Fallout 3 is probably in a top 5 of my all time
favorite video games. When I was growing up one of the first games I had, on my
then pretty shitty computer, was first Fallout. And as far as I can remember it
was one of the hardest games I’ve ever played. After the first game,
even though I enjoyed it a lot I haven’t played any Fallout games that came
after that one. That was until Fallout 3 came out. Fallout franchise was
changing developers, certain games went trough long periods of development hell
and some of them were even canceled. One of those canceled game was given a
codename Van Buren, a game that was supposed to be Fallout 3. But it never saw
the light of day. Eventually Interplay Entertainment which was responsible for
first two Fallout games (and said Van Buren) sold the rights to Bethesda Game Studios. One of their biggest
franchises was Elder Scrolls series. Oblivion and Morrowind are two games I
enjoyed a lot, and fan I heard that they would be developing Fallout 3 using
same engine as Oblivion and similar mechanics as Oblivion I was really excited.
When people describe Fallout they usually say it is basically Oblivion with
guns. While this is somewhat true, I feel that Fallout 3 is so much more.
The Story
The game is set
in 2277, about 200 years after a war ended which led to nuclear disaster. The
remaining people started living in
Vaults away from radiation and devastation of outside world. You begin game in
one of these Vaults, Vault 101. The game is set in a strange post-apocalyptic
future with a weird retro vibe. It cover a region that includes, Northern
Virginia , Washington, D.C.
and parts of Maryland.
Most of noticeable landmarks were those from Washington
such as Lincoln
memorial and White House.
Basically you
start this game with some baby steps (literally). The first thing that happens
in this game is your birth. As a baby you are basically going trough tutorial,
you are learning basic movement, jumping etc. Then you go trough certain events
in your life such as one of your birthdays in teenage years, doing a test that
will determine a most suitable job for you, shooting a BB gun… After you find
out that your father left the Vault all the shit breaks loose in Vault and you
must exit the Vault and search for your father. During your search for father
you take a journey through the Wastlend going trough a weird nearby town called
Megaton which has a church that prays to an undetonated atomic bomb located in
the center of the town. Eventually in your quest of searching your father you will
came across Galaxy News Radio station and its crazy DJ Three Dog.
As the plot unveils you will come across a Rivet City,
which is basically a big aircraft carrier. There you will find Doctor Li who
informs you about Project Purity, the idea of your father James to purify all
the water in the Potomac River.
Eventually you
will track down your father to Vault 112. There you will enter this virtual
reality program in which your dad was trapped. After freeing your father you
will find out that your father was looking for this device called G.E.C.K.
which was needed in order to finally activate Project Purity. Eventually Doctor
Li and your father would start working on this project, that is until they got
ambushed by military organization called Enclave. Your father flood control
room of the project with radiation in order to stop Enclave leader Augustus
Autumn from talking control of it. Your father dies in the process but Autumn
survives. You escape the scene with Doctor Li and eventually you travel to
Vault 87 to find G.E.C.K. in order to finish your fathers work.
After obtaining
G.E.C.K., with a help of Fawkes who can become your companion, you get captured
by Enclave. At the Enclave base you get freed from your holding cell by Enclave
leader John Henry Eden. Your next task is to get to his office and find out who
he really is, and what he wants. When you come to his office you will find out
that he is actually a sentient supercomputer whose plan is to infect to water
with modified strain of FEV that will make water toxic to any mutated life. At
this point you are given a choice of leaving peacefully or convincing Eden to self-destruct and
in turn destroy the entire base.
After escaping the Enclave base you return to the
Citadel. After having a conversation about Eden, G.E.C.K. and Project Purity with
Brotherhood of Steel, they will agree on taking a full on attack on Jefferson
Memorial where Enclave soldiers and control room for project purity is located.
Brotherhood will activate this big ass robot Liberty Prime, who will lead this
attack
In the control
room you will face Autumn and you will have the choice of persuading him to
give up or killing him. Either way you will be informed by Dr. Li that purifier
is ready for activation, but activation code needs to be input manually. Being
that control room is flooded with lethal amounts of radiation, you do a heroic
thing and sacrifice yourself for the better of human kind. THE END
The story even
though not necessarily all that complex or original managed to keep me
interested all the way trough. Resolving the mystery of why your father left
the Vault and figuring out what happened with the world around you was quite
interesting. Along the way you will stumble upon some rather interesting characters
with some interesting stories. The ending could have been better, although it
was saved by Liberty Prime and his anticommunist quotes. Overall Fallout 3 had
an interesting story to tell, and it told it well.
Side quests in
this game are plentiful. Through these side quest you will find encounter some
interesting characters, and even those more story driven quests are quite
interesting and provide a great callback to previous Fallout games. Some of
these side quests are simple fetch quests while others are far more complex. I
will now address couple of side quests that really stood out for me.
