Fallout 3 Is Better Than You Think

in 2008 fallout 3 came out and most people seem to like it not everybody this was a new dev team new publisher and the first over 400 3ds so some stuff had change and change is never universally liked but aggregated reviews of both critics and the public were generally very positive the game sold well and five DLC packs came out throughout 2009 rather than to wait another decade for the next Fallout game in 2010 Fallout New Vegas came out which was initially more negatively reviewed than fallout 3 largely due to the fact that for many people fallout sent via stopped working was the only quest available and disappointingly it only had one solution however patches and DLC followed and by the release of 2012's Ultimate Edition the game was not only a lot more stable it had also come to be fairly widely considered as a better game than fallout 3 especially true among older fallout fans so we got two Fallout games both gen Ewell regarded with plenty of DLC within a couple of years of each other so I'm sure everybody went on to be really pleased that we got to enjoy two different games and a franchise we all loved that didn't happen instead something also happened it wasn't enough to simply enjoy New Vegas more than fallout 3 like having a preference for the mechanical or narrative direction it took no for some people if you liked New Vegas you also had to dislike fallout 3 you weren't a true fallout fan unless you thought fallout 3 was garbage Bethesda a trash and Todd Howard was your sworn nemesis and that's not fat so I want to examine fallout 3 because 493 isn't just not bad and it's not just good fallout 3 despite some issues we'll also be discussing stands up alongside of all the other games and prepare your interest comments now because to my mind in some ways I think it's actually the best Fallout game of all but first we need to dig a little into the criticism because it's not entirely easy to get people to pin down exactly why they think fallout 3 is bad no I've had a lot of time looking into this I've watched feature-length videos and read fallen post the length of academic essays out of making this video and I think it's fair to say the one core idea keeps coming up fallout 3 contra to what you might think from its title isn't a proper fallout game now just against fallout through is your first Fallout game the original Fallout games just fallout want that is just about everyone is quietly agreed to pretend tactics and Brotherhood steel don't exist were isometric turn-based RPGs with a focus on open-ended exploration quest with multiple solutions and a sense of pitch black humor now if that sounds a bit similar to New Vegas to you gold star because plenty of folks who worked on the original fallouts ended up at obsidian where they did indeed make new Vegas and those points are probably in fact a pretty good starting point for pinning down the issues people have with fallout 3 next to the older fallout and new Vegas it isn't open-ended enough its quest don't feature enough branching alternative approaches and solutions and overall it doesn't facilitate roleplay and choice and I think all of that a very strange conclusion to come to about fallout 3 but I'm getting out of myself let's start appropriately enough at the beginning and take a simple factual look at fallout 4 is opening and what that tells us about the game and its developers intentions so welcome to growing up fast the first area a mini quest of fallout 3 technically it's the seconds you do get to play as a baby but as that's literally just character build and thus its equivalent in fallout worms and menu let's admit that you see the first error you playing when you get control can actually be very interesting because what the devs chooses utilize first shows us what they think the core gameplay elements are it's like how in Mass Effect 1 it's actually quite slow to get to the gunplay instead we start off by explaining scientific principles that underpin this world's technology seeing that technology in action meeting characters engaging in conversation learning about the universe because the Mass Effect team understood the what makes Mass Effect work isn't the gunplay it's the universe and the characters that live within it so back to fallout 3 where it's your 10th birthday party and you have to deal with a bully trying to steal your sweet troll and yes indeed it's a recurring Bethesda joke dating back to 1994 but how it's handled here is very very interesting you see in both Daggerfall and moral into the same conundrum is asked how to deal with bullies stealing your sweet troll except the three options there are to throw the sweet role as a distraction then punch the bully destroy it so he can't have it at all or hand it over and then go and get friends to beat him up but everyone fallout 3 that's all changed now you can refuse to comply and when he attacks run to get officer Gomez's help which is a fair approximation of gathering up your friends or you can spit on it so he doesn't want it a fair approximation for the middle option but jin-hwan is missing you can't punch butch violence is not an option yet the first tutorial is about how you have with conversations and how to avoid or resolve conflict without fighting yourself now the mission does go on to shoot or allows guns at the end but the game industry didn't put it up first we move forward in time to future imperfect and dealing with butchered there can be a combat tutorial but again it's the secondary option your choices are to stop butch bullying a martyr with a skill check speech in this case resolved by digging through other available information by speaking to the other tunnel snakes resolve it without violence by flipping sides and joining the factions otherwise have to fight by joining in with the bullying or finally by violence beginning - that requires a second confirmation the game clearly Flags it as a last resort so in both cases violence is there but it's not the primary solution now let's compare these opening rooms to other Fallout game openings fallout 1 which is straightening cave of rats no discussions no skill checks and alternatives just kill the rats or run past the rats if you don't feel like killing the rats new Vegas meanwhile start you off with the gecko hunt sunny smiles immediately - Toralei sirs shooting iron sight aiming crouching in order to shoot better sneaking to get close to things that you want to shoot the skill check - don't come into the game until quite a bit down the line now this is where I start getting a tiny bit confused because the criticism I see over and over about fallout 3 is there's no freedom there's no choice there are no skill check resolutions there's no opportunity to roleplay but fallout 4 each tutorial section seems to be trying to provide exactly that and it gets even better an escape which contains some really interesting and pretty unique ideas for example at the start of escape a martyr offers you a gun you can decline it and insist that she keeps it which goes on to have consequences down the line not just for you but for her in the interrogation scene where she'd normally need to be rescued but doesn't if she can shoot the guard herself and that just wrecks me as a really lovely story touch and I tried to think of another example of it anywhere in the entire Fallout franchise where if you decline a reward or a gift the game reflects that by showing the character going on to utilize what you yourself declined and I genuinely can't think of one and then butch shows up and asks you to save his mother from radroaches because he's scared of them sure you can refuse because he bodied you or Jung and safer but the really interesting option is the speech check where you can persuade him to save her by arming here with your old BB gun because he's just run up to you and tried to give you a quest to do and your response is to empower him to complete the quest by himself you can go and help or watch after that but you don't have to you can just run off you've just persuaded an NPC just sort out their own mess again I tried to think of another example of this anywhere in Fallout and I couldn't think of one new vixx's first proper quest ghost town gunfight is somewhat similar as you can ensure the town is armed and well armored but even then the quest remains centered around jou the fight doesn't trigger until you're there to trigger it even though you can choose to sit it out subsequently butch once he gets the weapon runs off to sort out the problem by himself and that is really rather interesting and unique the escape itself has plenty of options to the overseas door can be open with a lockpick scale or you can steal the key from his bedroom or you can threaten to badly hurt a martyr if he doesn't comply and give you access beyond that there's a science you can skip if you choose to thoroughly search the rooms as well thorn out through his message here is clear explore thoroughly and you'll find alternative solutions which again seems to be exactly what people claim that they want out of a Fallout game now some people also seem annoyed that you can't talk down the very first guard that attacks you at the start but you can very easily run away from him he's distracted by the radroaches in fact I kind of always assumed that's why the radroaches are there because he never seems to die to them so it's just a good opportunity to run if you want to be more of a pacifist in fact it's actually incredibly easy to escape the vault without killing using the radroaches as distraction the first guard loses you immediately you can avoid the guards in the atrium corridor incredibly easily there's even a specially recorded dialogue option for a monster to say if you sneak past their interrogation and don't intervene so the game's fully aware that this could be an option I didn't think I would make it my my father--he I my officer mag I didn't tell them anything I swear when the warning sirens came on they called ran out I I guess that was you and I honestly don't understand how people look at that and think that doesn't feel like a Fallout game in the style of the original games at every stage you can solve things with skill checks if you prioritize the right skills and if you haven't you can search the area to find alternative ways through you can blast your way through if you want you complete the whole area as a pacifist I honestly don't know what more people wants I'm also seeing to complain to people just like how you start in the voters Fallout supposed to be a big open game so the restrictive corridors and Voltron I won't start things off with the wrong ethos but that's kind of the entire point you start the game in a tiny cramped dark environment because it makes the wasteland feel so much bigger when you get there and fallout 3 post voltage reduction is truly spectacular one of the finest moments in gaming to my minds [Applause] [Music] just so much of its perfect the white flashes your eyes adjust to the outside world for the first time the wasteland spreading out in front of you the orientation of the vault and its elevation so the Capitol building and the Washington Monument are both silhouetted in the distance it's just such a perfect moment that both New Vegas and fallout 4 straight up copied it but neither executed it quite as well so we've got to the main game and we're in the wasteland so let's quickly talk a bit about that you see one of the really bad things about Fallout 3 is that it put vote 101 pretty much in the middle of the map and let you decide to stop running in any direction you want to this is exactly what Fallout 1 let you do on leaving the vault as well but for whatever reason fallout 3 never really seems to get credit for that which is Oakes's pretty much the most open Fallout game at the start consider New Vegas with a solid wall to the west and Qasr doors in a narrow canyon to the north who may as well be a brick wall - level 1 characters fallout 4 meanwhile opens in the very northwest corner of the map severely limiting your options though it is at least perfectly happy if you'd had over open ground to the east or the South even fallout warns vault 13 was at the northern extreme of the map with nothing to find further north at all speaking to fallout 1 one thing I've heard people praised it for is that there's nothing to stop you stepping out to vote 13 and running straight for the military base but you can do pretty much the exact same thing in Fallout 3 in fact I always assumed it was an intentional reference because in Fallout 1 and fallout 3 if you leave the voted immediately start running west you'll reach a major plot area true it's not quite the same as in Fallout 3 you're only getting to the end of the first act though that's definitely more than a third of the way through the game that's also pretty much identical to New Vegas which would go on to let you run straight to Benny and the skip that games first act as well still that's just little easter egg outside of speedrunning no one's gonna be doing that instead most players want to find their way to Megaton and I want to examine this initial journey in detail is it really demonstrates level of care and craftsmanship that goes into Fallout 3's world design because like I just said you can Murph in any direction so how is it the game directs you to Megaton now short there's a quest marker but not everyone's gonna realize what that means not everyone's gonna respond to it and not everyone that sees it is going to want to obey it let's just say instead you're up for some exploring well fallout 3 is ready for you you see the map immediately around vault 101 is slightly more empty than most the rest of the wasteland the car once of that is if you turn around outside vote 101 there are only compass ticks to the east the direction of Megaton now even if you're completely ignoring the compass the world is ready to guide you is if there's a small sign in front of you promising a scenic overlook it's pretty much the only thing of note in the only text in view when you step outside of the vault step over that and immediately look straight down the road to Springville immediately drawing your attention there even if you completely ignore that and just jump straight down to the road the more interesting view is to the left down past the cars walk past them and you see Springvale below you to your right is just some rocks you could go that way sure but the game subtly tries to draw you to Springvale and once you get to spring valve you see the eye bolt in the distance the bright flash of red of the nuka-cola machine and the red rocket sign it all just slowly draws you in the right direction and once you get into town Megaton is clearly signed and so onto Megaton which has a fantastic introduction and a really nice unique feel no I love Megaton and that's partly because it has a great visual design it's easier to get attached to a place if it's visually distinct for example I'm pretty sure I know where everybody lives in Megaton and in rivet City but in New Vegas as dude Springs which is much smaller population it was only years and multiple playthroughs later that I learned easy Pete sleeps in the long three room house in the middle of town I always just assumed that was player housing I actually can't remember I've stuck my head where Trudi sleeps now I think about it and I think part of that is good Springs it's just a town made up of a group of houses and it's hard to be interested in the comings and goings of the town's folk when they're just walking from one building to another as opposed to unique salvaged vehicles clinging to the side of a bomb crater speaking of that some people really bloody hate the bomb by the way because it's odd to build a town around a bomb I never bothered me though I always thought there was a fairly sensible reason for it you see there's no video from about five years ago that discusses fallout 3 and new Vegas called the SH and if occasion of fall down which basically discusses how games work better if their basic logistics have been thought through and it's obvious how basic human needs have been met so the case of Megaton the city has food because the one up side of the apocalypse is that wildlife is massive now and there are plenty of mole rats right by the side of the town as for water well when the bomb hit but didn't detonate it made a crater one deep enough that the town has access to ground water sure it's radioactive but so is all water that's kind of the point of the main plot the game literally begins with your dam talking about the waters of life and going on to tell you how terrible life is outside the vault and then the very first time you get to after you leave users of puddle in radioactive crater as its water supply it helps make you realize how bad things are on the wasteland and how important project purity is when that gets introduced thematically it actually worked really well but of course we can't discuss the bomb without looking at power of the atom of course which it gets brought up frequently in any discussion about how terrible fallout 3 is power of the atom as a reminder is a quest about dealing with the unexploded bomb at the core of Megaton the sheriff wanted to solve for good a mr. Burt acting on behalf of mr. Tenpenny wants it blown up why he Megaton off the map many people just like this is it's one of those uniquely computer day me moral choices where the bad option is such super villain level evil that it becomes slightly ridiculous Asura's I've seen it be asked many times why would any character have any reason to blow up the bomb well if you examine the mechanics of the quest it makes a bit more sense the good solution normally pays a hundred caps 500 with a fairly hard speech check for a low-level character whereas the evil option pays 500 caps by default up to a thousand with a skill check all the much easier black widow perk option both options have a reward of player housing too but you might want to have preference for the temp any sweet as it is much cleaner and does come with a balcony with a very nice view those are a couple of other tweaks that make the quest interesting to do see if you side with mega Tom Burke sends a team of assassins to kill you though they don't actually get sent directly instead they get added to a deck of random events that cancel in the wasteland so you may not necessarily see it in any given playthrough the only way to avoid that is to seduce him and convince him not to destroy the town in addition you can play along get the device to blow up the bomb and then turn it straight over to the sheriff as double-crossing aside that you've