Gamespot Fallout 3 Preview

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squicken

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http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/rpg/fallout3/news.html?sid=6173397

Gamespot said:
First, here are some key basics about Fallout 3. Yes, it's a first-person game, but it also has a third-person camera if you like to play that way, and the camera can be moved so that it almost mimics the perspective of the original Fallout games. No, it's not a pure action shooter, though it can be played like a shooter in some ways, if you want. However, the game does rely on role-playing statistics to determine whether you hit or miss. More intriguingly, you can pause the combat at any time and target specific parts of an enemy's body, just like you could in the original Fallout games. And, yes, it's very much a role-playing game with hundreds of quests. While it only has a few hundred characters as opposed to the 1,500 in Oblivion, each of the characters in Fallout 3 will have his or her or its own distinct identity and dialogue. But we'll cover all of this in a bit.
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Gamespot said:
And Bethesda really wants to make choices count in this game, much more than it did in Oblivion. After all, in Oblivion you could pursue every quest in the game and be all things to all people. In Fallout 3, the choices will be much more binary, and they will have far-reaching consequences.

The example that Bethesda gave of this involves Megaton, a shantytown built around the worship of an unexploded nuclear bomb. When you arrive at Megaton, you'll eventually have two choices. A stranger will reward you if you rearm the bomb, as he represents a developer that would like to wipe Megaton from the map to make room for a nice postnuclear suburb. Or you can inform the town sheriff of the plot and save the town. If you choose to go along with the stranger, Megaton will be wiped out of existence in a glorious nuclear blast; thus, all the quests and adventures associated with it are gone. However, by blowing up Megaton, you'll open up a new area in the game that you would not otherwise have access to, Tenpenny Towers. But if you decide to save Megaton, you won't experience the quests and adventures associated with Tenpenny Towers. Talk about a tough call.
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I like that there are consequences to your actions. It seemed weird in Oblivion to be able to do the really evil stuff be still be praised as a hero.

Edit:

Shacknews preview

IGN preview

Eurogamer preview

Right-click to save Major Nelson interview with Todd Howard
 
Far reaching consequences? What the hell... the consequences arn't supposed to be known untill you beat the game!
 
Eurogamer preview, if it hasn't already been posted

Bethesda has a lot to do. From what we've seen so far - and believe us, we're sighing with relief - they look to be on the right path.
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But this is first-person for a reason. It's about being inside the world. It's about being a person in a large, elaborate story, searching for your moral compass, the man who raised you (and of course you can choose to be male or female, and various races - the game cleverly then changes your dad's appearance to match that race). It's personal in a way Oblivion is not. So far it's looking true to its origins, while appropriately forward-facing. It's clear these people love Fallout. In a year's time, we think we're going to be joining them.
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Thoren said:
I'd be careful on taking Bethesda's promises seriously. Remember Radiant AI?
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What was wrong about the Radiant AI?

I thought it was a great addition to the genre. I can't stand shopkeepers who are nailed to the floor in their shops.

In fact I think it was revolutionary for big scale RPGs (Fable and Gothic already had something similar on a much smaller scale).
 
Frenck said:
What was wrong about the Radiant AI?
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All I can think of is that the first demo (woman in house with dog,) showed more advanced behavior than what actually shipped with the game.
 
nubbe said:
Far reaching consequences? What the hell... the consequences arn't supposed to be known untill you beat the game!
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Hopefully there will be some of those as well. I wouldn't mind branching storylines and even some Carlito's Way-esque twists at the end.
 
Every design decision announced so far has made me optimistic. While I would have preferred a pure turn-based system rather than the pausable real-time hybrid in Fallout 3, the first-person viewpoint is a good decision. Everything else sounds like it's well within the capabilities of Bethesda...now that the basic framework has been revealed to be solid, it's going to come down to execution. Is the dialogue going to be good enough? Is the quest design going to be clever enough? Are the combat scenarios going to be interesting enough? Like I said before, I'm very optimistic at this point.

Basically, Fallout 3 is now my most anticipated game.
 
Chairman Yang said:
Every design decision announced so far has made me optimistic. While I would have preferred a pure turn-based system rather than the pausable real-time hybrid in Fallout 3, the first-person viewpoint is a good decision. Everything else sounds like it's well within the capabilities of Bethesda...now that the basic framework has been revealed to be solid, it's going to come down to execution. Is the dialogue going to be good enough? Is the quest design going to be clever enough? Are the combat scenarios going to be interesting enough? Like I said before, I'm very optimistic at this point.

Basically, Fallout 3 is now my most anticipated game.
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Although I dislike the First-person view, they're saying that Bethesda is also working hard on improving the third-person viewpoint. If they can get that down well enough, I'm happy.
 
Frenck said:
What was wrong about the Radiant AI?
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I've spent upwards of 100hrs with Oblivion and I never saw anything impressive in regards to the AI. The whole radiant AI hyping by Bethesda was a joke. Everything cool that seemed random was during quests and actually scripted.
 
