TA Playlist Wrap-Up – Fallout 3
TA Playlist.
TA Playlist never changes…
Welcome back to another month of TA Playlist! For May’s poll, we nominated four game franchises with recent TV adaptations. However, unlike the tongue-in-cheek April 2022 poll, these TV adaptations have by and large been pretty good, as shown most recently by the Amazon Prime Fallout series.
The show was such a hit that it sparked a bit of Fallout fever, driving several of the older games back up the most-played charts, and directly inspiring this month’s theme. As such, it’s probably no surprise that The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, Halo: Reach, and Cuphead all got left in the proverbial irradiated dust, as Fallout 3 brought home a decisive victory.
This isn’t our first trip into the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout, with Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas taking the spotlight in the July 2018 TA Playlist, and Fallout 4 featured in June of 2021. Rather than moving forward to the Fallout 76 MMO, we decided to take a look back at 2008’s Fallout 3, which brought the franchise to consoles for the first time, and took the series in a drastically new direction.
The first two games in the franchise had been developed for PC by Interplay Software, and were isometric RPGs with turn-based combat. The original Fallout (1997) and its sequel, Fallout 2 (1998), laid the foundations for the post-apocalyptic world that the games are set in, including the darkly humorous tone, the retro-futuristic styling, and the branching questlines with multiple ways to resolve them. These original Fallouts were smaller games in both scope and audience, but they were critically acclaimed, and gained a dedicated fanbase on the PC.
A third Fallout game, Van Buren, was under development by Interplay’s subsidiary Black Isle Studios, but financial difficulties resulted in the cancellation of that game and the sale of the Fallout IP to Bethesda, who were mostly known at the time for their Elder Scrolls series. Playing to their expertise, Bethesda developed Fallout 3 as a first-person 3D open world RPG, rather than the 2D isometric perspective of its predecessors, and moved the setting from the west coast of the United States to the Washington D.C. area, where Bethesda itself is located.
Allgorhythm said:
Naturally, the immersion would not have worked had Bethesda failed to capture the look and feel of the first two games. But Bethesda, right on the heels of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, was on its A-game. And, to their credit, they didn’t make 3 into an Oblivion clone. Instead, they studied the intellectual property they had received from Interplay and retained the factors that had captivated the PC players in the first two games.
Because it was transformative, new players found the game as a good point of entry. There were many new players since the preceding games were not released on consoles. Additionally, although the lore ensures the games in the series are tightly cohesive, the individual stories are largely independent from one another. They are not presented in chronological order so players can jump in anywhere without feeling they’ve missed out on what came before.
Of course, with any type of change, there are those who preferred the way things were before. Some fans of the original Fallout games were vocally displeased with the changes to the franchise, including the switch to first-person perspective and the change in setting to the east coast, and many also claimed that the quality of the story, quest choices, and writing was much worse than the original games.
We didn’t have any serious detractors in the forums this month, although there were a few folks who had played Fallout 1 and 2, and at least one was initially put off by the differences:
Jerith Geros said:
I eventually went back to it after hearing some praise from friends and ended up really getting into the game once I figured out the VATS system, and I immediately dumped hundreds of hours into the game. While I ultimately ended up enjoying New Vegas more, Fallout 3 will always be a special game that made me appreciate the new direction the series was beginning to go in. I still have mixed feelings about 4 and 76, though…
For most of our commenters, however, Fallout 3 was their first entry into the franchise, and the majority indicated that they looked back fondly on their time roaming the Capital Wasteland:
Cristi said:
One of the first games I played when I bought the 360 and I spent hundreds of hours in it exploring absolutely every corner. So many good memories. And of course since 3 I played every fallout game with the exception of 76. Highly recommended must play series of games.
ManicMetalhead said:
This was the first Fallout game I played and I adored it. Put so much time into exploring everything I could.
From accidentally discovering Deathclaws and panicking, to one of my first encounters with missable achievements (the early vault bobblehead and the one in the Enclave stronghold), well before I was in the achievement hunting community, I had so much fun with this.
LinKPePo said:
It’s one of the entries I like the most. Fallout 3 was the first game I played of Fallout franchise and it will always have a special place in my memories. Right now I’m playing Fallout 4 and I love it, but I don’t think I’ll play it as much as I have played with Fallout 3.
