Fallout 3

Mercifully escaping the tourists, touts and, well, tramps of London's hectic Oxford Street, I find myself in the serene interior of a small hotel somewhere in the vicinity of a Japanese restaurant where I once blew the GDP of a small country on Schochu-based cocktail, which made me feel ill on levels beyond the physical. I'm here to be given a guided tour of Bethesda's eagerly awaited Fallout 3, and developer Peter Hines is on-hand to tell all.

Sitting comfortably in a darkened theatre room, Bethesda's man in London warns us that we're witness to a pre-alpha build of the game, and that all may not be the finished article - that said, as the game begins I'm immediately impressed by how polished and complete everything is looking, given that Fallout 3 won't be gracing our screens until autumn 2008.

Starting a new game, we're immediately greeted with the introductory sequence, featuring the instantly hummable "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" as the camera sweeps through a dilapidated bus, eventually taking in a post-nuclear city-scape. War does indeed never change. A bit like Vault 101, which has remained sealed since the nuclear holocaust of 2077, over two-hundred years of no one leaving, and no one entering. Into this closed world the player is thrust, the early portions of the game seeing our young charge being gently introduced to the world, via flashbacks to important occurences in earlier years.

Your father is your guide, and he'll be on hand as you select and tweak your initial skills, abilities and characteristics, choose your appearance, and eventually receive your Pip-Boy, an inventory device on the player's wrist which can be used in all manner of clever ways. Through this approach, Bethesda are cleverly integrating your introduction to the game world into the story, forging a seamless world in which everything that reminds you that this is a game is cleverly part of a believable world. You can choose to play in first or third-person, Bethesda inform us, though for the main part of our demonstration the game will take place from a first-person perspective which, it has to be said, give initial proceedings something of a BioShock feel - which is certainly no bad thing, though may concern puritanical fans of the original two Fallout titles.

This is not Oblivion, however, and Bethesda will stand no more comparisons. Likewise, those likening the game to a first-person shooter will be forcibly removed, I'm almost warned entering the theatre. Though it has to be said that, purely from an aesthetic stand-point, Fallout 3 isn't dissimilar to an FPS, even if no one will thank me for noting it. Similarities are thankfully little more than superficial, and even the combat - which can be tackled FPS style - is more intelligently approached using the pseudo turn-based VATS combat system - which allows you to pause the action and select parts of an enemy to hit, with your timing and shooting ability effecting how likely you are to succeed with that tricky head-shot, or the disabling leg-shot. Likewise, enemies will lose percentages from every part of their body - meaning that you can save ammo and take fewer risks by concentrating on a foe's weak spots via the combat system. FPS fans may of course prefer to engage in more 'traditional fire-fights', which can still be impacted by a player's strength, skill, and various environmental factors (radiation from exploded atom-powered cars and the like).

But before you can indulge in the exploration of the world and in battling or conversing with its innumerable and varied inhabitants, you're going to need to prepare your character and get out of Vault 101. This will happen when, after the initial premise-setting action has passed, your father mysteriously disappears from the vault - and you must follow in his footsteps to discover why he left you. Journeying out of the vault for the first time, the player is dazzled by the first natural sunlight he's ever witnessed, and you look out over the wasteland that surrounds what was once Washington D.C., before the 2077 war which brought to an end civilisation as we know it. Visually, the landscape is breath-taking, the draw-distance epic, and more over, it is awash with signs of former life; debris, ruined structures, and useful trinkets to be discovered and used as you set out to uncover what became of your father.

The first place you reach is the town of Megaton, and Bethesda tell us it is here that your first karma-impacting decisions will be made. Help the town and play nicely, and you'll make friends among the game's good guys. Behave badly, and (eventually) bring about the town's destruction, and you're likely to make enemies among the good guys while falling in with another crowd entirely. Our friendly Bethesda rep is clearly feeling the grim London winter more than most and, befriended by a sinister character called Burke in a seedy bar, we install a detonation device on the side of the town's centrepiece, an unexploded nuclear bomb taken as a sign of grace from god around which the town was founded. It is worth noting that town's such as Megaton are brought to life in vivid and rich detail, and that you can interact with any number of its inhabitants should wish to learn more about life and concerns beyond the sheltering Vault 101.

Our Bethesda guide, however, is on a mission to destroy Megaton, and so we embark on a journey through the disused Washington Metro en route to the middle of the former city and a rendezvous with the mysterious Burke that will see Megaton's landmark detonated - the will of sinister force's within Fallout 3. In the Metro, we meet our first real threat (beyond the giant red ants dispatched with a shotgun in the wasteland): the super mutants. These shambling wrecks of former humanity are the main villains of the piece, and it is in combat with them that we're demonstrated the title's combat system. Of course, how well you battle these nasties is impacted by how evolved your fire-arms skills are, and the Pip-Boy, as ever, will help keep you posted. There are also various boosting snacks you pick up, which grant you stronger abilities in certain areas. For example, in order to modify Megaton's bomb, you'll need a certain level of intelligence given the technical nature of the undertaking - such points can be a garnered via various diversions in the game world, or by picking up boosters.

Back to the disused Metro, however, and having overcome the super mutants we emerge to downtown DC and find ourselves tagging along with a Brotherhood of Steel force trying to repel mutants over-running the city. As we follow the troopers, we gradually pick-up a few new combat tricks, a couple of new weapons and a little more of the plot, before all hell breaks loose. A super mutant boss behemoth has crashed through a building, and having killed a couple of your new friends, you'll now need to defeat this monstrosity, using the portable nuke gun, which fires mini-atomic missiles, two or three direct hits from which should see the beast falling. Once again, the VATS system comes in handy, and the scale of the combat is certainly impressive - especially given the relative minnows you've faced so far.

But our brief glimpse of the game is drawing to a close, and now we find ourselves on a rooftop, out of harms way, and in the company of the sadistic Burke. A cut-sequence ensues, in which the button is pressed - sending white-light and a mushroom cloud wafting out over the city, from somewhere beyond the edge of the ruined metropolis. The ultimate bad karma move, according to Bethesda; Megaton is no more.

But, in a relationship councillor sty-lee (appropriate in the field of games journalism), what have we learned? Well, Fallout 3 is rich, ambitious and epic in scale. Whether it can blend perfectly RPG and FPS (with a splash of third-person thrown in) remains to be seen, but the lengths the developers are going to are more than apparent. We'll certainly be following this new offering with interest as it is polished, tweaked and expanded ahead of a debut around this time next year. Until then, suffice to say that this is one wasteland we'll be more than happy to revisit.