War, War Never Changes - An NGJ Review of Fallout 3!

“What are you playing?” I sat downstairs in the living room watching my dad play yet another cheap game he’d picked up off one of his friends. What I could see on the screen was a first person shooter, my dad was facing off against some guy that looked like a half naked thug at the top of a half-destroyed building. It was sunset, this is what I can remember most about this. Every so often the game would pause and my dad would zoom in and target certain parts of the ‘raider’s’ body and the game would revert into slow-mo as he shot the raider.

“Fallout 3.” My dad responds.

“Your health is really low.” I mention to him.

“I know, but if I eat anything I’ll get radiation poisoning and I can’t fast travel because I can see the enemy.”

WHAT?! Not gonna lie, this game actually scared me after watching this. It looked so lonely and very difficult to survive. Once I saw him face off against a bunch of feral ghouls in an abandoned metro station I said I was never gonna play this game myself, it scared me too much for me to actually give it a go.

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About a year later my friend was bragging about how many PS3 trophies he had acquired. The amount of trophies I had looked pretty poor compared to his but I had no new games to play that would give me any new trophies. Apart from one. At the beginning of PS3’s run not all games had trophies in them, but I knew Fallout 3 did. I had so much doubt about getting anywhere in this game when I put it into my PS3, I almost had to laugh at myself for even trying but God was I wrong.

Fallout 3 is such a glorious game, I can’t even begin to express how much I love it, but I’ll give it a go.

The first level you play is you being born. Haha yeah seriously. You’re born to a scientist, James played by Liam Neeson, because when Bethesda get voice actors they go all out and get some goddamn good ones. Your mother, Catherine is never shown but you can hear her voice and she’s ecstatic that you’re finally born. This level is all about your character creation, you choose a name. I remember replaying Fallout 3 recently when me and my best friend Siti had a gaming day (as you can probably guess, a day of us just playing games, and eating cheese and crackers because we always do this) and the default name for your character (known as the Lone Wanderer) is Player Name.

“We’ve been thinking about your name, what do you think of…” Dad starts.

“What do you think of Player Name?” Siti laughs.

Me and her find the stupidest things the funniest, so I played the game as a Lone Wanderer called Player Name. But that wasn’t the first time I played Fallout 3, the first time I played it I was called ‘Gina’ because I’m one of those sad people who likes to pretend they’re actually in the game. After being named you have a character creation screen to see ‘what you’ll look like when you’re all grown up.’ Ok as much as I love Fallout the character creation is simply awful. No really REALLY awful. It’s like they didn’t even try, and in Fallout New Vegas, the game that came out a few years after 3 the character creation was exactly the same. You didn’t even try Bethesda. But anyway, the reason the character creation is so awful is because whatever you do your character will probably still look ugly anyway, especially female characters because the hairstyles are all terrible. In the end I went for the only decent female hairstyle ‘Wendy the Welder’ which is pretty much a messy ponytail and chose a Caucasian skin tone (there’s very limited skin tones as well, kind of like in The Sims). Now as if this isn’t bad enough, you spend all this time trying to make your character look decent and then you spend almost the whole game in first person mode, and wearing power armor which means you can’t even see your character's face for more or less the entire game. So the awful character creation pretty much leads to a waste of time. As if this wasn’t bad enough your mum dies after you’re born, a lovely start to the game. I can see where this is going already.

This is the kind of character creation you have to deal with

Anyway the next level is when you’re a toddler. Dad teaches you your mum’s favourite bible quote Revelation 21:6 ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.’ This bible quote plays such an important part in the game. It’s mum’s favourite quote and it’s about water, giving water to everyone for no charge, for free. Now you were born into the year 2277, 200 years after the apocalyptic nuclear war of 2077 where the world was destroyed. You were from one of the many families that fled to the many underground vaults when the bombs hit. Vault 101. For 200 years the vault has never been opened, or so you’re led to believe for most of the game. No one ever enters or leaves the vault, this is what the Vault Overseer Alphonse tells everyone. Outside the vault is full of savages, raiders that will kill on-sight, experimented humans infected by the FEV virus and are now mindless killing-machine supermutants, mutated animals and insects, ghouls who are people mutated from radiation, some civilised and the feral ones that have lost all sense of humanity, as well as the regular human survivors who have tried to make a home in the wasteland. Now this is where the water plays a big role, everything in the Wasteland is irradiated, including the water. Dad wants to purify it all, this is his dream, as is your mothers’.

