The third game in the Fallout series, Fallout 3 is a singleplayer action role-playing game (RPG) set in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC. Combining the horrific insanity of the Cold War era theory of mutually assured destruction gone terribly wrong, with the kitschy naivety of American 1950s nuclear propaganda, Fallout 3 will satisfy both players familiar with the popular first two games in its series as well as those coming to the franchise for the first time.
Welcome to the nation's capital.
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The Brotherhood of Steel is a powerful ally.
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Customize characters with your Pip-Boy.
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The Story: Vault 101 – Jewel of the Wastes
For 200 years, Vault 101 , a fallout shelter, has faithfully served the surviving residents of Washington DC and its environs, now known as the Capital Wasteland. Though the global atomic war of 2077 left the US all but destroyed, the residents of Vault 101 enjoy a life free from the constant stress of the outside world. Giant Insects, Raiders, Slavers, and yes, even Super Mutants are all no match for superior Vault-Tec engineering. Yet one fateful morning, you awake to find that your father has defied the Overseer and left the comfort and security afforded by Vault 101 for reasons unknown. Leaving the only home you've ever known, you emerge from the Vault into the harsh Wasteland sun to search for your father, and the truth.Key Features:- Limitless Freedom! – Take in the sights and sounds of the vast Capital Wasteland! See the great monuments of the United States lying in post-apocalyptic ruin! You make the choices that define you and change the world. Just keep an eye on your Rad Meter!
- Experience S.P.E.C.I.A.L.! – Vault-Tec engineers bring you the latest in human ability simulation – the SPECIAL Character System! Utilizing new breakthroughs in points-based ability representation, SPECIAL affords unlimited customization of your character. Also included are dozens of unique skills and perks to choose from, each with a dazzling variety of effects!
- Fantastic New Views! – The wizards at Vault-Tec have done it again! No longer constrained to just one view, experience the world from 1st or 3rd person perspective. Customize your view with the touch of a button!
- The Power of Choice! – Feeling like a dastardly villain today, or a Good Samaritan? Pick a side or walk the line, as every situation can be dealt with in many different ways. Talk out your problems in a civilized fashion, or just flash your Plasma Rifle.
- Blast 'Em Away With V.A.T.S.! –Even the odds in combat with the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System for your Pip-Boy Model 3000! V.A.T.S. allows you to pause time in combat, target specific body parts on your target, queue up attacks, and let Vault-Tec take out your aggression for you. Rain death and destruction in an all-new cinematic presentation featuring gory dismemberments and spectacular explosions.
- Mind-Blowing Artificial Intelligence! – At Vault-Tec, we realize that the key to reviving civilization after a global nuclear war is people. Our best minds pooled their efforts to produce an advanced version of Radiant AI, America's First Choice in Human Interaction Simulation. Facial expressions, gestures, unique dialog, and lifelike behavior are brought together with stunning results by the latest in Vault-Tec technology.
- Eye-Popping Prettiness! – Witness the harsh realities of nuclear fallout rendered like never before in modern super-deluxe HD graphics. From the barren Wasteland, to the danger-filled offices and metro tunnels of DC, to the hideous rotten flesh of a mutant's face.
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 A review from an impartial gamer | | Review Date: November 18, 2008 | | Reviewer: Jarlaxle, Marietta, Ga | I play a lot of different RPG's and was not a fan of Elder Scrolls Oblivion. I will list the pros and cons as impartially as possible so you can be the judge on what matters to you.
PROS:
- You are left to explore and find things to do and quests on your own. This game is a true RPG. You have one main quest. Everything else are side quests.
- Over 100+ hours of places to explore. and more than 100+ unique map locations.
- Tons of perks and ways to develop your character. Become a science genius or concentrate on stealth and your lockpicking ability. Invest in large guns and go into places with guns ablaze. Play the game how you want. Be good and people will love you, be bad and people will fear you.
- Replay value. This is rare in RPGs but Because of the many different ways you can play the game I see myself playing this game again to play a different type of character.
- Some people complain about the targeting system known as VATS. This game is not an FPS. VATS gives you a wonderful 1st person shooter feel with an RPG style or turned based combat. Score a critical by shooting your enemies head and it might explode. Shoot the enemy on his weapon hand and he will not be able to attack you very quickly.
