>>308260
I finished Fallout 3 on my Xbox 360, meaning no mods, only official DLC and all played on outdated software.
I posted a lot of my musings in the Friday Night Thread
>>310720
>>310752
>>311337
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/fsaOl
archive.today doesn't work for me for whatever reason, if anyone has it working for them and could archive the thread that would be great, as most images are missing from the link above.
Fallout 3 could be compared to comfort food, if I were a nigger that used food metaphors to talk about video games, it tastes good but has little in the way of nutrition. Much like most Bethesda games, it is a really dumbed down RPG and really easy, however it has some good world exploration and decent game mechanics that I feel aren't ever elaborated on to the extent I would want to see. I talked about Fallout 3 as if it was a beta build or a tech demo for what would become the 3D Fallout formula, and I still stand by that, this made the game an interesting experience but also really rough at parts. Thankfully, by the end of the day, this still felt very similar to my recent playthrus, with it's own little quirks.
Combat was interesting, for example, since there was no armor, the game replaced the DT system with DR which means that everyone might as well wear cardboard and will definitely take some damage. This, along with any armor weight MASSIVELY impacting your running speed, means it's actually better to wear light armor or clothing with good stat bonuses over any kind of armor, even Power Armor. I initially wore the Vault 101 Riot Armor which weighted 15 pounds, I switched over to Merc Grunt Outfit with the same armor rating but half the weight and I moved noticeably faster. This meant that Enclave Soldiers were only slightly tougher than raiders and Brotherhood soldiers were laughably weak, in one instance they were killed by the raiders in Arlington Library(note that this has happened in many of my playthrus). I only used melee and grenades, like in other playthrus, and I must say, the biggest flaw of Fallout 3's combat, in that it is a very shitty third person shooter, is eliminated if you don't play it like a shooter at all. While janky, the combat was definitely more interesting when played with unarmed/melee and grenades, it led to battles being a bit more tactical in nature. I did craft and use a Dart Gun later on, which proved very useful, but I see that less as a weapon and more as a tool, likewise with Compliance Regulator in New Vegas. While it did some damage, most of it was done over time and it's main function is crippling otherwise deadly opponents like Deathclaws. Moreover, it is a crossbow so it is not only one shot only, it takes a long time to load and has actual travel time to consider, I did use it as a ranged weapon at times but it was subpar compared to close quarter combat or grenades. This weapon is heavily nerfed in TTW to remove it's poison effect(each dart has to have it applied individually from your own stock of poisons) so I enjoyed abusing it in Fallout 3 as much as possible, while I could. While "armor" I used for the entire playthru was just a t-shirt I found right outside Vault 101, my melee weapons of choice all came from DLCs, namely the Electro Suppressor which knocks targets onto the ground with a critical hit(beta version of the Cattle Prod in Fallout New Vegas with proper fatigue system in place), Shock Baton which deals heavy damage as well as damage over time(similar to the Shishkebab in the base game) and Steel Knuckles, which deal the same kind of damage as the Shock Baton but instead of the shock effect it has less AP, meaning I can spam it more in VATS. I used unarmed for about the first half of the game and switched over to melee when I got the electric prods from Mothership Zeta, grenades on the other hand were mostly the vanilla stock: Frags are nearly endless thanks to being one of the rewards from handing over common crap to the Outcasts and meant I could use them with reckless abandon, Plasma Grenades were very rare and I wish the game stocked more of them, ditto with Pulse Grenades but they were very situational(will play a larger role in TTW where Enclave have proper end game armor and can only be hurt with powerful weapons or EMP) and Nuka Grenades were the uber throwables that did heavy damage even to end game opponents, only limited by the rarity of Nuka Cola Quantums(I got a perk which turned normal Nuka Colas into Quantums to get a few more grenades, likewise since I had two sets of schematics I got two