Fallout 3 Completed for the Second Time

Earlier today, I finally completed Fallout 3's main Quest for the second time. As some of you may recall, last Fall during a stroke of genius I accidentally deleted all of my Xbox 360 save games, including my then current Bad Karma female Fallout 3 character, my second playthrough at the time.

I gave up at that point, and started playing through Fallout 3 again this past winter when I was able to download all the DLC on Xbox LIVE's Boxing Day sale for 50% off.

So this playthrough, a Level 30 Good Karma male, took me about 95 hours to complete. This includes the main Quest, all the DLC (except for Fallout 3: Broken Steel), and about half a dozen side Quests.

The items from Fallout 3: Operation - Anchorage really came in handy. The Gauss Rifle was my primary weapon throughout this playthrough, and I made great use of the Winterized T-51B Power Armour later on in the game. I also had a lot of fun with the Chinese Stealth Armour earlier on.

Reaching Level 30 occurred right towards the end of the main Quest, but I was rather disappointed at how bloody powerful you turn out. Level 30 allows you to truly max almost every single Skill, so there's very little you can't do by the end. This removes a great deal of challenge, I'm afraid, and lowers replay value as well since there's less to come back and do.

The odd bugs introduced in Fallout 3: Broken Steel, such as encountering Enclave Soldiers in the Wasteland long before they're supposed to appear, and hearing Three Dog go on about activating Project Purity before I had even found the place, put a slight damper on the game's story-flow, but it was cool to encounter more challenging enemies, such as Super Mutant Overlords, Enclave Soldiers wearing Hellfire armour, and even the dreaded Feral Ghoul Reavers, during the regular parts of the game.

What an experience, and now it is time to finally playthrough Fallout 3: Broken Steel for the first time, earn the last three Achievements in the game, and then hang up my Power Armoured gloves.

I'm all Fallout-ed out! If you add up all my time in the Xbox 360 version of the game, I've played a grand total of about 175 hours! That's a lot of time spent in the Capital Wasteland over the last two years, but it's certainly been time well spent. Except for that 30 hour playthrough of my Bad Karma character I deleted. That was just stupidity on my own part.