- The graphics are amazing. Its a beautiful post apocalyptic mess. The detail from the stains on a found mattress or a found comic called "Grognak the Barbarian and the Lair of the Virgin Killer" are all amazing. You can tell a lot of thought went into detail.
- The voice work is nice. Almost every character talks out loud. This allows you to listen and respond instead of just watching a mouth move and reading dialog all the time.
- Enemies do not automatically level with your character. This was my biggest problem with Oblivion. Some people liked the fact that enemies would always be your level. I found it totally unrealistic. Go ahead, run your level 1 character through the Wastelands. You might come across an easy roach or a mutant with a minigun. In my book this makes the game more fun and much more realistic.
- I have read on the forums and some bad reviews here that they can not find tons of ammo. This is not Halo, Call of Duty or any other FPS. People need to take the right mindset. This is a world 200 years after major Nuclear war. Things will break, ammo is sometimes scarce, radiation is a fact of life, bottle caps are money, people trade everything and you live in a harsh world. I think some people need to watch the Madmax series just as a primer to understand the world created here.
- Instant travel. Once you have visited an area you no longer need to walk to the location. You can locate the area on your map (through the PIPBoy 3000) and select it to instantly travel.
- The PipBoy 3000 Interface works great. This allows you to keep track of stats, items, equipment, quests, notes, maps, and karma very easily. The UI is easy and it keeps all the data you need at your finger tips.
CONS:
- AI is nothing special. It's not bad, just nothing special. When I am shooting a shotgun at you, running at me with a pool cue might not be the smartest thing to do. They will sometimes run away if severely over matched (which is the smart thing to do). The AI is no worse then any other games, just no big improvements here.
- Lack of good music. You can find radio stations on your PIPBoy but I was not a fan of the music. The background can be ok but not great. Sometimes when alone in the Wasteland you want some good background music.
- I had the game crash once but not a lot of times like some people are reporting. Still unacceptable but manageable. Loading and saving times can take anywhere between 10-30 seconds which is kind of slow.
- No item descriptions. The important data like weight, condition value, and perks of the item are still displayed but full description of the items are no longer available. This is different then Fallout 1 and 2 where each item had a paragraph describing it.
Additional thoughts:
This game is rated "M". This means you shouldn't play this game with kids in the room. This isn't a Con for me but this might be a problem for all you gamer mom and dads out there. Seriously, no kids allowed. Women offer there "Services", cussing, blood splatter on the screen when you get injured, mutants hanging people on meat hooks, tons of drug use, and of course blowing peoples limbs off. Good times but not for the kiddies.
No, its not perfect but it is a lot of fun and the best RPG currently on the market. My 5 star review was based on that fact. This is the best RPG I have played since FFX (Final Fantasy X). I hope you enjoy it.
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I cant help crying for ten years waiting | | Review Date: October 28, 2008 | | Reviewer: Shuhao Cao, | Maybe you would argue that this is just "Oblivion with guns", but this "Oblivion with guns" has more to offer than just "Oblivion with guns", it has a massive story(according the guide i received today, after you completed the game you got tons to do), also the SPECIAL is back! Pipboy is back, i cant help crying after i creating my character and seeing a whole new wasteland, which is far more detailed than the game I played 10 years ago. Maybe you would argue again, Bethesda is incapable of doing top-notch black humor like Black Isle, but the feels of exploring the wasteland is back, here I listed a few pros and cons
Pros
+ build of the whole wasteland
+ mission design
+ user interface
+ storytelling
+ Pipboy
+ tons of things to explore
Cons
- cant skip the VATS slow motion
- making choices wont affect the whole game too much, unlike Fallout1 &2, you have to pay for what you ve chosen
- no item description........(huge disappointment for some old fans maybe)
In general, I would recommend this game to those who love Oblivion
Update: the system is much more similar to Fallout 2 than to Oblivion, you have skills and perks, and at each leveling up you have 10-20 skill points(depends how much Intelligence you have) to distribute into a variety of skills, then you have perks like Lady Killer or Animal Friend; the system is deep and fun since you could be an agile and slick thief or a strong and stubborn warrior based on how you distribute your points and the initial attributes(S.P.E.C.I.A.L.)
