My opinion of Fallout 3 changed dramatically as a I progressed through the main game. At times it was involving and at other times it was boring. My opinion of Fallout 3 likewise changed as a I played Fallout 1 and 2. After Fallout 1 my opinion of Fallout 3 dropped dramatically as I felt Bethseda really lost the essence of Fallout and ten after Fallout 2 my opinion of Fallout 3 increased as I thought they captured a lot of what Fallout was.
So what is Fallout?
Fallout is a game built on the idea of awesome character making + great setting + multiple solution quests (aka, freedom). The character creation in Fallout is AWESOME. The traits, the perks, the skills and the tagging. It lets you create all kinds of characters with lots of cool abilities and then the game lets you USE THEM everywhere you go. Fallout 3 kind of fucks this up by making you run mini-games, making base stats not count much, making skills act out very differently. But overall, the character creation is
ace.
I don't even need to discuss the setting of the franchise. Everyone knows it, everyone diggs it. It makes the games better.
The setting#2, aka. the development of the worldview is excellent. The towns in Fallout were good, though not many. The locations in Fallout 2 were GREAT. From the casinos and whores of Reno, to the police state of NCR, to the jerks at Vault City, to the Mutants, the Miners, the Ghouls, the Tribals, the Slavers, the Raiders, etc... EXCELLENT. The portion of California represented in Fallout 2 is one of the most interesting rpg worlds out there. Fallout 3 kind of screws this up too as Fallout 1/2 were about cities & towns and PEOPLE. Fallout 1/2 had a couple dungeons but you could count them on one hand. Fallout 1/2 were just about meeting interesting people and using your specially created character to interact with them and ROLE-PLAY. In Fallout 3, you spend most of your time ALONE in the wasteland and in tons and tons of long dungeons of just you and scorpions/ants/mutants. There ARE cool locations in Fallout 3 and interesting people, but they are only a small fraction of the world and interaction with them is a fraction of the gametime.
Setting#3/Gameplay#1, FREEDOM of interaction/questing. All three Fallout games do GREAT jobs at giving the player choices in how to progress through a quest. I'd actually say Fallout 3 does the BEST job of the three, mainly because in Fallout 1/2 it's pretty hard to just kill people until mid/endgame when you have good equipment. In Fallout 3 otoh, once you get a weapon from the super mart at the start of the game you can pretty much kill any npc and thus you have far more options to any sidequest story. The sidequest stories themselves are great. They develop these towns into living, breathing locations. Fallout 2 is by far and away the winner here as its writing is sooooo good. The characters you can talk to in each location have very distinct personalities and there are many of them throughout the game. Fallout 2's world is full of win. Fallout 1's writing was nowhere near as good and people were mainly just "go here, go there, help me out". Fallout 3's writing tries to be more diverse than Fallout 1, but it's just not very well written. The characters are mainly boring and I think a big deal is that in each town in Fallout 1/2 there were like 5-10 quests to do that really fleshed out the location. In Fallout 3 there's like 1 big quest if you're lucky and maybe 1-2 tiny ones. So places in Fallout 3 are a lot less interesting and the game has few memorable NPCs.
Also Fallout #2 gets a huge thumbs up for having so much you can DO with your character. Want to have sex with mob bosses's daughter and his wife? Want to become a champion boxer? Want to become a kung-fu master? Want to become a porn star? Grave Digger? Married man/woman? Fallout 2 is awesome. Fallout 3 really took a step back here and because Bethseda has no balls in this hot-coffee era game industry they completely removed all the real world power of sex from the game, which takes a lot of fun away. Whether you're sleeping with a guy to get your car back, or running around with a useless NPC because their dad caught you the morning after and forced you into a shotgun wedding, you can run into a lot more fun situations because of the sex angle that is gone from Fallout 3.
Now all three games have battle systems with great original aspects, yet they are really average systems. The Fallout 1/2 system of turn-based tiles with AP is ok. Aiming at body parts to disable stuff is cool. And it's really neat how important SKILLS are since they are solely ACCURACY with a particular weapon. Every other game out there that gives you stat points when you level is about increasing your DAMAGE, but Fallout 1/2 is different because as you level up you aren't getting stronger. You're just getting more accurate, which allows you to use better weapons. Without a decent amount of skill points pumped into Big guns or Energy weapons you'll be getting -5% chances of hitting. Unfortunately this means once you get a weapon skill to the point where you have 95% accuracy for any body part....there isn't much left to the battle system upgrades besides perks and new armor/weapons. If you tag weapon skills you can hit the 95% point pretty damn fast and then the whole game it's just "aim at eyes and shoot; wait for everyone to move [HURRY UP PEOPLE]; aim at eyes and shoot (occasional reloading); etc... If you're just fighting a person or two it can be fun. Or at the start. But when you are fighting like 20 lvl.1 rats and you have to sit every damn turn through watching them all move the battle system grates on you. Fallout 3 completely gets rid of any skill type stuff since you can't do -5% accuracy in real-time FPS. Instead you just up the skills to do more damage and aim and shoot. Honestly I think Fallout 3's combat would be fine if it was like Halo with the ability to freeze and target using VATS. Unfortunately the enemy AI is not like Halo; It's like Doom3. The enemies just rush at you like morans and you just stand there and shoot them in the face. So yeah, the battle systems in all the games are kinda blah even though they have neat ideas and there are some cool battle perks.