already chosen and potentially even taken money up front from is frequently an option fallout 3 so quest rather nicely very rarely locked you into a site this much as a confrontation which can lead to the sheriff's death but that lets you acquire a very useful early game Chinese assault rifle and you can complete the quest anyways it could be turned into his son or the confrontation can lead to Burke's death getting you the first silenced weapon of the game and that also stops burg ever deploying hitman against you so there are some interesting options there but in short the evil option awards much more money which makes it a bit more interesting then we do agree with people who say there is basically no reason to detonate bomb other than role-playing as an evil person I do whoever find that in itself an odd complaint because one of the most frequently raised issues about fallout 3 is it's not a proper Fallout game because it's not a role-playing game because there aren't enough choices with consequences but right here you get the option to blood for major settlement potently killing multiple named characters including quest givers a companion shops a very hard locked armory a unique bobblehead player housing and also the only characters in the game who have information that leads to GNR in the main plot and you can choose to kill all of them and if you do you just have to live with it and find the main plot by yourself literally the game changes the objective to continue the search for your father and now you have no quest marker you block the one person in the world with information and now you have no information not even new vegas was that happy that you suffer the concert winters of bad decisions with its early-game main plot missions if you kill beagle he has a journal on his body giving you the exact information he tell you kill Manny the information is right there on his terminal but not fallout 3 though if you blow up your only lead now you're on your own and isn't that exactly the sort of freedom and choice and consequence that people say they want from the Fallout game isn't do what you want but be ready to live with the consequences exactly the philosophy that made fallout 1 so loved in the first place plus I think the bombs interesting thematically as well as weapons of mass destruction cannot repeatedly in Fallout 3 in case you missed them which is fairly easy to do is there well hidden at north on the map info Constantine you can find the launch codes for an intercontinental ballistic missile which you can attempt to launch though it does fail in a nearby satellites raid you can trigger an orbital weapons platform to drop a nuclear payload on the wasteland and that one does actually trigger and there's something interesting about these weapons as well both the safe was the launch codes in it there's a random waste Lander who got the safe open before you arrived he just got shot by a robot before he could use it and the satellite weapon is being worked on by some random girl who's trying to get stopped arational meanwhile Burke wants to blow up Megaton because Tenpenny voiced a slight preference for it three nuclear super weapons all three almost falling into the hands of some random waste lanta now we'll discuss tone in detail later but for now let's say fallout 3 is often grim the wasteland hasn't recovered from nuclear devastation the pockets of civilization are fragile and insecure in rfo they're about ready to give up in big town the people are initially pretty much completely despondent this is a game that dwells on the horror of nuclear apocalypse and accordingly at a basic level I think there's I mean fundamentally horrifying about the very presence of these operational nuclear weapons America is in ruins but there's still a few more nukes ready to go off yet fallout theories grip world is haunted by its nuclear past whether that's in the form of radiation that infects every water source in the wasteland old voltic experiment is the forced evolutionary virus there's now running rampant all the surviving weapons that can threaten what little progress has been made a theme powerful enough that New Vegas would revisit it in Lonesome Road if fallout 3 has a thesis it's perhaps a warning against clinging to the paps repeating old mistake replaying old conflicts it's a thing that new Vegas would pick up to probably best summarized by the expression old world blues to quote that deal say yeah it refers to those so obsessed with the past that they can't see the present much as the future for what it is and that's an idea that keeps coming up in the main antagonist of Fallout 3 president Eden wants to wipe the slate clean of anything post-war no matter how many casualties it would cause Bronn wants to recreate the old world even if it means living the rest of his life in a simulation the overseer is so scared of any change needs rather gunned down his own people than allowed to sense and they're right there in the middle of the very first town is the most literal representation imaginable of being haunted by the past an atom bomb sorry that was quite a big digression for one quest let's talk about the rest of Megaton so you get there and you need information the sheriff points to Moriarty who does have the information but needs to be persuaded to part with it and once again you've got plenty of options you can use the speech chicken Moriarty you can pay him some money you can sweet-talk his staff with a couple of speech or perk checks use a fairly hard science checked hackers computer or an easy a lockpick check to break into a cupboard to get the computer password or if you can't do that agree to a short unmarked quest for him to recover money from a junkie who skips town which you can also deal with through speech checked carefully selecting the right dialogue or violence all of which you different amounts of money which you can use to pay Moriarty for the information but remember fallout 3 isn't a proper Fallout game because there aren't enough skilled Chex choices or alternative solutions I mean that demonstrably are I just told you them again I keep hearing over over that this is fallout threes weakness and the vast majority of fallout threes quests are like this though I'd like to skip forward to one particular quest because one of the videos i watch the critiqued fallout 3 was by chunk called indigo gaming and they specifically called out trying to enter little lamplight as the peak of Bethesda's design choices which to quote the video is antithetical to the very core of Fallout games now this I find confusing because here's how that section goes you can immediately access to the lamplight if you pass a fairly tough speech check or if you've taken the fairly obscure and charisma gated child at heart perk alternatively you have to complete the rescue from paradise quest which is a really interesting quest what the video highlights however is that you can't use violence to blast your way into little lamplight in short that old chestnut the people regularly hold against fallout3 you can't murder children now I agree it's unrealistic that if you shoot children they don't die but it's also unrealistic you can inject yourself with a stim pack into the heel of injuries or get better at computer hacking even if you've never practiced hacking a computer just because that's where you assigned skill points after levelling up but both of those things have been in the franchise since fallout 1 the thing is no game will ever be 100% realistic every game has to draw a line somewhere even if it's just on grounds of technical limitations honestly it's unrealistic that any game ever has any form of physical barrier as given long enough I could logically dig under it or hit it with a sledgehammer for long enough that it breaks even if it took days of in-game time but not every game can have Red Faction guerrilla mechanics included so we accept compromises of course the only reason child murder actually ever gets brought up at all is because fallout 1 lets you do it 4 and 3 actually lets you enslave children for money including literally looking tight bomb collars around their neck that's not in Fallout 1 but of course fallout 3 as critics would never acknowledge that in this specific case it's slightly down to two factors somewhat unique to child murder first a child murder inclusive fallout 3 would likely be refused classification in some territories very likely including Australia and Germany and secondly it would massively increase the risk of earning the ire of some reactionary groups with a news of parents groups and increase the chance of boycotts the game being pulled from the shelves of major retailers all sorts of stuff the professor reasonably wouldn't want thought out one people perhaps forget was a small game made by a small team and wasn't considered during its production to be a major title interplay the same year they published 11 of the games included some big intellectual property like Star Trek Starfleet Academy in this view is some of fallouts of regional craters in 2017 pretty much confirm they were left alone to do their own thing which made it much easier for them to play with fire because it had blown up in their faces it wouldn't have led to the failure of an IP that had just been purchased for about 6 million US dollars before you even started making a game which well no one has actually ever stated how much fallout 3 costume make based on games from a similar period that we do have budgets fall like Bioshock crisis and crackdown we can estimate that it's at least 20 million US dollars probably much more due to the open world nature of Fallout 3 once you've put that much money on the line yes Bethesda made the call to be cautious and not include child murder plus in this case I'm not really sure what the point of the objection is the child you want to kill is sitting behind a barricade that's already been established you can't climb so what good is shooting them do do the town is more likely to let you and after you've murdered their mayor it's a somewhat petty complaint especially as The Associated questio Center complete is actually a really excellent example of a good Fallout Quest you see first you've got to gain entry to the settlement of Paradise Falls for which there are plenty of options including the faint hint of a reputation system you see in another quest head of state there's a conflict between slavers and slaves if you sided with the slavers Paradise Falls actually remembers that and you get let in automatically the mercy system has a use here as well very evil characters are allowed in immediately alternatively there's a hard speech check but it has to come with a substantial bribe a group of slavers are going to let you in for nothing no matter how charismatic you are alternatively you can agree to do some work for them enslaving one of four targets they highlight for you now if you're a morally good character with low charisma this poses an interesting question is it right to enslave one person in an attempt to free multiple child slaves and if so who'd you pick three civilians want a doctor in fact but the fourth one initially seems like an obvious choice Arkansas who shoots at you as you enter minefield but things still get a little bit uncomfortable once you get the collar around his neck don't kill me please I'm going you see the fallout 3 official game guide confirms they only shot at you because he thought you were a slaver he's actually a vigilante who lays traps for slavers and you just enslaved him and they're gonna do horrible things to him now I'm tempted not to sell him just so we can torment him use him for target practice or something hey once you do get inside though it's a slave market so naturally you can just buy the kids for 2,000 caps which is a lot of money in fallout 3 is there's less cash sloshing around that in New Vegas attentively if you just fancy doing a breakout there are a few science and repair checks that follow plus some amusing ways to distract the guard by paying all the prostitutes to keep bidding but the really interesting stuff happens once you're actually ready to break the kids out and let them make a quiet run for the drainage pipe that they can squeeze through you see two of the children are happy to go straight away another penny refuses to go until her friend Rory is rescued from solitaire accept the quest as effectively already complete those first two kids can fairly easily be convinced to abandon penny and with them rescued you can access to the lamp light job done there is literally no in-game benefit to also rescuing penny but it gets more murky yet because Rory's an adult and you can't sneak him out the same way as the kids he needs to escape through town and attempting to get through will turn the whole town against both you and him plus he almost never survives it regardless now you can set him free and tell him he's on his own he'll get himself shot dead in seconds and penny will leave so you've basically led a man to his death in order to rescue a child is a child's freedom worth a man's life and do you have the right to make that decision or of course you could just gun down the entire town to make sure he gets free but then his mass murderer okay if the targets are slavers I should remind you at this point that fallout frees frequently criticized for poor story and writing when it has to quest like that in fact fallout 3 is of a really interesting morally great quest we'll get to them later but for now honestly does that quest full of alternative solutions dark themes and grey moral questions sound antithetical to the very core of Fallout games let's actually compare that to fallout 1 and a somewhat similar quest also about breaking someone out of captivity rescuing Tandy the fallout 1 quest all happens in a single stage where you can kill all of the cards offered to buy her use a speech check secured her release challenge the leader to a one-on-one unarmed jewel kill just the nearest guards turn either lockpick the salle or use explosives to blow off the door or there's a ludicrously unlikely joke solution involving luck 9 and some other very specific conditions rescue from Paradise does not seem all that different to me plenty of the same options are available buying them removing the guard from the immediate area to allow the prisoners to sneak out just taking out the entire camp sure there's some cool stuff in Fallout 1 squares like using explosives to blow off the door but I prefer some of the stuff in Fallout 3's iteration - you can't just use a speech check to get the kids free to be unrealistic than an experienced leader of slavers be talked into handing over slaves for no charge plus Fallout 3's version as the interesting dilemma of when you cut your losses and start leaving slaves behind because getting all of them out alive is almost impossible to me it's a great little question complaining that it's not fallout II because you can't kill a child to skip it is downright weird it's also worth remembering the killing children the older Fallout games was a terrible idea made everyone hate you more generated bounty hunters to hunt you down and provided no benefit whatsoever the only reason you'd ever do is if you were role-playing as an evil character and yet the same people who complain you can't do this in fallout 3 are often the ones who are complaining about how stupid the choices are in power of the atom because blowing up Megaton is evil for its own sake makes everyone hates you and generates bounty hunters to come after you anyway we'll just get some more quest later but let's get back to Megaton which I want to talk a bit more about that you see Maggie Cheung is a brilliant fall out of town because if you go exploring there's so much there which is very much in the tradition of classic fallout where any town is likely to have one main quest but exploring and speaking to everybody leads to many more many do this particularly worthy of praise however because some of the stuff hidden away there's a very subtle and easy to miss so sure everyone will find power of the Ataman following in his footsteps but a woman who does absolutely nothing to draw attention to herself in the bar will give you a letter to deliver to her brother if you speak to her kicking off blood ties or if you go into the doctors back office you can find a holotype about an escaped synth that kicks off the replicated man early and the relegated man is particularly fascinating quests it has no quest markers the game simply prompts you to learn about the escaped synth and it's up to you to figure out who'd be the most likely people to show an interest in a runaway Android seeking a medical procedure whether that's doctors or engineers although sympathetic to his corpse and then there's the tiny quest helping Walter fix some leaking pipes or discovering from the authority figure in town that Leo Stahl has a drug problem not helping him or exploiting it's your advantage there is no listing these by the way is because this is fallout threes first town you step out of the training area and two minutes later you're here and you immediately have access to four major named quests if you can find them all of which send you off in different directions if you want to follow them plus the wasteland Survival Guide and three smaller unmarked quests just be comparison fallout ones first town shady sands again access straight up to leaving the vault has one major quest stop the radscorpions cheer associated sub quests relates to acquiring poison sacs from the radscorpions in order to make an antidote and other than that there are just two sub quests want to recruit Ian either vice speech or payment and improving their agriculture which has a single solution a science check when you put the two side-by-side it just makes me Antony baffled that people complain fallout 3 was too linear or a break from classic fallout because it just doesn't seem to match up with the facts also while we're on the Megaton quest I want to draw your attention to something in the city that's very elegant you see in the vault the only weapons to your access to our Malayan small guns which means you have no incentive to raise any other weapon skill because you don't own any of those weapons and why would you buy a weapon you haven't invested skill points into which makes it very easy for players to slip into a vicious cycle of only using small guns so what you have in Megaton to try and avoid that in the wasteland Survival Guide the SuperDuper mark gives you two laser pistols that combined have about the same damage as your 10 millimeter pistol plus another one is lying on the ground