As a predecessor to Oblivion, one excellent game. As a Fallout sequel, trash.
If I merely look at this game by itself or compare it to Oblivion, Bethesda has really done a good job at making a fun and immersive experience. Blowing people away with guns is a blast and the VATS system in my opinion is a lot of fun and a decent compromise for people who wanted more of a classic turn-based RPG feel. Best yet, exploring is actually super rewarding and there are lots of hidden stuff to see. Players who just follow the main quest will be missing out on the best parts of the game. This is why I have to give this game an 8 because it really is a good game and I recommend its purchase.
Unfortunately if I start comparing Fallout 3 to Fallout 1 or 2, the game really starts to break down. By this point some may be saying that I'm just being a crazy biased Fallout fanboy. Give me a second to explain and perhaps you may agree with me too.
One of the charms of Fallout 1 and 2 was that you were given a single goal; such as find the water chip or find the G.E.C.K. After giving players the mission, players could go ANYWHERE they wanted if they knew what they were doing.
Towns in Fallout 1 and 2 were handled in a modular way. In other words, every town typically had a story that was unique to that town. Players who poked and proded were rewarded with experience, items, and leads to the whereabouts of your main goal. The pro of this style was you had the opportunity to experience many different mini-stories. The con was that there wasn't a completely linear, dramatic, storyline that moved from beginning to finish. In fact oftentimes the main story was so broken up by the pacing of the player, it almost seemed to not exist.
Finally the last thing I wanted to say about Fallout 1 and 2 was that you could choose varying extremes of good, evil, or neutral in terms of what you did during the game. The games would reward you accordingly and when you finished Fallout 1 and 2, both would tell players the aftermath of their exploits in all towns giving players a sense of overall accomplishment.
In summary, Fallout 1 and 2, were open-ended games that allowed players to create a role of their choosing and complete the entire game this way. Want to kick the president of the United States in the balls? Sure, do it! Want to kill the final boss by throwing a well aimed rock? Go right ahead! Want to betray humanity by selling out to the leader of the mutants and watch a badass FMV of the Overseer in vault 13 getting overtaken by an army of mutants? Yep you can do it! Don't feel like finding that water chip? Go back to vault 13 and kill everyone. Ultimately the choices are up to the player, which is why the games where fun.
This is where I now get into the problems of Fallout 3. Bethesda had two great ideas that sound good on paper, but offer huge sacrifices. First, they wanted a large linear storyline that was dramatic and meaningful and second they wanted as much immersion as possible.
Problems arise when players ask themselves, "what if I don't want to help my Father? What if I want to do the exact opposite of what the storyline wants?" What Bethesda thought was a good idea, turns out to be a bad idea because now all of the open-ended gameplay that was a trademark of the Fallout series becomes all too linear.
Many times throughout the game, I encountered situations where I couldn't do something because the story wasn't ready for me to do it. In effect, Fallout 3 acts like it's an open-ended game, when in reality it's much more linear than people think. Yes you can walk off and go anywhere you want, but you still can't enter specific areas deemed "necessary for the plot." Worse yet, far too many characters are given invincible status until their importance for the story has been completed. Often I felt like I a child being led around by Bethesda's phantom hand. Things really start to hit home when you enter a town of only children. Since you can't kill children in the game, you can't do anything but follow the stupid quests the game forces you to complete.
As far as immersion goes, I consider voice acting to be one of those immersion choices that actually hurts games rather than helps them. Why? When it is decided to dub every single piece of dialogue in a game, it is no longer as simple as just entering text into a computer. Now you have to go through the trouble of hired someone to voice act. As a result, you get less dialogue choices.
This is purely an assumption with no factual basis, but in Fallout 1 and 2, if you had low intelligence, your character would talk like an idiot and everyone in the game would respond very differently. If Fallout 3 were to do this, they would need to have voice actors basically redub the entire game for all the new dialogue which takes more time and money. This is why I think they decided not to have intelligence affect dialogue options as much as it used to in past games.
Some of you may be saying "Well voice acting is really nice!" Truth is, how many people actually sit through and listen to all the dialogue anyway after you've played through once? Usually I find myself skipping the dub if I finish reading the subtitles before the voices finish. Basically voice acting in games is merely icing on a cake. It's not as necessary as people think.
In conclusion, Bethesda has created a decent game if not compared to Fallout 1 and 2. If it is compared, Fallout 3 lacks the open-ended gameplay the originals had. The truth is that Bethesda sacrificed player choice with a story they thought was good. In effect, players are shoehorned into a story they may not even care about and are ultimately forced to make a really lame decision at the end of the game. If this were a true Fallout 3, players would have been able to join enemy factions and kill their Father for no justifiable reason.
I still stand by my score, but to give others perspective, I think Fallout 3 deserves a 5 if compared exclusively to its predecessors.
With the advanced gaming technology we have today, there is no excuse to make a game less open-ended then a game that was made in 1998.