In the three years since its initial announcement, Fallout 3 has been scrutinized and criticized from all angles--before developer Bethesda Game Studios even released a single detail, screenshot, or trailer. Following up on a beloved cult classic open-ended RPG series whose reputation has grown to epic proportions, the game has quite a lot to live up to. I was recently able to visit Bethesda's Maryland offices, where the Elder Scrolls games are also made, to check out the game and get an idea of whether it is living up to its lofty expectations. Executive producer Todd Howard, who oversees all of the company's games, and lead designer Emil Pagliarulo, known for writing the Dark Brotherhood quest line in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, demonstrated early sections of Fallout 3 on Xbox 360 and spoke on various aspects of Bethesda's thinking behind the game.

War... War Never Changes
"In Vault 101, noone ever enters, and noone ever leaves. It is here you were born, and it is here you will die."

So speaks Ron Perlman, reprising his role as the series' intro narrator and prefacing one of the most fervently anticipated gaming experiences of the last decade. With the familiar line, "War... War never changes," Perlman once again recalls the events of the Great War that drove humanity into protected underground vaults and transformed the country into wasteland.

Fallout 3 takes place some 30 years after the events of Fallout 2. Though it follows the continuity of Fallout and Fallout 2, Fallout 3 does not pick up where its predecessor lays off. As many fans picked up based on the concept artwork, the game eschews the series' traditional California locales for an East Coast setting largely based around Washington, D.C.

"We do follow the continuity of Fallout 1 and 2," promised Howard, "though obviously they're set in the West Coast and we're set in the East Coast. When we do games, we don't like people to feel that they need to play the previous ones. We like to have lots of nods, and have the lore make sense. So it's not a continuation of that story, but it does say that stuff all happens. As far as the existence of Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel, we pretty much ignore their existence in the same way that I ignore Aliens 3 and 4."

It Takes a Vault to Raise a Child
Unlike in the original Fallout, which opens with the player being sent out of Vault 13, Fallout 3 spends a good deal of its initial gameplay within Vault 101--when the inevitable departure comes, the player will have a fuller sense of what is being left behind. The vault's insides are rendered gorgeously, with the series' trademark slick retro-future aesthetic managing to suggest a lived-in look. The overall lighting and ambiance is just right.

This vault section of the game spans several key periods in the player's life, starting--oddly enough--from birth, when the player chooses his or her character's physical traits. The appearance of your father, a crucial figure within the game's plot, is based heavily on your charater's own appearance, down to body type and ethnicity.

You'll also get a fill-in-the-blanks children's book serving as your initial character creation tool. Fallout 3 is again based on the series' S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat system, consisting of strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck.

At age one, you'll learn to walk. At age 10, you are granted a BB gun and the classic Pip-Boy 3000 accessory, a wrist-mounted device that allows access to character stats, quest goals, items, and an in-game radio. At 16, you take the G.O.A.T., or Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test, which serves as the last main round of character creation and allows you to select your specialized abilities.

Throughout these brief pictures of different eras from your vault life, elements will tie together to illustrate the passage of time. For example, the preadolescent bullies attending your birthday party during the age 10 segment reappear later at age 16 as a 50s-esque greaser gang.

Age 19 is where the story proper begins. For reasons unknown, your father--voiced unfortunately rather unremarkably by Liam Neeson--leaves the vault alone, and you of course set out into the barren post-apocalyptic wasteland to find out where he has gone and why.

"Fallout Is Yours"
"The first thing people usually ask us is, 'Why the fuck are you guys making Fallout?'" laughed Howard. "Which is a pretty good question," he added. "The prime reason is, when the game first came out, it was the kind of game that we really loved. It's a world where your actions really, really mattered."

Howard was already working at Bethesda when the group that would become known as Black Isle released Fallout in 1997. "We had just made Daggerfall, so we were very into our elves and swords and all that, and then this game comes along and we all started playing," he said. A sequel was released the following year, but Black Isle never revisited the series.

"One day, somebody made some crack that we should do it," said Howard. "Over time, it became, 'No, really, we should do it. Let's do it.'"

Bethesda started to look into the matter, contacting some friends at Fallout owner and publisher Interplay. Eventually, Bethesda acquired the game rights in 2004; this year, Bethesda took control of the entire property. "Pete left this sticky note on my keyboard when the deal was done," recalled Howard, "and it said, 'Fallout is yours.'"

Turn the page for details on Fallout 3's combat system and more.