Fallout 3

The Good
Introduction sucks you in.

Storylines are well written.

Controls are functional and what you expect from Bethesda.

World-design is very intriguing and makes you want to explore.

Been able to lose limbs is an interesting idea.

Nice atmosphere.

Perks and leveling.

The Bad
This game just LOVES crashing.

Karma-system feels out of place.

The stats on items are vague at best.

Repairing weapons.

Too many different bullet-types.

The Bottom Line
Story

In Fallout 3 you take control of a “vault dweller”, one of many people who sealed themselves into an underground bunker in preparation for the nuclear apocalypse. The game starts quite literally where the character does, at your own birth. The introduction takes you through several stages of your character’s life and has you making small choices that change your statistics and future appearance. Most Bethesda games do this kind of thing, but I must say that Fallout 3 is the first time they have done it right. Whereas in Oblivion and Skyrim you just magically arrive in the world with no backstory at all, this intro not only serves to fill you in on the lore, but it also familiarizes you with the characters and makes you emotionally invested. Soon enough though, the shit hits the fan and your father leaves the vault overnight, forcing you to go after them lest the security forces pound your brains in.

Once outside the true Bethesda feel takes over and you are free to pursue your father or delve into hundreds of fascinating side-quests. To my knowledge the team that wrote the Dark Brotherhood quests from Oblivion was in control of all the missions in this game and this leaves us with much better tasks than ever before. One point that still bugs me though and this is true for every Bethesda game I play, is that characters seem way too trusting. In the very first town I was approached by two individuals, one of which wanted me to set off a nuke that was in the town and the other wanted me to get irradiated for the sake of her research. Both of those requests seem like basic RPG-stuff, but consider for a moment that I just randomly walked into a bar after freshly emerging from a cave and suddenly some guy asks me to murder hundreds of innocent people. His justification was “you have no connections here” and while that is true, it still seems risky to assume random people might be insane enough to do something like that.

Gameplay

There are two problems that make playing Fallout 3 feel rather rocky: the interface and the fighting. Let’s talk about the interface first. The problem is that they tried to go more for atmosphere than functionality, so you get a rickety old computer that serves as your inventory, quest-log, map and everything else. The lack of size however means they had to cut down on text and minimize the amount of information that you can see, so a lot of terms that you need to remember are also abbreviated. It can also get downright confusing, such as when I scoffed down a handful of items that I thought would reduce my radiation poisoning, but after closer inspection were expensive radiation-resistance booting items. Where the combat falls flat is that it sometimes feels like a modded Oblivion, especially some guns feel more like firing arrows than firing actual bullets. At least in Oblivion every bow didn’t need some kind of fancy different ammo-type though! I am always low on ammo because there are so many types that it gets ridiculous, I can agree that a sniper shouldn’t have the same ammo as a rocket launcher, but then why did they group together pistols with SMG’s? Sneaking and explosives can also be really obnoxious, especially sneaking which you need to level up really high to have any use from. Most enemies spot you regardless of whether you are sneaking or not, some even from a considerable distance.

Everything outside of combat is very good though and I especially like the new mini-games they came up with for lock picking and hacking. These mini-games nicely combine the player’s own skill with the points they cared to invest in the stats-screen. Gaining a new level is also amazingly satisfying because of the brilliant perks you can get every time you do. After putting your points into the skills you want to upgrade, you’ll be send to a different screen where you can select a special upgrade. These make use of incomparables, meaning you can’t weigh off the effect of one against the other and decide which one is the best (as you could with a weapon in a RPG). Instead there are options like “getting gorier kills” or “special dialogue combined with more damage against male enemies” and the likes. It’s a bit rough around the edges and there are too many perks that just instantly boost your regular skills, but this is something that needs to be perfected. There is also not so much managing to do and this really benefits the more explorative nature of Bethesda games. Instead of spending minutes of your time comparing weapons in the interface, Fallout keeps everything rather straight in terms of items and armor. There are only a handful of weapons that give you bonuses and most of the time it comes down to what you happen to like, I decided to take a bit of everything in terms of weapons and I never had to deal with fancy firearms because the game just gives you a pistol, not a “venomous pistol of fiery death”, But a regular pistol. You just need to make sure you keep the ammo coming and invest skills in your shooting if you want to get better with it.

I must also say that they ironed out a lot of flaws that soured Oblivion for me. Times after the nuclear war are tough, so tough that nobody can really claim authority and punish you. In Oblivion (and to a lesser extent Skyrim) you would always run into pesky guards that punish you for the slightest provocation. The laughably bad AI often had them drawing their weapons when you did something as innocent as taking a cherry from a bowl in someone’s living room. Fallout doesn’t have that and instead the law of the gun is in place. If you do something people don’t like they’ll shoot you and you can shoot back, the one who lives was in the right. Loading times are also notably faster and there is a lot less time wasted on asking questions about the lore, time that you can instead spend on having more fun.