Pretty much Dad's life motto

Anyway in this toddler level you read a book called ‘You’re SPECIAL’ which is when you level up your SPECIAL points; Strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. You have a point system that you can assign points to throughout the game to balance your character out, the amount of points you put onto each SPECIAL attribute will later help with your skills;  barter, big guns, energy weapons, explosives, lockpick, medicine, melee weapons, repair, science, small guns, sneak, speech and unarmed. Good God there’s a lot of point-system based things in this game, as you can see this is a very heavy RPG game. Your skills can be upgraded every time you level up in the game as you get skill points to assign to your skill levels. The skill levels help you with obvious things out in the wasteland, you’ll need certain skill points to do particular things in the game, such as a high lockpick skill to pick the harder locks in the game. There’s still more to the point system, you’ll get to pick three TAG skills, which just means you’ll pick your three favourite skills and it’ll add extra skill points to them. My favourite skills to choose were speech, lockpick and  small guns. I try and talk my way out of a lot of things in Fallout 3 so I always have to choose a high charisma and speech. The skills I never cared much about were sneak, explosives, unarmed and melee weapons because I’m not very stealthy and I love to shoot things. Now the final part of the point-system (seriously? Sometimes I wonder how I got my head around all of this) is the perks. Each time you level up you get to choose a perk. Perks will all be different and will help your character in different ways, there’s so many perks so I’m not going to list them all but for example, the Strong Back perk lets you carry 50+ more equipment and the Cannibal perk allows you to eat the flesh of dead enemies to regain health. So yeah, the perks are extremely varied. I think the only thing I didn't like about the point-system was the level cap. You'd stop levelling up when you reached level 30 (35 if you had the Broken Steel dlc) which I didn't think was a high enough level because the game was so large, you could have done so much more to your skills.

The book where you choose your SPECIAL points

Anyway back to the actual game. The next level is nine years later and you open your eyes to your tenth birthday party organised by your best friend and the Overseer’s daughter Amata (Who’s a little bitch and will kick you out of the Vault later on in a side-quest if you allow her to become Overseer). The Overseer gives you a Pipboy 3000 which is a device you wear on your arm and you use to keep track of your items, heal yourself with either food or medicine, take drugs and alcohol (yeah you can do this, it’ll help your skills in a fight, but don’t overdo it, you can start to suffer from withdrawal!) and keep track of your current level, skills and perks. I love this thing, it’s awesome, I wish I had one in real life. Anyway this is a short level, you meet some other people in the vault here, a little whiny brat called Butch DeLoria who bullies you and tries to steal your sweet roll that Old Lady Palmer gave you for your birthday. Now there’s one other thing here, you’ll have a karma level, doing good things will raise your karma and doing bad things will lower your karma (obviously). Karma will effect how people will perceive you in the game. I personally like to keep a good karma and to avoid a fight with Butch you give him your sweet roll. Except I think the first time I played Fallout 3 I started a fight with him because he pissed me off.  After this Dad will take you downstairs to his lab where his friend and lab assistant Jonas give you a BB gun and you learn to use the Vault-Tech Assisted Targeting System (VATS, the GREATEST part of Fallout, especially if paired with the Bloody Mess Perk) which is what I saw my dad doing when I first watched him play Fallout where you’d target certain parts of an enemies body to shoot them. It’s an awesome feature and so much fun to watch people explode when you headshot them.

What VATS looks like in-game

So the next time lapse is six years later and at the age of sixteen you go to the classroom to take your Generalised Occupational Aptitude Test, or GOAT to find out what job you’ll get in the vault, and alto to choose your Tag skills. Now before you enter the classroom you see three boys crowded around a sixteen year old Amata, harassing her. The boys all don the regular vault outfits but they are also wearing leather jackets with snakes on the back. Wait a minute, is that, is that Butch? GOD DAMN HE’S HOT! Hell Butch is quite possibly the hottest character in the game, and there he is with his gang the ‘Tunnel Snakes’.

The hottest game character? Yes I think so.

“Ew.” Siti states. She hates Butch with a passion. And we dispute. A lot. Because I love him so damn much. But anyway, enough about Butch, you take the GOAT, choose your Tag skills and that’s that done.

Just gonna put this here for Siti:

Now the final time lapse is two years later. Amata wakes you up to tell you Dad has escaped the vault. WHAT?! I thought no one ever enters or leaves the vault. Alphonse you liar. Anyway this is a fight for survival now to get out of the vault and find dad. Amata will help you but more or less the entire vault is hostile towards you now. Goddamn, 18 years of my life spent here and now they’re all trying to kill you. Well you battle your way through the hostile soldiers and radroaches let in from when Dad left, severely piss Alphonse off, save Butch’s mother from being killed by Radroaches because I love him so much and he gives me his Tunnel Snakes jacket to thank me (gsjhkdfgnk) and I finally reach the end of the vault, bid Amata goodbye and step out into the Capital Wasteland. This is where the real game starts.

