One of the worse Fallout games, the surest sign of the irrevocable decline of the RPG as genre, Oblivion with guns, one of Bethesda's finest efforts. In my view, this is a game limited not by its shoddy execution but by its puny ambitions. Take the much maligned morality system of the game: will you defuse the bomb or nuke Megaton? The choice is mocked because the choice is obvious but enough is enough, let's be professional adults who do not condescend to professional adults: does anyone, perched atop some dilapidated hotel tower with a scenic view of the explosion REALLY think Todd Howard and company believed this was a grave moral quandary? It is so clearly not meant to be a dilemma. The point of the choice - the point of Fallout 3, to its ultimate detriment - is not to make you ponder good and evil but to give you the freedom to embrace extremes. In so being, the mutation is complete. The feint of fun in the original Fallout that gave way to a muted, omnipresent sadness has become the blatant substance of it all - post-apocalypse as playground.
It is within those unfortunate parameters that Fallout 3 can be considered a good time. The same way it was never meant to have you consider the weight of your actions, it was never meant for you to consider the weight of your gun. Comedically light, almost ornamental gunplay, interrupted anytime by the bored or thwarted player who pauses the flow of time to save time and find the next interesting attraction of the radioactive theme park. Fallout 3 pays homage to the shooter the same way it pays homage to the RPG, and arrives at something both lesser and special - it's the Bethesda guarantee. With the long-deserved revelations, reckonings, and admissions of Bethesda's myriad failures in our collective past, we can perhaps afford to be a little generous to this and Skyim, the supreme balancing acts between Bethesda's genre-skimming, aesthetic-appropriating, rigorously shallow method and the studio's mysteriously unprecedented and unmatched open world entertainment. Fallout 3 would be followed by New Vegas, 4, and 76, all of which made radical changes to 3 while keeping its true, solid, and generally underappreciated fundamentals: VATS, open world, diminished 1st person shooter, modified WRPGs. Influence or infection? That is each person's lot to decide, but both RPG Codex and Reddit can perhaps agree on this: in retrospect, this was the irreversible turning point, our last chance to be mindless before it came time to pay mind to how good and how bad things could be. This was the nuke of the Fallout franchise.
It is within those unfortunate parameters that Fallout 3 can be considered a good time. The same way it was never meant to have you consider the weight of your actions, it was never meant for you to consider the weight of your gun. Comedically light, almost ornamental gunplay, interrupted anytime by the bored or thwarted player who pauses the flow of time to save time and find the next interesting attraction of the radioactive theme park. Fallout 3 pays homage to the shooter the same way it pays homage to the RPG, and arrives at something both lesser and special - it's the Bethesda guarantee. With the long-deserved revelations, reckonings, and admissions of Bethesda's myriad failures in our collective past, we can perhaps afford to be a little generous to this and Skyim, the supreme balancing acts between Bethesda's genre-skimming, aesthetic-appropriating, rigorously shallow method and the studio's mysteriously unprecedented and unmatched open world entertainment. Fallout 3 would be followed by New Vegas, 4, and 76, all of which made radical changes to 3 while keeping its true, solid, and generally underappreciated fundamentals: VATS, open world, diminished 1st person shooter, modified WRPGs. Influence or infection? That is each person's lot to decide, but both RPG Codex and Reddit can perhaps agree on this: in retrospect, this was the irreversible turning point, our last chance to be mindless before it came time to pay mind to how good and how bad things could be. This was the nuke of the Fallout franchise.