Amazon has made two RPGs available for free to Amazon Prime subscribers (in an attempt to promote the Fallout series, while there will be no Skyrim adaptation according to Todd Howard), but these two games are not as accessible as you might expect.

The two games are at least a dozen years old, so essentially any PC can run these two games today. They are Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. While there’s Fallout Tactics, which you can download and run locally (again, requiring an Amazon Prime subscription), the 2008 and 2010 post-apocalyptic adventures are playable from the cloud. In other words, you can only access the two games for free via Amazon Luna. The service is officially only available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. The service is similar to Google’s Stadia, but a bit more expensive due to its subscription-based system.

So the only way to access the two games that you could probably add to your account for free on GOG for several years now is through Amazon Luna, but even the Epic Games Store has thrown up the two games as free titles (after a quick check, Fallout 3’s Game of the Year Edition and Fallout: New Vegas’ base game were freebies on Tim Sweeney’s service).

But according to Kotaku (and with a fast Internet connection), Fallout 3 was a poor experience, with poor image quality, high input lag, and stuttering. Streaming is only a viable alternative on cheaper office machines, but even on those, the low system requirements of the old games allowed them to run at higher resolutions, with better detail and no input lag.

Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas will be leaving Amazon Luna and Prime on October 10th. If you want to torture yourself, you can also pick up Fallout 76 (and you don’t even have to do it from Luna).

Source: Kotaku