This. So much this. Fallout 1 and 2 were top down watchamacallits. I would have avoided the entire Fallout series were they to go forward in that direction.

That being said, Bethesda could have just as easily have gone forward with Fallout in that direction and started another post-apocalyptic Elder Scrolls type game like Fallout 3. Just give Fallout 3 a new title basically. Then, I think it would have been judged or be judged less critically.

Wish there was no level cap. I think there was a mod to help me overcome that but it seemed to work on and off and I couldn't be bothered with its unreliability. I think theres still a lot of places I never explored but with a level cap I can't be bothered. Same goes with NV.

The problem with Fo3 isn't necessarily the FPS aspect or the crappy VATS. It's that it's plain boring. It can't motivate me to play it. I actually have the same problem with all Bethesda games. There is no coherence in them, nothing to drive you forward, just go and dick around.

Your perspective is just different than mine, the way we came to Fallout 3. I was solely seeing a brilliant open-world FPS with fantastic atmosphere. But thinking about this makes me curious about 1&2, they've been sitting in my backlog for a while.

He makes some good points but I'll still never touch the game again since I have FNV and that's simply a better game with a much more memorable setting and atmosphere. That said, I did like FO3's DLCs more than FNV's. HH and OWB do nothing for me.

See, this I don't get.
I thought the video presented some arguments in favour of the writing, yet those are often ignored.
For example:

The video mentions the water situation due to the impact crater and the ressources from the plane as explanations here. It's also quite possible that the reason for Megaton lie in the past, for example a different faction inhabiting Springvale that drove the predecessors of Megaton out. Springvale might also not be as ideal as one might think at first glance. The houses are comparatively spread out and may not be easily fortified due to this, which could be a major downside in this setting. There may have been reason to value ressources from the downed plane over those found in Springvale and logistical problems to move them.
I wouldn't want to put up any of that as a clear explanation, because the game itself is vague on this and never puts one forth, but I think it's a stretch to say it's flat out impossible to explain the situation as it is. Especially considering the ridiculous places humans settle at in real life.

And that's the thing. The vast majority of criticism of Fallout 3's writing is aimed at specific behaviour of its NPCs, but that's kind of the point. The wasteland brings out the worst in humanity and many people break and try to cope with it in ways that seem unimaginable to us. Post-apocalyptic civilization is largely different from pre-apocalyptic and I think that stark contrast is exactly the point and it happens again and again in the game. The bomb is a game changer and presented as such. Personally I think this adds to the writing, not detracts from it, and I would actually find it weirder, if a post-war society just rebuildt with largely unchanged cultural values as if the war was just a minor setback and not something that would massively shake up a society psychologically.

There are some holes in the plot, absolutely. The ending, where characters behave completely incongruently to what they showed earlier, just to facilitate a desired plot outcome, is an example of that. But I think that's the minority of cases and gets blown a bit out of proportion. In general, just because I wouldn't behave the way an NPCs does, doesn't mean it's a plothole.

Yet I've seen this a lot, how Fallout 3 apparently has so much worse writing than Fallout 1 and 2. Fallout 1 I get. I don't agree, but I get it. But Fallout 2's writing is utterly atrocious. And I could even get preferring that, if all you cared about was whacky memes and pointless references, but the first two games get conflated to be contrasted with Fallout 3, as if they were on the same standard of writing, which they never were - yet I've never seen bad writing brought up as a criticism towards Fallout 2, let alone have it suggested that it's not a real Fallout game due to its writing. I do understand people being disappointed with Fallout 3 in terms of gameplay. I have my own criticisms there and the mechanical experience obviously is one vastly different from its predecessors, so anyone who identified Fallout with its isometric turn-based gameplay would have to be disappointed and that's fair enough, but I think treating the first two games as unqueostionably the same in every other regard, too, including writing, is a bit baffling. They absolutely were not.

Most of the Megaton example is based on conjecture and assumption, not actual game words. Also when people say Fallout 3 is terribly written they're mostly talking about dialog, not plot or world design. Barring a few weird aspects like Robo-prez just letting you go thinking you'd poison everyone I think Fallout 3's plot and setting are fine, it's the dialog and choice and consequence which suck. In those areas New Vegas is a massive improvement.

I've always thought of Fallout 3 as an excellent game. Not with an as gripping atmosphere as F1 and F2 I'll admit, and the writing might be a bit iffy in places, but that's the only negative thing I can say about it.
The intensity of the hatred aimed at F3 at times puzzles me. I can buy people not really liking it, saying it's not to their taste or something along those lines, but that it is crap? Can't help but to think that that is just spillover hate from Oblivion (ie Oblivion with guns I believe was the phrase used)

Just installed it!

Now what is going to happen is that I'm going to spend the next month playing Terraria and Duke Nukem before I actually start the goddamn thing. :P

BTW, I wish someone had told me they got rid of all the DLCs when they switched Duke from the Megaton to the Anniversary. What a ripoff!

I just created a character named Noah. I'm building an ark.

Which is a little weird in itself. I mean, I did complain a lot about Oblivion back when I was playing it, about a lot if its quirks and shortcomings, and much like F3 the ending sucks balls, but looking back at it I have to admit I had a lot of fun. I would not have played it all the way through with a ton of sidequests too if I wasn't having fun. It's definately not one of my favourite RPGs, but certainly not something I would consider worth hating.

You see this is why Terraria kicks ass. "I think I'm going to play as Noah and build a bigass ark" - no explanation given nor needed XD
I still have to get back to my batcave from days gone by. Actually my batbee-cave. The yellow in that batbee sign is honey believe it or not and it took for goddamnever to make it!

edit: ignore what's happening above ground in that screenshot. I'm was busy constructing an automatic bunny killing machine :P

My Achilles heel with a game like Oblivion is that infernal leveling system and how the enemies scale along with it. I can't help but to realize things like : "If I don't run around a bit more and bump my athletics by another 2 points then I won't be able to increase my agility by at least 3 next time I level. I'm close to leveling so I should run around in circles for a while just to be safe" :P At least that is what has happened each time without fail from my 2nd attempt at the game onwards. On my first attempt I just played the game normally with a custom class and had to give up at a certain point when run of the mill enemies were turning into too much of a problem to deal with. That's when I looked up it's leveling system and realized how nonsensical it was.

But apart from that (and I think there are mods to improve on that aspect of the game) I also really enjoyed it. In fact as much as I liked Morrowind I found it really hard to return to it after Oblivion. Morrowind's world felt far less authentic after oblivion, the way its inhabitants are mostly frozen in place or confined to single areas.

Fallout 3 might also have level scaling of some sort, but even if it has I don't recall noticing it, or much less being bothered by it.

Fallout 3 Is Better Than You Think... Okay I'm willing to listen to this. I hate Fallout 3, and I'm not a game critic, so I've never sat down to analyze why a game fails or succeed. I'm not a story critic, so I can't analyze why some script might be considered a failure.

Guy on youtube repeatedly takes shots at people who say Fallout 3 isn't a real Fallout game. I stopped watching after the first hour or so... life is too short.

I'm not a critic, but I didn't have to be in order to notice that Fallout 3 doesn't feel like a cohesive world. Having said that, during the Tenpenny Tower quest, I did go with the option for the ghouls and the original inhabitants to live together. But I never personally discover that the ghouls end up killing everybody. Maybe I would have eventually, but it was spoiled for me by ?rockpapershotgun? or some other publication. That was an actually twisted good conclusion to the quest, though even then I remember feeling like, there weren't any hints at that being a possibility happening. Were there any warning signs? Or are we calling twist 'deus ex machina' endings good.