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You were born in the Vault. And you'll die in the Vault. It's what you've always believed. For 200 years your people have survived down here, in this test tube of a home - bleached clean steel walls, sterilized floors, and dozens of fellow survivors crammed into this self-sufficient hole in the ground. Xenophobia is a lifestyle. The world above is gone, annihilated centuries ago in one brief radiation-filled flash, leaving you here to live out your sad existence behind a massive metal gate. At least that's what you believed until just hours ago, when it became clear that your father - the only family you have in the world - disappeared from the Vault without warning or explanation. So now you stand before that imposing portal, the great bolts that hold it in place sliding free from their mooring, ready to pursue him into the wastes. With a shudder, the breach slides open before you. Having never seen the glare of sun, the world beyond appears first in a haze and slides slowly into focus as you step out onto real soil for the first time. A shattered land lies spread out before you, the ancient husks of crumpled cars broiling beneath the midday sun, ruined and forgotten buildings dotting the ground out to the horizon. But as dead as the world appears, life has survived - normal humans struggling as much against irradiated food and drink as the mutated monstrosities that roam the wasteland. Even 200 years after that civilization ending holocaust, you and all the others who were left behind live under the perpetual threat of
Fallout.
Into the Wasteland
Hunger for a new
Fallout game began years ago, and deepened when the team that brought gamers the original masterpiece disbanded. One of the great PC gaming franchises was left in limbo, without anyone there to bring it to a new generation of players. When Bethesda bought the rights to the franchise in 2004, many were overjoyed that their favorite RPG developer would be reviving the series. Some
Fallout fans immediately decried the move, sure from the start that Bethesda would change too much about their beloved series. Meanwhile, the folks at Bethesda quietly began to craft early concept art, research the original games, and brainstorm story and gameplay ideas. Now, after years of work, with the full force of their studio focused on their project, the team that brought us The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is ready to reveal their vision of the
Fallout universe. "The spirit of
Fallout - we've missed it. We've wanted to see it in games again," executive producer Todd Howard tells us. "It's humbling and exciting all at once to be the group that makes that game."
We got the chance to visit Howard and the rest of his team at their studio in Maryland. Ushered into a giant movie theater with enough seats for dozens of people, Howard sat in a booth high to our left as he played through a demo of the game while we watched on the massive screen. The nearly hour-long walkthrough (detailed in the narrative segments on these pages) revealed technology in stellar shape for a title that is over a year away from release. With almost no technical hiccups, the demo revealed how characters are crafted, the flow of combat, the structure of morality and questing, and wide stretches of the land upon which the game is set. As longtime players and fans of both
Fallout and the Elder Scrolls franchise, that one hour as we sat in rapt attention made one thing abundantly clear: This is the best of both of those franchises, without any compromises, and with enough amazing new details to excite even the most jaded or skeptical RPG enthusiast. "Differences between how we approach this and how we approach The Elder Scrolls are pretty huge," Howard assures us. "It's its own game. We don't assume anything we did in Elder Scrolls fits."
"In
Fallout 2, you start the game at birth," lead designer Emil Pagliarulo details. "In the original
Fallout game, your character had been born in a Vault. We wanted the player to experience that process." As your mother dies during childbirth, you masked father lifts you up to where the other vault dwellers can analyze you with a DNA scanner - one that will reveal how you will look as you grow older. Here you are given the chance to choose your gender, body type, ethnicity, facial structure, and physique. All the classic elements of character creation with a huge amount of detail are present, but with more realistic facial options than were available in Oblivion. Once satisfied, your father will remove his mask, and his ethnicity and facial features will reflect your own - not a perfect match, but a clear familial link that reveals your parentage. From there, the early hours of the game will check in throughout the long years of childhood in the vault, reinforcing the prison-like environs of your home.
While still a baby, your father will give you a small infant-style cardboard book. As you flip through its pages, which is cleverly titled "You're Special!", you'll choose the baseline stats for each of your seven primary aptitudes. A brief stop as a toddler teaches you to walk, familiarizing you with movement controls. At age 10, you are gifted with a BB gun and your Pip-Boy 3000, a wrist mounted computer that will serve as your menu system throughout the game. At 16 you'll take your G.O.A.T. (Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test), where your answers to various questions will help determine an initial layout of skills and traits. Finally, at age 19, your father escapes and you pursue him into the world beyond. Sometime before the Vault's door opens, you're offered one last chance to alter the character you've crafted throughout childhood.
