Fallout 3 Q&A

You can probably tell by now that I’m a Fallout fanboy. I absolutely loved the series, so much that I even gave the PS2 version a chance. I think I played it for 4 hours before I gave up.

Fallout 3 developer Bethesda had a little community Q&A regarding the game. It covers a variety topics ranging from gameplay to the setting to NPCs. Here’s a sample, where someone wanted more information about the game’s combat system.

Because so many of us still don’t understand, could you describe VATS in painstaking detail? No really, please!

Let’s start with the gameplay. One, you can enter VATS, whenever you want, you just may not have enough AP do take any shots yet, or enough AP to do as many shots as you’d like. The AP needed to do a shot is based on the weapon’s rate of fire; pistols can get more shots off in VATS than a hunting rifle. The camera zooms in on the target from your eyes, as VATS does a scan of the target, and you get a percentage chance to hit each body part. This accomplishes two things: 1) it just looks really cool, we even use the “combat-turn” sound from Fallout 1 here, and 2) the scan actually is detecting how much of the body part you can see to get us a good hit percentage. That hit-chance is based on how much of the body part you can see, the distance, your skill, the weapon itself, and a base body part chance we set per body part. That last thing, the base chance, is needed for us to jack up or down the hit-chance for game balance, so even if the head is X size compared to the chest, we can adjust it.

You can view the rest here. It’s pretty extensive, covering just about everything you can think of regarding the upcoming title.

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