2008 was a monumental year for games, most of my favourite games of all time released in that year. I didn’t get on to the seventh generation of consoles until around halfway through 2009 when I was given an Xbox 360 for my birthday. I’d been saving up to buy one myself so I, as any teenage boy would, put all the money I had been saving into buying games for the system. I got some great 2008 titles like Gears of War 2, Dead Space, Halo Wars, and Mirror’s Edge. But there was one game I bought that I thought sounded cool, but didn’t realise quite what I was getting myself in for, or how much it would impact my gaming habits forever. That game was Fallout 3.
As the title suggests it is the third entry in the Fallout series, yet it could quite easily be labelled as the first entry of the new style of Fallout games. It was the first Fallout title to be developed and published by new owners Bethesda. It was the first mainline Fallout title to launch on home consoles. It was the first Fallout title that was fully 3D, and it also ditched the turn based combat the series had utilised previously in favour of playing more like a first/third person shooter. What Bethesda had done was put the signature Fallout art style and some of the iconic mechanics into the game design of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and the result was intended to be something that returning fans would feel familiar with whilst bringing the series truly into the 21st century, and also attract lots of newcomers with the boom of first person action games that was happening at the time.
Fallout 3 is an open world, post-apocalyptic role-playing game where you, the Lone Wanderer, travel the wasteland of Washington D.C. and it’s surrounding areas in search of your father.
As the title suggests it is the third entry in the Fallout series, yet it could quite easily be labelled as the first entry of the new style of Fallout games. It was the first Fallout title to be developed and published by new owners Bethesda. It was the first mainline Fallout title to launch on home consoles. It was the first Fallout title that was fully 3D, and it also ditched the turn based combat the series had utilised previously in favour of playing more like a first/third person shooter. What Bethesda had done was put the signature Fallout art style and some of the iconic mechanics into the game design of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and the result was intended to be something that returning fans would feel familiar with whilst bringing the series truly into the 21st century, and also attract lots of newcomers with the boom of first person action games that was happening at the time.
Fallout 3 is an open world, post-apocalyptic role-playing game where you, the Lone Wanderer, travel the wasteland of Washington D.C. and it’s surrounding areas in search of your father.
You start the game fittingly enough with your birth. You can choose your sex, race, hairstyle, and fine tune all the small features of your future face here. You’re then taken through a prologue that skips to important moments of the first 18 years of your life where you’re taught the basic mechanics of the game in safe environments away from the dangers of the wasteland. You’re born in Vault 101, a nuclear bunker for large numbers of civilisation that was built for when the bombs fell in 2077. 200 years have passed with nobody in or out of the vault, until your father decides to up and leave one day. You’re hunted down by the Vault security team who want to interrogate you as to why your father escaped, but you’re more concerned about going after him. So, you too leave the safety and security of Vault 101 and emerge to find the destroyed, irradiated remnants of Washington D.C., The Capitol Wasteland as the residents of a nearby town inform you it is referred to.
As I previously stated your main quest is to follow the breadcrumbs left by your father, to go from settlement to settlement in search of him. To find out why he left, and ultimately aid him in trying to restore life to the Capitol Wasteland by purifying the irradiated water sources, or by aligning with a different faction and poisoning the water further to eliminate all life in the area. But along the way you’ll interact with the various settlers, traders, slavers, and factions that make up the Capitol Wasteland’s populous. They’ll often have things that need doing, and you’ll often be in the market for new armour, weapons, or just good old-fashioned financial gain which they will provide you with for helping them with their problems. They could be simple fetch quests such as one given by an old lady named Agatha who asks you to retrieve a rare violin from a nearby Vault; or they could be lengthy multi-faceted adventures such as one you can pick up very early on in the game where you help out with research for someone’s book called ‘The Wasteland Survival Guide’ where you must undertake a whole variety of different tasks, some of which you will have to travel great distances to fulfil the authors criteria.
