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I can hardly believe it – 1 year had passed since Fallout 3 was released, and I gave up trying to play Fallout 3 due to the numerous crashes I kept getting. At the time, the patch level for it was at 1.35.
After finishing Dragon Age for the 4th time a couple of weeks back, I re-installed Fallout 3 on my “new” Windows 7 OS, and applied the latest patch I could find, which is v1.7.
I am glad to say that either the new OS or the patch made Fallout 3 finally playable. Oh there were still crashes, but not as often. No longer do I crash near water. No longer do I crash when trying to exit Megaton. No longer do I crash when I switch weapons. No longer do I crash just for simply running out in the wastelands.
So, I was faced with my old saves. Many people would know this syndrome well – “what the hell was the last thing I was doing?”. Yes it’s been a YEAR since I gave up playing at level 5. I was very tempted to start all over again, but I decided against it. I loaded up the “newest” save among the list, and tried to see if I could “pick up where I left off”. Initially I was floundering, and not because I didn’t know how to control the game. It was more of a sense of disorientation. I had a number quests in my Pip-Boy 3000 that needed doing, and I didn’t know where to begin. Also, I seem to have lost the “package” which was found in the Marigold Station in Grayditch, and supposedly to hand it over to a guy in Girdershade. I went there, talked to the guy, but no dialog option showed up for handing the package in.
The second sad thing is that I seemed to have lost Dogmeat, my faithful dog. Well he must have died since I didn’t find him in Scrapyard. He could have died before the latest save, but I don’t remember. Ah well.
Anyway, from there I just went on my merry way. The great thing about Bethesda games is that you are not “forced” into a linear progression for the main quest. You are free to run around the world and kill stuff as you please. I did just that – “To heck with the main quest, I’ll just look around first”.
Well one thing led to another, and I picked up a robot (RL-3) follower as well as a Brotherhood Of Steel paladin. So now I am wandering the wastelands in a “3-man patrol team”, so to speak. We killed almost everything we came across, including those “Yao Guai” (妖怪), which are actually mutated bears, and Deathclaws. I found these 2 to be the toughest monsters in the Wastelands.
Then, I ran into a very surprising problem – I hit level 20 and I couldn’t gain xp anymore. What the hell? I haven’t even found the father yet! I haven’t even gone to Rivet City! After scouring the Internet for info, I realised that I could easily increase the level cap with a mod. Since I was downloading mods, I took the “pretty face make-up” mod too, to make women look more like women than haggard hags. Yeah I know it may not be very in-keeping with the whole post-nuclear apocalypse theme, but I want nice looking women in my games 🙂
The only problem is, I still have alot of places I haven’t explored yet and I got “stuck” on the main questline last night. So much so that I actually followed it to the end of the game. Well not really stuck, but it’s that “I gotta do this thing to see what happens next”. Yeah I did that for the main questline and inadvertently finished the game.
I still haven’t done Tenpenny Towers yet, for one thing. I also haven’t figured out what those satellite dishes are for yet too. Also I haven’t gone inside the Outcast HQ to wipe them all out yet. Well originally I had wanted to be friends with them, but for some reason, they now go hostile on sight. Even those Wasteland patrols out there also turn hostile when I pass near them. No it’s not because I’m wearing Enclave armour nor Brotherhood armour. I tried wearing the Outcast Armour too, and they still went hostile on me.
Oh yes, I still haven’t made anybody’s pants explode yet … *evil snigger*
So tonight, I’m gonna find a save point where I have not triggered the final sequence of events yet, and I’m gonna run all over the Wastelands doing my own stuff until I’m good and ready to “finish” the game.
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