Juewang Shidai
絕望時代
"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Re-evaluating Fallout 3
December 20th, 2021
By: Károly Jakabfy
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.
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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).
14mm pistol and a more colourful wasteland
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.
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
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.
