So you’re playing your way along through Fallout 3, exploring the Wasteland and doing lots of side quests, until you suddenly notice that shooting a Raider or unlocking a safe no longer produces that cha-ching sound. That’s right, you’ve hit that fantastic Level 20 cap, making much of the rest of the game pointless. Sure you can use Advlevel to artificially advanced, download a Mod with enough warnings about crashing the game to make even a dedicated overclocker think twice or keep constantly reverting levels. All of these solutions though are awkward and ruin the natural feel of advancing through Fallout 3.

Fallout 1 had a level cap at 21, Fallout 2 had no level cap at all. Fallout 3, which is a good deal larger than Fallout 1, has a level cap of 20. Or to put it another way, Bethesda created a sandbox game and then didn’t want anyone to keep on playing it, because it’s not as if Level 21 is the cutoff point at which you become superhuman or the point by which most players would have done most of the game. Unless you’re a very conservative player who doesn’t get into combat much and avoids XP giving situations, but you do plenty of the side quests and explore around, you will get the Level cap long before you’re even halfway through the game. I got it with only 16 quests completed. Not exactly sandbox friendly gaming there.

So why have the level cap at all? Bethesda’s planned release of 3 add on packs, answers that questions. Since Fallout 3 clearly does support levels beyond 20, the cap exists to keep the player down until he or she ponies up the money for the new packs. The first two packs are gimmick packs, recreate the Battle of Anchorage, which apparently would take you back to the war itself and to Pittsburgh for a battle with the raiders, meh. But the third one is equivalent to Oblivion’s Knights of the Nine, and will let you continue your quest in the Wasteland, deal with the Enclave once and for all, and oh yes, join the Brotherhood of Steel. All things that you of course can’t do in Fallout 3.

Like Oblivion, Fallout 3 suffers from a fairly short main quest that’s easy enough to finish, which is why smart players detour a lot and explore the gameworld. Fallout 3’s main quest is even shorter than Oblivion’s and while Oblivion had many problems, a deliberately crippled game wasn’t one of them. It is a major problem for Fallout 3, which through the level 20 cap cripples the game for extended play, and has a lot of locations, but cuts the overall game short in order to accommodate a future expansion. I have nothing against Bethesda making more money with add on packs, but those packs should not come at the expense of the main game itself.