There are hundreds of stories that The Capital Wasteland has in store for the Lone Wanderer, so whilst the main quest can be a little underwhelming at times, particularly its conclusion, it’s the incredible people you meet along the way that make the journey worthwhile. Fallout 3 encourages you to forget about finding dad for a few days whilst you trek off into the wilderness in search of new settlements and stories to be a part of.
My personal favourite quest is an optional one and called ‘Trouble on the Homefront’. You’ll only pick up the quest if you happen to pass nearby Vault 101 again after quite some time after you leave it. You’ll pick up a distress signal from your childhood friend, Amata, who is hoping that you will hear the signal and return to Vault 101 and save her. When you break back into the Vault you find that once you and your father left more vault dwellers wanted to leave. The Overseer, the man elected to be in charge of the Vault, denies this request though and a full-scale riot has broken out. It’s your job to ease tensions however possible, and in whatever way you so wish. You could kill the Overseer and allow those who want to leave to do so. You could speak with the Overseer to allow for excursions in and out of the Vault. You could talk to the ones leading the riots and try to convince them that life inside the Vault is much better than life outside the Vault. There are even more ways you could tackle the situation and all of them provide different resolutions that will impact how the world views you. For instance, if your friend Amata leaves the Vault as a result of ‘Trouble on the Homefront’, you will at some point later in the game encounter her dead body or see her murdered. She isn’t suited to life outside the Vault, but your actions are the cause of her leaving. Small details like that make decisions weigh on your mind much more than most choice-based games that don’t always necessarily show you the repercussions of your actions, you’re just told it’s good or bad. Fallout 3 often idles on these choices for a while and sometime later you’ll feel the repercussions of it personally.
As I previously stated your main quest is to follow the breadcrumbs left by your father, to go from settlement to settlement in search of him. To find out why he left, and ultimately aid him in trying to restore life to the Capitol Wasteland by purifying the irradiated water sources, or by aligning with a different faction and poisoning the water further to eliminate all life in the area. But along the way you’ll interact with the various settlers, traders, slavers, and factions that make up the Capitol Wasteland’s populous. They’ll often have things that need doing, and you’ll often be in the market for new armour, weapons, or just good old-fashioned financial gain which they will provide you with for helping them with their problems. They could be simple fetch quests such as one given by an old lady named Agatha who asks you to retrieve a rare violin from a nearby Vault; or they could be lengthy multi-faceted adventures such as one you can pick up very early on in the game where you help out with research for someone’s book called ‘The Wasteland Survival Guide’ where you must undertake a whole variety of different tasks, some of which you will have to travel great distances to fulfil the authors criteria.
There are hundreds of stories that The Capital Wasteland has in store for the Lone Wanderer, so whilst the main quest can be a little underwhelming at times, particularly its conclusion, it’s the incredible people you meet along the way that make the journey worthwhile. Fallout 3 encourages you to forget about finding dad for a few days whilst you trek off into the wilderness in search of new settlements and stories to be a part of.
My personal favourite quest is an optional one and called ‘Trouble on the Homefront’. You’ll only pick up the quest if you happen to pass nearby Vault 101 again after quite some time after you leave it. You’ll pick up a distress signal from your childhood friend, Amata, who is hoping that you will hear the signal and return to Vault 101 and save her. When you break back into the Vault you find that once you and your father left more vault dwellers wanted to leave. The Overseer, the man elected to be in charge of the Vault, denies this request though and a full-scale riot has broken out. It’s your job to ease tensions however possible, and in whatever way you so wish. You could kill the Overseer and allow those who want to leave to do so. You could speak with the Overseer to allow for excursions in and out of the Vault. You could talk to the ones leading the riots and try to convince them that life inside the Vault is much better than life outside the Vault. There are even more ways you could tackle the situation and all of them provide different resolutions that will impact how the world views you. For instance, if your friend Amata leaves the Vault as a result of ‘Trouble on the Homefront’, you will at some point later in the game encounter her dead body or see her murdered. She isn’t suited to life outside the Vault, but your actions are the cause of her leaving. Small details like that make decisions weigh on your mind much more than most choice-based games that don’t always necessarily show you the repercussions of your actions, you’re just told it’s good or bad. Fallout 3 often idles on these choices for a while and sometime later you’ll feel the repercussions of it personally.
