I saw a friend of mine's roommate playing Fallout 3 at his house the other night, and had to check it out myself.
It has a similar dystopian feel to Half-Life 2 (one of my favorite games), but is set in much older times. — It's challenging, but not frustrating. Open-ended, yet with a linear storyline. There are tons of optional sidequests that can help you discover new areas, meet companions to travel with, and more.
However, there's a known bug in all versions of the game that I also accidentally ran into:
…if you do not exit Galaxy News Radio via the back door as Three Dog instructs, you will be unable to return to the building to complete the quest via the front door (using the intercom will result in the doorman telling you that it's open, when it's not), and the side-door will be locked and require a successful very hard lockpick to open. It is not known if you can backtrack from Dupont Circle to the back door, but dialog from Three Dog when you accept the quest would suggest that you cannot. Picking the very hard side door will result in negative karma, but will allow you entrance to the building to complete this quest. (Source)
I never heard this part of the conversation with Three Dog, so naturally I just exited back out the front-door:
… The door's locked from now on (with no key available), but the workarounds for progressing the story are:
- Explore the game until you eventually discover “Rivet City”, where you can trigger the next quest with a new goal.
- Check an online walkthrough at GameFAQs or something that tells you where to go next. 😅
It also locks you out of the “Dupont Circle” region for fast travel unless you discover that area manually, and the game is then constantly telling you to “Return to Three Dog to talk about Dad” or whatever, hah. — You can pick the lock on the side-door if your lockpicking skills are high enough, but this will also (for whatever reason) trigger a negative karma stat adjustment, too. So, that sucks. 👎🏻
It's the first time I've run into any sort of major bug like this in such a widely-distributed game, and I'm surprised they haven't just patched it. — Hopefully, they will, since most modern gaming systems now support these kinds of downloads. 👍🏻