Honestly I think the Capital Wasteland looks beautiful

Right, tutorial mode off, I’ve pretty much spent 2000 words of this explaining about how you play the game, time for some real awesome gameplay!

The entire map of Fallout 3 is HUGE, one of the largest game maps I’ve ever seen, they pretty much tried to map out an apocalyptic version of Washington. You can see this already being a huge challenge. So because of the massive map, it’ll take you HOURS to play the game and explore every single inch of the map, especially since most new places will be filled with side quests. I have over 100 hours on my first Fallout 3 playthrough and am still nowhere near finished exploring the entire map. This is what’s so great about Fallout 3, it’s 100% worth the money because you will get so much playtime out of it it’s ridiculous! The graphics are decent, it is a 2007 game anyway but I absolutely loved how desolate everything looked, all the destroyed buildings, it was really awesome I thought! I’d never liked anything remotely apocalypse-related before but Fallout 3 has made me change my mind.

Look how huge this thing is!

As I already mentioned before there are a bunch of side-quests but the main quest is long as well, so even if you only do the main quest then the game is a decent amount of playtime. (but you’ll be missing out if you don’t do the side quests!) The main quest is mostly spent tracking down Dad, you’ll talk to a bunch of people, free some slaves, make friends with some kids, meet the Galaxy News Radio reporter Three Dog (one of the most brilliant characters in the game who plays an array of 50's music on Galaxy News Radio!) and loads of other stuff before you finally find Dad. He’s in another vault, Vault 112, trapped in a vault simulation along with the other vault residents there. Now this is one of my favourite quests of Fallout 3; Tranquility Lane. You also enter the simulation into a black and white world. You’re a ten year old child again and everything is set in the 50’s, all the people are wearing 50’s style clothing and the neighbourhood is a cul-de-sac. In the middle is another ten year old girl with a dog next to her. Upon talking to her you find out her name is Betty and she seems friendly until she asks you to make young Timmy cry. This is a bit suspicious but I wanna find dad so I comply. If you do what she says then you can ask her questions, the more you do as she says the more you can ask her. Later you find out she isn’t actually a ten year old girl at all but really Stanislaus Braun, the Vault 112 Overseer who has created Tranquility Lane (one of his many simulations) in order to torture the vault dwellers living there as he can kill them as many times as he likes and then bring them back to life to do it again. What a sick man. You also find out that the dog next to Betty/Braun is Dad. Yep, she turned him into a dog. Now is a very massive karma moment; you can either comply with what Betty/Braun wants, eventually donning the ‘Pint-Sized Slasher’ mask and knifing every single resident in Tranquility Lane to death for Betty/Braun’s enjoyment, or you can talk to Old Lady Dithers who has figured out that this is all a simulation and Braun is actually controlling everyone. She will tell you about an old abandoned house and that there is a failsafe somewhere inside. You can listen to a tune that Betty whistles now and again and this will give you the tune you need to play in the abandoned house, revealing the failsafe and allowing you to initiate the Chinese Soldiers simulation which will bring a bunch of Chinese soldiers into Tranquility Lane who kill all the vault residents. For good. What? Both of these sound like awful outcomes! Actually, killing all the residents with the failsafe is the good karma ending to this quest as Braun can no longer torment the residents and is stuck in Tranquility Lane alone, forever. Doing as Betty says and killing the residents for amusement will give you bad karma. Both endings will allow you and dad to leave Tranquility Lane and return to the Capital Wasteland.

Insane Braun as his Betty persona

“This is so fucked up.” Siti stated when I showed her the level as she still has yet to finish Fallout 3.

“I know.” I grinned because I fucking love this level. Sorry if that sounds messed up but I do. I don’t like horror movies or anything but when you’re the one doing the killing it’s different. And yes I went for the evil karma option in this even though I play for good karma, partly because I didn’t realise about the failsafe the first time I played it and partly because it’s fun.

Anyway you’ll finally be reunited with Dad and he’ll tell you he came here in search of the Garden of Eden Creation Kit or the GECK and he’ll tell you his ultimate plan, that him and your mother were scientists trying to purify the wasteland’s water but once your mother died he begged Alphonse to let him and you into Vault 101 in order to protect you. He didn’t expect you to follow him when he escaped the vault but explains he is again trying to make his dream of pure water happen again, for your mother. (Revelation 21:6, remember?)

