The first thing you notice about the guide is its sheer weight. The hardback version, for example, is a full pound heavier than the previous iteration, and it should be: there’s every possible piece of information you’ll ever need in there. But it’s the content inside that matters, and I’m happy to say that everything I and the team at Bethesda wanted has made it into both these weighty tomes. Glossy paper makes the screenshots pop. The Capital Wasteland map has new content areas labeled. But let’s delve into the guide on a chapter-by-chapter basis:

From the very start, we’ve revamped the guide to make it user-friendly, giving brief descriptions of what each chapter contains. This begins with the Training, which runs through all the statistics you need during character creation, along with general character development and Perks all the way to Level 30. Chapter 2 is the Factions and Bestiary, charting the machinations of every Wasteland clan and association from the Bandits to the Brotherhood of Steel, the Aliens to the wig-wearing Ghoul Guard. Then comes statistics for every single enemy in the game.

I’m particularly happy with Chapters 3 and 4: brand-new Wasteland Census and Gear information. The Census showcases every single person with a name that appears in Fallout 3. And I mean EVERYONE, along with where to find them, their biography, and their related Quests. Each Wasteland dweller has their own portrait too; a screen-taking process that took 72 hours alone to accomplish. But you will be able to look up information on anyone you meet, whether it’s Split Jack the Bandit or Leaf Mother Laurel. The Gear features every available weapon (along with a render of it), and all the wearable equipment you can find, with statistics and advice on how (and where) to find each type. Naturally, this includes associated Quests, unique weapons, custom weapons, and every other possible piece of information you need.

Next comes the familiar Main Quest, all the Miscellaneous Quests, and a thorough Tour of the Capital Wasteland. Did I just sum up pages 149-464 in one sentence? Yes, I think I did. Not to worry, there’s still close to 300 additional pages of content to peruse. This encompasses Quests and extensive Tours of every location you visit (and many you haven’t even spotted yet) during Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout, and Mothership Zeta. Finally to finish, there’s an Appendix listing Achievements, Trophies, and the location of hundreds of important items. Did I mention we have an index now, too?

The man-hours on this project and the social activity missed because of it cannot be understated, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. This book was created with great affection for the game, the series, the developer, and most importantly, the gamer. I hope it helps your Wasteland excursions for months to come.

David S J Hodgson. October 13, 2009.

The guide follows the rule of having increasingly more awesome Brotherhood of Steel action poses

Darting through Old Olney, the guide tells you when to fear the Deathclaws, and even reveals more about Kidd and Witt’s demise

There’s a fully detailed map of Point Lookout, showing absolutely everything you can find. And we mean everything.

My Wasteland wandering took a turn for the swampy over the past couple of months when I attempted a meander through the wilds of Point Lookout, and furthered my cunning adventures across the Capital Wasteland in Broken Steel. The information I accrued, including some delicious Easter Eggs never seen outside of the Bethesda compound, are all bundled up nicely in the third (or fourth) official strategy guide, on sale now (August 25^th). Naturally I was more than eager to explore every nook, cranny, and deranged Russian bear nest around, and thankfully the good folks at Bethesda were there for the highs (setting fire to an occult tome of fearsome power) and the lows (weeping at the headless torso of a favorite robot), as well as the stuff only the truly deranged would ever find (like that sunken ocean treasure with no buoy marker).

Those with previous Fallout guide experience will be familiar with the format. To start with, there’s an entertaining Foreward written by a Bethesda staffer, then a chapter all about the new entities, Perks, and other matters that affect your character’s ongoing well-being. Tips on all the new Perks you receive throughout your increased level cap are of particular interest, but there’s also complete statistical evidence for every new item, weapon, and inventory piece that sometimes borders on the insanely-meticulous. Did you know, for example, that the Police Hat is the only headgear you can wear with “that scar” on your head? If you did, you’ve probably been playing this game too much, but even so, you’ll still need to add this tome to your collection.

