Jun 18
2007

Fallout 3 Is Kinda Turn-Based

Tags: Fallout Games

All RPG Geeks have their eyes on Fallout 3 these days. Some have torches and pitchforks in their hands, and some already have their wallets open. Gaming discussions don’t get any more polarized! I played Fallout from start to finish a few times, and finished Fallout 2 once. They had style, humour, and a great setting. No other games have done the post-apocalyptic setting better.

Finally someone was kind enough to scan their copy of the newest issue of Game Informer, featuring the only details we have right now of Fallout 3. The biggest question to be answered: will it be turn-based like the old Fallouts, or will it be real-time Oblivion with guns. After reading the description, I'm not exactly sure which it is.

Here's the text of the article that fails to give a clear answer:

...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... 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.

I'm confused at the very start of this description. "Most players" will use VATS? Why most players? I interpret this paragraph to mean that there are two modes of combat: real-time, which is designed to be an inferior way to play, and turn-based, which is the ideal way to play. It also seems like you need to switch into real-time mode to let your Action Points recharge. Sounds strange. I'm sure Bethesda will clarify soon. Or rather, I hope they do. I don't quite get it.

I've played games that tried to have both real-time and turn-based combat, and it has never been great. Some examples:

Arcanum, by Troika (who expressed interest in the Fallout license before they went belly-up), had the worst implementation of real-time and turn-based combat in any RPG, in my opinion. The real-time combat was clearly unfinished, as it was much too fast to be playable. Rats could hit me about 3 times per second. I would sometimes be near death before I could even right-click on a monster! Even worse, it seems that the game’s turn-based mode had to make compromises to accommodate the real-time mode. So it ended up that Arcanum had a horrible real-time mode, and a disappointing turn-based mode. It was such a fantastic game otherwise. If only it stuck to one style of combat and did it well, we might have had another great RPG franchise like Fallout. It should have been the game that made Troika rich and famous.

Bioware RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Knights of the Old Republic used a “real-time with pause” combat system. In real-time mode, it was just something you watched. Then you had to slam the space bar to stop the action, give some orders to your characters, and hit the space bar again to see it all happen. Often, the orders you gave didn’t happen the way you intended them to. As a result, Baldur’s Gate had the most frustrating implementation of the Dungeons & Dragons rules I can imagine. Casting a fireball in such a system was a nightmare, since by the time the fireball went off everyone had moved and one of my characters had wandered into the fireball blast radius thanks to the flawed pathfinding AI! It was neither real-time nor turn-based, and certainly wasn’t strategic or fun. You can’t take a turn-based system like D&D and force it into a real-time system. KOTOR did a better job of this, but only by simplifying combat and making the game too easy.

It always ends up that one mode of play is better than the other. Sure, you could try to play Baldur's Gate in real-time mode, allowing your party members to operate mostly on AI, but you would be far more successful if you used the "pause mode" to micro-manage each character. If real-time mode was so inferior, why have it at all? If you've got one combat system that is fun, why offer a second? Have some confidence in your game design skills, game developers!

So, based on the Game Informer article (which could be inaccurate), it sounds like Fallout 3 is designed to have a turn-based system (VATS) that is the optimal way to play. The real-time mode may exist only to get through simple combat situations quickly, like killing rats that die in one hit.

Overall, I'm optimistic about the idea of VATS. It means that we'll get some sort of turn-based combat system combined with the immersion of a first-person perspective. I look forward to finding out more. A gameplay video that demonstrates VATS would be nice...