First Impression Video: Fallout 3 (PC/Steam)

This is the 139th instalment of our first impression video series. Today, we are playing Fallout 3.

Welcome to the 139th instalment of our first impression video series. Today, we are playing the Steam game, Fallout 3 for the first time. You can check out the video directly on YouTube or in the embed below:

I can definitely I wasn’t expecting to start 2024’s selection of games with a dud like this, but hey, when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

I heard a lot of great things about this game, but in researching this game, it wasn’t really clear if it would work on Windows 10. Obviously, since this is the Steam version, you need Windows 10 to run the Steam client. The problem is, you need an older (and unsupported!) operating system to get this game to work. As a result, this game wound up being unplayable.

Now, I did try and get this game running. I am aware that there needs to be workarounds with some of these games and am willing to try and utilize these techniques to get these games to run. The problem is that my usual bag of tricks didn’t work this time. Whether it was running this game as administrator, running this in various compatibility modes, or Googling for solutions. The last option suggested switching between windowed mode and full screen mode (no dice) and fiddling with the resolution of the game (which didn’t work either). There was the idea of using a suite of third party mods to get this working, but I wasn’t enthusiastic enough to register an account to get the mod files.

As I mention in the video, the real question is this: why is this allowed to be in the Steam store if there’s no convenient way to run this game? Some people apparently got lucky and got this running out of the box, but I wasn’t so lucky. I argue that there should be a warning label saying that it’s possible that this game may not work on current operating systems. There is an asterisk in the Steam page that says that the Steam client is only compatible with Windows 10, but there are plenty of games on the store page that says this, yet the game runs fine. This game, however, didn’t work for me. At the very least, it would inform customers before purchasing this game that there might be some issues.

What’s more, if Bethesda has no interest in fixing this game (that can be its own debate), then maybe it shouldn’t be sold as a game on Steam as if it’s seemingly expected to run without issue. There’s plenty of ways of addressing this issue, but just leaving it on the storefront page and expecting others to fix critical issues isn’t the greatest solution – especially when people like me are finding out the hard way that the game is basically broken on install.

At any rate, I hope my video can at least inform others that there are those out there that can’t get this to run and getting this to run could involve significant hoops to jump through. I have no particular attachment to this game as I’ve never played any games in this franchise up to now, so I’m not exactly losing my mind that I couldn’t get this to work. I’m just conveying to others what my experience was here and giving you a “buyer beware” warning is all.

This video is part of our first impression video series. Below is a list of 50 of the previously made first impression video’s we’ve made in the past: