. Although, black holes of the story are annoying. I think what Bethesda should have made the game based on previous fallouts - and just have raised the graphics, the violence, and continue with the trend of lack of political correctness (although that part was hard to see in fallout, but netherless). But hey, even if it will be a run and gun - they can at least make it fun, right?
27 your evil twin // Aug 4, 2008 at 10:51 am
I’m a big fan of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, and I am also really looking forward to Fallout 3. I won’t miss the turn-based combat. I loved the weapons and awesome death animations, but I had no particular affinity for the turn-based system.
I’m confident Bethesda will make an awesome Fallout 3. Not because they made Oblivion… because they made Terminator: Future Shock and its sequel/expansion Skynet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApSyX9_EEfo Those games were like a cross between Duke Nukem 3D, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Half-Life and Halo, had fully 3D environments and enemies (a few minor objects were still sprites). And this was before Quake! We’re talking ruined cities bordered by areas of deadly radiation rather than invisible walls, drivable cars and aircraft (that are easy and fun to use!), ability to throw throw grenades without switching weapon (Halo/Far Cry style), a laser gun with a functional night vision scope. All kinds of awesome stuff, made before Quake. And you can’t beat blowing up gigantic spider robots with a pump-action shotgun and molotov cocktails. Betheseda know how to make good post-apocalyptic stuff.
Regardless of whether or Fallout 3 really feels like the earlier Fallout games, what I am positive of is that it will kick arse. And I am happy to accept change if the change leads to excellent arse-kicking.
Leave a Comment