Fallout 3 - A Few Hours In

After playing Fallout 3 for a bit when I received it, I then had to put it aside to get my work done, and didn’t get a chance to play any games at all until recently. So it’s pretty obvious that I would have picked up Fallout 3 again once I had some gaming time. I’m going talk about my gaming experience, so if you haven’t played the game and want to stay away from spoilers early on in the game, then you may not want to read the rest of this article.

When I first started playing the game, I wasn't really sure what kind of character to create, so I just spread as many stats out over the attributes I thought would be the most useful. From experience of the first two Fallout games, those attributes to me were Speech, Barter, Small Guns, Repair and Medicine.

The speech attribute is very useful, since it allows you to often deal with situations by just talking your way through with special options that appear. This can often avoid lengthy alternatives, such as fighting them. Quite often it's best to avoid fighting since when you're out in the Wasteland, you'll want to keep your ammo for the random encounters.

The barter attribute is useful since it gives you better prices for buying and selling. And seeing that you pick up a lot of junk from pretty much everywhere in the world, you might as well sell them for a high price. This gives you extra bottle caps (the currency in the game, I can't imagine credit cards being accepted in a post-nuclear world). I often use this to replenish my ammo, since at times you'll be killing creatures who give no ammo.

There is a simple logic to having a high level in small guns. Early on in the game, you won't have anything but small guns. And even later on, you will find that you will generally have enough ammo and can still get away with using small guns. So with this in mind, and with experience from the previous Fallout games, I decided to put some points in this attribute. Later on I plan to put more into energy weapons however (hopefully this Fallout will play out like the previous ones too!)

The repair skill is very useful. Each of your weapons and armour has a condition attribute. The more you use it, it will generally make the condition worse. A high repair skill allows you to repair your stuff. The way this works however, is you will have to have two of the items you want to repair, and you then merge the two items, resulting in one improved item. An item with a better condition is generally more effective.

So, with my character pretty much set (the perks I chose were relating to the attributes that I was levelling up), I now wanted to properly get into the game. The beginning of the game is very innovative. Rather than just have you type your name in, and pick your attributes and perks and so on, all of this has been put into context. So right at the beginning, you're a newborn baby, just coming out from your mother's womb. At this point, you choose your gender, name, and also your appearance. Now, you get away by doing this since within the game, there is a projection tool that shows how you will look x number of years later. So you configure your looks within this tool.

The normal character stats, such as agility, endurance, intelligence, charisma, etc. are selected when you are a toddler. You go over to your box full of toys and have a book there too. Each page of this book explains the stats and you then select points to go into those stats. Very easy and simple.

During all of this, you get a feel for moving around in the game, looking around, interacting with objects and just generally getting used to the controls.

The next few stages of the game set things up quite nicely. Your dad unexpectedly leaves the vault, leaving you in danger since the Overseer (the person in charge of the Vault with absolute power) has gone a bit crazy, and ordered guards to kill your dad's co-worker, and is practically after you too. This forces you to leave the Vault, and wander into the Wasteland...

I'll leave this first editorial/article piece at this point. The Wasteland is so vast that I'll need another article to talk about everything I want to! I hope this gave you a good insight into the beginning of the game.