January 07, 2009

Fallout 3 impressions . . .

I decided to go ahead and start Fallout 3, even though I told myself that I wouldn't start until I was done with Prince of Persia. I just couldn't resist.

I can tell this is an RPG because I spent about 9 hours playing it on Sunday. 6 of those hours being non-stop. This always happens to me with RPGs. I get sucked into leveling my character, exploring, scavenging for items, and the next thing you know, hours have gone by. Seriously, last night I sat down to play at 8pm and just like that, it was 9:30pm. I felt like I had only played for 20 minutes.

The game itself is a lot of fun. The Wasteland looks great. The atmosphere is there, especially when stepping out of Vault 101 for the first time. The gameplay is very similar to Oblivion. There are obvious differences and improvements to the core gameplay, but there is no mistaking that this is a Bethesda game and it is running on the Oblivion engine. That might be my biggest problem with the game so far. It just feels too similar to Oblivion and it is not as new or fresh as I would like. If you never played Oblivion, this won't be a negative to you, but since I put in over 100 hours in that game (still need to beat it too!), this feels like a very similar experience.

I am also not the biggest fan of the Oblivion engine from a visual standpoint. Sure, it is managing a giant open world, keeping track of millions of objects and doing lots of computations, it has day and night cycles, complex A.I., realtime physics, great draw distance, and some vistas are gorgeous, but the final package just doesn't come together to "wow" me most of the time. Character animation is robotic, textures look iffy up close, and aside from the open Wasteland, indoor environments look pretty dull and boring. It is not an ugly game. Some might actually find it gorgeous. But for my taste, this engine doesn't really do it for me.

But graphics aren't everything, especially in an RPG. The story so far has been more intriguing to me than Oblivion. Maybe it is just more accessible than gateways to Hell opening up. You are simply searching for your father. The voice acting is much improved over Oblivion. Where it seemed that Oblivion had 5 voice actors in the entire game, Fallout 3 seems to have hundreds. You won't find every other character to sound the same.

Bottom line though, regardless if I complain that I don't like the engine, that there are no "wow" moments, that it feels too familiar, once I start playing I cannot stop and that is the greatest compliment a game can have.

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