Fallout 3

• 1. Introduction

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  Fallout 3 is a 2008 action role-playing game from Bethesda Game Studios, and it begins with a 19-year-old leaving the shelter where they grew up. Vault 101 is a high-tech fallout shelter, built for survivors of a nuclear war fought 200 years earlier. The player's father, a scientist, has walked out of it without explanation. The search for him leads across the ruins of Washington, D.C., where nearly every direction is open to explore. Behind the game sits an odd arrangement. A studio famous for fantasy worlds took over a series it had never worked on. How did that happen, and what did the studio do with its inheritance? What did a game about a ruined capital mean for the people who played it? And why did some of the series' longest-standing admirers feel that something they loved had been taken from them?

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• 2. A Franchise Without a Home

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  In December 2003, the cancellation of Van Buren left the Fallout series without a future. Black Isle Studios had been building it as the third mainline Fallout game, set across Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. Its combat would have mixed real-time and turn-based play. Interplay Entertainment, the publisher, was struggling financially, and the project ended.

  In 2004, Bethesda Softworks bought the right to make its own Fallout 3 from Interplay for a minimum guaranteed advance against royalties of $1,175,000. At the time, Bethesda was known for The Elder Scrolls series and wanted another project to broaden its catalogue. Developer Joel Burgess later said that ZeniMax Media, Bethesda's holding company, turned down several offers from other companies who wanted to make the game. In Burgess's words, "The sense was we had to make our own game."

  Development began in late 2004 with a team of around 10 people, because most of Bethesda's staff was busy finishing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. After Oblivion shipped in 2006, the team grew drastically. Programmer Jean Simonet estimates that around 75 people were working on the game by the end.

  Product manager Pete Hines said the studio's mindset was to treat Fallout 3 as if they had made the original Fallout games themselves. Bethesda kept the production in-house and hired nobody who had worked on those earlier games. Even so, a joke circulated among fans and journalists before release, and some players wondered whether it was true. The joke called Fallout 3 "Oblivion but with guns."

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• 3. The Search for James

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  Emil Pagliarulo, the lead designer and writer, wrote most of the main story early in development. When the team expanded, he let other designers suggest changes and make rewrites. He contrasted this with the rigid and "unhealthy" process on Oblivion, where developers had to follow the original design document whatever their opinions.

  Pagliarulo favored the oppressive, bleak mood of the first Fallout over the excessive, camp dialogue of Fallout 2. He wanted a "rawness" in the conversations, which led to occasional profanity. He also wanted every important decision to carry some moral ambiguity. To serve that goal, the player's father, James, was designed as a moral compass who reacts to what the player has done.

  The story begins after the Lone Wanderer's 19th birthday, when James leaves Vault 101. The player follows his trail across the Capital Wasteland, the region in and around D.C. Along the way, Colin Moriarty of Megaton, Three Dog of Galaxy News Radio, and Madison Li of Rivet City each reveal pieces of James's past. Before the Lone Wanderer was born, James and his wife Catherine had worked on Project Purity. Their plan was a water purifier inside the Jefferson Memorial, which would clean the irradiated water of the Tidal Basin and the Potomac River. Catherine died in childbirth, and James abandoned the project to raise his child in Vault 101.

  The Lone Wanderer finds James inside a virtual reality program run by an overseer named Stanislaus Braun in Vault 112. James explains that he left to find the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, or G.E.C.K., a device meant to help rebuild civilization after a nuclear war. When work on Project Purity restarts, the Enclave steps in. The Enclave are the remnants of the United States government, and Colonel Augustus Autumn commands their forces. Their leader, President John Henry Eden, wants to add a deadly virus to the purifier that would kill any mutated organism that drinks the water, humans included. James sacrifices himself to protect the project.

  The Lone Wanderer then turns to the Brotherhood of Steel, a military organization that protects the people of the wasteland. The G.E.C.K. waits in Vault 87, but the Enclave captures the Lone Wanderer and holds them in Raven Rock. After escaping, the player meets President Eden and learns that he is an artificial intelligence program. Eden hands over a vial of the virus. The player may later cause him to self destruct.

  With a massive pre-war military robot called Liberty Prime, the Lone Wanderer and the Brotherhood take back the Jefferson Memorial from Autumn. The purifier must be activated by hand or it will explode, and James has flooded the control room with lethal radiation. The player can go in personally, optionally adding the virus. The player can do nothing and let the purifier explode. The remaining option is to ask Sarah Lyons of the Brotherhood to go in instead.

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• 4. The Capital Wasteland

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  The first idea for the setting was the West Coast of the United States. Early in development, Bethesda moved it to the Washington metropolitan area. Pagliarulo credited the adage "write what you know," since the studio was based in Rockville, Maryland, a city close to Washington, D.C.

  Burgess wanted D.C. to be a hard place to explore, with tougher enemies and more radiation. Because of how the game engine worked, the city had to be split into separate zones joined by the Washington Metro. Playtesters routinely struggled to find their way through the Metro and complained that the extra difficulty made the area less fun. Bethesda tried removing the dividers between zones, but the first test looked unpromising and the idea was dropped. Burgess believes a proper test might have gone differently. He called the whole D.C. area "the big mistake I feel I made on Fallout 3."

