I bought Fallout 3 when it came out the other day. Duh. It’s fairly similar to Oblivion, which I was hoping for (I liked Oblivion. I have never played Fallout. So sue me.) and it’s… really good. I was planning on posting about my various role-playing adventures in the game, but no reliable method of screenshot capturing stopped this immediately. (I got it for a console, not PC. Again; so sue me.)
So, a quick review:
Firstly, the character creator is fairly less in-depth then I’d hoped. Most of the guys look the same unless you move the sliders to ridiculous extremes, and any given face looks just about the same no matter what race you give it: unless you design a face to be Asian, you can’t just move the slider to “Asian” and make it look as such. Also, no matter what, your character will always sport the same scowl; you can’t change anything about the mouth except for the size and color. Also, why is the number of options related to facial hair so much less than that of regular hair?
The tutorial, however, was alot better: none of Oblivion’s “I have seen your face in the stars” nonsense; it actually makes you feel for Vault 101’s characters. When you leave the vault, practically nothing compels you to go anywhere, so you can just follow your instincts. A few other changes from Oblivion exist, some good, some not. First, the positive (I apologize for the bullets, but this time you can bypass the lawsuits and bite me):
- Items are repaired by using other items of a like nature, not repair hammers; so if you’ve got, say, two half-damaged handguns, you can use parts from one to fully repair the other.
- Your Pip-boy 3000, which replaces Oblivion’s journal, is actually a computer, which helps to explain some of it’s more esoteric features.
- Items and ammo are few and far between, and you’ll likely need all of them on long treks, assuming you don’t just fast-travel everywhere.
- The date is actually displayed in standard earth units, which helps you make vague comments (September already? I hear it’s feral ghoul season)
Of course, some of the changes suck as well. Namely:
- Dialogue: It’s fairly obvious wihich ones will earn you positive and which will earn yyou negative karma (For example, “Fuck you”, which is a disturbingly reccuring option, tends to not make you very popular)
- Character creation: You get way fewer features this time around, as I’ve mentioned.
- The world: why is it that, to get anywhere in the south end of the map, you have to travel through miles of subway tunnels?
- Currency: Why am I so poor?
All in all, I like the game, even though it’s sucking up all of my free time and I’m far more popular in the game world than I am in reality. Plus, you can shoot a guy so hard, his head falls off. His head.
