A fundamental element of an RPG is the ability
to talk to an NPC, often times to make decisions that will impact the game world, making it
feel like your actions had an effect when they didn’t and nothing you do will ever
matter. But what if you wanted to be the quiet kid
who sits in the front of the bus asking the teachers what they think of his nose gold? Can You Beat Fallout 3 Without Talking To
Anyone? The simple answer is, no, obviously you can’t. But there are steps you can take to limit
the number of people you interact with. As for what counts as “talking to anyone”,
anything that involves the dialog menu. If you see the option to tell them goodbye,
you’ve already failed. Naturally, that comes with its own set of
challenges. The beginning of the game is dead simple. I’ve done this multiple times by now, it’s
just that this time I’m abandoning my father instead of him abandoning me. Now I could have, within the limitations of
this challenge, assigned my SPECIAL points before I began my grand escape. You don’t speak to your father during this
part of the game. You can speak at him, but you don’t have
to. You can walk up to him, say nothing, he’ll
leave you alone with an assortment of different choking hazards, and you can assign your points. It’s unnecessary. To begin escaping the vault as a baby, you
abuse the game’s instantaneous quick-save quick-load mechanic to glitch yourself through
a wall at which point you’ll fall through an eternity of grey nothing and be placed
in a part of the vault you can only be in if your current objective is to escape the
Vault. It was harder than usual to transcend reality
and make the wall my bitch. I couldn’t tell you way. Going back to SPECIAL stats for a moment,
I didn’t bother assigning them because the only enemies you’ll find in the Vault at
this point, because things are a little weird, are a handful of radroaches. As usual, I was completely defenseless against
them. Babies naturally suck at hand-to-hand combat
and lack the fine motor skills required to hold a gun, so you can’t go on the offensive
to take the fight to the bugs that probably weigh more than both your legs combined. Then you just snag the Overseer’s key, open
the tunnel, waddle to the Vault door, and you’re given the option to make any last
minute modifications to your character before entering the real meat of Fallout 3. I wasn’t sure which way I wanted to go with
any of my stats, so I just drained Charisma and evenly distributed the remaining points
to both have a well-rounded character and to have a solid assortment of perks to choose
from upon leveling up. Out into the Capital Wasteland, things went
down hill quickly. The only challenge that broke my heart this
early on was the Fallout 3 Without Moving The Camera video. If you’ve seen a couple of my other Fallout
3 videos, such as the one I just mentioned, you probably know what the problem here is. See, by escaping the Vault as a baby, you
are never given a Pip-Boy by the Overseer at your 10th birthday because you’re still
too stupid to be a 10 year old. Normally it’s a momentary annoyance that
is solved by talking to Lucas Simms in Megaton. But I can’t talk to Lucas Simms. I can’t talk to anyone, which means that
problem can never be solved. You’re probably wondering what other casualties
there are from this inability to obtain a Pip-Boy. They are many and they are fucking disastrous. Obviously without a Pip-Boy, you can’t equip
any weapons of any kind, you can’t equip any armor either, you also can’t use any
healing items or look at the map, set any waypoints, fast-travel to any location, or
even listen to the radio. Now remember that I’m also still a baby,
I can’t outrun a mole rat, or a vicious dog or a radscorpion or anything that has
a pair of functioning legs. But wait it gets worse, good god I wish those
were the only things I couldn’t do. 372 words ago I told you that I was defenseless
while in the Vault. Because nothing has changed since then, I’m
also defenseless outside of the Vault. Not only can I not equip any weapons, I can’t
smack people with my barely developed hands. I have absolutely no way of attacking anything. You know what else I can’t do? I can’t sneak. The medical explanation, if my 0 seconds of
research and completely baseless assumption is to be believed, has to do with a baby’s
legs not having kneecaps yet. Most people don’t get kneecaps until they
hit puberty. So let’s recap what I can do in Fallout
3 at the moment. 1) I can walk around. 2) I can jump and that’s about it. Going into it, I knew it was going to be a
complete show, but I had a plan. I was gonna wing it. Metaphorically shoot from the hip and just
see what juices I can squeeze from the lifeless corpse of a game. The first and primary concern was getting
to Little Lamplight. Going down the main quest-line isn’t an
option. You’ll hit a roadblock eventually. Specifically during your 10th birthday where
you have to shoot the rad roach, you can’t do that without talking to dad as you don’t
get the BB gun unless you talking to him. I ran into the first real problem in the form
of an escaped slave who for some reason ran up to a baby and asked it to help get her
collar off. I wasn’t sure if this counted as talking
to someone or not. She runs up to you, says something, you make
a decision, then she explodes. You don’t say anything but the NPC talking
text box pops up nonetheless. I trusted my gut after getting covered in
hers and reloaded a save to take a slightly different path to Little Lamplight. I don’t need to say to much about how annoying
it was to once again travel from Vault 101 to Little Lamplight as a baby. It sucks and takes a long time. I may have even attempted baby’s first suicide
by jumping off a clif. That was a doozy of a sentence, wasn’t it? The next obstacle in my path came in for form
