1.5/5 ★ – Jrdotan's review of Fallout 3.

After years waiting for a proper sequel, focusing hard on theorycrafting and writing ass-long wishlists from what we wanted from Fallout 3, we got some news. Not only Fallout 3 would in fact happen, but Bethesda softworks from the TES fame would develop it... more worrying than that would be the fact that this sequel would give up on its turn based roots, going for a newly added first person gameplay, which quickly made the game be known as "Oblivion with guns." Obviously the fans were not very pleased with some of the changes, but the question remains, after the game finally got released, did it achieve to be a proper fallout game? was it any good? Well, one thing that is visibly dissappointing about it, is its newly used engine, which quickly aged terribly. The texture work is very badly done, color pallette is pretty simplistic and never feels natural on top of not supporting natural illumination, having to resort to a weird artificial light system to portray flashlights for example. One thing this game heired from Obilivion, is the iconically hilarious facial expressions from npcs. Everyone is a bit deformed and look bad shapedly as if they are not very human. Its a bit uncanny to be honest, but it also plays on the humorous side of the game. Suffice to say, the graphics didnt age well, in fact, some of the animations are so bad that playing in third person is close to impossible. What about sound design? Fallout was always known for its excellent SFX and usage of professional VAs, what about fallout 3? does it live to the franchise's high standards? Well, no, although its clearly not as bad as its graphical side. See, the sound effects arent as beefy for guns and explosions, so it never feel as visceral as in the OGs, but they clearly sound as guns, so it does its job even if not particularly remarkable, the one way in which the sound design gets considerably more mixed as far as results go, is the VAs. See, they didnt get a whole lot of professional VAs for this game, with by far the most well known one being liam neeson (Schindler in Schindler's list), which does your Dad in this game. He is in fact the best VA in the game alongside three dog's (Erik Dellums aka Dr randell in the legendary tv series's "the wire"), the biggest issue being that not only both dont seem very emotionally connected to the game as if they just were told to read their lines without the in-game context, but half of the other VAs are amateur VAs from Bethesda developers, which not only feel very cheap, but heres the thing: This was an open world game from the 7th gen of consoles, released during the time everything had to be voice acted. To achieve that they repeated a LOT of VAs. which means that in the same town you will find 7-8 characters possibly close to each other with the same voice, including but not restricted to every raider being voice acted by the same guy, every overseer having the same VA,etc... it gets old and it gets old pretty fast. One thing that i didnt particularly cared much for, but people seemed to enjoy, was the newly added radio stations. see,they tried to replicate the in-game atmospheric mark morgan music with Inon zur's score, which didnt live to the legendary standards of mark morgan (by no means its bad music tho, just rather forgettable compared to classic fallout), but Bethesda also added some radio stations (probably influenced by GTA's radios) which play classic 40s and 50s music such as the ink spots's i dont want to set the world on fire and such. Those were very well received by fans and critics alike and became part of Fallout's vast iconography. and here it comes the important aspects we all find to be very important for roleplaying games, the writing and gameplay. Starting with writing, this was always one big aspect of classic Fallout, they were known for being extremely well written and had clear strong literary values as pieces of entertainment, how did bethesda handled the writing then? The story starts in 2277 telling us about our character's life, growing in an isolated vault, known as vault 101 and located in washignton d.c, completely ignorant of the outside world and what led to their current life. After a series of quite common events in his life, one day, for no apparent reason, our dad escape from the vault which leads to an insane civil war within the conffines of the shelter. At this point our character needs to escape from this hell, explore the outside world and find out why his father runned away from their home. The premise seems fine in practice, the game clearly wants to tell us the entire story of life this one person had and how he/she/they changed the wasteland throught their action, however, somethings are clearly very different from the get-go. For starters, the immaculate pacing of F1 is gone, side content is not as strongly interconnected to the main plot in question. in fact, the main plot is pretty different from the side content altogether, which means that adventuring in the world wont get you more invested on the events taking place in washington d.c. At most you will find some interesting side stories of little relevance. which reduce density and makes the overall experience more dettached instead of a cohesive grand vision of something greater than the sum of its parts. The other bad thing being the narrative itself. The main plot wanted to pander to old fans, including classic elements and factions from the classic