Where the Daedra At?: A n00b’s Review of Fallout 3

The game that first turned me into a rabid Elder Scrolls fan, Morrowind, was criticized for being too open and not directing the player in an effective manner. This resulted in players wandering about the forests of Vardenfell for hours on end before they finally stumbled into a village and found a quest. Well, it almost feels like Fallout 3 invokes that same kind of feeling at the start, but it’s completely intentional.

You are given a single waypoint to reach the first stop on the main quest, but you are never properly told how to read waypoints on your compass. This left me wandering around the wastes for about twenty minutes before I finally started in the right direction. In Morrwind, this kind of wandering was a pain in the ass because all you’d find were mudcrabs and bland, repetitive trees. But in Fallout 3, despite the atmosphere of a barren wasteland, you will stumble across all manner of exciting side quests, explorable areas and colorful characters—both aggressive and friendly—very quickly, no matter which direction you wander in.

Something else I noticed about Fallout 3 is that so many characters have their own unique stories. While there are a couple generic settlers that wander about occasionally, they are in the minority. Whenever you reach a settlement, you could spend hours just chatting with the locals and listening to the gossip. In a world as detailed and well-written as Fallout 3’s, this kind of interaction turns out to be surprisingly entertaining.

Also, Washington, DC is a beautiful setting for this game since it is riddled with iconic structures, not to mention the inherent unease that comes, as an American gamer, from seeing so many patriotic symbols in ruins. Although, I have to admit that I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony, since this game came out a week before the 2008 presidential election.

'I've said jiminy jillickers so many times, the words have lost all meaning!'

A lot of people were worried when Bethesda announced Fallout 3, saying that it would play like a rehash of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but with guns. Well, I can assure everyone that Bethesda made some massive improvements to their combat system to ensure Fallout 3 didn’t feel entirely like a post-apocalyptic Oblivion. Although, to be fair, you can draw a lot of similarities in the core design philosophy of these two games. In Oblivion, if you used a ranged weapon, you had to try and lead the target and hope for the best while melee combat was well-polished and visceral.

Well, melee takes a back seat in Fallout 3 and it plays more like a first-person shooter than any other RPG I’ve played in my life. Damage is dependent on what part of the body is hit and the controls are smooth. The inclusion of the combat-pausing V.A.T.S. system also allows players to slow the otherwise fast-paced motion and execute clean, precise shots. This control system could use a little tuning with the slow-motion camera and the action queue, but overall it is accessible to both FPS and RPG enthusiasts. And there is something so remarkably endearing about popping a super mutant’s head into a bloody cloud as their rag doll corpse pirouettes through the air gracefully in slow motion.

Continued on page 3.

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