Having gone back and played some of Fallout 3 again after having now completed both 1 and 2, it wasn't as good as I remembered. Not just plotwise, the but the gameplay felt extremely dated, even moreso than 1 and 2 somehow. I still enjoy the game, but there's more that bugs me about it now. Doesn't help that I have more DLC installed now, increasing the amount of slowdown and crashes tenfold.

Glad to hear you guys like all the games, Furball and Musashi. Although I do agree that Fallout 3 has some serious slowdown issues and can crash now and then.

I agree with Musashi, even more so, my experience remains the same when I attempt to revisit Fallout: New Vegas. Even with the Nevada mod the game feels too "stale" or "dated". Can't really decide 100% on what exactly F3 and F:NV need.. I was thinking a bit more polish and a better beginning.

By polish I mean the gameplay feels a bit odd. Moving around feels like you're floating, jumping feels like your floating, and the not-so-good first person and third person animations (reload, shooting, ect) look stale and make the weapons not really feel right \ like they pack anything.

As for the beginning, and I mean the exact start, it's too slow. I'm thinking that these games need to give you complete freedom and a quest asap. You should be able to pick your stats right away then go off on your adventure. Then when you find a village\person you should be able to get a quest right away.

I'm gunna stop my rambling as it probably doesn't give good examples and is arguable. Either way, I hope the fallout franchise continues and I'll look forward to the next entry.

(snip)
One thing that didn't feel like floating to me was falling. Died a couple of times simply due to gravity in Fallout 3.
It wasn't nice to die that way, not really, but it felt right in a gameplay sense. Reminded me of traveling through mountains in F1 and 2 with poor Outdoorsmanship.

I think I sense from you roughly what I felt when I played Fallout 3:
"It'll do."

It's simple. F3 should be forgotten, because New Vegas is so much better in every goddamn aspect you can think of. New Vegas is the true sequel to Fallout 2. F3 is a spin-off, didn't happen, non canon, bulls*it.
And yes, you're probably right. Without F3 there wouldn't have been NV. The only thing that's good about F3 in my book.

Also, I don't care how many people were brought to fallout franchise because of F3. What I care about is how much fun I'm going to have with my goddamn hard earned money spent on a video game. With F3 it's not so much (not a bad game but terrible fallout). With New Vegas it's "f*ck yeah!".
Cheers.

Actually, without Fallout 3 there still wouldve been New Vegas. New Vegas used tons of ideas from Van Buren, so we wouldve had Van Buren in place of New Vegas.

I loved Fallout 3 and had well over a hundred hours of fun as I trudged through the apocalyptic wasteland, my faithful dog at my side and my Pip Boy 3000 on my wrist.

Then again I didn't focus on what the game wasn't, instead, I focused on what I could get out of it and, oh boy, did I get a lot.

1) Fallout 3 is not "non-canon" unless the Bethesda guys say so. Get over yourself. It's their series, not yours.
2) No, we wouldn't have had Van Buren without F3 or New Vegas, because it was, y'know, cancelled. If Bethesda hadn't come in and bought the series, it would have stayed dead.

Not necessarily. I think that Obsidian would have made a play for the rights if Bethesda hadn't swooped them up. Anyway, the problem with me is that the F1, F2, New Vegas plotline is probably going to be dropped, and F3 is going to become what we think of as fallout. I hope that Bethesda and Obsidian work out some sort of partnership to allow Obsidian to continue working on the real fallout storyline.

I suspect they needed an engine first. As far as I can tell, they specialize in sequels and such, working for companies who already own a property.
Still, it's Obsidian, so they did have an unusually vested interest in the Fallout series, so... maybe. Or maybe this was just the golden opportunity for them without actually breaking their usual methodology. *scratches head*
How so? I mean, sure, I'd love to see Obsidian's continued involvement, but why do you say they're going to drop Obsidian's work on the setting, and why do you say their contribution, however lacking it may have been on everything but atmosphere, was not real?

I don't mean drop so much as discontinue. I figure that as far as Bethesda is concerned, the Capital Wasteland of F3 and whatever other locales they decide to explore will be what Fallout really is, because it's theirs. They will likely view New Vegas, and with it the story of the NCR and the non-idiotic Brotherhood of Steel (seriously? A small group of scribes and soldiers based out of one bunker in southern california that suddenly grew enough that a huge band of refugees trekked their asses across the wastes to D.C) will be shoe horned into a sidestory.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see parallel developement of East and West in the Fallout world, but the less they interact, the happier I'll be.

And yeah, you're right about Obsidian and sequals. That's never bothered me until now, probably because I never noticed it. It kind of annoys me that the group (more or less) that gave us the original fallout is now contenting itself making sequals to other peoples' games.

I suppose we'll just have to see how it goes. Maybe Bethesda will fall in love with the Western US.
Heck, maybe they'll fall in love with Van Buren Colorado.

Feargus Urquhart basically said the sequel projects are safer for them financially - "slam dunk" as he put it. Taking a risk with an original IP didn't pay off (Alpha Protocol's issues and reception shows that). Unfortunately the market doesn't allow for the kind of games we had in the 1990s any more. Troika found that out the tough way (although even FO1 sold poorly, so perhaps Tim Cain is just cursed :p )

Although I'm not sure what's up with the QA at Obsidian, it doesn't help that they usually work to short development cycles.

So they're like Troika but for sequels.

To be fair, Alpha Protocol was horrible, as least in my opinion. Maybe if it were great things would have gone differently.