A long time ago, I declared Fallout 3 to be little more than “Oblivion with guns” and set off to play said fantasy game and its expansion. Naturally, my short attention span got the better of me. I created a new character for Oblivion, spent a few days levelling him and finishing the Mages Guild quest path, and went to explore the Shivering Isles expansion. Too bad that this was exactly the moment when I got bored with the game.
In the meantime, I had been watching Flip play Fallout 3 and decided that it looked like fun. We had also been talking with nobody, who had already finished it once and had some good things to say about the versatility of the character build system. So, I resolved to dig in and give it a try. Flip generally plays a good character, so I went for agent of chaos (which in too many CRPGs is equivalent to destruction) and found a build online which would allow me access to pretty much all the skills fairly quickly.
In the fast moving world of game critique, a lot has already been said about Fallout 3. I know I’m several months behind the ball, but I’m happy to not be bleeding edge, and pitch you my own observations.
One principle complaint about the game is that the main quest is too short. I agree that it’s over pretty quickly, but that’s okay because there’s plenty to do. It follows in the Elder Scrolls template of activity all over the map. My complaint about the main quest is that it’s boring. I had the same problem with Oblivion (though to a lesser degree). For an earth shattering chain of events, I never felt invested in it, and the characters associated with the main quest demanded much without showing any concern for my own needs.
Quite early on in my experience, I said “fuck that for a laugh”, picked a random spot on my map and walked there. I would deviate from the path if I saw an interesting geographical or artificial feature. Usually, I was rewarded with an encounter that was far more engaging than the main quest. Oblivion took this another step further, however, by connecting more people to each other. There’s never a dull moment in Cyrodil, since a quest from one character will often require you to interact with another character who will point you at another unrelated quest. Still, whenever nothing suited me in the Capital Wasteland, I could always go exploring, and eventually find something new to do.
The gameplay is pretty standard for a Bethesda effort, but that’s not a bad thing. While first-person never made a lot of sense to me in the Elder Scrolls games (it’s my tabletop roleplaying background — that’s all turn-based), it works really well when you put a gun in the character’s hands. In fact, I used my FPS skills to great effect in my early days with the game. Eventually, though, the VATS method shines through as a pretty good way to automatically take out most enemies.
VATS is a good nod to the game’s predecessors. I found it to be invaluable at later stages, particularly with a number of enemies requiring tactics that mandated critical hits to one body part or another. While I never got into the previous Fallout games, I understand the appeal of turn-based gaming, and found VATS to be a good compromise between that and Bethesda’s first-person pedigree.
I also liked the visual theming of the game. It’s hard to pick just one thing about it, but I found the game to be quite immersive and overall very consistent. While sifting through ruined buildings for bits of junk was often tedious, I didn’t really resent it as I felt very much a part of the world.
All in all, a pretty good game that I would recommend playing, though I suggest you leave off the main quest as long as possible. There’s plenty of other cool stuff to do that is far more challenging than the final boss and cutscene.