Fallout 3 Mod Review - DC Interiors Project

Fallout 3 Mod Review - DC Interiors Project (combo edition v2.7)


Summary: Opens up some of the boarded-up stores and houses in various settlements.
Why Get This: Collecting trinkets for your house. You will want to have a proper house to begin with. Try sifting through here for one.

Depending on what you aim to do in Fallout 3, DC Interiors can either be a fun time waster, or just a huge time waster. After investigating maybe a dozen places from the mod, the key things you can get are generally trinkets amid the junk -- toys, books, and non-functional appliances.
The collectables are kind of neat, but ultimately useless unless you want to display them somewhere. Therefore, if you are quest-focussed, there definitely are better ways to spend your time. Ultimately, I feel that DC Interiors is really just good for getting trinkets. Even then, it wastes a lot of your time sifting through junk.

The design of the spaces are actually very good: They blend in with the overall design direction for Fallout 3, so in general, unless there are too many third-party models that visually look to be of a different artistic quality, you will likely not realize whether you have walked into a location created by this mod, or whether it is a vanilla Fallout 3 location (although later you will come to realize locations over-cluttered with miscellaneous objects is one of the trademarks of DC Interiors). What DC Interiors lacks, however, is importance.

In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, many locations feel "unimportant". BUT, if you insisted on looking for and doing every quest to completion, you will come to realize that every location and every person is involved in a quest.  There is an attempt to do the same in Fallout 3, though some quests got cut and clearly some people and locations were no longer important. But the principle remains.
A lot of mods that essentially add clutter to a game world lacks this essential trait -- importance. When something is ultimately of no importance, I end up uninstalling it, if even just to minimize mod incompatibility, or lighten the processing load on my computer, etcetera. In the end, despite the scope of the mod, DC Interiors just adds more unimportant time-wasting "clutter" class locations.
Compare this experience with the locations in vanilla Fallout 3. There is less clutter placed, but each location usually has something intrinsically interesting (skill books and bobbleheads don't count). For example, Springvale School, which at first looks like just a raider-occupied ruin, but there are notes from the raiders that give the place and layout some back-story and interest a bit beyond being just another ruined building. Or the Capital Post office, which starts out a simply laid-out location that feels boring until you discover the article about the Pint-Sized Slasher -- and then, in an eerie coincidence -- you discover a dead body downstairs, with a key and a note that points you to MineField.

There's nothing wrong to fleshing out the game world with more stuff and more locations, but Fallout 3 is a big enough game with enough to do that I don't need to wander into a mod location to kill a few molerats and sift through mounds of clutter. Each location has a lot of clutter and can take some time to properly investigate -- only to come up with nothing worth the time spent. The vanilla Fallout 3 locations tries to give you an experience in exchange for your time. I just didn't get the same feeling or return on investment with DC Interiors locations.

That said, if you are the sort who has nothing better to do than wander around after having finished the game, or just want to start up a collection of knick-knacks in your character's home, then DC Interiors offers you the chance to go out and "earn" those items by exploring. Whether this mod is worth the download really comes down to how you want to spend your time in Fallout 3.