Re-evaluating Fallout 3

 Quite recently Bethesda decided to do something unprecedented. They actually fixed bugs in one of their games, which meant that after close to a decade of having to tinker around with it, Fallout 3 now runs out of the box again, without crashes, more or less. 

St. Todd of Bethesda
I'm surprised he didn't make us
buy the damn thing
as a remaster again

I played New Vegas to death in my teens. It's just simply a great game, despite all its faults and how it was left on the side of the road to die by the publisher, never allowing Obsidian to flesh it out properly. (Not that Fallout 3 was finished when it came out, it's just that Bethesda managed to hide the unfinished parts more elegantly than Obsidian.)

But why am I talking about New Vegas if this "article" is about Fallout 3? To simply put it, it's impossible to talk about F3 without bringing up New Vegas, or at least a lot of people feel like it's the case. The issue lies in the fact that while Fallout 3 was an instant hit at launch, due to the fact that it ran like trash on multicore systems and the fact that New Vegas slowly grew into a cult classic, not a lot of people kept on playing it I suppose, even if I've seen online people claim that they spent 1k hour roaming the Capital Wasteland. 

To put it simply, its staying power was a lot weaker than that of New Vegas, which according to internet canon, surpassed it in nearly every regard, thought the debate still rages on, with people producing feature length videos on why one is better than the other and so on. 

Before this playthrough I  was firmly in the raging "IT'S SHIT, SHIIIT" camp, but somehow when I learned that it runs on modern systems and that a G2A key is the price of two cheeseburgers, I decided to give it a try for some weird reason. (Probably because I wanted to see all the funny jingoistic American propaganda in Operation Anchorage.) Was it really THAT bad? 

So I shelled out the money, gave a bit of my soul away to Todd and bought the game (again, since my disk version I got for a buck during some clearance sale was no good any more, and had none of the DLCs anyway) and jumped right into it, trying to shut out all the Fallout-purist dogma I've been fed on imageboards for a decade about the status of this game. 

Part 0: The Mods

I had a couple of mods installed for the playthrough. Nothing that changes gameplay all that much. Besides the official DLCs, I had Classic Fallout Weapons installed, which greatly expands the weapon roster of the game, which is by design limited, and I also had a mod that adds more Chinese troops to the Mama Dolce hideout. (Which bugged out and accidentally netted me a 25 Damage Threshold Chinese Jumpsuit with a hat that wouldn't break. Which is still worse than the unbreakable 45DT power armour that the Anchorage DLC gives you, which is a vanilla thing I mind you. I used this jumpsuit for the rest of the playthrough. It's not "amazing armour", unlike the Winterized T-51b from Anchorage, but it's serviceable and actually made the game more challenging).

The only thing the classic weapons changed is that instead of the hunting rifle and the combat shotgun being my workhorse weapons, I instead relied on the .223 pistol, the 14mm pistol alongside vanilla weapons like the Xuanlong assault rifle and the gauss rifle. 

14mm pistol and a more colourful wasteland.

The only other mods installed were shader mods so that there's actual colour in the game. The brown tint on everything made me feel nauseous. 

So I had a near-vanilla experience while playing the game. I played on normal. 

Part 1: The Gameplay

Personally didn't really have much issue with getting re-accustomed to having no iron sights or anything. The game's shooting is functional, but nothing more. 

Initially I enjoyed the firefights a lot. Few resources, relatively low armour, deadly enemies. There was real tension when I met the first super mutants next to a metro-entrance. The early game gunfights is where Fallout 3 really shines in my opinion. It's the only part of the game where you're getting the intended survival part of the experience. 

But as the game progresses, it grows more and more tiresome. Enemies get separated into two groups. Ones that you've out-levelled and can kill in a single shot, or absolute nightmare bullet sponges that won't die no matter what you use. 

The latter is my complaint against the Feral Ghoul Reaver, which is a post-ending enemy introduced in the Broken Steel DLC. It has double the health of a deathclaw, hurts more, and is quite damage resistant. It's also a melee enemy. 

This makes it an incredibly annoying enemy to fight, and it spawned often enough that it made me write it into this section. No matter the gun, the damage type, the part you shoot, killing one is a 4-5 minute long chore. 

Bethesda probably was trying to address the complaints that the game was "too easy", but I don't think they solved the issue by upping a basic humanoid enemy's HP by a factor of eleven and then giving it a strong attack. 

Basically this leads into one of my biggest complaints: The difficulty doesn't feel realistic at all because of how the levelling system works and how the map was created. But more on that later. 

The other gameplay elements like the lockpicking and hacking minigames are fine, though the hacking one gets tiresome by the medium level because of how hard it can be, and the very hard lockpicks are frustratingly hard to get open. 

I found lockpicking to be more rewarding than hacking (and oftentimes they're interchangeable, with a door being openable both through hacking and picking). It yields great rewards and useful items throughout the game. 

Most encounters are randomly generated, which means that the map never becomes "empty" like it does in New Vegas, but it also means that some areas will always remain infested by enemies. Most of them are easy enough to deal with, I've never once felt threatened by a random encounter in the game. 