grenades per batch of ingredients). Sadly, there were no proper thrown weapons like spears, since those were cut, so it was grenade central for me, not like the thrown weapons would do much since most enemies are bullet sponges anyways. Companions are pretty much useless in this game, not only are they very glitchy but they are either very weak(most humanoid companions) or extremely broken thanks to the Broken Steel expansion(Dogmeat, RL3, Fawkes). This meant I had to do most of the fighting myself and the companions largely acted as bait or distractions, one notable difference would be Cross when I gave her the Alien Blaster from the Mothership Zeta DLC, she one-two shot almost every enemy in the game with that thing and only took a few more rounds for the notoriously broken Broken Steel opponents like Overlords/Reavers/Albino Radscorpions. Once she ran out of ammo for it, even with a relatively powerful plasma weapon she was much less effective. Overall, I enjoyed the combat portion of the game, but there was way too much of it. Fallout Tactics this ain't, and the game lacks a lot of the freedom of options in encounters that proper Fallout games have, thanks to Bethesda's very special outlook on what an RPG is supposed to be. This meant it was hard to be a diplomat with a dedicated diplomat build and most of the time, I was either sneaking past enemies or bonking them with a stick, not something I was FORCED to do in any of my previous walkthrus, even Tactics which has unavoidable encounters let me specialize into non-offensive skills and with both it, Fallout 2 and New California I had a proper team of companions to deal with combat encounters, Leadership builds are impossible in this game.
Speaking of being a diplomat, this was the first playthru where I just straight up failed at doing so. One of my Friday Night Thread posts explains it with a video, essentially there is a rather complex formula that calculates your chance of success and not just based on your skill but also your karma, disposition(how a character feels about you, they like you if you do quests for them and hate you if you shit talk them ect.), but also Charisma. In fact, I think Charisma might play a larger role than Speech does, since even at 100 Speech and very good karma I had 40% chance to pass some of the late game checks in Broken Steel DLC. Let that sink in, it was nearly impossible to pass the rare speech checks as a dedicated diplomat character even at maxed out Speech skill, and mind you I actually had an EASIER time doing so in previous playthrus with maxed out Charisma(I had 6 in this one) but with lower Speech. I wish Charisma raising items were more common, my character didn't drink booze and I only got access to Grape Mentats that raise the attribute late into the game. I would have to run some experiments to see if I could pass these checks easier if I took some of them beforehand or if I changed my karma(it's inconsistent, but you usually want a good karma over being evil). Regardless, this meant that I was failing speech checks left and right, which meant I usually had to pay more or get into fights to resolve problems. Speech checks are already rather rare so this was something of a sore spot in this playthru, if someone like me that did my research and tested this character build in several other games already can't get consistent results how is a normalfag who can barely understand the SPECIAL system supposed to do? No wonder most people play Bethesda's games as mindless looter shooters. There was a point in the game where I reached 100% on most checks, but then Broken Steel post game entered the picture and I was stuck permanently at 40% without really knowing how to improve these chances, I certainly couldn't raise my Speech skill since I have long maxed it out specifically to avoid these situations. Still, this didn't ruin the experience, I was actually more offended at the bad writing and worldbuilding than anything. I don't think I need to explain this in detail, everyone here should be familiar with the rather "special" writing Bethesda games had post Morrowind, and Fallout 3 is no different. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't just done playing Fallout 2 and New Vegas, even something like New California and London, which were fan made modifications, were better in this department, and I really should stress out that aside from having actual skills in the game, London pretty much does everything better as far being a cartoony third world looting theme park simulator set in a major city goes.
