Everyone has their own opinion on how to fix Fallout 3. Even fans of the game will say that the conflict between Enclave and Brotherhood wasn’t fleshed out enough, that morality plays like Megaton’s bomb were just pitiful, and so on. Those less charitable to the game might say it needs a total rework, to be set in an earlier time period and ditch the classic factions to tell a story more in line with series canon. Personally, I’m somewhere in between, because I think that Fallout 3 actually does have the potential for an amazing story, despite the innumerable problems with its writing. The change to make it all work would be shifting the emotional heart of the story from the Lone Wanderer’s father to another character who already exists, who gives you a quest that could also hold up the entirety of the narrative.
Moira Brown.
Yes, the eccentric shopkeeper in Megaton who wants your help writing the Wasteland Survival Guide, and no, I’m not kidding. The way that the quest works in its current state mostly puts you in the path of raiders, mirelurks, and mole rats, but consider how it would look with an expanded scope, with the goal being to catalog not just the major hazards, but factions and politics as well. It would play out similarly to the independent route in New Vegas, where your goal was to make contact with the major regional powers, and either do their quest to make an ally or ignore them altogether. In the case of this hypothetical new Fallout 3, the plan would be the same, to visit raider camps, Brotherhood outposts, the Enclave itself, hear all their perspectives on the world, and try to bargain with them to make life safer for the common wastelander. Just like how the base game allows you to put in a varying level of effort with optional objectives and stat checks, players would have a wide latitude for how involved they want to be. If they want to improve the wasteland by joining one of the factions, they could then choose to write the book in a propagandized, realistic, or disillusioned way, with more useful details coming with more time as a member. It’s a system that would encourage players to genuinely engage with each faction and learn everything they could, on top of exploring different regions and destroying nests of monsters. Just as the player shapes the guide, the writing of the guide comes to shape the wasteland, which has shaped the views of the player. That sort of expressiveness is exactly what an RPG like Fallout really needs to leave a personal impact.
So, where does Moira herself come into it? Well, she’s the embodiment of the question at the heart of a project like this, of how a single person with hardly anything to their name could heal a deeply troubled world. Think of how much we struggle with this question in real life, how so many of us look around and see nothing but collapse and disparity, and don’t know what we can even do about it. Moira represents that spark of action we have within us, even if we aren't sure how to use it, and whether her own efforts are naive, noble, or something in between is up to interpretation. Whichever way she's viewed, the harshness of the world outside enforces just how much it needs people like her, and not more soldiers. Fallout loves to say that war never changes, but a story like this could be the reminder that there's still hope. It’s people like her who can change the world.
Addendum on the DLC (includes spoilers):
If you’ve read my other Bethesda reviews, you know the drill. The date listed for this completion is for a replay, and I had only played the DLC once upon its release, so here’s the DLC for the review. Just like last time, this will be longer than the actual review, and this is where I drop all pretense of being clever and just make fun of the game fairly directly, which for this game, is probably what everyone was hoping for anyway. Also, there are a whoppin’ FIVE expansions to get through this time, so I hope you’re comfy.
Operation Anchorage might just have the strongest premise of any Fallout DLC. It’s a rare glimpse into the past, depicting a significant moment in the lore for the first time, and what makes it doubly intriguing is how it’s presented as a military-produced simulation. It’s the perfect opportunity to present how pre-nuclear culture distorted reality, to satirize the sort of politics that lead America down that path, and mix it with grains of truth that the player has to dig through for the real history. It would be Fallout’s version of the histories of Herodotus, which contain a mix of true historical insight next to biased legends meant to excite the crowd. It could even be combined with an alternate plot of trying to escape the simulation in a way that gels nicely with Fallout’s sci-fi influences, there are so many ways that a writer could run with this that the only possible conclusion is that none were actually involved in this project. The DLC starts with a short linear shooting section, then drops you into a small map with two objectives: blow up two fuel tanks and clear a base full of enemies. Then, another linear shooting section wraps it all up. Did they think Fallout 3’s combat was so fun that the game just needed more? Did they think the base game didn’t have enough already? I genuinely have no idea what happened here. There’s no substance, just a little under an hour of pure shooting. The only benefit to engaging with it at all is how the armor it rewards you with is bugged to have 9,991 times the durability it should. Classic.
