Kotaku takes a second look at Fallout 3:<blockquote>Graphically, i found the settings, the attention to detail, more captivating then the characters. The characters were pure Oblivion with the occasional slightly off-kilter lip-syncing. But the game does so much to make you forget about that, that I hardly think it will be an issue.
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Instead of letting you run up to any computer and use your hacking skills to do stuff, like sic evil Robby the Robot guards on mutants (which sound a lot like the guy who played the giant cockroach in the original Men in Black), Fallout 3 makes you prove your hacker skills each and every time. To hack a computer you need to log on and then find the password in the computer's files. The higher your skills the easier this is to do. So, for instance, in one example the computer brought up a bunch of garble. Mixed into the garble were ten or so words. You had three attempts to guess which was the password. If you got it wrong it told you how many of the letters in the word you guessed were the correct letters in the correct position. It didn't take much to figure out the early ones, but as the game progresses the passwords become mammoth I'm told.
While I loved the aesthetic and feel of the game, it was the VAT, or VaultTech Assisted Targeting, that really did it for me. You can play through the game's combat as if it was a shooter or you can take a more tactical and probably practical approach and use the VAT. VAT freezes time and lets you expend action points to aim at specific points, from a body part to a weapon. The VAT shows your percent chance of hitting a target and can even show much much damage a weapon can take. Land a shot or two to a leg and your opponent starts limping, land a shot to an arm and they may drop their weapon. The neatest thing is, it does all this and still makes you feel as if you're playing a shooter. There's no moment where you really feel like you've dropped out of the intensity of the moment.
Fallout 3 feels like Oblivion for the rest of us, a game for people who are getting a bit tired of the same old fantasy fare. But it's not just Oblivion apocalypse either, there seemed to be enough different about the game, least of which is the pacing, to separate it from its predecessor. </blockquote>Link: Fallout 3 E3 at Kotaku.
Thanks Briosafreak.
(...)
Instead of letting you run up to any computer and use your hacking skills to do stuff, like sic evil Robby the Robot guards on mutants (which sound a lot like the guy who played the giant cockroach in the original Men in Black), Fallout 3 makes you prove your hacker skills each and every time. To hack a computer you need to log on and then find the password in the computer's files. The higher your skills the easier this is to do. So, for instance, in one example the computer brought up a bunch of garble. Mixed into the garble were ten or so words. You had three attempts to guess which was the password. If you got it wrong it told you how many of the letters in the word you guessed were the correct letters in the correct position. It didn't take much to figure out the early ones, but as the game progresses the passwords become mammoth I'm told.
While I loved the aesthetic and feel of the game, it was the VAT, or VaultTech Assisted Targeting, that really did it for me. You can play through the game's combat as if it was a shooter or you can take a more tactical and probably practical approach and use the VAT. VAT freezes time and lets you expend action points to aim at specific points, from a body part to a weapon. The VAT shows your percent chance of hitting a target and can even show much much damage a weapon can take. Land a shot or two to a leg and your opponent starts limping, land a shot to an arm and they may drop their weapon. The neatest thing is, it does all this and still makes you feel as if you're playing a shooter. There's no moment where you really feel like you've dropped out of the intensity of the moment.
Fallout 3 feels like Oblivion for the rest of us, a game for people who are getting a bit tired of the same old fantasy fare. But it's not just Oblivion apocalypse either, there seemed to be enough different about the game, least of which is the pacing, to separate it from its predecessor. </blockquote>Link: Fallout 3 E3 at Kotaku.
Thanks Briosafreak.
