The conflict of Fallout 3, if one chooses to acknowledge it, lies in the ‘vault dwellers’ separation from his father. The main quest is largely spent catching up with dad, helping dad, rescuing dad, and so on. But you don’t have to do any of that if you don’t want to. I repeat- the main quest of this game is completely optional. Once a player discovers just how free the game play is, it creates this great lightness that anything can be done. This is the root of the playful attitude found in the game.
The problem-solving lies mostly in where you want to allocate your time, what you want to explore, and who you want to help. One of the more immediate problems discovered in the game is the existence of a live nuclear bomb in the bottom of the aptly named city of Megaton. There are two competing wills that shape your experience with said thermonuclear device. A sketchy businessman offers great rewards for rigging the device for detonation (and later detonating), but a genuine sheriff offers a meager reward for its disarming. The third option is to do nothing. The scenario is much more complicated that I just let on, and in that complication – if approached with the proper playful attitude – awaits great fun.
Conflict abounds in the Capital Wasteland. Starting from the most macro of conflicts, you have ‘interracial conflict’ between Ghouls, Humans, and Super Mutants. Next you have factions of humans, primarily the Enclave and The Brotherhood of Steel, with separate dogmas and objectives. Then towards the mico end of the scale, you have mercenary companies that launch sorties to kill the player. All of this occurs while the natural environment is also trying to kill you with radiation and mutated animal life.
Thankfully the complex politics of the Capital Wasteland don’t confuse what it means to win or lose. To win is to play the game without losing, and to lose is to die. By frequent saving, the impact of losing can be made completely negligible.
The formalities of Fallout 3 lie in a lot of metrics. One of the more lauded aspects of the game is its use of a karma system that affects how people perceive and react to your character. While you never actually know your definite karma score (say -26, for example), you are able to know if you are very evil, evil, neutral, good, or very good.
A player’s skills and perks are also make up a very formal system. After every level up, a player allocates a number of skill points towards activities such as breaking locks, hacking computers, use of energy weapons, ect. A player will not have the capacity to be a master of all skills in Fallout.
Having such formality with the player’s character is interesting in contrast to the sheer amount of unknown found elsewhere in the game. It creates the effect of ‘knowing thyself’ and trusting in your abilities. I often took solace in knowing my character’s limitations in the presence of certain challenges.
The experience one earns out of Fallout 3 is largely up to the player. Decisions abound from the game’s start - decisions that often have very serious consequences. The breadth of choices available really serves the game’s intended realism greatly. What game factor does more to increase realism than consequence?
Fallout 3’s sandbox style of play is much more than having three different dialog choices that lead to the same ending sequence. If somebody says something that doesn’t quite jive with the ‘lone wanderer’ that you’ve created, you have a wide array of options to erase that character from the game. If somebody dies, they die for good. Not to worry though, any valuables carried by the person can be looted off their corpse, no questions asked.
The one thing that truly enables the experience Fallout 3 generated (at least for me) is the setting. If you were to take Fallout 3, and create a complete fabrication for its setting, it would lose an incredible amount of substance and weight. The first steps out of the vault will be forever engrained in my mind as one of the most genuine gaming experiences I’ve had.
To me, the surprise of Fallout 3 lies in exploring the unknown. Simply put, you never know what you will find. The starkest example is that of Andale, a seemingly odd relic of America’s suburban heritage. The citizens brag about Andale being the best town in all of Virginia. Truth is the town is full of cannibals with two full blown (human) meat lockers. Such dark humor becomes expected, but you just never know where it will come from.
Fallout 3 can be so immersive you don’t really realize you are having fun until you power down. Much of the game can border on becoming a chore due to the size and 'I have to survive' aspects of the game. I distinctly remember refusing to do a quest because at the time I had no desire to go back into a subway system.
You can also become addicted to an impressive array of vices. If that isn’t fun, I don’t know what is!
Curiosity is a vital component to the Fallout experience because of the importance placed on ‘scaving’. Scaving is essentially digging through ruble and ruins looking for food/health/ammo/caps. Whenever you see a desk, you think there could be caps in it! Whenever you see a locker, ammo! Whenever you kill a hostile, weapons! See a fridge? Beer!
Value in Fallout 3 is all determined by the player rather than the game. For instance, an energy weapon specialist would place little value in lugging around every hunting rifle he found, but a small guns specialist would be giddy to have a high condition rifle. Same goes for explosives and medicine.
You can become addicted to drugs or alcohol, obviously in those situations you’ll do just about anything to get your hands on some jet or buffout.
Almost every location you find has some story to it that will result in at least one problem that can be resolved, and off the top of my head there are somewhere near 150 named locations. While the game requires very few to be solved, most are rewarding enough to generate some excitement.
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