Fallout 3 Tips
The Capital Wasteland is an unfriendly place that's full of danger and death, but the price tag on that official strategy guide isn't too pretty, either. Here are some tips we've put together on our own after spending a few dozen hours in Fallout 3 and quite a bit of time analyzing all the perks, skills, and stats and how they work in-game.
Perks: good, bad, ugly
Intense Training (multiple times if need be - see our character guide for why this is good), Black Widow (specifically for female characters, as there are so many men in Fallout 3), Scrounger, and Educated (take this one as soon as you hit level 4) are all fantastic perks to get. For those who love using guns along with V.A.T.S., Action Boy/Girl, Grim Reaper's Sprint, Sniper, Mysterious Stranger, Better Criticals, Commando, Gunslinger, and Bloody Mess are all great.
Melee characters will eventually want to work towards the Ninja perk and may want to get a few hits in Intense Training and Life Giver for higher stats and more health, but getting Pyromaniac is great if you're going to use a Shishkebab for your endgame main weapon. You will probably have enough skill points to max the Unarmed or Melee Weapons skills, so you probably won't need Little Leaguer.
Avoid perks like Paralyzing Palm, Chem Resistant, Light Step, Chemist, Adamantium Skeleton (stimpacks fix limbs well enough), Solar Powered (especially since you'd have to miss Grim Reaper's Sprint to get it), Entomologist, Lead Belly, Infiltrator or Computer Whiz (that's what save/load is for!). If you don't feel like any perks are jumping out at you after a level-up, then tossing one into Intense Training or Life Giver can't hurt.
Here's a list of all the perks in the game along with descriptions and requirements. It's worth poking around here to think about where you want to take your character. Most paths are great, but always give yourself at least one solid combat option.
Maxing Skill Points
There are a few important things you can do to max the number of skill points you get in a game. The first is to jack up your Intelligence in the game's introduction, either to 9 or 10 (depending on whether you think you'll find the Intelligence bobblehead) to max skill gains. The other is to grab the Educated perk right when you hit level 4; do these and you can be getting 20 skill points each at levels 2 and 3, and 23 skill points from level 4 and up. Depending on the overall character you want to make, you may find yourself maxing Intelligence during the intro, and filling in your "main" stat or stats later in the game with a few instances of the Intense Training perk.
Steal things!
If you are planning on going evil, then you should be walking around town ready to steal everything you can. Unlike Oblivion, Fallout 3 doesn't flag items as stolen, so you can clear out the shelves of many stores and sell the owner's goods right back to him. Find a way to hide behind the counter to pick cash registers and even their safes. Once you get a few thousand caps in your pocket you can be a little more choosy in what you bother to steal and fence, but the important part about this too is that you don't need any stealth skill to steal something - all you have to do is force the situation where anyone around has their back to you. Just keep an eye on the indicator at the top of the screen when you're doing it.
Kill people if they have stuff you want
The Capital Wasteland does not a have a criminal justice system, so you can use this to your advantage and just kill some people for their stuff. Sure, if you start a fight with Lucas Simms then the whole town will try to kill you, but if you meet one of the wandering traders and want to loot all the crap out of his Brahmin's packs, just kill him and his guard and take what you want. Be careful, though, as you can permanently break quite a few quests with careless murders. Either way, always keep in mind the question: "What if I just shot this guy in the face repeatedly until there is no face anymore?" You may find yourself killing the kind of NPCs you never even try to mess with in other RPGs, and seeing some fairly appreciable rewards for doing it.
Finish Megaton before you really finish it
That leads me to this next tip. Early in the game you'll get a quest to either save Megaton or destroy it. The latter is a very fun option, but make sure you finish all you want to do there first. And then after that, why not go postal in the town to personally take everyone out before you head to Tenpenny Towers to hit the big red button? But even if you decide not to do this and want to help Megaton, make your decision and finish the quest early so that you'll have a single place that's yours to store all your stuff, sleep in the bed for the short-term +10% "Well Rested" experience bonus, and have your own personal butler to make you Purified Water and tell some jokes.
