Let nothing stop you from experiencing the Capital Wasteland
The world of Fallout 3 is an intricately detailed sandbox set in the area of Washington D.C. 200 years after a nuclear war ravaged life on the Earth's surface. You're a Vault Dweller, one who was raised in an underground Vault safe from the dangers of the surface. When you're 19 you leave the Vault to search for your father who was two steps ahead of you. What lay ahead is a land of crumbling buildings, irradiated plains, mutated animals and scattered traces of how the world was before the bombs. You'll meet raiders, mercenaries, super mutants, slavers, derelict robots and several factions of soldiers trying to restore the world in their own ways.
What you do next is up to you. There are quest markers to guide you but there's never any immediacy to dissuade you from exploring the world around you. In fact the game encourages side tracking and exploration by introducing markers on your HUD whenever you're near one of the 100s of locations littered across the map. Each location is uniquely crafted and house quests, encounters with wastelanders or just historical Easter eggs and loot. This makes the entire game world, which is quite vast and populous, feel realistic and alive. The bleakness of existence deeply affects everything and everyone in the Wasteland and takes gritty realism to a level I'd never imagined a game would or could illustrate.
Aside from the main quest there are no linear directives or predetermined quest paths. Every quest, especially major ones, has several steps with multiple resolutions at every step. Quantifying the bulk of Fallout 3's quests allows countless permutations and outcomes overall. Essentially you get to act out your own course of action and create your own stories. Do you buy the freedom of enslaved children or do you slaughter the Slavers holding them captive? Do you convince a bigot to let Ghouls reside in his hotel by slaughtering the bigots, slaughtering the Ghouls or through diplomacy? Do you disarm a live nuclear warhead in the middle of a large settlement or do you detonate it for payment from a rich man who sees the town as an eyesore? Hell, you could just skip the dialog trees and just kill everyone, and I mean everyone, in your path if you want. These are the types of choices you can make to pepper your reputation as a heartless barbarian, a messiah of peace or a mercenary with allegiance to none or somewhere in between. Everyone else in Fallout 3 has their own motivations, backstory and beliefs. The path of least resistance won't always lean one way or another and the path of most resistance isn't always the most desirable.
In RPGs gameplay tends to fall behind in significance to the exploration and the flexibility and competence of the storytelling. Since this an action-RPG the gameplay should step up and allow for a more immersive experience. Fallout 3 is far from perfect in this regard. It's intended to be played as a first-person shooter of which there are countless others in the genre for comparison. A first-person shooter's competence relies on tight, fluid animations and controls. The physics are bad, animations are even worse and the whole experience is extraordinarily clunky and difficult. The game is also unusually buggy. Animation bugs and texture bugs are commonplace; game crashes are annoying but not unusual with games nowadays but the occasional scripting error and frequency of the aforementioned tarnish the whole experience. The whole game is a series of scripts for NPCs and they're much too fragile that one harmless, goofy action can completely break the game a few minutes later. This appears to be a shortcoming of the game engine more than Bethesda's design prowess. The entire combat engine of Fallout 3 would be practically unplayable in comparison to other popular shooters if not for V.A.T.S. The implementation of V.A.T.S. saves what would otherwise be a lackluster presentation by allowing you to pause the action and target specific body parts with success percentages based on your skills and the relative probability of the attack. It's like DnD combat where you roll the dice and are rewarded with gruesome, slow motion kill shots. V.A.T.S. is quite satisfying and has timeless appeal.
Immersion is the key to any work in any medium. The better the immersion the stronger the experience will be. We can forgive some short comings in execution if the level of immersion is above and beyond what we're accustomed. The Capital Wasteland is a world that will forever be a must-visit for video game enthusiasts for years to come. It's a world as emotionally powerful and satisfying as any before or since. I'd compare the Capital Wasteland to places like Bioshock's Rapture, Half-Life 2's City 17, or Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City in terms of immersion through gameplay, illustration and attention to detail. It's the little touches that make every room feel fresh and lived in. The incredible scale of Fallout 3 provides enough terrain and locations to explore that could take 100s of hours. Even just playing through the quests and their several permutations and exploring to your heart's and level cap's intent could keep you coming back for three or more playthroughs. There's enough content to satisfy an MMO addict for months with the level of polish we'd expect from top notch single player games and a level of immersion that's incomparable to any game save those that broke the mold before it. If it weren't for the lack of sophistication in the combat and the abundance of annoying bugs and glitches, even two years after release, this would be perhaps the best action game released this generation bar none. Let nothing stop you from experiencing the Capital Wasteland.