I’m playing Fallout 3 again. I want to get the disk that has the two downloadable extra games on it, and I figured I should play the game through again just to familiarize myself with it. I’m playing it differently this time though.
For those who don’t know, Fallout 3 is a role playing video game. It takes place some time after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed America. You’re roaming around in what’s left of Washington DC in this kind of Mad Max style post apocalypse. Being that I love love LOVE post apocalypse shit, this game is right up my ally. It’s made by the same designers who did the game Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and Fallout 3 is very similar to that game in the way that it’s played.
It’s an open world “sandbox” style game where you basically wander around this big ass world and run into different people who provide you various missions and quests. As you do quests, they open up more opportunities to do other quests and missions. There are all kinds of little side missions and stuff that you can do aside from the main quest. The first time I played it through, I mostly ended up doing the main quest and I blew off a lot of the side missions. This time I had intended on ignoring the main quest and just doing the side missions this time though. And I’m still pretty much doing that, but things have changed slightly.
You see, there’s this “karma” system in the game. Basically, what that means is that when you do “good” actions, you get good karma and when you do bad actions, you get bad karma. The more karma you accumulate in either direction changes the way the game plays. The first time through, I was mostly neutral, leaning towards the good side. I helped people when they needed it and I didn’t go out of my way to kill anyone who wasn’t attacking me. I built up a decent amount of good karma points. I got a little bit of bad karma from stealing shit that didn’t belong to me, but for the most part, I was a fairly stand up video game guy.
But this time around, through an accidental goof up, I ended up having to kill an entire town of people. Right at the beginning of the game they send you to this nasty ass town built out of what looks like wrecked airplane parts, sheet metal and industrial grating. It’s built around an undetonated nuclear bomb. Like everything else in Fallout 3, it’s all very dirty and rusty and bleak. There are a decent amount of missions that stem from this town (one of which is to detonate the bomb and blow up the town) and it’s a good place to go back to when you’re stuck for something to do.
Unfortunately, I was sneaking around in the town at night trying to find something or other, and I attempted to pickpocket a sleeping person. I’ve done this before and sometimes it works and sometimes they wake up and give you shit. This time the chick woke up and ran out of her house screaming. That’s when everyone in the town decided to start shooting at me. So I had two options: The first was to run from the town and never come back. The second was to kill everyone who was trying to shoot me. I chose to kill everyone who was trying to shoot me, which turned out to be a lot of people. I managed to get through all of that, but it completely fucked my karma. I don’t know if it was beyond repair, but at that point I pretty much made up my mind that I was going to go through the game doing as much evil shit as I could.
It’s very cathartic, if somewhat disturbing.
There’s this weird apartment complex down in the southwest corner of the map called Tenpenny Towers. I hiked down there (which is a long goddamned walk, even in video game time) and when I got to the complex, I pretty much decided to walk through and shotgun the whole place, Amityville Horror style. Bodies piled up pretty high. I didn’t even bother saving the people who were necessary for my missions. I figured that a job worth doing was a job worth doing right. And if I’m going to just kill everyone in the town, I better be thorough. It might take a while, but I’m contemplating just killing everyone in the fucking game. I know that a lot of the non-essential characters respawn and come back, but whatever. I just want to see if I can get a completely evil character and still finish the game.
Oh, and there’s a thing you can get that allows your character to become a cannibal. So now after I kill innocent people, I can also eat them. GO ME!