games so.. expect to see super mutants, brotherhood of steel, the enclave and even the G.E.C.K in this game. most of the explanations regarding the presence of those are lacking and frankly confusing, which will make the game seems a bit rushed. Worse than that being the fact that a lot of the motive is so vague that by the end i was confused as to why some of the characters were even doing what they were doing, in particular.. the main antagonist. the lack of motive and density already hurts the game, but even the time to time dialogue is a culprit here, it really wasnt just one thing at fault but instead, a huge ammount of things going wrong. To exemplify this well, let me say that this game tries to follow a similar structure as the one present in Fo1/2 where the player will be walking around from settlement to settlement solving big problems and changing those places as a result. One of the first places you find is a city with a big undetonated bomb in the middle of it, once you open the big gates and go within the city's walls, the sheriff named "Lucas Simm" will approach the player and ask what is your business in town, you can answer immediately by saying you are asking for your father, describing him as "a middle aged looking man". Not only the description is extremely vague and not helpful at all, but Lucas will unironically answer to it saying "no, i haven't seen anyone like that" while the city is full of middle aged people going on with their lifes. Is lucas simm an asshole? is this supposed to be humorous dialogue? who knows, the game is either a sublime chapter of rick and morty with extremely subtle comedy or the writers have no idea on how to properly do investigative dialogue, i digress, the most important part of this dialogue happens right after that. The player can question the existence of said bomb. "who the hell builds an entire town around an undetonated bomb? wont't anyone try to disarm it?" you ask, clearly worried by the fact all those lives could just vanish from the earth at anytime. Then, lucas in all of his glorious sheriff responsibility, will let you, a 19 year old children he never seen in his life, try to disarm the bomb without evacuating the town nor leaving by himself. Let me tell you that his own 6 year old son is living WITHIN that town and he even says that if you are not careful, the bomb may explode. This is fallout 3 in a nutshell. in all of those situations in a lesser or greater degree, the characters wont act as if they are living beings in a real world, instead just acting as npcs from a video game to the point it seems like somekind of meta-language or fourth wall breaking dialogue (from the same kind you could find in parts of fallout 2) The worst part in my opinion and the one problem that plagues the writing in every bethesda game to this day, is the lack of good characterization. Characters dont have their own particular character arc, nor unique personalities or permanent impact on the player experience. they are often restricted to do something on a quest and once the player finished the quest, theres no new interactions to be had, no other quests connected to the character or new interactions recognizing the passage of time. This means they are not memorable and are often very forgettable as far as characterization goes, which makes the plot very difficult to care for and often the experience is rather bland. However, theres still the gameplay to talk about, does it do well in this front? Well, in some aspects yes, mostly? not so much It does try to translate the game to the classic TES gameplay, which means exploration heavy one. he player can walk in first person, fast travel to newly found locations, shoot at everything they see or simply sneak around. The one thing that was always impressive about TES, being the level of scenario interactivity the player has. you might lift a bucket and use it to help you distract enemies, throw pieces of furniture in the scenario, use big crates to help you sneak around,etc... which adds a layer of player input that is quite rare in open world games. Sadly, while the world is far bigger than any previous game, they never added the option to sprint, which means youll be slowly walking around this huge terrain until you can reach a point of interest. This is one of the most boring parts of the game and the navigation is a clear problem, specially in the main D.C which is full of invisible walls and your main means of navigation are the metro subway stations, often copy-paste heavy locations that are terribly labyrinthic to walk in, very easy to get lost and extremely boring to walk throught and fight hordes of ghouls... Combat is also quite weak, you can either shoot normally and aim (which lacks ADS), normally missing lots of shots (which is bad, because ammo is rather scarce in this game) because of the gunplay being less than precise (as means of trying to portray the rpg progression systems, suffice to say, it doesnt translate well in real time. Or shooting with V.A.T.S which is clearly how they intended you to play the game. Not only it has improved damage and crit change, but the percentage chance of hitting is displayed before confirming and action AND on top of all of this, V.A.T.S give the player 90% D.R, which means you are pretty much immortal as far as you keep spamming it. The enemy A.I is not good, often getting stuck with ease and not being able to jump, this means a player can quite easily exploit