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Fallout 3 - News Roundup

by Dhruin, 2008-10-02 01:36:54

Looks like there's a PR assault before the release of Fallout 3 at the end of the month, so I'll collect a few things here.

GameSpot has a rather early "post-mortem" video with Pete Hines saying they are in the "last stages" with things like (console) certification and manufacturing under way.  He goes on to talk about the game being larger than first anticipated, post game support with hints at DLC "modules".

GameSpot also has an early stages in-character preview titled Diary of a Wasteland Survivor:

Dear Diary,

Somewhere between being attacked by giant rats and making awkward small talk with a trio of passive-aggressive radiation zombies, I began to regret my decision to leave the vault the other day. After all, that cooped-up atomic-bomb shelter was the only home I'd ever known. But when my father mysteriously went missing, I knew I had to put my life of watching I Love Lucy reruns and eating canned beans on hold for a while.

MTV Multiplayer discusses DLC and the lack of it for the PS3 with Pete, saying the 100 hours of gameplay out of the box won't leave players "short changed" if they don't get any DLC.  Apparently Oblivion DLC is still doing very well:

“No, because of how many folks are still buying ‘Oblivion’ stuff today,” said Hines. “The number of people who bought ‘Oblivion’ content yesterday is just ludicrous. It’s [the] end of September 2008 — that game came out two and a half years ago and people are still buying it by the thousands, ten of thousands. It’s not just one day; it’s every single day for the last two and a half years.

How Fallout 3 is Different Than Oblivion is a piece at Kotaku that states the obvious:

I never played the first two Fallouts and have very little sentimental attachment to Pip-boy, Vault 101, or Dogmeat. When early impressions of Fallout 3 labeled the game as “Oblivion with guns,” I thought: sign me up. But many diehard fans and purists don’t want that. They want an experience that’s true to the spirit of the original Fallout, a game that builds on the innovations and atmosphere that evolved in Fallout 2.

After being filled in by Manfriend, I was able to take a look at Fallout 3 and judge for myself if it has more in common with Oblivion than it does with Fallout. And after three hours with the game, I’ve decided… it’s 50-50.

It's a quality piece with great quotes like "I’m glad they decided to make combat real time, because nothing screams “I’m afraid of evolving” like turn-based fights".

On to Joystiq with Four Hours in the Wasteland:

One of the combat highlights from our play session was using the V.A.T.S.' ability to pinpoint-target specific body parts to shoot the pistol out of a Raider's hand, then watching him try to run for cover as we capped him in the legs. (Ouch.)

Four Hours in the Wasteland is also the title of GameSpy's piece, which has two editors giving their views.  On quests:

Miguel: I'm hesitant to reduce them to the sorts of courier runs, fetch quests, and hunting forays that have come to pervade MMOs, but I'm afraid that they're going to sound similarly prosaic if I give you a blow-by-blow description. At their best, the quests I played directed you toward sites where interesting things were going on. One started out as a "fed ex" quest from Megaton to a remote settlement built on a ruined overpass overlooking the Potomac. When I got there, I found that the settlers were under siege by a group of vampire people. My arrival triggered a far more interesting task: to go find their lair and slaughter them. I had three choices of locale. Behind door number one, an abandoned drive-in theater, were a pair of super mutants. Too bad that our play time ended while I was en route to the derelict metro station where I suspect they were hiding.

I may be wrong, but I'm inferring from what I've played that Fallout 3's world is designed around sites like these. In some cases, you'll be directed to them by quests. In others, you may just stumble on them in the middle of something else entirely. So long as players are not encouraged to bypass any potentially interesting scenarios simply because they're not on a quest to engage them -- a common problem in MMOs, once players learn that nearly every monster has a kill-quest associated with it -- then this could lend itself to some interesting meanderings in Fallout 3's world.

Information about

Fallout 3

SP/MP: Single-player
Setting: Post-Apoc
Genre: Shooter-RPG
Platform: PC
Release: Released


Details