  When the player first steps out of Vault 101, the Washington Monument stands in the distance. Bethesda placed monuments from the region across the map to act as visual landmarks, and this one shows where D.C. lies. The first version of the map was about as large as the one in Oblivion. About six months before release, the team judged it too small. Oblivion could hide distances behind mountains and trees, but a barren wasteland let players spot locations too quickly. Bethesda enlarged the map by roughly 20 percent and spread the locations farther apart.

  To keep the map unpredictable, the team added random encounters, such as a group of contract killers attacking a character or a giant scorpion attacking a robot. Enemy encounters were spaced out so the player would not be swamped with combat. Late in development, someone noticed that nobody had modeled the White House. There was no time to build another major location. Players instead find its remains in a giant crater, explained as the result of a nuclear strike.

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• 5. Tools of Survival

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  The seven S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes are strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck, and each ranges from 1 to 10. At the start, the player picks a gender and race and distributes points among them. Thirteen secondary skills, including barter, lockpick, medicine, and speech, depend on those attributes. A player with high charisma, for example, begins with better barter and speech. Leveling up earns more skill points and a permanent perk. The Master Trader perk cuts the price of items sold by vendors by 25 percent.

  The Pip-Boy 3000 is the wearable computer on the player's arm. It works as the game's menu, showing items, character statistics, active quests, and a map used for fast travel to places already discovered. Companions can join the player and help in fights. The game can be played from a first-person or third-person view, and weapons include guns, energy weapons, melee weapons, and explosives.

  Executive producer Todd Howard wanted combat that mixed real-time and turn-based play, so it would appeal to both first-person shooter fans and role-playing fans. The result was V.A.T.S., which pauses the game and lets the player aim at specific body parts. Every attack spends Action Points, and when they run out the player must wait briefly. Howard asked for "cinematic" combat, and Simonet delivered slow-motion effects inspired by crash replays in the Burnout series. Burgess admitted that the ordinary shooting was one of the weaker parts. He said, "We didn't really have first-person shooter experts, we didn't really know... If nothing else, it speaks to some of the ways we were successful that the mediocrity of the shooting didn't matter."

  Lead producer Gavin Carter explained that karma was built to show the player the immediate consequences of their choices and to make them doubt whether they chose well. Giving water to a beggar raises karma, and breaking into a home lowers it. Some companions will only join a player whose karma meets their expectations. Slavers are friendlier to players with negative karma, and they offer services that neutral or good players cannot buy.

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• 6. Sound and Voices

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  Inon Zur composed the score for Fallout 3, mixing traditional American blues and folk with the strong cadence of military music. He aimed to show American life before the war while stressing the theme of militant progress. His influences included the post-apocalyptic film Mad Max 2 and the Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket. The music is fully electronic, with occasional samples of live instruments. Zur said, "I wanted to create something that almost sounds as if it comes out of a boom box, rather than something that feels symphonic and heroic. Because all of the technology is sort of low-tech in Fallout, then the actual sound is representing and helping to represent this aspect, too."

  Billie Holiday and Cole Porter are among the artists whose songs play on the in-game radio stations, alongside Roy Brown, Billy Munn, and Bob Crosby. The player tunes in through the Pip-Boy, and the songs come from the 1940s and 1950s. They sit against the ruins as a record of the world before the bombs.

  Over 40,000 lines of dialogue were recorded, which at the time set a Guinness World Record for the most lines in a single-player role-playing game. Liam Neeson voiced James and Malcolm McDowell voiced President Eden. Ron Perlman returned as the narrator.

  Blindlight manager Lev Chapelsky told Edge that former United States president Bill Clinton was jokingly offered a voice role, and the offer was swiftly rejected. Hines later said Bethesda would not have allowed it even if Clinton had agreed. In his words, "In no way, shape or form, did we say President Clinton is who we want for this role or tell Blindlight to go chase him."

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• 7. Launch and Controversy

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  Bethesda announced Fallout 3 in July 2004, at the same moment it bought the rights from Interplay. News then went quiet for years, though Tor Thorsen of GameSpot notes that interest jumped after the critical success of Oblivion. In April 2007, Bethesda opened a teaser site, and in June it released the first trailer. The trailer pulls back from inside a bus to reveal the ruins of Washington, D.C., while the Ink Spots sing "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire."

  With American Cinematheque and Geek Monthly, Bethesda held A Post-Apocalyptic Film Festival Presented by Fallout 3. It showed six films: 12 Monkeys, A Boy and His Dog, Damnation Alley, The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, and Wizards. The marketing budget came to $13 million.

  Fallout 3 arrived on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 on the 28th of October 2008 in North America. Europe and Australia followed on the 30th of October, and Japan on the 4th of December. In its first week it sold 4.7 million copies and grossed $300 million. That outsold every earlier Fallout game combined, and first-week sales ran 57 percent above Oblivion's. The research firm Electronic Entertainment Design and Research estimated 12.4 million copies sold worldwide by 2015.

