I know there's a lot of criticism of FO3 for it's bugs, it's lack of choices in comparison to the originals, the NPCs, lack of skill checks, the overly long tutorial intro, the repetitiveness of rehashing the conflict of the first two games, and Bethesda's one-trick pony FPS gamedesign. Especially, at least as it appears from looking at fandom, it's often derided in comparison to New Vegas. I don't give any of that credence, though. I do have some criticisms which I'll save for the end but overall I really enjoyed this game. In fact, dare I say it, I think I enjoyed it a bit more than NV at times.

• For starters, I love VATS. What a perfect and genius way to blend real time with turn-based combat!! That alone was such a nice bit of game design that the devs at Obsidian continued to use it when they developed The Outer Worlds. It genuinely is one of the great game design innovations of the last 20 years, IMO.
• Secondly, while the story borrows a lot of the main plot from F01 (seeking clean water and battling armies of mutants) it's changed up just a bit; rather than bringing clean water to a single community, it’s for an entire region. One of my favorite things about 1 & 2 was the way the canon actions of 1 led to social changes in 2, where the stability the Vault Dweller brought led to the rise of the NCR. We see some of the same thing here, albeit on a smaller scale, when purified water leads to the growth of trade.
• The post-apocalypse in FO3 feels a lot more Mad Max-y than 1, 2, and NV, with slavers, scrap metal towns, Lord of the Flies caves, wealthy jerks who entertain themselves by sniping random passersby, and a feeling that life is cheap in the Capitol Wasteland. And most of the side and main quests were good.
• Maybe I’m a bit biased because I’ve lived 43 years in various parts of the DC metro region and I loved seeing this city represented in fiction. It wasn’t an actual representation but they captured the feeling of the neighborhoods. Especially in ignoring anything east of Capitol Hill, a perhaps unintended but nevertheless true to life picture of the city for most of White professional class.
• The Liberty Prime attack on the Enclave is just an awesome scene. PROBABILITY OF MISSION HINDRANCE: 0%; DEMOCRACY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE
• Maybe I’m a bit biased because I’ve lived 43 years in various parts of the DC metro region and I loved seeing this city represented in fiction. It wasn’t an actual representation but they captured the feeling of the neighborhoods. Especially in ignoring anything east of Capitol Hill, a perhaps unintended but nevertheless true to life picture of the city for most of White professional class. Still, it was fun to see the Metro I've been riding for 20 years become travel tunnels (and a clever way to handle a large overland map) or the town I grew up in become a super mutant base.

There were parts I didn't love as much. For one thing, I really wish Bethesda hadn't reused the Brotherhood and the Enclave. They could have made their own thing and it would have great, I bet, given the world they built in Elder Scrolls. After two centuries, any cross-continental organization would have branched apart in culture and agenda, especially since The Pitt tells us that cross-continental travel was extremely difficult. And Bethesda chose to have two such organizations? That kind of broke my suspension of disbelief a few times. And Mothership Zeta was a whole waste of time. Still, definitely a worthwhile continuation of a worthwhile series.

OPEN-WORLD RPG - Your dad has escaped Vault 101, and it is up to you, the Lone Wanderer, to find him.

PROS:

++ Side quests. The highlight of this game are the side quests. There's not a ton of them, but none of them felt like filler and most had interesting storylines. There were also harder moral decisions to make in the side content than there was in the main storyline. I also really appreciated the variety of ways in which the player can complete the quest, and I hear Fallout NV is even better in this regard.

++ VATS. VATS is such a fun system, and without its inclusion, I would have been much harsher on the combat. But because of it, I had lots of fun with the combat still. I still don't get tired of taking a Raider's head off, or watching a Super Mutant's body explode!

++ Exploration. Unlike Oblivion, each location felt more interesting to explore. They don't feel as copy and paste as Oblivion and Skyrim dungeons. Each location felt like they had their own hidden story which compelled me to search each location fully. And it was nice that my sense of exploration was often rewarded with equipment and bottlecaps, sometimes even a unique weapon or armor piece! And in terms of cities and settlements, each had a distinct personality. Megaton, Rivet City, Little Lamplight, Paradise Falls, the Citadel, and Underworld were all unique pockets of civilization. And as I continue to play the game, I'm excited to discover even more!

