50 is such a .....conservative number, sir XD.

but rafael said it right, there was too much expectations for this game, I cannot understand how can game like this get 95+/100 ratings. lets say 75, or 85 without bugs. This is reason why i am fighting against this game, it has this rating just because its fallout and noone standed against it oficialy, excluding Dan Vávra (autor of Mafia) who said it right, good game, bad fallout.
regarding imagination..... yes I can imagine nearly anything, but how can I use my imagination if mainstory is so short ? I can imagine that i am nuclear scientist even with skill at explosives 25 and deactivate megaton bomb, I can imagine a lot of things but still it is just a imagination, there is still that small part of me, screaming, crying, calling for help. I can use imagination to cover flaws in morrowind, but morrowind offers me so many good parts and good gameplay, that this small part of me is quiet. I can use imagination to make game better, but just by limited part, i cannot make bad game good game. In oblivion i can have ubersoldat character, i need just time to train, but there is that time, i have to do lots of things to get in position of ubersoldat, I have to play for long time, I have to learn game mechanics and understand lot of things, then i can play assasin with dagger, and use sword only in case of emergence, but in fallout is nothing like this, i can start game, take minigun and start fourth world war (with fatboy on my back). There is nothing limiting me in fallout. And worst thing is that I am not able to forget what I know about fallout, and finding myrons jet in sealed vault, seeing so many supermuties in DC, or brotherhood of steel acting like good shepards and doing only things that are good are just too crazy to me. I don't have so much imagination to delete it. Same with game logics, I can use imagination to hide minor flaws, but how can i hide things like ulogical quests ? My imagination is killed by things like reading ingame about war at anchorage and then finding chinese CQC manuals in DC, imagination cant help me there.
I can imagine lots of things but not so many.

Oh, that Ulysses (google power) - I was expecting him to be talking about a game, it didn't even occur to me it could have been a book(not even after reading rest of paragraph) :-) Yes, you can't(well... You can, of course, only death is unavoidabel :D) skip a parts of a book and yes, I didn't know what Ulysses is, comes under the name Odysseus in Czech Republic.
Yes, but you have to pretend something anyhow, even if you play game 'normally', don't you?
And thinking outside the game's rules and world would be - I'll take Oblivion, it's my favourite example, since it would be even more bad without this way of thinking - to say "I can't leave the map becaouse that mysterious guy in Imperial City told me to". Of course, there's no mysterious guy in Imperial City.
My (and many other Elder Scrolls fans) way of thinking, which is appliable to many more games: I'm a thief, therefore, I don't care for warrior or mages' guilds, since I'm not warrior or mage (one problem of Oblivion solved), I may join assasins later, if I'm really low on money, but now, I'm going to join Thives' guild. I'm going to a city, but I've met a bunch of bandits - but since I'm a thief, I won't kill them, even though I easily could have, I'll sneak past them.
Aaah, what a cooicidence - I was low on money! So now I'm with my dagger, preparing to attack from a back of my victim. Of course, I could have used a sword, but I'm no warrior... - I'd say that's thinking inside game's rules and world and a very in-character way of thinking (good old role playing :D )
I won't try to explain it anymore, since I think I've already made my point...Several times :D - just go ahead and try it, anyone of you, I doubt you ever did... If you don't hate Oblivion (not for you, pkt-zer0, I know you're not exactly a TES fan :-) ), if you just think it's 'medicore', or even like it a bit, try and install it, just give it a shot and try to make your rules - it IS great way of playing games for those who are happy for what they have and try to squeeze as much as they can out of it. I wasn't always playing this way, my friend (TES player :D) reccomended it to me - and since then, I'm succesfully applying this on plenty of games, and having a much more fun with them as well: Don't like feature? Don't use it. Seriously, try it and you'll see it's not a bad approach.

aye,you hit the nail on the head, the worst part is actually the hype, if the media would actually have said that "this is an ok game, don't expect too much fallout, but it's still good" instead of going "OMG THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVAR! if you don't like it you are not an rpg fan or just a flamer"
about the pretending part, i can pretend that doom is a game about a knigth fighting through a dungeon, i just limit miself to attack close up and pretend that my weapons are swords and that the rocket launcher is a spell, so what ? is the game more fun?
maybe if you don't like the sci-fi setting, but for me it just got more confusing and a lot harder than before.

