It may have been ten years coming, but at long last Fallout 3 is on the shelves and, more importantly, on my computer. This was one of those rare, so-unlike-me launch day titles that I simply had to have. And was it worth it? Well, I’m a scant six hours of play into the game (and I am already considering re-rolling based on what I’ve learned about how the mechanics work and vary from the previous titles). But the simple fact that I’m sitting here at work, physically itching to go home and play like a Jet junkie desperate for a fix should tell you what you need to know.

Fallout 3 trades in the isometric sort-of-3d tile based system for the standard first/third person environment that virtually every game uses currently. And yes, Fallout 3 has a lot in common with Oblivion. Though I’d say it’s far more than just Mad Max meets Elder Scrolls. I’m sure there are some Fallout die hards out there that will curse the very inclusion of a three dimensional environment and a twitch-capable combat system. To be honest, the twitch portion leaves much to be desired, but in a lot of ways that feels intentional. The real combat takes place with the VATS system, which should feel instantly familiar to old school Fallout fans and is a vastly superior way to approach combat. So if you’re worried that Fallout 3 is just Doom with dialogue trees, don’t be. Combat is much deeper than that.

Specifically, combat is much tougher than that. Admittedly, I’m playing the thing on maximum difficulty because that’s just how I roll, but even sampling the game on an easier setting simply caused me to have to apply the same clever tactics fewer times in a row. Overall, I’d say the combat is still clever and tactical, just a bit more frantic. The one improvement I can see is that it doesn’t result in nearly as many no-win situations, which were my single greatest point of frustration in the previous titles.

But don’t take that to mean that the game is easy, or that it lacks serious consequences. Save states aside, dead still means dead in Fallout. And the Karma system is there in full force, judging your every action and choice. So far I’ve already run across at least one character that didn’t want to help me out because I was such a goodie-two-shoes, even with my wildly unchecked Charisma bearing down on his ever so plyable ears. The voice acting has been very good so far, and one thing that I do prefer over the previous titles is the fact that you are never taken out of the game’s perspective. Accessing the PipBoy is a matter of raising your wrist to the screen, and all conversations and dialogues take palce through your normal view. Granted, that’s a pretty common feature ten years removed from the last real installment of Fallout, but the disjointed loading and unloading of interface to talk to NPCs always bothered me a bit.

On the flip side, there are loads in the game. Essentially, there is an overworld, and within that overworld there are locations which load as separate areas (many of which have sublocations which are additional loads). The load time is fast, don’t get me wrong. It’s just a shame that it couldn’t have been done more seamlessly, especially in the case of the small, one or two room stores and buildings inside the already modest sized towns. For a game that’s all about immersion, I find it disjointing, though your mileage may vary.

Since we’re getting annoyances out of the way, I’ll just make a few remarks about the game’s engine and move on. Movement could be smoother in general. Though the isometric view is gone, I still feel on some level like the characters are navigating down extremely rigid tracks and paths. Usually it’s not noticable, but when it does come up it’s just about all you can notice. There are also reports of crashes and hang ups, which I pretty much expect with PC game launches at this point. I heavily suspect the game leaks memory, based on the degrading performance I experienced and the fact that I’m not alone. And for a lot of players, there are unusual sound issues (ambient noises completely drowning out combat, speech and music). But I started playing the game about two hours after it was even available, and I expect that most of these things are temporary bugs that won’t even affect 1% of players and will disappear for We The Beleaguered within the week.

I’d love to write more, but honestly I’ve only spent a few hours with the game and I don’t want to pass final judgment on the experience without even making it to the second town on the map. But I will say this. Anyone giving this game a “perfect” score needs to have their heads examined. Perfect means perfect, and Fallout 3 isn’t that. But anyone giving this game a score that doesn’t say, “You should buy this right now!” is also full of shit. This is a title that already wants to be amazing, and wants it bad. I’ll be back in a week or so to let you know whether it wants it badly enough.

Update: Ask and ye shall receive. Upon coming home last night, Fallout 3 patched itself (hurray for Steam). Whatever the patch was, it resolved my sound issues completely, and also improved my outdoor graphical performance. I don’t know if the patch actually did both of those things directly or if fixing my sound simply stopped the game from wonking out so the graphics engine wasn’t hanging up waiting. Either way, that’s less than a twenty-four hour turnaround on a widely reported problem – most MMO companies, who I expect to be perma-patchers, don’t resolve bugs that quickly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.