Use fast travel
Sometimes traveling the Wasteland can be a pain in the ass; sometimes you are full on loot and decide you really need to travel back to your place to drop loot off, but you're out in the middle of nowhere and not even remotely close to the place you were headed. Just find some kind of nearby landmark that unlocks a fast travel spot nearby so that you can quickly pop over, drop off your stuff, and come right back instantly. Going off the beaten path like this might also help you find new areas and adventures you otherwise wouldn't have seen.
Study the stats, perks, and abilities
Fallout 3 is one of those games where you can screw up your character pretty well. No, it's not like Oblivion where getting really good at running and jumping when those skills were major ones would cause you to be grossly underpowered compared to the monsters. No, instead you could be manually putting your skill points, stats, and perks in all the wrong places. I don't recommend you try and become a jack of all trades in Fallout 3, as you won't really have enough points to distribute. Pick a character type that interests you (V.A.T.S cowboy, barbarian, smooth talker, stealthy ninja, and the like) that makes good use of 4-5 skills, 2-3 stats, and use perks that complement those abilities.
Use V.A.T.S. all you can
This is especially true on the 360 where there's no auto-aim at all: V.A.T.S. will get you through a lot of tough situations. Sure, using it at long distances can sometimes be frustrating (why would I use V.A.T.S. which is giving me 20% to hit this sniper's torso when I can easily hit him on my own?), but it is really helpful at keeping your aim on point at short and medium ranges. Every combat-oriented character should be using V.A.T.S. and dropping points into at least a few perks to help it out. Another plus is that if you're in V.A.T.S., you're invincible until it ends, so you can actually start it then pop off a single shot to carefully avoid direct damage from any weapon, even explosives.
Scrounger
Scrounger is a great perk. It yields more ammo when you're searching through containers throughout the Wasteland. Now, that's pretty handy on its own, and it's almost a requirement for people playing on Very Hard difficulty (where enemies require more hits before they'll go down), but there's one last thing. You can also sell the ammo you're not going to use for some pretty appreciable profits! (And if you run out of ammo for some reason, remember that the Rock-It launcher, which can be built by talking to Moira in Megaton, can fire out all those junk items in the game and continually be re-used.) At the very least, sell the ammo for guns you don't use in order to buy ammo for the ones you do. And that leads us to the next tip...
Ammo weighs nothing
I guess Bethesda didn't want people to have to worry about all the ammo they'd have to carry or making players budget out weight allowances, so they made all ammo weigh zero. This is helpful, as it's a good source of cash if you just don't like certain guns. What this also means, though, is that if you carry a nice wide range of guns, you'll have all of that ammo on hand for combat situations. If you really love just your Assault Rifle and 10mm SMG, it's going to suck when you run out of ammo in the middle of a dungeon and don't have the weapons to use all that ammo you're carrying!
Lockpick and Science skills
Lockpick skill is pretty important to have in Fallout 3 if you're interested in maximizing the amount of loot you get. Science is better for those who are trying to dig up all the lore. (For a combat build, you really only need one of the two - that way you can spend more points in combat skills.) Many of the safes in the game can be opened either with direct lockpicking or with a nearby computer, but there are still a good number of areas that require high skill in one or the other to get into.
The Difficulty setting
The difficulty setting can be set as Easy, Normal, Hard, or Very Hard. The biggest effect increasing it will have is the increased health of enemies, but the interesting twist is that experience gotten from enemies is also increased. What this means for you is that a good player on Very Hard will get to level 20 quicker than someone on Easy or Normal - this is a good thing, so I recommend people to turn up the difficulty if they can handle it. Overall, a good shooter player will find Very Hard on the PC version to be not too tough at all, but I do think the Scrounger perk at level 8 is pretty much a must-have. The enemies take many more shots to kill them, so you'll need Scrounger just to keep up on ammo.