Pardon my ignorance, but why in the world should we have to resort to meta-pretending when playing certain kinds of games? Isn't the entire purpose of the game already based on the notion of pretending within the given framework? I mean we play the game to pretend we are something that we could never be in real life, why the hell should we have to pretend on top of that? In my opinion, having to add extra levels of pretending to a game that we play means that the game has failed in its primary purpose: to allow us the escape from the mundane reality we experience.
If I want to use my imagination I will read a book instead. At least with a book there is the understanding that the book provides the story while I provide the visual backdrop and sound effects and everything else that requires the use of imagination.

I don't and should not have to pretend I'm playing a different game, though, which is what you're suggesting. Plus, it's not as if these flaws in the game arise from necessity (interface or technological limitations), the rules of the gameworld could indeed be constructed to align with common sense.
Yeah, I've noticed that. TES fans keep praising the game as a great sandbox - they forget to tell you that all the sand in it is imaginary. I believe that games that cost multiple millions of dollars can and should do better than that.
The point is that it's all still just in your head, not actually in the game. Your imagination does not change the game itself, no matter how much you'd like that to be the case, so that sort of entirely subjective argumentation is quite pointless. Look at what the game does have, not what it-could-have-if-you-pretended-it-did-have-but-does-actually-not.
Yes, you are, if you're going to go by what the game is actually telling you. This contradiction is the one that weakens the RPG aspect severely, and it's there whether or not you choose to ignore it.

Who talked about playing a different game? Let's say a patch comes out for Morrowind, which would limit mages to use magic only... Suddenly, a limitation would appear. A limitation which would be in most cases accepted - but why? You can be a pure mage, even without the patch. Suddenly, people who don't want to be pure mages will be limited, and those who want to will probably be happy that game tells them they can't swing a sword around - but first ones will have the game ruined and second ones will have the same game. Where's common sense in that?
No, sand is not imaginary, sand is there indeed - You just need to build your sand castle instead of pile of sand without form, so to say.
Of course. Rewievers shouldn't have this approach. Ever.
So do you play games, or are you played by them? I was pretty serious with 'go and give it a try part'
JudasIscariot: Of course, it's pretty useless in certain kind of games. Doom for example :D
And why should you? Because you don't like something about the game, something that can be easily fixed by just ignoring / shaping it, which is not hard at all. It's like you were beating yourself in your head with a stick the whole day and whining about it - why do you beat yourself in the first place then?
"You can" != "You have to"

I see where Fenixp is coming from. If you're given the choice to play as a mage or warrior and warrior seems like more fun to you, just play as a warrior and ignore mage. :)

More variety I would think is a good thing. If it doesn't matter whether you're going with a fighter or mage, since they're all the same, anyway, might as well not have classes or stats. At which point you're praising pointless features, when in reality it's just sloppy design.
Choices without consequences are meaningless, it's as if the choice wasn't there at all. Seeing how decision making is at the core of roleplaying, that's a pretty bad thing.
How do you build a sand castle that is all possible shapes of castles at the same time from real sand, then? Quantum superposition? Since, as you yourself say, the restrictions and rules are only in your mind and are completely voluntary - entirely imagined.
I don't see what you're getting at here. I never questioned the game would be more fun if you ignored its flaws, but being ignorant is hardly constructive. And, as I said before, games can and should do much better than that, so if that is all that's on offer, one's time and cash is better spent elsewhere.

