They did come out at the same time yeah. Plus they're the best versions by a mile because of, as you say, the SDK etc. and the huge collection of mods.
I'm with the optimistic crowd on this one! Ex-Black Isle crew getting a chance to return to the world they made and which we all fell in love with should lead to amazing times. Even if they have to use the same engine that Fallout 3 uses i'm sure they'll be able to tweak some life into it, or at the very least they can put some dialogue in which isn't awful!
I just hope Bethesda don't make them use their voice actors.

have you played them on pc? there are technical limitations built into the game, thanks to the Xbox 360.

The very fact that the console crowd gets to touch the next Fallout game sullies it for me.
They do not deserve it.EVER.
Because of the consoles, everything gets artificial limitations because the consoles are too weak to handle anything more advanced than them.
The console crowd should only get mindless shooters and JRPGs and be happy that they get that at all.

Actually, it was received very well by a great many gamers. But yes, this thread, and its many ancestors, would give the opposite impression; hence my previous comment in it.

This could turn into a slaughter but i must ask, why all the Fallout 3 hating? Sure, it wasnt as good as the first two, the ending was weak, etc etc, but come on, anyone who was expecting Fallout 3 to be as good as the first two , or to be a nostalgia trip, clearly had way too high expectations. These days nobody (irionically barring Obsidian and indie RPG developers (see avernum et all)) makes isometric games, and Bethesda could not have been expected to make one. Fallout 3 is from a different age, and for the record I think that it was as faithful as could be expected since it was made a decade after the first 2. It's a different era of gaming, Bethesda HAD to modonise it.
As for the announcement of New Vegas, im really excited for this one, as long as Obsidian are given enough time to do it right. Although ironically, considering what i said above, the ending to KOTOR 2 blew huge chunks, particularly after i plunged nearly 30 hours into it making a deliciously evil character. No closure, just a big 'up yours'. Although, murder me if you wish, i think that KOTOR 2 had better moral choices and dillemas than it's predecessor, likewise for NWN 2. They were just unpolished.

we're all a buncha of fanboys. there are a few threads asking "why all the fallout 3 hate?" in the fallout forums.
plain and simple, this place is for good old games, which attract good old gamers, they're all old and crotchety and hate change.

Why does modern have to equal first person perspective?
Is it modernisation to use the same engine (with the same flaws) as Oblivion?
It wasn't what I was looking for. I don't hate it, but then I've never played it. I didn't hate Oblivion, but I was hugely disappointed by it. The Bethesda I liked (Arena, Daggerfall, Terminator: Future Shock) is gone, and I doubt they'll be getting my money again. Of course, they don't need to, because they have new fans now, who like different things.
Damn right! ;)

We hate stupid changes made to good franchises.....

and printers, they love printers!

"Unfinished" is the term I would use. If you ever make your way over to the Team Gizka website, you will be able to read just how much CUT content they restored/are trying to restore/gave up on restoring.....
Obsidian has so much damn potential but they allow their own hubris to dictate their motives into signing contracts with a stupidly short development time...and it has come back to bite them in their collective fundament....

See, that's something I just can't agree with, I'm afraid. I've encountered this kind of mentality on both sides of the fence. People who think PC players are losing out because consoles are so superior, and people who think PCs are superior. But while I never owned a console growing up (my first ever console was a PS2 and I'm 28 years old) I think there's plenty of games spread out amongst the various platforms that are nothing short of brilliant and I feel it's a shame that people feel a need to limit themselves because they think certain platforms have nothing to offer.
Sure, I grew up playing computer games and I'll probably always be a computer gamer first and foremost, but at the same time, I've played my share of console games and loved them. To say that console games are nothing but dregs left over from the PC games industry just isn't the case in my experience.
But I'm not going to convince you, I'm aware of that. And if anything, I'd argue that your point about the console industry putting a bit of a throttle on the industry can be a bit of a good thing at least as far as it affects the end consumer. I certainly can't afford to upgrade my PC every six months with the latest graphics cards and such. I can't afford to replace my motherboard, CPU and RAM every year. I've actually bought a game or two for my PS3 that I'd otherwise buy for my PC because I figured it'd look better and run better on the console than it'd run on my computer.

Shacknews has posted an interview with Pete Hines. No talk of the engine or plot or anything significant, but he does mention that Bethesda asked Obsidian for a pitch rather simply telling them what they should make. This could be quite promising.

Not all of us. I may be old and have more than my share of crotchets, but I don't hate change without a good reason.

Yes, I found that interesting. While I am sure Obsidian will use the tech and tools that Bethesda used for Fallout 3, it sounds like Obsidian came up with its own idea for what to do with them.

It is because of consoles that we now have the despicable three letter word known as "DLC"
It is because of the consoles we PC gamers have extremely buggy ports of what are supposed to be AAA titles (see Fallout 3 and, more importantly, GTA4)
It is because of consoles that developers don't care to finish their games properly and sell you the endings to those games as, you guessed it, DLC. (see the newest Prince of Persia and, yet again, Fallout 3)
Also, I have owned a variety of consoles in my time. From the lowly NES all the way to the PS2 and I have yet to find a superior game from the console side. I always went back to my PC.
Thanks to consoles, we no longer have a plethora of games with an intelligent story, characters that we can identify with and either love or hate them as the story requires. Instead we get a bloom-filled, badly optimized spectacle filled with badly written stereotypes saddled with even more atrocious dialogue.
Consoles should get games ported TO them not FROM them that way they can suffer with bad optimization, bugs, and ill-conceived control schemes.