Fallout 3: First Impressions
As soon as I heard the new post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout 3 hit the torrents sites, I went and grabbed it. I’d played the first two and they were always great fun if not solely because of the amount of freedom you have in the game. Not just the sort of sandbox-style freedom you get in Grand Theft Auto, but a freedom to actually affect the world around you. Someone you decide to beat to death in an alley early in the game could have been an important character to provide you medicine or access to some special area later on.
So after a few hours playing the third installment last night, I’m pleased to say it still has exactly this sort of freedom. And it’s friggin’ awesome.
I don’t want to get long-winded about why this game is amazing, so in a nutshell, here’s how the first few hours went:
After a fairly long tutorial where I’m born and grow up in a nuclear fallout shelter, a vault built into the side of a hill, I emerge to see a pretty impressive expanse of what I eventually find out is the bombed out wasteland of what was once just the DC area. The bomb apparently hit in the 50’s, but it’s implied that 200 years or so have passed since the Apocalypse, so everything has sort of a retro-futurist vibe, right down to the tunes played through a pirate radio station you can pick up relatively early.
I follow some signs to the nearest town, Megaton, a city built around the crater of an undetonated Atom bomb. I talk to a bunch of people in the town and basically I’m given four options:
- Blow up the bomb and wipe the town off the map for a pretty large amount of money cause a pimp in a neighboring town has some beef with this town’s residents.
- Defuse the bomb cause the city Sheriff is worried it could someday go off.
- Worship the bomb as part of a new church, The Children of Atom
- Ignore the whole thing and keep heading towards the Potomac and DC.
I screwed option #1 fairly quickly when I used my bat to beat to death the dude offering the money cause I thought he was a jerk. Eventually I will break into his house and steal his shit, but the lock on his door is too hard for me to pick right now. I ignored the bomb thing for a while and did some side-tasks (scavenge for food at the remnants of an old grocery store where I was attacked by Raiders, a group of people who seemed very inspired by Firefly’s Reavers, help some kid find his Dad who was attacked by mutant ants) and eventually earned enough experience points to beef up my explosives skill to the point where I could work on the bomb.
And I got lucky. Apparently my tinkering could have blown it up, but I didn’t. It was disarmed. The Sheriff gave me some money and a key to my own house and I look forward to telling the Children of Atom wackos that their bomb is no more. I managed to hack into their computer at once point and read their files and they were apparently planning on blowing up the bomb as some sort of kool-aid type mass suicide, so that’s cool.
I’ve got a few more sidequests I want to do for a girl in town who’s trying to write a survival guide for people in the Wasteland (next task: irradiate myself to a near-lethal level and have her check me out. Or dig up some mines from nearby Minefield.) but I’m pretty pumped to get to DC and find out who’s running this pirate radio station.
All in all, I probably shouldn’t have downloaded this game because it is now quite obvious that I’ll be getting very little work done for the next few weeks.
Comments
I’m obsessed with the 50’s aesthetic of jet-age futurism and tend to love stuff that uses it (Venture Bros., The Incredibles, etc.). I loved the first two games, but I’ve heard this new installment is missing some of the dark gallows humor that helped make the first installments so memorable.
Really, I’m just trying to make myself feel better because I can’t afford a new fangled videogame machine or computer (my desktop’s positively ancient, about seven years old). Toss this and Bioshock on the pile of games I sorely wish I had the money to play.
ryan does nothing but play fallout3. i’m a FO3 widow.
haha i was going to mention that Dawn is a fallout widow.
i love that game to death, although i also loved oblivion….
also John, there’s so much to do it becomes overwhelming, like you get quests that lead to other quests right now i have like 6 active quests. this guy i work with and i talk about that game from the time he gets in until he leaves and we’ve both played it for like 20 or so hours haven’t done anything the same way and i’ve done all kinds of stuff he hasn’t and vice versa.
Ryan, how far into it are you? Let’s hang out in a week so we can talk about video games. Also, we can trade pocket protectors and have our moms make us sandwiches.
come over for dinner one night and you guys can play, while Gosia and I make merciless fun of you both.
I don’t think that’d work. There’s no 2-player. It’d result in 4th-grade-esq arguing over whose turn it is and the proper way to take out a Wasteland Raider.
(sobs)
I want to play this game, dammit.
I’m going to go play it.
Right now.
Until tomorrow.
I hate you. You… you’re playing it right now, aren’t you?
Bastard. Going to bed now.
Hey Ryan, did you find The Family? The Wasteland mutants who killed that girl’s family? I looked in all the locations that dude said they might be hiding and didn’t find ’em. Do I have to go at night?