Game play:
Approaching this game as a normal player and not thinking about anything technical I loved this game. I personally love the ability to go in any direction and not even have to follow the storyline if I don't want but at the same time, have the main story line clearly visible if I wish to pick up on it. I played through it once doing everything that was part of the storyline and then made a new game after that just to do side quests and level up.
This game starts you off as a baby who selects what your traits are going to be when you're older, and you see how your character grew up in fallout vaults while connecting you with your in-game father. After you come of age your father was found to be from outside the fault and escaped while you were sleeping.
You have the option of what you want to do from there. You can help out your childhood bully to save his mother and earn his respect, you can decide to kill everyone in the vault and strip them bare of all their cloth and possessions, or just escape without killing everyone. Then outside you first see the wasteland of Washington DC after the years of nuclear waste mutating the environment in beautiful graphics! You can do whatever you want from there!
The repairing of weapons was very loveable. Every time I play I put some points in my mechanical skill so I can make my weapons to last longer and to save bag space. The talent tree is pretty cool and comes with a nice description and usually a humorous picture of it. You could be a guy who snipes from afar or be a brute that beats super-mutants away with his trusty baseball bat.
One issue I had with this game along with many other RPG games like this is the fact that you can't continue your game after you've finished the main story line. I wish I knew that the first time I played because I didn't want to download any DLC to be able to continue. Also I wish there was an option in this game to display text in a different size because I have a standard definition TV and everyone just assumes that every average Joe has a huge ass HDTV, but the voice acting made up for that so that I didn't have to read the dialogue text.
The obvious re-use of voice actors was kind of disappointing but I could imagine hiring several of those guys gets very pricy. I hope eventually actors begin to have a passion for video games and are willing to voice act for them for a lower price in hope of increasing quality but that's a high hope.
Technical review:
The first thing to point out about this game is the fact that it uses the same engine from Oblivion. When I first heard of this game with no video footage I had my doubts. But honestly they put so much work into it that it feels like a different engine, the programmers had much more time to polish what they tacked onto the engine than a programming team would have if they made their own engine during the game's development. Also since it was the same company as Oblivion they had a lot of experience already working with the engine.
Now I did play oblivion for about an hour and that's all. I didn't like the game too much because the theme wasn't my style. I feel way more comfortable fighting with a gun when I get a 360 controller. That being said I only noticed a few things that made it extremely obvious that they shared the same engine.
The first obvious thing is the faces. The faces are extremely similar with how they look and their movement when talking. Comparing the actual textures and models, they updated them but the emotion expression and mouth movement is still the same. Oblivion was made a while ago and I was hoping that they could change how they did their faces and make a strong improvement on how they talked and showed emotions.
Below you can see the textures are improved greatly but the facemovement in game isn't improved all that much. Fallout3 (left) Oblivion (right)
The next obvious thing is the articulated modeling. If you don't know what articulated modeling is, think of a G.I. Joe or a Barbie doll. All of the joints can bend or even twist to a degree to try to simulate real human movement or for making poses. In video games this encounters a problem and that when a player moves they look like a robot. Now since there are actually robots in this game, that makes sense, but they don't look so sweet on a human.
If you compare someone who is wearing a full-suit of brotherhood gear against someone wearing a vault jumpsuit, the brotherhood suit looks better when moving. This is because the model can move more freely and have polygons crossing over each other when they're wearing armor. The armor covers the fact there are graphical artifacts on the base model. Epic does this with gears of war and unreal. Notice that in that game they have kneepads and elbow pads on their armor. They can make those bulky men move so fast and fluidly without having to worry about the graphical artifacts that their articulated models make.
For example of a graphic artifact, look at this picture below. The circle at the left shows that at his elbow they covered the graphical artifact up with a blur like a comb-over of texture. It is more than what most other developers would have done but is still obvious to me. The circle on the right doesn't do me much justice but animals are the hardest to animate especially with an articulated model. You can somewhat see where the model for dog meat’s leg goes into his torso as part of his animation. I wish I had a different angle on that to show it better.
If you liked this please let me know, and if you have any suggestions, I'm totally open to them as well as constructive criticism.