X26 said:
I've spent upwards of 100hrs with Oblivion and I never saw anything impressive in regards to the AI. The whole radiant AI hyping by Bethesda was a joke. Everything cool that seemed random was during quests and actually scripted.
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And everything scripted never seemed to work properly because the NPCs were retarded.

But I'm going to have a little faith with Fallout 3. Maybe they'll crank out something really awesome.
 
X26 said:
I've spent upwards of 100hrs with Oblivion and I never saw anything impressive in regards to the AI. The whole radiant AI hyping by Bethesda was a joke. Everything cool that seemed random was during quests and actually scripted.
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Indeed. The only thing that was remotely like the radiant AI was that townsfolk would talk with each other and even that was badly done... and sometimes nonsensical.

Oblivion felt incredibly scripted, even more so than Morrowind <3
 
Frenck said:
What was wrong about the Radiant AI?

I thought it was a great addition to the genre.
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Yeah, it was. 15 years ago when Ultima 7 did it.

I like the sound of real consequences. I don't like binary choices. And I'm ambivalent towards the far-reaching part - I just fear that Bethesda will fall into the over-epicisation of all things trap that they're so prone to enter, which just doesn't fit Fallout at all.
 
All this talk about the "Radiant AI" brings up one concern for me. Is Bethesda going to bring it to Fallout 3? The preview said the number of people will be brought down from the number of Oblivion...maybe this is a good thing.
 
X26 said:
I've spent upwards of 100hrs with Oblivion and I never saw anything impressive in regards to the AI. The whole radiant AI hyping by Bethesda was a joke. Everything cool that seemed random was during quests and actually scripted.
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The radiant AI was overhyped and only turned out okay, but most other games with similar systems are entirely scripted. I don't think we'll see the radiant AI reach its potential for another generation of systems.

Jenga said:
All this talk about the "Radiant AI" brings up one concern for me. Is Bethesda going to bring it to Fallout 3? The preview said the number of people will be brought down from the number of Oblivion...maybe this is a good thing.
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Yeah I think the current system will be further realized with having less characters to worry about.
 
Jenga said:
All this talk about the "Radiant AI" brings up one concern for me. Is Bethesda going to bring it to Fallout 3? The preview said the number of people will be brought down from the number of Oblivion...maybe this is a good thing.
Click to expand...

The Radiant AI is back with Fallout 3, but it's been tweaked and enhanced. Specifically, a lot of the crap where Mr. Muldoon Merrywhether would take a nap in the middle of the day or steal an apple at 4am (and no one see him, so who cares?) has been curbed. Bethesda is promising that there will be more interactions between NPCs and the environment that will take place in open areas, where the player will be more apt to see them.

I didn't see too much of this in the demo, but it was slightly evident in some of the interactions seen between NPCs in the city of Megaton. Hopefully it'll be more obvious in the final release.
 
A quick summary ( not by me )

* The game takes place 30 years after the events Fallout 2. The events of the much-maligned Fallout: Brotherhood and Fallout: Tactics never happened in the universe of Fallout 3.
* The game will feature a day/night cycle and changing weather.
* There will be 21 collectible bobbleheads hidden throughout the game for Easter egg lovers.
* The game will feature 20 licensed songs from the '40s that will be played through radio stations accessible via your on-arm PIP-Boy and radios peppered throughout the game world.
* There will be no drivable vehicles in the game, but you can travel between locations through subway tunnels.
* There are children in the game, but the team isn't sure yet if they will be killable as they were in the previous Fallout games.
* The game will have no multiplayer mode and no demo is currently planned.
* Downloadable content and player-created mods are being considered, but nothing has been finalized.
* The game will feature nine to 12 endings based on how you've played it.
* The game's version of Washington D.C. will include iconic landmarks and the general topography of the real city, but will not be a street-by-street recreation. The downtown area represents about one quarter of the in-game map.
* There will be fewer non-player characters in Fallout 3 than in Oblivion, owing to the game's post-apocalyptic setting. Almost all the NPCs will be killable.
* You'll be able to hire mercenaries to aid you as in the first Fallout game. You won't have much direct control over them.
* Among other statistics, the demo's loading screens contained a mysterious metric of "corpses eaten." "We're not talking about that stuff," Executive Producer Todd Howard said when asked about the stat.
 
nicholasbrutal said:
The Radiant AI is back with Fallout 3, but it's been tweaked and enhanced. Specifically, a lot of the crap where Mr. Muldoon Merrywhether would take a nap in the middle of the day or steal an apple at 4am (and no one see him, so who cares?) has been curbed. Bethesda is promising that there will be more interactions between NPCs and the environment that will take place in open areas, where the player will be more apt to see them.

