Over the weekend I finished watching my way through the Amazon Fallout Series and I have to say… It nails the vibe of Fallout perfectly. There are so many things that are just “right” about the world and I have a feeling I am going to have to watch the entire series a few more times before all of them sync in. There are moments like Super Duper Mart that are pulled directly from the games, and then there are just set dressing and elements that are so familiar but not necessarily directly connected. For example the placement of first aid kits on walls in exactly the right location to where you find them in pretty much every fallout game. Then there are the sound effects and quite honestly just by those alone… I know exactly what weapon is being fired at any given time. Someone on this show clearly cared about these details and I greatly appreciate all of the loving work that they did on getting them right.
All of this built a strong desire to dive back in and immerse myself in the Fallout Universe. Now about once a year I end up playing some New Vegas because it is one of my all-time favorite games. Fallout 3 however is a game that I have not replayed in over a decade. So I went through the process of getting it up and running. I tried to install some mods and then got frustrated by the fact that apparently, you need to downgrade the current 2021 client… in order to get most of them to work. So instead I nuked everything and started fresh just playing through the vanilla game of the year client as downloaded from Steam.
I’ve got to be honest… the game as a whole holds up surprisingly well. I mean it still has obtuse gunplay and is full of that good good Bethesda jank, but nothing really felt terribly off from the formula we have all gotten used to. Sure mechanically there are some missing features that we have in the more modern Fallout games like 4 and 76, but mechanically it felt solid. I’ve not played a ton so far, and unfortunately Steam seems to not be able to track actual time spent playing the game and instead tracks time spent with the launcher open. I think if I were to play this further I would need to mod it a bit. I had forgotten just how desolate Fallout 3 looks. In the later titles, they realized that barren wastelands were a bit uninteresting to stare at in 3D, but this first of the modern Fallouts is a bit “spartan”.
Last night I spent some time diving back into Fallout 76. At some point, I completely restarted the game and as such still have a lot of the early quest scaffolding to work my way through. I find myself with the itch to live more in the Fallout world so between 3 and 76 I figure I am probably going to be doing a lot more of that in the coming weeks. 76 is a title that I feel like I have never really gotten into the swing of, so it would be interesting to play it enough to really feel like I am experiencing the benefits of the live service side of things. I know it has been a constantly expanding game over the last few years so it will be cool to get through the original story and see some of the newer stuff.
Have you watched your way through the new Amazon series? What were your thoughts? Has it also prompted you to want to spend more time in Fallout games? Drop me a line below.
My comment posted before I got to say that New Vegas is also my favorite of the series. I never finished a Fallout game until New Vegas and I binged-played it like I do my favorite MMOs which never happens for me with single player games.
Have only watched the first episode. When the first aid kit comes out my wife asked “what is that?” and “why don’t they use the needles on everyone?”. I blurted out “first aid kit” like my wife has any context to games she has never heard of until I said I wanted to watch the show. I didn’t have an argument against her second question other than “vault dwellers are dumb sometimes”.
I have maybe 2 more episodes left and I am enjoying it, but I have a love-hate relationship with the Fallout GAMES that thankfully didn’t translate to the series.
Fallout games are, for me, too bleak. Like Diablo, the atmosphere works a bit TOO well and I end up with an very persistent sense of dread and disgust that prevents me from making headway.
The series has a lot of action and humor that I think works for me where the games do not because the show is not about “me” but “someone else”. If THEY get bummed out in the Wasteland, that’s to be expected, but I don’t have to dwell on the situation except the one that other people are inhabiting for the next 5 minutes or so.
The Fallout we need is the happy-go-lucky-never-leave-the-vault cozy life sim.