Fallout 3 has been available for nearly 14 years, yet it and its spin-off Fallout: New Vegas remain two of the franchise's most beloved games. With so much time passing since Fallout 3's release, it's perhaps no surprise that it has been pored over by players. All Fallout 3's secrets have been laid bare, including an incredible amount of the action RPG's cut content. One content creator is doing what they can to catalog this cut content, with their latest video focusing on Fallout 3's main storyline.
In a series dubbed "Fallout 3: The Cutting Room Floor," YouTube channel TriangleCity is going through different aspects of the game detailing interesting cut content from Fallout 3. Previous Fallout 3 videos from the content creator include "GURPS in Fallout 3?!," "Fallout 3 Cut Weapons," and "More Fallout 3 Cut Content." Their latest video is perhaps TriangleCity's most interesting entry in the series yet, as it's an hour-long delve into cut content from Fallout 3's main storyline broken into several different key sections.
The first key area of the game that saw massive reworking is the opening sequence, starting with the Fallout 3 player's birthday party. The video details further details regarding the player's father, different paths to escape the Vault, and rebooting several generators in order to open the Vault door. TriangleCity theorizes that this entire chapter was streamlined and changed to focus on a faster-paced, action-focused experience.
Other areas of focus in the video include Rivet City, Vault 112's Tranquility Lane, the fate of the player's father, The Citadel, Little Lamplight, Vault 87, Oasis, Liberty Prime, Project Impurity, the Pipboy, and Fallout 3's endings. Suffice to say, Bethesda cut a lot of different story elements from the main quest line, including some things that could have dramatically changed the experience, for better or worse.
It's not necessarily a surprise that a game like Fallout 3 has such a massive amount of cut content; it's a huge game, after all. Sometimes, plans change and large amounts of content has to be cut for time or because there are new limitations that Bethesda wasn't aware of yet. Often, though, content is simply refined to tell a better story.
What's also important to remember is that Fallout 3 was Bethesda's first time taking the Fallout franchise into third-person. It likely learned a lot of lessons in the process. Those lessons were taken into the development of Fallout 4 and will likely be carried into the development of Fallout 5 in the future.
Fallout 3 is available on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.