There’s an awful lot of world to explore in Fallout 3. Roughly 289 square miles of wasteland for you to explore however you wish. You could make a beeline on the main quest and literally only ever explore the south east corner of the map where central D.C. is. There’s a lot packed in there, so you’ll still see plenty of stuff. But if you travel north to the mountainous regions, or west to the open plains you’ll find a wealth of civilisations with stories of their own, or long forgotten ruins to be explored and looted. The gameplay of Fallout 3 can be quite varies depending on how you want to approach it. During the opening of the game you set your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes, and these often determine how you will play the game. Each letter stands for something important, Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. If you invest all of your limited attribute points into Strength, you’ll have none left for anything else. That’s great if you want to have a load of health and hit hard with melee weapons. But you’ll often come across problems that cannot be resolved with Strength alone. I personally tend to invest into Charisma more than the other attributes. It benefits me the opportunity to talking my way out of problems, or into places I wouldn’t normally be able to access. For example, a high charisma could allow me to skip out most of the main quest because I can charm people into telling me where my dad went, rather than running errands for them.
Attached to the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system is your skills. Skills are quite straightforward to understand but how high each of them starts as depends on how you spent your attribute points at the start. When you earn enough XP through combat or completing objectives, you’ll level up. Levelling up nets you some skill points which can then be used to further upgrade any skills you want. High speech skills work well with high charisma characters. But I could also use this opportunity to upgrade my lockpicking skills, or my computer hacking skills in order to access locked doors or containers. I could upgrade my weapon proficiency, so I aim better and do more damage with certain weapon types. Finally, you have perks. You can choose one new perk every time you rank up, and some perks can be unlocked multiple times in order to reap multiplier benefits from them. Things like earn 10% more XP with each rank of one particular perk. Another one allows you to have unique speech options when speaking to children, often allowing you to gain information they have about the adults. One even just increases the likelihood of blood and gore effects when in combat, so you can see heads explode when you shoot them even more regularly.
How you invest in the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, spend your skill points, and choose your perks determines how you play the game. You could be a gunslinger, an explosives expert, a smooth talker, a thief, a scientist, or more. But general wasteland exploration will require you to rely on weapons. These can be melee weapons like baseball bats or surgical chainsaws; explosives like grenades or mines; small weapons like pistols and assault rifles; or all the way up to big weapons like miniguns and rocket launchers. To be proficient in these weapon types you must invest your skill points wisely. I usually rely on melee weapons early on in the game, then once I’ve stockpiled enough ammo I’ll rely on small guns as much as possible. Combat can either be handled like most first or third person shooters, but the aiming isn’t all that good, so you’ll often want to rely on the Vault Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.). This pauses the game and allows you to target where you want to attack an enemy and cue up the attacks. Once you’ve done so the combat will play out in a cinematic sequence without player input. V.A.T.S. uses Action Points so you can’t use it all the time, but so long as you have invested your points wisely you should be able to regenerate points fairly quickly.
It’s recommended that you explore every nook and cranny of environments to scavenge all the supplies you could ever need. Health items, armour, weapons, ammo, money, anything that sounds useful probably is. There are also scrap items you can pick up and sell to traders or even fashion them into new weapons provided you have the blueprints for them.
The last major pillar of gameplay is conversations. You’ll spend a lot of time talking to other survivors and Fallout gives you the option of what you want to say to them, or how to respond to what they ask you. It’s a very straightforward system where you select your response from a list at the bottom of the screen. Some responses will require you to have invested a lot of points into the speech skill and these are indicated by a % of how likely you are to succeed using that response. It’s never impossible to win speech challenges even if you don’t invest any points in speech, but the more you do invest the more likely you are to get your way with things. You can also unlock new speech options by unlocking speech related perks such as ‘Child at Heart’. So long as you have the required perk you will always succeed with these speech options, but often the same result can be gained through different conversation paths or by helping the person you’re talking to with something.