Due to the fact that Point Lookout receives a thorough inspection and trek, the Enhanced chapters are only for the additional items you receive during the two new content releases, which is what this guide is mainly all about; Broken Steel and Point Lookout. When you’re ready to embark on an Enclave-culling campaign, you’d expect there to be copious and detailed notes on every move you can make throughout Broken Steel… and you’d be right. But you’ll also be happy to find newly-updated maps showing exactly how the Capital Wasteland has changed since the invention and distribution of Aqua Pura. Every single new occurrence is logged, as well as all the Miscellaneous and Freeform Quests so you don’t miss a trick. Whether it’s befriending Bandits or shaking down a Ghoul with a bad wig, there’s a wealth of information to share here. So we did.

The gloomy and violent Point Lookout has an atmosphere so thick you could cut with a spoon. So we chartered a Ferryboat and turned over every rock and dived into the ocean depths to locate every single item in this brand-new region. Aside from taking you through the Main, Miscellaneous and Freeform Quests in these parts, there’s an extra-massive Tour chapter with dozens of secondary locations. Need to know the precise location of the downed Jet pilot, and know what was on his Blackbox voice recorder? Maybe you don’t, but we’re telling you anyway. Heck, there’s even a trip back to the Dunwich Building for a certain, supernatural Quest.

We sincerely hope you enjoy perusing through this guide as much as I did blasting Ghouls and Ghoul hunters in Plik’s private safari. After a quick trip around low-earth orbit for an extra-special final guide later this year that could cause a hernia if you lift it, my year-and-a-half rampage through the Capital Wasteland may soon be at an end….

Purchase the original guide HERE or the Limited Edition Collector’s Edition HERE.

Purchase the Game Add-On Guide for Operation Anchorage and The Pitt HERE.

Purchase the Game Add-On Guide for Broken Steel and Point Lookout HERE.

A smattering of never-been-seen-before art finishes off this tome nicely.

Look for the menacing Brotherhood of Steel member on this guide's cover, along with a variety of guide information on the back.

An example of a Walkthrough chapter; in this case showing the optimal route to collect Steel Ingots during your sweaty stay in The Pitt.

In early February 2009, I was lucky enough to venture into the Capital Wasteland and beyond for a jaunt through Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt. The fruits of my latest expedition can be digested today (May 26^th), as the Official Game Guide to The Pitt and Operation: Anchorage hits stores. Having charted the topography of the original game, we employed many of the same elements to this new tome, which couldn’t have been possible with out the help and continued support of Bethesda. I mean, who else would have found the secret Morse code radio signals that no one’s figured out yet, right?

   If you’ve seen the original (or chunky hardback collector’s) guide, you know what to expect: There’s an initial chapter devoted to the new enemies, Perks, and other gameplay elements that affect your ongoing game. For those excited by statistics, there’s a whole lot of them, listing abilities for the new enemies, weapons, and items. Later into the book there’s a complete Walkthrough for Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt, complete with those fabled flow charts, specific decisions you can make, and all the different outcomes listed. Naturally, we went a step further, too: 

  All of the new locations also receives a Tour inspection, which allows you to peruse through the full-color maps just like the first guide to pinpoint weapon caches, concentrations of enemies, and other places of note. Aside from detailed overview maps that show at least twice the data of your Pip-Boy’s World Map, there is specific and exclusive cartographical information for every place you visit. If you need to check out the crisscross of scaffolding of the Downtown suspended walkways in The Pitt, we show you where everything is, floor by floor. This means the book can be utilized in two ways, whether you’re investigating the Abandoned Apartments of Pitt Uptown during your Quest, or at your leisure. Collectibles also make a sporadic appearance here too; and they are duly noted in the Appendices at the back of the book.

   As an added bonus, this book has two Enhanced Encyclopedias. One shows every piece of armor, outfit, and headgear that you can find, and the other details every single weapon, along with a profile picture of the gun, knife, stick, or mangling machine in question. There’s a picture of each weapon in action (usually being forced down the gullet of a Super Mutant), as well as statistics, and where they are likely to be located. This includes every Custom and Unique Weapon too. Think of these as catalogs of impressive Wasteland warrior-wear and attack implements that you can view before you trek to locate them.

  I haven’t even enthused about the Gallery section at the back of the book either; this features exclusive, pre-production art from both Game Add-Ons, as well as some fantastic, non-irradiated versions of many of the in-game posters. Would you like a pristine advert for the Statesman Hotel or Radiator King, without any rips, dirt, or Raider blood? Then peruse the back of this book.