Whatever your choices, every aspect of character creation is based firmly in the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system that was utilized in the original
Fallout games. Of your 14 skills, you can tag three of them to grow at a faster rate as you level up. Every other level, you choose a perk, a special talent that may give you small bonuses in certain situations. Traits give you pluses and minuses that may change your style of play. It's impossible to create a maxed-out superhero - each facet of character creation is set up to force careful choices about the path you want your character to take through life. From the beginning,
Fallout 3 can be played in either a first-person camera view, or panned back to an over-the-shoulder third person angle not unlike the one offered in Resident Evil 4. In contrast to Oblivion's floaty and disconnected third-person option, the approach in
Fallout 3 has been more focused. "We found with our previous stuff that if we have a third-person mode at all, then people like to play in it," Howard tells us. "So we spent a lot more time on that mode so you can play the whole game that way if you want." From either camera angle, players will be able to observe the amazing attention to detail on everything from wrinkles in characters' clothing to rough textures on the ruined stonework of old structures. This is an evolved version of the engine that ran the graphics of Oblivion, but everything from the animation of monsters to the dramatic lighting of different environments has been designed from the ground up for the ruined landscapes of the
Fallout universe.
Once outside of the Vault, the focus of the game becomes finding a way to survive in the barren wilderness of the outside world. Water is a precious commodity, even though it is also one of the primary sources of radiation you'll encounter; every sip must be judged against how many rads it's likely to introduce into your body. Food, weaponry, and ammo are in short supply, so there's a constant need to ration and improvise new ways to confront obstacles. Hungry and malformed beats wander the world, and you'll have to find a way to either avoid them or take them down for good.
To do so, most players will find themselves taking advantage of the innovative combat system that Bethesda has developed for the game. The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) is what assures that this first-person game so chock full of guns doesn't become an FPS. "We don't want to be rewarding twitch play," Howard says. "It's not an action game. It's a role-playing game." While you'll certainly be able to tackle enemies in real time first-person shooting, V.A.T.S. lets players pause time and select a target at their leisure. Once targeted, a zoomed-in view of that enemy will show all the places you could aim to hit the creature, and the percentage chance you'll succeed. This percentage is based on distance, enemy defense, his cover, as well as your ability with the weapon at hand, among other factors. Just like in the original
Fallout, you'll have a set number of action points, largely based on your agility score. Every combat move you make will deplete this supply, at which point those AP will begin to regenerate in real time at a rate that also corresponds with your agility. Once you complete all your actions in V.A.T.S. you can continue to attack in real time, but this will dramatically slow the recharge of your action points, thereby encouraging tactical targeting over constant twitch shooting. As for those specific targets, which area you aim for will have a profound effect on your foe. Hit the arm of a super mutant, and he may not swing that massive cudgel at you with quite the same force as before. Shoot off the antenna of a mutated giant ant, and he'll go crazy and attack his brethren.
Also in keeping with the tradition of
Fallout, violence can and will be disturbingly brutal. If your final shot is about to result in a dramatic near miss, the sickening crunch of an exploding head, or any other dramatic moment, the scene will play out in slow motion, with the camera zooming in and circling around the bullet as it whizzes through the air only to tear into a mutant's leg as it explodes in a haze of blood. In addition to an array of ranged weapons, you'll also have access to melee weapons like the super sledge (a sledge-hammer) and the ripper (a weaponized chainsaw). These tools of war will function under the same V.A.T.S. system, allowing for gory close range slow-motion kills that shred those enemies foolish enough to get close. Embracing the bloody source material, Bethesda is very open in its declaration that
Fallout 3 will most definitely not be fit for children. Meanwhile, your foes are certainly not content to sit still and eat your bullets. "We've revamped the entire AI system from Oblivion to give us better gameplay with guns," lead producer Gavin Carter tells us. "We've altered the whole pathfinding system so the NPCs are much more knowledgeable about their surroundings. They can take cover, catch you in flanking maneuvers, and mainly react more realistically with their environments."
