Fallout 3 Previews

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Written by BuckGB on October 1st, 2008

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I arrived at the small northern settlement a cluster of tin shacks out on a broken overpass. Right away someone shot at me, but then had the good grace to come and apologize. He thought I was someone else.

Here again is a place where Fallout 3 blends its Fallout roots with the best of Oblivion: the dialogue exchanges. In Fallout and Fallout 2, there were complex trees of lines that led to completely different outcomes. Being polite over being sassy could be the difference between a firefight and a gift. In Oblivion, the voice acting and facial expressions were visual cues as to what you should say to placate characters; but often as not, those conversations usually had only one outcome. In Fallout 3, you can hear how a character talks and reasonably predict which response in your menu they want to hear. There isn't a charisma mini-game, alas, but certain dialogue options will open up based on perks or skills. (I heart Lady Killer/Black Widow because you can seduce people into telling you passwords.)

Conversing with NPCs was fairly basic stuff; we could ask them about the Wasteland, the town, themselves, and, in some cases, missions they had. It's not on the same level as Mass Effect's, but the dialog system does its job well.

A young lady in the saloon, who asked us to deliver a letter to her folks in a town called Arefu, gave our first task to us. It turns out that Arefu was actually built on top of what remained of an old freeway overpass, but that hadn't protected it from the many Raiders wandering the Wasteland. We ran into a few of them while en route (along with some mutated dogs and other radioactive beasts) which we took down using the V.A.T.S. (Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System).

I'm hesitant to reduce them to the sorts of courier runs, fetch quests, and hunting forays that have come to pervade MMOs, but I'm afraid that they're going to sound similarly prosaic if I give you a blow-by-blow description. At their best, the quests I played directed you toward sites where interesting things were going on. One started out as a "fed ex" quest from Megaton to a remote settlement built on a ruined overpass overlooking the Potomac. When I got there, I found that the settlers were under siege by a group of vampire people. My arrival triggered a far more interesting task: to go find their lair and slaughter them. I had three choices of locale. Behind door number one, an abandoned drive-in theater, were a pair of super mutants. Too bad that our play time ended while I was en route to the derelict metro station where I suspect they were hiding.

I may be wrong, but I'm inferring from what I've played that Fallout 3's world is designed around sites like these. In some cases, you'll be directed to them by quests. In others, you may just stumble on them in the middle of something else entirely. So long as players are not encouraged to bypass any potentially interesting scenarios simply because they're not on a quest to engage them -- a common problem in MMOs, once players learn that nearly every monster has a kill-quest associated with it -- then this could lend itself to some interesting meanderings in Fallout 3's world.

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