Can I Take A Jab At This?
Fine. I liked it. But I just LIKED it. To provide some context, I only played for about 25 hours. I did about 5 side quests: Got my house, my dog, my robot, my power armor, picked up a handful of Bobbleheads, and then I went into the main quest and finished it. Done. Time to move onto something else.
Maybe I don't know how to play these kinds of games; it is entirely possible I'm losing out on the entire "experience." Maybe I should be playing this one game for the rest of my life. I'm sure some people will be doing just that. But I just don't have that kind of attention span. I want to see what's next on the market. Maybe that's my shortcoming. But I imagine there are plenty of others who feel the same way. Fallout 3 is now on my shelf, along with my other "completed" games, and it has become a relatively fond memory. No need to revisit it. (Mass Effect? Same thing, BTW.)
OK, so given my proclivities (and my leanings towards jumping around in a frantic shootout instead of sorting through dozens of RPG menus), let me ask a few "jabbing" questions here about Fallout 3 to those fanboys and fangirls:
1. Why, oh why, did I spend 30 minutes crafting my face and my hairdo in the beginning of the game if I never, ever, ever really actually get to see my face during gameplay? Huh? Why? Huh? Can you tell me? Even in the final cutscene, you are walking away into the devastated landscape, WITH YOUR BACK TO THE SCREEN. Really, now.
2. Why did I bother naming myself if my name is never used by any of the NPC characters, and really never appears in the game in any significant way, other than on a few documents here and there? (My name, btw, was: "Am I Ever Actually Going to Finish This Game?" I know, a long name, but it fit me perfectly.)
3. Why does that robot have to be so darned chatty? And every single time you access his storage unit YOU GET THE SAME REPEATED LINE OVER AND OVER AND OVER. Sheesh, I was repeating it my sleep! Was I secretly being brainwashed? Was that part of the Vault 101 experiment too? (That was a joke.)
4. I'm finishing up GOW 2 now. And you know what? Wow, it makes Fallout 3's graphics look like inanimate junk. What do the guys and gals at Bethesda think when they see a graphical smash of a game like GOW 2 hit the shelves. Do they wince? Do they think "Uh, can we get all those copies back from ya'll so we can tweak the graphics a bit more?" I wonder....
OK, I'm done poking at Fallout 3 with my pointed stick now. Good, fun game. But nothing more.