Fallout 3: Completion

What better way to ring in your 30th birthday than to plow through some Enclave soldiers and beat the main storyline in Fallout 3? This also marks the fourth Fallout post in four weeks: Fallout Friday seems to be official, but without a main quest to journey through, I can't imagine there will be many more. Then again, there are a number of expansions...we shall see. I've already installed Broken Steel; apparently it was the first expansion released and for good reason as it's the only way to continue the game after beating it. It goes like this: once you start the very last quest, there is no turning back. You complete it, credits and video roll, and you are booted to the main menu. You can reload a previous save, but you can't really exist in the world after beating it. Broken Steel continues - so to speak - the main quest and if you have it installed, the game continues and the world is your plaything.

Broken Steel also raises the level cap from 20 to 30, although after just a few hours more of playing I am now at level 22. I was at level 20 and not thinking I was close to the end of the game when I was very near, which speaks to the length of the main quest. It's short. I spent 55 hours traversing the Capital Wastelands and only doing main story here and there, surely there had to be more, right? Not so much; the quest was interesting, but not difficult (thankfully). In contrast to the 150 hours I put into Oblivion, you could ask what's missing here? Well, all I can say is that Fallout 3 is tighter. Exploration is not as tedious, and the side quests seemed more relevant. Those guild quests from Oblivion can feel like grinding, as they just seem to go on forever without much variety.

So what else is there to say about the finish? This game has me in complete addiction. Do I want it to end? There are a few things I want to do, many of which just revolve around the achievements. Earlier this week I collected all the bobbleheads (I had about 12 throughout most of the game - there are 20 in total). I finished a couple of side quests and I'm starting to install the other packs. From what I understand they are not incredibly long, which is nice. This means tighter gameplay and story. Remember Shivering Isles? It was good, yes, but I could live without trudging through a mushroom infested multi-colour cave again. I don't feel that same attachment as I did in Oblivion, and you can blame that on the world. Nobody wants to live in the Wasteland; Cyrodill looked pretty appealing: colourful, lush and vast. Oblivion was a world I wanted to go back to; I have no urge to play through Fallout in its entirety again, but I will be very eager to jump into a Fallout 4.