  We hope you enjoy checking this guide out. Now if you’ll excuse me, the Swamp Folk at Point Lookout are getting restless and preventing my Punga Plant picking… where did I put my Microwave Emitter…?

  Purchase the original guide HERE or the Limited Edition Collector’s Edition HERE.

  Purchase the Game Add-On Guide HERE.

This is the second (or the third if you count that heavyweight hardback collector's edition) official tome. Also check out an example of a Wasteland poster.

Independent Games! Braid! Portal! Win! Fallout 3! Bacon! Listen!

Fallout 3 Regular Edition Cover

Get a chance to read a free preview of the Fallout 3 guide (or click the cover image!).

Part 07: The Back of the Book

An entire extra chapter with insider information, including Todd Howard's favorite armor? It's all here!

The back of this behemoth of a book has three additional chapters, the first of which is called “Ending it All”. Flanked by a “Spoiler Alert!”, this tells you how to obtain all the endings in the game. Yes, every single one of them. Following that are the Appendices – all 22 of them. Without resorting to some nasty Spoilers, I can reveal that every type of Collectible, Unique Weapon, Fat Man, MiniNuke, and other advantageous item that doesn’t “randomly” appear is listed. However, instead of simply flagging them, every special item has its own number, Zone, precise location, and description of its hiding place. This way you can additionally refer to the Tour of the Wasteland Chapter for more information on finding the exact items you’re looking for. Naturally, all the Xbox 360 Achievements are listed too, complete with any relevant tactical advice.

    If you’re thinking of bagging the Limited Edition guide, with its hardback cover, biggest map poster, and one-inch thick spine, you’re in for an extra treat. Firstly, there are dozens of art pieces, along with narratives by the team, in a section dubbed “Post-Game, Post-Apocalyptic Musings”. Whether you’re after information on how V.A.T.S. was created, the team members’ favorite locations, and some weird and wonderful scrapped ideas, this is the chapter to turn to. Exclusive art drips from every page, including some great sketches, early designs, and other oddities.

    The goodies continue in the final section called “Tall Tales from the Capital Wasteland”. Not only do you receive Bethesda’s top tips for preventing certain death (which includes some tactical advice you never thought possible), but there’s the unwrapping of some delicious Easter Eggs, too! Next up are a half-dozen “Wasteland Wanderers”; a few of the hundreds of player characters that Bethesda team members employed during their playthroughs. Each has their own (usually disgusting, despicable, and always socially-awkward) story to tell, whether it’s the lament of Davey “Comet” MacDonald (who overly relied on Chems and booze), or Porkchops the Fish Lady, searching for her giant teddy bear and honing her A3-21 Energy Weapon talents at the same time.

    All of this is wrapped up by an Afterword typed out by Moira Brown personally, exclusive to the guide.

    Thanks for reading this Blog, and thanks to Bethesda for all their help. Please let us know what you thought of the guide by emailing dhodgson@primagames.com. This concludes your Fallout 3 author blog.

Check out both the regular edition game guide and the collector’s edition game guide.

Part 06: Tour of the Capital Wasteland: Overview

A grim and unforgiving landscape, dotted with hundreds of areas to explore, like this long-abandoned church.

    In an attempt to craft the most valuable guide imaginable, we went kinda crazy with this section. Clocking in at over 200 pages (just over two-fifths of the total pages in the Limited Edition guide), the Tour of the Capital Wasteland was to serve two main purposes: 1: To allow you to instantly locate an area you’re needing help with, and 2: To reveal the items available, so you can judge whether a sortie is worth the risk of possible (and almost always grisly) death. This took around two months of hard graft to achieve, but the results were definitely worth it: You have a complete atlas of the entire game world at your fingertips.

    Written with the map poster in mind (although all the poster maps also appear inside the guide too), the Tour begins with explanations on the information each location has to offer. To start with, if the location is featured in a Main, Miscellaneous, or Freeform Quest, this is noted. Then comes the Threat Level (rated from one to five), so you can quickly ascertain whether to bring a 10mm Pistol, or a hulking great Follower armed to the teeth with a Minigun and a bad attitude. Then comes a Faction flag; showing you which Wasteland group controls this area; especially useful as you can bring preferred killing equipment to the expedition. Services are flagged for each location, too; so you can instantly know whether you’ll find a Healer, Repairer, or Trader. Next up are possible dangers (aside from the regular enemies); such as the types of traps to watch out for. Finally, the type and number of Collectibles the location has is shown, as well as more “miscellaneous” information; like whether you can find a Follower, sizable ammo caches, Perks, Radio Signals, and even a place to live in.

