There’s one stipulation of YouTuber Many A True Nerd’s Fallout 3 playthrough that I’m totally down with – he refuses to recruit companions, those stealth-incompatible tag-alongs. The permadeath, though, and the no-healing requirement? That makes much of his 14-and-a-bit-hour playthrough incredibly tense.
Prefer to sit quietly in a favoured corner of the wastes? Here are the best Fallout 4 settlements we’ve come across.
What aren’t included are the many, many practice hours. The YouTuber had completed Fallout 3 once, killing every single sentient being in the wasteland (minus the children, obvs), and finished New Vegas while sticking to his peculiar ruleset.
“Fallout 3 is much harder, mostly because it’s much more random,” Many A True Nerd told Kotaku. “New Vegas is complex but mostly predictable – it gives you mostly safe corridors to navigate the early game, and enemies have quite precise and small areas within which they have to stay.”
By contrast, Fallout 3 requires plenty of sneaking, diplomatically neutral karma, and judicious use of combat avoidance tools – items like the ghoul mask that makes the monsters harmless, and the dart gun that takes the roar out of deathclaws.
“I liked the feeling of claiming an item, and knowing immediately that a whole family of threats has been taken entirely out of the game,” said the YouTuber. “The best thing about doing YOLO in Fallout 3 is [that] the game rewards effort and planning by letting you slowly become master of the Wasteland.”
How would you go about attempting the same in Fallout 4?