1. First and foremost, it's a shooter. This was always a concern, and while it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, Fallout 3 should have been to Fallout 2 what Starcraft 2 will be to Starcraft. No leap away from isometric design is required - things can still be beautiful in iso! Isometric design and RPGs are a match made in heaven, why the hell would anyone tamper with that and think they can get away with it?!
2. Closely related to point number 1 - the 'feel' of the game. Everyone tried to convince me, particularly Bethesda, that the 'feel' of the series would remain intact. Rubbish. A major part of the feel of a game is the interface you use to interact with it. Sure you can have similar music, similar graphic design, etc... but that's only part of it. This game felt really, really different to the previous Fallout games. That's obviously not going to be a problem for everyone, but my main issue is that Bethesda basically said to old school Fallout fans that "everything will be fine," and it isn't.
3. The game is obviously designed for idiot console gamers with the attention span of mice. Perks every level? That defeats the whole purpose of perks. Perks were cool, something you really looked forward to every odd level, something you knew would have a massive impact on the nature of your character. Perks were valuable because you couldn't have them all the time. In Fallout 3 I had a hard time picking perks because I didn't WANT any of the damn things. They were all so watered down I didn't even feel they were doing anything. Some of the level 20 perks looked pretty useful, but I didn't even get to level 20 because the game ended so abruptly! (We'll get to that soon.)
4. Closely related to "designing for the ADHD crowd" above is this philosophy in the gaming industry that games should be designed with "replayability" in mind. STUPID. Games are stories. They should be treated like novels - most of the time I want to read a novel once, I want it to be detailed and complex, and I want to have a feeling of satisfaction upon completion. I don't want to speed read a novel 10 times to get everything out of it. If a game/novel is fantastic I'll play/read it again because it's fantastic, not because it was designed for "replayability." I recall a feeling of satisfaction with the previous Fallouts, and the Baldur's Gate series is another example, but not with Fallout 3. I played each of the previous Fallouts and BG series countless times. Were they designed with "replayability" in mind? Hell no. Will I play Fallout 3 anywhere near as much as I played those other games? Hell no. I want a game to be long and complex, I want to be satisfied. At the end of Fallout 3 I found myself completely unsatisfied (and only after actually accepting that the game was really and truly over).
"But there are so many different endings, you've gotta play it more than once!" I hear Bethesda crying. While I haven't played the game taking every conceivable path, I did take a couple of different options at the end of my first game, and it is pretty obvious where some major forks are. But my point is this: changing the final video from, say, "he went into the lab like a hero and started the project" to "too bad he's not a real hero, sending the girl in instead" does not constitute a different ending! Perhaps I'm being a bit hasty, and need to play some alternative routes, but I'm going to assume that all the hundreds of endings Bethesda promised are just alterations to this final video depending on various in-game choices, that you always end up in the Project Purity control room. That does not make me want to play the game over again! If you want to design with "replayability" in mind, at least have some completely new areas of the game open up based on character choices. Make the endings significantly different, different locations, different circumstances, etc. Then, and only then, can you claim different endings. Hell, Fallout 3 doesn't even have ONE ending - you can't call that an ending.
If I played in an evil way, I don't just want some video at the end telling me how evil I am. I know I'm evil! I want in-game consequences, branches of the game for me and my evil cronies. You could argue that some people would then miss out on something with such branching content, but then you're assuming people aren't going to play your game multiple times in multiple different ways, and then you're pointing out the failure of this "replayability" design philosophy anyway. Go ahead, argue it.
Make games long and complex, people will replay them if they're worth replaying!
5. VATS got a bit irritating after a while, particularly for crappy little critters that I would always kill with 1 shot in VATS, but took a couple of bullets in real time. I don't want to have to go into VATS just to kill these things, it's far too time consuming.
6. The game was really, really buggy. I was basically quick saving after every kill, as the game would frequently crash when loading new areas, opening up the PIP boy, etc. It happened probably once every hour or two, and this was an absolutely fresh install of Windows - heck I bought the whole computer brand new just to play this game at ultra high quality.
All negativity out of the way, I can move on to some good things:
1. The wastelands are beautiful. All these people I've seen complaining about how the colours are too brown - what the hell? It's a wasteland! I really got a feeling of awe from wandering around in it. The 50's feel was perfect - I loved the visual design of this game, period.
2. I thought the scarcity of ammo was particularly well balanced. I liked that I had to be ultra-conservative with my bullets, it really added to the feeling of the wasteland.
3. The mini-games were pretty cool - in particular lock picking. Also the virtual world that you enter was awesome.
All in all I had some fun playing this game, but nowhere near enough for the money I forked out, and in no way does this game even come close to living up to the name of its predecessors. I really wish they had called it "Fallout: <insert subtitle here>". Perhaps my expectations as a Fallout 1 & 2 fan were too high, but it gets a 6.5/10 from me.
