The Summer's Best and Worst Demo: Fallout 3
I wouldn't want to be tasked with selling a sequel in the 2008 marketplace. It's a landscape where roving consumers want shiny new features and eye candy attached to a familiar backbone. New games have to be pushed as both new and old, unusual and familiar. Publishers don't want developers to step too far away from what works, and developers want their work to stand on its own.
alt="Jericho"/>Of all the features that call back to Oblivion, the dialogue
trees are the most prominent. Sure, they're RPG convention, but one that desperately needs Fallout 3-style evolution.
(Not that this is new, or unique to gaming. Witness how Lionsgate is selling Frank Miller's movie "The Spirit" as a de facto "Sin City 2.")
Bethesda faces a very specific version of this battle with Fallout 3. A sequel to a series most of the current audience has never played, the game is much more evidently a follow-up to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
As Paul Semel's recent interview with a company rep demonstrates, comparisons to Oblivion come fast and easy, and Bethesda isn't much interested in entertaining them. Yet playing the game, the lineage is impossible to shake. What will happen when a vast public with hours of Oblivion experience and no working knowledge of the Fallout series gets their hands on the thing?
alt="Pip Boy"/>The PIPBOY 3000 is the prime distinguishing characteristic
between Fallout 3 and Oblivion, but is it more than a spiffy inventory screen?
Credit Bethesda that weeks after E3 has ended we're still thinking and talking about their Fallout 3 demo. In a small room I was given a chair, an Xbox 360 controller and 30 minutes to play. The only constraints were that I not reveal certain plot details that might come to light or write about achievements unlocked.
Provided with a game save that picks up just before the main character opens the Vault door to exit a lifetime of confinement, I was able to go anywhere. I could head to the city of Megaton and begin the quest for my father, break into random homes, maybe get into a couple of fights.
alt="Packbrahmin"/>Ah, the mule looks a lot more familiar. While the demo allowed
wandering into several populated areas, we saw mostly empty wilderness.
I was also free to wander the countryside, tuning into a couple of available radio stations while (hopefully) evading a few roving bandits and getting into the occasional scrap with an animal, which would be a great opportunity to learn how the semi-turn-based VATS combat system works. Fallout 3 is all about freedom, and the demo certainly got that across.
So why am I so unsatisfied?
Maybe it's that this demo did little to show how Fallout 3 is truly different from Oblivion. Ok, the lock-picking mini-game is slightly different (and better) but the dialogue trees, skill breakdowns and overall feel seem so much like Oblivion, at least in this early stage of the game, that the untrained eye could mistake it for a mod.
Combat is one place where the two games really diverge, but how can I really see that playing as a level-two noob with a couple of weak machine pistols? I had a difficult time fending off dogs and even a couple humans weakened from exposure and hunger. Not terribly appealing. Why not start the demo deeper into the story, where better weapons and skills could make the combat differences between Oblivion and Fallout 3 glaringly apparent? Or are they really as different as we've been told?
alt="Mutant Twins"/>This is exactly the sort of situation we would have loved to
play in the demo; instead, we used pea shooters against mean dogs.
Finally, there's the question of fun. If I was trying to show an experienced gamer what makes GTA IV wonderful, I wouldn't stick him with the first couple hours of the game; I'd open the doors to a mission like Three Leaf Clover, where they'd be able to see how intense the experience can be.
The same is true of Fallout 3. If this game is anything like Oblivion, it'll have 60 to 80 hours of gameplay, with the first couple hours being the least interesting. Why show those to a critical audience that has already seen examples of Megaton in previous demos, but will still draw quick inference between this new game and Bethesda's last?
At E3, Fallout 3 made a lot of "best of show" lists. I'm sure Bethesda is thrilled with that. Even in an E3 that felt positively anemic on the game front, being called out as one of the five or 10 most crucial is significant. But I don't see it. I've been told for months that this is a dramatic step forward from Oblivion, but very little of the open-ended demo I had supported that claim.
