I had my best experience so far with a brand new character. It happened completely by accident. I took the character all the way through the vault beginning and made my usual save in front of the exit. Then I started playing Neverwinter with a friend for several weeks. When I returned to my character, still in front of the exit, the memory of the vault was so faded that I was able to ignore it. I'm now roleplaying a character who has never been inside a vault.

It's still tough though. The game continues to give my character dialogue about finding her father. *sigh*

Bethesda fans: Annoyed by good choice and consequence. Stay classy.

Oh and one more thing. The lack of weapon and armor variation.
Something New Vegas solved imo. Bethesda take note, New Vegas may not be the greatest Fallout, but it was one of the few games where it felt like my choices and decisions had an actual impact. The only other series able to do so was the Mass Effect series....up until 3. *sighs*

As I finish up the story, I pretty much agree with everyone else here in that I wish I could throw my caps in with the Enclave. Or at the very least join Talon company.

It's been forever since I played Fallout,of course until recently, so what happened inside the vault has been a blur, due to the fact that when I have a save before the exit that I use for new characters.

I find most of the dad dialog is in Megaton and Rivet City, and even then it's not that much, I tend to skip through it and just pretend it never happens. It's usually with few people in the cities. I even ignore the mandatory age. My new guy's in his 40s.

My new character, Gilliam, hardly talks to anyone. His bartering is usually with the random Wasteland merchants.

It also bothered me, at least when I first played, that the "good" companions were only available if you played through the main quest to certain stages. Both evil companions are hireable from the get-go (one in Megaton itself), one of the neutrals is hireable as well (although the other also requires MQ participation), but both Cross and Fawkes don't even appear until after Waters of Life. That pretty much left the alignment-unfussy Charon as the only option for good characters who didn't want to do the MQ yet (or ever), and for some reason he scared me due to his voice and size. I had to write a mod which disabled the alignment check to recruit Clover.

Of course, once I played New Vegas, I realised how empty and meaningless the FO3 companions were anyway, and on my latest run-through I haven't recruited any of them, content to just use those wonderful companion mods. True, Lucy West, Bittercup, Angel, Gary and Nitro are just empty vanilla-voiced companions who can't hold a light to the wonderful vanilla companions of New Vegas (much less the wonderful Willow mod), but the same can be said of the vanilla FO3 companions. Apart from the novelty of having a Supermutant or Gutsy companion, they add nothing to the experience which a companion mod couldn't do. If anything, Lucy West's recycled vanilla dialogue gave her far more personality than any of the vanilla followers anyway.

No, the problem rests with the console's limited key assignments, as sprinting is not available on the 360.

PC gamers... there are no limitations. If Bethesda didn't make it, someone else did.

The whole dang main quest, and much of the side quests bothers me, as does the cities and layout of the waist land. It's just one giant plot hole.

It bothers me when people consider Fallout 3 a "Fallout" game when it has nothing to do with the rest of the series whatsoever and only has cheap references to Fallout 1.

I haven′t played any of the others, but I think FO3 is a good Fallout game. It has the vaults, the radiation etc. But I do get what you mean. It′s the same with me; I don′t consider Deus Ex:IW or HR to be true Deus games either. Ah, but I digress...

So, while I do love this game and know that there are mods for many of my issues (something someone on the Xbox or PS can′t use anyway), here′s -

What I don′t like with FO3

* The aimbot

* The looks and performance of the minigun

* The "reloading" of weapons that feeds from a backpack (the need to reload is non-existant unless the backpack is empty)

* Non-respawning interior and some exterior cells

* Killable travelling merchants

* Unkillable little brats

* Texture sometimes making it impossible to see things even if you′re standing right in front of it (like music sheets on the ground)

The only thing that really bothers me is the lack of appropriate options in dialogue so I often have to imagine saying something else instead of the given options. For instance, the conversation with Gob in Megation. There are only three options available, two of them are very rude and the one is very polite. There should be a neutral option as well, allowing you to ask Gob who he is instead of the option "[censored]. What are you!"

The 2nd example is the conversation with Dusty at Big Town when he asks you who are you and you can only say either "I'm a simple traveler, I mean you no harm" or "I am King of the Wasteland...".

Yes, it takes some references, locations, skill setups, perks, and such from the early games, but "Fallout" the series, for the most part, takes place on the West Coast (California, Nevada, etc). Fallout 3 has not a thing to do with that. It's a good post apocalyptic game, but it's not a good "Fallout" game.

