Is there a way to play Fallout without Steam? I've already tried to make a shortcut directly to the .exe in the Steam folders and it still opens Steam.

I'm not a fan of Steam at all, and I don't enjoy having to wait until I want to play a game because Steam takes the liberty of updating things for me.

If anyone could give a suggestion I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks.

Not without venturing into territory that gets you in trouble for discussing it here.

My advice? Just deal with it. You can make steam run in offline mode, and you can also (separately) disable Steam Cloud and auto updates for the game. Right click it in the game library and choose properties.

your sol dude, sorry. maybe they'll have a change of heart down the road and give their paying costumers a choice, or maybe they'll just be stubborn and ignore the people who don't like this decision.