Ways in which Fallout 3 will be an improvement
In light of the large amount of feedback from our first Fallout 3 related post, I think it is a good idea if we do another one. This will also give me a chance to respond to those who charged I was being overly negative.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that Fallout 3 has great potential, and I don’t think any of the things mentioned in my previous post are going to be major concerns once we are actually playing the game. Also, I am not one of the Fallout 1 & 2 diehards who think that any change in the formula of the originals or any influence from other games (especially Oblivion) is a bad thing.
In fact, I quite liked Oblivion, and played it quite extensively. It did, however, have some flaws that ultimately limited the long term replay value of the game. So, my hope for Fallout 3 is that it marries the best aspects of the previous Fallout games and The Elder Scrolls series, and avoids the worst.
It is tempting at this point to go into a long list of things that might go wrong with Fallout 3 as a result of the Bethesda influence. Instead, however, I will instead point out some things that I think will go right.
- Free form exploration - While Fallout 2 allowed you great freedom on the world map, once you were actually in an area there was usually not that much choice. While towns offered a variety of places to go, most other forms of maps were actually fairly linear. Fallout 3 should solve this problem. While obviously once you get into a specific dungeon things will likely still be quite linear, there will be no separate “world map” that completely separates the linear segments from the free form exploration.
- Better explosions / violence - This one is obvious. Fallout 3 will nearly certainly feature just as much over-the-top, hilarious violence as its predecessors. This will of course be made all the better by the much higher quality of the graphics.
- Faster Combat - Fallout 3’s option to switch between essentially real time and a pseudo turn based combat system has garnered its share of flak from the community. However, I suspect that this will actually be a good feature, as it will minimize the time taken by boring, easy combats. In Fallout 1 and 2, fighting even the lowliest of rats was guaranteed to take at bare minimum a few seconds. In Fallout 3, you should be able to deal with just a quick point and click with the mouse.
- Secondary Characters - In Fallout 2, there came a point in the game where, no matter how hard you tried, it was simply impossible to keep the dog alive any longer. When every enemy is a Super Mutant with a minigun or rocket launcher, the dog would just be ripped to shreds on the very first turn of every combat. I am quite confident that Bethesda will remedy this and other similar situations. They want their game to be fun, and they will not force players into essentially unwinnable situations.
Ultimately, I think it is overly nostalgic of gamers to think that Bethesda can’t produce a Fallout as good as the originals. While they were great games in their own ways, they were not without flaws. If Bethesda follows the old formula reasonably closely and also fixes some of the problems, Fallout 3 will turn out to be another classic.
