Miguel: I'm hesitant to reduce them to the sorts of courier runs, fetch quests, and hunting forays that have come to pervade MMOs, but I'm afraid that they're going to sound similarly prosaic if I give you a blow-by-blow description. At their best, the quests I played directed you toward sites where interesting things were going on. One started out as a "fed ex" quest from Megaton to a remote settlement built on a ruined overpass overlooking the Potomac. When I got there, I found that the settlers were under siege by a group of vampire people. My arrival triggered a far more interesting task: to go find their lair and slaughter them. I had three choices of locale. Behind door number one, an abandoned drive-in theater, were a pair of super mutants. Too bad that our play time ended while I was en route to the derelict metro station where I suspect they were hiding.
I may be wrong, but I'm inferring from what I've played that Fallout 3's world is designed around sites like these. In some cases, you'll be directed to them by quests. In others, you may just stumble on them in the middle of something else entirely. So long as players are not encouraged to bypass any potentially interesting scenarios simply because they're not on a quest to engage them -- a common problem in MMOs, once players learn that nearly every monster has a kill-quest associated with it -- then this could lend itself to some interesting meanderings in Fallout 3's world.
Sterling: I encountered no such thing during my wanderings, but I started off that messenger quest that you mentioned. That makes me wonder if my encounter at a food distribution plant filled with ghoulish soldiers wasn't part of some greater branching mission. That also makes me wonder if your quest didn't lead you down a different branch of the subway network. Do Mirelurks clash with vampires? Is there weird inter-mutant conflict? Perhaps we'll get a greater idea in four weeks' time. I sense that quests will drive the narrative (as they should), but I could see myself wandering around the Wasteland far more than I'd wander around, say, Liberty City. Part of that's thanks to the entertaining combat, which makes it fun to be lost.
Besides wondering how others in the room fulfilled their quests, I keep thinking about the V.A.T.S. system, and how well it works. Part of the reason that I played mostly in third-person was due to a greater spatial awareness, and also because, again, first-person lulls me into experiencing this game as though it were a Half-Life or Call of Duty. In practice, real-time shoot-outs are a last resort; enemies move too quickly and ferociously to play Fallout 3 like a shooter. V.A.T.S. works effectively because it slows down the action to a manageable level, but doesn't bring it to a screeching halt. Toward the end of my play session, I began to grow awfully partial to weapons like the Hunting Rifle and Chinese Assault Rifle, both of which could take a leg clean off a raider in a few turns. I didn't tweak my character to fix guns particularly well, but if I had, I think that I'd have enjoyed crippling even more mutants.
Miguel: I pretty much only fired in real time when my action points were replenishing. Everything else was all V.A.T.S. Armed with knowledge from previous Fallout games (plus min-maxing muscles that are mad toned), I suspected that dumping points into the "small arms" skill would yield big dividends. And I was right -- whenever I wanted an encounter to end quickly, I would activate V.A.T.S., click on maximum headshots, and watch things die. You know how in Japanese RPGs, you can take your eyes off the screen, mash the default attack button, and obliterate outmatched enemies while only half paying attention? That's kind of what this was like. If you're the type to decide whether or not Fallout 3 is a "real RPG" based on how many dice the computer is throwing behind the scenes, then rest assured that shots fired straight at something's face in real time were markedly less effective than those given a boost by V.A.T.S.
Which isn't to say that it was necessarily the best move to dump all my points into the best combat skill, pound-for-pound. It was fine for the purpose of a four-hour play session, but when I really sit down to play Fallout 3 I'm going to branch out. I encountered lots of locked doors and secure computer terminals that my single-mindedness prevented me from opening. It all may just amount to hoards of bottlecaps forbidden to those lacking the prudence to invest in ancillary skills. But given how much money in strewn around the world (in the form of toilet plungers, fuses, lawn mower blades, and cockroach meat), I'm hoping that Fallout 3's designers saw fit to hide more interesting stuff in those.
