Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve been chewing over. Today, while flicking through Amazon Prime TV, a question popped into Ollie’s head…
“War. War never changes.”
If this quote sounds familiar to you, then chances are you have had some experience with the Fallout franchise. First released by Interplay for Windows and Mac in 1997, it received critical acclaim and gained a significant cult following for several years, but it wasn’t until Bethesda Softworks purchased the rights and released the sublime Fallout 3 in 2008 that the franchise really took off. Now it seems there’s truly no stopping it, with a brand new Amazon Prime TV series gaining critical acclaim across the board.
Bethesda is well known by this point for its signature flavour of RPGs. Often taking place in a vast landscape with emergent gameplay at its core, Fallout 3 was truly the pinnacle of this vision when it dropped. Yes, the team would undoubtedly expand upon it with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4, but I would wager that none of Bethesda’s subsequent games have captured the same magic that Fallout 3 so effortlessly demonstrated more than a decade and a half ago.
The game starts off inside one of the franchise’s iconic ‘Vaults’; underground settlements designed to protect mankind from the dangers and radiation of the outside world. The first scene quite literally depicts your birth, with the one and only Liam Neeson providing voiceover work for your father. The following couple of hours of gameplay follows your life as you mature into a grownup in Vault 101 under the watchful eye of The Overseer, and while we won’t spoilt exactly what happens, it’s not long until you leave your comfortable life and venture out into the Capital Wasteland.
What follows is… well, it’s entirely up to you. You can stick to the main storyline if you like, but Fallout 3’s true genius lies in its many, many sidequests. Fancy activating a dormant nuclear bomb and decimating an entire settlement? You can! How about voluntarily becoming severely radiated to aid research into a ‘Wasteland Survival Guide’? Yep, you can do that too. It might sound rather quaint in 2024 to sing the praises of a game that boasts a ton of sidequests, but Fallout 3 just does it all so well that we can’t help but fall in love every time we play.
As we mentioned earlier, Fallout 3 is over 15 years old at this point, and while you can get a pretty well-optimised version of the game if you opt to play on Xbox or via PS Plus, there’s no denying that it’s aged considerably since its release. Facial animations look a bit off, combat is a bit iffy at times, and it’s all just so brown. But all of this pales in comparison to the level of freedom Fallout 3 offers alongside its excellent setting and devastatingly beautiful atmosphere.
So my question is… what gives, Bethesda? If we’re to ignore the fact that Fallout 3 runs flawlessly on the Series X via backward compatibility, it’s a game that’s nevertheless still trapped on seventh-gen console hardware. When you consider that Skyrim, a game that launched a full three years after Fallout 3, has been ported to almost every platform under the sun (okay, slight exaggeration, but only slight), including the Switch, it baffles me that Fallout 3 hasn’t been given the same treatment.
Now, something to consider is that Bethesda may be remastering Fallout 3 for modern platforms. This information came via a document leak from the Microsoft vs. FTC case back in 2023, and hinted at both Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion receiving a new lick of paint. Obviously, a leak such as this shouldn’t be taken as any kind of guarantee, nor does it mean that a potential remaster would be earmarked for the Switch, but at the very least, it gives us hope.
And in the Capital Wasteland, we could all do with a bit of hope.
Are you surprised Fallout 3 hasn’t been ported to the Switch? Have you played it on another platform? Leave a comment with your thoughts down below.
