The year is 2021. Fallout 3 installs on a laptop via Steam. It is the Game of the Year edition, and while I wait - I bemoan myself for what I'm about to get myself into. "I hate open world Bethesda games with no focus", "It'll be a buggy, crashy piece of shit", and "will this even run without me having to google a million solutions?".
Fallout 3 will now detect your video hardware and set video options accordingly. I nervously click ok. It detects Ultra High, but at a resolution not native to the PC or the external monitor attached to it. Windows warns me that the application may not run correctly. I click okay. It alleges the game has launched. Nothing has happened.
This is the experience of any Bethesda game - and die-hard fans will tell you it is all worth it, just download some mods. Then there's a rabid bunch of other fans for each mod distribution package, website, about how you must absolutely not install mods in a certain order or this mod instead of that mod, or you will inadvertently cause the heat death of the universe.
At this point, it is preferable to trolling through dozens of websites, RAR files, game directories, INI files, or the various mod management software that justifies its existence on the predication that a game that won't even boot on a modern operating system is even worth playing. Years ago now, I wrote an extensive block of text about Why every modern fallout game is awful..
In a word, there's one way to describe the game design of the Fallout series, and that word is simple. "Wasteland".
Fallout 3 should've launched in the time it took me to type all this babble. It hasn't. I sigh, and open the task manager. Oh look, Photoshop is still running - but there's nothing there suggesting that Fallout 3 is going to launch any time soon. This time, I read the error message in full.
This app can't run because it causes security or performance issues on windows. A new version may be available. Check with your software provider for an updated version that runs on this version of Windows.
Okay Bethesda. Support your product. In an official context. Here's the first result on google.
Run the game windowed.
Nope, didn't work.
Run the game as Administrator, in Compatibility mode for Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Were we helpful? No. See pic below.
Nope, didn't work. New error message. "The ordinal 43 could not be located in the dynamic link library". This is something to do with Games for Windows LIVE, which was part of the original release of Fallout 3 - but is no longer supported by Microsoft. Googling for a combination of these two things results in nothing on the Bethesda support page.
The steam forums for the game link to the DLL file, as the installer for Games for Windows LIVE won't run anymore either. I download it and extract it to the game directory... and the game launches. It actually runs. This is vanilla Fallout 3 (Game of the Year Edition) - and it is completely unmodified.
It is hideous as one might expect (running in windowed mode) - and there's even some form of ancient save file synced to my Steam cloud that enables me to continue from wherever I was up to when I last attempted to play this abomination.
Let's see how I go with actually playing the game...