The Pitt has a much simpler idea going on: sneak into the industrial hell that Pittsburgh has become, go undercover, and coordinate a resistance with the enslaved people. Having all your stuff taken from you to collect ingots in a factory overrun by mutants, scrounging for every bullet and stimpack, is an effective change of pace for highlighting the desperation of the setting, but that single mission is all there is to it. Afterwards, you fight in the arena, with the first enemies dropping great weapons that you can use to easily blast away the other two fights. Then, you get all your gear back. What happens next is particularly odd: you get called up to meet the boss of the entire operation and are expected to hear him out and maybe reach a compromise. However, knowing he’s a slaver and that I’m wearing 9,991 layers of power armor, I disagreed and chose the dialog option to kill him along with all the other bosses. This broke the DLC. Bethesda must have genuinely thought that the choice between maintaining the systematic enslavement of the entire East coast or killing a handful of slavers would be something I needed to really think about, because it made half the NPC’s dialog shut down. It also made the final quest entirely pointless, being a mission to overrun their base with mutants, even though everyone was already dead. So, The Pitt was a promising little plot for about 20 minutes, but after that, it completely ran out of steam. No interesting rewards or additions here either.
Broken Steel is perhaps the most famous of the bunch, thanks to its rewriting of the original terrible ending, but the new one has almost all the same issues. The Enclave’s overall motivation and their reasons for fighting the Brotherhood were hazy at the best of times, but with the purifier lost, their main base destroyed, their leaders killed, and the enemy in possession of a superweapon, what’s keeping them going? What’s their goal that we’re trying to stop? The closest we get is how their orbital satellite superweapon destroyed our giant robot superweapon, and now we want to get even. What they plan to do with it from that point, or why they didn’t just use it earlier, go largely unaddressed. So, the new finale of the Fallout 3 main quest is blowing up a base you learned of an hour ago, in defense of nothing in particular. I genuinely think this DLC was created just to pull the Lone Wanderer out of the grave that the writers inelegantly shoved them into, and the rest was an afterthought. Here’s a fun fact though: Broken Steel contains the only time in the main completion path where you visit the iconic Pennsylvania Avenue. While most players end up there while searching for Dad, players who did Moira’s quest first probably found Dr. Li in Rivet City, skipping quests from Moriarty’s bar, visiting DC, fighting mutants with the Brotherhood, and running errands for Three Dog. See, I told y’all that Moira was the best, she knows where to go.
If it wasn’t for Bethesda’s trademark lack of awareness, I would think Point Lookout was a parody of the main game. You join up with someone who’s entirely contemptuous of you in order to take down someone who’s essentially the exact same, with no firm reason established. Then, the other side tries to flip your allegiance, all without specifying a reason to do so. You really have no context for anything that’s going on and just dumbly shoot your way to the end, until you’re confronted with a pointless choice and an obligatory locker full of stuff. At the very least, this DLC has a full new map to explore, and I have to give credit for that, but it’s just not what this game needed. It’s like Bethesda asked what we wanted, and we yelled “More roleplaying opportunities!” and they said “Great! More shooting!” and served up Operation Anchorage. Then they asked us again, we yelled for more roleplaying again, and we got The Pitt, which asked us if we would be willing to end the murder of an entire generation if it meant the person running the operation would be really disappointed. Then the lag caught up at Bethesda HQ and they got the message that the ending was terrible, so they changed it to allow for more shooting. After we kept screaming for more roleplaying opportunities, we got a couple more square blocks of green mess to explore in a game that had miles of that already. Maybe the next DLC will finally give us what we want.
