Continuing the semi-regular Gamervision feature, Hit or Miss takes a look at one of the year's biggest upcoming titles and gives its best guess as to how it will do in sales and critical reception. 

Game: Fallout 3
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Release Date: Q4 2008 

Fallout 3 is, obviously, the third entry in the Fallout RPG series.  While the first two games were PC-exclusive 2D top-down games, the new iteration will be a fully 3D experience, played from a first or third-person perspective and available on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PCs.  Think of it as Oblivion in a post-apocalyptic future with lots of guns.

RPG fans love the Fallout series for its immersive futuristic story, its twisted sense of humor and its staggering amount of roleplaying flexibility.  The previous two titles allowed you to develop your character any way you wanted and did a great job of making you feel that your decisions had real ramifications in the game world. Fallout 3 looks to continue this with its expansive character creation tools, unique levelling system, known as "S.P.E.C.I.A.L.",  and a mission structure that guides you along different paths depending on how you complete prior missions. 

As for the humor aspect of the game, that's intact as well, with the threequel bringing back all the wacky "perks" (power-ups) from the originals, like "Bloody Mess", which turns all of your kills into spectacularly gruesome, bloody explosions of flying body parts.  Also returning to the series is the deep weapons customization system which allows you to modify existing guns as well as craft new ones from scratch out of found parts.

All this RPG goodness will play out in a massive open world environment that's described as "the world of 2050 as envisioned by those in the 1950s and then blown up in a nuclear war with China."  That world will be populated by hundreds of NPCs, and unlike Bethesda's other first-person hit, Oblivion, each one will have a unique voice and dialogue.  

Sales: Bethesda blew people away with Oblivion, selling over 3 million copies on the Xbox 360 and PS3.  Mass Effect, a game with similar RPG/shooter mechanics has moved over 1.5 million copies in less than 6 months.  If Fallout 3 can match or exceed the level of quality achieved in these games, sales of 2-3 million would not be at all surprising.  Even if the game isn't as good as I'm hoping it is, the creepy, BioShock-esque trailer will probably move 750k units by itself.

Reviews:  Nobody does first-person RPGs s well as Bethesda, so th franchise seems to be in good ands.   If the combat is anything like Mass Effect, though, we can expect a point deduction from just about every reviewer.  Additionally, the lack of any multiplayer functionality may be necessary for a game like this, but it could also hurt review scores.  If they manage to deliver on the promises they've made so far, though, expect a large amount of 9's and 10's.

Overall: While Fallout 3 will probably not be one of the biggest titles released for consoles this year, for many gamers, it wil be exactly what they're looking for.  RPG gun combat in a Mad-Max-like world?   Yes, please!  It will be a big enough hit that Fallout 4 will be a inevitability.

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