Post-Nuclear Role-playing
The Fallout series has been around for almost twenty years now, but it gained mainstream popularity with the third main entry, Fallout 3, in 2008. The game takes place decades after an apocalyptic nuclear war ravages the world, and your character steps out of her underground vault to explore the Capital Wastelands (the areas surrounding Washington D.C.). This game affords much more freedom to the player than previous games I have talked about; your character is not established in the fiction like Geralt in The Witcher or Commander Shepherd in Mass Effect. They are a construct, representing the player themselves, and so making choices becomes a more personal affair.
Radiant A.I.
Before you can understand how making choices affects the gameplay of Fallout 3, lets take a look at what makes the world tick, namely Bethesda's pretty amazing proprietary artificial intelligence Radiant A.I.. Instead of all the NPCs just standing around waiting for your character to come up and pay attention to them, they are all given a fairly broad schedule. For example, the A.I. could tell them to "Go to this town and eat at 2PM". How they decide to go about that task is up to them, if there are 3 taverns in the town than any one of them is fair game each time. Besides simple tasks like that, they also go to work, sleep, and visit other NPCs, basically have their own virtual lives apart from the actions of your character. All of this adds a sense of life to the world that greatly increases immersion. The main draw though, especially when it comes to choice, is the fact that the NPCs will remember your character's history and decisions, and react accordingly.
Resources
*Will be listed at end of Fallout 3 Part II
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