I played a wee bit of Fallout 3 at E3, but with such a sprawling wasteland and a dense population of mutants and survivors 15 minutes just isn't going to give you a decent taste of what the game has to offer. You know what? Neither is an entire hour. Still, that's what I got today, and my brief brush with Fallout 3 hinted at a staggering breadth of content contained within. Of course, as a post-apocalyptic adventure, quite a bit of that content is ruthlessly bloody (or maybe that's just because I'm mean as a snake).
No You Don't, Megaton
Eschewing the prescribed gameplay path of visiting Megaton (that admittedly is not actually prescribed except for the winding path leading from the Vault door to the city), I instead scrambled up the craggy mountain from which the Vault itself was carved and struck off for a broken and crumbling elevated freeway. I figured it had to lead somewhere, but I was shocked (shocked!) to find that there were quite a few creepy and incredibly hostile people hanging out on the remains of the overpass.
So attacked, I had to defend myself. Making superb use of a combination of the V.A.T.S. system and straight-up shooter skills (when I was all out of AP, the currency of V.A.T.S.), I dropped something like twelve half-naked humanoids. They offered no explanation for their brutal assault, but I don't really ask questions when somebody is running at me with a machete. For my troubles I got to the middle of the overpass with a beat-up sniper rifle and an awesome but fuel-hungry flamethrower.
Unfortunately, my plan to walk across a decaying elevated freeway was at best ill-advised, because once I'd gotten to the middle I noticed that the road came to an abrupt end. I peered over the edge at what appeared to be a 50-foot drop at the very least, but managed to slide down most of the way on a steeply graded chunk of overpass that was basically dangling by its internal rebar supports. Dropping the remaining couple of feet to a broken piece of freeway that jutted up from the ground, I splashed down into an ankle-deep pool of water that set my Pip-Boy's Geiger counter clicking like a bush full of terrified crickets. Clearly, this was extremely unhealthy.
