Fallout 3 - Preview @ CVG

Long write-up of a 5 hour play session of Fallout 3 by Will Porter.

Whereas Oblivion hid away many of its stats, or at least let you batter away in mindless ignorance, in Fallout Bethesda have pulled the link between player experience and player statistics closer to Black Isle's model.

As in the original games, your skill specialisations not only give you options in conversation (my medical bent would later lead a doctor to confide a patient's medical history to me, for example), or show themselves concretely in percentage strike-probabilities during V.A.T.S. combat, but are integral to your performance - such as when I disarmed the century-old nuclear device threatening the town of Megaton, having guzzled Mentats to make me extra brainy.

Having played the game for only five hours, and with many of the hang-ups people had with Oblivion only becoming apparent after 50, I can't be definitive about this - but in terms of building a modern game on the systems of one that's now 10 years old, it's hard to think of how Fallout 3 could have been tied closer to what has gone before.