their dumbness and spam V.A.T.S from an advantageous position, which is the optimal way of winning any combat situation. The other issues are more related to the other rpg elements and bad calculation adding up to make the game quite dull. as an example, you have a reputation system called "karma" which is the means of morally gauging if the player is a good, bad or selfish person throught their actions in the game. Due to the system being pretty much a meter, some problems quickly show up, for example: the ease in which you can revert your karma by doing superfluous stuff. The ammount of karma achieved by donating pure water to beggars for example, is enough to make the player go from death incarnate to "saint of wastes", which is hilarious. The reputation system is also very general, not a single system work to provide hostile memory in individual npcs the result? you may take pleasure in knowing they made the mistake of level scalling enemies to the player level, so you can raise your bare punches at level 1, spam v.a.t.s and kill an entire town, take all of their loot and leave for 2 days. because the system is unable to recall you were a mass murderer, everyone will forget and soon enough you will be able to buy, talk to npcs and solve problems without any major consequences, a far cry from the complex reputation system from fallout 2 which were basically 4 different systems interlocking together (Karma, local reputation, Reaction and Special reputation titles), they used to lead the player to very specific reactivity which was a huge payoff for specific character roles. Fo3 goes for a more general thing in which you cant be much more than super good, super bad or something in between. To end up the conversation about the rpg systems, i would like to say somethings were dumbed down quite a lot. the game features no traits on character creation for example (which used to be specific characteristics that provided your characters with advantages and disadvantages, such as good natured which gave you extra skillpoints in non combat skills, but reduced your combat capabilities,etc...), the skills went from 18 in number, down to 13 with some merged together (first aid and doctor) and others just completely removed, such as the traps skill. now, removing traps is a matter of just seeing the trap and clicking a button to disarm it, which is quite dumb. On top of that, perks are now obtained at each level, instead of the old 1 at each 3 levels's system. some may see this as a good thing, but they added way more skill based perks on top of the old system, instead of making perks more unique in gameplay. as a result, its very easy to max out a character and character builds are no longer a thing. The best aspect of the gameplay by far, is the quest design and some of the locations you explore. Vaults for example, while being pretty similar in design, are packed with interesting writing and often creative enough to spark that interest for the fallout setting that the rest of the game lacks. While quest design is mostly on par with the older titles, with side quests being varied in design, full of interesting decision making or outright clever places to go throught, in particular i would like to highlight the wasteland survival guide quest, which is a multi staged quest that start with pretty simple fetch quests and end up in a highly interesting conspiracy regarding the foundation of one of the game's bigger settlements. the quest allows the player to skip large portions of it throught skillchecks and its interesting enough to introduce you to game's mechanics and reward you well for that. The only reason why the rewards arent perfectly fit to each and every quest, is that the itemization is quite problematic. Mainly due to the repair system. Now, every piece of equipment has a durability bar. to repair an item, you either have to pay someone to repair it to you or find an item of similar type and duct tape both together, raising the durability of your equipment. Seems pretty simple right? The problem being that the lower the durability of an item is, the least effective they will be, most of the strongest equipment will come in terrible condition, which will lead you to think they mostly suck, energy weapons in particular are a victim of that. game designers spammed laser pistols in trash cans and around every fucking place to try and make up for that, but a band-aid can't fix such a big issue. on top of that, the new armor system is a bit terrible with extremely artificial passive bonuses being provided by using different pieces of clothing. Now, using a mechanic uniform will somehow improve your knowledge in weapon repair, a very dumb modern feature that plague rpgs and open world games alike. Falllout 3 is not what we all wished. it is quite underwhelming even if it has its fair share of good ideas and often falls flat when trying to pander to everyone. Its broken in terms of gameplay, quite buggy due to the outdated engine, the writing is mostly subpar and its just not very good as an rpg, it did ressurected the fallout franchise, but mostly not for the best. Do i recommend it? maybe for historical purposes, but it was vastly overshadowed by its superior sequel and it doesnt add much to a new player nowadays. Only play if you are a hardcore fan and as far as expansions go, only get broken steel and the pitt if you need to get them individually, otherwise, buy the now cheap game of the year edition. Rank: - 3/10