With all these different gameplay options, you could quite easily never play Fallout 3 the same way twice. You’re also highly unlikely to see everything in one play through of the game either. There are also karma mechanics in the game meaning that people will judge you based on your actions. If you go around killing unarmed civilians, then some settlements will shun you or shoot you on sight. You may even face higher prices at trading outposts because your custom isn’t welcome there. But if you’re revered enough then you may fall in favour with some of the more unsavoury types like slavers or mercenaries. On the other hand, if you’re well known to be an upstanding do-gooder then you’ll likely be benefited in several ways, but also be more likely to be targeted by those with no morals.
Attached to the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system is your skills. Skills are quite straightforward to understand but how high each of them starts as depends on how you spent your attribute points at the start. When you earn enough XP through combat or completing objectives, you’ll level up. Levelling up nets you some skill points which can then be used to further upgrade any skills you want. High speech skills work well with high charisma characters. But I could also use this opportunity to upgrade my lockpicking skills, or my computer hacking skills in order to access locked doors or containers. I could upgrade my weapon proficiency, so I aim better and do more damage with certain weapon types. Finally, you have perks. You can choose one new perk every time you rank up, and some perks can be unlocked multiple times in order to reap multiplier benefits from them. Things like earn 10% more XP with each rank of one particular perk. Another one allows you to have unique speech options when speaking to children, often allowing you to gain information they have about the adults. One even just increases the likelihood of blood and gore effects when in combat, so you can see heads explode when you shoot them even more regularly.
How you invest in the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, spend your skill points, and choose your perks determines how you play the game. You could be a gunslinger, an explosives expert, a smooth talker, a thief, a scientist, or more. But general wasteland exploration will require you to rely on weapons. These can be melee weapons like baseball bats or surgical chainsaws; explosives like grenades or mines; small weapons like pistols and assault rifles; or all the way up to big weapons like miniguns and rocket launchers. To be proficient in these weapon types you must invest your skill points wisely. I usually rely on melee weapons early on in the game, then once I’ve stockpiled enough ammo I’ll rely on small guns as much as possible. Combat can either be handled like most first or third person shooters, but the aiming isn’t all that good, so you’ll often want to rely on the Vault Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.). This pauses the game and allows you to target where you want to attack an enemy and cue up the attacks. Once you’ve done so the combat will play out in a cinematic sequence without player input. V.A.T.S. uses Action Points so you can’t use it all the time, but so long as you have invested your points wisely you should be able to regenerate points fairly quickly.
It’s recommended that you explore every nook and cranny of environments to scavenge all the supplies you could ever need. Health items, armour, weapons, ammo, money, anything that sounds useful probably is. There are also scrap items you can pick up and sell to traders or even fashion them into new weapons provided you have the blueprints for them.
The last major pillar of gameplay is conversations. You’ll spend a lot of time talking to other survivors and Fallout gives you the option of what you want to say to them, or how to respond to what they ask you. It’s a very straightforward system where you select your response from a list at the bottom of the screen. Some responses will require you to have invested a lot of points into the speech skill and these are indicated by a % of how likely you are to succeed using that response. It’s never impossible to win speech challenges even if you don’t invest any points in speech, but the more you do invest the more likely you are to get your way with things. You can also unlock new speech options by unlocking speech related perks such as ‘Child at Heart’. So long as you have the required perk you will always succeed with these speech options, but often the same result can be gained through different conversation paths or by helping the person you’re talking to with something.
With all these different gameplay options, you could quite easily never play Fallout 3 the same way twice. You’re also highly unlikely to see everything in one play through of the game either. There are also karma mechanics in the game meaning that people will judge you based on your actions. If you go around killing unarmed civilians, then some settlements will shun you or shoot you on sight. You may even face higher prices at trading outposts because your custom isn’t welcome there. But if you’re revered enough then you may fall in favour with some of the more unsavoury types like slavers or mercenaries. On the other hand, if you’re well known to be an upstanding do-gooder then you’ll likely be benefited in several ways, but also be more likely to be targeted by those with no morals.