With such clever adversaries, your foes aren't the only ones who'll be forced to deal with injury and pain. An intricate health system details the many problems your character will have to confront on his journey. Like most role-playing games, you will have a set amount of hit points that go down as you take damage. Food or soda will help improve your hit points slightly, and stimpacks (a sort of injection) can be a big help. As mentioned before, water can also give a boost. Sometimes the only way to completely fill up on health is to drink from some fixed water source repeatedly, like a toilet bowl in a forgotten subway station. However, when you go to drink, you'll be able to see both its health benefits and radiation level. Without medicating to reduce radiation, it will continue to rise until it begins to handicap stats and eventually kill you.
Beyond juggling health and radiation you'll also need to watch out for personal injury to different body parts. You're not the only one making targeted shots; your enemies will be aiming for particular weak points on your body as well. That means you may end up with a broken leg or a shattered arm. One might drastically slow you down, while the other will almost certainly make your once true marksmanship waver and fail. Conceivably, enough water and stimpacks could get your health back up to normal, but no amount of liquid is going to fix a broken bone. For these injuries, either beef up on your surgery skill or expect to make some long and painful treks back to the nearest town doctor.
While the simplest path to an objective is often through violence, Bethesda is committed to offering options that will fit anyone's play style, whether that means sneaking past dangerous foes or talking your way through to a solution. As with the original
Fallout, a karma system is in place that will vacillate back and forth based on your actions. Ethical dilemmas are a big part of the
Fallout universe, and sometimes one evil act may server a greater common good. Your place on the karmic scale will shift in response to your decisions, and different titles will be applied as you gain levels based on your current karma. In fact, many of the 360 version's Achievements will be about acquiring these different titles as you progress - getting all the Achievements is almost impossible in just one playthrough, particularly due to the nature of quests in
Fallout 3.
Like Oblivion,
Fallout 3 offers tremendous freedom in what actions and missions you want to take on. However, unlike Oblivion, a single character can't be all things to all people. Where your battle mage in Oblivion might have simultaneously been the heroic Champion of Cyrodil and the sadistic leader of the Dark Brotherhood, the quests you'll encounter in
Fallout 3 will offer complicated choices that take you down one path or another. If you make one choice, it may close off an entire branch of missions from ever becoming available. However, because of that one decision, an entirely new series of missions will emerge that the other option would never have revealed. Subsequent playthroughs of
Fallout 3 with different choices may very well completely change the path of the story. One avenue might have you taking up the insidious role of a slaver, while more righteous choices will have a town greeting you as a hero even upon your initial arrival since they've heard of your beneficent deeds. "Even within the quests we're trying to be careful to not just have the good path and the evil path, because a big part of
Fallout is shades of gray," Pagliarulo informs us. With a less concrete questing path, you'll often find yourself swept up into tasks rather than being offered a formalized missions from some distressed townsperson - but you'll always have choices about how to proceed, or whether you want to participate in the event at all. "It's more about how you handle these different situations, and less which ones did you do and in what order," Howard explains.
The environmental backdrop through which you'll be making all of these choices is a detailed reinvention of the universe exhibited in the old games. "In our process of envisioning what
Fallout 3 should look like, we started by going back to the first
Fallout. There's a lot of great raw material to look at there," explains Istvan Pely, lead artist on the project. "Now we have so much more to work with. You're there, and you're seeing everything in a greater amount of detail. So we're going to town on that. Every single detail - just fleshing it out to a level of realism and quality that will overwhelm people in terms of making them feel like they're really there."
The location of the game world is in some ways a familiar setting for studio members at the Maryland-based studio. Washington, D.C. and its environs offer a dramatic backdrop to the post-nuclear adventure of
Fallout 3. in the alternate history of the
Fallout universe, many things were different in the years after World War II - a terrifying series of events lead to the the war in 2077 that wiped out most of civilization. In 2277, as you emerge from Vault 101, the world has had a hard time recovering, and few places are able to communicate the fall from decadence like a trip through the crumpled remnants of the Jefferson memorial, or spying the chipped and battered rock that remains of the Washington monument. A large central hub called Rivet City is based in and around the remains of a crashed aircraft carrier, while outlying settlements like the town of Megaton serve as other remote bastions of life. The sprawling remains of the underground Metro line and sewer ways interconnect much of the game world. The map as a whole is only slightly smaller in size than the land area you were able to explore in Oblivion. While the land mass is still huge, and seemingly endless quests abound, the harsh conditions in this post-apocalyptic land mean there are actually fewer individual characters to interact with.
