So, you have finally become Lord and Master of the Wasteland in Bethesda Softworks award winning role playing game Fallout 3 (We awarded it Overall Game of the Year, Xbox 360 Runner Up Game of the Year, and Best Overall RPG of the Year), and you have explored every cave, vault and abandoned building, making friends and nuking enemies. But for some of you, there is something missing from your Fallout experience and it is very possible that creating your own game content with deeper and darker vaults, harder quests and anything else you can imagine is exactly that. Lucky for you, Bethesda, your local RPG gaming crack dealer of choice, has released G.E.C.K. (Garden of Eden Creation Kit) for Fallout 3 a very powerful set of tools which will allow you to create what ever your creative and possibly devious mind can come up with.


But before you download and install the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, you should be warned that creating you own content is not just a simple point and click, drag and drop, auto creation system, such as some of the very basic mod tools or game creation tools available for other games. But it is a very powerful tool which allows for some amazing freedom for those who like to mod their games and for those who wish to spend some time planning and tweaking their eventual creations.

If the above sounds fun or possibly something you would like to try and you do wish to make your own content, then you are in luck because along with the powerful G.E.C.K. Toolkit, Bethesda has released some very comprehensive tutorials and instructions on creating rooms, actors, quests and everything else you will need to make your own mod. One thing they have not provided with the G.E.C.K. Toolkit is a detailed guide to the lore of the Fallout 3 universe for continuity between the actual game and mods or a planning guide on how to plan your mod out. As someone who has worked on mods and games, I believe planning is one of the most important steps an individual or team can start with. Just throwing down some ideas in MS Word or on a note pad rarely works. So some advice to those who are new to modding games, sit down and plan and if you need help on that, you should be able to find examples out on the internet.


What makes the G.E.C.K. Toolkit so great is how deep the feature set is, allowing you to create towns, dungeons, quests, characters and everything else you can possibly imagine. The first thing you will do once you install the toolkit is run through the tutorials and I must warn you to follow the instructions carefully as the tutorials run into each other and you will use, or should use what you created in future tutorials.

The difficulty in creating your own mod will be determined by your knowledge or the ability to learn everything about the G.E.C.K. Toolkit and the scripting language you will need to master before creating wonderful and radioactive content. I did not find the scripting language or the toolkit to be difficult to use at all, but I did find the way the actual toolkit was designed to be a bit awkward and not designed well at all for organization purposes but after a few hours of using the toolkit it does not actually matter.


Stability wise the program did not crash once, but it does have one annoying ’feature’, the program stops working for up to a few minutes at a time after loading and saving your content and sometimes, but it is very rare, it does the same thing during other simple operations of the toolkit. In the end this is a bit annoying and surprising to see in a product from Bethesda that was not more polished, but again it is free and it is also dealing with a huge amount of data.

After a few weeks with the tool I have to say the potential mods we will see from talented modders should make the console owners of Fallout 3 envious with the amazing free gaming coming soon, just like we saw with Bethesda’s other incredible game The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and its many impressive mods.

If making your own content is not something you are into and for many gamers it is not worth the time or effort to learn how to or even download the G.E.C.K. Toolkit, that is completely understandable. I will say that playing the mods which are already created or being worked on (they are in beta) is very worth while because you can play for many more hours and extend the life of the best PC RPG of 2008.

Posted by Brian Edey (Falelorn)

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Posted by : Curtis McDonald (DarkCanuck)
Posted by : Brian Edey (Falelorn)