Fallout 3 Hands-On Preview

Here's how we're dealing with nuclear doom.

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By Alex Wollenschlaeger, September 16, 2008

My 30-or-so minutes with Fallout 3, Bethesda's new RPG for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, felt a lot like if I were given a chance to watch the opening scene of the year's hottest movie before being thrown out the theatre. It wasn't nearly enough time to truly get comfortable in the game world. I didn't earn many weapons or meet many people. I didn't kill a lot of enemies and the less said about my advancement in the skill categories the better. But the experience left me excited for what's to come and ravenous for more.

A few months ago I got to spend an hour with the always-affable Pete Hines as he took me through a few sections of the game. I came away duly impressed, but it wasn't until Bethesda sat me down with the game that I really got excited about it.

My experience of the Fallout franchise is limited to a few hours recently spent with the 1997 original on a beat-up old laptop. Despite the technical limitations of my hardware setup, I quickly caught on why this game had managed to build up such a vocal following over the past decade. There's an authenticity to the game world that immediately transports you to another place and time. Within mere minutes I had the same feeling from Fallout 3.

The demo was set during one of the early scenes in the game. Skipping the pre-teen and teenaged sections where your skills are defined and relationships are established, the demo started with my character in a crisp blue one-piece uniform venturing out from Vault 101 in search of his father, in a mission titled Following In His Footsteps.

What struck me first about Fallout 3 is how depressingly real the world seems. The crumpled highway that crisscrosses your immediate terrain, the delapidated buildings and the all-too-depressing landscape of rocks and boulders ring true with my own imagined post-apocalyptic world. The feelings of desertion and desperation are amplified by an ambient soundtrack that resonates with the visuals.

My first destination was the ramshackle town of Megaton, a reconstructed burg where desperate people live clustered around an unexploded device that gives the settlement its name. On my way to Megaton I came across an old man on the side of the road. He was begging for water, which I had in my inventory. I offered the old man, Nick, some water and felt a warm feeling course through me as he thanked me and chugged it down. I then shot him in the face, seeing his head explode, earning me bad karma in the process. But that was about it for negative repurcussions. In areas outside of the cities where the law is enforced, it seems that anything goes. The only barriers are those erected by your morality - or the morality you've chosen to live by in the game.

Enterting Megaton, I ran into Sheriff Lucas Simms, a burly no-nonsense lawman. He interrogated me about my intentions and I was able to question him, finding out about the town, its people and more about my current mission. I also picked up another one, named Power of the Atom, which tasked me with defusing the explosive at the physical heart of the town. Switching to this mission in my PIP-Boy 3000 allowed me to set a new target destination in my map. Just like in the earlier games, you'll only be able to set waypoints to places you've already visited, so exploration is something you're going to have to do, whether you like it or not.

Following my map further into the town and the live bomb at its centre, I ran into Confessor Cromwell, a madman who built a religious movement called the Church of Atom around the unexploded device. It was also there that I ran into my first skill limitation. As you advance in the game you earn new levels, giving you the opportunity to invest in new skills. Several missions will require you to be suitably advanced in your skills. In Power of the Atom, it was Explosives that demanded attention, and with my numbers lacking, I was forced to leave this particular one until I was better prepared.

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