After playing through a good bit more of Fallout 3, I thought I’d make a series of posts to note some of my observations about the different aspects of the game. This one will focus on the combat. As expected, this works very differently depending on how much you choose to rely on the VATS system. VATS is really a variation of the bullet-time ability introduced in Max Payne except that it pauses everything while you decide what to do and allows you to target specific body parts. While paused, you decide what actions you’re going to perform using your allotment of Action Points, with different weapons costing a different amount of APs to fire. Once you’ve made your decisions, your actions are played out in a slow-motion cinematic which can be cool to watch the first several times.

The problem here is that since your APs regenerate naturally over time, it’s really easy to abuse the system. The easiest way to win fights is to attract the attention of an enemy, then get behind an obstacle to force the enemy to come towards you. Once the enemy rounds the corner, enter VATS mode to pump the enemy’s head with as many shots as you have APs for. If that’s still not enough, run around to keep the obstacle between you and the enemy until your APs regenerate and then repeat ad infinitum.

This results in fights that feel less than heroic, although one could argue that this is in keeping with the Fallout series since I recall that one commonly used exploit in the previous two games was to wait near a doorway for enemies to come through one at a time so that you could kill them easily. In Max Payne you had to continually kill enemies to recharge your bullet-time meter. This wouldn’t be thematically appropriate for Fallout but something along the same lines could have been included to restrict VATS use.

Another annoying aspect of VATS is that hit chances drop too much from distance. This again encourages the player to just hide around a corner to wait for the enemy to shoot him from point-blank range. It’s hard to be impressed with an assault rifle if it’s only effective against enemies who already right on top of you. Longer ranged weapons like the hunting rifle and the sniper rifle have reasonable hit changes in VATS from a medium distance away, but nothing like what they should be realistically capable of.

If you choose not to use VATS, then Fallout 3 plays more like a standard shooter, albeit a somewhat mediocre one. This is because the accuracy of your shots is still governed by your skill with the equipped weapon, so your bullets won’t go exactly where you intend them to go. The upside is that you’ll generally be able to hit things more accurately from further away than in VATS. Using a sniper rifle from extreme range allows you to effectively kill enemies without them not being able to see where you are. I find it generally more satisfying to fight in free-aim mode but I do resort to VATS if things get hairy.

Either way, combat generally results in very gory animations. This is easier to see in VATS mode due both to the slow-motion effects and the increased chance of doing a critical, but happens in free-aim mode well, even without the Bloody Mess perk. My complaint here is the animations simply aren’t realistic enough. Heads and limbs get chopped off too easily like parts off a Barbie doll. You’d expect a shotgun blast to the head to pulp it rather than slice it cleanly off. As talented as Bethesda’s artists are, you’d expect that they’d get better animators by now after all the complaints about the stiff animations of games like Morrowind and Oblivion.

All of this is not to say that combat in Fallout 3 is un-fun. On the contrary, it’s always entertaining to see a grenade explosion throw a Super Mutant into the air from time to time as in the screenshot above, or shoot a grenade out of the hand of an enemy just as he is about to throw it, but combat isn’t the reason why Fallout 3 is such a great game and there’s plenty of room for improvement here.