of mutated creatures harassing me just outside of Smith Casey’s Garage. A bloat-fly and a mole rat to be specific. I sought refuge inside the garage, hoping
to wait for a while until the unpleasantness outside subsided. Couldn’t wait inside because of the roaches
and mole rats in the next room over that I had no means of destroying. In theory, I could let them tear chunks of
flesh off my body as I ran helplessly into the loving arms of a rusty barrel that, with
all the action, may start flying around and cause damage to them. It’s happened before. But with no way to heal myself, that wasn’t
a risk I was going to take. I tried one time to outrun the creatures waiting
for me on the other side of the door before realizing out futile that effort was. Something exploded and I saw what I really
looked like. It was, uh, well that’s a baby alright. I went back to the bridge of shattered legs
and again took a new path towards Little Lamplight, completely ignoring Smith Casey’s Garage. I remember slamming on the breaks while I
looked at Goo Lagoon. I was gonna use this moment to talk about
something in this video, but my mind can’t recall what that something was going to be. Maybe it was gonna be about the summer sausage
I left in my mailbox for a month to fry in the sun of Michigan’s mid-day sun before
freezing solid again when darkness reclaimed the state. In time, as I always do, I made it to Little
Lamplight. I also paused the challenge to see if there
are any hidden surprises in this treehouse. There isn’t. Inside Lamplight, I used the tried and true
quick save trick to get through the wall near the entrance to avoid having to speak to world’s
most densely packed ego. From there I attempted to clip through a second
wall at the usual spot at which it would be done. Getting into the correct position is difficult
and you’re small and can barely jump an inch off the ground. After failing at that spot, I entered the
Great Chamber, clipped through the wall, and blew my own mind. I was inside Vault 87. I had no idea this was possible, I’d wasted
so much time in other runs by not doing this. For the briefest of moments, there was actual
enthusiasm in my voice. It didn’t last long. This isn’t Vault 87. It’s an entrance to Vault 87 in the back
of Little Lamplight. If you had a high enough Science skill you
could hack that door and get inside. And theoretically, I could’ve done that. Intelligence of 10 and Luck of 10 will put
your starting science skill at 27. Add 15 points by picking Science as a tag
skill and 17 more points for leveling up after you exit Vault 101, and your science skill
is at 59. An Average terminal only requires 50 science
to open. Perhaps that will come into play in a later
challenge, not that I plan on playing Fallout 3 again after this. The game died a year ago and all I’ve been
doing since then is desecrating the corpse. After I spent 15 years walking from the back
of the Great Chamber to the gate to Murder Pass, I clipped through the side of the gate,
entered Murder Pass, and let the suffering begin. I’ve done this before and it’s never fun. You’re so slow that every Mutant you pass
will be able to keep up with you and attack you constantly. The only thing working to your advantage is
that because of your size, their attacks do miss more frequently than they normally would. By the time I got to the Reactor Chamber,
my health was nearly gone. And with no way to heal myself, I was out
of ideas. The reactor chamber is home to more Mutants
with better weaponry than those in Murder Pass. I had no hope of sneaking passed them. And that was where I left the challenge for
a while, in a stalemate between man and machine. In the time between the 2nd and 3rd recording
for this video, I played through Diablo 3, that video will either be out before or after
this one because that’s how time works, and came up with no ideas for how to proceed. That’s sort of a lie. I had an idea, it just wasn’t a good one. This run experienced a seismic idealogical
shift in what the core concept of this challenge actually is. In the beginning, it was a video about whether
or not I can do this. I can’t. Without the ability to heal, I could not get
through Murder Pass with enough health to reach the GECK. So the video became an “Is It Possible”
type video instead. If, in some magical hypothetical scenario,
you could contend with the Super Mutants, how much else of the game could you beat without
talking to anyone? Where do the other problems lie? This is where the real video ends and the
bull begins. I enabled God Mode to get to the GECK portion
of the Reactor Chamber. I also released Fawkes as a way to kill some
of the Mutants in the area without explicitly cheating, which in retrospect was a stupid
thing to do considering what I did moments before that and what was coming. Once in the Garden of Eden Creation Kit Dormitory,
I paused all enemy AI to give myself the illusion of getting their with them dead and attempted
to retrieve the GECK without God Mode enabled. I wasn’t sure how much health I should’ve,
I used a command to check my current health, held my keyboard up to the screen, counted
the number of keys my current health spanned, did a serious of complex mathematical calculations
to determine that my health should’ve been around 200, set it to 200, and crawled to
the GECK. My speed caused me to hit Deadly Radiation
Poisoning by the time I was in the doorway and I dropped dead before even touching the
GECK. My next brilliant strategy was to use a dose
of RAD-X. Giving myself the Pip-Boy didn’t give me the ability to open my Pip-Boy and
use any of the drugs I’d acquired, Bethesda went to great lengths to keep children from
being able to overdose in their games. Whatever, this is all a fever dream anyway. God Mode enabled, pick up the GECK, escape. Easy peasy when you’re a dirty cheater with
a big nose. The next theoretical roadblock was the Enclave. If you get captured, you’re forced to dialog