near Tangier now when you first meet the Brotherhood so you can repair it again later another of the wasteland survival guides opening quest brings you to minefield which effectively gives you a pile of free frag mine and some grenades from lawyer afterwards Plus remember you have to boost explosives 25 to complete power of the atom so the game tries to kick off some interest in those weapons as well meanwhile and more as infantry it's the schematic for the rocket launcher which is expensive to buy providing a nice bonus Trancas as much cash as possible for the early quest but even a character with low repair and low big-gun skill will end up with a big gun class weapon that's lots of to carry around has effectively infinite ammo and will almost certainly be more powerful per shot than any other gun you have ads in The Fatman you're gifted outside GNR and the early game of fallout 3 is quietly steered you into owning a decent selection of small guns and energy weapons explosives and big guns in fact new Vegas tracers you've pretty much exactly the same thing you'll gifted a laser pistol inside doc mitchell's house and ghosts and gunfights includes an explosive skill check and a gift of some dynamite to encourage you to experiment with that weapon class anyway that's enough on Megaton how many we've gone you're out blowing me right let's move on so the game now director's East down to the DC ruins to find our way to the gnr now I don't think many people seem to hate is fallout threes Metro tunnels you'll be delighted to I'm not about to try and convince you they're great ultimately the lack of distinctive features and fallout through relatively small pool of enemy types that small in the tunnels makes them hard to distinguish from each other and more confusing to navigate than they should be however I do think they serve an important purpose specifically they represent the least bad solution to a problem that new vegas would go on to have so speaking of new vegas do any of you have any particularly strong feelings about the city ruins around the eastern outskirts of new vegas probably not they're just sort of there there's a few landmarks there the mole rat ranch for example nothing special it's just an area you pass through because it's so easy to pass through it honestly makes the wider Vegas area feel a bit small the Metro tunnels meanwhile a part of one of Fallout three's cleverest conjuring tracks you see the actual area you can explore within the DC ruins is pretty limited but by choosing to have it as isolated islands it feels huge and can hide little areas of way in fact I'd wager decent money that even if you've played plenty of Fallout 3 you might never have been to the Tacoma area as it's hidden away along a line that can only be accessed from a station tucked away behind a heavily irradiated crater but if you do find your way there there's a shot with some unique items and also there's an artillery cannon which you can use to bombard a super mutant behemoth and it's just hidden away as little Easter Egg a reward for exploring that sort of hidden area wouldn't be possible if the city was just opened ruin blocks like in New Vegas and it's why I think the Metro tunnels actually have an important purpose they also formed part of another thing that I think fallout 3 does well arguably better than New Vegas and that's a variety of landscape much of New Vegas takes place in pretty much one biome rocky orange scrub land with cliffs dotted around to create natural barriers it doesn't matter if you're on the south near nip turn west near good Springs north of Vegas or East by Nelson the landscape is broadly identical with the exceptions of the canyon that the Colorado runs through which isn't really used for anything and the tiny area in the mountains that leads up to Jacobs town fallout 3 meanwhile has some more distinct areas there's a starting area which is largely flattened open and very similar term much of New Vegas the DC ruins however provide a very different feeling that collapsed buildings narrow alleys and maze of Metro tunnels and blocked roads create a claustrophobic and very oppressive environment reinforced by careful placement of super mutants and raised positions you can go into caution or danger have no idea who seen you or where they are the contrast between the wide-open spaces of the wasteland and the ruined streets of DC is great just let the transition from the opening of the vault out into the wasteland for the first time now the other biome is one you can overlook because you can choose to spend very little time there it's the northwest quarter of the map for a threes green filter drains away you enter the area instead of the more colorful south it's a very grey for boating area there's a lot more rocks around making it harder to navigate and much easier to become disorientated in there's also a lot more trees but they're all dead in fact I'd say it's actually quite likely Bethesda would recycle this last idea in Fallout 4 with the line of black dead trees that marked the edge of the glowing sea and the danger they're in it's not Bethesda's best work mine fallout 4 went on to do it much better with the glowing sea itself the rainy Marsh in the south and Boston's verticality though I personally think Skyrim shines here with the beautiful countryside of the rift folk reefs forests the misty canyons of the reach the swamps of more Thal or the icy wastes of the pale but despite the fact it would be done better in future I still think is worth mentioning here is it provides a bit of context that hopefully might make people think a bit more kindly towards an area that I've seen a lot of people dislike so we emerge for the tunnels and run straight into a confrontation between two of the most important groups in the game the super mutants and the brothers of Steel and that means now is an excellent time to discuss some of the big players in the story les enough for the mutants and I want to start by pointing out that fallout 3 does a phenomenal job introducing the mutants you see down to the Metro tunnels there's a good chance you'll run into your firstborn so far you've just been fighting ghouls and Raiders basically humanoid creatures of a normal size then you come around the corner in a smoky tunnel and there's a silhouette in the distance blocking your path at the end of the tunnel of a huge figure it's a hell of an entrance it's lovely and it's followed up by letting you fight them in big numbers around GNR with some assistance from the Brotherhood and after that you're on your own the next time you run into the soup we'll be when you emerge from the museum station and you see the mall for the first time converted into a battlefield with super mutants patrolling the trenches and fortified positions and just a great escalation of threats anyway let's talk about the mutants overall because I have seen them mentioned as a disappointment and this seems to be because people don't see the mutants as interesting and complicated next to how they were and fallout war just because you've never played it the original mutants were created as part of a plan referred to as the unity humans will be converted to mutants because humans were unsuited to surviving in the wasteland partly because they were just physically frail and vulnerable to radiation and partly because they were constantly bickering amongst themselves a single group of Hardy mutants might have a better chance it's a really great story for the mutants because the master has a point we do repeatedly in Fallout 1 see different groups of humans fighting each other and struggling to survive in the wastelands the mutants of Fallout 1 also aren't brute they have a plan they have leaders they have human allies who are helping them they set patrols they can maintain a military base in working order they challenge intruders they follow orders in short they're a society that has structure and a goal and while it's different a case can be made that they're not the bad guys and accordingly the master can't be talked out of his plan by telling him it's wrong the only thing that talks him down is providing proof that his mutant army is sterile and thus his unity if ever accomplished would be a dead end that inevitably dies out in the long term by comparison many were disappointed by the meets in fallout 3 who initially seemed almost more like orcs they hang up gall bags they yell short poorly film sentences they run at you screaming with a board with a nail in it they don't seem like a society they just seem like animals and I think that interpretation is wrong and that there's actually some really interesting stuff going on just below the surface with the mutants of Fallout 3 you see I think the mutants actually have a very tragic story what we see in fallout 3 is Richard Grey's worst nightmare and it's entirely consistent with fallout 1 you see the idea of civilians being big dumb brutes wasn't - fallout 3 invention it's absolutely in Fallout 1 most famously in the case of Harry but Richard Grey's diary makes it very clear that most mutants are very too but in fact a quite Richard gray the few Wanderers that have found their way here have been a disappointment to me they can't seem to mutate correctly the best I've been able to create are some big and dumb mutants most can recall nothing from before I initiated them into the wondrous unity but it's not as obvious in Fallout 1 because most of the mutants don't speak at all they just shoot you on sight but given Harry's entire team is characterized as stupid it seems reasonable to suggest that actually the vast majority of Fallout 1 mutants are roughly of Harry's intelligence so why do the Fallout war mutants have a functioning society but the fallout 3 mutants don't motion it's down to leadership fallout ones mutants are led by Richard gray and by the extremely small number of mutants who maintain their intelligence like the lieutenant the fallout 3 mutants have a small number of intelligence super mutants as well in the form of forks and Uncle Leo but rather than becoming leaders they were locked away or driven out its fallout one society flipped on its head and it's tragic creatures that were envisioned as the next step for Humanity instead embrace anti intellectualism and drive out to the few people who might actually be able to save them regressing over time to a state where they start hanging up gold bags and yet there's a lot more to the super mutants than even bats because they're actually grappling with the exact same problem that the master couldn't bear to contemplate in Fallout Warner how to reproduce and survive just like Richard gray they create new mutants by dipping humans in the green stuff as you can overhear in volt 87 forced evolutionary facts which aren't seen in-game but are mentioned on several terminals and they're empty this is Richard Gray's nightmare a mutant population unable to reproduce dwindling away an evolutionary dead end that's what the vault 87 mutants are but it's worse than that because the mutants are trying to fix it but without the benefit of the few intelligent super mutants that do exist that might have been able to help them you see to survive they need two things more humans and more FEV humans are hard to get hold of and that explains the large number of human captives you'll find everywhere but the FEV is a little bit more tricky now if you visit the vault 8 headquarters in DC there are mutants inside it attacking the robots why would they want to access vote tank because they need to find more fault because they're looking for more FEV because they think FEV comes from votes except the whole things are rather tragic doomed mission because we know for a fact there is no FEV in the other votes the mutants have spent years combing the DC ruins and the waste for more volts and even if they ever found one they wouldn't get what they needed they are quite simply facing an extinction level event and what happens in fallout 3 is irrelevant natural wastage would finish them off eventually anyway that they persevere clean to hope that they just smash a bit harder they can survive in some ways it's one of the saddest stories in fallout 3 in fact I think there's actually another interesting echo in the super mutant story that fits too well to be mere coincidence you see the Muse in fallout 3 came from a volt volt 87 where based on the accounts of of the wastelanders they previously had mostly stayed with mutant activity in the DC ruins massively escalating only in recent years and the only reason they left was because a crucial bit of pre-war volt tech kid that the Volt depended on stopped working for them as a result they left their fault and headed east looking for other vaults or information that might lead them there with a focus on locating volt tech data that could lead them to another vault because they desperately need to access a particular liquid for their survival all sound a tiny bit familiar by any chance yeah the mutants are on their own fallout quest locating their own water chip their own waters of life just that their waters of life happened to be green oh and what happens when an outside power discovers the location of their volt why the lone wanderer ahead straight there and murders everyone inside it fallout 3 you are the mutants bad ending in short the suit boobs are a lot more interesting than big dumb baddies so let's move on to the other side of that coin the one faction I've most often seen raises a problem with fallout 3 the Brotherhood of Steel now some people the Brotherhood are a big problem and it seems to boil down to one big issue the Brotherhood now acts in a more overtly benevolent and open fashion that fear a stranger odds with how the Brotherhood used to act in classic fallout now I'd like to address these points directly because I'm not really sure they stand up to any scrutiny the Brotherhood has not changed because this isn't the Brotherhood and I don't just mean because this is an independent cell acting alone in a hostile environment nearly 3,000 miles from Bravo Command though that is true I mean that they literally are Brotherhood anymore and the game explicitly says this Lyons directly refused orders and so the West Coast cut us off no communications no reinforcements and in case that was too subtle they even added in the outcast a faction that left specifically because lines wasn't following standard Brotherhood operating procedure this isn't some lazy retcon this is a small group that in one particular time in one particular set of circumstances made the choice to be something slightly different and they've had to accept the loss of their friends and being ostracized from their own order to pay for that change then let's actually examine how much has changed in lines Brotherhood because I think that's massively overstated you see older fallout fans will probably expect the fallout 3 brother to lock themselves in a secure location which they refused to allow you access to but that's exactly what they do just like in Fallout 1 they occasionally send out kill teams to hit super mutant positions of it's advantageous them though being slightly more open than previous situations to the Brotherhood they still treat outsiders with suspicion and disdain and there's also just a weird little coincidence then both fallout 3 and new Vegas you access the Brotherhood bunker for the first time when a female companion you already knew them asked to be let in via an intercom but really that's all superficial stuff let's look at the core conflict that's always existed at the heart of the Brotherhood his isolationism good or not in fallout 3 lines has already decided the answer is no he's opened up his brotherhood to the outside but that's not a change that's pretty much been the standard arc for the Brotherhood in every game and fallout 1 the Brotherhood are initially locked away in their bunker but at the end of the game you can persuade the Brotherhood that the mutant threat is severe enough that they should come out and assist an outsider were dealing with it and that's not a war off the cannon ending to fallout 1 goes as follows the Brotherhood of Steel helps the other human outposts drive the mutant armies away with minimal loss of life on both sides of the conflict the advanced technology of the Brotherhood is slowly reintroduced into new California with little disruption or chaos the Brotherhood wisely remains out of the power structure and becomes a major research and development house reintroducing technology and acting as an R&D house in fact their art is pretty clear they start off as isolationist hoarders learn that's a dead end and thus become more open to engaging with the world our beer from a safe distance in fact four up threes Brotherhood fits that and pretty much perfectly they have their Citadel but they're also trying to help the world around them while simultaneously keeping its Tom's LAN and bear in mind fallout 3 takes place over a century after the events of fallout Warren convinced a high order of Lost Hills that engaging with Outsiders in the outside world was sometimes necessary is it really so ridiculous that a century later some Brotherhood leaders might come to the exact same conclusion let's look at another example in New Vegas the Brotherhood said we meet a militant isolationist who lost the war that they started because they were so desperate to control technology and who happily struck bomb collars on to outsiders shoot enough to try and break into their bunker and our Brotherhood companion Veronica stresses that they'll die out and their high odor agrees that refuses to change anyway if the Brotherhood and New Vegas stick to the old ways they are destroyed by newer powers one of the only ways for the brother to survive the end of new vegas is for them to open up start showing interest in the outside world engaging with other groups and allying with the NCR in fact a constant idea in Fallout is that a closed-off Brotherhood cell must open up or risk dying out liyan's brother didn't even go that far with their experiments they guarded strategically important locations took out groups of sick mutants that threatened them and guarded small water caravans compared with Hawaii with the NCR and sending troops to assist them in a war they knew basically nothing about it's fairly modest but somehow when fallout 3 has its brothel to open up a bit it's a problem but every other instance of the Brotherhood eventually learning they have to open up a bit is absolutely fine you see just like in fallout 3 is it game with some crazy rules like it's totally okay to criticize fallout 3 for doing something that Fallout New Vegas