    Delve a little deeper, and there’s information on the dozens of Mini-Encounters that you might run into. Following that, the entire Wasteland is subdivided into nine sprawling Zones. Each Zone gets an Overview (which shows the Collectibles present in the entire area, as well as Primary and Secondary locations). Every single location can be found by either tracing the Latitude/Longitude on the Map Poster, or by its own Zone number. Naturally, the overview map looks just like the one on your Pip-Boy, so you can easily spot where you are. Once the overview is out of the way, you can dig into each specific area. Let’s take the church in the screenshot as an example.

    This is the eighth Primary location in Zone 1, so it is flagged as location 1.08. Instantly locatable on a map, there’s a list of assets, and a biography of any inhabitant living at the location (in this case, no one important enough is around). If the area has a likelihood of an enemy encounter, it is listed here, too. Then comes general and succinct tactical advice for the location, along with any Freeform Quests. Freeform Quests are smaller and optional tasks, usually taking place at one or two locations, and every single one of them is shown during this chapter.

    For larger settlements, such as Megaton, every single location within town is revealed, the type of Terminal and Locked Doors are shown (so you know whether your Skills are good enough to allow you access), and more importantly still, every location that needs it gets its own map. Maps have waypoints labeled on them so you know where every major occurrence is. With well over 150 “interior” maps (that aren’t on the poster), it took a team of four map makers around three months to finish them all, and they look superb. Naturally, they’re all extremely detailed (down to computers on tables, floor tiles, and debris piles), and are a great way to learn the topography of a location without blindly trekking through increasingly hostile corridors without any knowledge of how vast an area is.

    Around a third of the Tour showcases the labyrinth of the D.C. Metro Area itself. A massive series of locations that join the exterior Wasteland via dozens of snaking underground tunnels, finding your way around here is almost impossible without an “underground” map. Fortunately, there is one, so you can figure out the quickest routes between major areas. Naturally, each underground location gets its own map, too. There are 11 D.C. Metro areas to witness too; whether it’s the somber gloom of Arlington Cemetery, or the awe-inspiring Mall and Capitol Building, these get a meticulous going-over, too.

    Whether you’re out on a jaunt and want to find some specific enemies to slaughter, you’re out to grab every single particular type of collectible, or you’re encroaching an area that looks foreboding, this chapter can be dipped into and skipped across in a multitude of ways. Whatever you’re doing, and wherever you’re going, try utilizing the Tour to get there and back with a greater chance of living than you thought possible!

    Come back on launch day (Tuesday 28th October), where we finish off this blog in style with some extra-cool Appendices, and Limited Edition content information.

Check out both the regular edition game guide and the collector’s edition game guide.

Part 05: Main and Miscellaneous Quests: Chapter Overviews

A Brotherhood squad comes kitted out with all the best killing ordnance, and comes to your aid at a critical moment.

Much of this book (196 pages, in fact) is taken up with a thorough and meticulous exploration of the Main and Miscellaneous Quests you can begin at any point during your adventure. Segmented into dozens of logical parts, the strategy guide has some key advantages for getting the most (or just the very basic facts) from any point in the game, whether you’re exploring the basement of Tenpenny Tower, or searching for your father and finding out more about your upbringing, and his plans for the future. Expect copious amounts of advice throughout these chapters, which includes the following elements:

    Firstly, these two chapters of the guide are easily flipped to, as there’s an intuitive “tab” system on the side of the book, so you can locate a chapter in a second. Then, we’ve assumed you want to either “dip in” to a specific part of a Quest you’re having difficulties with (or want to find out more information about), or you’re content to read through an entire Quest to figure out all ways to complete it. Either way of reading the guide is simple to achieve: Firstly, the top-right of each page has the section of the Main Quest, or the specific Miscellaneous Quest named, along with specific Vault-Boy iconography. The first page has a complete overview of your course of action, with the main settlements flagged so you can easily cross-reference them with the guide’s poster map. There’s even a small mini-map showing the major location where most (but not all) of the Quest’s action takes place in.