An old photograph of Dad and Mum as scientists

You have one of two options in this game; to follow in Dad’s footsteps and help him and the Brotherhood of Steel purify the water, or turn against Dad and join the Enclave and President Eden in poisoning the water to try and purify the Wasteland from Eden’s point of view; kill off all imperfect humans. I chose to follow Dad obviously (how can you go against Liam Neeson?) but what bothers me is if you do follow Eden’s path (and I have played an evil karma playthrough as well) then the endings really don’t differ very much, there wasn’t very much variety in the ending, it’ll still be the same thing, you end up in the water purification chamber and then you die. There’s some different things said in the ending speech but there isn’t a hell of a lot of benefit from which side you take, even with the Broken Steel dlc that allowed you to instead of die, wake up from a coma two weeks later, the water is still irradiated.

But I helped Dad and the scientists of Rivet City and the Brotherhood of Steel. Eventually the Enclave will tear down everything and take over Project Purity, killing Dad (I can’t even, I want to cry so much when Dad dies, it’s so sad). You then meet the Brotherhood of Steel who ask you to retrieve the GECK from another vault and after a long battle through supermutants, you’ll finally have it, only to be ambushed by the Enclave and have it stolen off you. Here you meet President Eden, who is actually just a computer and he tells you HIS master plan of poisoning the water. He’ll give you a modified FEV virus and ask you to poison the water. You can either comply with him, tell him to fuck off or get him to self-destruct (if your science is high enough) but either way you can’t leave Raven Rock until you take the virus.

Who President John Henry Eden REALLY is

Onto the last part of the game, You fight alongside the Brotherhood against the Enclave to take Project Purity back. When you finally get in you need to kill Eden’s right hand man and the man who killed your dad, Colonel Autumn and you and Sarah Lyons, a Brotherhood leader will have to activate Project Purity. You have many options here, you can get Sarah to sacrifice her own life, you can sacrifice your own life and activate it yourself or you can infect Project Purity (again you’d still be sacrificing your own life). I chose to sacrifice my own life and follow in Dad’s footsteps, activating the project with the passcode ‘2-1-6’ (see! Look mum!) and you’ll die a hero. (Unless you have Broken Steel where you go into a coma instead) A touching ending sequence will be played explaining what you did in the wasteland, it will change depending on how you played the game and the final part of the speech will show a photo of you and Dad that was taken at your tenth birthday. God just writing that made me tear up. It’s a beautiful lie the ending really, no matter what you do you’ll feel like crying because Dad was just so damn awesome. Me and Siti literally flailed around almost in tears when we watched it.

If you're trying to make me cry, it's working.

So that’s mainly what Fallout 3 is about, it has it’s pros and cons, the only other important thing I haven’t really mentioned is that you can have ‘followers’ to aid you in your quest. You can choose from eight different characters and can have one human and one creature companion at a time. Some of the followers are brilliant, I always took the supermutant who had gained intelligence named Fawkes with a Gatling laser gun and Dogmeat, the bi-colour eyed Australian Cattle Dog because they are both fucking tanks. Guess who else is a companion? Butch. Hell yeah, you have one side quest where you can open up Vault 101 and Butch will leave and go to Rivet City, you can eventually recruit him as your companion but he’s kinda useless. I remember the first time I recruited him he was my follower for about 5 minutes before he got shot by a fucking missle launcher and died. I didn’t save that of course.

The awesome followers of Fallout 3

Another final thing worth mentioning was the amazing radio. The main two channels were Galaxy News Radio, hosted by Three Dog who played a variety of really old-time music from amazing people such as The Ink Spots and Billie Holiday. The other main channel, Enclave Radio featured American propaganda tunes as well as Eden doing a copy of Roosevelt's Fireside Chats. I think this was awesome and really effective.

The awesomeness that is Three Dog

But yes I think it’s about time to wrap this up. All in all Fallout 3 is an excellent game, there’s so much to do, the story is powerful and the characters lovable, there’s even five dlcs that will extend the story even further! The only bad things about it was the ugly character creation, the lack of variety in the ending and also the shit-ton of glitches! God, I know this is a massive game but it’s like you walk into a rock and you’ll get stuck in it! Some of the glitches are incredibly stupid but what the hey, it’s still a worthwhile game to play and if you haven’t already played it then go and do it now. Come on, I’m waiting!

Pictures from:

http://fallout3.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/normal_standby.jpg?w=468

http://develion.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tutorial-CustomiseFace.jpg

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http://images.wikia.com/fallout/images/d/df/Butch_FI.jpg 
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzpgMzP9pIg 
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http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101221201426/fallout/images/7/7e/Three_Dog.jpg 
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