Fallout 3 Is a PC Game

Reports are that Bethesda's new title plays best on the PC.

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By John Gillooly on 29 October, 2008

I don’t bother reading game reviews much on the internet. After all, why bother filtering through stuff when you can just go to Metacritic and get an average number that instantly explains everything about a game.

Ok, a little sarcastic, but one thing that often frustrates me is the trend towards one review covering a multitude of platforms. As PC gamers, we know all to well that what’s good for the gamepad is often horrible for the WASD crowd. We’ve become used to afterthought porting, often times without even a token effort made to get rid of reference to console controls. Dead Space appears to be the latest big name game to suffer this fate.

So, often times the reviews just don’t apply to the PC. It becomes hard at times to even find a review of some product done on the PC, as the console version is both the one pushed by the game companies and often a more enjoyable experience to sit through.

Which is why I’ve been smiling at some of the Fallout 3 reviews flooding on to the net. It seems that the venerable PC franchise is bringing the PC gamers out of the woodwork. Even better, they are almost unanimously declaring that Fallout 3 is an excellent PC game. The review on Shacknews puts it best:

Fallout 3 is a PC game. Sure, it’s an Xbox 360 game, too. And it’s a PlayStation 3 game, I guess. It’s also an RPG, technically.

But when you get at the heart of it, Fallout 3 feels like a game designed for the PC. It has the soul of a big-boxed, full-manual, five-CD game from 1998. It has all the complexity and addictiveness of a System Shock, or a Deus Ex – or, yes, a Fallout.

Or, more simply, this quip from VE3D:

The graphics and controls on the PC version destroy that of its console cousins. All the jaggies and pop-ups are gone and the controls are way smooth.

Given the Fallout heritage and Bethesda’s entrenchment in PC gaming, you’d bloody well hope that it would be a great PC title. Bethesda, after all, pioneered the mouselook control system that the majority of PC games ended up using. It has been doing 3D PC titles for about as long as anyone, and while it has also been pumping out console titles for a few years now, its PC roots are still strong.

I’m still waiting to grab a copy of the game, and I’m trying to ignore the bulk of reviews until I play it, but just knowing that it won’t be an effort in control-fighting frustration makes me optimistic indeed.

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