In Which Kimberly Grows Up in Vault 101

Y’all. Y’all. I actually started playing a game tonight that wasn’t either Skyrim or Elder Scrolls Online! GASP!

Specifically, I started a Fallout 3 run. I’ve actually owned Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas for a while, I just haven’t gotten around to trying to play either of them. But my household has started watching the new Fallout show on Amazon Prime, and we’re enjoying quite a bit.

In fact, it’s inspired Paul to break out his XBOX 360 for the first time in eight years and start a new Fallout 3 run of his own. This was not as easy as you might think–because that machine was old and cantankerous, and its disc reader had stopped working! Paul had to order a new laser part for that reader, and do surgery on the console to get that installed and working. During all of this, he also wound up blowing away all his old save data. And he just started fresh with a brand new game.

At the same time, I was thinking it was high time I actually tried it out on the Steam Deck. So I finally installed it, and then did a bit of work to plug it into my existing Vortex install. My thought here was to do something similar to my Oblivion setup, where I’m running as close to vanilla as possible, with only bugfix mods.

More deets behind the fold.

Right now the load order includes only three things:

1. Fallout Script Extender
2. Updated Unofficial Fallout 3 Patch
3. Command Extender, because the unofficial patch wanted it

And that’s it.

This actually took a little bit to set up properly, which was unexpected. I ran into file permissions issues with the Fallout Script Extender. I was able to install it just fine in Vortex, but when I tried to swap back to the “No mods” profile I set up for the game, or over to one of my Skyrim profiles, Vortex started bitching about permissions on a whole bunch of files.

On investigation, I found that all the files added in by FOSE had bad permissions on them, as far as the Deck was concerned. I couldn’t find any forum posts or Reddit threads on this specific problem, but I found other similar ones, with Vortex throwing permissions errors in other contexts. Of course, those various threads all expected you to be on a PC running Windows. But I was able to extrapolate to the appropriate equivalent steps to set permissions on the files on the Deck.

For the curious, there is a UI way to get into the permissions on the files, very similar to how you do it in Windows. Just right click on a file, go to its Properties, and then go to the Permissions tab. You can adjust permissions there.

Or, you could do what I did. Which was open up the console, cd into the right directory, and use the find command to slap a global chmod on everything in the target directory, files and directories alike. Once I did that, then Vortex happily let me swap back and forth between profiles.

I’ll need to keep an eye on this for any attempts at modding Fallout 3 in more depth, in case any other mods pull a similar problem. But that’ll be a problem to solve for Future Anna.

For now, I’m just focusing on trying out the game. Tonight I went partway through the character generation sequence, which was easy enough after watching Paul do it on the XBOX. I wanted to take my time to get familiar with the controls, and see how well everything worked on the Deck.

Answer: pretty well. I was a bit concerned, given the age of the game, that I might have to find a mod to make it friendly to the controls on the Deck. I had to do that to get Oblivion working, and that game is only two years older than this one. But so far so good, Deck controls worked fine, no mods required for functionality.

Between watching Paul set up his character and now setting up mine, I am very amused at how familiar the whole process feels. There are aspects to it familiar to me from both Morrowind and Oblivion. The big G.O.A.T. test you have to take when your character is age 16 is a lot like a similar test in Morrowind’s character setup. And the rather long character generation sequence, with various stat setting done at certain key points, reminded me a lot of Oblivion.

And so far, all of the various controls and what they do seem pretty damned similar to how Skyrim functions. I don’t think I’ll be very lost in this game at all.

The process of choosing what my character actually looks like was perhaps the most unfamiliar part, since, LOL, I wasn’t choosing any of the races of Tamriel. And it was definitely weird not being asked by Hadvar what my name was. ;D

I was quite pleased to learn that the voice actor for your character’s father was in fact Liam Neeson!

And so far I’m trying to play as close to a Lawful Good type character as I can get. Because why yes, I am pinging off the female protagonist in the show. And I was a little sad that I couldn’t do a hairstyle like hers.

I left off in the final escape sequence. I got as far as trying to save Butch’s mother from the radroaches, but she died because I couldn’t figure out how to kill them fast enough. And I wasn’t sure I was happy with that. So I rolled back to the autosave from when Amata came to wake me up.

It’ll definitely take some getting used to having to fight with a gun in this game vs. bows or staves or swords or daggers. Which means I’ll definitely have to work on my aim. As I have lamented before, my aim is kind of ass. But I also have seen that Fallout 3 does have the V.A.T.S. system, and I suspect I’m going to be relying on that a lot.

Overall I am not going to document this playthrough to the same depth of detail that I do Skyrim and ESO, just because the Elder Scrolls games are the focus of the Anna Plays Skyrim blog. But I’ll definitely post commentary like this as I proceed on Kimberly’s adventure.

This will mean I’m not going to tag these posts extensively like I do the Elder Scrolls ones. And I’m not going to take extensive playthrough notes.

But I will put up a page for Kimberly! And take screenshots, once she’s out of the Vault! So stand by for those to come.