Artwood: “Different strokes, I think.”

Probably, but hey, Joe asked, and since he was clearly making an assumption about what the answer would be that was contrary to what mine would be, I figured I’d throw it out there.

Dragonfire: “I disagree. Especially since you used fallout3 as an example. What exactly was neglected in that?”

The writing and story for one (or perhaps it wasn’t neglected and they simply didn’t have good writers – I suppose I can’t say for sure). The entire main storyline is boring and straightforward, the sidequests are no better, and the characters never exhibit more than one or two definable personality traits apiece. It never made me care in the least about any of the characters or anything that was going on. The only interesting portion of the game was the hallucination you go through to finally find your father, and that doesn’t last long. Plus the premise of the setting is ridiculous. A lot of the setting is clearly based on the 1950s, but the historical information for the setting puts the apocalypse in the 2070s. Which means they expect us to believe that 1950s culture and civilian technology remained entirely static for 120 years, while elsewhere military technology was advancing to the point of power armor and laser guns. Yeah, no chance of my suspension of disbelief stretching that far.

The gameplay is also pretty much generic FPS combat with the VATS system thrown in. I readily admit I’m biased there since I don’t like FPS combat to begin with, but then I see simply baffling things like the inability to target body parts in VATS using melee weapons. That right there just seems lazy, as if they didn’t want to bother animating different melee attacks targeting different limbs with the game’s melee weapons. In general there were problems with VATS being used in melee even beyond that, such as my character teleporting to a position from which her attacks wouldn’t reach the opponent I was targeting. And the third-person viewpoint option seemed poorly tacked on, since it actually made it harder to aim my attacks and react to what was going on.

Now this isn’t to say that I think Fallout 3 is a bad game – I don’t, and wouldn’t have played it as long as I did if I thought that – but I do think it’s a mediocre and overall boring one for someone with my tastes, and I have no intention of ever going back to play it again, even though there were substantial portions of the map I didn’t explore (primarily the western half, if you’re curious).

Personally, I’ll take a good turn-based game with good writing over Fallout 3 any day. For example, one of my favorite DS games, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor. That’s pretty much completely linear – you get seven days to play through, no maps to wander around outside of combat, most events occur at a fixed time, and even those you can choose to do at different times only have a fairly small window when they’re something other than a simple conversation with a character. Yet the game features writing and characters that few other RPGs can rival, with a story where literally anyone can die and death (along with a good many other topics) is taken very seriously, and five different endings consisting of substantially different approaches to solving the problem the story presents you with that are actually difficult to choose between (well, save for the one obvious “bad ending” choice); plus great gameplay that blends traditional turn-based RPG and tactical RPG combat, and of course the SMT series’ usual demon training mechanics. That game blows Fallout 3 out of the water from where I’m sitting, and it’s not even the best in its series.