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I've spent my entire life underground -- raised from the cradle in a high-tech nuclear shelter. Outside my protective shell, the flotsam and jetsam of humanity scrape by for survival in a radioactive wasteland. I'm about to join them in their living hell. And I'm feeling pretty dang excited at the prospect.
I've got four hours to play
Fallout 3, the post-apocalyptic role-playing game from Bethesda Softworks. The game's product manager Pete Hines is at my beck and call, providing something of a personal commentary track for my experience.
The wasteland.
I take the Xbox 360 controller in hand and move toward the control panel and press a dusty button. The huge metal vault door opens with the grinding of gears and a hiss of air. I walk tentatively towards the opening and through the corrugated aluminum door between me and the rest of the world. The wreckage of America sprawls out in front of me. The world is a grey, lifeless place -- a mess of bare stone and crumbled concrete. In the distance I see the rotting corpse of Washington.
We liked the idea from the original Fallout that you lived your whole life in the Vault. And what would that be like? How is the player going to feel walking out that door the first time with their eyes adjusting to the wasteland? All the possibility -- and feeling a bit overwhelmed. But at the same time, that first quest marker isn't that far away from you.
I love the Pip-Boy 3000. It's so bad.
My Pip-Boy 3000, a personal computer strapped to my arm like the Nintendo Power Glove, tells me that news of my father awaits in a town called Megaton. A green blip flickers on a map; a dotted line lights the way. I feel ambivalent towards the man who brought me into this world. Why should I chase after this deadbeat? What's my motivation?
Of course, I'm missing part of the picture. I haven't played the Vault portion of the game. I haven't actually met my old man (played by actor Liam Neeson). But I get the idea that plot in
Fallout 3 doesn't have quite the urgency as in
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, where a man as formidable as the actor Patrick Stewart tasked me in the game's first minutes with saving the world. Here, my old man's trail of breadcrumbs doesn't feel quite as alluring in this strange, deadly new world.