    Perhaps the coolest element of these chapters is the Quest Flowchart. For every part of the Main Quest, and every Miscellaneous Quest, there’s a plotted-out series of boxes and arrows, in one of three colors (white, red, and green). White boxes refer to Objectives you’ve unlocked (or yet to unlock) on your Pip-Boy. Red boxes indicate actions you need to attempt, and green boxes reveal the rewards you receive if the action is successful. As every major path variant is showcased in these flowcharts, and you can easily figure out your next course of action without wading through pages of text. Main and Optional paths are shown in this flowchart, along with the characters you need to interact with, the locations to visit, any recommended Skills and Items you might want to use, possible enemies to encounter, and whether your path has a particular Karmic influence. More often than not, checking these flowcharts gives you enough encouragement to continue playing the game with minimal interruptions.

    Naturally, after the Flowchart is a highly-detailed Walkthrough, too. There are captioned screenshots dotted throughout, along with text designed to inform and entertain. We hone in on every specific detail, with objective flags in the text so you know which part of the Quest you’re reading about. There are also icons showing every major item you can pick up, and box-outs showing particular Statistics, Skills, and Perks to employ at every critical point. Again, Karmic choices are flagged in the text too, and there’s the obligatory notes, tips, cautions, and spoilers to try to ensure you don’t die, and also don’t accidentally read a section with game-changing information in it! We even went as far as noting when computers, holotapes, and other information sources provide pertinent (or simply flavorful) information. “Exhaustive” is a great description to apply to these chapters. “Exhausted” is a great description of my mental state after writing these chapters.

    So, every gameplay path is catered for, every eventuality is noted, all possible rewards are flagged, and there’s help aplenty – not just to see you through the adventure, but to point to hundreds of possibilities you may not have even thought about. No wonder these chapters took two and a half months to write….

   Come back on Monday 27^th October, where the Tour of the Capital Wasteland (over 200 pages in length) is detailed and dissected. 

Check out both the regular edition game guide and the collector’s edition game guide.

Part 03: Training Chapter Overview

Want to create a fearsome Wasteland warrior? Consult the Training chapter.

Delving a little deeper into the guide, and moving chronologically through the pages, we begin with the Training chapter. Over 40 pages are dedicated to preparation for surviving and thriving in the Capital Wasteland, and there’s an incredible amount of useful detail for both character generation, and general overall tactics. It all begins with the Primary Statistics; the seven S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes that form the basis of your avatar. As these statistics influence other skills, we reveal exactly how everything is inter-related, and the precise modifications a higher or lower statistic brings into play. Want to know what skills your Charisma influences, and by what amount? Then consult this section. Next up is a section on Derived Statistics; a set of values automatically determined when you choose your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. values. These include how much weight you can carry, your chance to inflict a critical hit, how your health is influenced, your resistance to damage, Action Points in V.A.T.S. combat, and more. Say you want the most Action Points for your takedowns; you’ll find out the statistic you need to raise, by how much, and what modifiers and Perks you can use and choose to help augment this statistic.

Next up are Skills. These 13 cool abilities get a thorough going-over, with stats aplenty, with tips on how to receive more skill points to allocate to these abilities, as well as an overview of every Skill. Need to know the related Statistic that helps your Lockpick skill? Then the information is presented here, as well, for ease of use. Naturally, there are related Perks to every skill, so we flag them, and let you know the Level your character needs to be at before you can add the Perk. Where appropriate, we add tips to each skill, so you can choose the ones that best benefit your Vault Dweller.

This is followed by a massive and meticulous section on Perks. Mining the Bethesda development team for information, I was able to reveal every single Perk, the character level the Perk is available, how many times (or “ranks”) the Perk can be chosen, and any other requirements needed to receive the Perk. Then comes the crazy part; there’s advice on whether this Perk is going to help you in gameplay situations, and how. Every Perk gets its own tactical advice where appropriate, so you end up choosing only the Perks that benefit your style of play, and you never waste points. Is “Commando” a better Perk than “Gunslinger”? You’ll know when you’ve digested this section! Oh, and the Perks section ends with a list of Perks you can only receive during specific Quests, which is handy.