"With
Fallout, the number of NPCs is reduced. We're in the hundreds instead of the thousands," explains Howard. Consequently, the development team has been able to breathe more life into individuals as they move through their daily lives. "For us it's about making better characters - making NPCs that you're invested in," Pagliarulo adds. "The Radiant AI system of Oblivion takes its next steps forward in the game, as NPCs attempt to interact in meaningful ways with the game world. Characters who know each other won't just engage in generic small talk - they may address each other by name, and talk about things that matter to them as individuals. "Lucas Simms, the sheriff of Megaton, he has a son. If you see him walk up to his son and have a conversation, you would hear that the stuff that he says is particularly tailored to his son," Pagliarulo tells us. With the mention of Simms' son, the question of the presence of children in a game this violent must be addressed. In answer, Bethesda confidently assures us that kids will be found throughout
Fallout 3 - but how they live and (more controversially) die within the game world is yet to be revealed. For both children and adults, you can expect far more voice talent this time around, with fewer characters that make you think: "Didn't I just hear this guy in the last town I was in?" That broader cast is being led by the inimitable Liam Neeson, who stars as the lost father at the root of your quest into the post-apocalyptic surface world.
Feature sets and questing structures aside, there's much more to
Fallout than iterating off a great rule set from an old computer game. At its core, the
Fallout universe appealed to mature gamers for its juxtaposition of the realities of war and death against a dark humor that delights in the ironies of a once perfect civilization ravaged by their own destructive tendencies. It's a complex world without simple answers. Heroism and villainy seem to carry more weight in a land so near extinction. Simply put, Bethesda gets it. From the emulation of the '40s propaganda posters to the impossible moral decisions placed before players,
Fallout 3 is a role-playing game in the truest interpretation of the genre. It's about choices and consequences, characters and story, survival and sacrifice. And, after what seems now an excruciatingly short time seeing the game in action, it's about a long, long wait until the autumn of 2008.
The Pip-Boy 3000 (Page 4)
"We joke that this thing has more pixel shaders running on it than Oblivion did. We really wanted it to feel like this old beat up, retro device that you have strapped to your wrist," explains Todd Howard. The Pip-Boy 3000 is as close to a menu system that
Fallout 3 has to offer. Three red buttons on the wrist-mounted device are your tabs between the major screens. The first is your character's stat page, where you can check skills, health, and other personal details. The second button pulls up an inventory of items, and also includes the option to repair damaged items or scavenge old ones for parts. The third button is a data screen - here you'll find maps, quest logs, photos, and the like. Beyond that, the Pip-Boy also serves as a sort of radio. Detecting radio signals being broadcast across the wasteland, you'll be able to tune in any of the surviving radio stations. Some broadcasts will occasionally reveal new quests. Other times, the radio stations serve as a way to listen to the 20-some 1949s and '50s tunes that Bethesda has licensed.
The Behemoth (Page 9)
Here you can see the layers of work that go into producing a single enemy in
Fallout 3.
High resolution model used to define basic structures
Modeling of subsurface veins and blemishes, painted on in 3D
A texture pass for muscles and bone structure
A similar image with veins removed to aid in texture layering
Final image
Narrative Segments
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In the wastes beyond Vault 101, a dusty wind blows as the sun beats down on your pale skin. In the ruins of the forgotten town below, you chance upon a stashed rifle and some drugs in a battered mailbox. Not far away, near a broken children's swingset, you find a still-functional water faucet. Taking a sip, you're alarmed as your personal radiation meter begins to climb. A sound turns you around. Two impossibly large ants crawl towards you. Thinking quickly, you target one of the broken down cars near where the mutated insects are passing. A few shows find its engine, one of those old nuclear generators, and the ants and car alike disappear into a small mushroom cloud. Your radiation detector beings its ominous tick.