As I said, the more "threatening" enemies like the Reaver and the Supermutant Overlord are more of an annoyance than a test of skills. Did you pack enough stims and spare guns to heal yourself and repair your most precious gun? That's the only question the game asks you.

Repair as a skill is also among the most valuable. Fallout 3's weapons break constantly. I don't remember having to repair my guns so much in New Vegas. 

This initially creates and atmosphere of  ruggedness and desperation, until you've racked up enough points in your repair skill and also stockpiled enough guns to keep you firing during your many expeditions in the wasteland. 

But truth be told, I was incredibly annoyed by the missing of the Jury Rigging perk of Fallout New Vegas. Why can't I re-use parts from one type of gun in another? 

Not that the low vanilla weapon roster would make this useful, since the arsenal is quite limited. Most of the "unique" firearms are just reskinned versions of common guns found in the wasteland. Though their bonuses are usually good enough that it makes seeking them out worthwhile. (Like the Xuanlong Assault rifle for example, which I've grown quite fond of during my playthrough.)

The Classic Fallout Weapons mod I had slightly remedied this, by introducing more guns that can be repaired without having another example of the exact same gun on hand, but still, the arsenal felt quite limited. 

By the endgame it became quite tiresome that I had to constantly repair my guns, since it stopped being a survival element 20 levels ago. Just like many of the atmospheric elements, it slowly but surely turns into a nuisance. 

Part 2: The Overworld Map 

Fallout 3 takes place in the Washington D.C. area. It's quite desolate, the number of settlements is low, there's little to "see" besides the inner-city buildings of the old American government and some monuments of American history. 

Besides their unique models from outside, the Capitol, Museum of History, Museum of Technology and the Jefferson Memorial have little to offer from the inside besides advancing the plot. They're the same corridors you'd find anywhere else, filled with the same enemies. 

Fallout 3's design philosophy is quite different from that of New Vegas when it comes to its overworld. In New Vegas you're instructed to use roads, and via the quests and the aforementioned roads, most of the world is well connected. You will visit almost everything by the end of your playthrough. 

Because of this, New Vegas feels more like a living-breathing world where people actually travel between the settlements, that there's an economy, there's actually LIFE to be lived in this world. 

On the contrary, Fallout 3's quest and world design will leave you with a mostly unexplored map by the end of the game if you only do the main quests and the ones that are more or less tangentially related to it. On one hand, this is a point of criticism. There's actually no reason why a settlement is where it is, everything was just sort of vomited into the overworld around the real life sights and landmarks and that's about it. 

But on the other hand, this means that Fallout 3 is the kind of game where the player is tasked to do actual exploration and scavenging in a post-apocalyptic setting. You will run into a lot of buildings during your playthrough all over the wasteland, all waiting to be looted. 

The limited settlements also mean that besides the early game, you won't be doing munch trading. You quickly outstrip most merchants when it comes to available gear and caps, leaving you to repair your own equipment and stash away hundreds of guns whenever you actually need money for something. (Though I never once ran out of ammo for any of my guns, and I can't remember buying ammo in large quantities. This is the normal difficulty mind you.)

Fallout 3 doesn't really have "areas" like New Vegas does. Not many of the encounters are hand-crafted, so most of the map is immediately accessible while you're level one, and because of how the map is built up, favouring exploration, you're never really in true danger of encountering "too dangerous" enemies you can't handle. Unlike in New Vegas where accessing portions of the map is very much tied to your equipment and your character's skills and knowledge of the world around him or her. 

Some of the architecture is actually quite atmospheric in the game

Because of how the enemies are rubber-banded to the player's level and capabilities, wildlife is never truly dangerous to you the way it is in New Vegas, where even as a level 50 Courier you think twice about approaching a deathclaw or a cazador. 

Ultimately it all comes down to what you prefer and expect from a Fallout game. A well-built world where settlements have a purpose and are interconnected economic and human entities, or gamey exploration and adventuring. Which leads us to...

Part 3: The Maps and the Quests (in part)

Fallout 3's map and quest design is tragically bad. The game is worthy of the mocking nickname "Oblivion with Guns", because no matter the atmosphere it manages to create at times, ultimately it always succumbs to this weakness. 

By the midgame I dreaded picking up quests, because 90% of them means that you have to do a "dungeon". They don't call it dungeons, but they essentially are. You're going to descend into a metro, a sewer, some old industrial building, a basement. And it's tiresome. 

Every single fucking time some God-damn NPC will need something specific from an old building and it's always the same shit. You go there and you will fight the 2-3 enemy types available (Raider-Mutant-Ghoul) (or sometimes the Enclave or the Talon Mercs) and that's it. You're navigating basically copied and pasted corridors that usually have no unique loot and their only purpose it to prolong gameplay and feed into the loop by injecting the player with loot to keep them walking and firing. 

I hate it. I hate navigating shitty, brown corridors for absolutely no reward. It's boring. 

Can't remember a single time besides the odd Vault in New Vegas when I was forced down into a tunnel for a prolonged time during a quest. 