Presentation

In recent years the market has become flooded with games which have a very brown and gritty style of graphics, but Fallout manages to impress, even with this bland aesthetic. How they did this is simple: they just designed the world to be as atmospheric and imposing as possible. I have walked through roughly a hundred ruined cities in my gaming career and never have abandoned buildings seemed so eerie, never has a wasteland felt so full of adventure and NEVER have I screamed like a little girl while exploring relatively simple areas. The last time the game scared me was even more humiliating than you would think, because I was looking at a distant sculpture thinking it was an enemy, only to be jumped at by a cockroach instead. My point is that with good level design and the right atmosphere, even the overused brown aesthetic can be made into something entertaining.

The in-game presentation is amazing, but there is still something that bothers me: The technical aspect of this game. I bought the Game of the Year edition on Steam, this assuming it would come with all the DLC and with most of the bugs worked out. I was VERY wrong about the latter. The game did start up after the installation, which is at least further than Bioshock got, but after that it became a hell. The game would crash randomly almost every ten minutes for no apparent reason and trying to fix it took me several hours of looking through forums. It turned out that it was a processing problem and I had to edit lines of code in the .ini file… I don’t care what you say, that is fucking inexcusable. Even after I fixed it did crashes remain fairly common, especially when alt-tabbing or locking the computer. I bought this game at 11AM and was busy with it all day. At the end of that same day I had only racked up a total of 2 hours of actual playtime and I had only just left the vault.

Replay value

Bethesda games have always suffered from the fact that they aren’t really fun to replay, but save-files can’t be relied upon to stick around either. Sooner or later you are going to delete your file by accident or it will just get corrupted. In a game with so many variables (to the point that it saves the placement of every single item you drop) there will be a point at which it will just burst and die. This is often the point where I stop playing these games: it happened after 500+ hours in Oblivion, it happened after 75+ hours in Skyrim and I fear for the day that it will happen with my Fallout save. I really recommend that you make back-ups of your save, just to make sure you won’t lose them.

To its credits: Fallout 3 is more replayable than any of the Elder Scroll games. This is because the game is not very big on lore and therefore you can play it again without having to sit through endless conversations again. Having to repeat quests is still very obnoxious though, as it will always be. The many choices you make in Fallout’s story do seem to have more of an impact and aren’t as bland as in other games that claim to have choice. Sometimes you are even making choices while you don’t realize it, such as when I murdered my way through a cave where some troublemakers were residing, only to come to the realization that I could have let them live and get a whole different experience. “Choosing” how your character develops is still pretty simple though, even more so than normally. In Oblivion there were milestones that gave you bonuses when investing enough points in your skills, but here your accuracy just increases or you unlock tougher challenges. Especially the weapon-based skills are somewhat odd, since you can get along just fine without them if you’re good at shooting games.

Extras

Outside of the main story there is plenty to do in Fallout 3 and I am not talking mini-games here. There are many side-quests that you can pick up, most of which are longer than your average MMO fetch-quest. Finding these quests is also a small task on its own, as you will have to ask NPC’s for rumors or possible leads. The map is also pretty large and some quests are hidden in obscure locations, so if the dungeons alone didn’t provide enough incentive already, there is also the joy of finding a new story to follow by simply stumbling upon a shack. Fallout 3 also has a total of five DLC packs that you can purchase (or get for free with the Game of the Year edition) that add a new main story line to the original game (I’ll review them individually later).

The level cap in this game is twenty, which isn’t that high, but any higher would have rendered the Perks system useless. As stated before there isn’t a lot of grinding to be done for weapons either, but there are still some neat ones that require some extra work and searching. Once you’re done with all of that, I suppose you could try to clear every dungeon, but that would really be pushing the content to the maximum. One problem though is that the final mission of the main quest also marks the end of the journey and if you finish it, then you are send back to the menu. The only way to explore the content after the final mission is to reload a save, but the game locks the doors after the game auto-saves from entering the last room. This is very obnoxious if you have no extra saves to load up, because the only way out is to buy the DLC-pack “Broken Steel”, which will make you pass out and wake up in The Citadel area.

Verdict

Fallout 3 is so far my favorite Bethesda game out there and in the land of RPG’s it ranks fairly high. While the gameplay tends to be a bit rocky and unbalanced, the story and atmosphere do more than enough to make up for that. One thing I can’t forgive however is the load of technical problems I had while using the Steam version of this game, including not receiving the DLC and having the game take a million screenshots at random moments throughout the game. I know some people still claim to this day that Fallout 3 is a bad game because of how different it is from the original games, but frankly I prefer it when a franchise has some diversity (such as Donkey Kong Country), as opposed to just making the same kind of game over and over again (the direction Kingdom Hearts is going in).