did and then just politely pretend New Vegas is invisible for a minute I'll give you another very famous example in one of the Internet's best-known fallout 3 critiques fallout 3 is garbage h-bomb makgulli discusses the ending to fallout through space game and I just had this more spun out in 2016 so New Vegas had been out for 7 years he spent some time discussing how the final confrontation in fallout 4 against Colonel autumn is a very weak ending and what I'll discuss the ending in a bit more detail later I broadly agree it is one a fallout 4 his week a moment but I just want to directly quote a couple of points that I made about colonel autumn he just sort of turns up halfway through he's just a guy standing there saying well I guess it's time for us to fight now and in the space of three lines of dialogue you can talk him down and he just walks out I mean I don't even know what to say to that actually wait I do at least autumn actually showed up earlier in the game at least we've seen him before at least he's actually done something against million against my family and he's some effort was made to show not tau Linnaeus is literally some guy who we've never met before the final confrontation all we know is some vague stories about how many is but Eunice's even specifically mentions it might not be the same guy onto the mast and lucious's backstory for him doesn't match up with the one Caesar get and his face under the mask doesn't match up with Caesars story either so basically the news is just some guy who may or may not have done some bad stuff in the past but some of it was probably someone else who was just wearing the same hats and that's been talking him down at least in fallout 3 it vaguely makes sense in context consider autumns position he's already lost there's a giant murder bot standing outside Raven Rock is destroyed his president is gone if someone persuasive enough offered him a chance to walk away why wouldn't he but linnaeus a man who according to his own slightly dubious backstory was so obsessed with fighting that when his tribe tried to surrender he turned on them and kept fighting beyond the point of mutilation a man who Caesar specifically says has no love for the Legion and is just a butcher who is personally loyal to Caesar alone he is going to back down when faced with the argument that California is a bit big so it would stretch the Legion to hold ed yeah sorry I'm not convinced he's the sort of guy who gets convinced it's best to play it safe than risk conquering too much even mechanically I think autumn surrounds her actually works better because fallout3 speech system utilized both charisma and speech skills and that mean that you couldn't just shove skill points into speech you actually had to be a charismatic individual as well at even then you could fail but in New Vegas my most common build is charisma once speech a hundred a person so lucky in charisma the don't Mitchell mutters I must be suffering from frontal lobe damage and even then I can talk down the butcher of the East you know what as were already on the ending let's briefly talk about the ending because it's honestly not great but it's not as bad as some people say either it's certainly no Mass Effect 3 level disaster in fact I see the idea they were going with it's just the execution that doesn't quite work you see there's an early idea introduced in Fallout 3 right in the intro it was here you were born it is here you will die and following straight after that fallout 3 uniquely begins with your birth so it really wasn't that surprise you that the game chose to end with your death the problem wasn't the idea it was the contrived circumstances and some of the script around it that meant it didn't work and this is where the ending starts getting messy because for me doesn't have a single ending or even a single end point you see a lot of people didn't like the original ending and they particularly didn't like the massive barely concealed plot holes created by the fact that the whole thing's built around the idea that somebody has to step into the irradiated chamber to give the capital wasteland clean water when there are so many characters in the game better suited to doing it than you or Sarah including three companions you might have with you who are 100% immune to radiation Forked Karen and RL three but if you ask them they refuse even folks who earlier in the game volunteered to do something in a highly irradiated section of volt 87 for you and actively chastises you if you run ahead and do it yourself even care on whose character is literally been brainwashed to follow orders even rl3 who's a robot he's your property I don't need moral lessons from my toaster you bastards but credit where credit Jew told Howard freely admitted the nd wasn't great and they did fix some of the biggest holes but created a few new ones along the way you see we Broken Steel installed Forks Carolyn rl3 all happily agreed to start the purifier meaning no one has to die but they didn't redo Ron Perlman's voiceover so now he addresses rl3 as a true hero and attacks the player for that cowardice oh I'm sorry Ron next time I won't come up with a scenario where the entire waistline gets clean drinking water and nobody has to die Brobee just do also add to the fact that you can survive the ending of Fallout 3 so you can do a bunch of post endgame stuff with the Brotherhood but if you do go on to survive after choosing to step into the chamber yourself ron perlman still narrates about your noble sacrifice and how this is the end of your story and then you wake up and there's more story where's Ron Perlman just busy that weeks it really feels like they should have got ron perlman back in the recording studio and then you can see why this is a bit of a messy ending and I've never been quite sure how I feel about it because it's pretty clear the original intended ending was for you to step into the purifier and that'd be it the game starts with your birth and ends with your death with the alternative ending being you just walk away which will be fine too because before that one ads were you just walking away and that's it in short the DLC adds in a different ending which resolves some of the most blatant issues of the original and adds the postgame roaming that some people angrily condemned the fester for not including in the first place despite the fact that was no post endgame at all and fallout on a new Vegas but obviously no one Minds that but it was a messy fix the met the original ending somatic purpose gets lost and while the ending of broken still has a lot better in terms of game playing gunplay I actually kind of prefer the original at least conceptually anyway well we out GN are good and one thing particularly worthy of note here the behemoth fights see this is something that I think fallout 3 does spectacularly well it has those big wow moments oddly I often see this list as a criticism mostly phrased as how games are becoming more cinematic and thus more like films and thus more Lydia and that can be true in fact there's one bit of Fallout 3 I won't be trying to defend the totally for since that trap the march of Liberty prime okay it's kind of fun to see a giant robot stomping around but he completely overwhelms the game play as you can basically just follow him there's no need for you to actually get involved plus he frequently bugs out and gets stuck on three separate occasions when I was trying to record this footage in fact but mostly I don't feel that criticism really applies to fallout 3 it has big spectacle moments but for me they really just help to elevate certain quests oasis for example isn't actually a great quest it's just a cave with some milos to kill but the beauty of Oasis next to the rest of the wasteland and the beautiful visual design of Harold in particular bent over his arm rooted to the ground the bulging single eye the mouth pinned open by tree bark that all makes it work whatever you think of power of the atom standing on the balcony watching the Megaton explosion as the shockwave hits the tower it's one of those iconic scenes in gaming you'd instantly recognize anywhere waking up in tranquility Lane for the first time with its black and white visuals and jaunty music even little moments in fallout 3 were made to feel a bit more special by the structuring of main quests around the best-known landmarks like the mall the Capitol building the Washington Monument sauna 3 even managed to add a little bit of showmanship just arriving in a new town making it a bit of an event from megatons gates pulling open the crane at rivet city little lamplights barricade New Vegas had a couple of these moments to let the statues at the entrance the NCR outpost or the barricade into the strip but too many towns you just walked in the crane makes rivet city feel cool and special and entering it for the first time matters McCarran and New Vegas is technically a lot more important it's the headquarters of the biggest factor in the Mojave it's home to multiple quest givers and named characters and you enter it through a game that's got a sign over-the-top affair that's just nothing exciting there just walls stretching away in both directions the first adjust seemed to have a bit of a better a leaf reading a bit of flair to make moments stand out memorably and speaking of fallout 3 in showmanship the game's next destination is the Museum of Technology personally I this is a great little dungeon a blend of interesting unique rooms combat story atmosphere and rewards for exploring dig around the early rooms through the ruins you can find multiple stealth boys perfect if you fancy sneaking in and out without violence there's also some lovely dark humour in the area with the halls of today leading to nothing but collapse rubble and some quite tragedy with the Wright brothers plane just lying smashed on the ground and the exhibition's talking about mankind's glorious technological future this is the sort of choir atmospheric storytelling that fallout 3 does really well and speaking of that we proceed through the vault-tec exhibition which i absolutely love because it's dark there's blood smears the old exhibitions flicker to life and you sneak around the corners waiting for the ambush which never comes we'll discuss this in more detail later but fallout 3 is very good at silence and downtime little tense quiet moments when nothing happens just to let you soak up the atmosphere and allow your imagination to do the work but there's loads more as well there's a long way round the objective with more enemies or a shorter route if you've got sufficient skills and lock-picking or science plus multiple science 50 checks which is very high for this early in the game one of which lets you turn the turrets on to assist providing an alternative solution for those who invested in science over combat skills there's a weapon locker with some powerful specialized post grenades hidden behind either unlocked 75 check or a well-hidden gun locker key a secret area with a skill book if you're paying attention to the rocket exhibit an entire unmarked sub quest if you go digging through all the terminals which Ottoman leads to the unique Chinese assault rifle which is very powerful but only as a reward for the players who look into all the law now that's a great dungeon plenty of combat but plenty of ways to avoid it as well if you're sneaky and skilled enough to do so but it also leads me to a question I never even thought about so I made this video and there this is a bit of a tangent but why doesn't New Vegas have any real dungeons I mean it feels like they were planning for New Vegas to have dungeons because the boys and Steve introduces them and for ease I'll define a dungeon as an enclosed area of reasonable length with an objective at the end and some combination of traps puzzles or enemies in the way but then after the moistened Steve there's basically no other dungeon in New Vegas other than Volt's 11 22 and 34 I actually went over the entire map and there's almost nothing helia swans interior is acceptable if very short repconn headquarters is good but other than that I don't think there are any and this is a really a problem with New Vegas it's just something that confuses me a bit because fallout 3 is full of big interesting dungeons like the Capitol building Evergreen Mills The Statesman Hotel Our Lady of Hope hospital Germantown police headquarters for Constantine Dunwich so many others the by comparison new figgis's ruins tend to be extremely small and open and thus very quick to get through compare if you'd like the sunset sasparilla plans with fallout threes nuclear plant the nuclear plant is a huge multi stage dungeon while the sarsaparilla bottling plant is a small building with a handful of enemies scattered around a racist on Twitter ones and someone suggests it might be as a result of new vases short development time mapping out and developing large complex dungeons might not have been practical it's an interesting potential theory but after thinking about this for way too long I realized something I think might actually explain it you see there's definitely ideological thematic reason if there's been no dungeons in New Vegas because old world blues is full of dungeons with really cool unique old world blues rewards and that's when the solution hit me new vegas can't have huge sprawling dungeons because it doesn't have enough stuff to reward you with at the end think about it spending significant time and ammo getting to the end of an area will be extremely frustrating if there was nothing there at the end as a reward it's the same reason that by the mid game in Skyrim I lose interesting going into every random cave because leveled loop stops having any point once you can be certain it's gonna be worse than whatever you've already crafted an enchant us now fallout 3 does very well in this regard and it's one of the reasons why I think fallout 3 nails open-ended exploration because fallout 3 has plenty of good stuff to reward you with which provides a real benefit to your character bubbleheads skill books and also schematics because one version of almost every schematic can be found out in the wild fallout 3 therefore had enough stuff you could explore pretty much any random ruin and be fairly confident that you gonna find something genuinely useful there a bare minimum a handful of free skill points and this is something I actually think that Bethesda for labs the best at creating a big world that rule Ward's exploring now old fallout managed to get around this by simply not having very many locations there are 13 locations in Fallout 1 and 22 in Fallout 2 everything else is just random encounters fallout 3 and 4 meanwhile had far more locations 163 in fallout 3 and nearly double that in fallout 4 and 3 kept them worth exploring with all the skill points bobbleheads and schematics it liberally hand out whereas four came up with the junk and crafting system that meant even small areas could be treasure troves as the game progressed and your Proteas shifted from adhesive to screws to aluminium to advanced components for top team mods and power armor new vegas is weirdly perhaps the weakest game in this regard because it has the large volume of locations from fallout 3 slightly more in fact 187 in the base game but new vegas genuinely struggles to make it smaller locations worth exploring and the problem was new vegas took a lot of fallout through his rewards out bobbleheads were removed and replaced with the implant clinic though effectively all the bobbleheads could be purchased from one single location schematics are gone with most recipes instead immediately available but hidden behind skill checked perks or dialogue and the number of skill books and new vegas was vastly reduced as well there are I believe 54 skill books in the new vegas based game vs. are over 300 in fallout 3 new vegas the solution to this problem was the star bottle caps which is a pretty disappointing reward given you can generate those at random from drinking sarsaparilla which can be found everywhere and cheaply bought all over as well in fact I went over every location in new vegas and recorded the areas with no reward of the generic container loot and a star bottle cap and they are search like north goldmine the smith mesa prospecting camp bradley shack the emergency service Railway Co alt mines Eldorado Gaston service mountain shadows campground blue paradise vacation rentals the gypsum train yard the recti women Harper Shack and thus not a prospect account so quite a few and naturally all of those have to be either extremely short dungeons or single room areas or the effort to reward ratio will be frustrating for the player now for full disclosure New Vegas did have one other award to could use the number of weapons and new vegas is much higher and the so is the number of you variants that can be found but even then new Vegas didn't like leaving those in caves or ruins for a diligent explore to find often they request rewards bought for shops or a voice held by named characters would you believe I did the maths on this in New Vegas there are 20 unique weapon variants found out in the wild the ones on screen right now but another 16 are held buying named characters available in shops or quest rewards and that's completely ignoring the gun runner's arsenal guns all of which goes straight into shops fallout 3 is happy to scatter its rewards across the map while New Vegas concentrates its rewards in towns and in the hands of important NPCs still let's move on to the next big important discussion and this one's a big one the story and this one's about to start off well by the way because I'm about to positively compare part of fallout 3 storytelling to New Vegas so get your best angry comments ready but it said let's just start up for a second with fallout 1 because fallout 1 overall story structure is correct and part of that is because it unfolds neatly as you progress when you start out you're not going on a big adventure you live in a small community that community has a localized problem in the form of the water ship you're heading to a nearby Volt you already know the location of to find a replacement the scale WA is small but as you progress you learn more about the world and you can learn quicker or slower depending on how much you choose to explore and ask around the crucial point is you might not even meet a super mutant until a necropolis the Brotherhood meanwhile are only mentioned for the very first time in the hub fallout 3 follows a similarly elegant series of plot escalations it starts off again as a small personal story of somebody trying to find their