Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition

The story of Fallout 3 is like a rehash of Fallout 1 and 2. A civilization needs water so you go off to find a GECK, along the way you end up fighting against mutated animals, raiders, Super Mutants and the Enclave. From what I know about Fallout 1 (as well some info I read in the Fallout Bible it came packed with) both factions shouldn't be in DC. In fact DC should be little more than an irradiated crater. The quests are pretty bad. Go to area, shoot enemies, pick up the item that the giant glowing arrow is pointing to. It feels more like Borderlands than Fallout. Yes there are some exceptions, like Power of the Atom and Wasteland Survival Guide, but those quests take place moments after leaving the tutorial area and said quests also don't make sense in this universe. No one has written a survival guide in two centuries after the Great War? Why would you build your town around the thing that ended your entire civilization? I suppose you could argue that the vaults in this area only opened fairly recently, but I couldn't find any info in game that supports this idea. It's incredibly sad to see what little care Bethesda had for the setting, which is strange because this game is often praised for how atmospheric and immersive the setting is. How is a two-hundred year old irradiated desert where nothing grows and no one produces anything immersive? Nothing grows so nothing should be alive. Did Bethesda forget what the FEV did to plant life, or did they simply not research the original games enough? Returning to Fallout 3 over a decade after it's release has sadly ruined my memories of the game. It wasn't worth it. I could only recommend it to someone who wanted a Fallout themed looter shooter, but then I thought the fans were pretty clear they didn't want that after the backlash from Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel.

Amazing.

Nuance is the word of the day because Fallout 3 lacks it in bundles. World, characters, choices, factions, and gameplay all thrive with nuance. I will explain how much nuance and care went into each of these topics in Fallout 3 as someone who has played 1 thru NV. Bethesda had the task of making a 2D world 3D and ironically made it 1D. Fallout is set in the future but one with an alternate technological history with its own strengths and weakness compared to our own. An example is a Robobrain which has clunky treads, a box frame body, air-duct-tubing arms, a brain in a jar, and wields a shotgun that makes its tube arms awkwardly contort to fire the gun. It is a quintessential 1950s sci-fi robot and would be called an "android" saturated with sarcasm. Fallout 3 has androids that are indistinguishable from human beings, and the owner of an android has to comb the capital wasteland to find it since it's practically human. There were AI characters in the other Fallout games, but they were either computers the size of a room or a hollow mouth piece that would fail the Turing Test like a Robobrain trying to use stairs. Characters, choices, and factions mostly fit into two camps: slaving, civilian-killing, sadistic, fascist meanies >:( and altruistic, cleansing, empathetic, future-thinking, good guys! Side quests offer some degree of perspective but end up hollow. You can choose to get the residents of Tenpenny tower to allow the ghouls they despise to live there but the ghouls are just as bigoted and kill all the residents. You can choose to spare, kill, or negotiate with the self-convinced vampires, but you save or doom a camp of 6 non characters. The one thing Fallout 3 excels at is looting. The game will genuinely make you feel like a scrapper picking up junk and finding the right person to peddle your junk to for a profit. Valuables are hidden beneath, behind, and in the last place you'd look. If you don't understand these issues then buy this 5 star game now!!

The download and install button wouldn't work, it claims it can't connect to GOG.com and to check my internet connection. My connection is fine, hence buying it online and trying to downlaod it. Tried the offline installer, downloaded that, and it installed actually, but the game crashes on launch. Tried downloading the galaxy client to see if it would help, but cannot download galaxy due to the same error. "Cannot connect to GOG.com. Check your internet connection." I love the idea of GoG. I came after so much trouble with the steam version of this game, and everyone saying this version simply works. For me, it simply does not work. Very deeply sad about that.

As the title says. The game is great. Exploration, interaction, the fantastic characters you run into. A true joy to experience. There was an outcry when fans learned they had moved away from the isometric view of the previous titles - and I can understand it. In this case the result ended up being a great game anyway. The style and mood of the old games are certainly intact. The brilliant (dark) humor is also still going strong. The only downside, in my opinion, is that too much of the game is spent exploring subways and vaults. It got a bit tedious after the 20th one. 4/5 from me. Worth every bottlecap.