Wednesday 30 December 2009

Disaster Year 2008: Fallout 3



Fallout 3 tracks the complete lifetime of a messianic scavenger. Born to a super-scientist in an isolationist underground community, you live your fragile years through a personality snatch best-of reel. Stats and physical make-up sliders finished with, your adult doll stumbles out of its relative safety bubble into what's left of Washington DC. You'll have the outline of an individual, attributes and attitude established through rationed skill points, but nothing indelible. Your task is to craft a personality through experience. Alone in a hostile wasteland, what will you do to survive? Who will you help? Who will you kill? Players are offered a bare thread of narrative, tracking a wayward father, but there's no hurry. There are ramshackle communities of brutalised loners to discover. Get pally and they'll offer distraction tasks that get you exploring. These missions teach you to be patient and methodical, instructing you in the basic tools of post-apocalyptic survival. Those avenues exhausted, it's up to you to create and discover your own adventure. It can be about helping to bring a sustainable water source to what's left of civilisation if you choose. It can equally be about butchering and cannibalising those weaker than you. It's up to you. It's your hell.

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