The Power of Choice!
The year is 2277 and following a nuclear war 200 years earlier, a chunk of the population of Washington lives in refuge in a secure underground facility called Vault 101. There they have built their own community under the watchful eye of the Overseer, who has effectively ensured that no-one can ever leave the vault and head back to the outside world. Until now…Fallout 3 suffers from a very slow and unimpressive opening. Having witnessed your own birth, where your mother dies yet your father surprisingly doesn’t seem to care less (we think that’s bad acting rather than part of the storyline), you then have a number of decisions to make that determine the skills that you’ll bring along with you on your journey.
Your time inside Vault 101 takes part at various stages of your life. Aged 1, you dish out points between various attributes, such as strength, perception, intelligence and agility. Then, it jumps to your birthday party, aged 10, where you get your first BB gun and a Pip-Boy, the hand-held device that you’ll interact with to check your map and access your inventory.
Then, it’s to your 16th year where you sit an exam to determine what job you’ll take in the vault. They’re a ridiculously ambiguous set of exam questions that on the surface appear to make no sense (You’ve made the Vault 101 baseball team, which position do you prefer?) but we’re assured the answers determine which skills you’ll start off strongest in, from the likes of lock-picking, bartering , melee and explosives. Finally, at age 19, you discover your father has managed to escape the confines of Vault 101 and has disappeared into the dangerous wastelands of Washington DC.
Without further ado, in what is a surprisingly similar scenario to the opening of Oblivion, albeit goblins, rats and swords have been traded in for security guards, radroaches (radioactive cockroaches) and guns, you attempt to make your escape through corridors and computer rooms until you reach the exit to the vault where you descend on Washington DC in the search for your father.
It’s an uneventful opening that lacks excitement, but it builds the storyline effectively ready for your first forage into the wastelands.
Remembering the first time that we stepped out of the castle in Oblivion and took in the magnificent view across Cyrodil, it was with great excitement that we opened the vault door ready to take our first glance at Washington DC.
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