++ Atmosphere. Especially in the early game, the atmosphere was great! It felt intimidating and dangerous to explore these long-abandoned locales. Really made me feel how oppressive the wasteland is. Obviously, the stronger I got, the less I felt the atmosphere since I just mowed everything down.

++ Incredible guns! There are tons of great guns to choose from in the base game! From the Fat Man, to the Railway Rifle, to the Plasma Rifle, to all the different melee weapons, it was hard to narrow down which weapon I should use!

++ Sound design. Relating to the guns, they all sounded great. It made each gun feel distinct and feel powerful to use. The sound design of the game overall is also equally commendable!

++ Replayability. I would love to play the game again and focus on different skills, perks, and make different choices and see how certain quests pan out as a villain.

++ Enemy designs.

CONS:

-- Combat. Obviously, the game is not a standard FPS, but you still do a lot of shooting. Outside of VATS, the combat is quite rough. My reticle would be right over an enemy and my hit still wouldn't register. It was incredibly unsatisfying most of the time.

-- Main questline. It wasn't outright terrible, but I just wasn't incredibly interested. The story didn't really take any twists or turns, there was no compelling antagonist, and the ending was quite anticlimactic. And there weren't a lot of memorable moral choices to be made in the campaign.

-- Technical issues. I decided to play vanilla, and there were still quite a few bugs during my encounter. Nothing game-breaking but enough to be noticeable. Rivet City permanently becoming locked, Fawkes disappearing, a couple of crashes, audio glitches, etc.

-- Color palette. The game doesn't look that great overall, but that's to be expected for a 2008 game. But I really didn't like the overly green color palette.

Fallout motherfuckin 3 guys. This is yet another game I somehow didn't know existed until it came out on PS3. I remember thinking, "Huh, this is a lot like Oblivion," when I started, unaware that it was the same studio. But man, what a vibe. I was already pretty invested with the whole, "Your dad just bailed on the vault, now we're in a crisis," storyline that kicks off the game, but I remember being completely hooked after walking past the Vault door, turning around, and seeing the skeletons of long-dead wishful vault rejects holding signs that said things like, "LET US IN" and "WE'RE FUCKING STARVING" and so on. Most people will highlight the moment they exited the vault for the first time and saw the Capital Wasteland as the magical moment for them and I don't deny the majesty of that, as it certainly never gets old to me either, but there's just something about that scene of the skeletons with the sign that is absolute fundamental "Fallout" to me and really set the vibe for the game. I wonder how many first-timers missed out on that because of not turning around and just going through the wooden door out into the world.

As with Oblivion, I also had no prior knowledge of Fallout. I was playing blindly. And just like Oblivion, Fallout 3 contained so many cool, interesting, cryptic places that left a huge impression on me. I could list a hunrded and not be exhaustive, but I'll rattle off a few that come to mind:

• the journey to Vault 87 through Little Lamplight
• dosing the fuck out of myself with Rad-X and a hazmat suit and reaching the actual door of Vault 87
• the ruin that used to be the White House
• Dunwich Building
• the trenches that used to be the Mall
• the satellites that allow you to launch nukes
• Rivet City and the other story-related locations of course

I loved how the world was set up as opposed to Fallout 4. I hate that you start in the corner of the map in that game. Fallout 3's decision to place you in the middle of the map (relatively) is more enjoyable, because, even though it does have a subtle suggestive path for you to go on (exit vault, explore town below, get on road to Megaton, and so on), being centrally located encourages exploration in whatever direction and makes it easy.

Also, making a ramshackle town like Megaton homebase instead of a blown-out suburb is cooler.

Exploring the vaults was a highlight of the game for me. Finding out the back stories, examining each room, and learning what kinds of experiments were run. That kind of thing. Oh, and the fucking Gary's. I'll never forget that.

I played this the summer it came out on PS3. My family took a trip to Cancun, Mexico that year, and my friend joined us. He fell asleep on my bed while I played this game until the early morning, only stopping when it was time to leave for the airport. There are not many games I've pulled all-nighters for. The Capital Wasteland has an unmatched vibe and leaves an impression long remembered. We lone wanderers will always remember our first encounter with the Brotherhood of Steel. We'll always remember Arefu and that creepy storyline. We'll always remember the eerie journey through Little Lamplight into Vault 87. Fallout 4 nailed being a Fallout game but it felt utterly devoid of these pivotal moments that make core memories.