Plotting out a plan for creating the very best Wasteland survivor continues with a section on Character development. Working closely with Bethesda, an overview of choosing the best combination of Statistics, Skills, and other allocations reveals the key choices that allow you to dominate throughout your adventure. Is Lockpick better than Science? Do clothes affect your conversations? What are the key skills you should never leave Vault 101 without? All of these are answered, along with some Character archetypes; including “The Quick-Handed Assassin” and “The Boxer”.

Once you’ve created an uber-survivor, there’s a set of general training instructions to further familiarize yourself with. What’s the difference in gameplay difficulty? How does Karma work? What’s the deal with experience points? What are the finer points of my Pip-Boy? What are all the Radio stations I can listen to? Next up is a thorough overview of V.A.T.S., revealing the best plans and tactics for all weapon types. Do I shoot my foes in the legs, or head? Which is better? What guarantees the squishiest of deaths? Then comes advice on the variety of traps you’ll encounter, how to Sneak, Steal, what to do when settlements go hostile, and the finer points of pickpocketing and scavenging. More revelations end this chapter, including advice on trading, healing, repairing, tinkering at work benches, when to stand around or sleep, armor, health, chems, and a good amount of information on Followers. This is finished off by instructions on making all the custom weapons, and the different types of collectibles to scour the irradiated landscape for. Ultimately, there’s a series of massive tables revealing all the important stats on every weapon (including the value, weight, damage, rate-of-fire, and rarity), armor (including whether the armor is powered, the weight, and effects), and item (again, with copious amounts of detail).

Simply put, the Training section alone gives you dozens of concrete and battle-tested pieces of advice on creating the ultimate wasteland survivor. Check back on Thursday 23rd October, when we break open the Bestiary….

If you can’t wait that long, check out both the regular edition game guide and the collector’s edition game guide.

Now that you’ve had a chance to get a little more background on the Fallout 3 Strategy Guide, check out the interview below I conducted with David Hodgson.

Fallout 3 is the 67th Strategy guide you’ve authored. How did you get into this business?
Bear in mind that my body of work includes everything from The Official Strategy Guide to Gex: Enter the Gecko, Akuji the Heartless, and Star Wars: Demolition to Half-Life 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I started off in the UK, working for some defunct video-game magazines that no one has heard of (Maximum, for example). I then fled the UK and landed a job at the part-fraternity, part-sanitarium known as GameFan magazine in 1996. During that time, I helped out with GameFan Books, wrote a guide for Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, then helped start up a magazine called Gamers’ Republic, and also wrote a well-received guide for Metal Gear Solid shortly before that venture imploded. In 2000, I decided to go freelance, and work for a “proper” strategy guide publisher, and I’ve been working on Prima guides ever since.

About how many guides do you work on in a given year?
Due to the sheer enormity of the tasks (of which Fallout 3 has been far and away the most challenging and rewarding), I’ve cut down my workload to 5-6 books, but these are usually very challenging. I’ve done anywhere from 5 to 12 in a year, but the latter almost hospitalized me.

In your blog post, you mentioned the guide’s fold-up map is massive. Can you talk about the effort that went into putting that together?
There are two terms I’d like to use here to describe this effort; “collaborative” and “deranged.”

The map poster, which is about the size of a movie poster in the Limited Edition of the guide, is double-sided, and actually three separate maps. While working on the rest of the guide, I first received information from Bethesda regarding the labyrinthine connections that snake through the main DC landscape. You guys wanted a way to show how every location links to every other location. So, I trekked through the entire DC Metro area, and flagged connecting zones together, as if making a real map. This turned into a cartographical overview, showing how every area links to every other area, and looks a bit like a subway map.

The second “map area” of the poster are the Zones that exist within DC itself. These are self-contained and highly detailed areas, with a large number of key buildings and monuments in them. Bethesda provided rough maps, which were stitched together, then beautified by a team of map makers from 99 Lives Design (who were responsible for the dozens of maps inside the guide itself). I then labeled notable areas and hazards on top of these high-detailed street maps.