Update 2: for those of you concerning CE, I got my CE from amazon on the releasing date, and this is the nicest CE I bought this year comparing to the Fable 2 CE and GTA 4 CE. The CE package has a neat looking lunch box, you could either put it somewhere as a decoration or use it as the storage for small stuff, that Pipboy figure is a fine-maded bubblehead; There is also an artbook of 100 pages featuring the concept art in Fallout3, and a DVD of making of the fallout 3; I think the CE is totally worth the price especially now amazon is offering the $10 giftcard.
Update 3: this game is not for you if you are looking for a first-person shooter like Far Cry 2 or Call of Duty!!!!! this is a role playing game |
Like Oblivion, only bigger, and with more stuff to do | | Review Date: November 17, 2008 | | Reviewer: Andariel Halo, Phenomynouss@hotmail etc is my e-mail | I didn't write a review for Oblivion because there were hundreds of decent enough reviews that encapsulated my experience. I saw no need to add to the "ALSO, I LIKED IT, TOO, AS WELL" crowd without any negative comments worth mentioning.
The same dealy applies to Fallout 3, yet because of the sheer size and scope of it compared to Oblivion, I can be bothered to put both positives and negatives together into a decent enough review.
For note, I have never played any of the previous Fallout games, and showed no interest in them prior to this.
Also, I'll be dropping the name "Yahtzee" a bit, referring to video game reviewer Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw and his video reviews for The Escapist magazine.
Positive:
-The world is indeed tremendous, and compared to Oblivion, which to Yahtzee was merely a square mile of English countryside multiplied again and again with wolves and bandits added, this world is simply a gaping epic story in itself to look at. Ten hours into the game, I still can't get over stopping and staring at the horizon, and knowing that This is the way Washington D.C., has looked for two hundred years! Being a historian, this trapped me in a quantam vortex of awesome and pee-pants.
-The V.A.T.S. targeting system, which has slow-motion angle shots for combat scenes. While Yahtzee mentioned that it looked "groovy pants", he also pointed out that because it's basically the same thing every time you use it, it would gradually just become "pants". For me at least, it hasn't yet become pants, after ten hours of play.
-Realistic gore! The M rating is put to use here, in the form of excessive violence. While nowhere near the sort of explicit body explosions of something like "Rambo", I never get tired of seeing a point-blank gunshot to someone's head have a chance of blowing their head up in a mess of blood, bone, and mushy meat fragments. Nor do I tire of crippling someone's arm and seeing their gun fly out of their hand, or firing at someone's limb enough times to dismember them, or to sever their head from their body by utterly destroying their neck with bullets.
-Insanely top-notch graphics for a game of this sheer size.
-Play as male or female, with dialogue options altering to fit your gender (ie, you'll get compliments as to how much you look like your mother if you're female, or how beautiful you are, or how much of a bitch you are for trying to steal from them).
-Genuinely interesting story that pans itself out gradually.
-Interactive people all around, including Ghouls who are nice to you (there's even an implied lesbian Ghoul couple who run a hotel in the Underworld)
I'm sure there's plenty more great things to be said, but I can't think of any major ones to speak of and so I'll have to move on to the bad.
Negatives:
-I can't vouch for male characters just yet, but the customizable options for females is an utter mess. Faces are disgusting lumps of blotchy, rugged, seemingly acne-scarred messes (which considering that the character isn't raised in the Wasteland, but rather in the highly clean and stable environment of Vault 101, is a curiosity), and for some odd reason, every pre-set and color option always ends up with the same result---the women have 5 o'clock shadow on their upper lip, and around their chins.
None of the other in-game women suffer from these sort of options, managing to look like actual women, whereas your character is forced to look like a pre-op transsexual without a long, long time spent into wrestling with dials and sliders which, like Oblivion, are connected to one another, making it hell to mold the flesh with one slider without every other slider moving on its own to screw up your changes.
-The game is an action/adventure RPG, but it's still an RPG, so damage both taken and delivered tends to border on the ridiculous, as in one scene I had a pistol and used the V.A.T.S. system to put three bullets into a human opponent's head, and not only did they not die, but they were still standing, and continued to beat me half to death with a baseball bat until I had to punch them to kill them dead.
