Wastelanders Journal 25/07

Got attacked again today. Not just your common, garden variety raiders either. This time it was a squad of Talon Company mercs. Nasty guys, equipped and trained to high standards ... well, relatively. I was leaving an abandoned mountain shack I had been scavenging through when I caught them in the distance. Musta picked up my trail near Arefu. Four guys against one. Better to deal with them now; I liked the odds anyway. Takin' aim with an old .32 rifle, I loosed a few shots. Range was two great to do much damage, and I just wanted to put the wind up them. Got clipped by a bullet, one of 'em musta been carrying a sniper rifle. Wish I had a pair of binoculars, but shoulda guessed anyway. Making use of the rocky cover, I dropped a few mines around the shack and retreated inside. They would come to me. My vision danced a tango as the mines detonated. Grasping a custom sword I had built and planting my feet firmly on the ground, I waited. This is my domain. Abandon all hope, ye who enter. I looted their equipment and made my way outside again. People always talk of the wasteland as a place of ruin and despair. From here, the vista is exquisite, twisted, beautiful. Rolling dunes, in supplication to great vaulting mountains, crowned by a crisp, reaching blue canvas. To me, the wasteland is home.

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Fallout 3 is, strangely enough, the fourth game in the acclaimed RPG series, Fallout, which depicts a world ravaged by nuclear war, the end of civilization, and the rise of grotesque mutants. A fraction of humanity survives in the wasteland, while others (generally the rich or those considered useful by the rich) have avoided this more hostile incarnation of earth by living in giant, purpose-built vaults. The Fallout series mixes conflict with diplomacy, scavenging with trading, freedom to go where ever you choose with freedom to side with good or evil. Fallout has one of the best character creation systems I have ever seen, which allows for the creation of a huge variety of highly distinct avatars. The first two games (Fallout and Fallout 2, 1997 and 1998 respectively), were developed by Black Isle. These were isometric games and combat played out over turns. Both were excellent games, and represented genuine progress, especially in terms of setting, for the RPG genre. Next came Fallout Tactics (developed by Micro Forte in 2001), which placed the emphasis on party based, real-time combat. By this time the first two games had gained something of a cult following, and although Fallout Tactics was generally well received, there were the nay-sayers. Personally, I thought it was different but great. After a lengthy hiatus, Black Isle sold the rights to Betheseda. There was a mixed response to this announcement and, to a lesser extent, the game when it was released. So did Betheseda (of The Elder Scrolls fame) remain faithful to the Fallout universe? Did they make a sequel worthy of its predecessors?

The aftermath of a grizzly battle with some Talon Company Mercs.

The answer is yes. The biggest change in Fallout 3, is that you now see the wasteland through the eyes of your character. The excellent character creation system remains almost exactly the same. Diversity of path and moral choice? Check. Imaginative and foreboding world, coloured by a feel of the 1950s, and tinted with a splash of tongue in cheek humour? Check. The option to enter a turn based mode during combat? Check. Combat with unruly men, super mutants, and robots? Check. Interesting plot and a plethora of side quests? Check.

Fallout 3 opens in Vault 101, at the instant of the protagonist's birth. From here you begin to define your avatar, passing through fragments of childhood and adolescent life, while choosing attributes and starting skills. This fairly inventive method of character creation eases the player nicely into the game and doesn't last too long. Then things begin to heat up; daddy dearest runs into difficulty with the overseer and flees. The Overseer's goons have killed one of your father's friends and are coming for you. It's time to escape. Once outside, you are not just walking into the open wasteland for the first time, but also into the most complete and captivating realisation of Black Isle's bleak and haunting vision of the future. Your mission is to find your father. The first stop is the town of Megaton, a run down settlement built on the site of a still active nuclear warhead, which is guarded by a thick stockade of battered metal. From here the route is effectively open, you can choose to detonate the nuke, disarm it, or even go postal and wipe the town out. Any direction can be pursued (so long as you can survive), and the map is filled with a wealth of locations and terrains, from stinking sewers to shattered cityscapes. A host of side quests can be picked up along the way, such as retrieving a runaway cyborg, or infiltrating a super-mutant stronghold.

