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Fallout 3 Facts That Could Save Your Life
This past weekend Bethesda released a few new tidbits of information about Fallout 3. Game journalists were invited to an event with the production team, and came away with a much better sense of what the title is like. "Fortunately, you never had to experience the horrors of a nuclear holocaust. Unfortunately, your mother died during childbirth, and you were raised by your father (in a very scientific fashion). Your early, developmental years play an important part of the character creation process and double as a basic game play tutorial. The G.O.A.T. (Generalized Occupational Aptitude TEST) determines what some of your starting skills and skills will be. Physical, artistic attributes can be customized as well. Much like the first level of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, you can manually alter your starting stats and skills before you venture forth." For an epic amount of coverage on the game, Bethesda's new blog has two posts with copious links to previews and hands-on pieces.
Basically Oblivion didn't have the enemies placed by level designers or even their type determined that way but it looked at your level and just spawned enemies of a matching level. So if you go from level 1 to level 2 all monsters will be replaced with stronger ones. As a level up does not necessarily mean an increase in combat power you're screwed if you level more than you get stronger (as suddently all dungeons will be filled with huge dragons just because you trained your cooking skills a bit) and people had to devise specific strategies to gain as few levels as possible while gaining a maximum amount of power.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Sounds great, except that it lead to some real problems. You could complete the game's main questline while at level 2- it was quite easy then since you fought absurdly easy monsters the whole way. Conversely,if you were high level you would constantly meet bandits on the road who would be decked out in epic-quality items such as full Daedric armor. Why a generic highwayman would be wearing armor that even the highest level characters in Morrowind would have trouble getting was a bit of a puzzle.
There have been a lot of user patches to try and address this, mostly by capping the level and equipment of many of the random encounters and upping the difficulty on end game encounters.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
It's not a journalist's comparison that bothers me, it's the description that was dead-on for the character creation system in Oblivion and, to a lesser extent, Morrowind. Also, there was no Bethesda bashing, just a sincere desire that Oblivion (a game I really like) and Fallout (a game I also happen to like) be different games. Is that too much to ask?