As far as my character goes, I described a good bit about him in the Friday Night posts. He started out as a fish out of water type character, but as he grew in levels and experience, he got corrupted by the wasteland, becoming a slaver and generally siding with evil characters or taking bad choices in quests. The cattle prod like baton being his main weapon of choice was really fitting, I could imagine him telling human characters to "get into the meat pen" as he shocked the life and will to fight out of them towards the end of the game. At one point, when I got more money than I could ever spend(more on that later) I just started enslaving people for fun, mostly women and in "civilized" settlements like Rivet City or Tenpenny Tower, to spread slaver influence and show nobody was safe from the collar. He even started thinking about how good a slave collar would look on some of the more bitchy female characters, overall I liked him but being stuck as a snotty 19 year old straight out of the vault did limit my roleplaying options, something that Fallout 4 is going to double down on later. I think New California did this better, you are also a teenager in that game(for the New California portion, anyways) but you actually had time to build your own backstory in Vault 18 tutorial for an hour or two before getting out into the wasteland and, more importantly, you had a whole cast of characters that followed you out and stuck with you for the duration of the DLC, not to mention many recurring characters from the vault like Rossman, where as nobody from the Vault 101 tutorial in Fallout 3 ever matters again outside your dad, with the exception of one quest where you get to go back to Vault 101. Surprisingly, this was the first 3D Fallout game with this archetype that I WAS NOT a cannibal in, altho this was mostly due to health items being so common I never really needed them like I did in London or New California. Not that it mattered, Human Flesh is a generic food drop in the game so my character still ate people without knowing it anyways.
I mentioned I had more money than I could ever spend, about 37k by the end. Fallout 3 is very interesting, in a sense that rather than being set in a civilized setting like Fallout 2 or New Vegas, you play in essentially a post nuclear American equivalent of Africa: there is no industry, there is no economy, there is nothing to even really buy from shops if you don't use guns like me, you have a few pitiful merchants here or there but they don't really do anything, the "money sink" of the game is spending about 5k on upgrading the roaming caravan merchants so they can repair your gear better and that's about it. Outside of the early game, money doesn't matter and neither do resources, stimpacks are everywhere and even tho you will use more of them than in any other Fallout game due to them also doubling down as your Doctor's Bags, I still had over 500 left by the end of the game. Chems aren't much better, I had over a hundred or nearly a hundred of every major chem(Psycho/Jet/Med-X/Mentats ect). I should point out that this was with my character never really having more than maybe 1/3rd damage reduction at best of times, due to perks more than his crappy dirty t-shirt he called "armor", so I definitely took a ton of damage and still had all these resources on hand by the end. Scarcity just wasn't a thing in this game, outside of me running out of darts or grenades every so often. The chems are also weightless so I can carry a ridiculous amount of them all at once, something I fixed in my build of TTW. This means that your carryweight is instead spend on carrying duplicates of weapon and armor so you can repair them, an interesting concept...except it didn't work for me, since my Grunt outfit is bugged and I couldn't repair it with any other item, not even other Grunt outfits. Whoops! I also never really needed to carry duplicates of weapons outside the very early game where I had to use trash like lead pipes/police batons ect. so most of my fixing was done by merchants(that includes the Point Lookout merchant that is bugged and has 100% repair skill), I didn't even use the alien repair kits from Mothership Zeta since I was never in a situation where I needed to, I would switch from Electro Suppressor to Shock Baton when one or the other was in poor condition and Steel Knuckles if both of them somehow were damaged. The only other use for carrying capacity is junk items(which I turned directly into grenades at Fort Independence) and food items, which are fucking useless. Even with a Food Sanitizer which you get early on that increases effectiveness of food items, they are just not useful enough, the most common ones give +6HP and best ones give 24-36HP, why bother weighting myself down with dozens of them if my 500 stimpacks that heal on average 60hp will do? Even the radiation reducing ones like Cave Fungus or Punga Fruit were useless as Rad-X and Rad-Away were just as plentiful(and weightless) as other meds and chems, hell if you own a Megaton/Tenpenny home like I did, they are even more useless since you get a free rad purge right at home. About the only problem I had were addictions, which are not curable outside of doctors, there is no Fixer or Addictol like item in this game. This would be an issue, except that the player housing also gives you free chem cures as well. Overall, this is a very interesting weight and item economy, but I am not sure it worked. It needed some serious rebalancing, and what New Vegas did I think worked far better.
