Fallout 3: Rivet City

Last weekend was a marathon; borderline addiction, perhaps, but it happened. I just need to say that my personal life (what little there is of it) did not suffer. I may have added eight hours onto the time spent clock on Saturday alone. More hours would follow; as of this writing (Tuesday night) I just surpassed twenty five hours.

The focus here though is about Rivet City. Early on in the game (early being relative here, I guess) I had two quests pointing me to the floating city. One involved searching for my father, and the other was finding a rogue android. Now, as I was prepared and heading out of my home in Megaton, a lady got my attention and provided me with an android component that would prove the rogue was dead. Seems simple enough.

I begun the journey and was quickly blocked by a group of raiders living under a bridge. I must have died four times before clearing the group out, and continuing my journey. Time are tough: no stimpaks, a little bit of food and barely any ammo. I was only halfway there. I ran across the Brotherhood of Steel's Citadel but they offered no assistance. This is the point in the game where I realized that I would need to save often. Now I have hundreds of them, and they certainly came in handy.

Reaching Rivet City was great; once I got in, I began exploring and felt some stability. Previous to this, I wasn't sure how the game would play out, but now I was in a structured environment, with lots of characters and things to check out. Dr. Zimmer got a hold of me early on and I gave him the component, proving the android was dead (although he really isn't) and getting my good karma and achievement points. I would later discover that I missed a big component of the quest: there was a perk that I could have gotten if I chose another route. Well, this was upsetting, but also a testament to the many avenues available to you in the game. You can end the quest early, getting very little reward (50 caps in this case) or go full out and get some pretty nice things.

Now I had a decision: load up a previous save and replay two hour of game, or just keep going? As it turns out, it was an easy decision and I reloaded an older save and started playing. One thing is for sure though, it did not take long to catch up as you don't have to go through every conversation choice and didn't have to root through every container. I would jump off the end of the sip and swim through irradiated water, fight giant lobster-creatures and work my way through booby-trapped halls. But the reward was there: I got a great plasma rifle that absolutely vapourizes enemies, and a nice perk to add to my skills. I have to step back and wonder, in the grand scheme, if the time spent doing this was worth it. Depends on how far you scale back, but I may be missing the point: is anything you are doing, that you are having fun with, a waste of time? The Replicated Man was a nice quest, and really got me into the game. It proved that Fallout is not screwing around, it has depth and interesting things to do. It's full of interesting characters, and little back stories. Rivet City seems to have some decent history, and the world you're in is extremely rich.