If TES VI takes place on Akavir or Atmora I will still consider it an Elder Scrolls game (even though all the other games in the series take place on Tamriel). Personally, I'm glad they went someplace new for a change. *shrugs*

I suppose, it's in the same *universe*, but eh.... I feel like its only real connections to the rest of the games are cheap references and some iconic items/corporation ads/etc.

Again, where do I sign?

That makes no sense at all, it's still int he same world that fallout takes place, just in a different location. Fallout, for me, is about how people are living with the post apocalyptic wasteland, which of course, takes place in America.

That's one thing bothered me about the game. I'm in my 50s, trying to role play a character, but I'm forced to start out as a teenager with a number of people calling me "kid".

The thing that got me to give up on it (after going through the main quest, side quests, Broken Steel) was the endless metro tunnels filled with ghouls leading to another area of DC that was ruined and filled with super mutants. I just got a feeling that I'd done this so many times before and wasn't prepared to keep doing it. So after 120 hours of that character I quit and haven't been back to Fallout 3 since.

One of my only issues was whenever I went to a town, there was a lack of merchants. Granted there was the Caravans and Wasteland Scavengers, but They're not the same as Going to a town and trading there.

It's in the same "world"? So what? Just about every other Fallout game besides Fallout 3 has been in the west. Even Tactics. If it's going to be tied into the originals, it needs to be close enough so that references to the earlier games are actually plausible. Washington DC is too far away from California for anything that happened in Fallout 1 and 2 to have even the slightest bit of significance.

The Fallout series is post-post apocalyptic. It has been two centuries since the Great War, and, as shown by the originals, it has been enough time for widespread agriculture and cultural growth to occur. Fallout 3? Nope. Looks like it was nuked not even ten years ago.

So what? Look at the D&D games. The very first one for the computer was based in Phlan while the last ones were in Neverwinter, a long ways away from there. That didn't make those 2 games any less D&D. I'm not sure where the first TES game took place, but shifting the locations in later versions certainly didn't mean they weren't part of the franchise. Location is completely irrelevant, it's the theme and atmosphere that matters.


Well of course. As the seat of the American government and it's military, it would have been hit much harder than the West was. Plus there's a much greater concentration of population on the eastern seaboard, with many more targets in the event of an attack than the West. There are areas in the west where you need to drive 500 miles before you come to the next city, not so in the east. 50 miles and you're in another major centre, even less in some places. So the West would have suffered much less devastation than the East, making it much easier for things to bounce back there.

I'm not talking about barren areas like New Mexico and West Texas (which have defined the western stereotype, it seems); I'm talking about Southern California (where the originals took place), which is not one of those "areas".

Another thing that irritates me a little about Fallout 3 is how there's no elaboration on how each town eats food. There's no farmland, and the amount of livestock that each town has is very minimal.

It still matters. The more bombs that fall the more nuclear fallout there would be, which would have a more devastating impact on life in that area. And even Southern California doesn't have the population density that the eastern US has. There's still quite a bit of space between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Not so between New York and Philadelphia, or even Boston.


There's plenty of animals to hunt. There's several Molerats right outside the Megaton walls. Humans lived for thousands of years without agriculture, there's no reason why they couldn't do it again. I'd consider that a pretty minor complaint frankly. It wouldn't be that much of stretch to think that humans has reverted back to a hunter/gatherer type of existence there.

PS: I just looked it up. It's roughly 228 miles from New York City to Washington DC, with Philadelphia and Baltimore in between. All of which would no doubt be targeted. Certainly Washington and New York. It's roughly 382 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with not much in between. Just Fresno, which probably wouldn't be a target. That's quite a bit of difference in the event of a nuclear war, and it's aftermath. And aside from San Diego and Sacramento, there aren't any other major cities in Southern California. In the east there would be Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland etc. Then there's a lot more military bases on the east coast than there are on the west.

None of us knows for sure what will happen in the aftermath of the kind of nuclear holocaust depicted by the Fallout series. Scientists can propose educated guesses, but that's it. Until we have been through it and can look back from a vantage point of 200 years, we have no facts. Anyone who tells you he knows what will happen 200 years after nuclear devastation is either lying to you or lying to himself.

Enough to feed a town?

That's a bit of a stretch. Especially considering the fact that the Brass Lantern is consistently stocked with numerous amounts of food, most of which isn't gathered/hunted right outside of megaton on a practical level.

I personally don′t think that the east coast setting makes it less of a Fallout game. Like Nicho said, I think it′s the theme and atmosphere that counts

The first TES game was all over Tamriel. The second handled two provinces and the rest only handled Morrowind, Cyrodiil and Skyrim, but they are not less TES games because they′re not all over Tamriel.