The third part of the poster is the “rest” of the Capital Wasteland. This one almost drove me mad, as I wanted to show every major (and minor) location throughout the irradiated countryside. Firstly, I segmented the entire Wasteland into nine giant Zones. Then I found the location of every settlement, overturned truck, billboard, strange shack, and countless other buildings, and provided accurate locations and coordinates for each of them, and linked them to descriptions within the guide. I haven’t even mentioned the interior maps that are inside the guide, either.

Map aside, which section of the guide was the most difficult to put together?
Heh! The “Tour of the Capital Wasteland” chapter, which was written during the map-making insanity. This took around two months of work on its own, and clocks in around 200+ pages. Basically, I wanted the reader to bring up the Pip-Boy’s World Map in the game, situate themselves, and then flip to the appropriate page of the guide to find out the dwellings, cave systems, disused factories, and other locales in the general area. So I gave each primary and secondary location its own entry. Each location has its own threat level, the items contained, a map where appropriate, a bio of each inhabitant, the type of enemies encountered, and a walkthrough listed all the major booty you can collect. Locations ranged from tiny abandoned shacks to massive and frightening catacombs. I took a screen of each location, too.

In a “normal” game, with, you know, 10-15 locations, this would be straightforward. But making sure I didn’t miss any “collectible” or rare item was a real challenge. Fortunately, I also wrote up over 20 Appendices in the back of the guide so the reader can see what specific area houses an item they’re particularly interested in.

When you say that spoilers are flagged throughout the guide, how is this done? For folks that don’t want too much spoiled about the game at the onset, how would you recommend they use the guide?
Firstly, don’t let your eyes wander, or open the book at random! If you don’t want to know the outcome of the main overriding Quest, try not to skim read to the end of chapter three! We have a special “Spoiler” box out that warns of game-changing elements and revelations, but these occur at the start of each sub-chapter, so as long as you’re careful, you won’t see something you’re not wanting to see. Of course, as the guide is complete, the information is in there! The designers at Prima and Bethesda also worked very hard to ensure that each section of the main quest is segmented properly (along with a tab at the edge of every page), meaning you only need view the bits of the quest you’re wanting help with. We’ve also included some very handy flowcharts which plot out every quest decision and eventuality, if you’re more interested in playing than reading.

Recently at the office, we had a Fallout 3 speed run competition to see who could complete the game in the shortest amount of time. The winning time was 75 minutes. Given the amount of time you’ve spent with the game, is it safe to say you could compete with that?
I take my hat off to the chap who was able to finish in that quick a time, and I’d postulate that the guy must have played the game at least a dozen times to remember all the exploits and shortcuts to reach that conclusion. I’d come close, but even now, I still can’t help going off and exploring other areas instead of concentrating on a main task at hand!

I’d also be interested in figuring out how long it takes to complete every single Quest and witness every occurrence in the game. Although you can race through in under two hours (I’ve managed around 90 minutes myself), I’ve seen everything in the Capital Wasteland, and my gameplay time was upwards of the 500 hour mark. Heck, I spent an entire week in Megaton alone! Now, that’s with some serious exploring, but it does showcase how differently you can play the game.

For gamers out there that might be interested in working on strategy guides, what advice can you offer?
Well, if you’ll forgive a quick plug, I recently wrote a book on this very subject, called Video Game Careers, which reveals this all in greater detail. To be a strategy guide author specifically, you need a combination of good English skills, an analytical mind, the ability to describe convoluted puzzles succinctly, the patience to play a game as much as a Tester, social skills to liaise with a software company at just the wrong time in their development cycle, and a work ethic that allows 12-14 hour days for weeks at a time without you breaking down and sobbing. All this sounds difficult, but I can’t deny it’s great fun.

Finally, if you hadn’t been given the task of putting the guide together, how do you think you would have played the game? Good guy, bad guy, right down the middle?
There’s simply too many hilarious and frightening outcomes for me not to play as the bad guy, I’m afraid. I’d make all the smart-ass comments, use Beer and Whiskey to augment my combat skills, and eventually turn to human flesh as sustenance, before rampaging through all the tiny hamlets in the remote mountains of the northern wasteland. It wouldn’t end well….