Fallout 3 - Recap and review

      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.