Nostalgia Plays 2.1 Fallout 3 [Mods, Mercs, and Metros]
A new Nostalgia Plays series! Don’t worry, though, this is intended to run concurrently with the first, my Thief: Deadly Shadows playthrough, so expect more of that soon.
So. Fallout 3. It’s been a good few years since I last played this. In fact, I played this so long ago that I was still using my ancient (now stripped apart and cannibalised) desktop PC, and I was still worried about the Leaving Cert (end of high school exams, for you yanks). Thus, this game definitely qualifies for Nostalgia Plays.
Mods! I have fond memories of original, vanilla Fallout 3, but frankly it looks and feels kind of dated and bland nowadays. Enter, immersion mods! The main two I’m using (both of which can be found on Nexus) are: Project Reality, which takes away the green tint, adds more realistic and varied skies, and puts in lots of enhanced weather patterns like storms, rain, snow, etc.; and the Flora Overhaul, specifically the Total Devastation edition, which makes everything look like The Road, which is aces in my book.
Hell yeah
I should also note that this is the GOTY edition off Steam - I can’t seem to find my original disc, and I’m not sure it’d work anyway. Also it was on sale, so why the hell not. This means that, if I get to any of the DLC, it’ll be my first time with that stuff.
I actually started playing a few days ago, which has perhaps removed some of the immediacy from this first post, but I’ll summarise and describe things so far as best I can. I also caved and used a pre-made save game to skip the opening and get right to the Wasteland - yeah, yeah, cheating, I know, but I can’t count how many times I’ve been through that opening and it gets a little tedious after a while. I wanted to get to the goods, dammit!
My character is Alice Nine, and she is a bad motherfucker. Preferred weapons are shotgun, flamer, ripper, explosives of all kinds. Preferred armour - as scary and gnarly as possible. Currently wearing a be-goggled sack and bloodstained Talon Mercenary combat armor pulled from the body of a dying man. This reminds me - Alice has a vendetta against the Talon Mercenary Company. There’s some bullshit about a bounty on her head or something? Whatever, it’s her mission to end them by any means, preferably involving fire and explosives.
Atmosphere is everything. On the first day, I crossed the Wasteland with a storm at my back, wind wailing overhead, thunder rolling and crashing, and lightning flashing. Today, after going metro-spelunking, I spent an hour or more slowly making my way through a stretch of the DC ruins in the twilight while nuclear snow fell, eyes straining to see the super mutants I knew were waiting for me among the rubble. Later on, I stalked raiders when the dark and the snow came in again. Fallout 3 can often be goofy and over the top, conflict abrupt and anticlimactic, but when things get tense and fraught and moody like this, oh boy does this game sing.
Tonight, after I’d killed the last raider in the camp, I stood on one of the rooftops I’d emerged onto under the falling snow and gazed for a while out at the blasted trees rising from the fog. They looked like tombstones.
