t was with cynical optimism that we
approached this presentation. After reading
the words “never before seen footage” on our
invitation, it was pretty much impossible to take
any other attitude. It was with cynical cynicism
that we scrawled away in a notepad as the
words “I’ve been doing this demo before”
escaped the lips of Pete Hines, Fallout 3’s
Product Manager. Apparently, he managed to
shoot a grenade out of the sky last time.
This gunfire, of course, had nothing to do
with amazing twitch reflexes, but was instead
made possible through the in-game use of
V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System),
a throw-back to the original games that allows
precision targeting through the pausing of
time. It’s fair to say that the presentation of
the system is pretty tidy, with multiple camera
systems to display the slow-motion playback
of your choices ensuring that exploding heads
are still shown from all manner of elaborate
perspectives, even if you don’t get to witness
a grenade getting shot out of the sky. It works
fairly simply – points build up over time and
when you have enough they can be spent
by precision-targeting a part of an enemy or
enemies (with relevant dice-roll percentage
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chances of success based on distance and
clarity) and then unleashing the wrath of your
equipped weapon upon them. The targeting
can be activated at any point to allow players to
get a grip with and forward-plan their situation,
but action points will have to be replenished if
commands are to be entered. As for the rest
of the combat system? It plays out much like a
typical FPS.
DOG EAT DOG
While there’s no doubt that some purists of
Fallout 1 and 2 will be impossible to please, it’s
obvious that Bethesda are fans themselves,
and V.A.T.S. does a lot to keep the essence
of the franchise intact while making sufficient
new ground to be relevant to today’s gaming
landscape (a landscape, it seems, that feels
very reminiscent of Oblivion). Fortunately, other
aspects of the Fallout universe can be carried
over into today’s technology more easily, and
through re-interpretation can be somewhat
timeless. As Pete Hines himself pointed out,
while fans of the series will get a kick out of
again having a canine companion called Dog
Meat, the name still remains amusing enough
on its own to entertain newcomers without the
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Oh Noes! Banned!
This article was written well before the recent events that saw Fallout 3 get refused
classification by the OFLC. While it is a fairly dire situation, particularly for fans of
the series, we’re still very excited about the game and, in the end, are confident that
gamers will be able to get their hands on Fallout 3, one way or another.
Whether you are content to wait and see if a toned-down version is as good as
what was originally put to the board is another matter, but you can be confident that
we will continue to cover the situation of video game classifications, or lack thereof,
in this country.
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