With all of the hype surrounding Fallout 4, I thought it only appropriate that I work my way up to Fallout 4 by going through the games in the series, in chronological order. I already talked about Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Role Playing Game back in August and I apparently never finished the article I had written about Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (I also never finished after putting in 41 hours) and I am restarting Fallout 2 (again), so expect that article to be finished in about six months when I finally remember to post it. This all led me to starting Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition, which I just beat yesterday morning.
By now anyone finding this review (eight years after the game's initial release) will already know about the game so I will simply talk about my experience playing in the Wasteland that is/was Washington D.C. I will be bringing up specific story points in the game so there will be spoilers (y'all've been warned).
I feel that my largest critique of the game, was that the main quest felt kind of short and not overly developed. Once you leave Vault 101 (which happens to coincidentally coincide with a radroach infestation/attack?), you are on a hunt to find out why your father left and where he went. You end up a the nearest town, find out that your father went to a radio station (where you have to venture into the Mall to gather supplies/equipment/make-repairs before returning) so that you can find out your father went to a city in-a-boat, find out that he left there for another vault, find him at the vault, go back to the city-in-a-boat with him, go to his experiment, go back to Brotherhood of Steel, go to another vault, get kidnapped by "evil" organization, go back to BoS, then help launch attack against "evil" organization. End of main quest. Okay, so maybe the main quest really was not that short, but when thinking about the events that transpired, I feel like I did not do a whole lot. The thing about the main quest though, is that your destination will more often than not lead you to smaller side quests allowing you further exploration of the area.
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| So much area. |
And there are a great many areas that I have not visited/explored yet in the D.C. Wasteland. I have seen the White House from a distance, but I have yet to travel there. The capital, Arlington Cemetary, Lincoln Memorial, you know all the tourist attractions are places that I have yet to visit. I also have a lot of side quests to discover and a few to finish, and those are just the ones in the main game and not part of the five DLCs that came packaged with the "Game of the Year" edition. I did activate the "Steel" DLC about 55 hours in since I reached the level cap of 20. Before realizing that I had to activate the DLC to move beyond level 20, I hit a mental wall that made the game seem a lot less interesting. Like, I still had the main quest to complete (I hadn't reached the third required vault yet), noticed that my level said "MAX" and I just put the game down (after saving).
I also felt the desire to explore completely disappear. One of the great things about the games that Bethesda make, is that exploring off the beaten path happens all of the time. You see that you have a quest that takes you on the other side of some mountains and as you are traveling towards those mountains, you see a shack, or a cave, or a building with a door that looks like it is interact-able, so you go towards that thing and end up spending an hour exploring and gaining experience. Without the experience side of the exploration, I felt that the only reason to go into that cave was to acquire more stuff to sell to traders and caravans and I did not want that. If I were to see a group of Super Mutants off in the distance, I would be no longer compelled to travel in their direction to kill them/put them out of their perceived misery. That was when I discovered that the "Steel" DLC (which I had not installed manually) raised the level cap to 30. So presently I have only seven levels to figure out how not to lose that sense of adventure.
One interesting thing that I discovered after installing the "Steel" DLC was that the dog companion (apparently always named "Dogmeat") was a thing. I knew of the dog from Fallout although in my playthrough where I beat the game I never acquired him (although I did try to talk to the guy who was trying to get rid of Dogmeat and for whatever reason I just wasn't able to), but I did not know of Dogmeat's existence in this game until I saw the "Puppies" perk which allows the player to pick up a new dog at Vault 101 if Dogmeat dies. This was about 60 hours in now and I never came across anyone who was either trying to get rid of a dog or anywhere that lead me to finding a dog that would be my lifelong companion. Which is fine with me since I am frequently bothered by the NPC's AI as they try to run in for the kill and, as was the case with Fawkes, end up stealing my experience points if I didn't put in enough damage to the creature we were both trying to kill. So no Dogmeat for me.
One last story element that bothered me actually had to do with the aforementioned companion Fawkes. Fawkes is an intelligent Super Mutant that you gain as a companion late in the game (before you are kidnapped). Throughout the entire game, everyone mentioning Super Mutants are all fearful of them. Then all of a sudden, your character shows back up to the Brotherhood of Steel's headquarters (after earlier in the story they begrudgingly opened their doors for you, a smooth skinned human citizen) with this hulking Super Mutant wielding a gatling laser and no one says anything about him tagging along.
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| Everything's fine, no Super Mutant to see here. |
There was not even any NPC side comments that you overhear (or at least none that I heard). I felt that there should have been at least some acknowledgement that there was this normally aggressive and evil and always hunted down Super Mutant just hanging out. Imagine if Aragorn had strolled into Helm's Deep with an articulate Uruk-Hai behind him; or if Ridly returned to The Company with an Alien that spoke broken English with a British accent and no one in The Company says a word. I know, weird right?
While playing, I did at times experience various glitches in the game, most of which I could easily play through, while others caused the game to crash which required me to log out of my profile since Ctrl-Alt-Deleting or Alt-F4'ing out would not show a visible cursor and would have a blackened window at the bottom of the screen.
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| I believe I've been shot. . .? |
Instances like this were pretty common when they happened. There would be some type of tearing or extension of the characters or environment. Most of the time it was pretty amusing, but I knew that when this started happening, that I should be saving more often since the game could crash. Other instances of glitches was when sections of the screen (and in two cases the horizon) would become a gradient shade of depressing.
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| There's supposed to be more debris and buildings here, but you've seen enough of that, so here's some blueish-grey. |
When things like this happened, I pretty much resigned myself to saving and preparing to quit soon since a crash was imminent. Why this would happen I am not sure. All of my drivers are up-to-date and my computer model is less than a year old.
I would be lying if I were to say that Fallout 3 is not worth buying or that I did not have any fun during the 67 hours I put into this game over the last month and-a-half. I liked the art and design, the conversations with NPC's including all of the recorded dialogue, the music was bleak (and occasionally forgettable) yet fitting, and overall I enjoyed the world I was playing in. I will definitely go through most if not all of the DLC at some point, but as there are a great number of full games that I have yet to do more than look at, those additional stories may have to wait a bit. And then I will be moving onto Vegas for a while.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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