“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.
-
-
-
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
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110404205341/fallout/images/d/de/Revelation216.jpg
http://gaygamer.net/images/Fallout3b.jpg
http://blog.al.com/techcetera/2008/11/fallout3vats.JPG
http://images.wikia.com/fallout/images/d/df/Butch_FI.jpg
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/videogames/detail-page/fallout3_1_lg.jpg
http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110718214744/fallout/images/thumb/0/03/Wasteland_Map_1.0.png/650px-Wasteland_Map_1.0.png
http://mediang.gameswelt.net/public/images/200811/05a84e5c16c24cd7c768bad1f7e93f4d.jpg
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnmkht1IQE1qg2fbko1_250.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzpgMzP9pIg
http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090531125258/fallout/images/1/12/Followers.jpg
http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101221201426/fallout/images/7/7e/Three_Dog.jpg
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/videogames/detail-page/fallout3_3_lg.jpg