The DLCs were a triumph all of their own. The Pitt and Point Lookout were worth every cent I paid back then. Mothership Zeta and Operation Anchorage, not so much, but the dope winterized power armor from the latter was a welcome addition to the inventory.

I don't have much faith in Bethesda being able to reattain the vibe that is Fallout 3, or New Vegas. Especially now that the game has seen a new wave of success through the Amazon show. I think Microsoft and Bethesda are more interested in monetizing it. Maybe they can recapture the magic while still pulling that off, but doubtful. I'm that old guy that's saying, "MY Fallout was the best fallout, they don't make 'em like that anymore," but such is life.

Game #53/200 The last time I had played Fallout 3 was 15 or so years ago when I was in high school, which seems weird because I feel like it’s so “modern.” I have fond memories of exploring the Capitol Wasteland, putting in easily a few hundred hours into the game back in the day, and really being turned onto the idea of open world games by it (seems like all I have been playing lately, coincidentally). In 2008, Fallout 3’s open worlded gameplay was unprecedented to my knowledge (excepting maybe Bethesda’s other big title preceding this one: Elder Scrolls Oblivion). I loved Oblivion as well, but Fallout 3 seems less clunky and more fun to my memory. I actually was a bit hesitant to jump back into FO3 (being inspired by the great new TV show, like many other people), since I was worried that my experience would be dampened after being spoiled by modern open world games like Hogwarts, Horizon, Spider-Man, and Ghost of Tsushima. I found that the experience was a ton of fun, and not too badly inhibited by the lack of less convenient modern features (if at all). In fact, I think that Bethesda has created something marvelous with Fallout 3’s world and the design has probably not been surpassed by another series to my knowledge. I guess I’ll start by talking a bit more about the world: Fallout is truly “open” in the sense that once you leave the tutorial area, you can go anywhere you want. There are signs and waypoints that guide you to some areas that will give a new player an ideal starting experience, but you can easily die just traipsing the wasteland, or you can find something really cool or interesting. Megaton, the first town that most players will discover, offers the first of many interesting moral choices that impact your personal morality, character relationships, money (caps), and even some perks and other obtainables. My favorite part of Fallout was meeting NPCs caught up in various dilemmas — usually their stories were touched with a bit of comic absurdity and/or horror — and seeking out more information within and outside the community in which they resided, and then making a choice that would probably decide their fate. Many times you're responsible for the life or death of many NPCs. Do you want to be moral/immoral; are you motivated purely by money; are you interested in seeing how a story plays out?, etc. – you can play through the game an unlimited number of ways depending on how you are approaching things. It’s perfect for role playing, but you can also play as a completist, or you can simply enjoy the story.

There are a decent number (there could be more, but it’s a full-sized game for sure) of these side quests. Some that stuck out to me were: (1) the community of nature worshiping cultists in the Oasis, with whom you must decide to burn a tree-human that’s being worshiped as a deity, or slow his heart, or speed it up. (2) you need to decide whom to side with in a battle between two wastelanders masquerading as superhero/supervillain. (3) you are tasked with stealing the Declaration of Independence by a historian who shares erroneous historical facts about America’s founding. There are many unmarked quests as well that take less time, are less rewarding, but are bite-sized samples of Fallout’s wacky, catastrophic world. The progression system is also top tier for me, one of my all-time favorites, because it’s quite simple but addicting to be rewarded XP for completing tasks or killing enemies and moving up a basic track (that is capped at level 20 in the base game), before being reward with skill points that can be allocated in numerous different categories. The replayability of the game is greatly enhanced by the many skills you can invest in. You can invest many of your points in energy weapons, or unarmed, or explosives and focus on different weapon types (or any combination of these). You can also invest in medicine for better healing, science to hack terminals, speech to get bonuses during dialogue, or many other categories. Then you choose from a large list of enticing perks, like Animal Friend, which stops animals from attacking you in the wild, or Nerd Rage, which gives you a damage bonus at low HP. My only gripe with the perks is that there are far too many that simply award you skill points – kinda boring. But there is a wide enough variety that you can build your character uniquely.

