Fallout 3: Your first walk into the wasteland is always your best

Yes, I realize that this game is old (old as shit, honestly), but with Fallout 76 coming out and Fallout 3 being one of my all-time favorite games, I thought it would be a great first video game review to add to the list. It was actually one of the first games I ever played on my PlayStation 3 (sold to make way for the PS4, of course). I initially bought the console to play NHL 2010, and after borrowing someone else’s Xbox 360 and playing through Skyrim a bit, I was shocked at how different storytelling could be, even within the first set piece where you’re about to get your head chopped off, only for a dragon to attack at the last minute and save you. After that, I wanted to get my hands on all games made by Bethesda that had a similar style of gameplay.

Fallout 3 immerses you immediately from the start with an extremely clever tutorial, as you begin your journey as a baby, then morph into an adolescent within the tight community of a vault (where mostly everyone lived throughout whatever nuclear wars were happening outside). Your perks are decided during class, and there’s even a birthday party, which gives you time to interact with NPCs. It all leads to the disappearance of your father and your escape from the vault to go find him in the Capital Wasteland of Washington, DC.  

Bethesda sets up your first venture into the wasteland perfectly by spotting you near the top of a hill overlooking the rest of your surroundings. You can see the scope of the land, with quests designed to explore your immediate area, but also so much freedom that you don’t have to do anything the game tells you to. It asks you to venture out and play for yourself, with structures designed to lure you in and flesh out the world around you. That you can interact with almost anything; the game lets you collect items that sometimes don’t mean anything at all except to sell as junk. The interfacing with characters is a bit odd, as the camera focuses up on each one during dialogue, but that’s really the only thing that takes away from the reality of the world around you (well, that and V.A.T.S.). That the gunplay is wonky makes it feel endearing, like if you were dropped into that setting and was given a gun, you too wouldn’t be great at shooting it either. The V.A.T.S. system helps, sometimes giving the game a turn-based RPG mechanic but shooting from a distance without it often gives you a better chance of hitting if you can figure out the spray of each weapon.  

The story mechanics are probably the best thing about the game. Not the story itself per se, as your quest to find your father ultimately leads you to an unfulfilling ending, but the mechanics of how that story and other side stories are told is what’s most interesting. Without specifying it explicitly, the game usually gives you at least 2 options at any given point, leaving it to the player to figure out what those options could be and inviting them to investigate what exactly is going on.  Many games promote themselves on the idea that your choices dictate the outcome of the story (Life is Strange and Until Dawn come to mind), but not many invite you to use your imagination and paint a picture with what’s given to you. Of course, this being a video game, it doesn’t give you unlimited options, but whatever option you choose, it has a lasting impact on the game and your character. Sometimes you’re just not sure how to figure it out but you’re sure that whoever you’re dealing with is kind of maybe evil, so you decide to just use all your artillery and kill the entire lot (the slaver colony is a good example here, and I’m really eager to find a more stealthy way of freeing the slaves). It also gives you incentive to go back to an old save point and attempt to figure things out in a different way, like in Tenpenny Tower, where using the right investigative process will lead you to discover that whoever has control of the building is entirely up to you.

Tennpenny Tower, in all its glory. 

The details make the game’s atmosphere worth spending time in too. Little things like raider camps filled with empty cans and bottles, pilot lights inside ovens, and grocery stores with food items being feasted upon by radioactive bugs. The 1950s theme gives a surrealistic vibe to everything, developing a uniqueness to the world that seems like it could mirror the nuclear fallout of today, but is situated in an entirely different universe. The level design, from the open countryside to the tight alleyways of downtown Washington, makes it feel like there’s always something new to discover. Playing it a second time around, I’m still coming across vaults and hidden areas I didn’t know existed on my first playthrough.

Altogether, Fallout 3 is a well-designed ecosystem meant for exploration and storytelling. I’ve played through both Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4, and neither is as enthralling as Fallout 3. Las Vegas seemed like a good concept for an end-of-the-world apocalyptic game, but the level design was so minimal that your actions don’t feel meaningful, even though the main story was more credible. Fallout 4 reverted back to a denser setting, making an expanded, vibrant city surrounded by all sorts of weird characters, creatures, and buildings. Unfortunately, they completely ruined the story mechanics, making it impossible to really tinker with the plot structure except to give you one of four possible groups to join about halfway through the main quest. It was almost impossible to solve a problem nonviolently; in fact, the game was better suited as a straight up shooter since most quests involved clearing bases full of supposed bad guys. Fallout 3 supersedes the other 2 games for its sheer imagination and true open endedness, letting you dictate the terms of engagement and the result of the narrative.

With Fallout 76 coming out soon (the B.E.T.A. version is already out, though server time is extremely limited), it’s worth revisiting Fallout 3, the game that pushed Fallout into the realm of third-person RPG. With no human NPCs, I’m a little worried though. It seems like Bethesda is banking on a new strategy, using players themselves to help tell the story and build their own world. I was sorely disappointment in the Elder Scrolls Online experience, but that had mostly to do with the fight mechanics than anything else. I’ve already pre-ordered the damn game though—how could I not, it’s another Fallout game!—so here’s hoping Fallout 76 lives up to the same standard of gameplay of its previous incarnations.