Why do people think Fallout 3 was actually good?

The use of Washington DC just feels like wasted potential.

They could've done so much with the location, but instead they went "WAOW LOOK AT DA BOMBED CAPITAL BUILDING!! WAOW LOOK AT DA ROBOTS!! HUMAN BEINGS STILL LIVE IN SHIT HUTS 200 YEARS LATER WAOW!"

Basically it just feels like they imagined what it would be like 50 years after it was bombed and didn't at all think further ahead.

 

I actually strongly agree with this. The capital wasteland is a location that should of (and did) happen. But with all the potential behind the setting, I don't think it's something bethesda should have dived head first into during an age where technology restrictions limited what you could do with the game at the time. And while they were trying to figure out how to even make a fallout game.

But I'm not sure that a FO game now set in the same place would be better, and Fo3 turned out ok. So I guess I can't complain too much.

 

Washington D.C. is the last place a population would resort to using bottle caps for currency.

 

If a man was dying of thirst in a desert or very. very hungry he would gladly swap his Rolex (heirloom) for a bottle of water (purified) or a Cram fritter. Would the same man living in what was left of Washington reasonably well fed with a stash of water (purified) swap the same gold watch for 5000 bottlecaps ? Erm erm I don't think so.

 

I'm sure one of the fallout devs said " RPGs you just go into peoples houses and potter about robbing any food coin or health/meds " I had thought that.{exactly the same thing}'But if you try to play it like an angel who never thieves you are fucked. On occasions you may need to pickpocket a key to advance.So this makes playing a role fake as....

 

So fucking true, just one trip to the hellhole that it is Reddit and you can see people all over discussing about some ridiculouly dumb idea and trying to justify an fucking sci fi setting... It is even worse whe you begin to see how many people there have a complete lack of common sense.

 

I don't like when rpgs force you into an path either, especially in sequences that forces you to kill people just for the sake of it. But I do like when the evil option gives you more benefits than the good one. I'm not that big of a fan of games being too easy to be a good person, sometimes it goes completely against the message of the game. Bioshock might be one of the worst examples, you get almost the same amount of adam for saving the little sisters instead of harvesting them. And thinking about it now very few games managed to do this system right. The only one that comes into my mind now is Frostpunk, but even in that one it was somewhat easy for me to keep thing in the "morally right "side of things.

 

I get your point to a degree but if you take a route to gain more benefits then in some ways you are not playing the game; the game is playing you. Tyranny is ok as bad is good.
Again if people don't really deserve to die, I don't kill them but if forced it's the games fault, not yours. Also I got to a stage in Skyrim where you either align with the faction that had you in the hay cart at the beginning. Or the other Northern faction that were devout racists. 2 bad choices do not = a good one; so that is the most extreme case of being forced into something. I think I looked online to see if you could stay independent ( that's bad as I avoid spoilers/cheats etc). Sure the answer was NO as there was a war ready to start. I don't want to sound vague but it was years ago I played then abandoned Skyrim

 

I will say the detention camp in Point Lookout is probably some of the best actual worldbuilding Bethesda did in this game. The idea that the US was doing internment for Chinese-Americans like it did with Japanese-Americans in WWII is chilling. Of course, there was an actual Chinese spy that they caught - if it had turned out they captured an innocent person it would have been darker. And why would the PC go and destroy the Chinese sub, anyway? Just for the hell of it? It's been 200 years, for god's sake.

 

IMO Bethesda did an amazing job in the matters of scenario and atmosphere, hence why I do preffer Fo3 and 4 exploration over any of the other games. Indeed I agree on the fact that their writing is very mediocre, and ok at best, but in visuals and atmosphere they always got it right.

A simple change that would make Bethesda games way better is to simply put the as prequels, make them being set right after the apocalypse, even before Fo1. Imagine how much more sense the world of Fo3 and 4 would make if it was just a few decades after the bombs dropped, Fallout 3 in particular would benefit a lot from this.

 

Definitely; if Bethesda has any strengths at creating RPGs it's the worldbuilding and exploration. Unfortunately, at least for their Fallout games, it's mostly puddle-deep. 3 and 4 would definitely make more sense if they were only set decades after the Great War. Though, that wouldn't solve the lazy writing problem of shoehorning in Super Mutants, the Brotherhood and the Enclave thousands of miles away from where the classic games were set.

I finished my final-for-all-time Xbox hate playthrough of Point Lookout, which is probably the best expansion for the game. While the execution was just okay, I like the idea of a longstanding feud between two angry - and now immortal - men continuing far past the apocalypse, like Grumpy Old Men with guns. Now it's on to the one I was saving for last: Broken Steel, where they fixed the incredibly stupid ending but put some really stupid endgame perks in to balance it out.

 

I think it's worse now.

Ron Perlman still calls you a coward and a little bitch for not killing yourself and calls the companion you've asked to activate the Purifier the "true hero".

Timestamped

 

What’s more heroic than a Super Mutant walking into an irradiated chamber? I’m just glad a “true hero” was there that day.

 

Your dad getting his friend and a bunch of other dwellers killed and then killing another friend and blowing the work of his life, so that nobody else can take credit for it.

 

I mean yeah, it's still stupid as hell, but at least the game now actually lets you send someone in who can survive the purifier activation.

 

So, I finished my last ever playthrough of Fallout 3 on Xbox. Liberty Prime is blown up only for the Brotherhood to revive him again in Fallout 4, because why get rid of a popular character? When you assault Adams AFB the game literally gives you a superweapon that makes the ensuing fight much easier, though it is admittedly very fun to use. The best part of the DLC is probably the medic armor you find in the Olney sewers, because as hbomberguy said in his long video about Fallout 3, it's a nice piece of worldbuilding. The new enemies have weapons that ignore ALL armor which is stupid and frustrating, but I guess that incentivizes the player to use their most powerful weapons to obliterate them ASAP instead of hoarding the ammo for those guns forever, so there's at least a silver lining. Overall, I'd give it a 5 out of 10.

One extra note about Point Lookout is that while you learn about Calvert (brilliant professor from a family not at all like the Kennedys who has gone insane), you don't learn anything about Desmond apart from the fact that he's British and he survived the Great War...somehow. At least, that's all I learned in my last playthrough. I'd probably give this DLC a 6/10, partly out of sympathy for being the best overall DLC, even if the hillbillies stupidly have diamond-tough skin.

I guess I might as well rate the other ones too:

Operation Anchorage: 5/10. It's fun enough, and there's a hint of meta worldbuilding in how the simulation is constructed...but it's basically a Call of Duty clone in the 2008 Gamebryo engine, lol.

The Pitt: 5.5/10. Not sure how Pittsburgh survived the Great War, but the morally grey central conflict is a change of pace from the rest of the game.

Mothership Zeta: 4/10. It's...a complete non-sequitur based off an easter egg, with all of the potentially interesting elements simply not expanded on at all. The weapons are super OP though and can kill Deathclaws in like two shots, which is fun.

Uh...Fallout 3 as a whole, 4.5/10. It could have been a lot better as an RPG and as a Fallout game, but it's not the worst game out there. Fallout 4 had better shooting and environmental design but it made the writing and RPG elements even worse.