It took me an hour and a half to complete Mothership Zeta, I had started with 1,006 microfusion cells in my unique plasma rifle, and I ended with 96. So, firing 910 shots over the course of 90 minutes gives me 10 shots per minute, about once every six seconds. Since none of the enemies drop those cells and I never switched weapons, it’s a fairly reliable measurement. However, keep in mind this includes a couple times where I got lost, and all the time spent looting containers when the game is paused, so it’s more like a shot every 4 seconds. There were no story choices to make, so let’s put that at 0 meaningful roleplay interactions per second. Looks like we didn’t ever get what we wanted, huh. What’s sad is that they actually did have a decent premise in here: there are a bunch of people from different time periods and cultures that you release from cryostasis, and you all have to work together to escape the alien ship. Considering how Fallout is all about warring factions, wouldn’t it be beautiful to end the game’s saga with a story about how people can come together across culture and time to create the perfect team? Instead, it just means you can pick a companion with a shotgun, a rifle, or a revolver to shoot along with you. It blows my mind how a DLC that overtly apes Star Trek and classic sci-fi so thoroughly misses the underlying humanism.
If there’s a theme to all this, it’s how Fallout 3 has some nice little seeds of great ideas, which could have grown with some time and love, that just went nowhere. The Capital Wasteland is criticized for being a big green concrete ruin, but the harshness would have been really compelling if it was tied into a story about pushing forward when all seemed lost. Operation Anchorage’s premise is great, The Pitt is a setting just begging for more development, Broken Steel… shows that Bethesda is willing to listen to feedback, and so on. While I would love to say that the team just had to get their sea legs and would make the next Fallout amazing, we all know that didn’t work out. Fallout 4 was also a story that was basically about nothing, and Fallout 76 was entirely based around being about nothing. With such a storied legacy of nothingness, I don’t even know who I would tell to play Fallout 3 in this day and age. You don’t need to play this to see that New Vegas was good, and there are tons of games out there that are more fun to wander around in, overshadowing the one saving grace this game could be said to have.
Thus ends the Fallout 3 Survival Guide. As Moira said, “That concludes our exceptional expert endeavor. I have to admit, I was worried it would go over some peoples' heads…
...but it should be fine.” Thanks for reading this behemoth of a review, I think every Bethesda game I’ve covered has been the longest I’ve ever done at the time of its writing. Luckily, Fallout 4 only has two expansions.
Moira Brown.
Yes, the eccentric shopkeeper in Megaton who wants your help writing the Wasteland Survival Guide, and no, I’m not kidding. The way that the quest works in its current state mostly puts you in the path of raiders, mirelurks, and mole rats, but consider how it would look with an expanded scope, with the goal being to catalog not just the major hazards, but factions and politics as well. It would play out similarly to the independent route in New Vegas, where your goal was to make contact with the major regional powers, and either do their quest to make an ally or ignore them altogether. In the case of this hypothetical new Fallout 3, the plan would be the same, to visit raider camps, Brotherhood outposts, the Enclave itself, hear all their perspectives on the world, and try to bargain with them to make life safer for the common wastelander. Just like how the base game allows you to put in a varying level of effort with optional objectives and stat checks, players would have a wide latitude for how involved they want to be. If they want to improve the wasteland by joining one of the factions, they could then choose to write the book in a propagandized, realistic, or disillusioned way, with more useful details coming with more time as a member. It’s a system that would encourage players to genuinely engage with each faction and learn everything they could, on top of exploring different regions and destroying nests of monsters. Just as the player shapes the guide, the writing of the guide comes to shape the wasteland, which has shaped the views of the player. That sort of expressiveness is exactly what an RPG like Fallout really needs to leave a personal impact.
So, where does Moira herself come into it? Well, she’s the embodiment of the question at the heart of a project like this, of how a single person with hardly anything to their name could heal a deeply troubled world. Think of how much we struggle with this question in real life, how so many of us look around and see nothing but collapse and disparity, and don’t know what we can even do about it. Moira represents that spark of action we have within us, even if we aren't sure how to use it, and whether her own efforts are naive, noble, or something in between is up to interpretation. Whichever way she's viewed, the harshness of the world outside enforces just how much it needs people like her, and not more soldiers. Fallout loves to say that war never changes, but a story like this could be the reminder that there's still hope. It’s people like her who can change the world.