The gunplay itself is a bit weak. VATS is a very fun system in which you slow down time to score critical hits based on a % chance, but the actual shooting is pretty basic. It’s fun, but a lot of times the cover system and aiming doesn’t have a great feel to it. You can hide in weird places to get around being shot; you can stand right in front of an enemy and pour led into his head; the reloading with many guns takes an absurdly long time, etc. But there are some unique and fun weapons like the Railway Gun and the Mini Nuke which feel very powerful. I enjoyed that scavenging for junk could turn into crafting a powerful weapon. I also felt that scavenging and looting was well rewarded in this game. FO3 keeps you tight on resources – very tight IMO – which forces you to juggle your gun’s ammo well. This management aspect is made more challenging by weapon condition deteriorating rather quickly and being costly. Stimpak prices also add up so you’re usually strapped for caps. I never felt overly wealthy in Fallout.

Graphics-wise I thought the game looked stellar for being a PS3/360 title. There are some excellent and very creative monster designs and the world is pulled off super well. You have a nice mix of destroyed environments and some really careful touches. It would take hours to go through how cool some of the communities/world locations are: Little Lamplight with its all-children population, Rivet City’s vertical design and drama-filled inhabitants, many desolate gas stations, radio comm towers, and raider settlements. The game is packed to the brim with interesting locales and it can be addicting to look inside of a place only to get caught up in combat, looting, and exploring computers for lore. The music is also perfect, with so many excellent selections from the 50s. I only wish there were more tunes and Three Dog radio announcements. And there are many voice actors for generic NPCs who you’ll hear attached to many different characters, but no big deal, it’s a big game. Overall, I loved Fallout 3. It was so nice coming back into this world for ~25 hours and enjoying every aspect of it (the main questline, I should mention, isn’t the most exciting thing, but it is a nice vehicle for you to travel through the world and get sidetracked). It’s no longer a perfect game in my mind as it once was in 2008, but it’s still pretty close.

Writing about a game after so many years is not easy. Everything has been said about it and fans and/or haters are already very clear about what they like and what they hate about the video game. Even so, I will give my opinion, largely because I played it for just a few hours because my brother loved it, but I was not completely convinced. Until 1 month ago.

I like to start by talking about the graphics and I have to say that at the time they were pretty good, with many technical tricks very well used. The worst thing about this section is undoubtedly the textures, very generic and of low quality (solved with a mod that makes the low quality of the original even more evident). The textures of some characters and specific locations are saved, but what stands out are the animations, deaths and lighting.

The controls are typical of any fps and in general the gameplay too, but with role-playing elements, such as quests, skills, etc., and many conversations with different answers and a lot of decision making in the different missions. Perhaps this is what is most addictive, you can choose to kill, steal or help people as you please and thus create your own story. And it's better this way, because the main story of the game is very basic, it is short and has a completely anticlimactic ending. It is also important to know that it does not make you explore the map, so if you follow the story without exploring this world you will miss 70% of what the game offers you, without exaggerating (DLCs aside).

The truth is that the gameplay is fun. You have enough skills to choose from each time you level up, there are many weapons with their own ammunition, you have different elements to wear, including very top armor and in general loot for a while. Also the V.A.T.S. shooting system feels epic, especially at the beginning.

I think this game is recommended for all those people who enjoy RPGs in general. It has a good combination of action and role-playing, a lot of variety, a big world to explore with lots of little stories with a lot of humor and in my opinion this is what will captivate you, seeing what character is waiting for you in that cabin, who lives in that hotel, what is in that camp or where this tunnel will take me. Highly recommended game that has me hooked and already installing its sequel. 8/10

PS: The mods for this game are incredible. I have installed everything. Basically you start with the ones that are almost mandatory so that the game does not close continuously and from there textures, setting, exterior and interior lighting, etc. And then animations, weapons, skills, everything! There is even a very good one that adds survival mode (FO3 Wanderers Edition), having to drink, eat, etc., combining several mods, and it is incredible!

Greetings.