with Colonel Autumn before you can move freely around their base. Clearly hat wasn’t an option. I avoided the Enclave Abduction by clipping
through a wall, which placed me just outside Fawkes’s cell. Before making my way back through Murder Pass,
I used the resurrect command to bring the Failed FEV Experiment back to life, then I
killed him with a different command and crashed the game. Turns out that forcing life onto something
that was never meant to be alive then stripping that life away is a way to collapse a virtual
universe in on itself. I avoided talking to MacCready at the front
gate by taking large steps to the left and avoiding his all seeing gaze. You know what, none of this even matters anymore. I did a bunch of different but ended up at
the Citadel because there was nowhere else to go. You can’t trigger the end-game without escaping
the Enclave base. Giving the GECK to the Brotherhood of Steel
without escaping isn’t an option because it’s not supposed to be able to happen. I have now thoroughly explored all possibilities
for beating Fallout 3 without talking to anyone. But… there is one last thing we can do,
something with guaranteed success. Through some combination of dialog choices,
you can beat Fallout 3 by talking to as few people as possible and saying as few words
as possible. I was voted the quietest guy in my high school
class, I was fucking made for this. [www.OnlyDink.com ;)] I got born again in a way I never saw coming,
picked my SPECIAL stats based around getting as many points into Speech as possible with
the idea that passing skill checks would be the key to getting out of a conversation with
as few words said by both parties as possible, and began to celebrate my 10th birthday. Normally, Amata will initiate dialog as soon
as you’re given control of your character, but if you back away instantly, that won’t
happen. From there, you must talk to 2 people, the
old woman and your father. After saying a total of 2 words to Old Lady
Palmer, Butch will get up and try to bully you. But if you’re fancy with your movement,
you can avoid him. This isn’t easy. There are spots on the table that you can
get stuck on and you can’t just run around both sets of tables as Amata will tell you
happy birthday if you get too close. There’s a delicate dance that must be performed
here until such a time where Jonas ring-a-ding-dinkster’s your father, at which point you’ll have
to talk to him to get the door to the hallway opened, but you won’t actually say any words
to him. Beatrice will try to give you a stupid poem
that she wrote, you’ll avoid her, say 8 words to Jonas, 10 words to Dad, break the
targets, kill the bug, get your photo taken, time will fly by, and you’ll wake up in
front of your father on the day of the GOAT exam. You can say all sorts of things to him, or
you can say 2 words, snag the Medicine bobblehead, and begin your great escape. For all intents and purposes, I followed the
same path as you would in a Fallout 3 speedrun. At this point the game considers your character
to be an adult, so you can clip through the wall, the Escape quest will trigger, and you
can leave the vault without saying another word. At the door, I chose Small Guns, Speech, and
Medicine as my tag skills, dumped all the points into Speech after leveling up outside,
looted the Hollowed Out Rock near Megaton, and headed for Little Lamplight. Not long after leaving the Vault, I killed
a Scavenger and got a serious upgrade to my arsenal ( ty team) of weapons, then another
upgrade after I ended a handful of Raiders with the Missile Launcher I’d gotten from
the Scavenger. I took out Doc Hoff, his Caravan Guard, and
Pack Brahmin as well. Inside Little Lamplight, I did what baby me
did way back in the day to bypass MacCready, glitch myself through the gate to Murder Pass,
and enter Vault 87 proper. I’d also assigned weapons, Stimpaks, and
Rad-X to every available hotkey as the problem of not being able to use my Pip-Boy reared
its head again. I freed Fawkes for the same reason I did last
time, to take out some of the mutants attacking me, picked up the GECK, and got abducted by
the Enclave. There was no way around that. A series of events must unfold in Raven Rock
to place the game in a state where its ready to be beaten. I ran through the various dialog options with
Autumn until I found a set of choices where I said the fewest number of words possible,
17. There are actually 2 paths that get this interaction
over with in 17 words, not that it matters. The only guy that might give you some trouble
is the Enclave Officer outside your holding cell. He’ll look the other way if you toss a grenade
his way. Eden takes an unfortunate 49 words to end
his dialog. You’re basically just saying you’ll consider
what he says and that you’ll be on your way. Convincing him to blow himself up is the preferred
option from a gameplay perspective, but it’s too costly from a dictionary standpoint. Escaping Raven Rock is combat that you can
do if you want, I just ignored everyone, left, fast-traveled back to Vault 101, and headed
for the Jefferson Memorial. The last time I came this way I passed by
an opportunity to end a certain someone. This time, from the safety of a nearby rock,
I fired a warning shot into Grandma Sparkles, she spasmed like crazy, and the game crashes. That fliping woman is nothing if not predictable. There’s nobody you’re required to talk
to on the road to the Jefferson Memorial. Inside, I clipped myself into the purifier,
and realized that I had to talk to Autumn again to set this thing up properly, simply
knocking out him skin isn’t enough to do it. The quickest path to salvation is giving up
on diplomacy by uttering the last 6 words of your life, activating Project Purity, and
that’s that. I could not beat Fallout 3 without talking
to anyone, but I did beat it by only saying 94 words other characters in the game.