To the people that claim to have played this for hundreds of hours because it's "so epic" and "awards exploration", how did you do it? I did nearly every single one but I wouldn't do it ever again after my 30 something hour playthrough. 

Bethesda basically just reskinned Oblivion, made it into a simulacrum of the original games, added things for people on Reddit to circlejerk over and then left it at that. 

The fact that the unfinished D.C. areas are only navigable by using the metro-system at least once (yes, the D.C. area is unfinished, that's why the metro-dungeons are in the game) doesn't help much. 

While I personally dislike navigating dark corridors, dislike wasn't my initial reaction. Just like everything else, it slowly grows irritating as you play the game. 

Yes, the overworld has a lot to explore, but ultimately you will start telling yourself "while the building does look interesting, it probably has nothing of interest in it, it'll only waste 30 minutes of my life."

Part 4: The Lore

I'm going to be quick about this one, because there's dozens of feature-length videos out there of people dissecting F3's lore and why it's stupid. (And I'm probably already coming off as a massive nerd for caring so much about a more than decade old game's lore and gameplay.)

200 years after the war the inhabitants of the Capital Wasteland still scavenge for instant mashed potatoes and drink coke. 

It doesn't work from a worldbuilding perspective. If it's an uninhabitable place, then people would just simply leave. That's it. 

I personally just pretended we're like 30-40-50 years after the war instead of 200 (like how it was supposed to be afaik) and it suddenly all got much better. Make your head-canon. Disregard Todd. 

F3's world, quest and lore design is ultimately form over function. They serve an interesting idea, not a logical one. They're the spherical cows of RPG questing. But just like with spherical cows, they're all right as long as it's not a life or death situation. 

Part 5: The DLCs

Initially I wanted to do this after I played all of them, but I can't be bothered to play The Pitt after 35 hours.

Bethesda released 5 DLCs for Fallout 3, and it's telling that 3 out of those 5 are linear DLCs where you're shooting your way through a horde of enemies. 

Operation: Anchorage

I wanted to see it because of my interest in China. It's a corridor shooter. Except the shooting mechanics of the game aren't really good. It works, the loot is cool, but there's not much lore added to the game through it. (Though the small bits about General Chase's sanity are pretty cool.)

If I were forced to replay F3, I'd replay anchorage too just because of the almost game-breaking loot you get from it. 3-4 hours of shooting at PLA troops in VR.

Point Lookout

This one was actually good. Good atmosphere, nice quests (like the one where you trail a Chinese spy operation from before the war) and the main quest is okay too. 

Probably the best one out of all the DLCs. 

Broken Steel

Supposedly people were butthurt enough over the ending for Bathesda to make a DLC adding post-game content and more quests to the main story. It also adds new enemies like the God-awful Ghoul Reaver. 

It's another 3-4 hours of shooting Enclave troops, but being able to roam the wastes after the game is finished is probably the only worthwhile addition it brings to the table.

Mothership Zeta 

It's shit. 3-4 hours of shooting at 2 enemy types with three types of guns in a linear fashion. 

The alien weapons are bad and boring to use, their wielders are boring bullet sponges, there's no worthwhile addition to the lore and you won't learn much about your companions throughout the duration of the DLC. 

It's the absolute worst the game has the offer. 

The Pitt

To be added next week. I haven't played it yet, but I have inspiration to write this down right now. 

Update: 

I played it and it was abysmal. Based on the DLC's marketing blurbs I expected something more, but it was INCREDIBLY short. Basically no side-quests, no real in-depth explanation to what you're doing, you have a shallow choice that's presented as "morally ambiguous" and then the DLC is over. It introduces a grand total of 2 new weapons, a whooping three quests and nothing of real value to the player overall.  If you make a save before your meeting with the Pitt's overlord, then you can get both "endings" (there are no ending slides to tell you the consequences of your actions) without having to replay the otherwise linear parts of the game before that. 

I feel like it's a bit bullshit that raiders get to just simply "knock you out" when even if they were a group of 20 it wouldn't take much time to kill them for my character. 

This DLC's existence makes me feel revolted. This is more on the level of a well made mod (considering it blatantly recycles the Oblivion arena) than something I'd pay money for. 

It's not really a worthwhile part of the game. 

Part 6: Conclusion

I wrote a lot of shit about Fallout 3 in this lengthy review. But do keep in mind, that I did play it for almost 40 hours (half a very thorough New Vegas playthrough) and ultimately had a good time even if some elements of the game wore me out a bit by the end. 

If Fallout New Vegas is a 10/10, then Fallout 3 is still a 7/10 that might be worth your time if you're a bit tired of the former. 

I'm not going to replay it anytime soon, because the way the main story is written doesn't necessitate it, but still, I'm glad I gave it another chance after all these years, because it's still a fine game, even if the lore behind it is held together by duct-tape, some of its gameplay elements were surpassed by New Vegas and its quests are a bit too simplistic and black and white. It's simple, clean fun instead of the polcompass meme shittery New Vegas can be at times. 

If it's on sale for a really low price, I can wholeheartedly recommend grabbing it, or even pirating it, now that it runs smoothly on modern systems.