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 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.

A spine an inch thick, and Vault-Tec Approved: Two choices to help in your Capital Wasteland roaming.

Part 02: Meanderings and Overview

I initially received my first build of the game on May 25^th, which is when all major social activity (never a major concern for a strategy guide author) was curtailed, and my trip into the Capital Wasteland began. After booting up the PC and 360 versions, I began an intensive, week-long “cursory” play-session, and spoke at length with Pete Hines and Jeff Gardiner at Bethesda about what they wanted the reader to gain from the guide. They deluged me with pile after pile of internal wiki information, and allowed me to bombard the team with a variety of questions, most of which were variations on the “yes, I just discovered this, and it’s freakin’ awesome” theme.

Workload-wise, this guide took approximately 120 days to construct (And that’s not including the sterling work of others who commenced map-making, design, corrections, approval, and printing), and my personal involvement (authoring, screenshots, and doctor visits for more blood-pressure medicine) was approximately 1,100 man-hours. No, I’m not kidding. But I do have a shockingly thorough knowledge of the game, which was great when I wrote it all down in guide form, but is now sloshing uselessly about in my brain, waiting to be forgotten about. I must have about 650 game saves. And time spent actually playing the game? I’d say around 500+ hours. This was by far the most complicated, gigantic, and madcap guide I’ve ever been involved with, and I loved every minute of it.

Once the first week of intensive gameplay was over, I realized – with a creeping sense of both excitement and horror – that I’d only grazed sections of the game, but I’d been having such an entertaining time building the custom weapons, fiddling with skill and perk combinations,  finding devious methods to circumvent the “expected” strategy in a quest, and tried a few of the billions of other lunatic things you can attempt… that I didn’t mind. After some talks with the team at Bethesda (who remained steadfastly patient, enthusiastic, and helpful throughout my Wasteland odyssey) we’d already agreed on the breakdown of the strategy guide. Here’s what the final guide encompasses:

A comprehensive contents page and Foreward by Todd Howard.

A Training section where I mined the brains of designers at Bethesda, and offered meticulous advice on Attributes, Skills, Perks, the dangers of the game world, main tactical advice on V.A.T.S., information on Followers, and (naturally) a complete list of every weapon, outfit, item, Chem, Stimpak and Foodstuff in the game. I love stats, so we got a table with elements like fire-rates, ammo-clip totals, and everything the more deranged gamer needs to figure out which selecting the correct weapon to bring to a Ghoul massacre.

Next up, was a Factions and Bestiary, where the major warring forces of the game got an official back-story, and every single irradiated beast, mutation, and abomination received a thorough inspection. Can you check the health of a Super Mutant, compare it to the damage your favorite boomstick does, and then calculate how many shots it takes to kill one? Most certainly. There’s stats-aplenty.

Chapter 3 and 4 concerned the different Quests you undertake during the game, all of which are optional. These two chapters alone were large enough to be their own strategy guide, and every Karmic effect, Skill or Perk you can utilize at a pertinent point, and all the different outcomes are shown. Yes, including all the endings. Naturally, to avoid massive rage-filled forum posts, Spoilers are flagged throughout. Copious screenshots and Vault Boy iconography were used, as well as flowcharts. Oh yes, lovely, easy-to-read flowcharts showing every main route to try, and the rewards for trying for every single Quest in the game. The flowcharts (dotted throughout the chapters) take up over 30 pages on their own. Did I mention this game is big?

Then matters took a turn for the deranged, as I embarked on Tour of the Capital Wasteland. This sightseer’s guide ballooned into a 200+ page section, but includes maps of every single exploration point, and the major ammunition caches, items – and “other bits” I can’t mention – and an overview map modeled after your Pip-Boy’s. There are major and minor locations, each with a number and a coordinate to ease the cartographically limited. May I suggest a few hours’ study of the insanely dangerous and labyrinthine D.C. Interior and linking underground tunnels? These were mapped at great cost to my sanity over a period of three weeks.

Accompanying this Tour is a double-sided, movie-sized poster pinpointing every single location in the Capital Wasteland. I recommend studying it for a good 15-20 minutes to let it all soak in. I’ve never played a game with more locations that needed to be pinpointed correctly.

Tucked at the back of the book are the endings, so it’s wise to skip past those pages and gaze at the 20+ Appendices, which basically give you Achievement advice, and locations of everything even vaguely seen as “collectible”. Precise locations are shown, and a month’s worth of cross-referencing work went into all of it.

Decided to purchase the special Pre-War Collector’s Edition? Then, aside from a Hardback cover and a bigger map poster, you get an extra section packed with exclusive art, team interviews, additional team tactics, easter egg information, a half-dozen “Wasteland Wanderers” showcasing the entertaining and sometimes frightening way some of Bethesda’s team cultivated their characters, all finished off rather pleasantly by an Afterword by Moira Brown. Who’s she? Owner of the Craterside Supply, don’t you know.

Ready your coffee table for reinforcement; the Pre-War Collector’s guide clocks in at 498 pages.

Come back next time, where we reveal a little more information, and you’ll realize just how much of a job sabbatical you’ll need to take to make a dent in this behemoth of a game.