Your donations keep RPGWatch running!
Box Art

Fallout 3 - Retrospective @ Will Ooi

by Couchpotato, 2013-09-13 00:37:52

Will Ooi has a new retrospective on his blog about Fallout 3 were he writes that the game broke the fanbase in two.

The production of Fallout 3 had suffered through a long and sordid affair, with the rights to the franchise undergoing a protracted saga after the closing down of the series’ original development house, Black Isle Studios, and the cancellation of their vision of the third installment, codenamed Van Buren, before eventually leaving the grasp of a post-Brian Fargo Interplay (a memorable figure behind many revered 90′s RPGs who’s now back on the scene after Wasteland 2′s Kickstarter success) and landing in the hands of the Elder Scrolls developer, Bethesda Game Studios.

When this reimagined Fallout game did arrive in late 2008, a full decade after Fallout 2 (and not counting the best-forgotten console-market-focused Brotherhood of Steel, which incidentally existed at the expense of Black Isle’s version of Fallout 3 under disastrous new stewardship at Interplay) and with Morrowind and Oblivion lead Todd Howard at the helm, it did so with a Megaton bang. Despite the almost-unanimous critical acclaim and Game of the Year awards that left other big-hitting titles like GTA IV, Mass Effect, Bioshock and Metal Gear Solid 4 in the dust, another apocalypse was taking place over at the Fallout forums – chief among them No Mutants Allowed and the Fallout Wiki – with the existence of the latter an indication of both the richness of the series’ lore and commitment of its fanbase.

The ripple of complaints tore through quickly and in great intensity, with old school fans making known their feelings that Fallout 3 resembled and respected little of what had come before, more FPS than RPG and essentially a standalone title that sought to appeal to newcomers who had never played, or even heard of, the originals. Gone too was that West Coast of America setting, with Washington DC’s Capital Wasteland being undoubtably vast and detailed, but also severely lacking in internal consistency and logic – in 200 years since the war, how could these communities still live in squalor without any viable trade or agriculture? What, exactly, do they eat?

Information about

Fallout 3

SP/MP: Single-player
Setting: Post-Apoc
Genre: Shooter-RPG
Platform: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Release: Released


Details