Fallout 3’s legacy is a strange one. On one hand, it’s the game that not only brought the franchise back, but brought it into the mainstream. On the other, it was shown up in terms of narrative and role-playing by the Obsidian-developed New Vegas two years later. Both of these games have many quirks and technical annoyances that have aged poorly. While some of those annoyances have been smoothed over on PC and 360, the issues are significantly more pronounced on PS3.
Aside from the usual Bethesda Game Studios jank from this era, the PS3 versions of these games are messy as hell. Mixing the Gamebryo engine and the PS3 hardware turned out to be a toxic combination, introducing issues “exclusive” to the console. The biggest problem is the save bug, which causes the game to perform worse and crash more the longer you play. With each save, the file size increases, and once its over a measly 10 MB, performance apparently can take a nosedive, rendering the game unplayable by some accounts. I say “apparently” because I haven’t actually experienced this during my playthrough, due to me treating Fallout 3 like a, well, survival game.
I knew about these issues ahead of time, so before I started my playthrough I scoured message boards to find workarounds. The first thing I did was disable all autosaves. That means no saving on waiting, sleeping, or traveling: only manual saves, in moderation.
The difficulty in Fallout 3 is pretty uneven, so I’ve gone long stretches without encountering any challenges to walking through a door and getting one-shotted by a dude with a rocket launcher. The latter is extremely frustrating when it’s been half an hour since my last save.
It doesn’t help that the game has plenty of other technical issues. Aside from goofy innocuous glitches, the frequent load times actively affect my enjoyment. While the wasteland overworld is fairly seamless, once you are indoors the load times between every door transition add up. Needless to say, replaying a section with frequent loading after a death a long way from your last manual save is beyond frustrating.
This does however, create a fascinating meta challenge, a less extreme version of minimal save runs in Resident Evil games or the hardcore mode in Diablo. In Bethesda games on other platforms I’ve relied heavily on autosaves. If I die or get stuck in a wall or the game crashes, no big deal; I’ll just load an autosave from two minutes ago. In some ways it feels like the autosave system was a way to mitigate the technical issues and difficulty spikes. But remove that safety net and I’ve found myself playing smarter, more cautiously. I’m more thoughtful than ever about my skill points, weapons, armor, and what I carry in my inventory. The game truly feels like a survival simulator.
Additionally, there are steps I’m taking outside of gameplay to avoid disaster, based on tips I’ve read on the internet that may or may not actually make a difference. For one, I’ve been making each manual save a new one, never overwriting. After I get to 5-7 saves, I manually delete the oldest ones. Additionally, after every few hours I’ve been doing what’s affectionately referred to as the “cache clear code” (CCC if you’re in the know). This is a button combination you hold as the game boots up to clear the cache and potentially stave off some technical disasters. All of this is very silly for a console game.
While I’m not going to go as far as to call the bugs of the PS3 version a feature, it does create a unique experience. The game is broken to a point that it fundamentally changes the way you have to approach it. I wouldn’t recommend this version of Fallout 3 to anyone except the most die-hard PS3 sickos, but if you have the patience, you will have an experience unique to the platform, for better or (mostly) worse.
Played and captured on a PlayStation Triple
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