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The sign above the gate reads: "Megaton." The robot outside doesn't judge you a threat, and instead barks an advertisement for the local watering hold as the doors grate open. Inside stands the town sheriff, a stuffy fellow named Lucas Simms. Never a fan of authority, you dismiss his commands to stay out of trouble in his town and descend to the strange sight below. A massive undetonated bomb sits in the crater at the center of town, apparently the settlement's namesake. Some insane religious zealot kneels at its base, espousing the bomb as a miraculous sign from God. You push past him and head to the bar.
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Inside Moriarty's Bar, static-laced, ancient pre-war music blares from a transistor radio. Beyond the local riffraff, in the corner you spy an imperturbable businessman, the kind of man that looks like he might know something about your father. As it turns out, he doesn't. But Mister Burke, as he calls himself, does have a job that might net you a little money to survive on out here. He'd like to get rid of Megaton - something about "a blight on the burgeoning urban landscape." He's got a fusion pulse charge that could arm the live and ticking bomb at the center of town. It's not as if this town as done anything for you yet. Sure, your father might disapprove. But he's not here right now. You take the charge and head back outside. The radio croons: "I'm in love with a wonderful guy!"
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With the charge set, you descend into the ruined Metro subway lines below ground. Dust motes float slowly through shafts of light from the surface above. You march off in the direction of your pre-determined meeting place with Mister Burke, far away from Megaton. Rounding a corner, you're greeted with a hail of gunfire. A massive beat of a mutant stands beyond, armed with a rusted Chinese assault rifle, dwarfed by its too-large hands. In the fight that follows, you take some hits, but nothing a stimpack won't fix. In the corridor beyond, two more mutants pace, grunting back and forth to each other. Unwilling to risk another open battle, you sneak to a nearby passage and the security terminal housed within. Hacking the computer is simple enough, and a security bot emerges from its cocooned pod - unused these last two centuries. Rolling out onto the main platform, its tin can voice intones: "Tickets, please." As the mutants outside laugh and threaten to tear its puny metal arms off, the bot decides they must not have tickets, and opens fire with its laser cannon.
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Emerging from the Metro into the ruins of the old capital city of a dead nation, it only takes moments to realize you're in over your head. A swarm of mutants crawl across the old marble stonework, and your scavenged rifle just isn't going to cut it. Squeezing off a few shots, you know you're in deep trouble, when suddenly across the street more shots begin to ring out. Their powered armor gleaming, a squad of knight-like soldiers begins to drop your would-be killers. Approaching your unwitting saviors, one of them peeks out from her metal shell to declaim your stupidity for coming here, and offers for you to come along as she and her fellow Brotherhood of Steel members clear out more mutants. They're heading your way, so why not?
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After a running firefight through roofless buildings punctuated by blasts of laser fire and intermittent explosions, you finally find yourself near your destination, the Galaxy News Radio Building. Before you can enter, you're thrown back as a huge building crumbles nearby. From its wreckage saunters a behemoth of a mutant - a giant by any definition. As the soldiers you're with desperately unload, you see a fallen body nearby with a strange device in its hands. Picking it up, you recognize it for what it is - a Fatman. Arming this portable nuclear catapult, the tiny bomb slides into place with a ding that sounds disturbingly like a diner lunch bell. As the giant mutant turns its eyes on you, you pull the trigger, and the bomb hurtles over to the beast's feet. The creature crashes down in a cloud of nuclear
fallout. Slipping away from the surviving soldiers, you enter the nearby tower and climb to the top. Up above, you emerge onto a wide balcony. "It's about time," Mister Burke says, and hands you the detonator. In the distance, you can see the town. There's no turning back after this. The money's not really that good, now that you think about it. You press the button anyway...
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War. War Never Changes.
Captions
Page 3:
*The art team on the game talks a lot about the importance of having "no arbitrary detail." Every gun, console, switch, and rivet should have a purpose, even a fictional one. When it does, the game world simply feels more genuine.
*Your father's facial features will be different based on the design of your character - he'll even appear to age throughout your childhood.
