Fallout 3, originally released in 2008, is now available for free on Epic Games Store.
Fallout 3 is one of the most successful, critically acclaimed, and influential video games in history. While Bethesda Game Studios had already made their name with the The Elder Scrolls games, what they had accomplished with Fallout 3 elevated them to becoming among the most important game companies in the industry, to this very day.
After Bethesda acquired the rights to the Fallout franchise from Interplay, they set about to remold what had, at that point, been an isometric turn based adventure that followed the GURPS rulebook to the letter, to a 3D shooter, open world, role playing game. While in many ways this was a transition of Bethesda’s signature style on The Elder Scrolls to a science fiction setting, the work Bethesda had put on worldbuilding and game design made it a distinct franchise with its own identity, and its own fandom.
Fallout 3’s setting also gave Bethesda an opportunity in narratives that it didn’t have before. Going beyond the amusing tone of the original two Fallout games by Interplay, Fallout 3’s world is a scathing, if not subtle, critique and parody of 1950s nuclear age America. Memes like the Vault Boy and Nuka-Cola have earned their place as video game culture icons, as enduring as Dragon Quest’s Blue Slimes or Borderlands’ Claptrap.
It should be said that Fallout 3’s acclaim is not universal, as it also reflects many of the other things that Bethesda is famous for. As with nearly every other Bethesda game Fallout 3 also launched with many bugs and issues, and even so many years later, some of those issues were never fixed. To be fair, there are also some gamers who never bought into the Bethesda hype. That’s their prerogative, but Bethesda’s decades long success and influence in the industry are simply empirical facts that cannot be denied.
For Epic Games Store, Fallout 3 comes in its Game of the Year edition. That means it comes with all of its add-on packs: Anchorage, Broken Steel, Mothership Zeta, Point Lookout, and The Pitt. Bethesda has also gone ahead and published Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics on Epic Games Store, all on sale at $ 2.50 each.
Also up for free on Epic Games store this week is Evoland Legendary Edition. This actually bundles Evoland: A Short Story of Adventure Video Games Evolution and Evoland 2: A Slight Case of Spacetime Continuum Disorder. The Evoland franchise is itself a tribute of legendary games. It’s an RPG that is about the history of RPGs, and brings with it its own memes and in-references to the genre.
Both Fallout 3: Game of The Year Edition and Evoland Legendary Edition are free on Epic Games Store until October 27, 2022 on 8 AM PT or 11 AM ET.
Source: PCGamer