Oasis is an
interesting quest, since it is located in a place that is quite different from
any other place in the game. It is strangely filled with vegetation. Some
people accidently stumbled upon this place which was full of vegetation and
they managed to protect it from harsh outside world. Here you will find a
talking tree named Harold, who you should be familiar with if you’ve played
previous Fallout games. In earlier games he was actually a ghoul that had a
tree growing out of his head. In Fallout 3 he was essentially absorbed by the
tree. He wants to die, but doing so requires you to find his heart. You have to
go trough the cavern and fight a bunch of creatures before eventually locating
and destroying his heart.
If you stumble
upon the town called Cantebury Commons you will notice two dudes fighting The
AntAgonizer and The Mechanist, and side quest called the Super Human Gambit
starts. The AntAgonizer is a human (and female at that), who is dressed in an
ant costume. The Mechanist is a 40-year old men who has a bunch of robots, that
he controls. And he is dressed in a robot styled suit. This is basically a
weird superhero rivalry Fallout style, where the AntAgonizer can be described
as villain and The Mechanist can be described as hero. Your task here is to
decide after which one of the two will you go after and basically settle this
rivalry once and for all.
One of those interesting side quests is called
Trouble on the Homefront. If you progressed trough most of the main story, and
if you walk close to the place where Vault 101 is. You will pick up a radio
signal from Amata (your childhood friend from beginning of the game) and this
side quest will begin. This side quest basically involves you going back to
Vault 101 and essentially seeing what happened to the Vault after you left. You
will meet some of the familiar faces, and depending of what you did at the
beginning of the game some things may vary in this quest. Regardless of what
you did you will find that place has gone to shit and it is essentially a mess.
Here you are tasked with ending Vaults troubles by stopping Overseer. If you
killed an Overseer at the beginning of the game (which I did), you will find a
new one here. I killed him as well. Amata won’t be pleased with what you did,
but she will still take the helm as the new Overseer. Because of havoc you
caused you are asked to leave.
Stealing Independence is a side
quest that tasks you with retrieving the Declaration of Independence from the
National Archives. You receive this quest from mane named Abraham Washington
(get it). When you enter the National Archives you will find a female (named Sydney), who will help
you on this quest. Here you will have to fight an onslaught of Super Mutants.
Your next task is to traverse National Archives and find the room in which
declaration is located. On your way there you may stumble upon a room where
Bill of Rights can be found, and some ammunition as well. Once you locate the
room you will notice a Protectron (a robot), who you can kill or if you have
high enough speech rating you can convince that you are Thomas Jefferson. He
will find this impressive and he’ll give you the code for terminal that you
need to finally reach the Declaration of Independence. After picking up the
declaration this is where you and Sydney split up. And all that is left to do
is bring the Declaration of Independence to Abraham Washington, and receive
your prize.
Graphics
For the time
this game came out visuals were rather impressive. They really paid attention
to detail. Megaton and Rivet
City look really cool.
The mutant and creature design is quite interesting. When this game came out it
was riddled with glitches, which makes overall visual experience not so
pleasing overall. Still, glitches aside, this was impressive looking game back
in the time.
However this game is severely lacking in
character design. This refers mostly to humans, because mutants look really bad
ass. I got some weird uncanny valley feeling from humans with their unblinking
eyes and weird face expressions. Creatures are appropriately weird and very
imaginative
Gameplay
Skills and perks
This game can be
easily described as first person shooter RPG, with mechanics similar to Elder
Scrolls: Oblivion. You have your primary stats (Strength, Perception,
Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck or short S.P.E.C.I.A.L), and
this stats can range from 1 to 10. Then you have your wide range of skills.
When you level up you will have 10 skill points (plus a number that is equal to
your intelligence stat – max is 10). Here you can distribute this skill in a
variety of categories that include – barter, big guns, lock picking, medicine,
small guns, melee weapons, science, repair, speech… And you will invest skills
into attributes that suit your play style the best. Your primary stats are
associated with your skills and they add bonuses to them depending on how high
are your primary stats. For example your charisma stat affects your barter and
speech skills.
Finally you have
perks. Perks are bonuses with a wide range of effects. You have 58 regular
perks, 5 special and 7 quest perks. I will mention just a couple of them. Thief gives you a +5 to your lockpick
and sneak skill. Black Widow gives
you +10% damage to the opposite sex, and unique dialogue options with certain
characters. Adamantium Skeleton
which reduce damage taken by limbs by 50%. Grim
Reaper's Sprint - kill in V.A.T.S. restores all your AP immediately. Gun Nut - +5 small gun, +5 repair. Lead Belly – you receive half as much
radiation whenever drinking from a water source. These are some of your regular
skills. Perks that you can get early on for the most part improve on your
skills or primary stats. Later ones have more world or situation related
effect
You
receive special perks by interacting with other characters or by performing
special actions. You get this perks automatically without the need of leveling
up. There are 3 of these skills. Dream
Crusher – this skills reduces an enemy's chance to critically hit you by
50%, you also get 30% discount at Craterside Supply, and Moira Brown (who you
interact with in order to obtain this perk), who sells you weapons and can
repair your armor and weapons, receives +30 points on her repair skills. Hemathophage – blood packs now heal 20
of your hit points instead of 1 point before.
