Fallout 3 Preview Overload, Part Three

The massive dose of Fallout 3 previews continues, as more websites offer up impressions of what they saw at the press event Bethesda hosted last month. The first is at GameSpy:

Howard prefaced the demonstration by showing the amount of research and preproduction that went into Fallout 3, noting that Fallout was their target for tone and feel. He went on to comment, “Fallout 2 is also great, but it was a little too nod-nod-wink-wink in its jokes. Too many pop culture references, too much breaking of the fourth wall. The ‘go ahead and kill me, I’ll just reload and kill you’ type of thing was a bit too far, and we prefer Fallout’s still-funny, but toned-down humor in comparison.” He also elaborated that Fallout 3 takes place thirty years after Fallout 2, but features a new protagonist in a new setting (Vault 101, a Vault underneath the ruins of Washington D.C.). He quickly added, “For our purposes, neither Fallout Tactics nor Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel happened.”

The second is at Joystiq:

Graphically, the engine has come a long way since even the relatively recent Oblivion, with post-apocalyptic environments that show incredible wear and tear. The ever-present rubble is especially impressive and players can always create more through a system called “parallax occlusion mapping” which lets practically every surface be potentially filled with bullet holes or warped by explosions. “Destruction is the new trees,” Howard quipped during the demo, referencing Oblivion’s use of SpeedTree.

And the third is at Critical Hits:

The combat has been a hot bed of questioning lately, and from what we saw it is a complicated thing to convey properly. The game is in real time, not turn based, and enemies will move and act in real time when you fight them. The key is when you activate the VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) button that it becomes interesting: the game pauses entirely as your view zooms into an enemy and you see the parts of their body highlighted with different percentages. While the game is paused the player assigns actions to be taken using their given number of Action Points. i.e. shoot them in the head 3 times) Once this has been done, the system is deactivated and the assigned actions play out in a matter of seconds in what is really a seamless mini-cinematic. And if the player has succeeded the mutant’s head explodes in glorious 3D with guts and eyeballs flying all over the place. It is vague at this point about how fast action points refresh and therefore how often this can be done, but in the demo Todd was using this system repeatedly in each combat over and over again. It seems that when used in the game, it really borders on becoming a turn-based game where things simply happen in real time between player turns which really just means the turns are more fluid. We will have to wait and see exactly how this turns out.