I didn't see too much of this in the demo, but it was slightly evident in some of the interactions seen between NPCs in the city of Megaton. Hopefully it'll be more obvious in the final release.
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Neato. Another thing, I heard that Bethesda is planning on putting in 9-12 endings for Fallout 3. Is this based on the number of locations? Like each location getting its own specific ending like in the original games?

devilscallmedad said:
* There are children in the game, but the team isn't sure yet if they will be killable as they were in the previous Fallout games.
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Although I'd like to see it happen, I'm sure a modder will enable stuff like this if they decide not to. Hell, if Bethesda lets modders mess with the Karma system, we could see modders come up with stuff like the Child Killer karma title.
 
I hope the choices in this game aren't too black and white, as far too many games have done the same thing, with no shades of gray.
 
Well if kids aren't killable I say leave them out. Having immortal kids would just hurt the immersion/atmosphere more thna haivng them in would help it. I don't like the sound of downtown DC = 25% of the whole games area, I hope that's a slip up by whoever wrote the list first.
 
devilscallmedad said:
* Among other statistics, the demo's loading screens contained a mysterious metric of "corpses eaten." "We're not talking about that stuff," Executive Producer Todd Howard said when asked about the stat.
Click to expand...


Mmm...cannibalism.
 
Jenga said:
Neato. Another thing, I heard that Bethesda is planning on putting in 9-12 endings for Fallout 3. Is this based on the number of locations? Like each location getting its own specific ending like in the original games?
Click to expand...

It seemed like they were hinting that the endings would be dependent on the choices you've made throughout the game (those choices could lead you to a number of locations, I supposed). They were also pretty amped about what they were doing with the ending(s), calling it "bold."
 
Ark-AMN said:
I want to befriend a Deathclaw in this one and have it follow me around like the dog in Fallout 1 :D
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That is, if any Deathclaws survived the Enclave genocide long enough to make it East.
 
Jenga said:
That is, if any Deathclaws survived the Enclave genocide long enough to make it East.
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I hope so, Deathclaws are one of the Fallout staples, I was sad there was no real way to save them in 2

Hmm, according to Wiki, apparently Fallout: Tactics had Deathclaw NPC's, but since 3 doesn't acknowledge that game's existence, who knows.
 
disappeared said:
Licensed 40's music? Awesome. There could be some really eerie scenarios with that.
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Totally. From my article, which I'm not going to link because I'm not feeling whoreish today:
A transistor radio is playing one of the game's 20 licensed songs from the 1940s, "Happy Times," by Bob Crosby, Bing's younger, less successful brother.
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There's stuff like this all over the game, too; little ironic nods to the 1940s, post-war culture. I don't know if this has been said, but you'll also be able to pick up radio frequencies on your PIP Boy bracelet when talking through the world (you'll hear songs, pick up clues to enemy locations, find quests).
 
Prime crotch said:
That would make the NMA guys assplode in outrage.
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Really? Wasn't there a mutant called Melchior that could summon deathclaws to fight for him? And I think Deathclaws have a decent lifespan...Xarn cameo anyone?

nicholasbrutal said:
Totally. From my article, which I'm not going to link because I'm not feeling whoreish today:


There's stuff like this all over the game, too; little ironic nods to the 1940s, post-war culture. I don't know if this has been said, but you'll also be able to pick up radio frequencies on your PIP Boy bracelet when talking through the world (you'll hear songs, pick up clues to enemy locations, find quests).
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By the way, did the Pipboy make an appearance on the bracelet? That red-haired elf guy.

EDIT: Here he is.

pipboy-700881.jpg
 
Jenga said:
Really? Wasn't there a mutant called Melchior that could summon deathclaws to fight for him? And I think Deathclaws have a decent lifespan...Xarn cameo anyone?
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Don't think so and the NMA guys also hated Fallout's 2 talking Deathclaw.
 
nicholasbrutal said:
Pipboy has been replaced (?) with Vault Boy. He's a smiley, blond dude in a blue vault suit.
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Don't think so, that Vault guy always appeared in the stats and perks screens and in tutorial like videos like in the intros.
 
Frenck said:
What was wrong about the Radiant AI?
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Not being worthy of the name "Artificial Intelligence", for starters, Radiant was Artificial Stupidity.
devilscallmedad said:
* Among other statistics, the demo's loading screens contained a mysterious metric of "corpses eaten." "We're not talking about that stuff," Executive Producer Todd Howard said when asked about the stat.
Click to expand...
mmmmmmmmmmmmm

Stupid stats? Me like.
 
Prime crotch said:
Don't think so and the NMA guys also hated Fallout's 2 talking Deathclaw.
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Yes, there was a mutant named Melchior who summoned Deathclaws to fight for him in the bottom of the military base.
 
Prime crotch said:
Don't think so, that Vault guy always appeared in the stats and perks screens and in tutorial like videos like in the intros.
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Right. I stand corrected ... sort of. He was referred to as Pipboy, previously. He's not called Vault Boy in Fallout 3.
 
I hope there's a decent weather system in the game. I'd love to be creeping around a town on a rainy night, and wander into a dimly-lit room with some some 40's crooner singing softly on a radio in the background. Atmosphere like that just kills me!
 
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