Eurogamer previews Fallout 3

[Bernard Bumner]

I could have lived with a KoTOR like real time system. You had to think fast, but cue commands seemed to work very well.

Oh well. I'll be picking up F3 on launch day regardless and I suppose I will know then.

The combat was fucking horrible in KOTOR. The worst of it being the Sabre combat - pretty much the only reason to play a Star Wars game. Did you ever feel as though there was any real connection between the actions you queued, and what eventually happened? In any situation with more than a handful of combatants, it is a completely frenetic cluster-fuck. It was (sometimes) pretty to watch, but it didn't amount to much more than picking the right weapon and clicking away.

I'm guessing that the experience of combat in Fallout 3 may have a very similar outcome, actually, given the mechanics. The FPS gameplay will be modified by stats, and VATS appears to have almost no tactical depth. Any individual combat is likely, therefore, to be either over very quickly via VATS, or else become confusing and frustrating because you don't have enough APs to utilize properly stat-based combat.

Still, KOTOR was sufficiently entertaining as a story and adequate enough in terms of choice for the Star Wars universe. However, if you were to reskin it as a Fallout game, then it would fall a long way short of the standards set by the first two games.