Well in that case we pretty much agree with each other and I was blind enough not to notice it :-)
Yes, it should be a point of criticism, it should be mentioned in a rewiev(or however is it spelled) and score should be lower for it. BUT when you're reccommending the game to someone, when you're talking about it, you should say 'There is this and that design flaw ...' and then add '...But it's not forced upon you and you're free to make advantage of it'.
For the 'restricting yourself' topic: You say it's pretty much against role playing - I say it's exactly what makes role playing. If you really play your role in the world, you don't even need stats to restrict you(As you said, they are useless. Well yeah, they are, to some degree) - in the end, I've never taken stats from Morrowind, Fallout or whatever game as more than an information for me to make playing game more interesting (it WOULD be possible to write down how many opponents you killed using which weapon and then restrict your aim according to that, but ... Well... I don't really see fun in that :D ). I've never knew what level I am on, I just played the game the way I wanted to play - I was what I wanted to be - and cared for stats just on 'yay, I can sneak better!' level - Obviously, approach of both of us is entirely different - you (as I understood) take roleplaying at game-mechanic basis, where you create your character the way you want it to be and then anticipate it to create boundaries you can operate within (for example, you talk like an idiot in Fallout with int 1, even though you're not an indiot in real life), while I'm not creating in-game character, because I'm creating my other self in the game: Which, for me, means 'I hate swords, let's take this bow!' - even though 'bow' would be the worst choice game-mechanic-wise. That's why TES system in fact suits me better than Fallout system for the most part - it doesn't restrict me in any way, I can be pretty much anything I want, I can use any combination of skills I choose to - and I tend to stick to it, because I'm trying to be in-character, even if the character existed only in my head
If I took it to the extremes, you'd be the dungeons and dragons player who always sticks to the rules, while I'm the D'n'D player who takes it more as a collective tale :D
(I hope I didn't offend you by using 'you' - if I did, I'm sorry, it's my on-spot created picture of you to use as an example)

I did enjoy Fallout 3, but it didn't take long before the post-apocalyptic blandscapes made me wish I was back in Tamriel, with it's lush forests and beautiful vistas. Bethesda should have hired GSC Game World (STALKER) to do the visual design.
Also, due to the more realistic setting, I found that the repetitive areas and illogical things (like how food from before the war could still even exist) just stood out more than they did in the fantasy worlds of the TES-games.
Though the game did have some good, long and varied side-quests. That's the one area where it's quite superior to anything Bethesda has ever done before, and pretty good compared to most other modern CRPGs as well.

Not true. Stats are what define the character in the game's world, if they aren't there, the world can't hope to realistically react to your actions. For example: does your character get swindled by a con man? There's no way to tell with only self-imposed restrictions in place. The best you could do is choose "yes, I am fooled" or "I see through his lies", regardless of what character you're supposed to roleplay.
You can't bluff your way past raiders with CHA 1, you can't seduce the dumb super mutant guard with an ugly male, you won't notice the improved spearhead the bridge guard uses with PER 1, etc. You'll fail if you try regardless, and that is a good thing, imho. So not caring for stats is mistake - if you wanted to play a big, dumb brute, why did you pick go with STR 1, INT 10 and the Small Frame trait?
Yeah, but just pissing around in a virtual world with no point can't be called a game. For that the rules and goals are very much necessary.
Well, if I'm playing a mage, I don't expect to be able to run around in full plate mail and swing a two-handed sword. Heck, people insisting otherwise would ruin the "collective tale" aspect of the thing for everyone else.
Anyhow, comparison to pen-and-paper RPGs aren't necessarily useful in this case, since in cRPGs, the game itself is the DM. Fallout is the one that gives you with massive penalties if you actually do try to slay orcs in plate mail with a mage, TES is the one that says "sure, go ahead".

Actually, I would be curious what your response to my example brought up as a counterpoint in the first paragraph would be. Other than that, I'll leave things be, if you wish.

I understand that some people simply don't like the game...and that's fine. However, Fallout is one of those series that's been around for so long, and become so iconic, that it gets judged rather harshly. The same treatment will be delivered to a new Xcom game (if one ever appears), for example...expectations are simply so massive that it's going to be hard for a game to live up to it.