only surviving relative who ends up getting introduced to the fact there are other conflicts happening in the wasteland as they hunt down clues but it's not until you reach rivet city that anyone explains anything about project purity nobody mentions the Enclave at all until they show up and start murdering people fallout 4 follows a similar principle you start off with a small personal journey and then we introduce other factions and conflicts as they become directly relevant to you new vegas is to my mind the weakest fallout game in this regard and it's something I don't see mention much but let's just quickly go over the wrong Perelman introductions you seen fallout 3 wrong lets you know there's been a nuclear war some people survived it thanks the votes and that's where you'll be starting out which is pretty much the same intros in Fallout 1 in New Vegas before you get to play the game at all Ron lets you know there was a big nuclear war but that was aged to go and now the NCR is the largest regional power in the southwest but their resources are a bit strained so they sent Scouts east and they found hoover dam and new vegas so he sent their army there to fix it but there was this other army called caesar's legion they also wanted the dam so there was this massive battle but that was a few years ago and the NCR won but it was closed so the NCR of the dam now but the legion is still nearby their token or attack it again also new vegas is still or las vegas e and there's this bloke called mr house he runs things there he's got lots of robots working for him and you're a courier and you were delivering some into this trip but that's gone wrong and then we go straight into another cutscene where we meet belly and the conf action and the indifference pyrrha see and then we get to play the game and i'm sorry but we didn't need any of that information that is just a massive exposition dump that is pure telling not showing and I'm utterly baffled that managed to make it into the final game because we don't need any of it the information we need to begin new vegas says you're a courier Benny robbed you he's got a distinctive look so we can ask after him go find him all the other information is irrelevant the second town you find is held by the NCR they could very easily have given you a quick NCR history lesson Plus imagine how much more impactful Nipton would have been walking down the street of crucifixes seeing Romans emerging from the Town Hall if you haven't already been specifically told there was an army of Roman style slavers around still that's a fairly minor point to the actual discussion around fallout three story breaks into two parts writing and plot let's start with writing because weirdly it just became part of the accepted narrative to say that fallout 3 has bad writing obviously I had no choice but to amputate I even stitched a little smiley face in you to keep up your spirits it's kinda hard to see from your side though yeah sorry I'm not having that fall out of threes got some great writing and some amazing voice acting to go with it fine there are some weaker moments the replicated man stands out to me is failing to convey the enormity of heartlessness discovery the Bethesda face doesn't help either no I'm really not convinced we should condemn a game based on a handful of poor examples because New Vegas has some very dubious moments as well nice Charlie's - give him a shake for the bend man will ya hello seriously to this day I'm amazed they actually let Matthew Perry leave the recording booth if that was the best tank still that's just a scratch what most people want to talk about is the plot I've never fully understood the hate here either at high level wasn't discussed earlier key information about the world is unveiled as it becomes relevant slowly expanding the story from a person to one into one where you're a key figure the deer's of major factions which strikes me as somewhat similar to new vegas the structure of hunting down the ship in act 1 and through your actions in that hunt coming to the attention of major players in the world who therefore want to deal with you going forward but some people seem to have a real issue with the structure of act 1 in Fallout 3 the story of leaving the vault and tracking down your dad to revisit h bomber guys well-known critique he dislikes how you move around the game board running into major players and factions you go walking from clue to clue the overarching story boiling down to and I quote you're still following this one guy's trail again I find this an odd criticism because I've never seen anyone hate on New Vegas s first act even though it's pretty much exactly the same you spend the first thing trying to track down one guy who can run straight - if you know where you're going and how to get there the most players are we following the road from clue to clue running into major characters and factions on the way weirdly h-bomb a guy's video even takes a moment to call out the GNR where you can choose to skip a quest if you can pass a skill check there by missing out on calm and as if the exact same thing didn't happen in Novak where the entirety of the rep contest site can be skipped by just breaking into a single terminal in the motel but let's move on to a higher view of the plot because unquestionably fallout 3 post tranquility Lane is weaker than Fallout New Vegas post Benny but I've never been convinced the comparing main plot to main plot is a fair comparison and I'm gonna prove that to you right now with maps let's have a quick look at New Vegas as well and how you would logically explore it if you're following just the main story including fast travel when it would make sense to do so so we start up in Goodsprings and we move down to prim pretty much just following the road we then follow the road round to nip to because that's where the quest market takes you before updating to lead you up towards Novak from never make a brief trip over to the retcon Testament in order to get the information we need from Manny we then head north probably sticking pretty much close by to the road again a very lucky swing by the 188 on our way to Boulder City before proceeding pretty much directly into Vegas itself cutting through freestyle and reaching the strip thereby ending act 1 after act 1 let's say we're gonna do the NCR route as the MCS the first faction run into in the game next up you'll be sent up to Nelson to take care of that's business then have some work in freeside you're over towards dealing with the cons after the cards you have to deal with the Brotherhood before finally heading over to hoover dam to wrap up the game but all of that assumes that your base is going to go in and start shooting if you actually want to resolve any of the quests that show up at the factions you need to add in a tiny bit more so for example if you want to deal with the boomers quest you're gonna need to go to lake meet the most efficient way to deal with the cons meanwhile will be to go and find Melissa in order to get popper on side with them and then finally if you want to do the Brotherhood peacefully good luck because there's a bunch of stuff to do regarding finding power armor finding scouts finding vaults all the rest of it now the most important thing here is notice how much of the map has just been filled up pretty much all the major factions have been visited this is because the biggest question new vegas are all on the main plot threads velar a GI blues you'll know it when it happens beyond the beef come fly with me and the few big quest that aren't are placed directly next to main plot roads to ensure you don't miss them like that lucky old son now let's do the same thing for Fallout three's map so we travel from the vault to Megaton for mega the quest market brings us straight over to the subway by the subway system we make it over to GNR G&R brings us underground over to the mall we visit the Museum of Technology from that point we're moving on to Rivet City but probably the easiest way to do that Rothen try to navigate the metro system is returning to the underground system and looping around the outside of the river to get to Rivet City from the outside that's certainly how I typically do it anyway I've played a lot of Fallout for it and even I can't remember the option way to cut through all of the metro systems from that point we nip over towards the Jefferson Memorial to pick up with project purity and then it's over towards tranquility lane probably this way to do that is from vault 101 after a brief excursion to project purity and an underground job the Briggs's the sits down we have to go to the lamp light probably the easiest way to go there is simply cutting from Smith cases garage up north in order to access that we have to nip over to Paradise Falls and then there's a lot of fast traveling back to the lamp light being teleported up to Rafe and Brock and from Raven Rock you can fast travel straight back to the Citadel so then we skip to the end of the game where we instead just walk straight from Citadel down to project purity and that's the entirety of the main game right there but let's be more generous to fallout 3 and also say we're gonna do the wasteland survival guide because that's a pretty main quest those are the three journeys we need there to the robco factory to minefield and the arlington library ok let's be even more generous and let's actually say every single town we've passed through we're going to do a hundred percent of named quest that can be found in those towns so from mega turn we will travel over to arrow foo in order to do blood ties in rivet city will do stealing independence and for that we can fast travel to the museum of tech and then just cut across the mall and just for fun let's also say from robco will nip down to tempani and do the tampa neat our quest as well now even with all those extra quests i shoved at the end the result is radically different half of the map has barely been touched but it gets much more interesting yet let's look at where summer fall out for his big named quests or locators whatever just highlighted there is good a showed starting point for the nuka-cola challenge canterbury common starting point for super human gambit temper of the union starting point for head of state and oasis starting point for would you believe OSS lesson a bit more on as well major locations with unmarked quests the rookies have just ads on their R and L the Republic of Dave and vote 108 so obviously there's a big difference in design philosophy going on here fallout 4 is tough for the whole bunch of big interesting quests and stories way off the beaten track far away from any possibility you just accidentally walk into them if you were purely doing the main plot the really crucial thing is for the vast majority of these nobody will ever give you a quest marker for them they're just four explorers and in these locations that's where fallout 3 hides some of its best stories you see fallout 3 story is decentralized large numbers of small stories attach their own communities and people with largely localized consequences which is why fallout threes main plot doesn't stack up well to other Fallout games because more than any other Fallout game fallout 3 keeps plenty of content away from the main plot let's try and add a bit of detail and flesh this out in fallout 3 because of decentralized narrative a lot of the plot is attached to side quests have their own stories so discuss fallout 3 story we are so off to discuss its quests so let's drink it's the big complaints that seem to show up about the fallout 4 request and I think the word that best encapsulate sit is uninteresting the fallout 3's main quests are supposed to be uninteresting for three main reasons I've seen repeated and here we come back to some of the criticism I mentioned right at the beginning there's not enough ways to resolve them there's not enough consequences as a result of solving them and to come back to power of the item they're morally uninteresting so let's say there's criticism one at a time firstly quests don't have enough interesting ways to try and solve them now for some of the main quests this is absolutely 100% true and I can see how somebody - only played the main quest could come to that conclusion scientific pursuits for example can only be solved by recovering one particular audio log from Project purity but is rather harsh to condemn the entire game by a handful of more linear quests just like I've never heard anybody attack New Vegas for the fact that both the mr. house and yes-man routes force you to go to the Eldorado substation and install one thing on one computer with no alternative solution in fact I've come up with a theory about this criticism of Fallout 3 I strongly suspect that some people have underestimated just how many interesting options there are in Fallout 3 because just like in Fallout 1 some options simply don't appear in dialogue unless you already have the requirements to fulfill them in short I reckon some people shoed fallout3 didn't have enough options just because they never explored well enough to find them and fallout 3 didn't clearly flag they were there to be found let me give you an example the superhuman gambit which is a great little wide-open side quest the SATA mist is a super hero and a super villain and you have to stop them in fact stopping either will do as then they'll start fighting which is actually a really interesting setup in my mind there's all the usual skill checks in alternative ways around that just about every fallout 3 quest has you can use speech and perk checks in town to gather additional information in fact you can't actually speech your way to a peaceful solution if you haven't asked around town to discover the antagonizes real name plus you can use lockpick 50 to bypass a base and then you can help her kill the mekinese to help the mechanist kill her but there's one really interesting resolution but it's only for explorers now I'd wager the vast majority of Fallout 3 players have never been to hubris comics because it's fairly well tucked away but if you do go there and you do read a particular terminal you discover a letter to the editor discussing how the antagonising used to be a more interesting character rather than the one-dimensional villain of later grog that comics and how the character should have been redeemed knowing this raises a completely unique and hidden dialogue option allowing you to ask her where she got the Adelphi costume leading into another way to talk her down but this is the crucial bit nobody ever tells you to go to hubris comics no quest marker will ever point you that nobody will ever mention her in any way imply you should go there it's just there to be found if you explore we'll come back to that point later but I want to draw your attention to something that hints at one of the biggest differences between fallout 3 and new Vegas right now how many significant new Vegas landmarks are there that you are never sent to by any quest excluding the areas we discussed earlier which have nothing unique in them or just single room shacks because I count to Guardian peak and the H&H tools Factory and that's what was clearly planned to be involved in the quest before they took it out remember that new Vegas map that was just the main plot new Vegas settlements are full of quest givers that lead to more quest givers new Vegas will slowly eventually quest marker you too or very close by to just about every location on the map keep that in mind so I think it's actually very important but let's move on to the second criticism I mentioned for the moment sufficient consequences to quest making them feel meaningless now on this one new vegas absolutely wins hands down the reputation system isn't just about consequences it's about lasting consequences shoots at rivet City in Fallout 3 and they'll shoot back but go away for a few days and when you return everyone will pretty much be fine with you new vegas made it so that annoying a faction had long-term consequences that would likely go on to expand or limit your options as time went by fallout 3 didn't have this but mostly that wasn't a big deal because most groups and towns and factions are only visited once or twice you very little reason to revisit oasis after you're done with this site while it would be a welcome nice to have thoughtfully wouldn't actually benefit much from a reputation system because it's not a bustling rebuilding world with representatives of the same few competing groups present in every settlement and I don't mean that as a criticism fallout 3 isn't trying to be a bustling rebuilding fallout it's a lonely desperate place still struggling to recover from the apocalypse even so I think there's a lot more consequences than people give fallout through credit for but just let the hubris comic solution to the superhuman gambit I think some people didn't see them and just assume they weren't there you see the reputation system makes consequences very obvious new Vegas literally pauses the game to tell you that you're now accept it or idolized or vilified by a particular faction fallout 3 meanwhile handled its consequences a bit more subtly you see fallout for his wasteland is populated overwhelmingly by drawing random events out of a deck completing quests in a particular way and an additional events that deck but because it was still a random draw you might not see it on that playthrough but they were still there and what I particularly liked about that system was it meant you've got to see the consequences of your small decisions live when even New Vegas mostly didn't do that let me give you an example in New Vegas you might choose to help the ghouls of the retcon test site escape in their rockets but there's no in-game payoff to that aside from the quest rewards Dettol consequence for the ghouls themselves is only relayed via the ending slideshow literally it is told not shown for a three meanwhile lets you stumble across so many consequences for example did you know that if you persuade the antagonize er to leave town purely because the mechanist isn't worth her time in the super human gambit there's a chance you'll stumble across her later at making random wastelanders with arounds depending on how you resolve trouble on homefront you can run into vote to us thrive you on a trading trip or stumble across a martyr being interrogated by the Enclave if you forced them out after completing varieties Rangers you can run into Donovan fighting even more mutants assuming he survived in the first place betray Sydney in stealing independence and she can hunt you down with her friend Emmeline