Fallout 3 opens with your character growing up in Vault 101, around 200 years after the nuclear war between the US and China that devastated the globe. The vault chapter serves as both character creation and game tutorial, teaching you the basic aspects of dialogue, skill checks, and combat. Your father, James, has raised you since your mother died in childbirth, but shortly after your 19th birthday, James disappears without explanation, leaving you, the Lone Wanderer, to leave the safety of the vault and explore the Wasteland in search of your father. The first moment stepping out of the vault and looking out across the desolate wasteland is an iconic moment for many gamers.
Stevo6483 said:
From the moment I first emerged from Vault 101, blinded by the light, I knew I was in for a great adventure across the hauntingly desolate Capital Wasteland. And despite the wasteland setting there is some variation and interesting locations (more so than New Vegas) like Megaton, Rivet City and of course the vast ruins of downtown DC and its dangerous network of connecting metro tunnels. Loved the lore, the humour, gameplay, etc. Enjoyed the DLC too. Great game.
You leave the vault with one simple objective: find your father. There’s no quest marker pointing you where to go to do that, however, and you don’t really have any solid clues as to where to start your search.
SkoochMG said:
One of my favorite moments in gaming is in this game when the vault opens, you walk in to the wasteland for the first time, and the game is like ‘find Dad’. I remember in that moment it feeling so cool to enter this huge world with this vague objective and almost no direction on how to achieve it. Felt like you had to get out there, learn and explore, and see what you could find in this cool new world – and as my first Fallout game it was all as new to me as it was to the character. I just recall the feeling of “its out there – go find it” being pretty epic.
Most players will be drawn to the nearby settlement of Megaton, one of the game’s most interesting and iconic locations, due to the large undetonated nuclear bomb that serves as the town’s centerpiece. The bomb is the focal point of one of Fallout 3’s most well-known questlines, which gives you the option of either detonating it, destroying Megaton entirely, or diffusing it, which puts you at odds with a rich and powerful character who will seek retribution.
Cylon 118 said:
Have beaten this, New Vegas and 4, and I have to say that this one’s start just goes on a little too long, as you get into the main game in the others much quicker. But the first place you are likely to visit, Megaton, is my personal fav out of the three, as it is so unique and really sets the tone of the wasteland. But all of the underground sections that you need to take to get around the city are one heck of a pain!
Beyond just being an interesting quest, the decision to blow up Megaton or not was a way for the game to highlight the Karma system, which assigns a good, bad, or neutral karma rating to many of your actions throughout the game. NPCs will react differently to characters who are strongly good or evil, and even pure neutral characters might have different dialog options than characters who are far out at either end of the karma line. Several achievements were also tied to the karma system, and blowing up Megaton was a great way to accumulate a large amount of negative karma very quickly!
tranceformer81 said:
The memories of debating whether I should or shouldn’t blow Megaton to pieces.
Hurn Weasel said:
Charliwea said:
My first Bethesda game, played it after watching a trailer for Point Lookout dlc and it changed my life, I got into RPGs after this. Funnily enough, after playing Fallout 3 multiple times in 15 years I’ve never done an evil karma run lol, I just can’t.
Through investigating Megaton and talking to various NPCs there, you do find a clue as to where your father went after leaving the vault, and your journey takes you into the ruins of Washington D.C. Due to technical limitations with the game’s engine, the city is broken up into a series of smaller areas by rubble and debris, and the player has to find their way from one area to another via the underground D.C. Metro stations. These underground areas were almost universally called out as the worst part of the game’s design.
PsychicChicken said:
I absolutely loved Fallout 3, but the Capital Wasteland (DC Metro area) was the worst part of the game. I spent too many hours trying to find my way to objective markers, in and out of tunnels that didn’t actually go where you needed. Still, great game.
Aside from the metro system, though, many of our commenters praised the games unique locations, and seeing the ruins of many of Washington D.C.’s famous buildings and landmarks made for an interesting and eerily familiar setting for the nuclear wasteland.
FosterJag15 said:
It’s probably my favorite in the series, though I’m biased as that’s partly because the setting is most familiar to me. I lived in the DC area for a few years, and seeing it completely transformed blew me away.
