Divide By Zero - a blog by Kamran Ayub

Well, it certainly is a month of rejoicing for gamers. Not only are there Fable 2 and Far Cry 2 to sink our teeth into, now we've got Bethesda's latest installment: Fallout 3. And let me tell you, this one's a doozy.

I've spent a good 4 or so hours on this game and I've only skimmed the surface, maybe not even the surface, the surface tension.

The first thing you realize when you start this game is that it is much more cinematic than previous Bethesda games. From the moment the classic retro music starts playing, you know that is will be an epic game. The tutorial sequence and introduction is beautifully crafted, very clever, and will stick with you, like how you can recite the intro dialog to Morrowind.

Unlike Oblivion, I would very much enjoy playing the introduction whenever I start a new character but there's no doubt that there will be a "Quick Play" mod to exit the vault faster.

Once you exit the vault, the whole scope of this game comes into focus. It's massive. To give you an idea, I played for 4 hours, I discovered 6 locations, and only one city (the first one, Megaton). About 2 and a half of those hours were spent doing one quest. It was awesome.

As with my previous posts, I will just go over some key areas that interested me, since I could write a lot about what I've played so far.

The Dialog

Remember when you played the Dark Brotherhood quests in Oblivion and realized that it was more fun than the main quest? A good chunk of that was due to the amazing dialog and writing. I'm glad to say that that's all of Fallout 3. The dialog and writing in this game are fantastic, engaging, and quirky. People have personality and I haven't run across the same voice yet. You can tell that Bethesda has tried their hardest to make Fallout 3 seem like a living, breathing world with different people and different personalities. Many, many lines of dialog were recorded in this game and depending on what you do, can be different each time you play.

Like previous Elder Scroll games, you can choose responses to dialog but this time, some choices are affected by your attributes or perks. Case in point, the Black Widow perk for women gives you special dialog choices when interacting with male characters. On the other side, the Lady Killer perk does the same for your male character.

Combat

You will realize almost right away that Fallout 3 is not your typical FPS. It is a step above Oblivion's ranged combat, so real-time shooting is definitely a plausible line of attack. However, I would say that the VATS system is infinitely more helpful during combat. VATS is the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. It lets you pause the game and target different enemy's body parts, using up Action Points in the process. Using up your AP will render VATS unusable until you wait a little while in real-time to regenerate your AP.

Whenever you use VATS, the game will choose a slow-motion cinematic camera angle to show off your skills. This makes for some awesome combat scenes, especially when you shoot off someone's head.

While in VATS, the game shows your percentage chance of hitting the different body parts. For those of us who thrive on leveling up our characters, this pleases the innate statistician in us. For other players, real-time combat can be just as fun and I use it all the time to snipe people with my rifle. Sometimes, though, VATS is useful when you're running low on ammo and need to act strategically. This brings me to another point…

Conserve your ammo in this game. Unless you are actively raiding out in the Wasteland, you will easily start running low on ammo. As with Oblivion, the easiest and cheapest way to stock up is to go adventuring. Guns will give in to disrepair quickly and you have to find other guns of the same type to repair them. I suggest putting a lot of points into your Repair skill, it will save you some precious caps. Each gun uses different ammo and there are lots of different types of guns. Small Guns, Big Guns, Energy Weapons, Melee, and Explosives are the different weapon types you'll encounter.

I only am starting out, so I've mostly been buying ammo from traders and store owners. I am praying that it will be easier to get ammo when I start adventuring.

Stealth, Stealing, and Hacking

Stealth is finally super-useful in this game! As with Oblivion, you will do critical hits when sneaking. The game will also warn you when an enemy is close to detecting you. Backstabbing someone is possible now and sneaking overall just seems more solid than in Oblivion.

Computer terminals are useful devices to unlock doors, gain quest secrets, and overall learning more about the world. Your Science skill helps your hacking. To hack a computer, you choose phrases or letters on the screen to guess a password. The game tells you how many characters in the string are correct, to help you narrow down the results. I've only been able to access Very Easy and Easy terminals, so the passwords aren't very long. You get 4 attempts and if you don't get it by the last attempt, you'll be locked out. The game is nice though and you can restart the mini-game anytime by accessing the computer again, but the phrases will be different.

Lockpicking is the classic bobby pin picking and stealing in the game is much, much better than Oblivion. You are free to sell anything you steal to anyone and if you're not seen, no one will know, just as it should be. Pick-pocketing is also fun, as long as you're careful. You know this game is amazing when you can put a live grenade in someone's shirt. KABOOM!

Atmosphere

Fallout 3 is all about atmosphere. The Capital Wasteland is a joy to explore and the post-apocalyptic landscape is ripe with fruit to pick. Cities, characters, locations, and enemies look like they belong. The feeling of starvation, of anxiety, of helplessness is palpable. Oblivion was basically cities and caves with trees in between. Fallout 3 actually feels like a cohesive world, where different places look different. You will remember landmarks and there's always stuff to find in nooks and crannies. And there are a lot of nooks and crannies. Detail is attended to here, even more than Morrowind I would say. Generous gifts are there for you to find if you know where to look.

Everything Else

I haven't even got to talk about the quests or other small details this game has to offer. The crazy, backwards physics in Oblivion are fixed here, things fall at the right speed. The character models look generally better overall, animations are still not Bethesda's specialty but nothing to rant about, and sound is used very well and has a very minimalistic philosophy in the game. The music is fantastic and really adds to the game. Making moral choices is fundamentally different than other games, sometimes it can be hard to be pure evil since people actually feel like they matter.

I have the PC version of the game and I can't complain about performance. It performs better than Oblivion, and I even have anti-aliasing enabled. Smooth framerates, minimal loading stutter, I am very happy with the optimizations. The graphics aren't Crysis but they are beautiful and dark, easily fitting for the atmosphere. You can see to the horizon, I have yet to see any fake distant landscapes/mountains that you can never reach. Everywhere you see, you can go.

Later in the month, I will be sure to record more of my thoughts about this game, as well as the mandatory One Sentence Review.