It won GameStooge's Best RPG of 2008, Best Xbox 360 Game of 2008, and Best PC Game of 2008, and it captures the overall prize. There are so many factors that made Fallout 3 so special: the look of the game, making even a post-apocalyptic desert beautiful; the theme and setting; the storyline and voice acting; the VATS system and action; the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and Karma roleplaying game elements; from beginning to end, Fallout 3 felt like an event. Kudos for Bethesda, who have the unenviable task of trying to one-up their own creation.
Best Game of 2008: Fallout 3
Best PC Game of 2008: Fallout 3
Best Xbox 360 Game of 2008: Fallout 3
Best PlayStation 3 Game of 2008: LittleBigPlanet
Best PlayStation 2 Game of 2008: Persona 4
Best Wii Game of 2008: No More Heroes
Best Nintendo DS Game of 2008: Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Best PlayStation Portable Game of 2008: God of War: Chains of Olympus
The artist behind Fallout 4’s Deathclaw reveals just how bad things got back when Bethesda took over the series
People are stupid I get it. No one should feel unsafe,
But I think they need to talk about why they cut so many corners during the development process and why none of their games ever look current. And why they think all of this is okay while they charge full price.
As much as Bethesda deserve criticism, that's not really relevant to the reveal of Fallout 3 in 2007.
The default angle Kotaku always go for is to highlight the worst in gaming.
I would’ve focused on the creative.
Bethesda's post-apocalyptic RPG remains an unabashed classic, more than a decade and a half on from its launch.
For me its the fact that I could put hundreds of hours into it and still find areas I missed in my earlier runs. It was also my first FO and despite what I had to put up with at times such as overall crashs and killing my orginal PS3 with the YLOD it's still my favorite entry to this day.
Tons of reasons
But my silly little one…hunting for unique weapons and armour
Something Fallout 4 just didn’t really have as much because they replaced most of it with randomly generated customised weapons. Even Elder Scrolla doesn't do it as well.
I remember during my first playthrough of Fallout 4 back in 2015 I somehow got an automatic combat rifle that shot explosive rounds by defeating a legendary creature. Unfortunately that was the only playthrough I ever got that weapon. It's a shame because it was absolutely epic!
Sense of exploration. That was why older Bethesda games were so good. They might have had glitches, broken mechanics, meh visuals, etc., but they were some of the best around when it came down to the sense of exploration. You could go wherever you wanted and you would find something cool; it might have been a faction, a weapon, an enemy and much more. And that is what they are lacking now. Skyrim still had a lot of that, but Fallout 4 dropped it by focusing on an interconnected world and more randomly generated rewards. Fallout 76 just kept that trend and added multiplayer, and Starfield went even further in killing it by creating a whole universe with parts completely isolated from each other.
I think the retrospective of Fallout: New Vegas' existence has somewhat diminished the view of Fallout 3 in the eyes of many, but it getting out of the vault in Fallout 3 was, for me, the most remarkable experience I've had in a videogame.
I was 12 when it came out, and I remember I just saw the score it got in Gamemaster magazine (remember those!? 😅), and I just went to the shop and bought it with my pocket money.
Not knowing anything about the game, I thought the whole thing was going to be about growing up in a vault, especially given that I'd spent about 2 hours in it....I literally could.not.believe it when you got out and it was just this wasteland on every direction. Amazing.
Probably because these Bethesda games were hand crafted so that exploration meant something. Unlike Starfield where this sense of exploration is replaced with the illusion of scope and procedurally generated worlds. A player can always appreciate when they wonder into an unforgettable new encounter by accident or stumble across a new questline that becomes their favourite. Just like a player can always tell when they're ploughing through filler on auto pilot, that they'll forget the moment some resource numbers go up and nothing worth remembering occurred.
I mean, in Fallout 3 you could nuke an entire town as a SIDE QUEST. In The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Skyrim, the Dark Brotherhood questlines were my favourite in any RPGs and you could completely avoid them if you didn't care for them. In The Witcher 3 side quests take you on ridiculously dark and mysterious storylines that are some of the best I've played in RPG history. There's a reason why people still talk about KOTOR to this day. Difference between a developer creating something or just padding a game world with stuff.
There were some side quests that could yld have been developed into an entirely separate game. Some great writing there.
The Fallout Anthology Edition is coming to PC very soon, and is packaged with some very S.P.E.C.I.A.L. bonuses.
It’s an awful downgrade to the last one they did
They included physical disc back then
I would love the classic fallout games on console. Closest I could find was atom rpg, I liked that one a lot
Fallout 3 is an amazing game. Can't wait to get this on the 360 with the exclusive DLC.
Fallout 3 certainly should get GOTY! Awesome game with so much to do and good replay value.
Homicide I also can't wait to get that DLC :) 3 in the next 3 months! Though for PC you could also get the GECK dlc which is a map editor and sounds pretty dang sweet but I don't have a gaming PC anyways
Just for the record, GameStooge gave Fallout 3 the following honors:
Best Game of 2008
Best PC Game of 2008
Best Xbox 360 Game of 2008
Best Roleplaying Game of 2008
Fallout 3 was also nominated for:
Best Music Score of 2008
Best Graphics (Technical) of 2008
Best Graphics (Artistic) of 2008
Best Voice Acting of 2008 - for Liam Neeson as Father