As far as the 3D games go, it definitely is the creepiest in terms of the environment. Crawling through the metro or the tunnels beneath the Capitol building still freaks me out. The overgrown vault from New Vegas and the initial landing in Far Harbor are comparable, but I still think overall Fallout 3 has the most unsettling environments to me. Such a great game and such a great series. I think it’s one of those definitive games of the 360 era of gaming.
From the D.C. metro area, the game’s main plot takes you to many locations in and around the former U.S. Capital as you search for your father and learn why he left the Vault. In addition to the main plotline, however, you are free to explore a huge map full of small villages, caves, and yes, barren wasteland. For some, maybe a bit too barren…
Scoli said:
I’ve traversed the entire Capital Wasteland 3 times, and comparing it with Fallout: New Vegas, it succeeds too well at feeling like an empty wasteland. The story is good, but it really makes you feel like the entire world is against you and unsafe since there are very few settlements. New Vegas is my favorite game of all time, and I had a very hard time getting back into Fallout 3 after having played it. Still a good game, but Obsidian has done it better. I started playing Fallout 4 this month instead, and while I think Bethesda did a better job making it feel like a lived in world than 3, it still doesn’t compare to NV.
As is often the case when we talk about games in a series, much of the conversation revolved around comparing Fallout 3 with other games in the series, especially Fallout: New Vegas, which was originally planned as a large expansion pack for Fallout 3 but eventually spun off as an entirely separate game. New Vegas was developed by Obsidian, a studio cofounded by former employees of Black Isle Studios and Interplay Entertainment. Obsidian used the same game engine as Fallout 3, but featured a smaller, more tightly-focused narrative. Whether you prefer one over the other seems to be largely a matter of taste, but most of our commenters liked both, in some order.
Allgorhythm said:
I, personally, believe that Fallout 3 is the best in the series followed closely by New Vegas.
snake42069 said:
I don’t know what it is about New Vegas but I wasn’t completely entertained by it. Perhaps because I played Fallout 3 so much before even attempting NV that I wasn’t fond of the small technical differences between the two.
BigBanjo K said:
New Vegas felt more ‘on rails’ to me. At least in the first half. They put that canyon of deathclaws and stingwings North of Goodsprings, so you’re forced to go the long way around
There weren’t many votes for Fallout 4 or 76 as the best of the series, but at least one commenter pointed out that Fallout 3 and New Vegas are starting to feel a bit old after more than 15 years.
Danixpxd said:
I recently completed Fallout 3 to 100% after watching the TV show. A lot of fun, although I must say when compared to Fallout 4 and 76 (gameplay-wise) both FO3 and NV felt a bit outdated for me…
Nonetheless, once I got used to it, was very fun indeed. I hope the karma system come back on a future entry!
zeldafanjtl said:
I didn’t play Fallout 3 before this month, but I would think even at release it would be considered clunky. This game came out in 2008, an era when infamously virtually every Xbox 360 game worth playing was a first-person shooter. It’s wild that Bethesda put out a game with gunplay this bad at that time.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been enjoying the game a lot. But it is a very clunky game and I’m sure always was.
The combat system is one of the main criticisms of Fallout 3 (and Bethesda games in general, to be honest), something that even the game’s designers acknowledged. In an interview with TechRadar, Bethesda developer Joel Burgess said, “We didn’t really have first-person shooter experts, we didn’t really know … If nothing else, it speaks to some of the ways we were successful that the mediocrity of the shooting didn’t matter.”
To help mitigate the relatively lackluster gunplay, and to help differentiate Fallout from simply being “Oblivion with guns,” Bethesda’s Executive Produce, Todd Howard, wanted to offer a mix of real-time and turn-based combat that would allow for players to take a more tactical approach. This blended combat system lead to the development of V.A.T.S. – the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System – which has become a staple of the franchise.
Allgorhythm said:
zelafanjtl said:
The real-time combat in this game really is atrocious. I do think retaining VATS from the turn-based games was a smart move though, it at least gives you a way to not make fights a total slog, and I wish more games experimented with a blended system like that.
I agree though, Bethesda games generally have enough good things going for them (writing, worldbuilding, open-endedness and freedom) that they’re still worth playing despite their serious flaws.