  Five downloadable add-ons followed. Operation: Anchorage sends the player into a simulation of a battle between American and Chinese soldiers in Anchorage, Alaska. In The Pitt, set in Pittsburgh, the player infiltrates a slaver compound and searches for a cure to a mutant disease. Broken Steel picks up right after the main story, as the Brotherhood of Steel hunts the last Enclave soldiers. Point Lookout, set in Point Lookout State Park, involves a missing young girl. In Mothership Zeta, aliens abduct the player, who must escape a UFO.

  Work on the add-ons began about two months before release. Only three were planned at first, and player feedback raised the number to five. The PlayStation 3 version did not get them at first. Analyst Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital Markets guessed that Microsoft had struck a deal with Bethesda. Howard gave another reason, saying more Xbox 360 owners had paid for Oblivion's add-ons than PlayStation 3 owners. By 2009, all five were available on the PlayStation 3.

  The Australian Classification Board refused to classify the first Australian version because of its realistic depiction of drug use. Selling an unclassified game is illegal there, so Bethesda replaced morphine with a generic drug and removed the injection animation. It then changed every version of the game to match. In Japan, a quest letting the player defuse or detonate a nuclear warhead was altered so detonation became impossible, and a weapon was renamed. The Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons removed excess blood and gore from the German version. Microsoft chose not to release the game in India over perceived "cultural sensitivities," and players there had voiced religious concern about mutated cattle named Brahmin, which is a varna, or class, in Hinduism.

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• 8. Praise, Backlash, and Legacy

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  Metacritic gave the Windows version of Fallout 3 a weighted critic score of 91 out of 100, the PlayStation 3 version a 90, and the Xbox 360 version a 93. That Xbox 360 score ties with Braid, Gears of War 2, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl as the fourth highest of 2008.

  Demian Linn of 1UP.com praised the open-ended play and flexible character leveling. He found V.A.T.S. fun, but said fights lacked precision in real time and offered little variety in enemies. He called it a "hugely ambitious game that doesn't come around very often." Erik Brudvig of IGN admired the "minimalist" sound design, imagining a player hearing "nothing but the sound of wind rustling through decaying trees and blowing dust across the barren plains." Mike Fahey of Kotaku wrote that the real stars of the music were the vintage songs from the 1940s. Edge scored the game 7 out of 10 and called it "cumbersome in design and frequently incompetent in the details of execution." In a later anniversary issue, Edge placed it 37th on a list of the 100 best games to play today.

  Tim Cain, game director of Fallout and Fallout 2, praised the art direction and attention to detail. He disliked that the endings were not built around the player's choices, and he disliked the recycling of Super Mutants and the Enclave from the first two games. Chris Avellone, the main writer of Fallout 2, praised the immersion and the open world, but criticized the writing of some characters. Bugs in physics and crashes broke some quests and blocked progress.

  Members of No Mutants Allowed, one of the oldest Fallout fansites, took issue with the changes. They objected to unspoiled food after 200 years, wood-framed dwellings surviving a nuclear blast, and Super Mutants appearing so early. James Stephanie Sterling of Destructoid called groups like theirs "selfish" and "arrogant," arguing that a new audience deserved a chance. Luke Winkie of Kotaku saw it as a question of ownership, since hardcore fans watched their favorite games become something else.

  Gamasutra, GamesRadar+, GameSpy, IGN, and UGO Networks named it Game of the Year. At the 2009 Golden Joystick Awards it won Ultimate Game of the Year. The Game Developers Choice Awards gave it Game of the Year and Best Writing. At the 12th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards it won Role-Playing Game of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Original Story.

  The Smithsonian American Art Museum included Fallout 3 in its exhibit The Art of Video Games. The game is also considered one of the defining titles of the seventh console generation, which spans 2005 to 2013. Critics often single out the open world, which set 1950s American culture against nuclear devastation. Khee Hoon Chan of Rock Paper Shotgun suggested the world is best traversed by abandoning the search for the father and wandering as a "roaming wayfarer." Jeremy Peel of PCGamesN wrote that part of its legacy lies "in setting the concept of a videogame dungeon free."

  Since then, the early praise has cooled. Retrospective writing often points to a lack of meaningful story choices and to unrealistic character decisions. At the purifier, for instance, the player cannot ask a companion to go in, even a companion immune to radiation. Fallout: New Vegas, made by Obsidian Entertainment in 2010, added several questlines and replaced karma with reputation among specific factions. Some players now prefer it and deride Fallout 3. Journalist Jade King answered that it feels elitist to call the game a failure, because in 2008 it set a new benchmark for open world role-playing games.

  Billy Studholme of The Washington Post wrote that the game "blew the hinges off the franchise in the best way." The series had stagnated in the mid 2000s after poor reception for Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, and after Van Buren was cancelled. Switching from isometric to 3D graphics and releasing on consoles widened its audience, and Maxwell McGee of GamesRadar+ called it a guided introduction to the Fallout universe. Fallout 4, the fourth major installment, followed in 2015. In 2023, a leaked financial forecast indicated that Bethesda was working on a Fallout 3 remaster scheduled for 2024. PC Gamer noted that the projection predated the COVID-19 pandemic, which has likely caused delays.

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