-Occasional game freezes.
-The instant-transport system from Oblivion is back, which has both good and bad implications in that you can easily move back and forth from places without spending hours wandering around the ruins, but it's done without any consequence to time or health or fatigue anything in between, so you can just teleport from place to place as much as you want as quickly as your game will load.
-As Yahtzee mentioned as the biggest problem with Oblivion's immersion failure, there is a limited number of voice actors for the Ghouls. I can thankfully say that unlike Oblivion, not everyone has the same two voice actors, but with the Ghouls in particular, there are quite literally only two voice actors, one male and one female, and they don't even bother changing up their voices when playing the Ghouls. As such, every Ghoul you speak to of a certain gender will sound exactly like one another.
-There are some audio tapes/files in the "Notes" section of your Pip-Boy (such as your father's personal diary entries and such) which are almost completely inaudible due to the low sound mixed with the poor recording quality. It's only by sheer luck, determination, strain, and high volume, that I've managed to understand half of what is said in these diary entries. |
Unbelievably addicting! | | Review Date: December 18, 2008 | | Reviewer: C. Bishop, | I bought this game a few days ago, hoping that I made the right choice by picking this game over Tom Clancy's End War. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that I made the right choice now. Not since Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 9 have I ever found a game this addicting.
The world map is beautiful and extremely detailed. From radioactive rivers, to piles of rubble and smashed up concrete, the detail in these objects is amazing.
Im the type of gamer that HAS to explore every room, and check every nook and cranny to ensure that I have every thing that the building/zone has to offer. It takes me anywhere from 1-2 hours to completely clear most buildings and kill all the enemies inside. With the hundreds of buildings in the game, you can easily spend 100+ hours playing this game on a single character. I have read the complaints about running out of ammo, its complete crap. I havent run out of ammo yet, and I have a little over 40 hours completed so far. You may run out of "condition" on your weapons, but if you have your repair skill up, that shouldnt be an issue. If you play the game smart, and pick up the most valuable items you see and dont weigh yourself down with a lot of junk, you should have plenty of "caps" to buy ammo and repairs for your weapons.
In all, I can see myself making 2 more characters easily, just to experience the game differently. The current character I have is a good guy, but I will have to make an evil guy soon just so I can see how it affects the storyline. This game is definately a good buy! |
Never seen a game quite like this | | Review Date: August 30, 2009 | | Reviewer: G. Martinez, Lancaster, CA USA | | Sure some can compare this game to Bethesda's previous attempt The Elder Scrolls IV, but at the end of the day I have never seen such a damn convincing world of a post apocalypse . Almost everything succeeds in this game, the story of the Lone Wanderer is not wholly original but what makes the gamer interested is the mythology of the Capital Wasteland, you will find dozens of interesting characters that will make you care deeply for, may it be a Super Mutant Poet warrior named Fawkes, a loyal canine companion by the name of Dogmeat, or even a Super Patriotic Fascist news-casting president by the name of John Henry Eden. The music is eerily perfect for the atmosphere of Fallout 3, the happy upbeat music from the 30s give you a sense of hope and comfort even after your being attacked by a pack of Deathclaws or Ghouls (avoid the Deathclaws if possible). The gameplay is standard FPS or Third Person(in whichever way you want), but with RPG mixed into the gameplay. But what makes it stand out is the V.A.T.S system which allows you to slow time and aim for you enemies extremity parts, some may feel it takes away the challenge but if your a casual gamer you will heavily depend on it to fight packs of large creatures or humans with guns. Another thing that makes the game really stand out is the open world you can explore, and oh boy is it huge. If you play the game 24/7 it will take you days to find every single city, landmark, and settlement. But if you play casually you will spend weeks finding every single place from basement to roof, the architecture of the buildings have elements of steampunk, and a lot of the building themselves have some character of their own may it be the city Megaton, or Oasis, or to the ever creepy Dunwich Building. Fallout 3 is one of the games that come every couple of years that gives us so much replay value that after 10 or 15 years later you will still be playing even after the PS3 and Xbox 360 are long gone. Don't hesitate in buying it, it is worth the price. |
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