help Big Town and you can run into a traitor who's delivering whatever it is you taught them how to use there's even consequence events for tiny things if you enslave anybody at any point in the game then you can run into a group of wastelanders hunting you down because you're a slaver and there's loads of this sort of thing in fallout 3 but rather ironically given I regularly see fallout 3 condemned as a simplified and dumbed down entry into the franchise it was organically inserted into the game so subtly that people didn't even see it and just assumed it wasn't there and I think rather tragically Bethesda are actually realized this and you can see it in the way in which the game is evolved between fallout 3 and Fallout 4 you seen fallout 3 the little grognak minigame it's buried away inside to your breast comics the area we discussed earlier just a little terminal hidden away in a dead end in a building the vast majority of players will never actually see it's just a nice little Easter egg a reward for explorers something that you might not find for years maybe not even at all maybe this is the first time you've ever heard of the damn thing it's just a fun little text adventure but after fallout 3 and possibly as a result of the feedback that they got to Fallout 3 by the time fallout 4 came around that's a very much changed fallout 4 also has a grognak minigame but it's not hidden away as a fund Elektra flares to find no no no it's put right in the memory dead in plain sight in a main plot location and the other four minigames are as well for 111 Concord Valentine's Detective Agency fault Argan they are laid right in front of you in the critical plot path to make sure you couldn't possibly miss them and I think that's a bit of a shame because fallout 3 was just at its absolute best when you went exploring and you found cool things hidden around the edge of the map still let's get back to fallout 3 and something I do really want to draw attention to because it is something that fallout 3 innovator and it did stick around into new vegas and fallout 4 and quite rightly to the raid nuts for inventing the idea of juxtaposing john sees 50s music with creeping around a rated base and some dark ruins which perfectly suited the classic fallout trend of mixing sometimes goofy humor with moments of utter darkness but for the fancy provided constant feedback letting you know what happened next and how people feel about that the maratti system in fallout 4 is far from perfect when paired with radio I think it actually works well it's nice that if you do something awful three dog calls you out on it by contrast I found mr. new Vegas rather uninteresting and I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone say they prefer into three dog and it's because mr. new Vegas fairly neutrally reports on what your actions have done to the games factions whereas three Doukas of personality and one that's perfectly happy to call you out or praise you thereby giving direct feedback to the player anyway moving on the third big complaint about fallout through storytelling and the quest structure the power of the atom problem the fallout 3 doesn't have interesting moral choices now this one I think is just plain wrong and I think fallout 3 is decentralized storytelling and lack of a reputation system actually helps with it you see New Vegas doesn't really do moral questions for the most part instead it has faction questions rather than asking you to figure out what was right new vegas asks you to pick which faction you want to benefit morality was a secondary concern with the characters karma level doing basically nothing mechanically let me give you an example in New Vegas you can decide the fate of the town of Nelson but it's never framed as a moral question nobody even considers what's best for no sir nor the people of Nelson because Nelson doesn't have any people it's just a space for the NCR and the legion to fight over choose the NCR and clear up the legion or choose the legion assassinate the NCR commanders i actually went through new vegas a--'s quests and tried to find ones that had interesting moral quandaries and i found to a tumor brute a is an interesting one as it's unclear whether allowing caesar to die is a good or a bad thing it might destabilize the legion but it might also unleash lani is to do even worse things in the short term and how that blues definitely has an interesting choice between directly and immediately being responsible for the deaths of a few versus the risks you might hurt the long-term viability of a much wider community later other than that most quests don't ask you to figure out what's right they simply asked you to pick a bed fishery but because 4r3 doesn't have ubiquitous recurring factions each quest has to be resolved on its own merits and some of them are genuinely difficult questions Oasis straight-up asks you to deal with a question of euthanasia in cases where the person is unable to take their own life but their family doesn't want to let them die and then on top of that throat in the complication that if you disregard Harold's wishes and keep him alive against his clearly stated desire to die it might present a long-term benefit to the wasteland the pit asked if it's justified to abduct a baby from loving parents and hand her over to someone who caused her pain and suffering if it might lead to the discovery of a cure to a disease slightly sooner even quest that initially looked simple have a sting in the tail trouble on the home front for example looks clear-cut at first glance and Marta wants to open up the vault and let people come and go on occasion and the overseer who murdered Jonas and is generally a dick wants to keep it locked forever now everything in Fallout history says a martyr is right she's been the sympathetic character so far the overseer is clearly framed as a slightly man villain and thematically fallouts all about moving on rebuilding the horror of the past and the hope of a better future except it's a bit of a no-win in fact the overseas terminal reveals that the enclave are actively seeking to enter the vault and if you head outside you can find one of their vertibirds literally parked around the corner by Springvale but on the other hand the more science-minded lone wanderer can inform the overseer the genetic diversity means the vault is doomed within a few generations if he does nothing so what's the right thing to do with vault 101 or take tranquility lane where you have a choice you can perform acts of cruelty to cause the residents of a simulation suffer pain and death for a mad scientist's amusement or you can figure out how to disable the simulation and stop what he does forever this seems simple at first until you pay close attention to the simulation and what ending it actually means you see even though you're torturing and even killing the residents of tranquillity Lane the simulation resets and they don't seem to remember any of it with the exception of old lady dippers activating the failsafe leads the actual real-world death of all the vault dwellers and brawn left trapped alone in a simulation you can never escape from forever so which of those actually causes the least suffering another fun one that many people miss is Tenpenny tower the second prison that Roy Phillips wants to live in the tower and Tenpenny the other students don't want ghouls there you can kill Roy he'll protect the tower by force or persuade the tower residents to allow the ghouls in after which point most residents except the ghouls actually turned out to be ok it all seems very clear the moral good proper option is the last one except if you do that and you return a few days later the humans are gone search around and you can find a pile of corpses in the basement Roy planned all along to merge the humans and take the tower for himself and his gold friends so once you know that perhaps the best option is to kill Roy in his gang for people dead to save the tens of people who live in the tower well to small issues there first you have to wipe out his whole gang which includes Bessie a shine completely oblivious Bill who absolutely has no idea about the plan and secondly the reward the only way to get the ghoul mask is to help roy either by directly helping him to storm the tower or persuading them to let him in both of which end in the towers inhabitants all dying and the gore mask is great especially if you've got broken still installed and the feral ghoul Rivas starts showing up are you willing to condemn an entire society to death for a valuable unique item given the vacatur towel go on to be a home to ghouls anyway now of course we can't discuss morality without briefly touching on the karma system and it's not a great system in particular it occasionally undermines the gray morality of the quest by effectively flagging one result is canonically good and the other has been bad though many times actually didn't Oh Asus is common neutral unless of course you've killed Harold using fire when he specifically asked you not to do so he's terrified of fire the game calls that evil and hopefully that's not too controversial [Music] there is one interesting thing about the Karma system though and it helps fallout4 avoid a trap that many great games do fall into is he giving you a Bic wa t of the main factions in new vegas map and main quest missions most players will probably pick one that they're going to be supporting early on an experienced players will very likely do a house run or a legion run it's just the same way that I might play Mass Effect 1 and choose at the beginning if I'm going to be going Paragon or renegade in both cases it's optimal to go all in in a single direction once you're back in the NCR there's basically no reason to help the Legion on any occasion when there's a choice between them getting idolized with your preferred faction as quickly as possible gets you more unique darlig options better prices in stores access to powerful arm of i safe houses all sorts of good stuff fallout 3 meanwhile managed to avoid that by making extremely high and low karma not the most powerful or useful position neutral karma is arguably the best place to be impartial mediation is the most powerful skill point boosting perk in the game and only remains active while you maintain a neutral karma meanwhile only neutral characters don't have talents all bounty hunters constantly attacking them and as soon as it's optimal to sometimes be good and sometimes be bad the need to always pick the same option just as that's the run you're doing disappears meaning you're free to evaluate each question its own morale merits in fact I honestly think New Vegas made a bit of a mistake in this regard because New Vegas contains too many optimal solutions consider Boulder City Showdown you can either help the NCR kill the Karns help the cons kill the NCR free the hostages but then immediately betray the cards or negotiate for the cards to go free and get the NCR to honor the deal which leads to everyone surviving reputation game with the NCR and reputation game with the cons so why would you ever do anything other than that it's literally a perfect resolution with no downsides in Fallout 3 even a quest as simple as power of the atom has a downside to the good resolution even if you arrange for Bert to die so we can't send hitman after you it look short of ever owning the temp and eat our sweets in fact Oliver was actually very good at balancing rewards in general head of state for example was much easier to complete if you just joined the slavers but the best reward came if you sided with the slaves the wasteland Survival Guide is incredibly easy to complete you can lie to Moya if you want to do the bare minimum work for each chapter but the perk you'll receive at the end is much better if you put in the work follow three also a great habit of letting you switch sides or play to people off against each other to get both sets of rewards in you gotta shoot him in the head your ass to kill temp any for a hundred caps tell Tampa knee he loved you 300 caps to kill the quest giver instead but a lot for a hundred of that upfront so you take the hundred kill him anyway and get the original hundra from his death from Crowley and carry on with the quest regardless in the replicated man meanwhile you can reveal the truth he escapes synth for a powerful plasma rifle or turn them into Zimmer for a powerful unique perk or you can tell the synth of truth get the rifle run straight to Zimmer give him heart whistles identity for the perk and then immediately murder him to wrap up the loose ends with the powerful plasma rifle which is pretty much how I always do it anyway let's move on which it's time to get to the perhaps controversial meds the bit that I think fallout 3 does utterly masterfully and it's right there look very very closely yeah nothing empty space the wasteland of Fallout 3 is a masterpiece and it's where many of the points I've been discussing so far all come together and it's where everything that's best in Fallout 3 works perfectly in harmony you see fallout 3 is set in the post apocalypse I know doesn't feel like that needs to be said because Ron Perelman never shuts up about it but it actually does because New Vegas isn't that's a post post apocalypse game nitrix is about rebuilding the savagery of the immediate post-war era has mostly been swept away there's plenty of water and electricity and rads are basically a non-issue in fact it's almost weird how little radiation there is in New Vegas for a game literally called fallout but fallout 3 is such an entirely different world a lonely desperate world of chaos and surviving day to day where the habit of making you feel tiny and alone and I think the entire world design is built around that core idea you see the first thing to grasp is how crucial empty space is to fallout 3 and that's a bold choice to make and one the professor didn't repeat and fallout 4 instead in Fallout 4 the map is densely packed you're always only a minute away from some clear sign of current habitation reinforced by the revised Skyrim style compass which replaced subtle tip marks with large cymbals clearly advertising what was around the corner in New Vegas too the map is densely packed and in the game in which major world powers and nation building around you you'd kind of expect things to be busy also just to get you confused yes baller through new vegas have pretty much the same map size yes new vegas has twenty more locations and yes fallout 3 is still less dense this is actually because fallout 3 has a huge concentration of locations in the DC ruins where they look very close together as the crow flies but actually are because the block top streets and the need to use the metro stations to get between them and this cluster of locations in the ruins means that the wastelands locales are actually much more spread out see fallout threes the only game in the entire franchise that truly embraces the horror and loneliness of a silent dead post-apocalyptic world now it might seem odd to hold that against fallout 1 and 2 as in those games world expression is handled via the map screen except you'll pull down to the map screen for random encounters and those encounters are overwhelmingly because your character is just running to something relevant to the current world a faction or some wildlife a caravan some Raiders in fact I went through the entire list of random events in Fallout 1 and 2 looking for those to put any focus at all on the fact that there was an apocalypse that wiped out the vast majority of the world not that long ago and that's kind of a horrific nightmare and there aren't any there's a ruin nuke struck in Fallout 1 on a cave with a vault that never got completed in Fallout 2 they kind of count I guess in fact let me give you an interesting comparison in Fallout 1 you leave the vault and you find it corpse by the vault door immediately that's at he's someone who previously left the vault which we know because he's wearing a vault 13 jumpsuit and he's there to teach you how to loot give you some ammo and indicate that the world is dangerous in Fallout 3 something very similar happens you leave the vault and there are corpses by the vault door but it's not vault dwellers who left and it's not there to give you anything instead you see the signs they're holding and you instantly know these are people who came to the vault after it closed immediately after the apocalypse and begged to be let in and they were left outside to die straight after that you leave the vault and the first thing you see isn't Megaton it's Springvale the houses are broken but there are suitcases on the doorstep you can find the vault 101 acceptance letter for officer Gomez's ancestors and that's denying access to one of their neighbors there's a silent children's playground beyond that there's a school with skeletons of children locked away with what happened not entirely clear fallout 3 is full of these moments tiny unspoken stories couples who died each other's arms suicides and if you want something truly horrific listen to the Keller family transcripts now I've heard that several times before I still find it pretty harrowing but this sort of thing makes fallout 3 work because fallout 3 is the post apocalypse fallout things are horrifying and lonely and violent and desperate and that ties so much of the game together let's stop the entire world of Fallout 3 is populated we briefly touched on this before aside from a handful of fixed spawn points and some scattered wildlife fallout through his wasteland is populated at random as you move around and trigger random events spawns throughout the world except the genius of it was that randomly spawned events had no restrictions put on them in terms of where they could go and what they could interact with now as a counterexample consider Fallout New Vegas you know exactly what is going to spawn we're beyond prim there's amps in the lake bed to the left and ghouls in the plane to the right there'll be a couple of radscorpions by the garage and a big plus to be on the radar ambush if you veer off the road there are some bark scorpions and nipped him by the caravans a Raider ambush of one Raider on the ground and thriller surrounding hills beyond nipton always the same every time and beyond that those enemies have very restricted roaming Rangers stopping them from accidentally interacting with each other in short new vegas enemy placement is highly curated and there's sort of criticism it's just a difference in direction fallout 4 went on to follow New Vegas s model have much more reliable enemy placement you can cover D know broadly what's gonna