PC Game Fun Time

Good news for all the Fallout lovers out there!  Bethesda Softworks has announced their intention to release a Fallout 3 modding kit / editor, appropriately named the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (G.E.C.K) in December.  Also mentioned in the press release are three pieces of downloadable content scheduled for the next few months.

While I am personally not too excited about downloadable content, the news of a proper modding kit on the horizon has me very happy indeed.  Given the game’s very strong sales numbers, it seems almost certain that we will be seeing some excellent work from the modding community.

It occurs to me reading about this that there may be a somewhat hidden agenda behind the delay in the release of the mod tools for Fallout 3.  While it is fairly common for modding kits to lag behind the releases of their respective games, Bethesda has traditionally been pretty on the ball in terms of getting modding support out there early.  Could there be a political motivation behind the delay?

Simply put, having widespread modding support is now a potential liability for game publishers.  There are all sorts of possibilities for offensive material to be added to a game like Fallout 3.  Even if the shipped product did not contain the content, it is not hard to imagine a mainstream media outlet getting hold of a Fallout 3 child killing mod and creating a “Hot Coffee” style incident.  By December (Fallout 3 was released on October 28), Bethesda is probably betting that the attention will have reached a low enough level for a relatively safe release of the modding kit.

If this reasoning did play a factor in Bethesda’s decision to delay the modding kit, one can hardly blame them.  The last thing any game developer or publisher needs is a potentially very expensive lawsuit.  In any event, I look forward to seeing some high quality custom content for Fallout 3.

It has been a while since I posted my “final” review of Fallout 3 indicating my disappointment with the game’s ending.  In that time, I have started a new character and brought him up currently about level 10.

I wish I could find enough ammo to use this gun more often.

Let me just start by saying the second playthrough has been better than the first.  It turns out that on my first time playing, I barely scratched the surface of all the weird and awesome sidequests available.  Since I had scarcely explored the northern half of the map on my first time through, I promptly headed off North on my second attempt.  Almost immediately, I encountered several brilliantly crafted (and also totally bizarre) sidequests.

I won’t spoil the surprise for those of you who are still planning on putting some time into the game.  Suffice it to say, however, that Fallout 3 is a huge game, and sticking even roughly to the main quest throughout will cause you to miss all but a tiny fraction of it.

My second play experience has also proven quite a bit harder than my first.  Instead of pumping tons of points into small guns and turning myself into a sniper rifle wielding head exploding machine, I have been mostly focusing on big guns and energy weapons.  Unfortunately, at this stage of the game I have found almost no energy weapons, and big gun ammo has been scarce.  So, I have been forced to rely on my assault rifle a fair amount.

This has also led me to making some use of explosives and the game’s homemade weapons system.  While it is not particularly robust (there are only a relatively small number of predefined schematics to be found in the game world) it is still a lot of fun.  The homemade bottlecap mines, for example, are incredibly effective, almost ridiculously so.  While your mileage may vary depending on how you distribute your skill points, for me they do about 5 times as much damage as the standard frag mines.

The weapon crafting system seems like an area that should be ripe for modding.  Unfortunately, mum is still the word from Bethesda on the release of an editor like we had for Oblivion.  While smaller mods have sprung up anyway, without a dedicated toolset the chances of a large, successful modding community sustaining itself are pretty slim.

Even without mods, Fallout 3 is offering a lot of replay value rarely found in a game.  But with a large modding community, Fallout 3 could be so much more.  I continue to hope for an official release of an editor from Bethesda.  I am pretty optimistic that this will happen.  I just hope it comes soon enough that there is still interest in using it.