*As you travel, weapons will degrade with use, or may be damaged directly by attacks. As you find new armaments, you can use the scrap from your old beat-up arsenal to add to the new
Page 4:
*"There's destruction everywhere. Destruction requires a great deal of randomness," lead producer Gavin Carter relays. "So one of the things we're playing with is how we apply decals to the world - not only when you shoot things, but we can actually apply very large decals to any kind of arbitrary geometry."
*Most of your experience points in the game come from complete quests - grinding for experience just isn't that useful. Whether you use guns, stealth, or diplomacy to complete those missions is a choice left to you
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*Unlike Oblivion,
Fallout 3 does not scale your encounters to fit your current level. Wander into a dangerous zone alone, and you shouldn't be surprised when that Super Mutant beats your head in
*Extensive visual effects like this use of depth of field puts
Fallout 3 in a whole new graphical category from Bethesda's previous work
*You'll be able to hire followers who might help you out in a fight, but it's definitely not a party-based game. And for fans that are curious, Bethesda hesitantly confirms there will be a dog in the game, but they're reticent to speak on the subject for now.
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*The V.A.T.S. combat system keeps the game firmly grounded in the tactical decision-making of good RPGs
*
Fallout has always been unabashedly graphic in its depiction of violence, and this installment appears not to shy away from the tradition.
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*Like in the original
Fallout, the opening cinematic of
Fallout 3 (of which this is a screen shot) will include music from the classic '40s and '50s band, The Ink Spots. The ironic song choice: "I Don't Want To Set the World on Fire"
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*
Fallout 3 has a more defined narrative structure than many previous Bethesda games. You'll play your character as he or she progresses from level one to a cap of 20, and after dozens of hours of play you will reach a definitive end to the story. That end, however, may be any one of many - nine to twelve unique endings are planned, based on your actions throughout the game
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*The Fatman is a handheld nuclear catapult. We'll say that again in case you missed it. In
Fallout 3, you'll have access to a handheld nuclear catapult
Resumen del artículo
- El juego correrá en una versión mejorada del engine de Oblivion, la vista en tercera persona ha sido completamente renovada ya que (literalmente) la del Oblivion era una mierda xD
- El juego empieza con tu nacimiento y la muerte de tu madre dandote a luz, en ese momento entra la fase de personalización del juego, una vez elegidas estas, tu padre (que te está sosteniendo) se quita una mascara y revela tener los rasgos que has elegido.
- Vas creciendo en el hospital, en una especie de zona de tutorial, encuentras un libro que dice "tu eres especial", en el te dan la opción de elegir tus 7 habilidades principales. Tambien conseguiras tus primeras armas y un ordenador que hace las veces de menu (o diario), segun creces podrás ir probando tus habilidades.
- El sistema de habilidades esta basado en el SPECIAL de los primeros
Fallout, de 14 habilidades puedes elegir 3 para aumentarlas rapidamente.
- El sistema de combate sera una mezcla entre el clásico y tiempo real, tu puedes elegir jugar en tiempo real todo el tiempo que quieras, pero tambien puedes pausar el juego y elegir los objetivos como se hacia antes, sin embargo, necesitaras una serie de puntos para poder pausar el juego, dan a entender que es recomendable hacerlo, ya que la dificultad en tiempo real sería casi extrema.
- El juego sigue siendo tremendamente gore y realista, una de las escenas más impresionantes es la cabeza de un tio explotando a camara lenta con severos detalles sangrientos.
- Diversas formas de afrontar el juego, matando a todo cristo, infiltración, conversación (en los primeros
fallout podias pasarte el juego solo convenciendo a la gente de que hiciera lo que tu quisieras xD)
- Los enemigos pueden usar el sistema de pausa tambien, aunque tu no te darás cuenta, vamos, simplemente serán jodidamente infalibles atacando, habrá un sistema de radiación/salud nuevo para medir la cantidad de radiación de ciertas cosas que debes consumir (como el agua) para saber que consecuencias tendrán en tu organismo.
- El sistems Karma regresa.
- Sistema basado en puntos de experiencia, la mayoria vienen de quests
- nivel maximo 20
- de 9 a 12 posibles finales basados en tus acciones en el juego (interesante)
- No hay escalado de niveles, si vas a una zona de nivel alto mueres horriblemente.
- Hay NPC's, pero no es un juego basado en grupos