spawn where the majority of the time but not fallout 3 fallout 3 reveled in utter violent anarchy and that's just so mechanically fitting for the world in which the game is set and it leads to beautiful fresh experiences every time here's some stuff that just happened to me while I was recording footage for this video just outside for Constantine a group of brotherhood outcasts to chance directly into bear territory well on the ridge above me explosion started raining down and I have no idea what was causing them a couple of wandering bears got too close to a super mutant camp man and got dragged into a fight clearing out the entire camp forming an on-click Patrol walk straight to an ant's nest and started trying to clear the bastards out with a flamethrower and I had no idea what was going on for a minute you can even use this chaos in the wasteland to resolve quests for you take either stay where to get the best reward the game wants the slavers eliminated but let's say that you're a low-level character rather than taking them on directly what you can brilliantly do instead is tell the slavers where the slaves are hiding which is far to the north the slavers then have to travel there on foot and if you follow them around they'll run into all the same dangers as you and Su pubes will attack them on sight in fact you can actually use them to clear out of UDC Simeon camps if that's what you want to do last time I test this in fact they didn't even make it out of the DC ruins they were all shut down by the soot beams on the elevated bridge after that's done simply return to the slaves you have no idea you betrayed them or pretended to because why would they and you've got yourself an easy quest completion I also think this is easily the best rendering of classic fallouts wasteland in 3d possible you see fallout 1 and 2 drew random events from a deck as well so you had no idea what was coming except in those games every encounter is self-contained so you can still see all of them fallout 3 embrace the idea of random encounters but made it truly random so that every random encounter can mess with every other random encounter and as a result of that I've been playing this game for nearly a decade and I'm still seeing new interactions every time I play so with all of that the stage is set for violent anarchic survivor in the post apocalypse so let's talk about how player mechanics are perfectly suited to support that as well because I think at some level fallout 3 is a survival game not in the sense that we've come to most frequently used the term today that sort of thing with hunger thirst tiredness disease and so on was very well done by fallout 4 survival mode but just noting a few extra bars that need to be topped up or drained isn't the only or if you're necessarily the best way to create a survival experience from proof of that look to new vegas because while we generally don't like saying this out loud new vegas as hardcore mode isn't actually that great and that's because it doesn't make the game harder or more interesting just adds additional faff and slows the adventure down tis not like there's a shortage of food or water or beds they're everywhere and that makes fulfilling those needs just busywork put simply if a game is a bill with the idea of a survival mode in some capacity from the beginning as fallout 4 clearly was tacky an arbitrary need to eat and drink into it isn't going to work for non 3 however does something I think is a lot more clever it creates the atmosphere of a survival game being short of resources being vulnerable through some very clever game design choices now that's been massive nerds for a second and discuss damage calculations you see back in the old days of fallout every armor possessed a few different stats but the most interesting one is a stack called damage threshold this was basically a representation of how tough the armor was and what it could stop and thus when you were hit by an attack the attacks damage had the damage threshold of the armor deducted from it with no restrictions on that deduction whatsoever as a result it was entirely possible you can be shot repeatedly and takes zero damage if you aren't strong enough armor now for the most part I like that idea it rewards players who diligently acquire new better armor and it provided a great incentive to get hold of money because in the early game the fastest way to get a lot of good armor is just to buy it and it can be very expensive indeed if there was a problem however it was that they might have been a bit too generous to the diligent player Brotherhood power armors pretty much the best armor in the game with a pile of damage threshold and huge damage reduction for all types of damage on top of that and once that's up for grabs for free in the brotherhood bunker if you can complete the very simple fix the armor quest once you have that traveling the wasteland poses almost no risk to you aside from a handful of tough endgame enemies the Raiders and creatures of the world and now just minor inconveniences and I suspect them at least some of the Fallout devs agree with that assessment because when they went on to make new vegas damage thresholds returned but it was a bit less generous now it couldn't reduce damage below 20% of whatever the original attacks damage was the days of zero damage were gone but return it did and that led to the same scenario in new Vegas if you got hold of some very high damage threshold armor you were basically Ironman bullets just bounced off you and sometimes that works really well it's fun but it's also rather incompatible with feeling vulnerable afraid tense and that's where fallout you see fallout 3 utilize the damage resistance system simply to ARMA how to damage resistance or dr value and that was the percentage that was reduced off incoming damage let's just do some basic maths to see what that means let's say that in each Fallout game you're wearing basic early game leather armor and you get bitten by a basic dog in classic fall out the dogs bite has a base damage of 5 but the leather armor has a damage threshold of two reducing the damage to three but the armor also comes with a 25% damage resistance for normal attacks reducing it further to 2.25 in total basic early game armor deflects 55 percent of a basic early game attack in new Vegas the dog bites gone up to 12 damage but the leather armors improved as well to 6 damage threshold no damage resistance is applied so the end damage is 6 50% of the attack has been reflected in fallout 3 the dogs bite is still 12 and the leather armor meanwhile has 24 damage resistance so the dogs damage falls to 9 with 24% reduced put simply fallout threes damage calculation was brutal especially in the early game when you'd be choosing between low condition armors of around 12 damage resistance at best but that had two brilliant consequences you see a subtle problem with the damage threshold system is it makes the armors damage threshold number ludicrously important let's say some Raider is about to fire a 9-millimeter submachine gun at you in New Vegas it's gonna do 14 damage per bullet and that's 30 bullets in the clip if you have damage threshold 6 armor on you're taking 8 damage per bullet 240 from the whole clip but if you are wearing damage threshold 11 armor you're taking 3 damage per bullet 90 from the entire clip a huge reduction this means that in Fallout New Vegas you absolutely 100% always wants to immediately where the highest damage threshold armor you could find because a single point of damage threshold made a huge difference let's do the same thing in fallout 3 where damage resistance 6 you take 395 damage total with damage resistance 11 you take 374 at that point damage resistance is not necessarily the absolute priority and that opens the door to making tactical choices about armor you see fallout 3 introduces loads of our math have interesting stat changes attached to it you can sacrifice a bit of damage resistance for more agility more sneak more it's more perception big guns explosives luck and I think that made armor a lot more interesting sorry that was a bit of a digression let's get back to fall out through his atmosphere naturally this damage resistance system suits the grim post-apocalypse perfectly it's in fallout 3 early and mitigate you are vulnerable and you can go down pretty quickly as anyone who's ever accidentally run into an early game super mutant freak with a minigun knows all too well this also works alongside fallout threw his combat mechanics which I think don't deserve old criticism they get yes combat is slightly clunky in Fallout 3 and that's good because fallout 3 is into shooter it's an action RPG and because your character isn't a soldier they're a teenager from a sheltered environment whose only experience of gun plays their BB rifle sure you can take manual shots and sniper shots and small engagements I'm a well often handle manually but the slight clunkiness means that fats has a purpose because of that to use good results and that means that action point management perception and a whole bunch of perks are worth taking to improve that plus it's been 10 years and that skills in fallout 3 still haven't got old for me they're also an gory and ludicrously over-the-top and the perfect 3d reworking of Fallout ones also ludicrously violent over-the-top death animations unquestionably though New Vegas got the balance slightly better adding annoying sight aiming but maintaining some of Fallout 3 select clunkiness so that's remains an attractive option but fallout 4 I think shows the risks of what happens if you make shooting too polished in a Fallout game you see I've played a lot of Fallout 4 and a comment that I've seen pop up a lot which has never shown out what I make videos about fallout 3 or new Vegas is why do you use that so much and that worries me because so many people asking that question means a lot of people have got so used to playing Fallout 4 as a straight first-person shooter that they don't seem to know how many of the games mechanics work anymore because they've never had any reason to learn them simply a high luck frequent critical build is one of the most ludicrously powerful builds in fallout 4 the amount of damage each crit does and how many you can constantly be using and building is ridiculous fallout 4 genuinely had some really interesting new perks like penetrator gun foo and critical banker which created some really cool character builds especially with the lower number of special starting points the into tough compromises but plenty of players seem to be totally oblivious to that and just pledged sin FPS which is fine really play the game as you like it's just a shame fallout 4 crates of scenario where people could get by without ever learning the more intricate game mechanics when traditionally fallout rewarded you for understanding how things worked this is a matter of personal opinion of course it's definitely not fundamentally dudes that fallout 3 has clunky gunplay but it does make sense if you think that fallout should be at least in part an RPG because our characters shouldn't be a crack shot straight out to the vault just because the player might be for me I like the fallout 3 starts you off with flimsy armor and inexperienced with guns because in an RPG that's what a low-level character should be like and that flimsiness and vulnerability can help make the wastelands atmosphere of violent Anarchy work by adding weight to random events you see I was running to vote 112 from vault 101 to record some footage and some Raiders fired on me and you know what happened next a random Patrol of Talon company merged attacked the Raiders and murdered them and then left me alone because I was still neutral karma that's just beautiful and that sort of procedurally generated anarchy makes fallout 4 is wasteland the best one in the franchise sometimes you'll run into a deathclaw just outside Megaton sometimes creatures will clear out mutant encampments for you sometimes you'll just be destroyed in the early game because the wayside is supposed to be a cruel and inhospitable place Ron Perlman uses that exact phrase but let's get back to how form after is a survival game you see damage resistance works both ways that's how damage your foots on the enemy is calculated too and that means that in fallout 3 rapid-fire weapons are amazing sure you wanted a rifle for sniping because the damage multiplier of sneak attack suits the high damage shot but once it was an open fight you've wanted the highest dps and that was the automatics that meant that in Fallout 3 we burnt through ammo like crazy even I found myself a bit shy however when I was recording this footage to give you an example in the early to mid game the Chinese assault rifle is a ludicrous death beast if you can keep it loaded and keeping it loaded is a real challenge you see all the enemies in Fallout 4 tend to be a bit on the tanky side suit boobs and mile Oaks are obvious and common examples and because plenty of mutants and all my loads either don't use guns or stick with basic hunting rifles killing them often uses a lot it but doesn't get you many back in short progress was a constant drain on ammunition and money started to come by than in New Vegas or Fallout 1 as scavenged guns have vertical value and shops are both infrequent and generally aren't that well stocked with ammo anyway all of that worked together beautifully to make fallout 3 feel like a survival game you may not have a thirst meter but the ticket down on the bullet count works just as well but there's one more genius twist in Fallout 3 and that's how the game quietly turned you into an explorer and let's provide you with a reason to explore its wasteland magnum opus now we mentioned previously how New Vegas is a curated experience in terms of its enemy placement and that's still true we also launched a couple of maps earlier and perhaps looking at them again you might realize another way that New Vegas is a very curated experience it's the robes New Vegas loves robes I don't care what your father says let's run away together in literally the first town people are giving you instructions based on the assumption you'll be following robes Sunday even specifically says you should stay on the roads to be safe and the quest markers agree the road out of good Springs perfectly syncs up whether they went thattaway quest marker and then you can walk pretty much all the way to Benny without ever leaving the tarmac if you wish stay on the road nice and Blenheim is a few Raiders the road is king and if you have a new quest there will absolutely be a road that leads there which will be the safest way to get there but in Fallout 3 what for example is the optimal way to get to vote 112 and Smith cases garage how does the game want you to get there because the road near vote one I want to go that way it veers north and the largest road south is a raised freeway you can't access the simple fact is fallout 3 doesn't have a route it wants you to follow for our three reason to think like that fallout 3 is just an open space in fact trying to follow roads in Fallout 3 is a terrible idea then no safer than the waste all the same random events are being drawn in fact they're probably slightly more dangerous as the old fixed military checkpoints can be manned by all sorts of nasty robots and the Enclave often set up shop on roads turn now that like an obvious roads in Fallout 3 means you'll often just head off into the wasteland as the crow flies and here's where everything I've been discussing starts working together I've discussed earlier how fallout 3 has a lot more empty space the new Vegas and all of these factors are a recipe for a sensation of exploration in I can show you this live I was literally just heading west to record some footage and I saw this big radio transmitter thing and I couldn't remember what it was so I went to go and have a look at it keep in mind I chose the route that I'm on no road middle of nowhere and now I'm diverting to go and have a look at something to me that feels like exploring and that's where the empty space comes in if everything's so densely packed together these just accidentally wander into location after location you're not exploring you're not discovering you're just encountering but fallout 3 was big and empty enough that if you wanted to you could 100% walk quite significant distance across it without hitting any names location but of course you'll see things a church over there a power plants on top of that hill the radio mast I just showed you and because there's enough space then you don't have to go to them going to them becomes a choice it's something you've opted into and that means you're actively exploring I mentioned rewards in fallout 3 earlier as well and that fits into this too exploring in Fallout 3 works because you can be certain that there'll be something worth looting there between bobble heads weapon schematics unique weapon variants hundreds of skill box but there's one other thing I've already discussed that comes back in here as well and that's quests and locations because as we saw on the map earlier thorn out threes main quest uses a relatively small proportion of the map and some of its most fun areas from and outer oases are reserved exclusively for explorers and that's wonderful you know what listen gentlemen I could go on I could I could talk about every individual quest in detail but instead I'm gonna hope that I've set enough to persuade you that maybe some of the narrative about fallout 3 and it's terrible utter betrayal of fallout isn't fair then in some ways fallout 3 is actually a great success as a sequel to the classic fallout that it's a very different but very worthy companion to new vegas and maybe even that in some ways in some of the experiments it did with the mechanics it mixed together it created one of the most interesting representations of the wasteland in the entire Fallout franchise but perhaps best of all and might inspire you to replay fallout 3 and give it another chance with fresh eyes because I think it deserves it but that's all for now I'm gonna leave things off here but do if you happen to be do hang up I do a lot of Fallout to this day hopefully you'll join me for some of that but in the meantime up in John spend many a true nerd and fallout 3 it's better than you think thank you very much and goodbye app we've got a gate key here I've made a mistake I've made a mistake I've made a mistake I've made a mistake this is gonna take all of my skill and cunning as a hunter sort of do are you moving faster die die go go away go away nobody likes you that was a good idea till it wasn't