Fans of the old Fallout games are certain to have some good times revisiting the Wasteland and Vaults with this game, as long as they are willing to deal with a slightly less complex experience and more streamlined controls. Likewise Bethesda fans are certain to have a blast with this if they can deal with the lack of medieval themes that usually characterize Bethesda’s high-profile titles. If you have never played the games I mentioned, then you can also ask yourself if you would be interested in a somewhat challenging open-world RPG. If the answer is “yes”, then sit down and enjoy some Fallout 3.

The Good
Fallout 3, the game that I have been waiting for since I finished Fallout 2. Why back in 1998. Some 10 years later, and Bethesda finally makes good and releases Fallout 3 upon us. After so many false starts, can this be true at last? Am I really writing this review. Or am just dreaming that I am a man writing this review?

Oh sorry for my metaphysical meltdown just now, I haven’t slept in days. When I first heard that Bethesda was making Fallout 3, I felt elated yet not. I mean it could have been worse, what if Square soft had made it? It would have spiky haired goobers, teenage melodrama, kindergarten philosophy, and gasp, a contrived plot.

Can Bethesda’s unusual style of games live up to the classic imaginings of Black Isle? (And am I crazy or is everyone stealing my use of casual asides?-MM-)

To say that I was intrigued would be a bit of a misnomer. I preordered the game, the special edition, and went to the midnight launch. I did not sleep much that night, I can tell you.

Set about 20-30 years after the events of Fallout 2. We find that the wastelands are in worse shape than ever. Humanity has made little progress in turning back the tide, and reclaiming it’s past. Things really are worse than ever.

It is into this cruel world you are thrust. Will you help man’s progress or hinder it? Or maybe you don’t care either way.

Fallout 3 starts out very interestingly, and oddly it starts off with you as a baby. With simple objectives like “walk to dad”. It continues as you grow up in a Vault. Until on your 19th birthday, the game begins in full.

Your dad has gone missing. And Vault 101 is in uproar. Some of your friends are dying and the Overseer blames you, for the troubles, this leads to one of your first moral choices. You eventually make into the harsh wastes, leaving behind all you knew. Your goal is simple to find your dad. From here things get more complicated, at the fate of humanity will be on your hands.

There are tons of quests in the world of Fallout 3. Besides the main ones, there are a good number of large ones, from the world spanning, Nuka Cola Challenge, to helping, Moria complete her “Wasteland Survival Guide”.

There are also a slew of other things to do. From finding as many of the mini-encounters that you can. To collecting bobble heads, killing all the super mutant behemoths, the list goes on. Furthermore the Capital Wastelands are huge. And to see all the game has to offer will take quite a bit of exploring.

The setting is interesting as well. Instead of the West Coast of the USA, it takes place in the ruins of DC, the “Capital Wastelands”. Having walked those same streets myself in the real world, I found Fallout 3, chilling. Particularly when walking down Pennsylvania Ave. I have also been to the west coast, and did not find it invoked the same feelings. Perhaps because Fallout 3 just had better graphics, or perhaps it is because you do not see any real world places in Fallout 1&2. You can even travel to Bethesda, MA!

Fallout 3 takes place in an alternate reality. In which technology is largely based on nuclear power. Yet everything still has that 40’s-50’s art deco thing going on. This installment also keeps the series dark humor in tack. From the ridiculous notion of the coin-operated bomb shelter, the stupid grin of Vault boy, or the slogans like, “When the world ends, your life doesn’t have to!”

Now I would like to talk about V.A.T.S., and Fallout 3’s combat system. No V.A.T.S. is not a strange cult that worships a dead sci-fi author, or a special interest group, or a new age diet. It is the Vault Assisted Targeting System. Or VATS for short.

V.A.T.S. plays very much like the turn based system of the previous games in the series as well as Arcanum. During combat you can pause the action, and enter how many shots you want to take and what parts of the body you want to target. Head shots can kill the quickest. But a well placed leg shot can cripple your enemies, an arm shot can greatly reduce there aim. The amount of shots you get is based on your AP, which is based on your level, more on that later.

There is also standard FPS style combat, which is much more challenging that the V.A.T.S. And does not include to wicked cool death animations. The boys at Bethesda, took the Burnout franchise’s concept of realistic damage, and transferred it from cars, to super mutants. These animations are fun to watch and never get old. What better way to finish off a pesky mutant, than by blowing it’s head off, and seeing his eyeballs fly off. The gratuitous violence reminds me of the old skool shooter, Rise Of The Triad.

But wait there’s more! With the plasma gun you can turn your foe into a pile of goo! Fun for the whole family!

