I'm happy to put it on the record here that Fallout 3 is my favourite of the 3D games in the series, beating out New Vegas and Fallout 4, which I love and like respectively.
Now there are obviously plenty of ways that New Vegas actually improved on the third game. Aiming down sights was a lovely treat and the way the player can mould the story into one of many different endings really gave us the power of choice, and that is to be commended.
That said, none of the games quite manage to distill the essence of the series into quite as stark a package as Fallout 3, with the Capital Wasteland a bleak and hopeless place to scratch out a life within.
A big part of what made both games so fun to roleplay in is a system that was actually introduced in Fallout 2, Karma.
The Karma System Must Feature in Fallout 5
Advert
Over on Reddit, one user shared how much they missed the inclusion of a Karma system in Fallout 4, with the hope that it will return in some form for the next game, and it's safe to say the community agreed, with more than 2.5k upvotes at the time of writing.
There were also a ton of people who chimed in to share their own thoughts on Karma featuring in the next game.
"Karma, faction rep, and companion rep. While those things aren’t themselves important to the core of Fallout. They do help round out the whole of its roleplaying," one said.
"I wouldn't mind Karma coming back but it has to be for big, obvious stuff only. Eating a baby is evil. Giving free water to the wasteland is good. Not the arbitrary confusing crap of 'Its okay to kill this guy but its evil to take his s**t'," another added.
Others strongly disagreed, with one saying, "I'd rather not have karma. All it does is create objective morality in a setting that's supposed to be morally grey. The game shouldn't tell you point blank what you did was objective good/bad. NPCs should just react to your actions based on how it affects them."
Whatever direction Bethesda does decide to go in with the next game, it looks like we're going to have to wait a long time to get our hands on it. Todd Howard's promise that we won't be getting Fallout 5 news until after Elder Scrolls VI puts all of these discussions firmly on the back burner.