I have played about 10 - 15 hours of Fallout 3 over the last week. Don’t ask me where I got it already, you should know the answer to that question.
Source:http://savedbyatowel.com/2008/10/24/fallout-3-oblivion-re-dux/Now, I haven’t played the game nearly enough to even begin to give a full-fledged review (I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of the single-player plot), but I wanted to spend some time and comment on something that I think hasn’t gotten nearly enough traction on other gaming sites: just how similar Fallout 3 and Oblivion feel.
You should know, going into this, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years, that Fallout 3 is being produced by Bethesda, a company famous for their Elder Scrolls series, and more recently their smash hit Oblivion. They took on the Fallout 3 project a few years ago, and basically decided to re-use most of the Oblivion engine. And, to me, it shows.
The graphics are great, and the atmosphere is rather fantastic for a Fallout game. You really do feel like you’re wandering around a post-apocalyptic world, where everything is destroyed and even the smallest nooks and crannies are tainted by the nuclear fallout of a world gone haywire. The sound is fantastic, with mixes of orchestral moods and old-era music wafting from broken-down radios. And the plot and characters are very well developed.
I should also make special mention of the character system here, with the feats and other old-school Fallout mechanics. It really does take a page from the old games, and the feats are both interesting and useful. The introduction to begin your character’s journey is also quite well done, starting from when you are an infant, and going all the way until your teenage years, before you begin your journey outside your Vault.
But that’s where the uniqueness ends, and even the uniqueness that is there is constantly tainted for anyone who has played Oblivion for any long stretch of time. Running around the landscape is just the same, it just looks different. The creatures you encounter are the same, they just have different skins on them. The combat system is exactly the same, only you can use action points to pause the action and go into slow-motion combat every once in a while, which is a cool effect, but is in essence just a gimmick. The dialogue system is the same, with a few modifications, like replacing the mini-game that was present in Oblivion with a chance system based on your character’s skills and feats.
To give you a more concrete example, let me compare some of the gameplay from both games. In Oblivion, I played a character who had high sneak and lockpicking abilities — I was a thief. There is literally no difference between what I did in Oblivion as a thief and what I do in Fallout 3. I wait until nightfall. I lockpick the door of someone’s house who’s asleep (and, I should point out, the lockpicking system has been changed, but it’s really nothing more than a cosmetic difference). I crouch to sneak. The game shows me if I’m stealthed. I sneak through the house, rifle through all of their stuff while they’re asleep, and then I take what’s valuable and exit the door. I can’t describe to you how doing all of those things was EXACTLY like playing Oblivion. Sure, I was in an old shack in a post-apocalyptic wasteland instead of a house in a medieval city, but it all just feels so gorram similar. In essence, you spend a good half of your time wandering around with a feeling of deja vu that just won’t go away.
Is that a bad thing? I can’t really decide. On the one hand, the Oblivion engine is fantastic, and why mess with something so great? The goal should be to tell a new story, not necessarily redo every little gameplay mechanic for every new game. On the other hand, at times Fallout 3 feels like nothing more than a glorified “mod” for Oblivion that happened to have a lot of high-quality folks working on it. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what it is.
I think, at the very least, it could have been offered at less than the $60 price for a full-fledged “new” game, since they basically just had to make a lot of new content, and that’s about it. But we’ll just have to wait and see what the average gamer thinks of the whole situation.