Power Armor Training – which
gives you ability to wear any form of power armor.
Finally
you have quest perks which are obtained from completing some of the side
quests. There are 7 of this perks By completing side quest The Replicated Man
you receive perk called Wired Reflexes which
improves your V.A.T.S. accuracy by 10%.
Combat
As
far as combat goes this essentially works as FPS, although you can play in
third person it is rather hard and not recommended. You can only shot from the
hip (Fallout New Vegas added shooting from iron sights) or by using V.A.T.S.
Shooting pales in comparison with some of the modern shooter, gun play is not
that fast and precision is kind of questionable. Also gun fights have feeling
of duels since you will be fighting only a few enemies at the time. But what
makes the combat interesting is V.A.T.S. or Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting
System. When you are using V.A.T.S. otherwise real-time combat gets paused.
With V.A.T.S. you can target a specific body part of your opponent, and next to
each body part you will have a percentage of hit possibility.
Attack in V.A.T.S. cost action
points (you can see them in down right corner in the picture above labeled with
AP), and once you used up your action points it will take some time for them to
replenish. So you will basically have to switch between V.A.T.S. and regular
combat. This makes combat more interesting and adds that element of strategy
when you are approaching your enemies.
Weapons
Your
weapon and armor degrade over time with use. The level of degradation affects
theirs usefulness. You can repair them by paying local repairmen or by having
the same weapon or armor and combining the two. Weapons variety is quite
impressive. You have your small pistols (which include .32, 10mm, dart gun, .44
magnum with some different variations on said weapons), rifles (which include
assault rifle, sniper rifle, BB gun, hunting rifle, railway rifle with some
different variations as well), shotguns (you get your regular combat shotgun,
double-barrel shotgun and sawed-off), submachine guns (10mm SMG). Then you have
your big guns which include minigun (on the right in picture bellow, gatling
laser, flamer, Fat Man (on the left in picture bellow), Missile launcher.
Then you have an
entire subset of energy weapons. You have your energy pistols (plasma pistol,
laser pistol, alien blaster – which is one of the best weapons in the game…)
and energy rifles (laser rifle, plasma rifle and some variations of said
weapon). You also have explosives – mines (frag, bottlecap, plasma and pulse
ones), grenades (frag, nuka, plasma and pulse ones.
You
also have melee weapons both bladed and blunt ones. These include swords,
knives, baseball bats, lead pipes, sledge hammers etc.
Finally
you have custom made ones. These you can build by obtaining blueprint and
scavenging for items mentioned in said blueprints. Some of the items are really
hard to find.
In order from left to right – top
(Nuka-grenade, Rock-It Launcher, Bottlecap mine, Deathclaw gauntlet), bottom
(Dart gun, Railway rifle, Shishkebab)
Miscellaneous stuff
On your journey
through Capital Wasteland you can acquire companions. The maximum number of
party members is three – yourself, Dogmeat (a dog who is located in the
Srapyard), and one of humanoid companions. Availability of companions is
dependent on your Karma, which is
another important system in the game. Basically your Karma level depends on
things you do in the world. If you are doing basically good things you will
receive good Karma and vice versa. Good karma companions (Fawkes, Star Paladin
Cross) Evil Karma (Clover, Jericho),
Neutral Karma (Sergeant RL-3, Butch DeLoria), Certain companions (Dogmeat and
Charon) have no Karma requirement. They can be helpful on your journey, but
they are very hard to manage. Issuing simple commands to them is quite
complicated, since you have to start a dialog with them and then give them a
command. They are pretty stupid on the battlefield for the most part. Probably
the most useful companion is Fawkes since he has a lot of hit points and he can
use heavy guns.
Crafting is another part of the
game. I already mentioned some of the weapons you can craft on workbenches. But
you can also one type of ammunition my putting a different type of ammunition.
Finally
you have lockpicking minigame which you probably encounter in numerous other
games. And hacking minigame which is a logic puzzle where player has to guess
the passcode out of a pool of given words. Upon choosing a codeword out of the
list, the computer will either login (if the word is correct), or tell the
player how many letters are correct.
Final Thoughts
All of these things combined make for an rich and
complex RPG experience. The games emphasis on exploration is something that
really hooked me from the start. Eventually I got used to combat, and through
addition of certain perks the combat was much easier and more fluid. I
generally enjoyed the setting, the world and its inhabitants. It is a great
game and one of my all time favorites.
