The game opens in bizarre fashion - as you are born. Your Father asks what you should be called and uses a machine to have a look at what you will look like in the future. This is the character customisation screen. Your Mother then goes into cardiac arrest and dies.
The story jumps to your 6th birthday where you meet some of the residents of your vault including your best friend, and a bully. The story jumps to when you are 16, your Father teaches you how to shoot and you are told what job you can do; another customisation screen. The story jumps again, and your best friend tells you that your Father is gone, and her Father “The Overseer” has ordered the death of your Father's friend, and now you are in danger. So then you escape the vault and see the outside world for the first time.
The game seems very much based on Elder Scrolls Oblivion’s game engine. Obviously the theme is radically different, so replace fantasy with post-apocalyptic wasteland. The combat is mainly FPS rather than swords, shields or magic, although there are plenty of melée weapons, plus the option of fists. Some mechanics like stealth, pickpocketing, lock-picking are exactly the same as Oblivion.
Fallout 3 is an RPG, so when you level up by completing quests and defeating enemies, you'll gain skill points to customise your character. These skills include: Small/Energy/Big guns, Speech, Barte, Repair, Medicine, Science, Stealth, Lock-picking. You also choose a perk which can enhance these skills further, or tweak other mechanics like bonuses for using certain guns.
Your base attributes are known as SPECIAL: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. These attributes are mainly fixed, but there is a perk that allows you to add 1 more point. These attributes influence at least a couple of mechanics each; a brief overview is as follows: Strength determines melee strength and how much you can carry. Perception affects if enemies appear on your radar, Endurance gives you damage resistance, Charisma affects your influence in dialog, Agility improves your success in the VATS mechanic, and Luck improves critical chance.
The Pip-Boy 3000 was given to you during your 16th birthday. This is basically a menu system where you can view your attributes, skills, your quest log, view maps, and change equipment. Activation stops the game, allowing you to change weapons without danger. You can assign weapons to the 8 directions on the D-Pad. Outside of battle, it provides a basic light that you can turn on and off at any time. Navigating menus is cumbersome and I found it hard to compare equipment.
Dialog is handled similar to Oblivion with a number of dialog options to select. Your character is a silent protagonist, but other characters are voiced. Your sheltered life kept the horrors of post-apocalyptic life hidden from you, and so the player and the character discover the world for the first time. This means the character has the option of asking basic questions about the world; locations, factions, day-to-day life without it coming across as stupid.
When you have choices to make, these can affect your karma. I think this can have a further affect on dialog options and how certain characters react to you.
The world is quite large and has a mixture of environments. The city area is in ruins, and many streets are blocked, meaning it feels very linear as you are shepherded down certain side-streets and often have to go down to the subway tunnels to actually traverse it. Outside of this, there’s large, open environments with villages and points of interest scattered around. You can see quite far when it is day-time and then have the temptation of walking towards structures you have spotted from a distance. You can quick travel to previously visited places using the map.
You will need to keep picking up weapons and ammo and switching between them. Weapons and armour degrade when used, but if you find a duplicate item, you can then use it to repair your current item. It is quite easy to run out of ammo for one weapon, which forces you to rotate. There are several weapon categories, and the same category uses the same ammunition. So it is beneficial just to carry one weapon from each category.
The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS) lets you freeze the action to target an enemy’s limb. You are shown percentage indicators to show you the chance of hitting, and you spend your “Action” points which regenerate . Depleting the health bar of a limb “cripples” it, which means the enemy struggles to move if you shoot their legs, they drop their weapon if you shoot their arms. I think head crippling lowers accuracy. Your limbs can be crippled too, and you can use a Stimpack to heal a particular limb.
The combat can end up with slow-motion decapitations, or “gibbed” enemies.
You also have to manage your radiation level which increases when near a radiation source.
This can be 1 or 2 points per second. Every type of health-recoverable food found is toxic as well. I never got the meter up more than around 30% so I don’t know what the repercussions of this feature was. There are more than enough Rad-X curing items to keep the value low. Many healing items are simple food which barely does anything, so you really need to use the Stimpacks or find a bed to rest in.
The graphics hold-up well enough today although the game generally looks dull with the choice of colouring - it has a very dull colour palette, then mixed with a shade of green for UI elements. The retro theme reminded me of Bioshock in places. There’s robots that you see patrolling the wasteland that play old music or radio broadcasts which is a similar sound-design to Bioshock.
If you like the game mechanics of Elder Scrolls, then I think you should enjoy this game. Obviously, the theme is different, and there’s some new mechanics like the VATS system that offers a slight tactical element to the battles.