First Thirty: Fallout 3

By Joe Haygood | October 28, 2008

So Bethesda was nice enough to send over a 360 copy of Fallout 3, and while I waited for the midnight launch of Fallout 3, I decided to pop it in and start playing it.  This is the first thirty minutes of that playthrough.

First off, instant fanboy service is granted with Ron Perlman dropping his famous line, “War.  War never changes.”  It is a fitting start to a game that was 10 years in the making.  From the intro, we are delved into one of the strangest openings to a game ever.  You start off, blurry eyed and spattered with blood as you exit your mother’s uterus.  Ewww!  Yes, you start from child birth, setting up your sex and name.  You also set up your look, through a process called genetic prediction.

From there we move forward one year, and we are just learning to walk.  After good old dad gives you a pep talk, he leaves you by yourself while he goes to work.  Someone needs to work on parenting skills in the Vault.  This stage has you picking your beginning stats and traits.  Very cool stuff.  You continue to go forward, with each age step giving you new items like a PipBoy or your skills.  It is very in-depth, and to be honest, took up almost all of my first thirty minutes.  The last thing I got to before I shut down the game for the evening was an initial walk about the outside area near the Vault.  This initial walk out of the Vault immediately gives you a scope about the size of the world.

The VATS combat system is my preferred method of combat, and I never seemed to run out of enough action points where I could not use them anymore.  I stuck with the first person view, as I found the third person view kind of awkward.  It looks like you are floating on the ground, instead of walking in the world.

So just figure that your first thirty minutes of the game is spent just getting out of the Vault.  It is not a bad thing, but just surprising that they spent so much time developing that attachment to the Vault.  Look for a review a little down the road, as I assume this will be a long game.