One last thing I want to mention is stealth: since the game throws so many enemies at you in a map that is genuinely unpredictable(unlike New Vegas), you have to be prepared for everything at all times. This meant I heavily invested in my sneaking skill and got as much Stealth Boys as possible. With how many main and side quests expect you to fight(to the point where many of them are broken and just have enemies standing in place waiting to be shot if you go invisible, devs never expected that you would want to avoid them), I had to think of a way to get past these encounters without a fight to salvage this failed diplomat run. First of all, stealth with companions is impossible, they are followers in a very literal sense, as in they are just random NPCs that follow you around rather than having their own systems like companions in 2 or New Vegas. They will aggro every enemy for miles, to the point where I would be walking along far away from enemies but Dogmeat attracted some raiders from behind me and they were shooting rockets and bullets in my general direction since the furry little shit was still following me(even tho I was still hidden) like something straight out of a cartoon. Likewise, human companions would randomly aggro and shoot enemies from far away and give away my cover, this meant I had to dismiss them from any areas I wanted to sneak past. The areas I managed to do entirely with stealth are as follows: Vault 87, Raven Rock, Old Olney, Calvert Mansion, Ritual Site, most of Mothership Zeta(I ran out of Stealth Boys towards the end), Museum of Technology, National Archives. As you can see, I avoided the toughest encounters in the game so I would say I at least somewhat partially did a non-violent/pacifist run, or at least avoided a massive headache as each one of these areas is a massive pain in the ass for various reasons, especially for melee oriented characters like me. I did intentionally go with companions for several combat-heavy main missions just so that I could experience the setpiece better, Take It Back is a good example, as is Death From Above and the very final raid on Adams Air Force Base. I preferred the stealth sections, at least there is a very basic challenge in managing Stealth Boy supply and avoiding bumping into enemies/moving too quickly to give away your footsteps there, not to mention getting past locked doors and computers. It ain't no Thief or Metal Gear but it did engage me more than just whacking people with a stick over and over. Old Olney was the highlight, my Stealth Boy ran out right in front of a Deathclaw, and rather than popping another one right in front of it, I got into an impromptu slugging match with it and beat the shit out of it with my brass knuckles before going back into stealth mode, it was very satisfying.
Overall, I did enjoy my experience with this game very much, more so as a nostalgia experience and gameplay element deconstruction than as a proper RPG. The combat is very mediocre and the system for speech checks is needlessly complicated, I am intrigued by how complex it is but if my 100 Speech Character has less than 50% chance to pass one because his Charisma isn't high enough, then something is very wrong. I would say Fallout 3 succeeded as a Fallout flavored Oblivion mod, but as a proper Fallout game, it would be a strong C+, not much more. I did like every minute I spend with the game, but it just doesn't have much depth, and the curveballs it threw with my character weren't very good or interesting(getting past forced combat encounters with the use of Stealth Boys, failing speech checks as a speech oriented diplomat character ect). I think people tend to shit on this one too much, Fallout 3 isn't a great Fallout game but it's not bad as far as console action RPGs go. Even as far as "Bethesda problems", this one is rather low on the totem pole, those would get much worse going forward. Either way, I am not done with my little sojourn back on my 360, now I want to play Fallout New Vegas on it to compare directly to Fallout 3, to appreciate all the changes it did bring after having Fallout 3 so fresh in my mind. I don't suppose it will be that much different from my New California playthru, sans the mods, but finding an excuse to play New Vegas yet again is never a bad idea. I already predict my biggest issue will be the constant bugs and crashing, which I should add were there in Fallout 3 but not as much as I remember. The game is super janky and in what feels like a prototype state, but there were very few bugs and only maybe 3 crashes during the entire experience. That's not going to be the case for New Vegas, I can already tell you that, but that's a small price to pay for how many improvements I will get in return.