Fallout 3 is not a first person shooter.
While my “interwebz” have been on hiatus for a week or so, I’ve been forced to give up my usual rotation of online games: Team Fortress 2, Warhammer Online, PoxNora, Wrath of the Lich King Beta – which has given me the opportunity to enjoy the irradiated wonder that is Fallout 3.
Enjoy it and, at times, revile it.
Bethesda has created a game that is a faithful adaptation of the game, a spiritual successor if you will of the Black Isle series. It’s been called an RPG FPS. I would argue that it is the former and not the latter. Here’s why.
First, an FPS considers several elements when creating a universe for believable combat – whether you are combating mutants or pesky North Korean soldiers. While post-nuclear Washington D.C. certainly delivers with a bleak, survivalist tone; but among the destroyed buildings use of cover is almost non-existent unless you duck into a doorway or behind a partially demolished wall. Most FPS games utilize cover and using the “Q” and “E” buttons on the PC you are able to lean from cover and shoot.
In Fallout 3, not so much.
Often enough you are forced to trade fire down a hallway with a mob, your eyes flitting from your health bar to the mobs to see who will win the fight. While this basically encapsulates most shooters, I can’t help but think it was a major oversight to combat to not include a better cover system.
The second problem I have is with the Vault Assisted Targeting System, or VATS. When activating VATS you essentially pause the game, select a section of the mob for concentrated punishment, and let fly depending on how many action points you have accumulated. Damage is done according to distance, weapon DPS, weapons proficiency – melee, heavy weapons, small arms and energy weapons – and the mobs armor.
The difference in combat with VATS and vanilla FPS combat is huge. Using action points, you can only fire so many times but with the law of averages, you will be almost guaranteed a hit – a hit in a specific area of the mob. Tag the mob in the leg and cripple it and it won’t be able to chase you as fast. Cripple and arm and its aim will be off. Plus – and this is important in a game where survival literally means how many bullets you have in a magazine – ammo conservation in VATS is far superior.
Third – and this has been driving me absolutely up a tree… I mean gnashing of teeth frustrated – is the fact that while I can see the irradiated wasteland as far as the eye can see, the game only rendered a mob when it is practically on top of you. “But Justin, you must be playing this on a Commodore 64! Lrn2upgradenubkkthx!” Not so much, actually. I have a high-end PC with dual-SLI graphics cards and can run Crysis at max setting just fine – yet mobs in Fallout 3 do not materialize until they are five to 10 yards away from me. Sure, they can shoot at me from much farther away, and I see this hail of bullets coming at me and I don’t even know where it’s coming from.
Overly harsh critique? Maybe. I would argue that Fallout 3 is an RPG first and a FPS second. But it seems to me lately that my experience with FPS games lately has been lacking. Even FarCry 2 – which was supposed to be a transcendent FPS experience – was lacking when it came to enemy AI, making the game slightly comical.
Fallout 3 is a great RPG, and I’ll recommend this game to anyone who asks. I just wish it was a better FPS.
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