Visually Fallout 3 is pretty ugly. Not in the, it’s a destroyed world so of course it’s going to be ugly way, but more regarding the way things are a bit blocky looking and textures aren’t particularly eye pleasing. When compared to other games release at the time Fallout 3 looks pretty bad, but some of these issues relate to the game size when compared to other 2008 titles. It also has a really hard time holding a stable frame rate, with very large drops on the regular. The game is also pretty buggy, meaning it’s best to save often in case it crashes on you or you get stuck in some scenery.
The art style is incredible though. Fallout was always recognisable for its retro future look. Think ‘The Jetsons’ and you’re on the right path. It’s a future that never grew out of the 1950’s aesthetic but has technology for superior to what we have now. From a style point of view, Fallout 3 will remain lodged in your mind for one of the more memorable looking game worlds. This 1950’s vibe extends to the music too. Whilst there is an original score for the game, made up of mostly industrial sounding overtures, it’s the licensed songs that really make the game stand out from its peers. Some real 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s bangers for you to wander the wasteland and shoot bad guys to. It contrasts the game so starkly with this upbeat jazzy music that makes you want to sing and dance, but the world is so depressing and violent.
Fallout 3 is a marmite kind of game. I’ve yet to really meet someone who is truly indifferent about it. Whilst the main story can certainly be underwhelming, the side missions are so richly detailed with great lore and interesting characters that the draw is not the main story at all, but everything else you can do. The gameplay will also put many off. Those of you who want a straightforward shooter should probably check out the series more recent entries, but those of you who want great flexibility in your gameplay and can look past the occasionally clunky mechanics will have a blast.
The game isn’t much of a looker I’ll admit, but it sounds incredible and you can engross yourself so much into the world that eventually you’ll stop noticing how ugly it looks and just enjoy the architecture and design of it all.
Fallout 3 is a game I would recommend to anyone. It is a game I always revisit whenever I can. I’ve played it more times than I can care to count anymore and invested well over 1000 hours into the game at this point over multiple journeys through The Capital Wasteland.
The art style is incredible though. Fallout was always recognisable for its retro future look. Think ‘The Jetsons’ and you’re on the right path. It’s a future that never grew out of the 1950’s aesthetic but has technology for superior to what we have now. From a style point of view, Fallout 3 will remain lodged in your mind for one of the more memorable looking game worlds. This 1950’s vibe extends to the music too. Whilst there is an original score for the game, made up of mostly industrial sounding overtures, it’s the licensed songs that really make the game stand out from its peers. Some real 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s bangers for you to wander the wasteland and shoot bad guys to. It contrasts the game so starkly with this upbeat jazzy music that makes you want to sing and dance, but the world is so depressing and violent.
Fallout 3 is a marmite kind of game. I’ve yet to really meet someone who is truly indifferent about it. Whilst the main story can certainly be underwhelming, the side missions are so richly detailed with great lore and interesting characters that the draw is not the main story at all, but everything else you can do. The gameplay will also put many off. Those of you who want a straightforward shooter should probably check out the series more recent entries, but those of you who want great flexibility in your gameplay and can look past the occasionally clunky mechanics will have a blast.
The game isn’t much of a looker I’ll admit, but it sounds incredible and you can engross yourself so much into the world that eventually you’ll stop noticing how ugly it looks and just enjoy the architecture and design of it all.
Fallout 3 is a game I would recommend to anyone. It is a game I always revisit whenever I can. I’ve played it more times than I can care to count anymore and invested well over 1000 hours into the game at this point over multiple journeys through The Capital Wasteland.
STORY: 8/10
GAMEPLAY: 10/10
PRESENTATION: 5/10
LIFESPAN: 10/10
SCORE: 9/10
I feel there is genuinely something for everyone in this game, but some people will just have to look a little harder than others to find what they fall in love with.