Channel: Many A True Nerd

Views: 6,447,665

Rating: 4.5525942 out of 5

Keywords: Fallout 3, Fallout 3 game, Fallout 3 gameplay, let's play Fallout 3, Fallout 3 walkthrough, Fallout 3 playthrough, Fallout 3 part 1, Fallout 3 discussion, Fallout 3 good, Fallout 3 review

Id: 5z8XHe2NoAE

Length: 114min 44sec (6884 seconds)

Published: Sun May 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Malaix]

The only thing I really disliked about fallout 3 was the main quest and mainly how it both failed to grasp you or get you attached to the player characters plight while creating a narrative break. I didn’t care about the father or finding him. In fact I thought he was kind of an ass. Yet you had the nagging “I HAVE TO FIND DAD” narrative in he background of a rpg that begs you to explore it. And for some reason they repeated the same issue in fallout 4 (which had a slew of other issues) I really don’t understand why Bethesda thinks this story narrative is compelling since it really limits the players character development and customization while not telling a very interesting story anyway.

[u/camycamera]

He does bring up some interesting points... I haven't watched the entire video yet (44 minutes in) but I think he kinda misses the point on some of the criticisms though. People wanted to kill the children in Lamplight because they honestly should absolutely not be there. Their entire concept makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that are entirely obvious, not to mention they are right next to both a raider camp and the home base of the super mutants yet apparently they're fine? They just should not be a roadblock to the main quest like that. It's just terrible.

Also, the point about the super mutants... He brings up actually very interesting points about their backstory that I've never heard of before and the mirroring to them on their own "find the water chip" quest is an interesting one. But the fact is that is never brought up in the main story, or dealt with in any interesting way. This was gathered from observations from notes from terminals and noting where certain super mutants are (the vault tech museum was a nice touch) ... However, aside from Fawkes (and Leo, which, let's be honest, most players won't ever encounter and he doesn't have anything to say anyway), your interaction with this "society" is just blowing them all away and that's it. They always attack you first, because they're another enemy type Bethesda thought up to throw at you. They're such a missed oppertunity^TM to create something truly interesting. Their storyline is never resolved either, the BoS are just there to kill them in DC because they're "looking for something", but then that entire plotline is completely forgotten once the dumb Enclave come around. He only made comparisons to Fallout 1 (which had far more non-hostile SMs than Fo3, to the point where dumb SMs can be outsmarted), but doesn't mention the transition for SM in Fallout 2 as a non-hostile faction in Broken Hills that just wants to be left alone (and New Vegas continues this interesting concept).

Sure you can form a tragic backstory from some background information, but the fact is all player's interactions with SMs in Fo3 are hearing them scream "no more games, TIME TO DIE!" and then run at you with a shotgun before you blow their brains out. Or blow up a ridiculously large SM with a stupidly large fire hydrant that came out of nowhere.

He also does bring up interesting points regarding the quests not being very linear as people think, but the problem is the way it handles skills is horrible (I'm sure he'll bring it up later in the video edit: he didn’t), due to speech being a percentaged-based dice roll, and things like [intellegence] and [science] checks being entirely... pointless and really dumb? He also brings up the point of the intro being wrongly criticized because it offers lots of options, and while that's true, it doesn't take away from the fact that it's overly long and honestly just a boring drag that makes repeat-playthroughs worse. I get the idea that the point was to have it feel claustrophobic and so once you get out of the vault it's freeing, but... I don't think they should've done that in this sort of game, IDK. Plus, they used that time to develop Dad as a character, but completely failed. Dad is as one-dimensional of a boring character as it gets.

I could probably go on about how his point regarding "what do they eat" being "mole rats to hunt and eat and the irradiated water" is a bit dumb, considering what the shandification video was referring to was things like growing crops, and that the entire concept of project purity is poorly reinforced because aside from the copy-pasted beggers outside of Megaton and Rivet City (why don't that walk inside?!), nobody actually seems to have any trouble with water (and to purify the water, it shouldn't need a purifier that emmits loads of radiation for absolutely no reason). There aren't any quests or dialogue in Megaton or Rivet City where people are saying "we've all been dying because all we've had to drink is irradiated water!" (again, aside from the dumb beggers which are disconnected from everything else in existence), the closest we get to that is "fix our water pipes" in Megaton.

I think the main problem people have with Fallout 3 is less the whole "it's not a great Fallout RPG" (although like I said, the way it handled skill checks was dumb) and more "it's just dumb when it comes to Fallout", at least from my perspective. I think this article, that goes through the entire main quest of Fallout 3, highlights this best. It talks about lack of reinforcing themes, terrible character and plot issues (the entire conflict ends with who gets to push a button first...), lack of motivations for certain factions, stupid decisions.... If you don't want to read all of it then just skip to part 5. I promise, it doesn't devolve into a "New Vegas is better!" thing either.

I still liked Fallout 3, btw. It was my first Fallout game. I had fun shooting stuff, had fun modding, it was also arguably my first real open world and rpg experience. But I just despised all of the story content in 3, especially when playing New Vegas, 1 and 2 afterward. It just felt like a waste of potential and one big bad fan-fiction story.

Edit: Watched the entire video. He brings up some interesting points, and throughout there are things I disagree with, but I'm obviously not going to go through one-by-one because this is already too long. He brings up stuff like how NV's map led you around to all the locations, and that all the locations on the map are tied to quests, and that Fo3 didn't, and therefore Fo3's better at exploration, but I disagree. That's just obviously different design decisions, and I vastly prefer NV's IMO. It gave every location a sense of purpose. He also brushed over the whole "writing/story is bad" criticism of Fo3 by showing some funny good lines from Fo3... and of course, my counter-argument is above in that article.

But anyway, overall, it's a good, interesting video that shows off an alternative viewpoint for once. Some of his points have some holes in it that I countered above a bit, but he still makes some good points in favour of 3.

[u/willempage]

I totally agree with his final point about how the emptiness of the wasteland allows for much greater exploration and giving you a feeling of accomplishment for going out of your way to find a point of interest that catches your eye far in the distance. This is the same exact reason that I love Breath of the Wild and wish that more open world games would ditch the dense minimaps and give their world a bit more room to breathe. Yeah, sometimes scaling a hill or cliff in BoW or running to a distant shack in FO3 yields a mediocre reward, but the gamble and payoff of finding a shrine, unique weapon, cool area, etc. makes exploring those games so much more exciting.

[u/Vladie]

Loved exploring the Washington wasteland with the awesome radio, good memories. But I was never an original Fallout fan so I do think the criticisms of it are valid.

[u/TopinasCorp]

I'm not fan of Fallout 3 myself. Finished it once, it's defi not terrible it's just I really don't plan on playing it again. I tried to once heavily modded even but nah.

Hearing all this does not change how I felt about the game ofc but at least I understand why so many people enjoyed it more than I did.

Really that is main reason why I love these long video essays. To learn why people disliked games that I liked or liked games that I disliked.

Since I personally don't divide games as good or bad but simply as games that I like and games that I don't.

It makes discussing games with others much more peaceful :D sure lot of people have different stance, seeing their opinion as absolute but no matter what anyone says I always see it only as opinion. Well and I like hearing different opinions! Lengthier the better.

[u/LAWSON72]

Since TES is so far away, I need a NV equivalent, FO4 just dropped the ball. I am actually replaying it now and even though it is not a bad game it just does not compare to older BGS games. They put way to many resources into settlements and no matter how robust they tried to make it, it will never compare to actual dev created content. FO3 was packed to the brim with original quests and cool locations, same goes for NV.

I will take anything following the game design formula of BGS games.

[u/SirDerplord]

Fallout 3 is only just behind New Vegas as my favorite Fallout title. Lot of great characters and quests from when Bethesda still cared about interesting objectives. Moira Browns quests, the simulation, and Andale really nailed it for me.

[u/D-Rez]

I liked exploring F3 more than FNV, which this video touches upon. But my biggest issue was that Bethesda clearly didn't think much of the lore in the previous Fallout games. At times I felt they probably should just have created their own setting from scratch.

[u/NathVanDodoEgg]

I hate all these video essay titles. "Fallout 3 is garbage", "Fallout 3 is Better Than You Think", "Bethesda's design is insulting". Can't they just do the Matthewmatosis, SuperBunnyhop or Raycevick ways where they just have a title saying what the video is rather than a jumping "THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD THINK, ANY OPPOSING VIDEOS ARE WRONG!".