For exactly 28 minutes of our final day at E3 2008, we got to step away from Los Angeles and into the post-apocalyptic ruins of Washington, D.C. for some completely unguided hands-on time with Bethesda Game Studios’ Fallout 3. Tutorial and character creation segments were completely absent. We simply loaded up a save, pressed a nearby button and walked through the hatch separating the early portion of game from the completely open world waiting just outside. And it was glorious.
Click through for the goods.
The path that lay before us pointed the way to the town of Megaton. Already armed with a little bit of knowledge about that location’s potential fate, we hooked a hard left in the direction of a cluster of dilapidated buildings. The largest of the group turned out to be a former elementary school, a ruin now populated by crazed human raiders. Armed with only a pistol and the hope of finding better weapons before our 28 minutes ran dry, we ventured forth into the dusty unknown.
The battered elementary school turned out to be a maze of corridors spread out across multiple floors. Conventional definitions of “treasure” seemed to go out the window here, with ornate wooden chests replaced by battered lockers and overturned desks. Thoughout the complex, raiders – often more than one at a time – waited in every room, giving us plenty of opportunity to try out Fallout 3’s hybrid combat system.
Whether you’re a ranged or melee fighter, the most effective way to eliminate the opposition is by using VATS. Tapping the Xbox 360 gamepad’s right bumper pauses the action while the camera zooms in to target a specific enemy, broken down by hit locations. Each targetable location – which extends beyond the body to include any wielded weapons as well – is accompanied by a percentage value which indicates your chances of achieving a direct hit. Successive attacks can be queued up until there are no Action Points left to be spent – they regenerate automatically as you perform real-time attacks – which at the best of times for us amounted to roughly half an ammo clip.
After one or more attacks have been set up in VATS, real-time action is returned to with the push of a button. Queued strikes are dealt out automatically, with killing or particularly damaging blows highlighted by a slow-motion close-up. After sinking tens of hours into Elder Scrolls IV, Bethesda’s previous game, the level of gore in display in Fallout 3 came as a bit of a surprise. More than once we saw one of our headshots remove half of the fallen opponent’s skull. In another case, a well-thrown grenade resulted in a satisfying rain of torso-less limbs.
Dissatisfied with the crummy loot dropped by the elementary school raiders – little more than sub-standard armor, weak weapons and random supplies – we sought out an exit and returned to the nuclear wasteland. As was the case in Oblivion, and Morrowind before it, it’s tough to know where to turn when you first set foot in Fallout 3’s open world. With time ticking away, we made a snap decision: that red-colored metal structure visible just beyond a nearby hill would be the next destination.
The structure turned out to be… well… we’re not exactly sure what. But it was also situated very close to another cluster of buildings. Pushing forward, we suddenly found ourselves wandering through the broken streets of what’s labeled in the game as Bethesda Ruins. Our sudden desire to hunt down the developer’s former office – surely it must be hidden somewhere as an easter egg – was interrupted by the sharp crack of a hunting rifle.
It turned out that another group of those pesky raiders had decided to call the area formerly known as Bethesda their new home. And one of them had a hunting rifle. We targeted him first, running up a bludgeoning the poor bastard to death with a baseball bat. Snatching up the hunting rifle, we turned on VATS, took aim at the next raider’s head and… oh shit… time’s up. The few potshots we had queued up flew wild and we were hustled away from the demo station, to make room for the next group of journalists.
After 28 minutes we walked away armed with no better understanding of Fallout 3 than we previously had, but with a newfound mad desire to see and explore as much of the broken world as possible. The game feels and plays exactly the way it looks, like a post-apocalyptic remix of Elder Scrolls. We’ve still got plenty of questions about the story, sidequests, NPC interactions and more, but the brief taste of Fallout 3’s freedom at the tail end of E3 turned out to be one of the most delicious morsels we sampled at the show.
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