Fallout 3 GC Preview

GameSpy tries out Fallout 3 at GC Leipzig to find out if it does justice to the franchise.
There's far more to do in Fallout 3 than just shooting people to itsy-bitsy pieces. If you're playing a character with plenty of speech skill, you can sway the natives with the power of conversation, plying them for free stuff, favors, and access to stuff that you'd otherwise only achieve through combat or thievery. Then there are the hacking and lock-picking games that will get you into places where you weren't meant to be. The lock-picking mini-game is a test of finesse, as you work a screwdriver and bobby pin simultaneously in order to turn locks, hoping to apply the right amount of pressure before your pin snaps. The hacking mini-game is a word puzzle, where through the process of elimination and lucky guesswork you arrive at the necessary password to break into the system.

Fallout 3 is a very different game from its predecessors on a surface level, but the feeling we get while playing it, even in this unfinished state, tells us that it's also very much the same. Bethesda clearly has a solid understanding of the appeal behind the franchise, and has taken great steps towards recreating and even improving upon the most important aspects of the classic PC role-playing games. Even the most die-hard Fallout fan couldn't ask for anything more.