Fallout 3 is an unashamedly broken game. It’s buggy, glitchy and regularly freezes, but I always come back for more. If you want to know why, it’s simply that in real life I just love hoarding stuff. As anyone who’s played the game will know, there’s a whole lot of stuff in the Capital Wasteland to take and a whole bunch of lockers to keep it all in.
I admit, I’m obsessed with collecting things, mainly games and gaming bits and bobs but I have a ton of other stuff too, ranging from stacks of boxed car models to a couple of pieces of British Soldiers’ WWI equipment (a water bottle and entrenching tool, if you must know). Collecting and keeping stuff is just something that I’ve always done and I hardly ever throw things away, sell them or even use them, surprisingly. I’ve never sold or traded in a game, for example; I’d rather keep it and not use it than trade it in and not have it at all.
Enter Fallout 3, and the Capital Wasteland; specifically, all the random crap scattered throughout said wasteland. Whenever I stumble across an object that looks like it might have some use, is interesting or is rare, I pick it up. One of the main stats that I always try to bolster is that of strength so my character can carry more stuff around with him, and Buffout (which lets you carry more) became an absolute must. Once I obtained a house in Megaton with actual storage, nothing was safe from my hoarding. You put me in a room with a fork and unless it’s bolted down, I’m taking it.
The promise of loot is always something that gets me through certain quests, even if the game is constantly freezing, glitching out and forcing me to restart every 20 minutes. Unlike most, though, I don’t really want the loot to use it, I just want to have it. After recently picking up the Fallout 3 Game of the Year Edition for the DLC, I completed Operation: Anchorage! with the promise of special equipment behind a blast door underground. Upon picking up the Winterised T-51b Power Armour – an extremely rare bit of kit – I didn’t instantly equip it and roam the Wasteland in my pristine, damage-reducing attire. I fast travelled back to my house and stored that shit in a locker.
Speaking of lockers, my house in Megaton allows my OCD side to creep out a little bit. One locker is used to store all of my guns, another for clothes and armour, the fridge stores food and aid items and the locker upstairs is filled with all my miscellaneous tat that I’ve stolen from you.
Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition is probably one of the worst games I’ve played, framerate-wise. If it’s not just freezing every 5 minutes then the framerate is juddering all over the place like a post-apocalyptic slideshow. Do I care? Not one bit, because I know that if I persist I’ll get that awesome piece of equipment that I can store in one of the lockers in my house. Story, gameplay and karma be damned, I’m in it for the forks.
If I remember right, the T-51b had some insane glitch that meant it didn’t deterioate unless you used it for real life days on end. I think it was that armour, or it was another.
Really? I used the normal T-51b (from Fort Constantine) for quite a bit of the game and it deteriorated all the way down. Need to get it fixed – apparently there’s a guy in Point Lookout who has a glitched repair stat so he can fix things back up to 100%.
Yep, doesn’t degrade at all.
I just stuck with that after Anchorage forever… and ever.. then I lost my save.
As for collecting things… I love loot! One of the main reasons I loved Borderlands, opening crates for guns was just… awesome.