Nothing to be done.

This incarnation of the Fallout universe is the largest ever. There are at least a hundred locations over a vast swathe of land, and travelling to these can be genuinely dangerous, especially on the hardest difficulty level. Enemies include packs of feral dogs, slavers, super-mutants, ghouls, robots, and the high-tech enclave faction. A total of thirteen skills including speech, melee weapons, lock picking, and stealth, ensure a fairly diverse number of solutions to every problem. Completing a quest, or performing any activity which requires the use of a skill provides experience points. When enough experience points have been gained, your avatar advances a level; when a new level is reached, skill points, health, and a perk are awarded. Perks tend to improve skills, or provide unique abilities. One perk, Mr Sandman, allows you to kill any sleeping character silently. Another perk, called nerd rage, makes you more powerful as you take damage. Each perk has an illustration with the pip-boy which suggests what bonus the perk awards. These illustrations are reminiscent of something Bill Watterson might have drawn; the pip boy is like a weirder and older version of Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes. These nice little touches derive from the original game. The vanilla game allows a maximum character level of twenty, which could be easily reached by following the main quest and a little exploration on the side. Being unable to reach a higher level was something which I had considered a flaw, but this has been addressed with the addition of downloadable content called The Pitt; the level cap now stands at thirty.

Fallout 3 has stunning visuals.

Fallout 3 has been presented with a high standard of excellence. I can't think of an RPG that looks better; the screen-shots speak for themselves. The music is also of special note. It ranges from dignified guitar riffs, to electronic scores, to intense orchestral based combat music; furthermore, Three Dog, an eccentric wasteland disc jockey, plays a collection of completely out of place tunes, which originate from a time of prior innocence. Most of the time when playing games, I find that the music is often blanked out in favour of other stimulus, but in Fallout 3, the music lends surprising dramatic force to a game which is already incredibly atmospheric. The sound effects are also pretty good, but they don't stand out as much as the music or visual presentation.

Combat is one of the weaker points, but it is essential to remember that Fallout 3 is an RPG, not a FPS. e. Bullets often don't go exactly where you want them to, it seems that the chance to hit may be based on a dice roll. This is the largest flaw in the game; if you bought Fallout 3 expecting a contemporary shooter you would probably be disappointed. It is possible to momentarily pause the action to get increased damage and to target specific parts of an enemy. This is called the V.A.T.S system and is a type of homage to the preceding games. When you attack from V.A.T.S you are shown a cinematic presentation of the action, a nice touch. There are a couple of small bugs with this system, but generally it works quite well. Fallout 3 is a richly developed vision of a dark and inhospitable world, and surviving can be difficult in the tougher game modes; as a result, Fallout 3 is very capable of drawing the player in. One time after spending a few hours fighting off the worst the wasteland could throw at me with a friendly, and rather hardy hound called Dogmeat, I logged out of the game. When the dog's incessant panting stopped I looked around the room to see where he had gone. Sad, but true.  Fallout 3 is also extremely violent. Heads get busted, eyes pop out, limbs get pulverised. Somehow, and I'm not sure how, the violence is easier to stomach than the violence in Prototype, which I recently reviewed. Still, its not for the faint of heart.

My First Supermutant, the latest toy from Fisher-Price.

Fallout 3 is a game whose excellence is difficult to overstate. You could easily spend sixty hours playing and not see everything. You could play the game several times, choosing completely different paths each time. The content is first-rate throughout and the universe is perfectly realised. All in all, Fallout 3 is a triumph, imaginatively, in relation to atmosphere, content, and in terms of the manner in which it executes Black Isle's chilling vision. I recommend this game highly, not as a shooter but rather as a vast and all encompassing first person RPG.