Whether lands of spells and swords or spaceships and aliens, most role-playing games take you to a world you want to visit.
But one gaming company has something else altogether in mind for its next RPG.
Rockville-based Bethesda Softworks is in production of a new game for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 that will take players to a bombed-out wasteland where everything is radioactive, hostile 6-foot ants roam the earth and mankind is just barely clinging to survival.
The new title, “Fallout 3,” is the newest chapter in a cult-favorite gaming franchise that has been dormant for almost a decade.
The “Fallout” games are set in a world where ’50s America’s utopian “world of tomorrow” came about and was wiped off the face of the earth in a tsunami of nukes and fire.
Mankind is forced to take refuge in self-sufficient underground shelters called Vaults. In “Fallout 3,” the main character is from Vault 101, where his community has lived for more than 100 years.
“It’s very much your story,” lead designer Emil Pagliarulo said at Bethesda’s June press event, “the game starts with your birth.”
For the first few hours of gameplay, players will live out milestones of their character’s childhood, and the choices made will determine base stats as they enter the world.
As the main character’s father, voiced by Liam Neeson, mysteriously decides to leave Vault 101, he must abandon all he’s ever known to find his father.
The minds behind the award-winning fantasy games “The Elder Scrolls” have preserved the “Fallout” world, but made the gameplay their own.
“It’s based on the setting of ‘Fallout 1,’” Executive Producer Todd Howard said, “but we don’t want people to feel like they have to play the previous games.”
Much like Bethesda’s most recent title, “Oblivion,” “Fallout 3” looks like a first-person shooter but plays like an RPG. Combat is based on skills and attributes called S.P.E.C.I.A.L.s, an acronym for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck.
While there will be melee combat, Bethesda disclosed information only about the ranged weapons. Players can aim and fire real-time, or they can switch to a turn-based perception mode where specific areas on your enemies can be targeted with a listing of percent chances to hit.
Also, any weapon that creates or triggers an explosion will pollute the area with radiation that can be aborbed by and will harm the characters. Even sources of restoring health, pretty much anywhere you could find water, are contaminated with radiation and players must balance the benefit of health versus the rads they’d be taking in.
“We loved the original games and were always asking, ‘When are they going to do another ‘Fallout’ game?’” Howard said.
He stopped asking when, in 2004, he found a sticky note on his computer informing him Bethesta had aquired the rights to the franchise.
Unlike the first two games, which were set on the West Coast, “Fallout 3” is set in an area that was once the city of Washington, D.C., now called called the Capital Wasteland. Players will be able to fight their way around monuments and locations in the D.C. area.
“We were very interested in doing a story that dealt with ‘who’s in charge now?’ of this destroyed world. What would the government be like? Who has the power and why? It’s just a perfect fit,” Howard said in an e-mail to The Examiner.
The war that triggered the nukes to drop was with China, so “there’s an anti-communist political climate,” Pagliarulo said.
“We’re not trying to make a point about who’s in charge [in the current administration] or anything like that,” Howard said.
While the title is well underway, don’t expect to see it on shelves until fall of 2008. As Howard put it, the team at Bethesda needs to enjoy some “martini and bathrobe time.”
Dark humor for dark times
The original Fallout titles were pioneers in video game violence.
The team at Bethesda intends to live up to that standard in “Fallout 3.”
“Violence done well is … hilarious,” said executive producer Todd Howard.
Howard explained during Bethesda’s June press event showcasing an interactive demo of “Fallout 3” that over-the-top violence and wholesale destruction is used in the game as humor, not to make the game edgy or more realistic in any way.
“It’s like crash mode in ‘Burnout’ except with body parts,” Howard said.
Another risky aspect of the source material the “Fallout 3” team is looking to preserve is the inclusion of young non-player characters in the game. Interplay’s original “Fallout” titles also had children, but they had to be removed from the game when it was sold outside the U.S.
‘Fallout 3:’ Location, location, location
When it comes down to it, the District seems like the place to be when the world ends.
When asked why D.C. was chosen as the barren wasteland setting for Bethesda Softworks’ new game, executive producer Todd Howard told The Examiner, “This is where we live.”
The dungeons and mode of travel from place to place are abandoned Metro tunnels, now infested with mutants and monsters.
Locations along the Potomac and most major landmarks downtown are present, and the shelter where the main character is born is in McLean, Va., where Howard is from.
The team at Bethesda wanted to find out “who has the power” in the world of “Fallout.”
According to Howard, D.C. was “just a perfect fit.”
– Jeremy Monken