There are tons of guns and weapons in Fallout 3. There are of course the standards, like pistols, machine guns, and shot guns. Which are all fun to play with. But it is the absurd weapons that steal the show. Like the Fatman launcher, which fires mini-nukes. Be warned that there is a limited number of the mini nukes in the game. The is also the shiskabob, a flaming blade, that will slash and burn some super mutants. Other favorites of mine include the rail spike gun, which does exactly as it’s name implies, and fires rail spikes. And of course the junk gun, which fires well junk. These last three have to made on one of the workbenches found in the game.

Leveling up in Fallout 3 is your more standard system. You gain experience, and when enough is gained you level up. Each new level you can pick what skills you want, as well as a new perk. You gain perks quicker this time around. You can also supplement your levels by finding magazines. Guns & Bullets, raises your small guns skill, Lying Congressional Style, increases your charisma. And Grognak: The Barbarian, raises you melee skills.

There is also the Karma system. But fear not it goes beyond the good and evil thing.(Hey I’m philosopher and don’t know it!-MM-) There is good, bad, and neutral karma. Which lead to different perks, as well as different endings. There are also special perks which are quest related.

The graphics in Fallout 3, run on a modified Oblivion engine. And it’s looks fantastic. The world of Fallout is bleak, and terrible, yet beautiful, at the same time. (It’s like Detroit!-MM-) And the lighting effect are superb. As is the overall design. From the humans and non-humans of Fallout, to the places, you will go.

The sound and music excels as well. From the music composed for the game, to the licensed music. It’s all from the 40’s and 50’s and like Bioshock, fit’s the game wonderfully. A lot of reviews claim that the voice acting is not that good. How can that be when Ron Perlman, and Liam Neeson, and Malcolm McDowell, all lend there talents? I think what these reviewers meant to say was that all the minor characters do not sound that good. (Have these people played Final Fantasy X? They could not have if they think that this is bad!-MM-)

And that is not even entirely true. It is not that they do not sound good. It’s more to do with that you hear the same voices over and over. There is only one voice for the ghouls for example.

Another nice little effect is the radio. During the game you can hear Three-Dog, the non fascist radio personality, recount your heroic endeavors.

The Bad
For some reason Bethesda decided, that the level cap would be Lvl 20. Why? By mid game I was already maxed out! And the non-VATS combat tends to get a little clunky.

Venturing the seemingly endless subway systems gets old. The good news is once you have already discovered an area you can just zip there via your fast travel.

The A.I. can act oddly at times. And the bugs do not help. But they are not as bad as some may want to believe.

Exploring the wastes is not as fun as it should be. At least later in the game. When giant rad-scorpions ambush you constantly. And the enemy re-spawn rate is way to high!

The Bottom Line
Overall, Fallout 3 was worth the decade long wait. And while it is not the same as the other ones that is kind of the point, to re imagine the Fallout universe for today’s game market. If your PC can run it, or you have a Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3, you are required to play this game! Seriously, I know where you live!

Here to Fallout 4, not taking another 10 years!

The Good
Full 3D world, good graphics.

Very entertaining when playing without questioning things.

The Bad
Bugs and crashes.Lots of them.

Failed to establish the same atmosphere from the predecessors.

The Bottom Line
Being an old school player, I had the privilege of being able to play the series back in the day. They were something completely new then, and still are, since there is a lack of successors. However fallout 3, which caused me much anxiety, was something different.

When I first got the game, I had problems trying to run it, every time I clicked in new game, the game closed. After just a few hours of useless patching (yes, it took hours), I discovered that I was not the only one with this problem and just gave up, gave the dvd to a friend of mime, just to find later that he had no problems to run it, except for recurring crashes, that look like everybody else had.

The game extinguished the isometric theme of the series, adding a new 3D world, which is a very good thing, but apparently the attention to the graphics are not reflected in the rest of the game: the optional missions are varied, but with tenuous motivation. The VATS system seems to be a murdering tool, implemented to disguise the FPS nature of the game, instead of a remake of the old system of post-apocalyptic atmosphere combat. The atmosphere did not save the game to resemble "Oblivion with guns", an unhappily true cliche by now. There are many small illogical details, as the fact that you cannot sleep in a bed you don't own. All this leads me to believe that this is not only an unreliable sequence of fallout, but even not a pure RPG (consider the fact that the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system has only a fraction of the game effect from the previous), just a commercial exploit with the name of the series and most of their elements.

Nevertheless, the title is interesting as a FPS dressed up like a RPG. If seen this way, it offers a good deal of action (since gun blazing it's the way to go, unlike the previous two games when you could beat the game killing only the final boss, not necessarily fighting) and the bonus of good music and a bit (or a lot,if you like) of wandering mixed with a different background of most contemporary action games, which are settled almost exclusively in WWII and modern warfare environments. Therefore, it's recommended for a large audience, and should earn a higher score if it wasn't the bugs and crashes.