When I wait so long to play something, especially if that something was very impactful on release, I often have a hard time figuring out whether the opinions I hear about it are based on a nostalgic then or a more objective now. Fallout 3 was a perfect example of this. I never fully understood if everything I'd read or seen justified a playthrough today, because a) I struggled to find any recent first playthrough accounts, and b) it is a fairly long game. As an older gamer, I tend to value my time a lot more than I used to back then, so I pause when faced with a prospect of investing 25+ hours in a game that might end up leaving me feeling underwhelmed after I play it.

After my 36hr playthrough though, I can easily say Fallout 3 was worth the time. I’m hard pressed to remember a game I played that was able to convey a more effective sense of a nuclear post-apocalyptic world. This is, unquestionably, Fallout 3’s biggest strength: its environmental design is remarkable even for a fresh pair of eyes in 2022, and the world is a joy to explore in great part because of this. The game sets the perfect visual tone - even if, ironically, it sometimes seems tone-deaf in other aspects. But that’s not all Fallout 3 offers. The next best thing for me was the intro: it plays so much like the quintessential set piece that it almost feels personal, taking its time in nudging you to become involved and engaged with the life in the vault from infancy to adulthood. This is fundamental to provoke in the player that sense of wonder when they step out into the world for the first time. And it was so well done that it still manages to create an impression even if, like me, you’re only experiencing it now. At this point I was still not entirely sold on the game, as its age was showing in different ways and this took a bit of getting used to. However, by the time I reached the Super-Duper Mart and had my first one-on-many against a bunch of Raiders, I was hooked. There was just something so satisfying about making use of the VATS system to make it out alive, even though I felt clearly underleveled. And this mechanic is actually what makes combat ultimately feel okay. Actually, gunplay as a whole doesn’t exactly live up to the horror stories I had heard. I mean yes, it is far from perfect and guns do feel weak when used in normal mode. But not only did I eventually get used to it, using VATS definitely brings the experience up a few notches, even if the whole thing can still be a bit janky now and then. Audio wise though, nothing to criticise on the gun front. All weapons sound amazing, and this is actually transversal to the rest of the sound design. Everything in the world sounds as it should, from the environmental effects to the radio stations you can listen to (though I’d recommend turning those off for that truly gritty post-apocalyptic feel). Another thing I appreciated was the sense of progression. Though you can reach 100 on a couple skills fairly quickly, there’s a growing feeling of accomplishment when you start going from a clueless noob to a wasteland veteran. It isn’t ideal, but it gives you just enough balance to justify replayability. Finally, the story. Apart from a couple of weird instances, I liked it more than I thought I would, in the sense that even though it’s nothing groundbreaking by today’s standards, it still gives you more than enough to be engaging and, and at a couple of turns, even surprising.

All of these positives, of course, need to be stacked against Fallout 3’s problems. Even if the new FPS and resolution boost mostly made it a joy to play on the Series S, the game’s clunky movement and mechanics can feel pretty awkward until you get over it. The dated visuals and animations don’t do the it any favours either, and the worst part of this is that F3's colour palette leans heavily on darker tones, resulting in a loss of detail especially indoors, even with the brightness cranked up (at times I couldn’t even see objects that were right in front of me). Something else I didn’t like was how restrictive exploration felt around the metro areas, especially for an open world. I understand this was by design, but closing off that many areas with rubble, thus forcing you to navigate through a bunch of subway tunnels that look identical to each other, was a bit off-putting. Another point of contention is the emotional tone of the game. Too me, it often felt too ‘chirpy’ for a miserable looking world where destruction and radiation reign supreme and a lot of people are suffering. There are exceptions to this throughout your journey of course, but it was still prevalent enough for it to become somewhat bothersome. One last word for the lack of ambiguity in your choices. Even though I love how the game gives you enough room to either become the stuff of legends or an absolute asshole, I would’ve liked to see more grey areas in terms of decision making. I heard New Vegas addresses this issue and I’m excited to see that for myself.

I suppose the only real question that matters is whether I would recommend a 2022 Fallout 3 playthrough to the few oddities out there who, like myself, have never played this game before. And the answer has to be a definite yes. Even after all these years, Fallout 3 still manages to be an engaging experience, with an almost perfectly crafted post-apocalyptic tone, loads of fun to be had, and a decent amount of replayability. Unless you find any of the flaws I mentioned above to be a complete turn-off in your games, you will likely have a great time with it if you're into these types of worlds. 8.5/10.