Last week, I wrote about how games had fit into a 6 month period of my life that saw a lot of change. I don't want to make personal reflections on games and my life a thing...but the announcement of Fallout 4 got me thinking about the fact that I loved Fallout 3 but never completed it. And then I started thinking about why that was.
Fallout 3 was released on October 28th of 2008. In late August of 2008, I broke up with my partner of 6 years. We had lived together for more than 5 of those years, had adopted two cats and a dog together, and bought a condo right before the real estate bubble in the DC suburbs...well, it didn't pop, but selling our condo 5 years later wasn't going to work out for us. It was as bad of a breakup as you can have. I was hurt and confused and devastated, and we kept living together while we sorted out how to physically break apart when the emotional connection had been gone long before that fall. At the same time, there was this weird amiability between us. We had tickets to a baseball game on my birthday a few days later, and we went together and sat down the first base line and I kept score as my team got shut out by a divisional rival and I watched my favorite player get his ankle broken and carted off the field right in front of us. It was an appropriate day.
She moved out 3 or 4 weeks later, and I turned to video games. I also turned to drinking alone, sometimes while playing video games and sometimes games kept me from that more self-destructive behavior. I played a lot of Rock Band 2 after it was released, partly because we had played a lot of Rock Band together. When Fable 2 was released, I played a lot of that as well and it became one of the few games I completed in that console generation. The same goes for Mass Effect 2, which had been on my shelf since release but I picked up again and helped fill the void I had in my life at the time. I completed every loyalty mission, proving that I wasn't a bad person, or just bad at being a caring, attentive person who listened to others' needs and desires and tried to help them achieve their goals and find personal fulfillment.
Fallout was something different. While the Fable and Mass Effect sequels were big, fully realized worlds, I felt a pull to see them through to the end. They were stories I had to complete. As a resident of the DC suburbs, Fallout 3 put me in a familiar but foreign world. Landmarks that had stood forever and helped create a sense of place had been destroyed and destroyed in spectacular fashion, with minimal explanation. I was left to exit the vault and make sense of the wasteland in front of me. I felt at home in this world, but felt no pull to see it to its end. I was searching the wasteland for my lost family, completing quests because that's what you do, but not needing or wanting to get to the end. So I wandered.
It's been many years since I played any of Fallout 3. I remember loving the systems and the look. I remember scavenging gear. I remember spending a lot of time in Megaton, building my small bachelor apartment and using it as a repository for all the things I might need later or just wanted to hang on to for a bit longer. I remember completing some wildlife related quests for the sweet, naive vendor in town but never helping her finish her book. I think I helped a town of recluses fend off some bandits, I think I helped save a small boy from some spiders or scorpions, and I think I found a subway full of vampires or child slavers or freaks of some kind. I may have slaughtered them, or tried to use them to help further my own needs. The later seems most likely. I didn't blow up Megaton. How could I destroy the first people I had met after leaving the Vault?
I fired up that same save file on my Xbox 360 about 2 years ago. Despite never acting to finish Fallout 3 - or even really advance the story very far at all - I've always wanted to do so. It's appropriate really; wanting something without being willing to really work at it was how I ended up wandering in the wasteland in the fall of 2008, then playing a ton of Fallout aimlessly.
I'm in a new city now, removed from the real life wasteland of Washington DC and it's suburbs. I'm excited about Fallout 4. And I'm in a spot personally where I want to fire up Fallout 3 and put in the time to see the whole story. My biggest decision now is if I do so on Xbox 360 or PC with mods. I'm leaning towards 360 due to the simplicity and the idea of finishing it how I started it...even if I know I'm going to start fresh with a new save file, completely from scratch. There are too many mistakes and things I don't want to repeat from that first playthrough. I know that's the case, even if I don't remember all the digital details.
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