And that does seem to be the prevailing opinion in the forums about our time with Fallout 3. It’s not perfect, but it was certainly a great game, especially for the time it was created, and it was the foundation for a legacy that continues to this day, with the current success of Amazon Prime’s Fallout TV series. The success of that show brought massive increases in player numbers to all of the games in the Fallout franchise, with Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 jumping into the top ten in our weekly Gameplay Charts back in April, with Fallout 3 and New Vegas also in the top 40.
THE DEADLY DOG said:
What I loved most about the Fallout show is the fact that it peaked my interest to go back and see how things were in my Fallout saves. Best decision yet, was cool seeing how everything wound up, what I was doing, and collecting. Darn good times for sure.
jimbobvaquero said:
I told a a co-worker to watch the new Fallout tv show. He did, and reported back he thought it was good, but f**ked up.
That’s Fallout, baby!
Allgorhythm said:
Amazon has definitely shown how a video game adaptation should be made. Amazon has energized the franchises fans with a show they find appealing. This is in stark contrast to the Halo series released on Paramount+ where the fans constantly complain about the adaptation.
The Fallout series provides gamers with recognizable features from the games. It creates a bond with the gamers. It’s almost as if it says, “(Wink… Wink…) Look what we have to show you.”
The Halo TV series, in contrast, separates itself from the fictional universe of the games–creating its own space: the Silver Timeline. The TV series, thus, isolates itself from the gaming series. Gamers feel the TV show hijacks the Halo brand and then does its own thing with the story.
The Fallout Series takes the opposite approach. It rewards players of the games. Although everyone–players and non-players alike–can appreciate it, gamers feel they are put on a pedestal. The part where The Ghoul frets about getting sidetracked on side quests is sublime. Anybody who has played a Fallout game can relate.
In short, the purpose of an adaptation is to capitalize on the source material’s fan base. Yet, so many adaptations alienate the base they should be catering to. The Fallout TV series is the exception that proves the rule. It has earned the right to give us its recently announced second season.
Can’t wait to see it!
In all, 9,401 tracked gamers played along with Fallout 3 by unlocking at least one achievement during the month of May. 2,518 of those tracked gamers were starting the game for the first time, while 526 earned the completion during the month. A total of 87,242 achievements were unlocked during the month, worth 1,820,340 GamerScore and 2,771,370 TrueAchievment score – an overall ratio of 1.52 for the month.
The “Vault 101 Citizenship Award” is story-related, unmissable, and is the earliest possible achievement to earn in the game, so naturally that was the most-unlocked achievement during the month, earned a total of 2,152 times in the Xbox 360 version, and another 26 times in the GFWL version.
The least-unlocked achievement from the console version was “Paradigm of Humanity”, which is earned by reaching level 20 with Neutral Karma. There are similar achievements for reaching the same level with Good Karma (“Last, Best Hope for Humanity”, unlocked 1,109 times during the month) and Bad Karma (“Scourge of Humanity”, unlocked 514 times during the month). While we’d expect that most people in the community will eventually get all three, it’s somewhat reassuring to know that the Good Karma outcome was unlocked more than twice as many times as the Evil one!
As for the GFWL version, due to the availability of console commands, the achievement win distribution is incredibly skewed. The most-unlocked achievement was actually “Scourge of Humanity”, earned 30 times during the month, while the rarest was “The G.O.A.T. Whisperer”, unlocked just 23 times in May.
Since all the console commands in the GFWL version can be typed in in roughly 10-15 minutes, it’s no surprise that the top 17 of the 32 entries on the May 2024 Shout-Out List were from that version of the game, with most of them completing the achievement list in less than half an hour, and the fastest console command typers completing the game in just 9 minutes. For the Xbox 360 version, Neo Chocobo had the fastest completion, with 142 hours and 10 minutes from earning their Pip Boy 3000 on May 22 to completing the final achievement in the Broken Steel DLC on May 28. Nice work!
Now that June is nearly over, it’s time to get your final thoughts in about this month’s featured game, Prey. Either unlock an achievement in the game before midnight UTC on July 1, or drop by the Spoiler-Free and Spoiler Discussion Threads to discuss this sci-fi thriller from the gone-but-not-forgotten studio, Arkane Austin.
Originally posted by www.trueachievements.com
