About a week ago I acquired a copy of Fallout 3। I was little worried to jump into Fallout after spending over 100 hours of Oblivion and buying and beating the Shivering Isles expansion. Fallout looked as if it was drifting to far for comfort from Oblivion. I just wanted an Oblivion sequel. Drastic changes in combat from mostly melee to ranged gun fights just seemed not as fun. The new V.A.T.S. system was a little odd as well. VATS lets the player pause the game during combat and pick which part of the body that they would like to hit. The system also gives the player the percentage that they will hit the desired body part. The setting of Fallout is completely different from Oblivion, going from a beautiful old English setting to a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Just to be clear my impressions are based on being a level 10 and an estimated 30 hours.
There are substantial differences between Fallout and Oblivion. Some changes are good and some are not. There is a significant graphical upgrade over Oblivion. The resolution is higher and characters and environments have more pixels. A major gripe of Fallout is that there are invisible walls are everywhere. The map will tell you to go to point A to point B. On Oblivion you usually could get there without any real obstacles. On Fallout many things get in the way of getting to your destination. The most common barriers are rubble. Rubble makes up such a large percentage of the world. It becomes pretty frustrating. Another issue that I have comes as both a pro and a con, which is the environment. Oblivion was beautiful and had a wide variety of environments. Environments ranged from snowy slopes to swamps. Fallout is pretty much all destruction and destroyed cities. Most of the world of Fallout looks the same. There is not much variety. The world looks like it is about half of the size of Oblivion. However, Fallout does a great job of immersion. Fallout keeps the player asking questions as to what happened to this world. I have noticed only a few different character types in Fallout. Most common enemies are the Supermutants, Ghouls, Raiders and large insects. Most of my encounters are either Supermutants or Raiders. Oblivion had a unique ranking system that introduced new enemies as the player progressed. Oblivions ranking system was liked by some and hated by others. With Fallout all of the enemies are available immediately when you start the game. No part of the world of Fallout is blocked off at all. It would be wise for the player to visit certain parts of the map that are safe for his rank. Fallout started extremely difficult for me based on this new all enemies are available from the beginning system. It took a while to understand that Fallout is a world of low resources and is a lot more dangerous then Oblivion. The new dangerous setting is actually one of the strengths of Fallout. Resource management can be fun if it is presented correctly like Fallout.
Quest are a little harder to come by on Fallout। I currently have about 4 available vs. the 13 plus that were almost always available on Oblivion. I’m not sure if they want to guide the player more towards a specific goal while still giving a lot of freedom. It may have something to do with the huge decline in NPCs. Oblivion had at least 50 percent more NPCs then Oblivion. The common complaint was that Oblivions NPCs were repetitive in their conversational dialogue amongst each other. To Fallouts credit the NPCs seem a little more like individuals verses being carbon copies of each other. Fallout has also taken on more of a mature approach. You will hear a lot more profanity. Profanity is often available in the dialogue trees as well. The new ways of killing opponents offer blown off limbs and exploding heads. The more mature approach is not bad. I like blowing limbs off. However, the new gory style is becoming a little cliché. Call of Duty World at War, Gears and even Brothers and Arms are popular gory games.
Closing Comments –
I guess it’s too early to tell if I will put in as much time into Fallout as I did with Oblivion. I must admit that it is very interesting and also very entertaining. Since I'm currently a Ps3 owner only I feel shafted. The Ps3 version is reported to play worse. I think that the game is beautiful, even with all its rubble. Ps3 is also getting screwed on the DLC. I’m not sure that the DLC is a big issue. Early signs seem like Fallout won’t get as much attention as Oblivion. I am sure that it will get tons of my time. Oblivion got at least eight months out of me. I never played a game with so much value until Bethesda introduced Oblivion to me. Oblivion just seemed like it had longer legs with the different environments and abundance of quests.
If this was an official review I would give Fallout a 9.4.
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