Addendum on the DLC (includes spoilers):
If you’ve read my other Bethesda reviews, you know the drill. The date listed for this completion is for a replay, and I had only played the DLC once upon its release, so here’s the DLC for the review. Just like last time, this will be longer than the actual review, and this is where I drop all pretense of being clever and just make fun of the game fairly directly, which for this game, is probably what everyone was hoping for anyway. Also, there are a whoppin’ FIVE expansions to get through this time, so I hope you’re comfy.
Operation Anchorage might just have the strongest premise of any Fallout DLC. It’s a rare glimpse into the past, depicting a significant moment in the lore for the first time, and what makes it doubly intriguing is how it’s presented as a military-produced simulation. It’s the perfect opportunity to present how pre-nuclear culture distorted reality, to satirize the sort of politics that lead America down that path, and mix it with grains of truth that the player has to dig through for the real history. It would be Fallout’s version of the histories of Herodotus, which contain a mix of true historical insight next to biased legends meant to excite the crowd. It could even be combined with an alternate plot of trying to escape the simulation in a way that gels nicely with Fallout’s sci-fi influences, there are so many ways that a writer could run with this that the only possible conclusion is that none were actually involved in this project. The DLC starts with a short linear shooting section, then drops you into a small map with two objectives: blow up two fuel tanks and clear a base full of enemies. Then, another linear shooting section wraps it all up. Did they think Fallout 3’s combat was so fun that the game just needed more? Did they think the base game didn’t have enough already? I genuinely have no idea what happened here. There’s no substance, just a little under an hour of pure shooting. The only benefit to engaging with it at all is how the armor it rewards you with is bugged to have 9,991 times the durability it should. Classic.
The Pitt has a much simpler idea going on: sneak into the industrial hell that Pittsburgh has become, go undercover, and coordinate a resistance with the enslaved people. Having all your stuff taken from you to collect ingots in a factory overrun by mutants, scrounging for every bullet and stimpack, is an effective change of pace for highlighting the desperation of the setting, but that single mission is all there is to it. Afterwards, you fight in the arena, with the first enemies dropping great weapons that you can use to easily blast away the other two fights. Then, you get all your gear back. What happens next is particularly odd: you get called up to meet the boss of the entire operation and are expected to hear him out and maybe reach a compromise. However, knowing he’s a slaver and that I’m wearing 9,991 layers of power armor, I disagreed and chose the dialog option to kill him along with all the other bosses. This broke the DLC. Bethesda must have genuinely thought that the choice between maintaining the systematic enslavement of the entire East coast or killing a handful of slavers would be something I needed to really think about, because it made half the NPC’s dialog shut down. It also made the final quest entirely pointless, being a mission to overrun their base with mutants, even though everyone was already dead. So, The Pitt was a promising little plot for about 20 minutes, but after that, it completely ran out of steam. No interesting rewards or additions here either.
Broken Steel is perhaps the most famous of the bunch, thanks to its rewriting of the original terrible ending, but the new one has almost all the same issues. The Enclave’s overall motivation and their reasons for fighting the Brotherhood were hazy at the best of times, but with the purifier lost, their main base destroyed, their leaders killed, and the enemy in possession of a superweapon, what’s keeping them going? What’s their goal that we’re trying to stop? The closest we get is how their orbital satellite superweapon destroyed our giant robot superweapon, and now we want to get even. What they plan to do with it from that point, or why they didn’t just use it earlier, go largely unaddressed. So, the new finale of the Fallout 3 main quest is blowing up a base you learned of an hour ago, in defense of nothing in particular. I genuinely think this DLC was created just to pull the Lone Wanderer out of the grave that the writers inelegantly shoved them into, and the rest was an afterthought. Here’s a fun fact though: Broken Steel contains the only time in the main completion path where you visit the iconic Pennsylvania Avenue. While most players end up there while searching for Dad, players who did Moira’s quest first probably found Dr. Li in Rivet City, skipping quests from Moriarty’s bar, visiting DC, fighting mutants with the Brotherhood, and running errands for Three Dog. See, I told y’all that Moira was the best, she knows where to go.