Small note for NPC followers. In Fallout 1 they are ehhh because you just get one. Though they can be useful like Dogmeat tripping everyone. In Fallout 3 they are ehhh but really useful because they shoot everyone in the face with good weapons. In Fallout 2 they are a mixed bag. On one hand it's totally totally cool to have a posse wherever you go. So cool. OTOH in battle they get in each others way and shoot each other, outside of battle they GET STUCK IN DOORWAYS AND HALLWAYS ALL THE TIME OMGWTFTHISISANNOYING. Having to repeatedly push them over and over and sometimes the design blocks of the view of them behind a wall so you CAN'T push them and are just stuck and have to reload. OMGWTFTHISISANNOYING. Why didn't they just make all hallways 2 tiles wide.
The NPCs from a story-perspective are cool in Fallout 2 and 3. They might not have deep backstories, but they have small ones and personality (at least the voiced talking head ones in Fallout 2).
The dungeons are bearable in Fallout 1/2 because they are pretty short and there's only a handful in each game. The downside is the sitting and waiting for every scorpion/rat to move and then you shoot one or two and then wait. Oh and I didn't mention before, but the worst is when you shoot and miss and you want to reload because you are screwed and you have to wait until ALL TWENTY PEOPLE MOVE first before you can reload. You can't even alt-tab and ctrl+alt+del close the program until ALL TWENTY PEOPLE HAVE MOVED and its your turn again. Fallout 3 improves this! You don't have to wait for 20 people to move. But instead of a handful of generic dungeons you get like 50-100 of them and many are pretty decent length. Also all the dungeons in Fallout 1/2 had a point to them. They were either story, or the background story of the ruins of an important place. Most of the dungeons in Fallout 3 are just caves/metro tunnels of no importance besides maybe taking you somewhere else on the map.
So gameplay=talking=interacting w/humans= awesome in Fallout; gameplay=dungeons=shooting= zzz in Fallout. Fallout 1/2 are 90% human interaction, Fallout 3 is 80% dungeon crawling. Whoops.
The main stories in all 3 games are pretty weak. I actually like Fallout 1's the best because the game is short as hell which works with how simple the plot is. You see the world, you stop the bad guys. Fallout 2's main plot spent waaaaaay too much time foreshadowing with little events and images for the Enclave which aren't even in the game until the last hour of a 40-50 hour game. Likewise Fallout 3 doesn't have much of a plot and the Enclave and Outcasts are pretty wasted and just thrown in for plot points when needed. You've barely seen the Enclave in Fallout 3 until they're gone in 10 mins. The talking head characters in Fallout 1/2 were way more interesting than any of the characters in Fallout 3. I read somewhere that they preferred when games didn't have full voice acting because then the people who WERE voiced stood out. Everyone in Fallout 3 is kind of the samey, Sulik, Myron lololol, Marcus, etc... were awesome.
Overall I thought the Fallout series was pretty cool and all that, but maybe all the hype over the years and idolization of the franchise had me expecting something grander. I love Fallout 1 for starting this all out. The character creation, the short but very replayable non-linear game, the body part aiming, the post-apocalyptic old-timey setting; great game. Definitely an A in my book. I enjoyed Fallout 2 A LOT for it's fantastic locations, memorable city characters and ability to really roleplay and do a billion things. The improvements in the writing, the larger amount of voiced talking head characters, the HUGE FREAKING GAME (took me 40-60 hours), all great. Another A quality game in my book. I kinda like Fallout 3 for the immersive 3d world to explore, the quests, a few of the characters. But a lot of the game was forgettable and there was a good amount of boring exploration full of nothing. Game was more of a C+ in my book, though I haven't done Broken Steel DLC yet and a better plot/ending could bump it to B level of remembrance when all is said and done. None of the games really blew me away. None had incredible battles that will stick with me. None had fantastic stories that I won't forget. Yet they were all pretty good stuff with Fallout 3 being the weakest of the bunch. I'll give Fallout Tactics a shot soon, but the idea of an entire game based on the so-so battle system of Fallout 1/2 does not excite me at all.
Finally, Fallout 2 wins because IT HAS A SUPER TURBO CAR you trick out and even run into situations where
spoiler (click to show/hide)
you get carjacked
HELL YES!!