If it wasn’t for Bethesda’s trademark lack of awareness, I would think Point Lookout was a parody of the main game. You join up with someone who’s entirely contemptuous of you in order to take down someone who’s essentially the exact same, with no firm reason established. Then, the other side tries to flip your allegiance, all without specifying a reason to do so. You really have no context for anything that’s going on and just dumbly shoot your way to the end, until you’re confronted with a pointless choice and an obligatory locker full of stuff. At the very least, this DLC has a full new map to explore, and I have to give credit for that, but it’s just not what this game needed. It’s like Bethesda asked what we wanted, and we yelled “More roleplaying opportunities!” and they said “Great! More shooting!” and served up Operation Anchorage. Then they asked us again, we yelled for more roleplaying again, and we got The Pitt, which asked us if we would be willing to end the murder of an entire generation if it meant the person running the operation would be really disappointed. Then the lag caught up at Bethesda HQ and they got the message that the ending was terrible, so they changed it to allow for more shooting. After we kept screaming for more roleplaying opportunities, we got a couple more square blocks of green mess to explore in a game that had miles of that already. Maybe the next DLC will finally give us what we want.
It took me an hour and a half to complete Mothership Zeta, I had started with 1,006 microfusion cells in my unique plasma rifle, and I ended with 96. So, firing 910 shots over the course of 90 minutes gives me 10 shots per minute, about once every six seconds. Since none of the enemies drop those cells and I never switched weapons, it’s a fairly reliable measurement. However, keep in mind this includes a couple times where I got lost, and all the time spent looting containers when the game is paused, so it’s more like a shot every 4 seconds. There were no story choices to make, so let’s put that at 0 meaningful roleplay interactions per second. Looks like we didn’t ever get what we wanted, huh. What’s sad is that they actually did have a decent premise in here: there are a bunch of people from different time periods and cultures that you release from cryostasis, and you all have to work together to escape the alien ship. Considering how Fallout is all about warring factions, wouldn’t it be beautiful to end the game’s saga with a story about how people can come together across culture and time to create the perfect team? Instead, it just means you can pick a companion with a shotgun, a rifle, or a revolver to shoot along with you. It blows my mind how a DLC that overtly apes Star Trek and classic sci-fi so thoroughly misses the underlying humanism.
If there’s a theme to all this, it’s how Fallout 3 has some nice little seeds of great ideas, which could have grown with some time and love, that just went nowhere. The Capital Wasteland is criticized for being a big green concrete ruin, but the harshness would have been really compelling if it was tied into a story about pushing forward when all seemed lost. Operation Anchorage’s premise is great, The Pitt is a setting just begging for more development, Broken Steel… shows that Bethesda is willing to listen to feedback, and so on. While I would love to say that the team just had to get their sea legs and would make the next Fallout amazing, we all know that didn’t work out. Fallout 4 was also a story that was basically about nothing, and Fallout 76 was entirely based around being about nothing. With such a storied legacy of nothingness, I don’t even know who I would tell to play Fallout 3 in this day and age. You don’t need to play this to see that New Vegas was good, and there are tons of games out there that are more fun to wander around in, overshadowing the one saving grace this game could be said to have.
Thus ends the Fallout 3 Survival Guide. As Moira said, “That concludes our exceptional expert endeavor. I have to admit, I was worried it would go over some peoples' heads…
...but it should be fine.” Thanks for reading this behemoth of a review, I think every Bethesda game I’ve covered has been the longest I’ve ever done at the time of its writing. Luckily, Fallout 4 only has two expansions.
Reviewed on Jul 28, 2021